Simha, Mazal and Odetta go shopping

Simha, Mazal and Odetta went shopping on Tuesday. Simha wore a brown overcoat, Mazal wore a navy blue overcoat, and Odetta wore a grey raincoat.

They turned into the shuk from Allenby, and moved slowly through the Tuesday crowd, making sure of each individual fruit and vegetable by picking it up and studying it and comparing it with others and hefting it in the hand and smelling it. Mazal carried the citrus, Odetta carried the vegetables, and Simha, who said she had doctors orders, carried the pocketbooks of all three. Mazal had a large brown vinyl bag, Odetta had a large green cloth bag, and Simha's own pocketbook was black plastic.

When they finished the shopping, they turned onto Nahlat Binyamin's pedestrian mall. On Tuesdays, a shuk day, arts and crafts vendors show off their wares in a long gauntlet of jewelry, cermaics, ostrich feathers, peacock feathers, three-dimensional paintings, seagulls on puppet strings, dried flowers in little baskets, dried herbs in little packets, watercolors, jugglers, minimalist pantomimists, buskers, and waitresses in black trousers and white shirts carrying cakes from counters of the cafes to people sitting at the outdoor tables. There was rock and roll music playing from an outdoor cafe's loudspeakers. Simha, Mazal and Odetta stopped to study every handicraft on show.

Mazal wanted to buy a packet of six peacock feathers for her grandaughter, but the six feathers cost 25 shekel, two packets cost 40 shekel, and an individual feather cost five shekel. Mazal only had ten extra shekels left, and Odetta said that one feather wasn't as pretty as a bunch, and pulled Mazal away from the peackock feathers before Mazal spent five shekel on one peackock feather. They found a bench between a cafe and a long table covered with old paperback books in many different languages. The books had the musky smell of dust.

The bench faced a shop that Odetta said was where her mother bought cloth to make Odetta's wedding dress. That was a long time ago, Simha said, and Odetta said it was four years after she came to Israel, she was sixteen years old and now look, the shop is empty, there's nothing in it, and since Nissim died she doesn't have anyone because her children are in America and the grandchildren, she doesn't know if she'll ever see them again.

You have us, said Mazal, but Simha said that's not the same.

They sat on the bench facing the shop. The winter sun was to the south, and they were facing north, so the warmth was on their neck, on the collars of their overcoats, on their backs. After a while, Odetta said it was too hot for her, and she got up and took off her overcoat. Her grey-white blouse was decorated with a large electroplated clasp that had a large oval piece of purple glass in its middle. Simha also took off her coat but Mazal said the doctor told her it was better for her to be too warm than to get a chill.

The sun made halos from the wisps of hair loosened from the barets and pins with which they fixed their hair. Simha took a white paper bag from her pocketbook. The white of the bag was stained slightly golden in patches. Odetta and Mazal also dug into their pocketbooks and took out their bags. Each had a boureka, and each woman ate the flaky pastry slowly, pausing between each delicate bite.

At the cafe table nearest them two pre-army girls and a pimply pre-army boy were talking loudly. The two girls were wearing tight black jeans and a lot of jewelry on their hands, and chewing gum. They ordered draft beer and the boy wanted to arm wrestle with one of the girls.

The three women on the park bench finished eating their bourekas. Mazal collected the paper bags and the napkins and looked around for a waste basket. Next to the bench was one of the promenade's white, wide-mouthed tree planters that look like air vents on the deck of a ship. At the foot of an ivy growing out of the open mouth of the planter she found a plastic bag and she stuffed the trash into bag but still didn't have anywhere to throw it. There was a sudden crash. The pimply boy had lost his arm wrestling contest with one of the two girls, and a glass of draft beer was knocked off the table and crashed onto the sidewalk.

Simha, Mazal, and Odetta turned at the noise, which came precisely at one of those strange lulls in street sounds when the only noise seems to come from far away and is distinct. The way the beer glass crashed in that serene silence turned the loud laughter of the two girls and the pimply boy into a hushed giggling.

Odetta sighed and Simha said that she knows her grandchildren drink beer but there's nothing to do about it, it's not in her hands. Mazal said God is great and that it seems nowadays that young people have no respect for anything, that there's no respect at all. Odetta took a packet of cigarettes from her bag, offering one each to the other two women. The smoke was bright blue in the sunlight.

From somewhere, a radio suddenly played the theme song of army radio's half-hour news bulletin, and then there was a self-important broadcaster's voice announcing that ministers were to meet later that day to make a decision and that the station's reporter was on the scene and would provide all the details. The voice seemed to be carried on a breeze and was quickly lost in the bustle of the crowd in the street. Nobody looked up or around as if to seek more information from the brief gust of news.

When the women finished their cigarettes, Simha and Odetta put their coats back on, and Mazal looked for somewhere to throw the plastic bag with the garbage, but when there was no wastebasket in sight, she left it on the bench.

A few minutes later, an elderly man brushed away Mazals' discarded trash and sat down on the bench, the hot sun of early spring warming his balding head.

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