A little later, Zoë is slumped in her rope-backed wooden chair next to Efi, sipping a tin cup of lemonade and watching the bride, who is greeting her guests and relieving them of their gifts, mostly tiny envelopes containing, no doubt, even tinier sums of money. Despite the setting – the wind has veered round again, and the municipal dump is breathing over the parched field – Mrs Vlessas’s daughter looks stunning in the dress Mama Katina has made her: a replica, in ivory damask curtains, of Greta Garbo’s dress from The Mysterious Lady. She looks down at her own dress: expertly sewn together from an expensive shawl that Mama had found, tattered and stained, in one of the flea markets. It looks expensive – it looks beautiful, because Mama can make beauty appear from anything – but because Zoë knows it had once been a ball of dirty cloth, it still reminds her of what she is: a refugee girl.

Meanwhile, the musicians are setting up under an awning made, far less expertly, from faded, pink-striped bedsheets. She knows most of them: Mr Karagozi, the butcher, with his oud; Petro, who plays guitar; the square head and neat moustache of Mr Perpiniadis, who sings in church and has such a beautiful voice. There is Mr Batis, grinning and showing the big gap between his front teeth. Others she hasn’t seen before: the clarinet player; another with a big round drum; and a thin man with a long, serious, almost saintly face especially catches her eye. He is taking a violin out of its case. The other musicians are all being very attentive to him, and Zoë wonders if he is famous, though what would a famous musician be doing at this wedding on the edge of the Piraeus tip?

‘Who’s that?’ she asks Mama, pointing.

‘It’s rude to point,’ says Mama. And then she points her own finger. ‘Him? That’s Dimitrios Semsis. Head of Recording at His Master’s Voice,’ she says, with a reverence Zoë doesn’t hear very often from her lips.

‘Aman!’ Zoë breathes, impressed. Mrs Vlessas has a phonograph, an old one with a big trumpet like a dingy flower. Zoë loves the records, the heavy, shiny blackness of them, the way there is music hiding in the tiny grooves. ‘Is that his dog, then?’

‘Dog?’

‘You know, Mama! On the label.’ She loves the little white and brown dog, the way he is staring, confused but patient, into the trumpet of the phonograph.

‘You’re so sweet, koukla.’ Mama chuckles and pinches Zoë’s cheek gently. ‘Can you imagine a dog in a recording studio? Bark, bark, bark … Well, they want me up there.’

Mama pushes back her chair, kisses first Pavlo, then her, on the top of their heads – Zoë smiles at the wine and garlic on her breath – and walks over to join them.