For this week’s Translation Tuesday, a proposed coffee date unearths secrets and regrets in Vassilis Alexakis’ “The Daughter from Jannina.” Our protagonist is a journalist awaiting the arrival of a young woman claiming to be his daughter. A conversation about the veracity of the woman’s claim reveals a bittersweet history of personal mistakes. Here we have the trademarks of Alexakis’ writing: straightforward exposition, quotidian detail, and a dryly comic voice, all of which belie a deeply complex interiority and emotional self-awareness. With emotional subtlety and humour, our protagonist weighs the importance of love and family life against the backdrop of national displacement. Translator Rebecca Dehner-Armand writes: “[Alexakis] has composed a singular œuvre, marked by his particular staccato and wry style, that illuminates the experience of a growing sector of French society: immigrants, exiles, and foreigners.”
A cloud of smoke floats above the ping-pong table. I am seated at my desk, at the other end of the room. At the moment, I am not smoking. On the ping-pong table there is a mostly used-up roll of toilet paper, a paddle, and Lina’s camera, as well as a Tupperware container that I should return to Grigoris’ mother. A few days ago, she brought me some garbanzo bean soup in this container. Where has the other paddle gone? I don’t see the ball either. I played ping-pong last night with Vasso. The match was shit. Lina came over afterwards, around midnight. She slept here last night. It hasn’t been long now since she left.
I am listening to The Turk in Italy, a joyful opera by Rossini. The Turk falls in love with a married Italian woman and begins plotting to purchase her. She gently explains to him that this type of transaction is not done in Italy. In reality, I am not really paying attention to the opera. My mind is elsewhere. It seems the cloud of smoke is headed for the open French doors. It is quite chilly, but I don’t have the strength to get up and close the doors. Lina will no doubt come by sometime during the day to pick up her camera.
Normally, I should be prepping for my TV show by now – I am going to be interviewing the minister of maritime trade—or writing my column for The Investor. These notes surprise me; I am not used to recording my comings and goings. I am writing in pencil, which surprises me even more: for a long time now, I’ve typed out everything. Maybe I chose a pencil precisely because I ascribe no importance to this story, because I can envision a quick abandonment. I can see myself throwing it in the trash after ripping it to shreds. A little piece of paper will fall to the floor. Once I bend to pick it up, there will be a knock at my door: it will be Stavroula, this young girl who was not at our get-together last night and who thinks she’s my daughter.
***
A week ago, she called me at the newspaper; she confessed that she had been following my activities for years; watching my show, reading my columns. “You are pursuing a false lead, mademoiselle,” I repeated. She insisted that we make a time to meet. “Surely you aren’t going to come all the way from Jannina just to hear me say the same things in person?” Many years ago, I came to know her mother in Jannina while serving in the military; I was twenty-two years old, la petite was nineteen. “Would it really be that bad to have a coffee with me?” she asked. I ended up giving in. I told her to meet me yesterday morning—eleven o’clock in a café in Colonaki.
I brought Odysseus with me, not because I felt that I would need a witness, but simply to avoid the conversation taking a poignant or even emotional turn. He seemed the ideal companion, probably because he was an actor. We deliberately arrived at the café early. It’s a busy establishment, especially on Saturday mornings. We sat at the end of the terrace, not far from the newspaper kiosk and the telephone booth. A relatively sturdy little blonde sat down to our right, she was reading Great Expectations. On our left sat an old couple. The woman’s face was covered in make-up. She used a newspaper folded in fourths as a fan, and yet it wasn’t hot out at all. Her husband read a detached page of the same newspaper. Only ten minutes later, the terrace was packed.
“Imagine that she is the spitting image of her mother and that you fall in love with her!” said Odysseus. “What’s her name?”
He thought the name Stavroula was dated and a little provincial. I admitted it didn’t exactly appeal to me either. He asked me to describe her so he too could watch for her.
“She is small, thin, with long brown hair . . . At least that’s what she told me on the phone. Her mother was also small and brunette, but she was definitely not thin.”
A young long-haired brunette passed by our table. She was very tall and didn’t seem like she was looking for anyone. She went into the café.
At eleven o’clock sharp, I experienced a certain agitation, an emotion that reminded me of waiting for Stavroula’s mom years ago. I was so in love with her. I haven’t loved another woman as intensely as I did Maria, not even Vaguelio who is now my wife. Maybe our first romantic disappointment reduces our capacity to love. She was older than me by about a decade. She already had some grey hair. She loved me less. She was tortured by the memories of a love from her youth. I still remember how lonely it felt to be in bed with her.
