The date was 20 October 1995. The Bergmann family home resembled a busy  ants’ nest, as did Cape Canaveral in Florida. There, they were attempting to get the space shuttle Columbia into the atmosphere without an explosion on that day. Here, the Bergmanns were preparing to fly to the city of the emperors later that afternoon. But, for now, they still had a lot to do around the house.

‘Oh Rome, Rome the wonderful!’ Edith sighed. ‘I wonder how much it has changed.’

The woman took a few dancing steps with the broom in her arms.

‘Probably not a bit.’ Joseph broke the heady atmosphere. ‘The Colosseum is still round.’

Edith snorted, still dancing.

The South African man who murdered his victims in Johannesburg and Pretoria has been accused of killing at least forty women and a boy. 31-year-old Moses Sithole was seized by police with a hatchet in his hand at his Johannesburg hideout. After a lengthy standoff …

The latest news update poured out of the television while Angela was watering the potted plants.

‘Have you packed the passports? And your wallet? And pack the plane reservations, too, would you please?’

‘Yes, darling, all’s done, we’re ready to leave. Let’s put the luggage in the car. I don’t think you’d need to clean half the house again before leaving.’

‘I know, Joey, but this way I can see better what we might have left behind. I keep forgetting things anyway. The camera! Have you packed it?’

‘Yes, I have.’

‘Slippers? Map? Toothbrushes?’

‘All in. Get changed, Angela.’

Angela ran upstairs to her room with her fair hair swinging around her little head. Edith, flashing around the house like a fireball, drew the curtains, shut off the water at the mains. She kept everything and everybody under control.

‘You can get ready too, my love. We should leave as soon as possible, who knows what traffic’s going to be like.’

‘You’d better lock the garage, and put the lawnmower in too.’

‘But Edith, we’re only away for three days. The house won’t be robbed. This place is so out of the way, and the neighbours keep an eye on our house all the time.’ But he knew how ineffectual his protestations were.

‘Oh, don’t worry, I’ve told the old neighbour as well.’

‘Oh, all right then …’

He rolled the lawnmower into the garage as if to sleep and put a gigantic lock on the creaking door. By the time he got back, Angela was already in her red, ladybird-dotted windcheater. She smiled at him.

‘Daddy, we can leave,’ she chirped, beaming in the middle of the room.

‘The Italian dictionary,’ Mother buzzed past them.

Even Angela laughed at this. Edith sneered, ‘All right, you perfidious lot. Tease if you like. At least I won’t miss anything.’

Within half an hour they were on their way towards Budapest. Although the sky was clear, the trees along the road were torn by rough blasts of wind and some frightened rabbits crossed before them. The hunting season had begun. The jeep, drunk on spritzers of Super 98 petrol, ate the distance, often at top speed. It would at least burn the soot out of the engine.

‘I hope we can avoid the Friday traffic jam.’

‘I very much hope so,’ murmured Edith. ‘We’ve got to be there two hours before take off. Angela, honey, won’t you be too hot in that raincoat? The heating’s on.’

‘No, Mummy, let me keep it on.’

Edith shrugged. She did not suspect that Angela only had the raincoat on in case otherworldly visitors made the top of the car disappear again. Otherwise, I’d get soaked, Angela thought.

Cars were crawling in Budapest, wrapped in a cloud of smoke so dense that Nagykörút, one of the main thoroughfares, kept spitting them into the other main streets. Joseph was only able to crawl along at a snail’s pace. The family kept silent. In their minds, they were already flying above the clouds.

The airport enchanted them. It was as if they had been dropped in a different world. But the check-in gate really upset them: Edith had to leave behind her favourite paper scissors, Joseph his penknife, forever.

’We should’ve put them into the suitcase,’ Edith grumbled; and they could see she felt really ashamed.

‘Daddy, how does an airplane hang on to the sky?’ Angela asked as their plane took off late in the afternoon.

‘Well, how shall I explain, dear? The wing of the airplane is tilted, and the engine propels it so fast that not all air can tumble under the wings within such a short time, so the air pushes the wings upwards.’

‘Well, Joseph, you’d never make a physicist,’ Edith cut in and placed a warm kiss on her husband’s forehead.

‘Oh, you queen of retorts, you!’

‘I? No, just let’s be precise.’

‘Why, Mummy, why’s that?’

‘Come here, sweetie, I’ll draw it for you,’ Edith answered.

She tore a page out of a notebook and began drawing.

‘This here’s the cross-section of the wing … here comes the air … here it tumbles as Daddy told you …’ she purred into Angela’s ears and soon explained how lift overcame and then balanced the force of gravity.

