All through the winter, they had shared an attic with an artist who’d also been taken in, a Jew from Belgium, Ahron Weitz. The couple who owned the house were Adele and Daniel. They owned a fabric shop and rarely spoke to their guests; the less they knew about one another the better in case the Milice, a paramilitary organization instituted by the Vichy regime to assist the Germans, came to question them. Ava often brought home baguettes from the school’s oven to share with their hosts, along with fruit pastries, tart due to the lack of sugar, but delicious all the same. The attic was well hidden, up two flights of winding stairs, more than ten cubits above the earth, which meant that Ava had no power at that height. She could not see into the future or hear the voices of angels or speak the language of birds while in that place. When she took a withered apple in her hand it remained so. Magic escaped her, and even when she tried to listen in to Lea’s dreams she was met by silence. She was almost an ordinary woman in this attic, one whose feet hurt at the end of the day, who was chilled by drafts and needed to pull on a sweater, who told Lea to sleep tight, and who, herself, slept for the first time, deeply and without dreams.

The painter was an older gentleman, a landscape artist, once quite famous in Belgium. Though known for his oil paintings, he now had little choice but to use watercolors, ones he made himself from crushed plants and berries mixed with a bit of oil in a cooking pot. He had been an animated, successful, rather wealthy man. His situation had so radically changed that he did not even recognize himself when he walked past a mirror. He was in his mid-sixties, but his back had been broken when a gang of Nazi sympathizers set upon him one day as he left his studio, and he now walked with a limp. What little hair he had had turned white when his son was sent to a death camp. He wasn’t sure if he had a reason to live, but some fellow artists had helped in his escape, and he felt he must stay alive in a show of gratitude. All of his paintings that had been left behind in his studio in Brussels had been stolen or burned. He knew he would not be remembered, not his work or his name, and that freed him to now do as he pleased. The attic walls were filled with small landscapes, luminous images painted in mysterious hues on plain white paper. A sky could be vermilion or crimson or indigo, an unexpected choice, yet true to nature.