He sits down on the nearest bench, feeling all his certainties, all the beliefs he has demanded of himself in order to stay alive and sane evaporating into the Athens air. The air that smells of pine trees, burning houses, tank exhaust and cordite. Athens is just another battlefield after all.

CHAPTER THIRTY-EIGHT

Andromache is not well. She has had diarrhoea for two days and is too exhausted to get up from the bed. Apostoli, gaunt with hunger and lack of sleep, stays slumped on the floor at her side. There is cholera in the neighbourhood and shelling has disrupted the water supply. Burst sewer pipes leak out into the street. No one has left the house for a week, maybe more, except to run to the standpipe on the corner to fill jars and buckets with water, or to one of the Red Cross stations where volunteers risk sniper fire to hand out cans of soup and slices of jaundice-yellow bobóta. The sickly taste of the gritty corn bread, though it is keeping them all alive, never leaves her and sometimes she wakes in the night after dreaming of it, only to gag on its oily ghost in her mouth. The three of them have retreated to the cramped upstairs rooms of the house since an artillery round came in through the kitchen window and destroyed the icebox. Though there has been no ice for years, it was one of their stores of tinned food and now they have very little left to eat. At night, the sky is criss-crossed with tracer. Spent bullets lie so thickly in the streets that even the little boys are tired of collecting them. They huddle together in the bedroom for warmth and for company. They barely talk, but being close to one another is just enough to stave off despair.