CHAPTER 1
SABINE
December 24, 2008
Marburg, Germany
All around her, the world was white and bright and hushed; a pale sky pressed upon red-roofed buildings and was pierced by thin, reaching branches of trees made bare by cold. Sabine nuzzled her chin deeper into her turtleneck and clenched and unclenched her hands inside her gray wool gloves to keep the circulation moving, though her fingers were already stiff and painful. She knew they wouldn’t get warm again until she was back in the animal shelter and could run them under the hot-water faucets. She still had twenty minutes till then, and she couldn’t make the time go any faster.
That was okay; she had become accustomed to numbness. Winter this year had come hard and early to Marburg, and Sabine both hated the cold and relished it. Hated it because she had lived so many years without it, had adjusted to the thick, heavy heat of a different continent and forgotten how bone-biting a northern wind could be. But she loved the stark nakedness through which that wind swept. She hated the layers of clothing she had to don and discard every time she entered or left a building, but she loved the city when it was buried beneath a layer of snow, clean and quiet.
Aside from a few cars driving idly past, the streets were deserted as she walked the last few blocks down to the River Lahn, pausing every few steps to let Bruno sniff a clump of dirty snow. The bells of Elisabethkirche had just rung the noon hour, and Sabine felt the stirrings of hunger. She’d take her lunch break as soon as she got back. Bruno hadn’t really needed to go out—he’d had a long play session with another dog at the shelter, the two black Labs tumbling over each other in a slobbery wrestling match—but Sabine enjoyed the exercise, despite her frozen fingers. Together she and Bruno descended the stairs to the riverbank and wended their way along the river’s curves. She saw that new parts of the river had frozen over since yesterday. How quickly the water turned to ice. She knew, too, given a sudden rise in temperature or even a light rain, how quickly it would turn back.
She thought of her niece, Lily, who was returning to the U.S. today after half a year volunteering in Uganda. It was Lily’s first time in Africa. All those years Sabine had lived on the continent—in Ethiopia, Tanzania, Mozambique—Lily had asked to visit, but Sabine kept putting her off. When Lily graduated from college earlier this year and announced that she’d arranged to spend six months as a volunteer in Kitgum—a small town in northern Uganda, the site of Sabine’s last assignment—Sabine had felt a flicker of foreboding, but all she said was, “Stay smart, stay humble, and if you’re going to ride bodas, for God’s sake wear a helmet.”
For the past five months, Lily had e-mailed religiously once a week from the offices of the nonprofit organization where she worked, using an ancient computer she dubbed Old Reliable. She wrote about the children she counseled, the expats she met, the groundnut sauce, the smell of the earth after a heavy rain. Her messages reflected the standard surges of optimism and defeat, eagerness and frustration that plagued all first-timers with the unfortunate possession of innate idealism. Sabine was tempted to write long e-mails in return, peeling back the layers of naïveté that fostered such sentiments, but in the end did not interfere. Lily would learn the harsh truths of aid—and of herself—and come out stronger for it.
Then came Lily’s last e-mail, three weeks back; Sabine recalled the precise words, the phrases so very American, so earnest:
Wrapping up things in Kitgum … a few weeks left in Uganda, I figure I’ll do some sightseeing … nice to get off the grid for a bit … don’t freak out if you guys don’t hear from me before my flight!!!
There was no mistaking the emphasis of those three exclamation marks. Since then, Sabine had dutifully managed to not freak out; that is, she’d worried about her niece backpacking alone in East Africa, but vaguely, distantly, in the way she worried about climate change and the dubious fiscal responsibility of certain members of the European Union. She was concerned, she understood the risks, but it didn’t change what she ate for dinner.
After all, Sabine had once been young in Africa, too, and she remembered clearly the exhilaration that sprang from tossing caution to the wind, the thrill of making up your itinerary as you went. Lily had turned twenty-two earlier this year, the same age as Sabine on her first assignment abroad. That year Sabine had spent her R & R hitchhiking around Ethiopia with nothing more than some camping equipment and a stack of U.S. dollars. That was before cell phones and e-mail made transcontinental communication instantaneous and cheap, before Couchsurfing and Lonely Planet built the temple of budget travel in which every restless college grad worshipped. Sabine remembered pitching a tent outside Lalibela and waking in the morning to a band of local men in her campsite brandishing scythes. After some animated discussion—mostly in the form of charged gestures—she realized that they were afraid she had come to steal relics out of the churches. They’d been drinking tej all night to work up to a confrontation. When she assured them that she was only interested in seeing the stone-hewed churches, perhaps with the assistance of a hired guide or two, their anger dissolved and everyone was chummy.
