The Sound of Our Steps

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 of 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.'"

But 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 à 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...