Lolita at Leonard's of Great Neck and Other Stories from the Before Times by Shira Dicker

Author:Shira Dicker
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Post Hill Press
Published: 2024-03-25T17:08:08+00:00

The Jerusalem Lover

I

It is a chilly morning in early March. You are sitting at Café Rosa in Jerusalem, reading your usual pile of newspapers, magazines, and dog-eared paperbacks, nursing a mug of tepid tea. Café Rosa is located in the Valley of Ghosts; it is the main thoroughfare of South Jerusalem, invariably and somewhat inaccurately termed trendy or upscale or affluent in the international press. It is, in fact, the pulse and soul of the German Colony, studded with eateries, hardware stores, clothing shops, food markets, jewelry boutiques, kiosks, and cafes, known more commonly by its Hebrew name—Emek Refaim.

You are a creature of habit and it is your habit to arrive at Café Rosa every morning at 8:00 a.m. and remain for a couple of hours, after which it becomes unseemly, slothful and perhaps even suspicious for a solitary man to remain reading in a coffee house as if he has no work, no obligations, no human ties.

This morning, though, you are heedless of time, reading the iconic work of a twentieth-century Jewish philosopher, a paperback edition, published locally and recently re-released after an initial printing some fifty years earlier. So engrossed are you in your reading that you barely notice the table to your left being occupied by two American teenagers—a boy and a girl—who bear a striking physical resemblance to one another.

After a short interval of chair scraping and the resting of their respective book bags under the table, your young neighbors attend to the matter of breakfast. The boy scans the menu and orders a hearty Israeli breakfast platter while the girl places an elaborate order for coffee; there is much discussion in American-inflected Hebrew, with agitated hand motions. It seems that the girl wants to make sure that her coffee is decaffeinated with skim milk and artificial sweetener. She is anxious that her order might get mangled. In the lull between placing their orders and the arrival of their breakfasts, the students unabashedly turn their attention to the work you are reading as if they were browsing in a bookshop and you were merely the shelf upon which it rested.

“Do you believe in the covenant?”

It is the girl who poses the question; she is a delicate version of the boy, with languid feline eyes, brown hair in a pixyish bob, and pink cheeks. You look up at her question but she is addressing the boy. You might as well be invisible. “As in between God and the Jewish people?”

The boy has been checking text messages on his cell phone. He slips the device into his pocket and regards the girl. It is clear now that the two are twins, most likely college students spending a year studying at Hebrew University, citizens of an American city rich in history and lore, a city that hosted the likes of Benjamin Franklin or Thomas Edison or Mark Twain. The boy’s cheeks are not pink but they are smooth and full and his haircut mimics the girl’s. Where he differs

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