‘Constantia?’ he begged, to call her back, to what remained of life.

He saw her come towards him then, out of the shadows, and light from the burning town struck the colour of verdigris out of her helmet, from the bird’s wing she was wearing unsuitably on her head. But convention had stuffed it there as she ran. The once soothing silver of her dress had been ripped streaming open while remaining soft to touch. She stood against him, calming him.

‘But Yanko,’ she said apologizing, ‘I almost lost our box. I put it down. Just for a second. When I found it again, somebody was sitting on it.’

He half-remembered the cardboard box, frail and dispensable, if it had not been necessary as their one surviving possession, to be manoeuvred up a rope ladder.

Now she was standing, surrounded by the unnatural light, in her idiotic little plumed hat, holding the recovered cardboard box.

‘What the devil,’ he shouted in relief, ‘whatever could you think of bringing along in that box?’

‘The tea glasses,’ she answered. ‘Of the Russian from Konya.’

‘But which, for all I care, could have followed him to Russia! Or smashed in Konya! The box! My God, the glasses!’

The rage of fire had grown too much for her. She was blinded by it. So she burst into tears on the public deck, where private scenes were no longer even interesting.

A last barge drifted empty and abandoned. A corpse floating face down was nuzzling peacefully at the water. Anonymous voices were calling: We are moving, we are saved – as if that were really possible, more likely: risen from the dead.

In any case, he put his arm through the crook of her arm to watch the death of Smyrna, and the cardboard box jumped against her dress with her continued gulping. She was determined to hold on to it, though.

In the little garden-house outside Geneva Philippides sat stirring the dregs of his tea. Malliakas had drunk too much of the stuff. His otherwise empty stomach began to turn against him. He was feeling sick.

‘Not the greatest of all disasters,’ Philippides said, ‘except that it was our own.’

The old man in the poacher’s cap was perhaps by now too far distant from even his own disasters. He was obsessed by present minutiae. Looking at his watch he remarked:

‘It is tiresome my wife is late. We had decided on the avgolemono. She makes an excellent avgolemono soup, which she learned, I believe, though she won’t admit it, from Kyria Assimina, a housekeeper she disliked, who came to us in Chios.’

Philippides’ eyes were focusing again. His vision had been refreshed by the healing promise of his wife’s soup tureen.

‘We lived at Chios for some time,’ he said, ‘in my grandfather’s house, which I believe I still own.’

‘The house in which the shutters bang.’

‘Yes!’ said Philippides. ‘You remember then?’

But his guest did not answer. He was living it