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thinking all the Turks are devils, but you’ve never met one, and you probably never will, and you don’t know a damned thing about it, and it’s ignorant people like you who stir up all the trouble. So don’t spit when I mention an imam who happened to be a Turk and a saint too, and if you don’t like it I’ll just talk to someone else who’s got more sense. And I’ll tell you something else, and I don’t care if you don’t like to hear it, and that is that before all the clever Christians came here from Asia Minor, you people were living like dogs and didn’t have a clue about anything, and this island had almost nobody on it because anyone with any sense had left, so I’ll have no more spitting when I mention the imam, and while I’m on this subject I’ll just remind you of something you probably don’t want to know, and that is that in all the hundreds of years of occupation the Turks never did anything to us that was half as bad as what we Greeks did to each other in the civil war, and that’s something I know about, believe me.
    Now I’ve got all worked up. One day some idiot’s going to give me a heart attack. I was talking about my best friend, Philothei.
    I thought she was picked out. I’ve had a good life, even though I lost my husband and my only son, and so I am not ungrateful to God, but I used to think that He gave my share of everything to Philothei, so that I was left with just the bare bones to gnaw upon. I wasn’t bitter about it, because I too was intoxicated by how lovely she was, and even though I am old and decrepit now, I still feel a kind of gratitude that Philothei came to earth.
    Philothei was vain and melodramatic, and sentimental, and unreliable and infuriating, but she was also soft-hearted and sweet-natured, andeasily wounded and intelligent. She was my best friend, my heart’s true friend, and I loved her because even her faults made her lovable and amusing. I followed her around as faithfully as a dog, and as shamelessly as Ibrahim, who was in love with her from the day that both of them were born. When I think back I realise that he was courting her from infancy, and that doesn’t happen too often, and finally it was Ibrahim she was betrothed to, even though he was of the other faith. It did happen sometimes, so don’t believe anyone who says it didn’t.
    If the stories are true, she was born beautiful. It was said that the imam declared her to be the most exquisite Christian child that the town had ever seen. They say that her eyes were dark as well water, so that those who leaned over the crib and looked into them had the sensation of falling and whirling. My father, for instance, I don’t mind telling you that he was a brute and a drunk, and there wasn’t any man ever born who was harder to love, but even he would tell us: “When I saw her eyes I was afraid of God for the first time in my life. It was as if they belonged to someone who had lived too long and seen too much. They were an angel’s eyes, and they made me think of death. I went out and drank some lemon raki to get over it, and then I went into the church to pray, and, I don’t know why, but I fell down on the church steps and couldn’t be raised. I lay there a long time, with the dogs licking my face, till I woke up again and went in and kissed the icon of the Virgin Mary Panagia Glykophilousa.” That is what my father said, but he was a complete sot, and my mother cursed the day she married him, and she used to go out to the taverns with a slipper in her hand and drive him home as if he were a sheep. My mother told me that he had indeed got drunk on that day, and passed out on the church steps, but that the priest—his name was Father Kristoforos—had delegated a couple of young men to carry him home. I think he would have got drunk whether he had seen the infant Philothei or not, since it needed no pretty child to provoke his drunkenness on any other day.
    Philothei had very dark eyes. You