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and win more prizes, but at sixteen she moved into ‘a different category’ and the girls she was competing against were what she called ‘full-blown professionals, with dragons for mothers and steel for sinews’. And so no more prizes came her way, but she still loved skating, for its own sake, and when she heard about the new rink opening in Matzlingen – a covered rink with smooth, manufactured ice and a huge gramophone which played Swiss folk music and American jazz, and a café counter which sold drinks and pretzels – she said to Anton, ‘Let’s go on Sunday afternoons. We can take Gustav. I’ll pay for us all.’
    She had a beautiful glide. And she could still gather momentum for a perfect lutz and land with grace. Adriana Zwiebel dressed herself in woollen leggings, a short tartan skirt and a green leather jacket. The eyes of the men at the rink followed her as she made her elegant turns, with her arms held out like a dancer’s and her dark hair tied in a ponytail flicking and flouncing as she moved.
    Seven-year-old Anton and seven-year-old Gustav watched her, too, not so much because she was beautiful, but because they knew they could learn from her. Anton was naturally good at skating and Gustav was not, but Gustav set himself to master everything Anton could do and, in time, everything that Adriana could do – however distant this goal might be. He fell over frequently, but he never cried, though the ice was hard, the hardest surface his bones had ever met. He taught himself to laugh instead. Laughing was a bit like crying. It was a strange convulsion; it just came from a different bit of your mind. The trick was to move the crying out of that bit and let the laughter in. And so he’d pick himself up and carry on, laughing.
    At the end of the afternoon, he and Anton would do one circuit of what they called their ‘mad dash’. They would hold hands and skate in synchronisation as fast as they could round the rink’s outer edge. They came to be known by the rink regulars as ‘the laughing boys’. At this time, Gustav was one inch shorter than Anton.
    It was at the skating rink, where Anton and Gustav were allowed to buy hot chocolate, that Gustav learned about something ‘nobody ever mentions’.
    Anton told him that he had once had a baby sister, named Romola. He said, ‘I can’t remember her very well. She just stayed being a baby and then she died.’
    ‘Why did she?’ asked Gustav.
    ‘That’s what nobody talks about.’
    ‘Was she killed by some robbers?’
    ‘I can’t remember any robbers.’
    ‘They could have come with a hatchet, or something?’
    ‘I don’t think they did. I was three. I would have remembered robbers, wouldn’t I? I think my sister just died in her cot and then she was buried, and some time after that my father got ill and was put into a hospital. My mother told me he was ill because Romola had died and he had to be left in peace, to recover.’
    Gustav and Anton looked out at Adriana, still on the ice, still turning and leaping, as if she would never weary of her own wonderful grace.
    ‘What about her?’ asked Gustav. ‘Wasn’t your mother ill, too, after the death of baby Romola?’
    ‘No,’ said Anton. ‘My mother is never ill. She’s never even tired. Except when we had to leave Bern. She said she was tired then. I expect it was the thought of moving all the furniture. We couldn’t leave it behind, because my parents are very fond of furniture.’
    ‘So why did you leave Bern?’
    ‘Something to do with my father’s job. I think the bank in Bern thought – after he’d been ill for a long time because of my sister dying – that he’d be happier in a smaller bank, and so we came to Matzlingen.’
    ‘And you cried at the kindergarten.’
    ‘And you drew your Mutti as an ice cream!’
    They laughed then, but Anton stopped laughing suddenly and said, ‘You must never, ever tell anybody about Romola, Gustav. Swear in blood.’
    ‘What d’you