The door was unlocked, and again there was no one in the foyer or in the first floor loft. But the building was filled with sounds of activity: furniture being moved, footsteps on the stairs, hammering, television and babies’ cries.

She stepped into the loft, the others behind her. The driver set down his boxes and hurried out to bring the car around.

“Gosh. This place stinks.” Leslie pinched his nostrils, but his expression soon changed. “God Almighty,” he said at the sight of the seventy-foot-long double rows of cribs. He dropped his packages on the floor and took Nola’s from her.

She shivered in the chill of the room. In the milky light that streamed through the unwashed windows, babies were awake, crying, babbling. Some rocked or thrashed about weakly. Only a few sat up.

An abject yearning for Lulu's two small arms around her neck rose in Nola. “Make yourself useful,” she told Leslie and Yoram. “Open the toys and distribute them. These babies get no sensory stimulation.”

“Miss Nola, Miss Nola, I don’t know nothin’ ’bout no babies,” Leslie whined. But when she glanced at him, she saw a cast of gray under his eyes.

“Weren’t you the one to say that babies were a wonderful way to start people?” she asked. “Well, take a look at these—”

At the far end, in an open area, two dozen babies, all girls wearing only short, loose shirts, were sitting splay-legged on bamboo benches underneath which chamber pots had been placed. The chest-high tray of each bench was fixed over two vertical bars and locked the girls’ torsos and open thighs. The girls looked at Nola with hollow, dark eyes. Nola crouched in front of them and little white buttocks like pale, unripe peaches peeked at her below the holes cut into the benches.

Yoram rattled a trinket in front of a baby who did not try to reach for it. “I did shifts at the kibbutz nursery, but I’ve never seen anything like these babies. They’re zombies.”

Leslie touched one little head after another as though counting them—or perhaps transferring positive energy onto them. “Nola, this is not my idea of a lunch break,” he said after a while. “We must go back and rehearse. We’re in the midst of a concert tour.”

Nola surveyed the floor under the cribs for a scurrying rat. From above, the sound of rhythmic banging, accompanied by a choir of cries, echoed down. “I’m going to check things on the next two floors.” She dashed out and took the steps two at a time.

The first thing she noticed was the banging sound of babies who rocked and hit their heads against the slats of their cribs. Some accompanied their violent rocking with percussion-like chants, “Aha—a, aha—a, aha—a.”