The next few hours of waiting were excruciating as Batya’s fear swelled. At last, after a clock somewhere struck four, Rochel led her back into the same room where the doctor had checked her. He was laying instruments on a white cloth. Batya sat on the bed, a towel underneath her. She breathed hard through her mouth; her own stench was undeniable, but the doctor’s instruments frightened her.

“Lie down,” he ordered, and she used the last drop of her courage to obey. He raised her legs and buckled them to a metal frame with leather straps. Against her determination, she began to weep and shake.

“Can’t you give her something?” Rochel asked the doctor.

“Opium will cost you.” He filled a thimble-sized cup from a vial and handed it to her. “Have her drink this.”

The tincture smelled like the sap Batya used to collect from the bark of trees in Russia to make glue, and its taste was bitter. She scrunched up her face, coughed, and pushed Rochel’s hand away.

“I don’t have all day.” The doctor removed his monocle and glared at Batya. “You’d better drink it, or I’ll go where I’m needed.”

“Please,” Rochel said to her. “You’re lucky to have a doctor.”

Batya swallowed the medicine, then rested her head back. Sniffling, she closed her eyes, awaiting the wave of pain.

Chapter Nineteen

She wavered between consciousness and hallucination. It was daytime, then night. She heard the sounds of cicadas and the melody of haunting musical chords, maybe played by angels. Constellations of stars danced in the sky. She shivered in the Russian winter and burned in the Buenos Aires heat. Somewhere women laughed, chatted, argued, until the Siberian wind swept their voices away. She panicked in the bowels of the ship; rats and darkness attacked her, cut off her windpipe. Only the cool hand on her burning cheek comforted her. Her mother! She changed wet compresses on Batya’s forehead and stuffed her private parts with cotton. She made Batya drink that bitter opium and promised she would be healed. Then Batya was Miriam, cut open, blood seeping from every rat’s bite and pooling on soil too frozen to absorb it. Miriam, the friend she hadn’t sufficiently mourned, laughing at Batya. “Who’s better off?” Batya had felt guilty for surviving, until life wasn’t worth surviving, and now she envied Miriam, murdered at the end of her ordeal.

Standing behind the flames of their burning home, levitating with the smoke, Hedi the ghost waved and cried out, “You must live to pull Mama and Papa out of their Russian hell. I was never given that choice.” Her voice became Freda’s. “We employ here only good prostitutes who are healthy and whole. This house has a reputation to uphold; we can’t pass diseases to our clients.”