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outspread on his chest. His laughter seems to make a mockery of the photograph nearby, of me. My face so serene, almost ridiculous in its nobility, rigidly immortalised next to his.
    I feel behind the two photographs. There’s something else there, hidden behind the other two, wedged in tight. I take it out, spread it open. It’s a standard size Agfa print. The colours are not so vivid as the passport shots; washed out, grainy as an old film. There’s a deep crease between the two figures in the centre. Zoi. His brother.
    Zoi looks straight ahead at the camera with his peculiar green-eyed stare and Dimitri’s head is turned sideways to seek him. But there’s something different about Zoi’s face; it’s open, trusting. He appears happy, free, his energy lurking somewhere beneath the surface, in the curve of his arms, in the tightness of his belly. I haven’t seen that expression on his face, not once. Not ever in our first days together when we took photos of each other all the time, not once when we talked, not once when we made love, not once, not at all, not ever.
    I sit on the edge of the bed, holding the photograph between my fingers. My face, my heart, static as a photograph. Then I fold it quickly, how easily it creases in the centre, how it’s meant to be in that soft leather wallet, secretly behind the other, these images of the two people Zoi loves.
    13
    THE FIRST TIME I meet Alcmene alone I have no words. It’s my third day in the village and I’ve left Zoi to fix what he can in the decrepit house.
    â€˜Where are you going?’
    â€˜Just to the square.’
    â€˜Don’t get lost. Keep to the village paths.’
    I don’t keep to the well-worn trails that cut through the village. Instead I take the main road leading out of the settlement until it veers sharply down into a valley. I climb to the top of a crag from where I can see the village spread out below me: silly, inconsequential, harbouring no danger. I turn around, walk away from it, always higher. I seem to know where to go, plunging through bracken and tree roots until I find Alcmene’s home.
    The old woman stands awkwardly in her dirt backyard. She looks as if she’s about to run away. Her sheep lean against her; protective, possessive, and one of her hands rests casually on the head of the closest one. She has dark, weeping sores over her cheeks and chin. I’d failed to notice them before, or perhaps they’ve become worse in the intervening days. One is heart-shaped and purple. She motions for me to come into the house.
    â€˜You can call me Mimi,’ she says. ‘The people who loved me in the past would call me Mimi.’
    Mimi, in Greek can mean sore, scratch, wound. It can also mean help me, mother me, make me feel important.
    Alcmene lives in a single room with her son, Yanni. I know this from Zoi, from the gossip that very morning at Pandelina’s kitchen table. She was pregnant at fourteen and gave birth to her child alone up in the mountains one spring night rather than risk the village judging her transgression. Nevertheless they found out and pressed her for the name of the father, which she never told. I know Zoi’s theory: the man who made her pregnant was her own father. ‘That’s why the boy’s an idiot,’ he said. ‘Bad blood.’
    As I stand in the doorway of the hut I see no evidence of Yanni’s presence. It’s a female room, womb-dark, fire-lit, untouched as a nun’s cell or a cave. Candles everywhere, even in the warm pink light of afternoon, and nubbled garlic hanging in every crevice, permeating the folds of Alcmene’s clothes. There are apples too, from last season; cold apples strewn on the stone floor. Alcmene gives me some and we eat together, not speaking; they’re small, soft and ripe under the skin. Bursting sweetness on the tongue.
    â€˜I’ll show you my tree,’ Alcmene says.
    She takes my