The wait was maddening. “It will take time for my sister Keyla to receive my father’s letter with the money, and a lot more if she even decides to make her way from Siberia to join the family,” Batya told Efram when they sat down at his mother’s dining table. “Just in case my father hasn’t received the previous letter, let’s write another one. And if he did receive it, this one should urge him to act.” Without her father, a man who could work, it was likely that her sisters and their children—and now Vida—wouldn’t be accepted into the Baron’s program.

Efram put his hands to his ears. “What you’re doing is dangerous.”

“What is?” She pretended not to understand. “I want the letter to be short.”

He looked at her. “These secret letters. I don’t like it.”

She pressed herself against him. “Would you rather that I don’t come here for extra visits? Do you want to wait for your monthly stipend?”

After leaving his home with the letter in her pocket, she crossed the street to Rafael’s cart. She had visited him twice in the makeshift tent he created at night by throwing a large canvas over his cart and unrolling a thin mattress on the ground underneath. It had taken an effort for Batya to drag herself out of the house at dawn, after her night work ended and Freda had retired to bed, but Rafael had become her lifeline; God must have put him in her path to help save her family.

Rafael smiled when he saw her. He recognized her, of course, but she was never certain whether he remembered having sent a letter for her.

“Maybe you could do me a grand favor?” she asked, as if posing the question for the first time.

“Anything.” He craved her. She didn’t need to lower her eyes to check.

She repeated the instructions she’d given him last time. “I need you to mail a letter for me. My fiancé should never know, so it must be from the post office in your village.” When he nodded his head vigorously, she added, “Can you keep a secret? Our secret? No one is to know, no matter what they say to you.” She touched the back of his hand, and her fingers grazed, as if unintentionally, the front of his cotton pants. “I’ll bring it shortly.”

She rushed to the bank, where she converted money into two more certificates only her father could cash. She walked to a side table and, with her back to the lobby, put them in the envelope Efram had already addressed in Russian.

Then, shaking with apprehension and worry, Batya asked the clerk to write in Spanish on the back, Postmaster: Please add your return address, before sealing her letter with his red wax stamp.