Of Nicoletta Bortolotti
Nastya is a diminutive of Anastasia, a Greek name that bears the etymology of the resurrectionAnd. Burden or responsibility? Nastya, Ukraine, “Little Risorta”, four years of life and three of war against a serious form of lymphoblastic leukemia. And against the Russian invaders that Dad Artem fights in Donbas, while looking for funds to pay the care of his daughter. Originally from Mykolaiv, the city of wheat in the south of Ukraine, Nastya went to Israel in 2022 with her mother Maria of thirty years old, the grandmother Olena of fifty -four years and two cousins. The father and grandfather must remain in Ukraine because the state of war does not allow men who have not yet made the sixty years to leave the country.
The treatments seem to have effectthe tumor that chews the girl’s blood is not entirely defeated, but decides to collaborate. He sits together with the doctors at the negotiation table. Because the doctors, the good ones, know that in the end they are always them, the proliferating neoplasms, to decide.
But there is someone who, however, does not want to collaborate. There is a third war to fight that awaits little Nastya at the intersection of a bedroom or park with the slides, The swing and the pink plastic cars that pushes with your feet, an intersection called the future, there are five hundred kilos of explosive of an Iranian missile launched against Israel, in Bat Yam, south of Tel Aviv, and fallen on the condominium where Nastya lives with his family. Ukraine, non -Jewish.
And so it happens that a punch of cancer cells that perhaps had decided to stop feeding on the blood of a child must deal with an even more relentless enemy. And it happens that one can escape from a war to fight a disease and be found and overwhelmed by another war. For the doctors who had nastya, death is called “leukemia”, for the Greeks “fate”, for Christians, the Jews, the Orthodox Christians and the Muslims “resurrection”.
But the only sepulcher from which one still wonders if God can rise together with a child, together with Nastya, is the place not a place where the innocent people go to die. In the beginning it was the logos, the verb. Now, however, there is the small body of Nastya without more verbs or adjectives.
War does not bother only cities and peoples on the ground, but thought and language. The places where the cannibal shadows that are shaking within us can be seen, understood, sfamate, before they overflow outside to devour innocent lives. The universal language that, in pronouncing a single name, Nastya, loses all the names. Stammer and shows its insufficiency. It can no longer be inhabited by why.
When the writing teacher is the disease and the narrative voice is not that of the war but of two wars, The life of a seven -year -old girl is a criminal novel that knots her breath. Anastasia means “resurrection” and Ukraine “earth in the margin”. Even boys and girls are lands on the sidelines. On the sidelines of love and other things that are not understood. As for example that Nastya was seven years old.
(Photo Ansa: a building in Israel destroyed by an Iranian missile)
