A Bookseller of Jerusalem by Nelly Shulman, coffee

I first stumbled upon his shop on one of those ghostly pale days when the veil of snow descended upon the city from the leaden skies, when the stones weep with moisture and the diamond frost crowns the dark greenery in the enclosed gardens.

            Slipping on the pavement, wrapped in a scarf, I hurried home. In winter, Jerusalem's days are short, and the heavenly light, having touched the city in the morning, disappears by the late afternoon.

            I was aching for coffee and an armchair to extend my tired legs. My house was just a quarter an hour away, but I wanted to spend a few minutes of mindless rest by the window of the coffee shop. I loved to people-watch, but today, an empty street bathed in the eerie silence of an approaching Shabbat. A sharp wind pushed me, and I almost knocked down a small blackboard on the pavement.

 ‘Coffee and Letters.’ I read. ‘Open every Friday.’

The bell on the door tinkled, and I stepped into the warmth of a cramped nook, where the multitude of books and the pyramids of shabby magazines almost obscured the tiny counter with a copper coffee pot and an electric stove. The handwritten card on the glass jar advised me to pay what I wished.

I was almost expecting to see a benevolent genie, but a man who appeared from behind the velvet curtain wore a kippah and a beard of an observant Jew. I judged him to be on the lesser side of forty, which would have made him my peer.

            I asked for a coffee politely since it was a bookshop and not a street stand, and, hearing my accent, the bookseller switched to fluent English.

 ‘Certainly,’ he pointed to the crammed shelves. ‘Please feel free to browse.’

            Inhaling the pungent smell of spices, I looked through the most bewildering collection of books I have ever encountered.

Prose jostled for space with poetry, and playwrights threatened to suffocate the memoirists. I saw books in English and Hebrew, French and Russian, Yiddish and Spanish.

 ‘Here is your coffee.’

His steps were as light as a feather. He was a lithe man of an almost ballet grace, so tall that he had to lower his head diving into the back of the shop, where, as I supposed, he kept the storage of sorts.

            Coffee smelt of a sunny afternoon in the Old City, and the candied violet melted in my mouth.

 I saw the owner only when leaving and paying for the book I chose, the whimsical Victorian gardening manual. I wanted to grow some vegetables in the tiny backyard of my apartment.

            Thus, my weekly visits to the shop started. As Jerusalem was plunging into the deepest winter and people crowded the shops looking for Hanukkah presents, I always came to “Coffee and Letters” on Friday afternoon for coffee, books, and conversation.

            Yaakov, the owner, was unfailingly polite and almost invisible, appearing from behind the velvet curtain when, having drunk my coffee, I took a book or two from the shelves. We spoke about Joyce and Kafka, Chekhov and Mansfield, Flaubert and Du Maurier.

Once, he inquired whether I believed in ghosts, and I smiled.

 ‘No.’

 ‘Sometimes our memories are so potent they turn into ghosts,’ Yaakov said. ‘Have a wonderful Shabbat.’

 I bought a poetry book that afternoon, and Yaakov remarked he was a student of the late author, a great luminary of Hebrew letters. I deduced the bookseller was not born observant.

            Next Friday, on the first eve of Hanukkah, I hurried to the shop, slipping on the icy pavement, longing for a familiar warmth and the smell of spices mixed with the comforting aroma of an old paper.

The street sign was not there, and I thought Yaakov took it in, preparing to close the shop before Shabbat. I still had an hour to linger in a shabby chair by the window, frosted with a snowy lace. The day was clear but bitterly cold, with a sharp northern wind.

            The window display, where the pyramids of worn books threatened to fall over, was gone. A shadow appeared in the darkness, and I stepped over the threshold. The stocky woman in a neat wig looked at me with displeasure.

 ‘I am not open yet,’ she said matter-of-factly. ‘I have rented the space only recently. Did you want to buy a wig?’

 ‘Yaakov,’ I mumbled. ‘I am looking for Yaakov. There used to be a bookshop here.’

 She switched to accented English.

 ‘You must be his family from abroad.’

 I nodded, and she signed.

 ‘He fell in the war last year. That's what the estate agent said. Wait,’ she ordered, ‘sit down.’

