The Sound of Our Steps by Ronit Matalon

Author:Ronit Matalon [Matalon, Ronit]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781429947664
Publisher: Henry Holt and Company
Published: 0101-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

ON OTHER RAINY NIGHTS

ON OTHER RAINY nights nobody expected anyone, and the rustling sounds and voices outside were none of our business, evidence of nothing and signifying nothing, because “everybody” was already at home, all of us sprawled or semi-sprawled in the living room, competing for proximity to the heater—even Corinne, who on these nights suspended her usual care for her appearance and walked or lay around with her hair mussed, a single loose clip on her head that didn’t hold anything up, wearing long white flannel underpants, and, draped over them, something between a shawl and an old blanket.

The room that was the living room seemed to be holding something, guarding the light that was shining on us indirectly, bringing exactly the right warmth of here and now, testifying that there was nothing missing, that we lacked for nothing. There we sat, close together, in the only space in the shack that was free of the rubble of the building site that was the shack: the mother was renovating, again, again she turned the house upside down to make it even more of a home. We sat among the dusty cardboard boxes that filled the living room, the furniture removed from other rooms (two in all), the groaning Friedman fridge (“Friedman is a good firm”), the standing and table lamps, the pictures taken for the time being off the walls and leaned against each other, according to height, the one from the little passage to the bathroom first in line, peering at us from the gap between the cardboard boxes: Le balcon.

The evening was endless, merging into the night without us noticing; we were confined to our places not like prisoners or the sick, but like people recovering from life, even if only for a few hours, this life of which the mother and Sammy and sometimes Corinne said: “Life, life, life.”

Sammy wanted fried eggs even though he had already had two for his breakfast, but there was no bread to have with the eggs, except dry bread from yesterday. We went out to the starry sky of the kitchen, Corinne and the mother and I, the roofless room in the process of renovation, over which the sky spread dense with rain, split by lightning as if by a knife. The mother fried the eggs, Corinne held the umbrella over her head, over the stove, and I shone the flashlight on the sizzling frying pan. We used all the eggs in the fridge, maybe eight, and toasted the dry bread over the gas flame of the stove until it turned black. The water had already reached above our ankles, but it hadn’t passed the low wall of cinder blocks placed between the entrance to the kitchen and the living room. There everything was still dry. We made our way back, with the pan and the bread and the plates, threading between the furniture and the cardboard boxes (the corner of Corinne’s shawl caught on the chest and she almost tripped with the pan) to Sammy waiting sleepily for his eggs.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.