The band has set out a chair for Mama Katina next to the long-faced man, who kisses her hand and gives her a tambourine, which she taps and then listens to, expertly. Zoë waves but Mama is too busy talking to the men to notice her. She is beautiful, Zoë thinks. Tall, always very thin, she wears the black clothes of a widow, but not the shapeless weeds that so many of the refugee women – so many widows – hide themselves behind, growing stout and stooped long before their time. Mama has made her clothes herself and Zoë thinks they would not look out of place in Kolonaki. She has almost forgotten that Katina Valavani is not her real mother. She tries to picture her parents here, in the breeze from the rubbish dump, and for a moment she sees them, out at the edge of the field, the border between the waste ground and the ugly new buildings, quivering in the transparent ropes of hot air: a woman in a white dress, a man in a blazer and a sailor’s cap. Almost solid, almost hers again … But they have no faces, because she no longer has faces to give them. And they are already fading. She can’t keep them. They don’t belong here.

There is a speech. The groom’s father, rather overweight, strutting proudly in his khaki gendarme’s uniform, makes some bad jokes. ‘Will we get arrested if we don’t laugh?’ Pavlo whispers in her ear.

‘You smell of retsina,’ she whispers back. ‘You should be arrested.’

The gendarme makes a toast and the party’s cheers echo from the rocks of the mountain. The priest blesses them all again and everyone crosses themselves. Another speech. Laughter. And then the band starts to play. Mr Karagozi picks out a complicated skein of notes on his lute-like oud: swirling, mysterious, not quite happy and not quite sad. The road is the one called kiourti. The long-faced man with the violin breaks in, picking up the oud’s tune, making it soar and dip. It seems to wind around the wedding party like a silk scarf or a flame, caressing faces, not staying long enough to burn. Zoë has never heard anything so beautiful. It falls, rises, falls and climbs, slows. Mama sways in her seat, her back arches and the muscles in her throat tense.

I’ll break cups because of the words you said,

And glasses because of the bitter words.

Aman, aman, don’t cry any more, my little girl …

‘What a voice,’ says the woman sitting next to Zoë. Mrs Bakas is small, wiry, sharp-tongued. A widow, of course. ‘I heard her when she used to sing in the cafes in Punta,’ she goes on, reaching across the table to snap up a lonely square of kataifi that the children have somehow missed.