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The Sound of Our Steps
A Novel
By Ronit Matalon, Dalia Bilu Henry Holt and Company
Copyright © 2008 Am Oved
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-4299-4766-4
CHAPTER 1
The Sound
The sound of her steps: not the heels tapping, the feet dragging, the clogs clattering or soles shuffling on the path leading to the house, no. First the absence of steps, the creeping dread in anticipation of her arrival, her entrance, the loaded silence, measured by a twelve-minute unit of time, heralded by the next-to-last bus stopping, the 11:30 bus from which she would descend.
Our mother didn't step, she skimmed. At great speed, in a total silence that split the balanced quiet of the street in two.
What did she put on her feet back then, which shoes, or to be more precise, how did she prepare for battle, how, with what? That sense of purpose she had, to the last detail, the sacred air of purpose, how she loved what was useful, necessary. I remember her last pair of shoes because I bought them; the earliest ones in my memory, less so.
I think she preferred shoes with laces. A bit of a heel, about two inches, no more. Maybe more, but just a bit.
I think they were brown or maybe black.
When they were brown she dyed them black. When they were black she turned them brown.
The brown didn't turn out too well, the black showed through.
She gave them to the shoemaker, Mustaki. ("How are you, ya Mustaki?")
A few times she gave them to Mustaki and then didn't wear them. ("That Mustaki made a total mess of the job.")
I think she didn't do the repairs to wear the shoes but to put things right, to clean up another corner of the world, to keep up her war against the disintegration of things. ("It's a good thing we've got him handy, that Mustaki, he doesn't take much.")
Small feet, size 6.
She was proud of them, her feet, but in secret. You knew she was proud when she talked about other feet, not small. ("She's got a pair on her, big as boats.")
* * *
THE STEPS, the approach, the return, the night. The return at night, after twelve hours' work. The return home, her bursting in. She burst through the door. The grating of the key in the lock took no more than a second, she must have taken the keys out on the way, when she got off the bus or even before. No, that's not right, the keys were in the plant pot next to the front door. We weren't worried about burglars. She wasn't worried so we weren't either: "What are they going to take? The tiles off the floor? Let them. We'll put down new ones."
But they broke in once anyway. Through the bedroom window. The police came to investigate. "Mother, what did the police say?" "Nothing. He looked. For half an hour he looked inside and out and then said, 'He came through the window.' 'Thanks a lot,' I said, 'so he came through the window, did he, that puts me at ease.'"
But she wasn't at ease. Her entrances, the way she burst through the front door, starved after long hungry hours of not-home, of longing for home, of keeping up appearances out in the world, which was not-home. The weariness corroded her like acid, a weariness of body, but more than that, the weariness of keeping up appearances, of not-home.
We listened for her entrances, for their violence, we knew every detail, step by step, yet we were still taken by surprise. The dread was the surprise.
In one wide-angled glance, from the semidarkness of the hallway, she took in the shack and the area around it, she registered, noted, and classified what she saw: a slight change in the placement of the vase on the oval table, shoes left on the carpet, a cup on the coffee table, someone slouching on the sofa, a squashed cushion, a chair out of alignment. Even before she put down her bag, she stood with it in the hallway, her eyes narrowed, jaw clenched, collecting evidence, coming up with evidence of collapse, of breakdown, of the chaos of our home's disintegration. All the evidence confirmed it. She was the house. And any disturbance of the right and proper order signaled that the collapse had come or was about to. It was coming.
A few times she threw a plant or a vase (my brother Sammy ducked, the vase shattered on the wall above his head).
Or she swept the table with her forearm, knocking everything to the floor.
Or she smashed the dirty cups in the sink and bled from the splinters.
Or she kicked the leg of the table, hurting her toe.
Or she tossed a pot off the stove.
Or she took off her shoe and hurled it at the television.
Or she threw out our friends.
Or she hit us, with a broom, shoe, mop, hammer, the base of a lamp, a kitchen towel, her hands.
Or she screamed.
Her screaming, her entrance, the entrance was a scream. She always said, "I want to get in already." Not "come back" or "come in." There was nothing casual or assumed about her arrival, it was always an event, a display of suffering. Again and again she would trumpet her entrance, her return. She proclaimed it, not so much to us but to herself, to the house. Her entrance was an effort to awaken the house to her, to rouse her heart in response. She restored it to herself after the hours of exile, of not-home, of not being able to scream.