 I sank into the same chair, standing in the same place, but the walls around me were devoid of shelves and books, and the coffee smell gave way to the whiff of desolation and despair.

 ‘Here.’

A sheaf of papers appeared in my lap.

 ‘I found them in the box behind the counter,’ the woman explained. ‘They look like poems.’

            I left the shop, clutching them in the tight embrace, but a sharp gust of wind slapped my wet cheeks, and, losing my balance on the black ice, I released the papers. White wings and black letters soared to the azure Jerusalem sky.

I heard his soft voice.

 ‘Have a blessed Shabbat,’ Yaakov said.

 ‘You too,’ I echoed. ‘Wherever you are.’

 

 

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The Garnet Bracelet by Nelly Shulman, champagne

 

Wet sea pounded the low sands of the deserted beach. During our drive the familiar flatness of the gulf has changed and the calm waters turned into the roaring bottle-green waves smelling of salt and something pungent. This is the smell of the person you are falling out of love with.

I was falling out of love with G., tired of his jealousy, drunkenness, and preference for semi-automatic assault rifles. I mentally calculated the retreat strategy. He knew my address and my phone number but both could be changed in a matter of a day.

I needed to collect my meagre belongings and move back to my parents. G. had no idea where they lived and had never shown any interest in them. He could not have found me even if he tried.

I thought about it during the uneventful drive in the G. new toy. He had a penchant for buying cars made in the year of my birth.

The white leather seats now bore the whiff of cologne, champagne and a strong aroma of weed. G recently turned into a heavy user, claiming business problems. He assured me that everything is fine.

‘Or I am about to discover the information to the contrary,’ he said enigmatically. ‘This trip will clear the air.’

Nothing else was said during four hours of the boring highway, where the melting snow was painted smoky black, the combination of the exhaust pipe residue and the dirt. Few naked trees perched at an endless plain.

We went through the small towns, the ugly constellations of the industrial concrete, where the bus stops were besieged by people huddling in the freezing twilight.

Having noticed an especially long line to the wooden pavilion with the ‘Flowers’ sign, G. snapped out of a habitual morning stupor. He usually spent the first half of the day in bed rising for a late lunch inevitably accompanied by a few vodka shots.

This early trip was a concession to his business acquaintances. He explained that we need to reach the city by midday.

‘Otherwise I would never dream of waking you up so early,’ he added apologetically. ‘You can sleep in the car.’

In the end, I was the one wide awake. He occupied the back seat, half-dozing, half daydreaming.

G. inquired aimlessly, in his habitual manner, not asking but rather contemplating aloud.

‘Why would anyone queue for flowers on a damn Saturday morning?’

One of the Adidas twins, driving the car, politely coughed.

‘It’s Saint Valentine’s day, boss. We can stop at the pavilion if you wish.’

The twin glanced at me. I immediately grimaced in horror.

‘You despise commercial junk,’ said G. good-naturedly. ‘Point taken. We need to hurry, because our hosts despise tardiness.’

I did not want to receive a cheap bunch of flowers but was disappointed nevertheless. G. was lavish with his gifts and I needed to detach myself from the style of life I became so accustomed to during the past year.

‘We have to make a detour,’ G. ordered unexpectedly. ‘I want to visit a shop.’

I was surprised since he was insisting on driving beyond the speed limit. After a careful study of his determined face, I allowed myself a curt remark.

‘I thought you said those people appreciated punctuality.’

G. looked at me with the customary mix of admiration and amusement. This time the latter prevailed. Rarely, if never, I have tried to venture into his business deals.

‘They do,’ he smiled. ‘However, right now something else is more important.’

Keeping my usual unperturbed face, I nodded, ‘I see.’

The car hit the windswept dunes and the narrow strip of the sea on the horizon became a loud beast at our feet. The gulf continued raging in the evening when G. deemed it to be suitable to take me out. He returned from his business encounter with the slightly amused grin on the already ragged face.

G. was at the younger side of forty but sometimes I saw in his features the man he was destined to become in a couple of dozen years from now, if he was to live that long. Not being sure in the latter I preferred not to think about the future.

Even when exhausted, G. never allowed himself to plop down in the nearest chair. Moving with the graceful gait of the desert predator, he occupied the ugly sofa in the best suite of a best hotel in the tiny beach resort we have found ourselves in. G. preferred to mix his own drinks.