The Boeing was climbing higher and higher into the sky like the king of birds and their ears popped.

‘You’re really professional, honey, but I’m turning in a bit professionally now,’ Joseph said and closed his eyes.

In his dream he was walking in the forest near home with Angela. Soon, they reached a clearing. The savoury smell of roasting lard and stinging, onion-smelling smoke welcomed them. There were two figures sitting at the campfire: Ricky, the postman, with his broken leg, and Zümi the unfortunate driver of the rubbish truck. They were both drinking brandy, whooping and stuffing slices of bread with bits of roasted onion. When they saw him, they yelled out so mightily that a nearby oak tree broke in half.

He walked up to them carefully and almost accepted the spit holding the lard when something on the ground caught his eye. Fire glowed among the clumps of grass as if the surface had been perforated. Every time Ricky or his mate stamped their feet, wider rips appeared in the ground. Joseph tried to warn them of the danger but they did not take the slightest notice. He began to back away from them, holding on to Angela, then turned and broke into a run, pushing his daughter in front of him. With a sharp, tearing noise Ricky and his friend disappeared into a flaming abyss. The fiery crack extended towards them, Angela screamed. Joseph picked up his daughter and ran towards the trees as fast as his legs could carry him. He managed to put Angela onto a branch but the ground was already melting the soles of his shoes and he began to tumble down.

He woke up with a start, drops of sweat rolling down his forehead.

‘Are you all right, Joseph? Having a bad dream?’ his wife asked him. ‘Feeling too warm? We’re descending to land soon. Oh, Rome, I can’t wait!’

Joseph wiped his forehead and looked at Angela.

‘She’s sure to like it too. After all, she won this trip for us.’

The setting sun sliced through the windows of the plane and along the seats when they landed. As the masses of passengers flowed to the exit, Angela clung to her mother’s hand, yawning and clasping her favourite teddy bear to her chest. Her stomach was still churning even though they had nothing to fear from turbulence any more.

‘Let’s hurry, Mummy!’ she shrieked over the murmur. ‘I don’t like being here. Flying is for birdies. Can we go home by bus instead?’

‘You won’t think anything of it on the return flight, honey.’

‘But I don’t want to fly!’

‘Well, all right. We’ll see what we can do.’ She was trying to appease the child, but Angela kept screeching.

‘I hate flying!’

People around them fell silent, some of them even turned round. As they left the plane, a stewardess slipped an airline key ring into her hand.

‘Here you are, girlie. I got it in a faraway land, but I’m giving it to you. You’ll see what a lovely place Rome is.’

‘Thank you,’ Angela answered, pacified.

‘You’re welcome, dear. I’m Petronella, and what’s your name?’

‘Angela.’

‘Well, well, Angela. You really look like a little angel. Be as good as an angel, then.’

The little girl swallowed and wanted to reply but a passenger further behind called out, ‘What’s happened, why isn’t the queue moving on?’ The stewardess waved to Edith to move on.

At arrivals, they took a taxi and melted into the sooty maze of the jungle of cars. As the taxi moved along, they watched the Italian ‘highway code’ being put into action before their eyes. Scooters making break-neck twists cut in front of them; tourists scampered like ghosts across the most congested sections, trusting to the reflexes of drivers; a pickup magically made room where there was none between their taxi and the microbus before them.

Fantastico!’ the taxi driver hollered and added a string of flashy oaths, referring to the pickup driver’s mother, in all probability.

At last they reached the hotel. The glass door opened and a bellman in a red jacket hurried up to them, taking care to carry all their baggage as far as possible. They could not avoid giving a tip.

Excitement woke them up early the following morning as they had planned to visit Saint Peter’s basilica in the Vatican. The murmur of the waking city filtered through the curtains, sometimes interrupted by a loud honk or the rumbling of trams. Angela emerged happily from below her blanket, her crown of fair hair almost shining against the bedclothes.

‘Mummy, I had such a strange dream. But I didn’t get scared.’

‘Is that right, sweetie?’ Having learnt from earlier experience, she went on, asking, ‘and where did you go in your dream? Were we there too?’

‘Yes. I dreamt that I lost the way at the airport and you both disappeared. I looked for you everywhere: in shops, toilets, the waiting area. I got really scared but then a very nice tall man in a grey suit came up to me and told me you were waiting for me at the entrance. Then he showed me the way to you.’

‘So your dream had a happy ending, right? It wasn’t a nightmare, after all.’ For Edith, the matter was closed. She continued planning the best way to get to the Vatican. She already had three routes in her mind. She walked to the window. A little grey spider was wrestling with her fruit-fly breakfast.

