Another day. It is April. The trams have stopped running altogether and Zoë has spent the night on the floor of the cloakroom at the Ntama Koupa, wrapped in a man’s raincoat, as she has done for the last three nights. This engagement was the band’s first job in a fortnight. She wakes up early, feeling the bruises on her hip bones, and walks back to Kokkinia in the thin morning light. At least the sun is shining.

She walks down Stadiou Street. Stacked against the marble walls of the buildings, brass bedsteads glint in the sun, their owners standing next to them. These are the rich, the ones who live in Kolonaki and Thissio, and they are selling their beds because they have sold everything else. Their clothes hang from the beds, English suits, Italian scarves and shoes, arranged so carefully and with such genteel desperation.

A convoy of German Opel trucks full of soldiers passes her on the long, straight avenue down which she is walking. She stares at the soldiers’ faces, her fist around Tom Collyer’s badge in her coat pocket. They look bored, or peevish, or sleepy. No one so much as glances in her direction. Last night the club was full of German officers and their well-fed Greek mistresses and Zoë had to look at them, all right. She always has to look at them, to smile and flash her teeth and wave her tambourine so that the ribbons dance and the bastards keep applauding, so she can bring something home for Voula and Efi and Marika. No, not Marika. The cart has come for Marika. They found her one morning, blue and stiff on the kitchen floor.

Zoë can’t help thinking about Marika as she remembers the food she ate last night at the club, some garbanzo beans cooked in black market oil. Not olive oil – there hasn’t been olive oil since last summer – but some sort of industrial lubricant. Still, it was a feast, especially as there had been nothing but a few crusts of black bread for the two nights before that. And before the black bread? She can’t really remember. She can only think of the little mound of beans, no bigger than a newborn baby’s hand, swimming in its little pool of colourless oil. It was paradise, though her guts are rebelling horribly now. Twice she has to duck into a ruin to squat down and relieve herself, and each time she is more exhausted when she staggers back to the road. Only another mile and a half, she tells herself. Her shoes have become too large for her and she has had to pad them with newspaper.