was worse on the left, as if her heart was leaking, and I tried not to look.
‘You cannot leave this place. Do you know that?’ she said.
I said nothing in response. I was thinking about Mohammed now. Seeing these men in the woods brought new questions to my mind. Did someone take him? Did they tempt him away or snatch him in the night while he was sleeping?
‘The borders have been closed, you know.’ she continued. ‘Everyone is coming and not many is leaving, and I can’t go back. I am a dead. I want to leave from here. I want to find work. But nobody want me.’
Beneath a tree one of the older men was talking to a young girl. She was probably about eleven or twelve, but the way she was standing made her look much older; there was something overtly sexual in the way she was leaning against the tree.
‘Do you know why Odysseus make his journey?’ the woman said now, nudging me, and I wished she would be quiet. I turned to her for a second, and when I looked back the man and the girl had disappeared. I felt sick.
‘He went from Ithaca to Calypso to god knows where – all of this journey, to find what?’
There was an intensity to her – the way she leant into me, the way she pushed my leg if I took my eyes off her.
‘I don’t know,’ I said to her.
‘To find his home again,’ she said. And then she remained silent for a long time, perhaps she had sensed that I didn’t really want to talk, and she sat there with her hands folded in her lap. She had a fierce presence, her eyes wide, fully alert. As much as I tried to shut her out and pretend that she was not there, I couldn’t.
‘What’s your name?’ I said.
‘Angeliki.’
‘That’s a Greek name.’
‘Yes. It means “Angel”.’
‘Where are you from?’
And again this question seemed to disturb her. She gathered up her blanket, wrapped it around her shoulders and wandered off into the night, picking up something from the ground along the way.
I lay down beside Afra but I couldn’t sleep. Deep in the woods I could hear strange cries – of foxes or cats or people. The man who was sitting on the step of the statue was still there. In the light of the dying fire, I noticed that he had scratches on his arms. Red raw wounds as if an animal had got to him.
And although my mind was restless, I closed my eyes tight. I didn’t want to see or know anything more.
In the morning there was prayer and later Pedion tou Areos was like a playground. The sun glowed through the leaves of the trees, a canopy of emerald so that I was reminded of Angeliki sitting here the night before in her green headscarf. There were locals among the refugees, old women with bags of food; they walked around handing out packages.
I noticed one young mother sitting on a blanket, a sky-blue hijab draped loosely over her head. In her arms she held a tiny baby, probably just a few weeks old – its hands and legs like twigs, sticking out of the blanket. It was like she was holding a dead thing, rocking a dead thing in her arms, as if her eyes knew this but her body didn’t. An old Greek woman knelt down on the ground beside them, helping the mother give bottled milk-formula to the baby, but the baby would not feed. The old woman gave up, and instead she poured a big glass of condensed milk and filled a paper plate with chocolate biscuits and gave it to the mother, encouraging her to eat and drink, pushing the cup up to her mouth whenever she stopped.
‘Pies to olo – all of it,’ the old woman said, in Greek and English, and the young mother seemed to understand one of them and she gulped it down now and held the cup out for more. The old woman gave her another glass, then, when she was done, the old woman took the mother’s hands in hers and cleaned them with baby wipes and massaged them with cream. The mother’s eyes were sad, blue as the sea and far away.
‘Beautiful Mahsa,’ the old lady said, and kissed the baby’s forehead.
Mahsa. The baby was a girl. I watched the ease between the women, the way they interacted with such few words. They knew