The line slows and comes to a stop. Voices start up all along its length: prayers, curses, wails of relief. The girl stands, swaying. Her legs don’t feel as if they are joined to her body. The boy in front turns around and pulls a face at her, but she just stares at him. The woman cuffs him, not gently, on the head. Behind, in the line, an old man starts coughing, a wretched, gluey cough. Suddenly she feels dizzy. How long has it been since she last ate? Some soup last night, ladled out by a beady-eyed foreign woman in an odd black and red uniform. Just one ladleful, and not enough. There hadn’t been any breakfast. There is a lamp post next to her, and as she puts out her hand to lean against it she catches sight of someone standing in a shop window. A small, meagre little girl wearing a frightful, sagging sailor suit, once white but now streaked with tea-like stains, the jaunty blue collar soiled and half torn away from her neck. Bare-legged, bare filthy black feet. The apparition raises her hand to scratch her matted hair and of course the girl’s nails are raking her own scalp, because despite everything she recognises the girl in the window. Zoë Haggitiris.

‘What is your name? Your name?’ The woman, tall and middle-aged, wearing a flouncy white dress that looked too heavy for Piraeus in September, leant down and put her hand on Zoë’s cheek for a moment as she asked her question in dreadful Greek. That had been two days ago. ‘What’s your name, sweetheart?’ she repeated, more gently. Her voice was rounded in the way Zoë recognised as American.

‘My name is Zoë Haggitiris,’ Zoë answered obediently. ‘Please, do you know my mama and papa?’

The woman blinked in surprise. ‘Heavens! You speak such good English! Are you English, sweetheart?’

‘My mama and papa speak English. And Greek. And Turkish. And Armenian,’ she added proudly.

‘My goodness! And who is your father, sweetheart?’ the American woman said, brightly.

‘His name is—’ She screwed her eyes shut and found Papa, striding up the garden path, holding her hand on the chugging escalator in Xenopoulo, grinning as he lets her hold a slippery bracelet of woven gold. ‘Kyrios—Mister George Haggitiris. He has a jewellery shop on Frank Street. Do you know it?’

‘Where?’ The woman smiled kindly.

‘Smyrna, of course! Don’t you know …’ Then Zoë saw that the American woman didn’t know George Haggitiris & Cie, had never been to Frank Street or even to Smyrna. Not ever. She was holding a sort of writing pad, a board with pieces of paper fixed onto it, and a pencil, the end of which she nibbled, now and then, with rather large, very white teeth. The top sheet was full of names scribbled onto lined paper, and beneath it were many, many more sheets.