The Unquiet Mind (The Greek Village Collection Book 8) by Sara Alexi

Author:Sara Alexi [Alexi, Sara]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Oneiro
Published: 2014-10-16T21:00:00+00:00

Chapter 15

As the door slams behind him, he hears the coats falling onto the floor on the other side. His feet carry him away from the square, up the hill, wishing he was on the ridge, goats by his side. Sister Katerina said a lot about fear and denied that there were demons. It seems to him that fear gives life to demons. Since stepping on mainland soil, his fear of not being a good guest has taken solace in an ouzo bottle. He has drunk so much, his memory has failed him, he has fallen asleep in company and even broken into someone’s office. He has become involved in politics and the ways of the world that he has spent most of his life trying to avoid. He has been kidnapped, gambled his money for his freedom, and he has beaten up a defenceless old man who, in all fairness, had kidnapped him. While he has been busy doing all this, he has left his poor baba to cope by himself and, if she is not already, then very soon, his mama will be worrying why he isn’t home.

The problem isn’t how he will be seen; the problem is who he is becoming.

The houses are below him now, the road peters out into a path and the rough land leads up to a clump of pine trees that top the hill. A cockerel crows somewhere in the village. The vegetation thins and is replaced with a bed of pine needles that deaden his footsteps and add to the hush of the wind that whispers through the tree tops.

Is it because he is a solitary, reticent creature that he cannot be amongst men and carry out three simple tasks? Buy a donkey, deliver a parcel, and maybe visit an old friend. Is he such a fool, such a simpleton? Has he learnt nothing in his studies with Sister Katerina? What did all that learning give him?

He sits to look over the village spread before him, at the whitewashed walls and red tiled roofs surrounded by orchards of olives and oranges that spread as far as the eye can see, all the way to the foothills of the faded purple mountains that surround the plain. There, to his left, almost entirely hidden by the hill he sits on, is the sea lapping at Saros town, the sparkling blue that stretches a finger towards the village, making it the ideal spot it is. He drops his weight heavily to sit, leaning back against a tree, his feet pulled in, arms resting on his knees, his hands dangling. There are houses dotted across the plain as well as in the village and within each house, there will be a family, each most likely with a mama and a baba, and papous and yiayia maybe, and children who will get married and the cycle will go on, generation after generation. Even the most uneducated man manages to keep this cycle going.

What did all that

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