‘I trust you,’ he winked. ‘On the other hand, the man in my position ought to be cautious.’

I did not care much since the only drink I took at that time was champagne. Pouring his favorite illicitly produced brandy, G. sucked on the lemon.

‘My dear darling,’ he said melancholically. ‘The dive is still the same.’

I recognized one of his beloved poems. G. elegantly waved his hand with the vintage silver cigarette holder.

‘The junk adorns the walls. The prices have not changed. Has wine at least improved?’

He smiled again.

‘I don’t think so. It is neither good nor bad. The progress is not here yet but this is good,’ jumping to his feet, he tenderly lifted me from my chair. ‘It means we can relax.’

I giggled.

 ‘The last verse is not by Joseph Brodsky.’

G. kissed me.

‘I have taken the liberty of adding my own words,’ he looked at the watch. ‘Hurry up, because people are waiting. Put on the bracelet,’ he added. ‘I am glad you liked it.’

I decided not to inquire about the mysterious people, assuming G. wanted to parade me in front of his business associates. I did not bring a lot of clothes to an impromptu outing but I knew G. would appreciate something fancy. For someone who spent almost ten years incarcerated, he was surprisingly elegant, having a penchant for bespoke suits and vintage watches.

The bracelet he gifted me in a cluttered second-hand store was also vintage, a chain of blackened silver with a scattering of garnets. Their pomegranate color was almost menacing as if at some point the trinket was spluttered with blood. The liquid disappeared, leaving behind the faint trace of a bygone murder, the almost undetectable whiff of something illicit.

The shop on the outskirts of the resort town where G. purchased or picked up a bracelet, was piled up high with the jumble of old kitchenware and broken appliances. Leaving me at the entrance, G. disappeared behind the rails of mismatched clothes. He emerged with the bracelet, lying in the pale palm of his dry, almost artistic hand.

He did not ask my opinion of the gift. The honors bestowed by him were to be accepted with gratitude and his choice was not to be questioned. On the other hand, he had always given me the objects of infinite beauty. Once he noted that almost nothing of the worldly goods was worthy to accompany my aesthetic perfection.

I put on a black dress of vintage silk and dangerously high heels. In the living room, G. nodded approvingly. His grey eyes were already slightly bloodied by liqueur. His gaze was wandering but he managed to help me into the softest black cashmere coat. I steadily refused to wear fur and he did not insist. His lips brushed my neck, and I caught the powerful smell of whiskey mingled with the aroma of weed and the salty wind of lost desire.

‘Time to go,’ he opened the door for me. ‘People are waiting.’

I attended such gatherings many times before. Women were usually banished to a side table, but this evening G. asked me to stay with men. The deserted summer café was boarded up and badly lit. Even now he wanted to boast, showing me to his business acquaintances. I realized he wanted to cement whatever victory reached in the afternoon by parading a rare bird of paradise, the desired creature that he managed to catch and tame.

Suddenly bile rose to my throat. I could leave but G. was notoriously unpredictable in his moods. I did not want to end up in a raging sea of early spring. The waves were pounding the wooden promenade outside the shaky shack of the café.

I caught a quick glance of the stocky man of peasant appearance on the other side of the table. His milky-blue eyes followed G, gleaming with pure hatred. His sweaty flaxen hair was disheveled. Taking off his tie, he unbuttoned the shirt collar.

I smiled imperceptibly. The vassal hoped to become king but his dreams were crushed and he was publicly humiliated in front of his enemy. Such a man would never refuse revenge, especially of the sweetest nature. I looked at him, briefly moving my head. His nod was visible only to me.

‘I shall go to the Ladies,’ I whispered to G., who did not pay any attention to my words.

I only had to wait a couple of minutes in the bare toilet next to the café entrance. The tap water dripped into the chipped enamel sink. I smelled the whiff of the sea and the door creaked. The nameless man pinned me to the white-tiled wall. The black silk tore, and stockings slithered down my thighs. His strong fingers found warmth inside me, and I bit my lip. In the dull mirror on the opposite wall I caught a glimpse of an elegantly thin silhouette.