“She’ll probably recognize you, she has to have seen you on TV,” said Odysseus. “Is she a student?”
“Yes, of literature.”
He gave me a little pat on the shoulder.
“I’m sure that she wants to go into journalism.”
Maria was a teacher of history and geography at the high school in Jannina. We met each other in a basement studio that belonged to her parents. The walls were orange. I remember the dampness in the air. We could hear the music coming from the bar upstairs. It was there she made clear her intention to leave me. She made this decision long before the end of my service and my return to Athens.
The last weeks I spent in Jannina are among the worst I’ve ever endured. For hours and hours, for entire nights, I hung around in the square opposite her parents’ house, where she lived. Early one morning, no doubt believing that I had left, she came out on her balcony and began throwing bread to the pigeons. The moment she saw me, she retreated, closing the French doors. I imagined her observing me through the shutters. I gathered up the breadcrumbs on the ground, balled them up and devoured them. I’ve forgotten the name of the square.
“How did la petite find out that you had had an affair with her mother?”
“From my letters . . . She found the letter I sent to Maria from Athens. I was naïve enough to believe words could make her change her mind. I wrote to her every day.”
“Stavroula must have read those letters as if they were written to her . . . Did you write well, back then?”
I would happily reread those letters. I suppose I had a certain talent. I once thought I would dedicate myself to literature. The demands of being a professional journalist did not leave time for much else. I stopped believing words could bring about miracles. Journalism had dissipated my illusions.
The old man and his wife didn’t say anything. He had finished his reading; she had stopped fanning herself. They were watching. We were watching as well. People were standing and waiting, soliciting the attention of the waiters. Many young girls passed by again and again, students from a nearby dramatic art class. They were brunettes for the most part. A few times I half raised myself from my chair to get a better look. I even waved at one girl who wore a backpack; she didn’t pay any attention.
“Calm down,” Odysseus said. “Are you completely sure she isn’t your daughter?”
“Her father is a petty officer, I believe. Maria got pregnant long after my return to Athens. The first time she wrote to me, it was to announce that she was pregnant and to ask me to marry her. She was determined to keep the baby, without the father’s knowledge. She didn’t even intend to tell him; it would’ve probably been an inconvenience for him anyway. She preferred to tell her parents that I was the father of her child, because at least they knew me a little bit.”
I must have stashed this letter away somewhere, with the one Maria sent me when la petite was five or six years old. She was not yet married. I learned from Stavroula that Maria ended up marrying a real estate promoter and had two other children with him.
“Maybe she was the one who wasn’t suitable for the petty officer. He must’ve run off when he found out she was expecting a kid.”
“That never occurred to me,” I admitted.
Our conversation began to annoy me—I feel the same weariness in mentioning it here. It brought to mind places I had no desire, no reason to revisit. “Maria must be over fifty now,” I thought.
“I don’t know if I did the right thing in telling the la petite to come.”
“Did you talk with her about the petty officer?”
“Naturally . . . I had the feeling she didn’t really want to have a petty officer for a father.”
Odysseus burst out laughing.
“Why would you say that? Maybe he became a general!”
I laughed as well. The old man had pushed the ripped-out newspaper page towards his wife.
“Read this,” he said with a look of revulsion.
The article was about angry farmers who were occupying the major highways. Evidently the man did not approve of this demonstration.
“I don’t have my glasses,” said his wife.
Again, they fell into silence. The blonde turned a page. From time to time she traced a little vertical line in the margin of her book with a pencil. She was wearing thick-lensed glasses. She wasn’t exactly ugly. “She’s the kind of girl who doesn’t leave a trace in men’s memories,” I thought.
“It’s remarkable, don’t you think?” I said to her, gesturing toward her novel.
She agreed with me, nodding her head. In an interview I gave on Channel 2, I had said that Dickens was my favorite author.
“There she is!” yelled Odysseus, abruptly standing up.
A young girl was walking by on the sidewalk who seemed to fit Stavroula’s description exactly. She was weighed down by a large travel bag. She watched as one by one the customers sat down at a table. I was disappointed that she was not at all attractive.
“Stavroula!” called Odysseus.
She didn’t hear him.
“Stavroula!” he repeated.
