‘Not long after the boy and his mother were settled in their new home, and he was enrolled in the local school, she failed to return from a trip to the market in the next town. He’d sat by the window until long after dark waiting for her to come. The two strangers, though friends of his mother’s, apparently, who’d taken them in, looked upon him with pity. When he asked where his mother was, they said he was not to worry, and that he would see her soon.

‘But the boy never saw her again. Nor his father, and it was understood he was not to speak of them. The people who raised the boy were not unkind, but having no children of their own, they often seem puzzled by what to make of him. When they left their home by the river and moved to another village, deep in the mountains, the boy wondered how his parents would find him so far away from where they had left him. At school, he used the surname of the people who’d taken him in. As the years passed, he could scarcely remember what his real name was, or the people who used to be his mother and father. All that remained was a photo, taken not long after he was born. His mother’s thick dark hair falling across her cheek as she gazed at the child in her arms. His father’s hand on her shoulder, looking straight into the camera, beaming with pride, as if to say, See what we have made.’

Gessen stood and pulled back the curtains. The moon was nearly full, and the ghostly light glazed the ever-deepening snow on the mountains. Beautiful but deadly.

‘As the boy grew older,’ Gessen continued, his eyes fixed on the highest peak, ‘he looked for his parents everywhere. He was sure he spotted his father boarding a streetcar in Zurich or seated in the back of a passing taxi. And wasn’t that his mother amongst the throngs of Saturday shoppers in the Bahnhofstrasse, pausing to look at shoes or handbags or bed linens in the plate-glass windows of the shops? With no proof of their deaths, how was he to know they weren’t still alive? The trick was to stay alert, and to look for them everywhere. Harness the power of filial love to align the planets, until they reached the exact point in space and time when their paths would intersect.’

He returned to the chair by the bed.