‘The old box,’ Mama had always called their house in Kokkinia. She had been grateful for it – ‘We should have an icon of the Refugee Settlement Commission,’ she would say, and sometimes, instead of crossing herself she would trace the letters RSC on her chest – but Zoë understood that, over the years, it pained her to be so grateful for something so meagre. It was a home, though. A brutally simple one-storey building, four walls of panel board set up on a rubble plinth and topped with a roof of cheap tiles, it had a living room which opened onto the single bedroom, which in turn led to the tiny kitchen. A set of concrete steps led down into a little yard, and more concrete steps led up to the lavatory, as Zoë insisted on calling it, which was no bigger than a wardrobe. Within weeks of moving in, Mama had got one of the hundreds of unemployed workmen in the neighbourhood to slice the little box up into even smaller segments, carving off a bedroom each for Pavlo and Zoë from the living room and Mama’s bedroom. For the first time in eight years, Zoë had been able to close a door on her own private space, though this space was little bigger than the single bed it held. Now it is full of Mama’s furniture, not that there was much of that: a wire washstand, a chest of drawers, a straight-backed wooden chair, a rolled-up carpet. All of it stacked on Zoë’s bed.

She sits there in the almost-dark. It is getting cold: she has let the stove go out. The house is silent but outside there are the usual noises: motorcycles, dogs, voices. Her ears prick, but the sound they are missing is Mama’s laboured breathing, the paroxysms of coughing. It is good, surely, that those have fallen silent. It is God’s mercy. That is what the old women have been saying. But Zoë doesn’t believe them. God keeps taking things away from her. Mama hadn’t really believed in Him either. ‘Better to believe in Venizelos,’ she would say, ‘or the Commission.’ She wonders whether the angels that Mrs Mouhtaris had said were gathered around Mama as she lay dying are still here. The thought makes her angry, somehow. ‘You shouldn’t have taken her, you angels,’ she says aloud, and the silence of the house just grows more suffocating.