The woman clicked her tongue. ‘Your label said that you are an orphan. You know what that means?’ She waited, watching Zoë intently. Zoë’s chest began to heave. She stuck all her fingers into her mouth to stop herself saying anything bad. The woman smiled so unhappily then that Zoë, despite the misery that felt as if her heart was being crushed like a rotten peach, saw that she was kind after all. When the woman held out her hands to her, Zoë took them.

‘Yes,’ she whispered.

‘Good. I’m sorry, little doll. But what they’re doing is rounding up all the orphans and taking them off to a big, nasty place far away …’

‘I wanted to go with them!’ If Zoë had had the strength, she would have stamped her foot. ‘I want water! I want to go to the lavatory!’

‘Lavatori,’ the person tending the fire chuckled, repeating the English word.

‘Oh, little bird. I don’t think you’ll go to the lavatory again.’ She squeezed Zoë’s hands. ‘This isn’t Smyrna, my darling. Smyrna is gone. We’re in Greece now, Old Greece, among the peasants.’ She sighed, and her wide mouth turned down at the corners. ‘Haggitiris. Did your daddy have a beautiful shop near Xenopoulo? Selling jewellery?’ Zoë nodded. ‘I loved that shop. I used to stare in the window every day. All gone now, all that lovely stuff. The Turks looted all those shops. I saw it.’

‘Papa took all his jewels,’ Zoë said, proudly, and the woman’s eyes went very wide. ‘On our yacht. In big boxes.’

‘And what happened to Papa’s yacht?’

‘It sank.’ Zoë found herself staring at the little boy, who had wound himself under the woman’s arm and was clinging to her, staring back at her with big, hostile eyes.

‘God. At the bottom of the sea.’ The woman clicked her tongue. ‘Well, that’s not the worst thing that has happened. Now, Zoë. Are you really all alone? No brothers and sisters? No aunts? An uncle? Grandparents?’ Zoë shook her head to all of that.

‘My grandparents all died. My uncle Paul was killed in France. So was my uncle Nico. Mama … Mama was going to have a baby. A brother, she said.’

‘Po po po.’ The woman let go of Zoë and made the sign of the cross, then pulled the little boy, Pavlo, against her, and kissed his greasy black hair. ‘It’s the end of the world, little one, but we’re still here. Isn’t that the worst thing of all?’

‘I don’t know.’ Zoë twisted her hands into her tunic. ‘I don’t know!’

‘Listen, little doll. There are more people coming in every day. Haven’t you noticed? The Turks are kicking everybody out of Mīkrá Asía.’ Asia Minor. Home. ‘All the Greeks and the Armenians too, the ones they haven’t slaughtered. We’re refugees now.’

‘What’s a refugee?’