It is freezing cold in Athens Cemetery Number 3. The wind is blowing down out of the north, and everyone has their overcoat collars turned up, their hands clamped down onto their hats. February is a bad time to die. Zoë, by the graveside, looks around at the people around her, shuffling their feet, dabbing their eyes with handkerchiefs. Her friends, just behind her: Efi, Marika, Voula. She catches Mr Georgiou, the mechanic, looking enviously at the hands of Mr Prokopiou, the baker, which are clad in a newish pair of capeskin gloves. The musicians – Stellakis, Batis, Iakovos Karagozi, Apostoli Vikos, Dimitrios Semsis the violinist – stand in a gloomy huddle. Even Batis’s gap teeth are hiding behind his moustache. Beside her, Pavlo is looking straight ahead across the grave, across the rows of white marble gravestones to the sea, which is bottle-glass green and fretted with white caps that look as if the graves continue on out into the bay, as though the cemetery has no limits and the sea itself is a part of it. She loops her arm through his and shivers.

Katina Valavani had not wanted to inconvenience her friends and her neighbours. She would have liked to stay until Easter, to hang on in this world just long enough to make sure her funeral was touched by the spring sunshine. The doctor, though, had not been able to manage even this small thing, though he had said plenty of useless stuff. If, years ago, Kyria Valavani had gone to a sanatorium, if the houses in the refugee settlements were less damp, if the bad air of the city wouldn’t hang quite so low, then things might not be so hopeless. But everyone knew that tuberculosis didn’t get cured in Kokkinia.

There had been some good days, some happy days. Mama had found some last reserve of strength, and the three of them had made her tiny bedroom a strange little oasis of laughter and music. The neighbourhood women were almost offended by this affront to the traditions of dying, but Mama waved them away.

‘Ridiculous,’ she said. ‘I want to die of TB, not boredom. Sing to me. Play to me, my children.’ So they sang her the old songs, the amanedes of Smyrna, and when she complained that they were too dirge-like – she, who had been the mistress of those songs for a lifetime – they sang her the ones that were being played now, down by the harbour, songs about booze, and hashish, and crazy love. A whole new music that people call rembetiko, that Mama herself had embraced in the last few years, always reaching for the future. ‘That’s more like it,’ she said. ‘I won’t have anything to give Charon, but if I sing him one of these, the bastard will have to row me across.’