Psiri is on the front line between ELAS and the monarchists. Occasionally a British tank will grind through the narrow streets, and the Royal Air Force is constantly overhead, but it is a small though deadly civil war that is raging through this part of Athens. Further off, in the direction of Omonia, they have heard the sounds of a much bigger battle, which has been going on for days now. The year is at its pivot point. Outside, everything is grey: the light, the buildings, the faces of the people she sees around the standpipe. They gather news in hurried, breathless snatches. Churchill has been and gone. Someone says he brought the king with him, others say that is nonsense. ELAS still hold much of the city but more and more British soldiers are coming in every day and they can’t last much longer. Is any of this true? No sooner has someone delivered a scrap of information than they will be ducking or running for cover as a sniper opens up or a Spitfire begins its dive. The graffiti is thicker than ever, huge EAM-ELAS slogans, hammers and sickles, lengthy diatribes that take up entire walls. Young men and women run from doorway to doorway, ruin to ruin, carrying rifles and wearing German helmets. Propaganda is shouted through paper funnels. But at the ration tables and the standpipes, people no longer cheer for the partisans. Every day, Zoë hears that someone else has died, someone’s brother, uncle, granddaughter. The snipers don’t seem to care who they target, and no one knows who they are: ELAS, X, the British. There will simply be a crack! and a body will go sprawling. In some streets, unclaimed corpses have become landmarks: the old woman stretched out beside a lamp post, the boy slumped on the doorstep of an abandoned shop. And the rumours are worse every day. Men rounded up by the British for no reason whatsoever and taken God knows where, bodies with their throats slit by X, or hacked to death by KKE assassins. ELAS fighters executed by Rimini Brigade soldiers, X-ites shot by ELAS. Men and women who have survived the famine and the blokos, who don’t care who is in government so long as there is bread and oil in the shops, blown to pieces by rockets fired from RAF planes. Tracer arcs from the distant crag of the Acropolis. A woman drops dead in the middle of a quiet street, and children run and snatch up the cornbread that has slipped from her outflung hand.