The gunshot deafened me, and the tiles exploded in the spray of sharp edges. G. aimed for his head but missed. He was not likely to miss twice. Screaming, I crouched in the corner. The nameless man was younger and quicker than G. and his shot found the target.

G. doubled, clutching his stomach, painfully moaning. The dark ruby blood turned his white shirt into a ripe pomegranate. G. sunk to his knees in the glistening red pool on the floor. The stream of bullets broke the mirror over the sink. The nameless man’s skull cracked under the fire and he lifelessly plopped to the blood-smeared tiles. Darting past the Adidas twin clutching a rifle, I ran through the commotion in the café.

The white sand cooled my bare feet, the droplets of icy seawater hit my face. Fresh blood spluttered the garnet bracelet. Tearing the chain from my wrist, I threw the trinket into the black beast of the night storm. Breathing the clean air, I went to the lighted bus stop nearby.

About the author 

Nelly Shulman is a writer currently based in Berlin. She is an author of six popular novels. Her work has appeared on JewishFiction.net, in the Vine Leaves Press Anthology of the Best 2021 Flash Fiction and in the various literary magazines and anthologies. She is a winner of two writing awards.

www.nellyshulman.blog

 

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The Silence of Snow by Nelly Shulman, Turkish apple tea

 

Few hours before dawn was always the worst one.

After the night shifts, Max usually dozed the whole day, plunging and emerging from the deep sleep, moaning when the dreams came, breathing like a dying fish. The last time he went fishing was a decade ago, with his uncle, visiting the family from the frontlines. Uncle Boris was killed next March when the wet snow in the trenches slithered under the feet, and the warm western wind carried the putrid smell of the decomposing bodies scattered over the no man’s land.

 Max had never seen a real battlefield. He just spent a few futile hours in the hastily thrown together unit, mainly made of the former students, attempting to stop the impending wave of the Red cavalry. Their murderous tsunami was spreading from the north into the barren steppes of the wintry Crimea. Max was seventeen at that time and twenty-seven now.

For the last ten years, stuck in the underbelly of Istanbul, he wandered amidst seedy basement shops selling counterfeit perfumes and illegally produced cigarettes. Drowning in the market crowd, he smoked when he had a spare minute, and drank when he could afford to do so.

The pension was sound asleep. An hour was too late for the night revelers and too early for the market sellers and port dockers.

Getting out of the unkempt bed, Max did not even need to fumble over the chair where he kept his watch, a cigarette case, and some or another Russian book. Flicking a lighter, he sucked in the habitual bitterness of the first-morning cigarette.

The room was strangely lucid. The dawn had not yet risen over the city. Opening the tiny window, Max was startled by the icy breath of the night wind. The molten lead of the wintry Golden Horn barely moved under the whirlwind of snow.

In a couple of hours, the dilapidated houses would come alive. The first yellow tram, festooned with hawkers, market sellers, and the lowlifes loitering around the narrow streets, would slowly but persistently make its way from the upper station of Tunel along the Istiklal Avenue. Max seldom used the tram or the funicular descending to the port warehouses on the shores of the Golden Horn.

On the rare occasions when he needed to cross the Horn, he went to the other shore on foot. Max traversed the wooden bridge crowded with pedestrians, trucks, pushcarts, and the ubiquitous black taxi motors, reminding him of the beetles, busily coming alive in the first months of spring.

            Max’s spaniel had always tried to hunt them, barking in disappointment when the insects slopped away from under his paw. The dog, brought by his late father from Britain the year before the war, was left on the family estate when Max with his mother and sister fled the capital to join his father, fighting with the White Guard. All of them were now dead.

His father, killed on the Don river, would have said it is useless to cry over the spilled milk. Max agreed with him but still sometimes wondered about the spaniel’s fate. He imagined the dog roaming freely in their vast park. He always saw it happening in his favorite hour when the sunset bathed the trees and the meadows in the copper light. The tea was served at the terrace, and the spaniel, having ran home well before Max, always managed to climb the stairs and lie under the wicker chair well before Max would appear at the tea table.

