The excitement around the breakfast table was palpable. This morning, instead of each group of sisters clearing their plates before the next took its turn, dozens of girls crowded the kitchen and the yard, interrupting Batya with so many questions that she had to repeat the details of the frescos and the women’s dresses and restart the story of Aida yet again—never reaching the most significant part of the evening: the singers’ voices, which had even shut up Moskowitz. Like the voices of angels, who had floated down from heaven only for the evening before flying back up to sit at the feet of God. How could Batya describe such sounds emanating from the throats of humans, the women’s high, like magic flutes, the men’s as sonorous as the roar of the ocean?

She was in her fourth telling when mayhem broke out. A police carriage stopped in front of the house, and two officers dragged Dora in through the door, the girl screaming and kicking.

Batya felt her stomach flip. The night before, in her excitement after the opera, she had briefly checked on Dora and verified that the girl had eaten. Then Batya fell asleep happy, the sights and sounds of the opera pulling her into a dream in which an Egyptian commander dressed in a leather tunic rode his horse across the desert toward her.

It took only a few minutes for the officers to unfold the story to Freda and Moskowitz: Sometime near dawn, Dora had climbed out her window—probably had wriggled out between the twin bars—jumped on the roof of an adjacent lean-to, and run off to the police station. There, in Yiddish mixed with a smattering of Spanish, she begged and cried and asked for protection. She tried telling the officer of her entrapment, of the beatings, of the auction. With several policemen snickering at the polaca’s distress, the officer told her in Spanish that she must obey the law, that prostitution was legal, and that the law said she must obey her husband. Dora, of course, didn’t understand any of it, but the officer who dragged her back to the house filled in the details as he handed her back to Moskowitz. Batya watched as their jailer, not attempting to be surreptitious, tucked a gray banknote into the policeman’s palm. One hundred pesos!

During the following days, Dora was beaten, starved, and confined in a hole under the kitchen yard, where sewage seeped through the walls and cockroaches swarmed. The sisters moved in silence through their morning chores of cleaning, laundering, mending, and cooking. The lesson for disobedience and betrayal was meant to reverberate in their hearts. Indeed, while doing her kitchen duty, Batya could hear Dora’s moans through the floorboards. No one but Freda was allowed to open the top of the hole, into which, once a day, she lowered a pail of water and some bread.