Journal Article

The Sound of Our Steps

Matalon, Ronit

2010

Overview

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. The entrance was the attempt to awaken the house to her, to awaken her heart to it. [...]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. The fear was softer than the pity: step after step, one-hundred-and-fiftyeight 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.

• Publisher: Indiana University Press
• Subject: Fear / Jewish studies, literary studies / Pity