When the ship rises up out of the orange morning light, the girl has long since screamed herself into silence. It appears behind her, a low cliff of white paint streaked with rust. She looks up to see faces, more than she can count, an endless line of noses and eyes and mouths, blinking and wailing like seagulls. A white circle floats towards her, hitting the water and splashing her so that she almost lets go of the wood. ‘Lifebelt!’ someone shouts, and she flails herself into it. A couple of sailors haul her up and pull her out of the lifebelt as casually as if they are shucking an oyster. No one speaks to her and she is shaking too hard, and her throat is too raw, to say anything herself. After the sailors dry her off they ask her some half-hearted questions. She can’t answer. Are my mama and papa here? she wants to ask, but something tells her that if she asks, the world will end. So they just push her into the packed mass of people which fill every inch of space on the boat, and she ends up trapped against the railing, a fat woman’s legs pressing her hard into the sharp edges of the blistered paint. She is grateful, at first, for the warmth of the woman’s doughy body. She can’t think of anything except how cold she is: when she tries, her thoughts have no reality. Her mind drifts, febrile and raw, through an endless series of pictures flicking like a picture book in a breeze. Mama, smiling. Papa’s hat. The pistol. A rose, sinking into darkness. Above her, the woman keeps up a whining litany of prayers for hours, muttering at the Holy Virgin as if she hopes that the Theotokos will give in out of sheer boredom. The endless wheedling voice, the throb of the engines, the groans, screams and prayers of the crowd fill air already thick with bad smells: smoke, oil, sweat, stale perfume, an overflowing lavatory. And all the time, the girl is forced to stare out at the sea, blue-green and calm. ‘I’m going to see Mama and Papa,’ she starts to whisper, in time to the fat woman’s prayers. ‘They’re waiting for me.’ And she tries to believe it, though she is too frightened to make that part of her do what she wants it to do: to make her feel like she does when she prays in church, or to the icon at home: that warm certainty that invisible things will help her. ‘My every hope I place in you, Mother of God; keep me under your protection,’ the woman mutters, but the girl can feel her flesh trembling through her damp skirt, and she knows that the words aren’t helping the woman either.