morning.
She got up from the bed and looked up the number of a local taxi firm. The woman she spoke to was hard of hearing, but she managed to shout loud enough to make herself understood. She could only hope that the taxi she had ordered really would turn up on time. As Vassilis had arranged to pick her up at five, she ordered a taxi for half past four.
She sat down at her desk and wrote a letter to Vassilis. This is it, it's all over. All good things come to an end. I can feel that I'm on my way to somewhere else. I'm sorry that you came to pick me up in vain. I did try to ring you. Louise.
She read through the letter. Did she have second thoughts? She often did – she had written so many farewell letters in her life that had never been sent. But not this one. She put the letter into an envelope, sealed it, and braved the darkness to fasten it to the letter box by her gate with a clothes peg.
She dozed for a few hours on top of her bed, drank a glass of wine and stared at a pack of sleeping pills without being able to make up her mind.
The taxi turned up a few minutes early, and it was pitch black. She was waiting for it, by the gate. Mitsos's dogs were barking. She slumped down into the back seat and closed her eyes. She couldn't sleep until her journey had started.
It was dawn when she arrived at the airport.
CHAPTER 2
When she had checked in her suitcase with one of Lufthansa's half-asleep staff and was on her way to the security barrier, something happened that made a very deep impression on her.
Looking back, she would think that she ought to have taken it as an omen, a warning. But she didn't. All she saw was a solitary woman sitting on the stone floor with her bundles and ancient suitcases held together by the string tied round them. The woman was crying. She was totally immobile, completely self-absorbed. She was old, her sunken cheeks indicating that many teeth were missing. Louise thought she might well be from Albania. There were a lot of Albanian women looking for work in Greece, they are prepared to do anything at all since a little is better than nothing, and Albania is a desperately poor country. She had a scarf round her head, the scarf of a decent elderly lady, she was not a Muslim; but she was sitting on the floor, crying. The woman was on her own, it looked as if she had been washed ashore in this airport, surrounded by her bundles, her life in tatters, and all she had left was this heap of worthless flotsam.
Louise paused, people in a hurry barged into her, but she stood firm as if bracing herself against a strong wind. The woman on the floor surrounded by the bundles had a brown, furrowed face, her skin was like a petrified lava landscape. There is a special sort of beauty in the faces of old women, where everything has been reduced to a thin film stretched over bare bones, where all the events of her life are registered. Two parched furrows had been excavated from her eyes down towards her cheeks, and they were now filled with the woman's tears.
She is watering a pain I know nothing about, Louise thought. But something inside her is also inside me.
The woman suddenly raised her head, her eyes met Louise's briefly, and she slowly shook her head. Louise took it as an indication that her assistance, whatever that might have involved, was not needed. She hurried on towards the security check, elbowing her way through the teeming crowd, through a haze smelling of garlic and olives. When she turned round to look, it was as if a human curtain had closed and the woman was no longer visible.
Louise had kept a diary since she was very young in which she used to record incidents that she thought she would never forget. This was one of them. She thought about what she would write as she placed her handbag on the moving belt, her mobile phone in a small blue plastic box, and passed through the magic barrier that separated bad from good.
She bought a bottle of Tullamore Dew for herself and two bottles of retsina for Henrik. Then she sat down outside the exit and