But it could have been otherwise, and in those days pre–cell phones and Internet, when things went wrong, they went truly wrong. Modern backpacking, with all its guidebooks and safety nets, seemed to Sabine to be relatively benign—certainly more benign than the moral thicket of humanitarianism—and Lily had already managed half a year in Uganda on her own. After Lily sent her final missive from Kitgum, Sabine went about her life in Germany as usual, attending to the animals at the shelter, scattering salt on her balcony to melt the snow. Every so often she’d think of her niece somewhere near the equator, wearing flip-flops and getting tipsy on perspiring bottles of Nile Special, sleeping in hostels under mosquito nets with the sheets kicked off. These visions rarely lingered.
Now Lily’s three-week holiday was over, and with it, her time in Uganda. If Sabine had the time difference right, Lily had landed in Denver hours ago. Steve—Lily’s stepfather—was supposed to pick her up. Just last night Sabine lay in bed imagining Lily’s plane somewhere above, perhaps passing over this very part of Germany on her way from Entebbe to Amsterdam and onward toward home.
As they turned the next corner, Bruno tensed and stopped, his eyes trained ahead. Sabine followed his gaze, looking through a screen of slender, tangled branches, and was startled by a movement at the edge of the river on the opposite side. A tall man clothed in all black stood on the icy shore. Sabine gripped Bruno’s leash tighter.
Apparently unaware of Sabine’s presence, the man kneeled down onto the packed snow and came on all fours, then—to Sabine’s profound surprise—began to crawl slowly onto the frozen river.
Bruno growled low in his throat, and Sabine soothed him with a hand on his head. Meanwhile the man moved steadily forward, his gloved fingers brushing the ice ahead to feel the way. Sabine was baffled. The man seemed to be crazy. There was no way of knowing how thick the ice was—it could be newly frozen, fatal if it cracked and he went through.
No one else was around. The man was silent as he paused, knocked lightly on the ice, then crawled another few centimeters. Sabine held her breath. The moment felt uncanny, this strangely solitary man breaking into her own strange solitude.
Then she saw the swan. Obscured by the branches in the way, the swan’s colors had matched the blue-white of the river and snow. Now she could make out the shape of its back, the writhing limb of its neck. It began to hiss, pumping its orange and black beak forward as if hoping to pull the rest of its body free.
Which, Sabine could see clearly now, would fail: the bird was trapped, frozen into the ice. Even its wings were pressed tight against its body. She knew this happened sometimes with ducks and other water birds that chose poorly where they slept the night. Usually they died. But swans seemed so big, so powerful; surely this one would have been able to thrash its way out?
Sabine looked again at the man’s clothes and realized he was wearing full-body waders, like fishermen. When he turned slightly away from her to evaluate his distance from shore, she saw a hand ax tucked into his back belt loop. She dared not move, both for fear of agitating the swan further and because she didn’t want the man to know he was being watched. Bruno sat and started sniffing the air. Sabine didn’t remove her hand from his head.
The closer the man got to the swan, the harder the swan strained its neck. The man seemed to know the danger of getting too close; he stopped a few feet away, just out of reach, and pulled out his ax.
As gently as if stroking a cat, he began tapping the ax against the ice.
Bit by bit he chipped the frozen river away, taking care not to shift his body weight nor come within range of the swan’s angry beak. Sabine watched, enthralled. Time was lost to her. The man’s fierce concentration was contagious; Sabine hardly breathed. The world narrowed to the scene before her: the scratch scratch scratch, tap tap, scratch scratch of the man’s ax, the swan’s constant hiss.
A crack broke the trance; bits of ice bobbed in the water, suddenly loose, and the bird surged forward. The man got to his feet quickly and stumbled back, out of range of those massive, miraculous wings, as the sheet of ice shifted and groaned. He made it to shore just as the swan beat its way out of the river and into the air, and the ice broke away. The swan was gone in seconds.
Stillness returned to the sky, the river.
Then Bruno barked and Sabine remembered herself; she looked over at the man as he noticed them for the first time. He waved, unembarrassed, then gathered his things and trudged on in the other direction. Sabine watched him until his figure disappeared around a bend, even after she felt her phone begin to vibrate deep beneath her winter layers. Slowly, she removed her gloves and undid the necessary zippers to pull it out.
