The Researcher
Published in Issue #30 Translated from Greek by Mina Karavanta(Excerpt from a Novel)
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Lieber Anschel, Lieber Franz,
I am sorry for the sudden bout of intimacy, sorry if I tired and inconvenienced you, sorry if I said anything that might have hurt your feelings or upset you.
I have been reading your work since I was twelve. If it means anything to you. I switched straight from Mafalda to you. Straight on. A kind of Mafalda that stood between Prague and Komotini. A six-year-old lonely girl who at times felt she was called Yulie, at times Milena, and at other times Dora. This could possibly cheer you up. I started with The Metamorphosis. I shed light on the pages with a little flashlight in the tent of a youth camp by the sea. The boy I had fallen for was totally ignoring me, and the so-called group activities were utterly boring, until my mother—I’d rather be silent about our Kafkaesque relations—brought me some children’s books. She finally returned to Komotini with the children’s books, leaving to me the book she was reading.
I was born fifty-two years after your death in a border town in northern Greece. A provincial society that, despite all the makeup of prosperity and development as time passed on, remained a depressing mud town of Christians and Muslims, but also of inconsolable Jewish ghosts at its deep core; once a fortress, a walled town of the Ottoman Empire, that once belonged to the administrative district of Andrianopolis.
For years I felt like something between an ashamed girl and a trapped animal.
Do you think that this is due to, among other things, my unfulfilled initiation ceremony into adulthood? The passage from the children’s world to the adults’ world that never took place because of a tongue-twister that troubled me since I was a child.
To this very day, I feel the haunting shadow of a perpetually postponed bat mitzvah.
I am sorry for being so intimate at this very last minute. I owe you a lot. I will restrict myself...
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