Towards the end of her second day on the docks of Piraeus, Zoë’s aimless wanderings took her to the edge of the mass of people. Not the edge: rather, she came to a place where the throng had pulled back from something, like the tide. And, like the tide, it had left things stranded. Zoë saw a wall and, beyond it, an ugly, new-looking church. There was a big plane tree beside the church and she was just thinking that she would like to go and sit down in its shade when she saw a row of people laid out in a neat row, heads almost touching the wall, feet towards the sea. A small child, when faced with neat rows of things, is often tempted to count them. Zoë had counted to four when she realised, with a surge of nausea, that the people were dead. But she kept counting, because she couldn’t stop, chanting out the numbers in a blur of terror, because the next body would be Mama or Papa. But she reached nineteen and, shaking with relief, saw that her parents weren’t there. Four old women, an old man, seven younger women and seven children, girls and boys, three of them very small. She was aware of the crowd murmuring behind her. The word cholera meant nothing to her. As she stood there, two men dressed in white coats with bright red crosses on their white armbands appeared, carrying a stretcher, which they put down and with a few businesslike moves unloaded another body, which they laid out at the end of the row. She moaned and stood on tiptoe to see, not Papa’s face but an older one, deeply lined and furred with white whiskers. The dead man’s collar stud had come undone and the starched ends were pointing up like a soiled white horseshoe. His eyes, milky blue, were wide open. So was his mouth. Two bodies in the water, the man who looked like Venizelos had said. She hadn’t understood him then, but as the white-coated men unloaded another corpse, she realised what he had said.

She didn’t know that she was screaming until an arm caught her around the shoulders and she was pulled against the folds of a heavy wool skirt.

‘Hush, little one!’ a voice said, while a hand began, quite roughly, to smooth her hair. Zoë felt herself being led backwards through the crowd. ‘Hush!’ The hand shook her, pressed her face into the rough cloth, which smelt strongly of onions and sweat. She stumbled, blindly, her chest still heaving, her throat raw, until the woman holding her sat down abruptly on a packing case.