Odysseus was really in a good mood. He surely guessed that he would have the chance to play out an unconventional scene, something that would give him the chance to improvise. He quickly snaked his way in between the tables and took ahold of the girl by her arm.
“You are from Jannina, right?” he said, loud enough for everybody to hear.
She turned completely red.
“No, I don’t know what you’re talking about,” she stammered back at him.
“And you, you aren’t named Stavroula either!” concluded Odysseus in an almost triumphant tone.
***
I was looking for the two letters from Maria. I had spread out all my old binders and folders on the ping-pong table, but they weren’t there. I couldn’t have thrown them away though: I was sure Maria would tell her parents the baby was mine. “I will send a photocopy to Stavroula, once I’ve found them,” I decided. I thought of Maria’s father, a square-faced man, with a grey crew cut, and tough hands. He terrorized his wife and his daughter in turn. I had no memory of Maria’s mother.
Lina and Grigoris dropped by, she to take back her camera, and he to get back his mother’s Tupperware. He wanted to play ping-pong, but we hadn’t found the second paddle yet. The ball was under the vacuum cleaner. I went with Grigoris to a restaurant. I slept for an hour.
I tried to consider the farming demonstrations for a moment, because I thought about approaching this subject in my column, but I only came up with incomplete sentences that didn’t follow each other well. Of course, I am against an occupation of highways that ends up harming the whole of the country’s economic activities. The thought of sitting down at my computer did not cross my mind. I carefully sharpened my pencil.
It has only been sixteen hours and already it’s almost night. I don’t like these dwindling little November days.
***
“You should call the airport,” said Odysseus. “Her plane has probably been delayed.”
It was eleven-thirty. There was a line in front of the phone booth, so I went down to the restroom to call her. Inside the café I ran into Minas; he was ringing the bell. It’s a bell with a wooden handle like those in courtrooms.
“How’s it going, Minas?”
“Not too well,” he said, grimacing. “I run around from morning til night. Years ago, I could make the same amount in just five hours of work. Now I have to work ten!”
As usual, he was dressed up like an ancient Greek. Two gleaming tinplate pieces, suspended from his neck, covered his back and his chest. His thighs and calves were wrapped in piping, also made of tinplate. On his head he wore a little olive oil container shaped by the blows of a hammer as a helmet. Below this he had glued multicolored feathers and ribbons. Under this armor-like exterior, he wore a military camouflage shirt and a filthy pair of red pants. He was barefoot and wearing a toe ring.
“You aren’t going to give anything, are you?” he said to me.
He had begun shaking his bell again, looking at me ironically. This is his system: he rings the bell until someone gives him money.
“How’s your son doing?”
A certain gentleness immediately spread across his face.
“He passed the entrance exams for dental school! He was in the top ten in his class!”
The plane had arrived at eight-twenty. There weren’t any more planes between Athens and Jannina scheduled until late that afternoon.
“She must have been walking around to pass the time before your meeting and lost her way,” said Odysseus.
As for me, I thought the blockades on the highways must have led to an unexpected increase in the number of travelers and she probably couldn’t find a way into the city.
“I hope she had the same idea as you and will come with a friend! We’re going to see two knock-outs show up.”
I still don’t understand why I’m writing all this in such detail. I am as serious in this undertaking as if I were recalling an important event. Yet nothing even happened. It feels as if I’m using this story just to see if I am able to write a more personal piece. A few moments later, we were joined by Antigone. She came on her motorbike which she parked close to the phone booth. Odysseus got up again. She came right to our table, without even looking around. Her arrival stirred up a certain excitement on the terrace of the café, as she is both very famous—she hosts an educational gameshow on TV—and very beautiful.
“Are you waiting for someone?”
One free chair remained at our table.
“You can sit down,” I said.
“You’ll never guess who we are waiting for!” Odysseus declared.
He did not have the patience to leave her time to think.
“His daughter!”
“I thought that you had sons,” she said to me.
“He just inherited a daughter who lives in Jannina. Can you believe it?”
She smiled at me.
“Is it true?”
***
Again, I was compelled to tell the story about Maria, Stavroula, and the petty officer. I loved Maria enough to marry her, even if she was pregnant by another man. What dissuaded me from doing it, at the end of the day, was the memory of my loneliness. I had sent her a short and somewhat harsh letter. I married Vaguelio the following year.
Antigone listened to me with her eyes wide open. She was fascinated, as if I were telling her a myth. While I was talking to her, Odysseus was arguing with the server who had not yet come by to take our order. The old couple left.
