Lying in the semidarkness, for once certain that no client would enter her chamber, she was free to transmit questions to her mother on subjects never before even hinted at. Had her mother ever felt the sexual rapture that Batya had grown to enjoy? Not with all clients, certainly, but in her first year, with Rochel’s and Nettie’s guidance to her body’s secrets, with the sisters’ frank talks about their trade and the sensuous and seductive tango, something had bloomed in Batya. By the time she celebrated her sixteenth birthday, sometimes passion rose in her to an unimaginably pleasurable pitch.

Clients often complained about their unresponsive wives, and the sisters speculated that married women were given to other pleasures in their lives to make up for the drought of their flesh. Had her mother’s body, forever burdened by worries and exhausted by physical labor, ever experienced sexual sensations underneath the layers of clothing she removed only in the mikveh—a body her mother had never even glimpsed in a mirror?

Hours later, Batya stood at the open window, unable to sleep. The monotonous screeching of cicadas was broken by the hoot of an owl. The full moon, now on her side of the sky, bathed the street in silver, and she imagined her father and sisters watching the same moon even though it wasn’t possible, not in this upside-down world called Argentina. Dawn in the southern hemisphere, Rochel had long explained, was dusk in Russia. Perhaps in a few hours, in Russia, when the moon shone full and yellow like a wheel of cheese, her father and Surale would be thinking of her, comforting themselves with the myth that she was the only one of them living a tsures-free life, that no troubles plagued her. With Keyla in Siberia still visiting her husband once a month and Hedi forever the ghost, Surale must be the one taking care of the orphaned Vida and managing their father’s house. Five months ago, they had been united in their sorrow, but by now they were back to their daily struggles. Batya was alone in her grief.

She replaced the letter in the stack and reread the first one to have arrived. How well she remembered that day, Passover eve—her fifteenth birthday. The Seder was the first time she’d seen the house closed for business. Huge tables were set in the pavilion for all the sisters, and a wayward rabbi invited to retell the story of the Jews’ exodus from Egypt. Together, they chanted the familiar songs of deliverance. The decreed bitter herbs of slavery Batya had eaten that night were the most bitter she had tasted, and the charoset the sweetest, as her heart had shared both of these symbols with her family.