23
The scent of things to come
Thessaloniki, June 1983
After she let the daughter go in foreign lands abroad
She would only wear black, black like the gloomy sky
Standing still and stiff like the dead over her husband’s grave
Curse I give you, she cried, for my piercing sorrow
Missing a daughter is no less than missing half my body
A daughter fresh like waterfalls, fragrant like a rose.
They were sitting on the marble steps of the ground-floor entrance of the block of flats where Eleni lived, singing the song together and tears flowing down their cheeks. One of the elderly residents on his way up to his flat had stopped to admire ‘two beautiful girls in their tidy navy-blue school uniforms singing nicely together’. But when he came close enough to perceive the tears in their eyes
