As you go to be with strangers, take me too, take me along for company.

They go to a cafe further down the hill, the only place that has enough watered-down brandy and paximadi to give everyone their ritual mouthful. Then she goes back to the house with Efi to cook the fish soup, the thinnest fish soup in the world, for the widows. That’s it, Zoë says to herself, after the old women finally leave. I’m completely alone. I am my whole family: Haggitiris, and Valavani too. They both live inside me now, and when I’m gone … She sits on the front step in the last purple light of sunset, turning the painter’s badge over and over in her hand. If you could have heard me singing today, she tells the man she doesn’t entirely remember any more, a collage of thoughts and memories in a box marked Tom Collyer: floppy black fringe, long fingers – like my brother’s, she thinks suddenly – a calico pattern of cuts and burns on bare arms. Trousers cut off ragged above the knee, trailing threads. Eyes, the colour of which she doesn’t recall, but were perfect, gazing into hers that morning when they woke up. The Germans had only been in Piraeus for two days then. There had still been an inch of coffee in the jar.

CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR

Rimini Airport, 16th September 1944

Dearest Zoë,