‘Mummy, that tall man was actually a bit weird. He had green light pouring from his buttonholes and a sword hanging from his side. And he was invisible to you. He also said I’d have to show him my gratitude for finding you.’

Edith was startled because the spider had paralyzed the fruit fly, whose little legs were painfully sticking out in every direction.

‘Don’t you think the tall man had a duty to take a lost child back to her parents?’ She turned to her daughter.

Angela began to think.

‘I don’t know, Mum, but I felt he could have killed me with a single sweep of his sword.’

‘What are you talking about? Little girls are not cut down with swords.’

‘Why not?’

‘Just because.’

‘Is it bad manners?’

‘Yes.’ Her mother laughed. ‘It’s bad manners.’

The girl slid from under the cover and, with a smile, reappeared in the bathroom. Edith sat down on her daughter’s bed and ran her hand along the sheet, which was still warm from her little body. She adored Angela’s clean morning scent of snow-flowers, which innocently hiding under the cover.

‘She’s our greatest treasure.’

‘Yes, she is,’ Edith answered, looking at Joseph. Her eyes moistened. ‘So we’ll have to take very great care of her.’

For a few seconds, they looked into each other’s eyes.

‘I’m glad we’ve come, Joseph. And we can thank Angela for this too. If she hadn’t collected all those labels!’

‘We can rest a little at last.’

‘You’re wrong there,’ the wife replied with a self-satisfied smile. ‘We really have to get a move on if we want to see all of Rome.’

The man tapped his forehead. ‘Edith!’

Angela was crooning a song in the bathroom, splashing at the tap. Her mother admonished her.

‘Hurry up, honey! We’d like to get in there too. Don’t use up all the hot water from the boiler.’

The singing ceased.

‘But Mum, there isn’t a boiler here.’

‘You’re right, sweetie. What a keen observer you are!’

‘The best!’ Angela strutted out of the bathroom.

Joseph walked to the window and caught sight of the spider, which was now weaving a capsule around the fruit fly with swift movements.

‘Edith, have you seen this spider? It’s fixed this poor sod of a fruit fly.’

‘You’d save everybody, wouldn’t you? But that’s life: the strong always defeat the weak.’

‘But who’s the strongest here?’ her husband mumbled.

After a hearty breakfast of fried eggs, they took a bus to the Vatican. The bus-load of tourists with a variegated palette of skin colours, face shapes and attire of all shades from sky blue to golden brown was an interesting sight. They were jolted towards the Vatican and quashed together like fish in a tin.

Suddenly, Angela cried out, ‘Mummy, Daddy, I can see the dome!’ And yes, there in the distance loomed the egg-shaped dome of Saint Peter’s.

‘Sweetie, how do you know it’s called a dome?’

‘Mummy, you said “It has a huge dome on top of it”. Then I asked the teacher and she drew it on the blackboard. She drew it exactly like this.’

They wrestled their way off the bus, crossed Saint Peter’s Square and stood in the three hundred metre long queue. While waiting, they admired the perfect symmetry of the colonnade, its strict proportions, and watched the hundreds of pigeons marching like armies from one statue to the other.

‘Joseph, where is Angela?’ asked Edith suddenly.

‘I can’t see her.’

‘Oh, my God!’

They looked for her among the tourists, terrified. The queue of those waiting instantly closed behind them.

‘Angela! Angela!’ Edith cried, tears already flowing down her cheeks. A dreadful scenario unfolded in front of her eyes, like in a silent movie. She imagined Angela being bundled into a van and the driver speeding away. Angela’s face was showered with cruel slaps as she fought tooth and nail, until, finally overcome, she collapsed, crying quietly. Edith was going berserk.

‘No! Joseph, no! Damn it, search faster. Why weren’t you keeping an eye on her? Why weren’t we keeping an eye on her?’

They rummaged back and forth in the crowd like moles, looking everywhere, but did not find her. A few Japanese faces stared back at them enquiringly, others were commiserating with them and whispered. Joseph took out Angela’s photo and, drawing on all his linguistic ability, tried to extract something from the people loitering about and taking photos.

Only one couple remembered Angela’s face because the girl had bumped into them about fifty metres from her parents. Edith cried and laughed at the same time.

‘So she wasn’t kidnapped? Then she must be somewhere here. Search for her!’ They set out into the enormous square, Joseph working in from the left, Edith from the right, but the crowd did not reveal their lost treasure. When Joseph reached his wife, she was at the edge of the square in a circle of people. She was on her knees, wailing.

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