On the way down to Rakhmo’s
in the Mahane Yehuda market
there’s a little shop selling secondhand clothes, thirdhand even;
A hole in a corner type of place,
a cave whose walls are padded with faded sweaters
(you can almost smell the distant, summer-white café),
and cloth coats heavy with genuine Jerusalem winter gloom
like the city’s stones after early rains.

I don’t remember his name
maybe I never knew it.
he always fingered the material,
put in a good word about the cloth,
the quality, the finish:
“they knew how to make shirts in those days.”
And he was familiar with each and every one of those worn-out discards
as if he’d daily worn them next to his skin.
I don’t remember his name.

I spent a few shekels there years ago
on a glum and weighty coat
with a huge collar and yellow stain on the back.
“Who’s to see?” he said, helping me button it
stretching and smoothing:
“It fits you like it was made to measure.”

And the old woman in the doorway spits on a pair of shiny red spike-heeled shoes
spitting and polishing with her sleeve
she looks at me and says: “like new”.

I still don’t know if she meant the coat
or the shoes that gleamed there in her wrinkled grasp
a flashback of an old French movie still.



Translated from Hebrew by Suzy Shabtai