But she doesn’t die. She sleeps, and dreams so sweetly of Tom Collyer that when someone slips a hand behind her head and raises it gently so she can smell the rank soup, she thinks he has come to feed her, so she drinks the broth of weeds and seawater. She wouldn’t have woken for anyone else. In the days that follow, she lies in bed under the folded-up carpet while Efi and Voula force her to drink, and take her to the lavatory, wash her and bring her back to bed. Voula, who is sturdier than the others, has enough strength to go foraging in the hills, and comes back with meagre bundles of greenery: dandelions, vine shoots, bramble shoots, the odd wisp of wild asparagus. The hills are being picked bare, she reports. Only by breaking the curfew and slipping out before dawn does she manage to find anything at all. Even so, it keeps them alive. The local church opens a soup kitchen and they queue for hours for cups of vile-tasting broth. They do whatever they can, they use every ounce of strength, every last spark of intelligence, and it all adds up to just enough. And then there is Pavlo.

In the last days of her illness, before it stops being serious and is just something to put behind her, Zoë’s brother makes an unexpected visit. He sits on the edge of her bed, on the fraying carpet.

‘You look like a ghost,’ she tells him.

‘Thank you,’ says Pavlo. ‘That means I must look better than the living.’ He takes out a packet of cigarettes and offers her one. She takes it almost reverently. She hasn’t smoked since last November.

‘Where did you get these from?’ The smoke is delicious but dangerous, as if it could burn her up entirely.

‘Wait.’ He pulls out a flat, circular tin with a bright red pattern on the lid. Opens it, and takes out a triangle of something black and gleaming. ‘Voula,’ he calls. Voula is scrubbing the kitchen floor, the kind of useless chore they have been doing for a year now, just to pass the time. Pavlo takes out a switchblade – Zoë hasn’t seen that before – and cuts the little triangle into three equal slivers. ‘Here you go.’ He holds one out to Zoë. She sniffs it.

‘Christ and the Holy Virgin!’ she hisses. ‘Chocolate!’ Before she can stop herself she has jammed the piece into her mouth. The deep, earthy sweetness bursts inside her mouth so powerfully that she thinks she is going to be sick.

‘Chocolate?’ Voula snatches the piece Pavlo is offering her and holds it under her nose for a whole minute before slipping it slowly between her lips.

‘Where did you get it?’ Zoë demands, as Pavlo divides up the other triangle in the tin.