Trafika Europe 6 - Arabesque

ASTRAGAL

I t was still early when they called him. Not long after lunch, as the day began to turn. From his window he had seen them sunning and smoking on the terrace, and the procession of children pulling sleds, with the ski slope thrust through black pines at the rear. He had gone back to his manuscript. But when they found him he was stretched on the bed in a milky doze. His wife and daughter were in the room shouting and shaking him, asking him Had he seen her? Had he seen where she had gone? Hadn’t he been looking from the window earlier? For his granddaughter had disappeared from the playing area and they were conducting a search. It had happened, Magda sobbed, before their very eyes.

He had not seen the girl, he said. It was sharpening before him, this scene. He looked at the two women with their fraught faces. It was true he had watched over the terrace and playing area before, and he thought he had seen his granddaughter’s blue hat. But how could he be certain? He stood and paced to the window. They were saying it had happened so quickly. She had been there one minute, with her sled tramping up the little rise, then gone the next. The women spoke over each other in a contrapuntal way, almost a sing-song that made his heart go ragged. The girl had never socialised well, his daughter said; there’d been a kidnapping the other

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