That night, when everyone has gone, Zoë sits alone in the little house. Pavlo has vanished. He slipped out before the last guest left, before the fish soup was all gone, the Soup of Consolation, as Mrs Kodjagas called it, though Zoë hadn’t felt consoled. ‘Where are you going?’ Zoë hissed, following him to the door, knowing that the old women’s eyes were following them. None of the musicians had come. Pavlo already reeked of brandy. ‘To the Teké Hanoum. Batis and the boys are playing.’ He glanced back into the house, at the dark figures hunched comfortably around the table. ‘Fuck this.’ And he went. He didn’t even close the door behind him. Zoë had seethed with rage. Abandoned already. But then she realised: You’ve already let go of the rope. You’ve already broken your promise.

Mama’s bedroom is empty. All the furniture has been carried out and stacked wherever it can go to make room for the vigil. Zoë takes a chair from the kitchen and sits in the middle of the floor, between the trestles that had carried the coffin. The few pictures on the wall – Mama’s icon of St Polycarp, patron saint of Smyrna; an aquatint of Smyrna Harbour; another of Boudjah. A pencil drawing in Mama’s crude, confident style of a large house surrounded by a walled garden. The cover of a copy of Vogue that Zoë found years before in Kolonaki, carefully framed – are all covered with black cloths, as is Mama’s single mirror. The air still smells, faintly, of flowers and candle wax, of the wine the neighbourhood women used to wash the body, last night. And of the dull resignation of Mama’s illness, milky and tainted, like cheap, rancid soap. The room is tiny but tonight, empty, it seems cavernous. Mama had only enjoyed her new house for five years. But then again, she hadn’t really enjoyed it. The house in the drawing had been hers, back in Smyrna. She talked about it a lot in her last days, after years of never mentioning it at all. Zoë had listened, holding her damp hand, as Mama moved through her memories, forwards and backwards, until, perhaps, she had brought every one out into the world. The last one was something about a cat, a big ginger tom called Alexandros, who one day had caught a raven. ‘Just like those ones out there,’ she whispered, pointing to the women in the kitchen. It must have been the last thing she needed to say, because by the next morning Mama had slipped into a coma. The image – the savage but lovable cat with the huge black bird, bigger than itself, in its jaws – had been a strange parting gift. In the days after, Zoë watched the old ladies take over the house and thought of the raven, how these old ravens had taken her life in their beaks.