She was surprised to see Steve’s name on the caller ID. In an instant the swan was swept aside, vanished as if from a dream.
“Steve?” she answered. “It must be four in the morning over there. Was Lily’s flight so late?”
“She’s not here,” Steve said, his voice panicked. “Lily’s not here.”
“Not there?” Sabine said. Holding the phone to her ear, her exposed fingers were already white and trembling. “You mean it’s delayed?”
“No, no, the plane arrived, but Lily—she wasn’t on it.” In the background of the call, Sabine could hear a low echoey airport announcement being made. “I just talked to the customer service rep at KLM,” Steve continued. “They said she never showed up in Entebbe. Did she say anything to you about changing her ticket? Has she contacted you at all since she left Kitgum?”
“She was backpacking…” Sabine trailed off. “She said not to worry, that she would be out of touch for a little while. Remember? She said that.”
“So you haven’t heard from her?”
“No. Nothing.”
Bruno had stopped whining and was now, bless him, sitting patiently, watching a pair of bullfinches chatter in the branches of a nearby tree.
“What does it mean?” Steve said.
“I’m sure she’s fine. She probably just missed her flight.” Even as she said it, a trickle of nausea snaked through her stomach.
“And didn’t tell us?” Steve said. “Not a word?”
“She might be in the air right now.” Please let her be in the air right now.
“No,” Steve said. “It’s not like her. She would have found a way to contact me. Something happened to her.” His desperation was escalating. “What was she thinking, going to Africa in the first place? Hannah would have talked her out of it.”
At the invocation of her sister, a prickling of guilt wreathed Sabine’s neck. “You don’t know that.”
“She was my wife.” A beat passed. She heard him exhale heavily. “I’m sorry. I’m a mess. What do we do?”
He was on the verge of splitting open; she heard it in his voice. How long had he been at the airport, waiting, sleepless? Scrutinizing face after face, his hopes repeatedly expanding and deflating as passenger after passenger exited customs and did not materialize into the singular shape of his late wife’s only daughter? He needed her to pull him back from the edge, to take control.
“I’m sure there’s an explanation,” she said with a confidence she didn’t at all feel. “You go home, get some rest. I’ll call the U.S. embassy in Kampala.”
“What about the police? Do we file a missing person’s report?”
“Let me talk to the embassy first,” she said. “They’ll know what to do.”
After they hung up, Sabine stood in the snow a moment longer, the phone still in her hand. The bullfinches were gone, and Bruno had lain down and was licking his front paw. Bits of lingering ice still bobbed in the river. The twin Gothic spires of Elisabethkirche impaled the sky. Impossible, Sabine thought, that the world hadn’t stopped completely, that the church bells had managed to ring that morning at all. The assertiveness with which she’d spoken to Steve came easily; it was a familiar instinct, managing crisis with pragmatism. But stirring in the depths was something darker, more menacing.
The day she left Uganda for the last time, two years ago, she’d looked out the oval airplane window as they lifted off the tarmac and rose into the air over Entebbe: the undulating green hills below, the vast blue of Lake Victoria glinting all the way to the horizon. She’d known even then—hadn’t she known?—that after everything, she couldn’t just flee; it wasn’t as simple as packing your bags and unpacking them on another, colder continent. She thought of Lily—earnest, eager Lily—and her knees nearly buckled with the weight of it.
She tugged lightly on Bruno’s leash and he stood, and together they turned back toward the animal shelter. The doubts, the guilt, that gaping absence in the shape of a twenty-two-year-old girl—these and other things could be kept in abeyance so long as she focused on first one task and then another, as simple as putting her feet forward, left, right, left. The path ran straight from the river to the shelter, and she no longer felt the cold.
* * *
She called the Kampala embassy from her office at the shelter. As the phone rang, she picked up the photograph of Hannah and Lily that sat on her desk. It had been taken a decade ago, and the mother-daughter pair could have been mistaken for sisters: same constellation of freckles across the nose, same soft eyebrows, same closed-mouth smile. The primary difference was hair color: Hannah’s was mousy-brown while Lily was dark haired, like Sabine. Hannah looked so young in the photo—she was so young. She had eloped at nineteen with an American student she’d met in Hamburg and returned with him to the States at the end of the semester without completing her degree. It was the single boldest act Sabine had ever known her sister to make. What other adventures might Hannah have had if she hadn’t gotten pregnant so soon after arriving in Colorado? She’d never said anything to hint at regret, at fantasies unfulfilled, but Sabine wondered. While other American girls celebrated their twenty-first birthdays by taking their first legal drink—and second, and third—Hannah spent her twenty-first birthday eight months pregnant with the baby girl she’d already decided to name Lily, after the white-and-yellow flowers that bloomed in early spring in the grassy foothills of the Rocky Mountains.
