One afternoon, when Bruno came home from school, he was surprised to find Maria, the family’s maid—who always kept her head bowed and never looked up from the carpet—standing in his bedroom, pulling all his belongings out of the wardrobe and packing them in four large wooden crates, even the things he’d hidden at the back that belonged to him and were nobody else’s business.
‘What are you doing?’ he asked in as polite a tone as he could muster, for although he wasn’t happy to come home and find someone going through his possessions, his mother had always told him that he was to treat Maria respectfully and not just imitate the Way Father spoke to her. ‘You take your hands off my things.’
Maria shook her head and pointed towards the staircase behind him, where Bruno’s mother had just appeared. She was a tall woman with long red hair that she bundled into a sort of net behind her head, and she was twisting her hands together nervously as if there was something she didn’t want to have to say or something she didn’t want to have to believe.
‘Mother,’ said Bruno, marching towards her, ‘what’s going on? Why is Maria going through my things?’
