A terrible shock. Our poor mother took to her bed for months. With no way to properly grieve, she found it impossible to live without knowing what happened. For a time, she was convinced he was still alive, and would spend all day wandering the streets, or standing at the window waiting for him to come home. At one point, we thought she might have to be institutionalised. She never believed he was dead. Though the other option, that he was alive and had run off, was even worse, I felt. Better dead than drive a stake through your own mother’s heart.

Vida was our own dear boy – he was always Vida at home, never Vidor – the only boy in a household of women and much loved and petted. Though we couldn’t make up for the absence of our father. We were refugees from the 1956 Hungarian uprising, and after helping us get to the Austrian border, my father turned back to join the resistance fighters in the capital. It was a terrible blow to all of us, but the unexpected abandonment affected Vida most of all. For months, he couldn’t be consoled.

When Vida disappeared, I was the only child still living at home. My three elder sisters were either married or out of the house by then and had lives of their own.

I was very close to my brother and his sudden disappearance from our lives was a terrible shock. My sisters left home within months of each other, not long before Vida’s disappearance, and in our diminished household my mother was truly bereft. We’d had a student lodger for a time, but he’d moved out by then. So it was just my mother and me, drowning in our grief.

I’m not sure what else I can tell you about my brother, but my sister Katerina still lives in Paris, and she may be of more use to you. A sweet boy, he was, and we had such hopes for his future. A glorious one, I’m sure, if not sadly cut short.

Yours sincerely,

Mrs Renata Sovàny Thompson

Gessen folded the letter and added it to Vidor’s file. So there it was at last, the massive lie at the heart of Vidor’s story: that his father had lived in Paris with the family, after leading them all to safety. When in fact, he’d abandoned his wife and children at the border, obliging them to make their way alone. This unexpected betrayal was likely the long-festering psychic wound Gessen had been trying so hard to uncover.