The ground floor of Zalman’s house was occupied primarily with the necessities of his business: large sacks of flour, wide wooden workbenches, a vast clay oven stoked to blistering temperatures each morning before the sun even had a chance to rise and compete. Baskets of rolls, rugelach, and, on Fridays, shining brown loaves of thick, braided challah crowded close in around the door. If you wished to speak with Zalman, you would invariably find him here, attempting, it seemed, to cover each of his sober black garments thoroughly with flour before his day was done.

It was mainly on the narrower second level that the women of Zalman’s house led their lives. His wife, Feygush, insisted on maintaining a second kitchen there, away from public view, which required quite a bit of schlepping—water and other necessities—up the rough wooden stairs.

This schlepping almost always fell to Zalman’s daughter, Bluma.

Bluma was widely considered a good girl—pretty, kind, generally receptive to the needs of others. Her only fault was a slight overfondness for the fleeting territory between sleep and waking, where the eyelids are heavy, the blankets are warm, and the entirety of the world seems to be confined behind a thick sheet of glass. Rarely did she rise until midmorning, when she might creep downstairs to steal a wink and a smile from her father—and often a sweet bun besides.

It was because of this abundance of time spent in bed that Bluma was the member of the family far most familiar with the activities of her grandmother, who lived on the third floor.

Third floor, though, was charitable. In truth, it was a cramped attic, almost perfectly triangular, in which Bluma’s grandmother lived with her crabby, toothless gray cat. Attic even was a bit too kind: there was barely enough space among the rafters to accommodate the bed, the table, the chair, the old woman, and the cat all at once. And what little floor space there was hung directly above Bluma’s bed.

Bluma knew the sound that the ceiling made when the old woman first shifted in bed in the morning. She knew the sound of the cat jumping from the pillow to the windowsill. She knew the sound of tiny old feet shifting onto the floorboards, of the chair being pulled from beneath the table.

And on this particular morning, the floorboards above her were dead silent.

—

“Papa?” said Bluma.

Zalman looked up from his kneading and smiled. “Good morning, darling,” he said.

“Has Bubbe come down?”

Zalman shook his head and began to knead again. “I think she’s still upstairs.”

Bluma shook her head. “I haven’t heard her all morning.”

Bluma’s bubbe was nothing if not reliable. Reliably, she stumped down from her attic in the morning to retrieve a bit of bread and water, and reliably, she creaked back up without having spoken a word to anyone.