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Chapter 23

“That’s as bad a translation as it can get, don’t you think?” he asked her, pointing to the label stuck on the back of the front seat with the caption ‘προσδεθείτε εφόσον κάθεστε’ and ‘fasten seat belt while seated’. He had scarcely completed his phrase when the beat of a familiar folk song sounded all of a sudden from within Lela’s bag – as he would soon find out her name was – who set out, after an initial hesitation, to rummage through it. However, the mobile phone – be-cause what else could it be? – as though it were play-ing hide and seek, kept slipping through her fingertips which, fumbling in the dark with the contents of the bag, first fell on those items which, whenever she con-versely needed, they found last. Because of that, she was running so amok, that only if she attributed deceit to each object individually and a conspiracy plot to all of them together, could it be rationally justified. It betrayed, if nothing else, a person who construed the slightest setback as yet another blow of relentless fate. The only thing that was certain in the whole upheaval was that his question had been recorded in his outbox. In her inbox, not necessarily. Let alone whether it had

+ a person, probably, who ended up consid-ering Murphy’s law as indeed a law, only she was unable to explain it, and that really exasperated her.

Simos Panopoulos - Look at that

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even been comprehended. Because, from her long legs – like those which in the ‘pink novels’ were classical-ly described as endless or, more rarely, as statuesque – but mainly her plump rump where they ended, he never managed to discern where she was from, earlier on. Already, from the terminal waiting room, when he spotted her amongst the crowd of passengers queuing up in front of the gate, he had fixated on it. By in-specting its so endearing to the eyes symmetry, it was more of an aesthetic pleasure then a sexual one that he drew, a pleasure similar to that of a museum visitor observing a work of art, rather than that of a starving voyeur (after all, on no account had the specific part of the female anatomy ever been a part of his sexual fantasies.) Moreover, every time it disappeared from his field of vision, either because a passer-by hid it out of view or because he himself averted, for the sake of common decency, his eyes, he was pierced by a pain characteristic of withdrawal syndrome, so on the first available occasion he would restore them back onto it. He could not bear to do