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Ronit Matalon receives the prestigious Bernstein Prize 2009
Ronit Matalon receives the prestigious Bernstein Prize 2009 and is shortlisted for the Sapir Prize for The Sound of our Steps!!
From the book
Trans. Dalya Bilu
The sound of her steps: not the tapping of heels, the dragging of feet, the clatter of clogs or shuffle of soles on the pavement leading to the house, no. The non-sound of her steps, the growing anxiety in anticipation of her arrival, her ‘entrance’, the absolute, loaded silence, measured by a unit of time twelve minutes long, and presaged by the stopping of the next to last bus, the 11:30 bus from which she descended.
She didn’t step, our mother, she skimmed. At top speed, in an absolute, level silence that split the horizontal silence of the street in two.
What did she wear on her feet in those years anyway, what shoes, or more precisely: with what did she prepare herself for that battle, how, with the help of what. That purposefulness of hers, down to the last detail, the sanctity of the purpose, of the use, how she loved the useful, the necessary. Her last shoes I remember because I bought them, the first, the first in my memory – less.
I think she preferred shoes with laces.
A bit of a heel, about three centimeters, no more. Maybe more, but only a bit.
I think they were brown, or black.
When they were brown she dyed them black. When they were black – brown.
The brown wasn’t a success, the black underneath showed through.
She gave them to the shoemaker, Mustaki (‘How are you, ya Mustaki?’)
A few times she gave them to Mustaki and then she didn’t wear them (‘That Mustaki made a right mess of the job.’)
I think she didn’t repair them to wear but in order to repair, to clean up another corner of the world, to renew her war against the disintegration of matter (‘It’s a good thing we’ve got him handy, that Mustaki, he didn’t take much.’)
Small feet, size 36.
She was proud of them, her feet, but secretly. You understood that she was proud when she spoke about other, not small, feet (‘She’s got a pair of feet on her – big as boats.’)
The steps, the approach, the return, the night. The return at night, after twelve hours work. The return home, the breaking in. She broke into 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 flowerpot next to the front door. We weren’t afraid of burglars. She wasn’t afraid and we followed her example: ‘What can they take? The tiles off the floor? Let them. We’ll put down new ones.’
But once they broke in anyway. Through the bedroom window of the shack. A policeman came to investigate. ‘Mother, what did the policeman say?’ ‘He didn’t say anything. He looked. For half an hour he looked inside and outside and in the end he said: “He jumped through the window.” “Thanks a lot,” I said to him, “so he jumped through the window did he, now I can relax.”’
Bu she couldn’t relax. Her entrances, the way she simply broke into the front door, famished after long hungry hours of non-home, want of home, pretense vis-a-vis the world, which were the non-home. The weariness that corroded her like acid, the weariness of body, but more than that – the weariness of pretense, of the non-home.
We listened for those entrances, the violence of the entrances, we knew every detail of the sequence – and were always taken by surprise. The anxiety was the surprise.
In one panoramic glance, from the semi-darkness of the entrance passage, she took in the area of the house, registered, noted and classified: a slight change in the position of the vase on the oval table, shoes forgotten on the carpet, a coffee cup on the coffee table, someone slouching on the sofa, a squashed sofa cushion, a chair out of alignment. She still hadn’t put down her bag, she stood with her bag in the passageway with narrowed eyes, clenched jaw, gathering evidence, inventing evidence of collapse, of breakdown, of the chaos of the collapse of the house. Every piece of evidence testified to the collapse of the house. The house was her. Every breach of the correct and complete order announced the collapse that had already taken place or was about to take place. It was upon her.
On a number of occasions she threw a flowerpot, or a vase (my brother Sammy ducked, the vase shattered on the wall above his head.)
Or she swept the table with her forearm, sweeping everything to the floor.
Or she smashed the dirty cups in the sink, bleeding from the splinters of the glass.
Or she kicked the leg of the table, wounding her toe.
Or she threw a pot off the stove.
Or she removed her shoe and hurled it at the television.
Or she chased out our friends.
Or she hit us: with a broom, shoe, mop, hammer, the foot of a standing lamp, a kitchen towel, her hands.
Or she shouted.
Her shout, her entrance, the shout was the entrance. She always said: ‘I want to go in to the house already.’ Not go back, go in. Or: ‘Let’s go in.’ There was nothing natural or self-evident in her entry, it was always an event, a show of suffering. Again and again that cry of the entrance, of the return. She announced her entry, not so much to us as to herself, to the house. The entrance was the attempt to awaken the house to her, to awaken her heart to it. Thus she returned it to herself after all those hours of exile, of non-home, of the inability to shout.
In her good clothes, not fancy by any means but good, or more accurately, proper, she stood in the semi-dark passage (the yellow bathroom bulb lit it from the side) and took command of her domain, declared her sovereignty, banished everything and everyone that needed to be banished, at least temporarily, until order was restored, until the act of retaking possession of the house was declared, shouted and recognized. Only ostensibly was the shout a claim with content, only ostensibly. I could have written: a cry of despair, but no: it was a shout of furious longing. That’s what it was: the fury of longing.
Did you miss us, ya bint, did you dare to miss us? (Her mother, Nona, called her ‘ya bint’. She sometimes called herself ‘ya bint’ when she scolded herself for something, but tenderly: ‘Yallah, get up already, ya bint, do something.’)
She never, almost never, said ‘I miss’. She said: it’s missing. He’s missing. You were missing. The house is missing.
The shout was the pit. We didn’t know anything about the pit, only about what came before it and what came after it. We built bridges over the pit that pretended to be a continuation of the land. This too was the work of repair: before and after the pit.
In the pit we were the closest, us and her: no one distinguished any longer between his dread and the dread of the others, the dread of ‘the world is dead.’ This was the shout: ‘the world is dead.’
For a minute, in that jagged moment of the shout on the threshold of the house, between the outside and the inside, in the yellowish semi-darkness of the passage, the world died. It died because it had become so alive again, with her return home. It dared to die because it was alive again, because it was there.
Before the pit came the steps, the silent footsteps not heard but guessed. We held our breath in fear, in pity, in fear mixed with pity. The pity was harder than the fear. The fear was softer than the pity: step after step, one hundred and fifty eight centimeters, sixty five kilos (in her thin periods), twelve hours of work, four hundred plates in the restaurant of the Rosh Ha-ayin school, twenty something giant cauldrons, three hundred chairs to rearrange in the ‘Students’ Center’ in the afternoon, after the restaurant, a few pounds, a few pennies, an ironed handkerchief soaked in cheap lavender water, the kind she bought by the liter.
There isn’t a cat in the street. She said ‘There isn’t a cat in the street’ when she wanted to say ‘fear.’ The bus driver knows her. All the bus drivers on the line leading to our neighborhood know her. The good ones stop next to the house for her, before the bus stop. The mean ones, there was one mean one, with ginger hair, only at the stop itself: ‘It’s the law.’ She hates his law and whoever made his law. His law is for his own good, she thinks, and she says what she thinks too: ‘Your law is for your own good, mister.’
She always says what she thinks, and more than what she thinks. Especially when she’s worn out, parked on one of the seats in the empty rectangle of the bus, in the ghostly light of the late night hour, or standing in the dim, ghostly light of the passage. More than what she thinks are the shout, the nails.
Her words are nails. ‘Her words enter your body like nails,’ says my sister Corinne, dropping her cigarette ash to the floor, listening to the steps.
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