In her good clothes, not fancy at all but good or proper, she stood in the semidark hallway (lit from the side by the yellow bulb in the bathroom) and took command of her domain, declared her sovereignty, banished whatever needed banishing, at least until order was restored, until her repossession of the house had been established. It only seemed that her yelling had any substance, that it said something. I could have said it was a cry of despair, but no: it was a cry of furious longing. That's what it was: the fury of longing.
Did you miss us, ya bint, did you miss us? (Her mother, Nona, called her "ya bint," daughter. She sometimes called herself ya bint when scolding herself for something, but tenderly: "Yallah, get up already, ya bint, do something.")
She never, almost never, said "I miss" anything. She did say "that's missing," "he's missing," "you were missing," "the house is missing."
Her screaming was the pit. We knew nothing of the pit, only what came before and what came after. We built a bridge over the pit as if it were a continuation of the land. This was repair work: before and after the pit.
We were closest, us and her, when we were in the pit: we no longer distinguished between her dread and our dread, the dread of hearing her say, "It's the end of the world." This was what she yelled: "It's the end of the world."
For a moment, in the jagged moment of her yelling, on the threshold of the house, between the outside and the inside, in the yellowish semi-dark of the passage, it was the end of the world. It ended because it had been reborn, with her return home. It dared to end because it was born again.
Before the pit came her steps, the steps we guessed at if we did not hear them. We held our breath in fear, in pity, in fear and pity. The pity was harder than the fear; step after step, five feet two inches, 143 pounds (in her thin times), twelve hours of work, four hundred plates in the Rosh Ha'ayin school cafeteria, twenty-something cauldrons, three hundred chairs arranged in the student center in the afternoons, after the cafeteria, a few pounds, a few pennies, an ironed handkerchief doused with cheap lavender water, the kind she bought by the pint.
There isn't a cat in the street. She said, "There isn't a cat in the street," instead of saying, "fear." The bus driver knew her. All the bus drivers on our local line knew her. The good ones let her off at the house, before the bus stop. The mean ones, one of them had ginger hair, only let her off at the stop. "It's the law." She hated the law and whoever made it. The law is whatever happens to suit him, she thought, and she said what she thought, too: "Your law is just what suits you, mister."
She always said what she thought, and more. Especially when she was worn out, parked on one of the seats in the empty rectangle of the bus in the ghostly light of the late night, or standing in the ghostly light of the dim hallway. The yelling was more than what she thought, and the nails.
Her words were nails. "Her words pierce your body like nails," my sister Corinne said, dropping her cigarette ash on the floor, listening for the steps.
The sound of her steps every night, night after night, for years. The ground she covered from the bus stop to the dirt path turning off to the left, leading to the house, and ending in a line of paving stones. The open square of the porch, the house. The front door with the two potbellied clay flowerpots painted green, sleeping toads.
She saw everything when she returned. She saw even before she saw, on the way, before she arrived, she saw what she hadn't yet seen: scenes of devastation, a desert. The thirsty lawn, the shriveled rose beds. Their dryness was her parched mouth. Even before she came in, with her coat, her bag, her packages, she fell on the sprinkler, the rake, the hoe ("Where's the bastard who took my hoe, where did my hoe go?")
She entered with black hands covered in earth, she paused on the threshold, the tense, thick air that she brought with her, that she created. The watchful look of the mistress of the house, the prison guard, her miraculous memory for the smallest details of objects and spaces and the relations between them: she never remembered people's names, only things. What did you miss, ya bint, what did you miss?
Perhaps it was not the house itself that she guarded, or the household objects and their arrangement, but the idea of the house that she pored over and over dozens if not hundreds of times, tested again and again the hope, the hope of home.
The entrance was the site of dashed hopes, of her injury, of her drama: she encountered the house only through her drama, slashing her veins in the presence of her lover, the house.
Our indifference, the complacency of our ignorant desecrations (our ignorance maddened her more than any knowledge) was to her an act of aggression. She wasn't striking out, she was reacting. The destruction she brought, great or small, was a declaration of love, of faith. This was the pit.
On the brink of the pit was the bathroom. The pit had no time, only space. We never knew how long it would last, only its dimensions in space. At a certain moment she would stop, abandon everything, disappear into the bathroom for a long moment, emerge with her face washed, her hands washed, after swallowing something, some pill or other.
A different stage would begin, the slow, calmer stage of her pallor.
In the gradual spread of her pallor, on her hands and face, the house would break out of its shell, stop being a stage, and become a home. The low table lamp cast a concentrated beam of light on the tablecloth, the carpet threadbare but acceptable. My sister searched for her tweezers.