This pre-dawn hour was the one he loathed deeply. His violin, a mass-produced article, bought ten years ago in one of the junk stores nearby, also hated the loneliness of this early hour. The instrument that usually occupied a place on the wall would come alive, producing some strange howling noises, reminding Max of the cries of a wounded animal or a sick child. His little sister dying from typhus in the smelly bowels of an ancient ship that carried them from Crimea to Istanbul had been screaming for days until her tiny body, shrouded in the piece of cloth, sunk to the bottom of the Black Sea.

His mother slit her wrists two weeks after they disembarked on the crowded pier in the middle of the night. Under the relentless eastern wind and sharp blizzard, they carried one battered suitcase containing a meager fistful of gold coins, enough to secure a tiny dilapidated cell of a room not far from the pension where Max was wasting his life nowadays.

The rest of the money they spent on food. The insistence of the mother also produced the infamous violin. She hoped Max would continue to perform and compose as he did before their life was torn and broken and before nothing was left for either of them or the country they could not imagine ever depart. Still shocked and silenced, he did not argue, hoping for the return of the sounds within him but a fortnight later, finding his mother in the rust-covered bathtub, drizzled with the dark pomegranate of her blood, he understood that the music inside him was dead.

Max did not count as music the sounds he produced every other day on the beaten and abused piano, hiding in the corner of the dubious nightclub on one of the narrow side streets off Istiklal Avenue. The patrons did not care for the quality of the music accompanying their dancing with resident girls, populating the lowly pensions all around this side of the Golden Horn. Sometimes Max found himself in the creaky bed of one or the other prostitute, perfectly aware that both were merely trying to drown their sorrows in the oblivion of the quick and soulless sex, accompanied by the cheap wine.

Still perched on the windowsill, Max listened to the sounds around him. The violin hummed something sorrowful. The silent air was filling with the distant weeping of the approaching wind. He shivered in his threadbare nightshirt and old pajama pants, stained with the bloody red of the spilled wine and the faint remains of the vomit. Max has never been good at laundry. In his first years in Istanbul, struggling to make the end meet, he worked a night shift in the basement of the luxury hotel in Pera, where the rows of boiling cauldrons tried to whitewash the greater and lesser sins of the guests, soundly sleeping somewhere above.

The violin still would not shut up. Max started to hate the thing, hanging in his room as a constant reminder of his failures. Leafing through the American and French newspapers in the lobbies of the decent hotels, he sometimes saw the names of his fellow students, the Conservatory class of 1916. A couple of them were performing in Europe, and one has emerged as a Hollywood composer. Max did not want to write to anyone asking for help.

He hated begging, which he has also tried, although consoling himself that he was at least doing something and not simply pestering the pedestrians. He was always a quick learner and could play any tune after hearing it just once. Standing on the corner of Istiklal Avenue, under the rain or the scorching sun, Max played the potpourri of the local and Western tunes, sometimes mixing them with the old Russian songs he hated to play since he did not want the bystanders to see him crying.

His unshaven cheeks were wet now as well. Wiping his face with a shirtsleeve, Max wearily got up. He briefly contemplated returning to a chilly bed but instead took his overcoat from the hook in the wall. Max decided not to change his night outfit into something more decent. He was not likely to meet anyone on the still empty streets under the dawn, barely reddening over the Bosporus. Max just shoved his feet into the broken street boots.

The violin barely fitted into the torn and crudely mended pocket of his overcoat. The woolen scarf bit his bare neck.

Slamming the door, he went downstairs, where the copper pot of Turkish tea was already simmering on the stove. The reception desk was empty save for the sack of still-warm flatbreads delivered from the nearby bakery.

The cold wind on the street slapped his face, and Max shivered. The white veil of snow enveloped the tiled roofs. The leaden stretch of the Golden Horn began just at the end of the steep side street. The leaking boots turned into the shackles on his feet, but he stubbornly went forward as if hearing the song of the water.

The storm raged somewhere in the open sea, but the Horn was standing still. Stopping at the edge of the water, Max extended his arm. The violin flew into the air. The instrument became a dark dot on the expanse of mute water, quickly sinking into oblivion.

Breathing on his icy fingers, Max listened to the silence of snow. 

About the author 

Nelly Shulman is a journalist and writer. She is an author of six popularl novels and a collection of short stories. She is working on the seventh novel and on the documentary book about the Russian revolution. https://nellyshulman.blog/