‘They bring you here too?’
I looked up and saw the black woman from the night before. She had a blanket around her shoulders and a piece of bread in her hand.
‘Make sure you get food in the morning,’ she said. ‘They bring food from the church but is finish quickly. They bring medicines too.’
She spread the blanket out on the ground and sat down beside me. She was wearing a headwrap the green of an emerald.
Suddenly, from nowhere, a violent wind swept through the camp, as if the gods of the place had awoken. Leaves and dry soil streaked past us, but she just waited for it to settle, which suggested to me she was used to these unexpected and short-lived blasts of weather. Then she plunged her hand into a small linen bag and pulled out a container of talcum powder, shook a perfumed cloud into her palm and smeared it all over her face and hands. This had the strange effect of making her look grey, the life and light in her cheeks suddenly extinguished. She was watching me the whole time.
‘They steal children here,’ she said. ‘They snatch them.’
From among the foliage, men’s eyes gleamed in the moonlight.
‘Why would they do that?’
‘To sell their organs. Or for sex.’ Again she said this casually, as if she had become immune to such things. I didn’t want to listen to this woman, and I wished I couldn’t see the shadows moving in the woods. I noticed again that her breasts were leaking, fresh wet patches on her white top.
‘My mind is ill,’ she said, tapping her forehead. Then, pinching the skin on her inner arm, ‘I am a dead. I’m turn black inside. Do you know what that means?’
Her dark eyes glimmered in the firelight, the whites slightly yellow. There was a roundness to her features, a wholeness, a softness, a transparency; it was in her expressions and her hand movements, and yet I wanted to get away from her, because I didn’t want to know. There was too much in my head now; there was no room for more. The wet stains on her top kept catching my eye, it was worse on the left, as if her heart was leaking, and I tried not to look.
‘You cannot leave this place. Do you know that?’ she said.
I said nothing in response. I was thinking about Mohammed now. Seeing these men in the woods brought new questions to my mind. Did someone take him? Did they tempt him away or snatch him in the night while he was sleeping?
‘The borders have been closed, you know.’ she continued. ‘Everyone is coming and not many is leaving, and I can’t go back. I am a dead. I want to leave from here. I want to find work. But nobody want me.’
Beneath a tree one of the older men was talking to a young girl. She was probably about eleven or twelve, but the way she was standing made her look much older; there was something overtly sexual in the way she was leaning against the tree.
‘Do you know why Odysseus make his journey?’ the woman said now, nudging me, and I wished she would be quiet. I turned to her for a second, and when I looked back the man and the girl had disappeared. I felt sick.
‘He went from Ithaca to Calypso to god knows where – all of this journey, to find what?’
There was an intensity to her – the way she leant into me, the way she pushed my leg if I took my eyes off her.
‘I don’t know,’ I said to her.
‘To find his home again,’ she said. And then she remained silent for a long time, perhaps she had sensed that I didn’t really want to talk, and she sat there with her hands folded in her lap. She had a fierce presence, her eyes wide, fully alert. As much as I tried to shut her out and pretend that she was not there, I couldn’t.
‘What’s your name?’ I said.
‘Angeliki.’
‘That’s a Greek name.’
‘Yes. It means “Angel”。’
‘Where are you from?’
And again this question seemed to disturb her. She gathered up her blanket, wrapped it around her shoulders and wandered off into the night, picking up something from the ground along the way.
I lay down beside Afra but I couldn’t sleep. Deep in the woods I could hear strange cries – of foxes or cats or people. The man who was sitting on the step of the statue was still there. In the light of the dying fire, I noticed that he had scratches on his arms. Red raw wounds as if an animal had got to him.
And although my mind was restless, I closed my eyes tight. I didn’t want to see or know anything more.
In the morning there was prayer and later Pedion tou Areos was like a playground. The sun glowed through the leaves of the trees, a canopy of emerald so that I was reminded of Angeliki sitting here the night before in her green headscarf. There were locals among the refugees, old women with bags of food; they walked around handing out packages.