excerpt
They travelled in silence, tired. Demetre couldn’t find a way to
take him away from his thoughts, although he surely wanted to talk
to him about Magda. But the young man was in a melancholic mood,
just like the overcast sky over them and the monotonous light rain
of Crete. The monotony that overburdened a heavy heart or a wandering
mind that only knew how to find disturbance and make it its
own, that only found imbalance and made it its own, as was Hermes’s
mind and heart this fine cloudy evening.
And it was that certain heaviness on his chest as his mind travelled
to the years he’d be faraway from this land he was born into and
raised, this land with its poor people for who Hermes had strong feelings
of understanding and empathy, these people for he felt he had
to work his best to alleviate their daily burden by making sure one
day they might carry a lighter burden and they might be able to have
a decent living comparing them to the citizens of other European
countries, since he had spent many hours studying and educating
himself with regards to the standards of living in some European
countries and he knew things could change to the better if the proper
legislature was passed and if new and modern rules were put in place,
he had many thoughts of the how and the when, yet he also knew it
was very difficult to change things people had been doing for eons,
but he also knew he had to try nonetheless because he truly believed
that when the going gets tough, the tough get going, as a familiar saying
went.
When they arrived at his parents’ house, he had in mind to
show them the graduation papers which he had brought along and
which were resting inside his small briefcase. He wanted them to feel
pride for his diploma, something many people would love to have,
yet he had this unbearable weight on his heart and he could see it
with the eyes of his soul, a soul big enough to take in the whole world,
the world with its poverty and disease, with its wars and disasters…
Manolis Aligizakis 