We would look at her, now she let us look: we were afraid of her ferocity, but we were in awe of her pallor. This is her second entrance, her true arrival: she sat down on a kitchen stool, took off her shoes, dipped a piece of bread into tea with milk. There was other food but she didn't feel like it. This is what she felt like: yesterday's bread dipped in tea with milk.
Tea with Milk
Tea with milk is what she drinks when she can't drink a thing, not a thing. Tea with milk is the sign of emptiness, which has at its heart a longing for comfort, a kind of babying that she usually denies herself but now will accept: something warm, sweet, murky, and white like thin porridge, a colorless color of nothing forceful. That's it, tea with milk is what she drinks when she refuses to speak forcefully: not "refuses," but dissolves in the face of it.
Tea with milk is a rare moment of consent. Her consent to weakness, softness, motherhood. She is most a mother when she's drinking tea with milk, dunking a slice of yesterday's dry bread in it, fishing out the soggy bits of bread with her fingers. Tea with milk gives her a sense of the true proportions of what she has and, mainly, what she doesn't have. She admires austere modesty, but as a matter of style, not substance, really not substance.
Now I recall the oilcloth that covered the kitchen table with the aluminum legs, a square table with a new oilcloth. The cup makes a print on the oilcloth, a round ring that she quickly wipes away, not getting up to do it, just reaching for the sink, for a rag, and wiping. The pattern on the oilcloth: symmetrical squares, symmetrical flowers, symmetrical lines. She hates the material but puts up with it for its practicality. This is one of her great inner dramas, the struggle between the aesthetic and the practical. She resolves the conflict for a while when she changes the oilcloth on the kitchen table. Every two weeks a new one, spotlessly clean.
We sit on stools with aluminum legs, which she calls tabourettes ("put the tabourette back in its place when you get up"), doing nothing, saying nothing, a limited moment of grace while she puts off going to bed, going to sleep. She hasn't got the strength to go to bed, to perform the necessary acts preceding sleep, not because she's too tired to get up, but because it's hard for her to stop, to accept the big break that is sleep. Her sleep is short and intermittent; she puts it off longer and longer simply because she is afraid of it.
This is what hangs in the air among us in the kitchen as we sit on the tabourettes by the gleaming oilcloth in which our faces are outlined, abstract and featureless. This is what hangs in the air at night at the end of the day: her fear.
I see her on the tabourette, it is late, the hour seems to reach beyond the limits of time; from a distance of years of life and death. I see her there, in the kitchen of the shack, on the tabourette, in a state of complete surrender within the inevitable surrender of the end of the day's work, surrender within surrender. Her broad backside on the stool, still in the skirt with the broken zipper, overflowing the small round seat, her stomach overflowing onto her thighs, her breasts on her overflowing stomach. She is bowed, huddled, I should say, her short plump chin buried in her bosom, in her neck, her arms lying in her lap, without desire or will, touching her bare knees beneath her skirt. I don't remember the season, summer or winter or fall, but she leans over, hunched, as if she wants to warm herself at a heater at her feet. The features of her face are hidden from me, effaced in her bowing down, in the shrinking of her body. It is a picture of mourning. She is one keening.
It's quiet in the kitchen. The barred window is painted green. One of the cats that live in the yard pokes its head through the bars, looks in. On the other side of the kitchen, in the hallway, the clock keeps up its jolting, maddening tick. She bought it on twelve installments from a peddler who passed through the neighborhood (it turned out she paid four times more than it was worth). One night, when the clock was driving her crazy, she wrecked the mechanism and silenced it. In the morning we saw the wounded clock, still hanging on the wall. "I shut it up," she confessed matter-of-factly, a gleam in her eye. "I made it shut up at last."
At Last
At last she came to me in a dream, after years when she hadn't. There was a long, empty hall, a kind of barracks or a hut in some sort of camp, a wing in an orphanage or old age home. I think an old age home. It stretched on for miles, the hall, long and rather narrow, beds lined up on both sides, with narrow regular intervals between each bed and the next. Two long lines of iron beds, sheets gleaming white, not a bright color but a terrible glare. She was in the last bed at the end of the hall. She was sitting on the edge, dressed in a gown that was open at the back, the kind they give you before an operation. Her legs dangled in the air, not reaching the floor, like a little girl's. Her face was fresh, whole, as if her life had not yet begun, as if she were on the threshold. I spoke to her: "I came to take you for the holiday, come spend the holiday with us, come be with us."
She clasped her hands delicately, shook her head with reserved, almost bureaucratic regret. "I won't," she said.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from The Sound of Our Steps by Ronit Matalon, Dalia Bilu. Copyright © 2008 Am Oved. Excerpted by permission of Henry Holt and Company.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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