Archive note: This text comes from the old archive of Nomika Epilekta and is carefully preserved for historical and informational reading.

Zacharias, born in 1969, unmarried, unemployed, without property and therefore unreliable, happened to have kept a shop for two years in the past and to have created a tax debt many times greater than his income, amounting to EUR 70,000, which the State had repeatedly demanded and did not receive.

Thus, the State proceeded to the compulsory collection of the debt and seized, as the only thing suitable to satisfy, as far as possible, its above claim against Zacharias, a turntable, used, AKAI type, manufactured in 1980 and worth EUR 200, which had the audacity to gasp its last in the cheap apartment of the said recalcitrant debtor.

After this, Zacharias filed an objection against the seizure, paying three times the value of his thing in court expenses.

Nothing in the above troubled me, since nothing troubles me anymore. What did keep me awake, however, was why, out of all my sensible colleagues, distinguished judges, it happened to be me to whom they assigned Zacharias’s objection.

I do not know whether fate is wise, but it is certainly scheming. For I immediately took a liking to that veteran turntable. And in this very case file I reread all the scratched blues I had forgotten. And when, in the operative part, I released the annulment of the seizure, I truly saw Zacharias tenderly placing the vinyl on that old thing, an offering to everything he had lost, and I too listened to that sweet rasp that only old loves can sing.