There is an exclamation and a thin cry further up the queue. An old man is staggering and, as Zoë watches, his legs give away and he lands hard on his backside, his legs, so thin that his trousers look empty, stretched out straight in front of him. His head sags forward and his hat falls into his lap. The people nearest to him gather around, try and lift him, but he is quite limp. So he is dragged, as gently as can be managed, to the side of the pavement. A man and two women arrange him, face up, hands crossed over his chest, beneath the boarded-up window of a shop. Someone goes through his pockets and finds an identity card. Zoë crosses herself – everyone is crossing themselves – but it makes her arm ache with exhaustion so she stops. To die just like that. He will stay there now, she knows, until the municipal corpse collectors with their horse and cart come around and pile him in the back with all the others. The line settles. No one has the strength to do anything but stand still. Women whose stockings, if they have them, are sagging from their shrunken legs. Men who, when they gather their coats around them, seem about to cut themselves in half. I’m no better, thinks Zoë. She has not looked at herself in a real mirror for weeks, but whenever she catches sight of herself in a window, her stomach lurches. Her hands are like webs of skin, translucent bones and blue veins, and the skin where her stomach meets her ribs is beginning to bruise because it is stretched so tightly. Her insides feel as if they are withering. She hasn’t had her period in months.

There hasn’t been any food since the autumn. The Germans have taken all the food and sent it back to Germany. They have stolen everything: the factories cannot make cloth because the cotton has been stolen. There are no shoes because all the leather has been taken to Germany or Italy. The harvest has all gone north. She has watched soldiers in smart Wehrmacht uniforms stripping shops. Standing on counters in their polished boots so that they could reach the last bolt of cloth on the top shelf, the last packet of cigarettes.

The tram finally arrives but it is soon full and she has to wait almost another hour for the next one. Then there is a half hour walk to the house. She knows she ought to find somewhere to stay up in Athens, closer to the nightclub, but she is afraid that if she stops showing up at the house in Kokkinia she will lose it. Ownership has stopped meaning very much. Her fear is that she will simply turn up one morning and find the house belongs to someone else.