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birth. They agreed that her mother would take on the role of looking after her grandchild and Petra would send money each month.
    Hardly anyone knew that Petra now had a son. She had told friends and acquaintances that the pregnancy had been terminated, perhaps because her pride was not reconciled to Wolfram’s departure. Her mother also concealed the fact that the child was Petra’s. Even though in big cities it might be perceived as “modern” for a single woman like Petra to give birth to a fatherless child, in a German rural outpost on the Dutch border it would still have been considered a manifestation of immorality. Nobody discovered the truth. In the village,
they knew young Peter as the son of Petra’s married older sister who was living in Korea. They didn’t even tell the child the truth. He knew Petra as his aunt.
    Peter was a beautiful child. Beautiful and, like all children brought up by elderly people, rather sad. Petra would go to the village to see her son once or twice a year, and she even managed one holiday with him during his first six years of life.
    As for Wolfram, he had settled in Africa where his name soon became well known in the field of malaria research. They had run into each other once in Berlin, but he hadn’t even asked what happened about the child. “Maybe,” Petra said, “someone told him that I’d had a termination. Still, I did expect him to ask. When he didn’t, I kept quiet about it.”
    Petra was rapidly climbing the ladder of fame; she had no time for anybody, let alone her son. Over time she saw less and less of him, but they would talk on the phone. Her mother kept saying that the child was very withdrawn, that he had no friends at school and that the reclusive life he lived was not suitable for a child. Petra would forget her mother’s anxieties the moment she put the phone down, but she would always send extra money the following month.
    Work prevented Petra from seeing her son on his first day at school and on his sixth birthday. A few days after this birthday, Petra’s mother called to say that Peter had not returned from school that afternoon. Petra dropped everything and went to the village.
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    Peter was a lonely child. He had no friends. He was the worst student in the class and was always causing problems. On that day, some children had seen him
talking to a man when they came out of school. Peter was looking unusually happy. He was laughing out loud, holding the man’s hand and turning round to look at the other children. The man was tall, blond and wearing a suit. The children couldn’t give any more details about the man’s appearance. According to the village bar owner, a man of this description had been seen several times in recent weeks. However, no one had spoken to him and he had done nothing to attract attention. He was an unremarkable outsider in a tiny village.
    Peter’s grandmother said he’d come home with a huge teddy bear on his birthday, but didn’t say who had given it to him. “But,” said the old woman, “somehow he changed after that birthday. He started doing his homework as soon as he came home, tidying up his room and he looked happier than ever before.”
    His teachers had also noticed the change in Peter. “He’s shown more interest in everything over the last two weeks. It’s given us all hope,” they said.
    Peter did not have even one friend, not a single person with whom he could share a secret. The children at his school did not know why Peter talked to that man, why he looked happy, why he held his hand or when he first met him. Peter did not keep a diary of what had been happening; in fact he couldn’t really write properly. But he did draw pictures. A child psychiatrist working with the police tried to discover clues in his pictures, but came up with nothing.
    Peter’s photograph was distributed to all the surrounding