At last, a recorded message: Thank you for contacting the embassy of the United States of America in Kampala. We will be closed from Wednesday, December twenty-fourth, through Friday, December twenty-sixth, for the Christmas holiday. Normal business hours will resume Monday, December twenty-ninth. Please visit our Web site for more information. If this is an emergency, please contact our duty officer at … Sabine wrote down the numbers that followed, then replaced the phone on its cradle.
She hadn’t factored in the holiday. She knew it was Christmas Eve, of course; it was a hard thing to forget. She drove past the Christmas market outside Elisabethkirche every evening on her way home from work, the kitschy circus-like wooden stalls juxtaposed with the church’s regal gray stone, the smell of fried dough and Glühwein and bratwurst seeping in through the car’s heating vents as she passed beneath a lit-up banner that read, O DU FRÖHLICHE WEIHNACHTSZEIT IN MARBURG!—a joyous Christmastime indeed, Sabine thought, when you spent your days cleaning kennels and administering medications to surly felines and reluctant mutts. The animals at the shelter never took a day off, and Sabine always agreed to take the holiday shifts, along with a brusque young Polish girl who was currently tending to the rabbits. Their colleagues were grateful to spend the time with family, and it was all the same to Sabine; she hadn’t celebrated Christmas in any meaningful way since Hannah died.
As girls, the sisters had made the annual trek from Stuttgart, where they lived with their parents, to Marburg, where their maternal grandparents had a house in the narrow cobblestoned streets of the Oberstadt, below the castle. Oma cooked the goose for Christmas Eve, and Opa read them stories of talking ravens and glass mountains and siblings lost and found. The Grimm brothers had lived in Marburg in the early 1800s, and the town’s hilly forests and half-timbered houses still retained an atmosphere of magic and wonder.
After Hannah expatriated to the U.S., and Sabine to Ethiopia for her first job, these Christmas pilgrimages were often the only occasions when the sisters would meet in person, Hannah with Lily in tow. Sabine watched chubby little Lily take her first unsteady steps in the same garden where Sabine had once broken her wrist during a clumsy cartwheel; she consoled Hannah during her divorce from Lily’s father, while four-year-old Lily blew bubbles at the neighbor’s cat, shrieking with delight when a gossamer bubble hit its mark and popped in a silent smatter of droplets that sent the cat bolting for cover. Sabine felt a painful nostalgia when she secretly observed Hannah tucking Lily in at night, reading stories of talking ravens and glass mountains and siblings lost and found.
The sisters had continued to come to Marburg after their grandparents died, and then after the death of their own parents, but after Hannah was gone, Sabine let the tradition slip away. It was easier to just keep working, and Lily seemed content to spend Christmases in Colorado. Then, when Sabine returned to Germany two years ago—she told people she needed a break, she was burned out after eighteen years of disaster zones, which was a portion of truth large enough to satiate their interest—Christmas felt too loaded, too weighty, to invite Lily to join her, and Lily never asked. The last time she’d seen her niece in person was a year and a half ago, when Lily stopped in Marburg overnight on a whirlwind summer backpacking trip with a college friend through Europe. Sabine remembered offering to pick them up at the train station and being surprised by Lily’s cool confidence that they could find the animal shelter on their own. When they’d shown up right on schedule—Lily’s laughter disappearing beneath the chorus of barking dogs—Sabine had a fleeting vision of Hannah as she must have looked upon arrival in the U.S.: sure-footed and beautiful and unafraid.
Another memory came: one Christmas, when Lily was seven and they were gathered at Oma’s house in the Oberstadt, Sabine and Hannah were standing together in the garden, facing the house, when they realized Lily had been quiet—too quiet. They turned and found her gone. After they’d spent twenty minutes scouring the neighborhood, calling Lily’s name over and over again, they returned home to call the police, and there was Lily, emerging from the deep hedges at the periphery of the garden holding a sliver of wood, long rotted: part of an old rabbit hutch. Holding it as if nothing were amiss. Now, listening to the line ring for the American duty officer in Uganda, Sabine recalled this moment with a mixture of hope and unease. Could it be that easy, again?
