He is an odd child, this boy she now thinks of quite naturally as her brother. Nervous and intense, he never seems to be quite touching the ground, because he walks like a deer in the forest: stiff-legged, always waiting for a hunter or a leopard to burst out through the trees. He would rather live in his dreams, Zoë knows. Just this morning he told her of a princess he had met, a being made entirely from scraps of shimmering embroidery silk, the kind Mama Katina saves in an old chocolate box with a picture of Lake Geneva on the lid. He needs something to keep him from floating back into his dreams. Coffee, tobacco, wine and stolen drops of ouzo and tsipouro. But most of all it is his bouzouki that keeps him tied down here in the real world.

Already, at ten, his fingers dance up and down the frets, almost too fast for Zoë to keep track of. The instrument was a gift from a dying man, Mr Gounaris, who had owned a cafe in Ayvalik but who tried to find his feet here in Piraeus by playing in bars down by the harbour. Perhaps it had been going well, this new career; Zoë hardly saw the man: he slept all day in his screened-off portion of the warehouse, and went out in the evening, his bouzouki wrapped up in an old overcoat. But sometimes he would wake up in the afternoons, and if he did he would sit on his bed and practise. Zoë and Pavlo would always slip over to stand outside the curtain that passed for Mr Gounaris’s door, and listen to the notes winding in and out, up and down. The roads, he called them, the modes that made the music sound one way or another, happy or desolate. Zoë loved the sound of their names: sabah, ousak, hijaz, rast, minoure, piraiotiko. Houzam and karadouzeni. They could have been streets in Smyrna.

Once, Mr Gounaris was arrested – Zoë never found out why – and when he came back after five months in Averoff Prison, he brought something for Pavlo. A miniature bouzouki, about the size of Mr Gounaris’s forearm, with six strings and a bowl made out of a gourd. A baglamas, he called it: easy to make in prison, easy to hide. Look, you could slip it up your sleeve. It made a high, tinkling, tinny sound but Mr Gounaris could make it sound wonderful. Pavlo took it in his hands, eyes as wide as saucers, and just stood there, cradling it like a baby. Zoë knew that her strange, shy brother would never ask the important question so she did.

‘Why him?’

Mr Gounaris tilted his head, the vaguest of shrugs. ‘Because he listens,’ he said.

‘But I listen too.’