But they are not. The line shuffles into other streets, past grander buildings. Trams and buses and motor cars pass them in the roads. Everything looks more modern than Smyrna here: the streets are wider, the buildings look foreign. But there is something grubby, down-at-heel about this city. Its people, staring at them through tram windows, from shops, from houses, look suspicious. They don’t have the spark of people back home, the ready smiles. They hold themselves differently, as though the sky is pressing down on them. The refugees creep past squares lined with palm trees. Zoë looks up, and there is a sight so familiar to her from books that it seems like another dream. A white temple on a bare crag of rock. They pass into a zone of low white houses and narrow cobbled streets right up under the rock, past shops where bottles of lemonade and drinks of every colour are lined up on shelves, looking more beautiful than Papa’s shop ever had. The smell of food is everywhere. But they creep on, skirting the houses now, through an empty place of rocks and dead grass squeezed between the city and the crag. They are stumbling over stones in the grass, past ruined walls and fallen columns. No one pays them any attention. Zoë has been staring at her feet for hours. The girl in front of her fell over again ages ago, and her mother – and that horrible boy – dropped out of the line. Zoë wonders what has happened to them. She remembers the line of dead bodies back at the harbour. When Mrs Valavani takes her by the hand, Zoë squeezes the unfamiliar fingers as if they are a charm that will make such thoughts go away. And they do, a little.

‘Thank you, Holy Virgin,’ gasps Mrs Valavani, after they have staggered along a dusty, churned-up path lined with trailing, thorny plants that catch their ankles. It is almost sunset, and the light is turning golden.

‘What?’ Zoë gasps. Mrs Valavani is pointing ahead. At first, all Zoë sees is another temple standing in a field of sunburnt grass. Then she sees bright white pyramids. They are so perfect, so pointed, that she thinks something has gone wrong with her eyes. But then she sees people milling around them, and realises they must be tents. There is a Greek flag flying above them, and a flag with a red cross on it. The smell of food reaches them along with the familiar scent of tobacco smoke, and the line lurches forward. Soon they are among the tents. Men in army uniforms are there to meet them. Women, like the women at the harbour, are going back and forth busily with clipboards. One of them comes up to Mrs Valavani.

‘Names?’ she asks, in French-tinged Greek.

‘Valavani. Katina, Pavlo.’ Her fingers tighten around Zoë’s hand. ‘Zoë.’

‘From?’

‘Smyrna, miss. Where else?’

‘Husband?’