A harried male voice answered. “Yes? Hello?”
“Hello?” she said. “I’m trying to reach someone at the U.S. embassy. Is this the right number?”
“Well, I’m the guy on call.” His accent was unmistakably American. “What can I do for you?” In the background she could hear cars honking. She grasped the noise as evidence of Kampala—she smelled the fumes, felt the fine grit of dust and the bump of an anonymous shoulder jostling her in the crowd.
“My niece—she’s been in Uganda since June. She was supposed to fly home yesterday out of Entebbe, but she never checked in for her flight.”
“American citizen?”
“Yes.”
“In Uganda?”
Why didn’t he sound concerned? She rapped a pencil rapidly against the desk. “Yes—I think so. She left northern Uganda a few weeks ago, probably December second. Her last e-mail was December first.”
“But she’s in Uganda?”
Sabine’s grip tightened around the pencil. “She could have crossed a border. She’s been out of touch since she left Kitgum.”
“Where?”
“Kitgum.”
“Hold on a sec.” The line became crackly, and the seconds ticked by. She heard a muffled thump, and then he came back, and the background noise was gone. “Sorry about that, Mrs.…”
“Hardt. Sabine.” She didn’t bother to correct the Mrs.
“The thing is, I’m not in the office. Christmas Eve and all. I’ve been running around downtown. Just got back to the car. Okay … pen … paper…” She could hear something rustling. “Got it. Your niece, you said? What’s her name?”
“Lily Bennett. B-e-n-n-e-t-t. She’s twenty-two years old. She was volunteering with Children In Need. It’s an NGO in Kitgum. The last time we heard from her was December first. She said she was leaving the next day to go backpacking.” Sabine was aware that she was repeating herself, but the facts she had were so spare. She had nothing else to offer.
“Bennett,” he echoed. “And where was she staying? Which hotel?”
“I don’t know.”
“She didn’t say?”
“She didn’t make any reservations. She was probably staying in hostels.”
“Was she traveling with friends, family?”
“She didn’t mention any friends. No family,” she said, then added, uselessly, “her mother died six years ago. My sister.”
A respectful pause; then: “Did she keep a blog, Facebook, anything like that?”
A few days ago, Steve had mentioned that he’d been checking Lily’s Facebook profile over the last few weeks, but there weren’t any updates. “Not that I know of.”
He sighed. “Look, I’ll be frank with you. I’m just a clerk in the visa office who got the short straw as duty officer over Christmas. If you give me a number where I can reach you, I can make some calls here and let you know what I find out. But we haven’t had any reports of an American citizen being hospitalized or detained recently.”
“Detained? No, she’s—that’s impossible.” But she knew it wasn’t; it happened all the time. “She’s just—out of touch.” She couldn’t bring herself to say missing.
“I’m sorry. I understand. It’s just, from what you’ve given me, there’s not much we can do. The local police have to conduct the investigation.”
The word investigation sent a ripple of unease down her spine.
“So I should talk to them?” she said. “The Ugandan police? They’ll be able to help?” Thinking of her previous dealings with the Ugandan police did not fill her with confidence.
“That’s the official line,” he said.
“Is there an unofficial line?”
“Local law enforcement can be hampered by bureaucracy.” He seemed unaware, Sabine thought, of the irony in this statement coming from an employee of the U.S. government. “And three weeks without contact is a long time,” he continued. “There’s gonna be a lot of legwork involved, a lot of phone calls, a lot of dead ends.”
Dead ends mingled with investigation, hanging bleakly in the air.
“What are you saying?” The dogs began to bark in their kennels. The light slanting in through her office window seemed diffuse. At once the image of the man and the swan returned to her from that morning: his gentle touch, the explosion of ice and energy and bird when the swan broke free, and then the wide, still, gray sky. She remembered a different brightness, an all-encompassing brightness—dust rising from a red-dirt road, a woman waving frantically … Then a shadowy place—a hatbox with something written there, an unfamiliar name, her grandfather’s spindly handwriting, a terrible secret—
The American’s voice cut back in. “… it’s what a lot of families in your situation choose to do.”
“Sorry, what?”
“It’s what a lot of people decide,” he said again. “If they can afford it, you know.”
“Afford what?”
“A plane ticket.”
And then she understood.
For a moment her voice didn’t seem to work. At last she said, “Thank you for your advice.”
“Good luck,” he said. “I hope you find what you’re looking for.”
Copyright © 2017 by Jennifer Williams
