When Petros brought up the subject with his wife Doris, he realised she already knew. Mothers are always in the know, and fathers are always the last to find out. The mother and her daughter must have been hiding and plotting something intolerable together. What was even worse was the good woman’s calm response. ‘And why not?’ she said. He objected as much as he could, sometimes calmly, other times raising his voice, arguing that the girl was on her way to university, the man was a Muslim and a womaniser, the age difference between them was huge, and so on. ‘The girl doesn’t want to go to university,’ the mother said. ‘And she loves him.’ These two pieces of news were, for him, a cause of sudden shock and exhaustion. All night long, he raved between sleep and wakefulness. In the morning, h