“It’s fabulous,” said Antigone. “Can I stay to see la petite? I bet she and her mother are two of a kind.”
“I said the exact same thing to him,” Odysseus called back. “I even predicted that he would fall in love with Stavroula and we would have a tragic drama on our hands.”
“Wrong!” Antigone corrected him. “He won’t fall in love with her, but he’ll do his best to seduce her!”
She turned towards me and added, with a distinct emphasis:
“You’ll want affection from la petite that her mother refused to give you!”
We were making a spectacle of ourselves. The server finally brought the drinks. I had ordered a beer. It was just past noon.
“I’d like if we could change the subject,” I said.
My objection momentarily discouraged Antigone, who had nonetheless been late in entering the fray:
“Let me ask you one question: did you tell her about your divorce and your children?”
“Of course. She was pleased to learn that I had children . . . It makes sense since she considers them her half-brothers.”
I was still watching the young girls passing by on the street, but distractedly, as if I’d accepted that Stavroula wasn’t going to come. The telephone in the booth rang. There was no one in the booth, nor anyone around it. The shopkeeper came out of his newspaper kiosk. I thought the call was for him, but in fact he simply stood watching the booth. I almost went and picked it up; that’s how unpleasant the ringing was to me, but it stopped. Apparently neither Odysseus nor Antigone had heard it.
“It’s a story for TV, that one,” Antigone concluded. “And do you know who I can see in the role of Stavroula? My daughter!”
“Your daughter,” said Odysseus, incredulously.
“Yeah, why?”
I could sense that she was on the verge of losing her temper. We talked a little bit about our children. I let them in on my problems: the youngest of my sons was at risk of being held back a year in school; his brother, who was managing pretty well in high school, had joined the Young Communist Party.
“He treats me like a reactionary! I almost hit him the other day!”
Antigone offered to take Odysseus home. Again, she encouraged me to write up this story as a mini-series.
“Of course, the mother never said anything to her daughter about her birth.”
“She simply forbade her to ask questions. The only time when la petite dared to approach the subject, her step-father slapped her.”
“God, she must hate her mother . . . You better consider that aspect, if you decide to write a screenplay.”
We were already on our feet.
“There is one eventuality that we have not yet thought of,” said Odysseus, “what if she looks like her father!”
***
I found Maria’s two letters. I had hidden them in a voluminous history of the Balkan wars I’d read as a student. I quickly glanced over the first one. The second one distressed me: Maria says that her daughter, then six and half years old, is blonde. She writes at length in praise of la petite, and adds however, that she has some problems with her eyes. The face of the girl who was sitting less than a meter from me at the café suddenly comes to mind. “It was her, of course.” I attempted to convince myself I was wrong, but I knew I wasn’t. She was probably reading Great Expectations because she’d heard me talk about Dickens on television. I guess she’d given me a false description of herself in order to approach me without being recognized. “She must’ve been disappointed,” I thought. I even imagined that she must have cried on the plane that took her back to Jannina.
While searching for Maria’s letters in the library, I found the second ping-pong paddle: Vasso had slid it, God knows why, between two books.
Translated from the French by Rebecca Dehner-Armand
Vassilis Alexakis (1943) is a Greek-French author, self-translator, cartoonist, and film director. Born in Athens, Vassilis Alexakis has spent his literary career composing works in both French and Greek that interrogate the exilic condition, the impetus to write in a language other than one’s own, and what it means to belong (or not belong) to a place or to a people. He grew up in Greece but moved to France as an adolescent to study journalism in Lille, returning to Greece after his studies to fulfil his military service. In 1968, in the wake of a devastating military coup d’état, Alexakis went into what would become a lifelong exile in Paris. Alexakis has received a variety of France’s most prestigious literary awards, including the Prix Médicis (1995), Prix Albert-Camus (1993), and Prix de la Langue Française for his entire body of work (2012). Despite the prescience and timeliness of his body of work, only two of Alexakis’ novels have appeared in English translations. The author now splits his time between Paris and Athens.
Rebecca Dehner-Armand is a literary translator of contemporary French and Francophone fiction. She is currently a Ph.D. candidate in Comparative Literature at Washington University in St. Louis. Her research focuses on contemporary Francophone literature, autobiography, exile, and (self-) translation studies. Rebecca’s literary translations have appeared in Delos and The Massachusetts Review.
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