Does Shira truly remember her father, gray speckled and musky, his embrace warm and soft but not like her mama’s, or is she making him up, mixing him up with her visions and dreams? A star-backed violin at his bearded chin, notes undulating like a tuning fork come to pierce her mother’s heart. The dancing stopped short, the violin boxed and buried after he didn’t return. Upon waking, the thought that if she could just lie with an ear to the ground, she might hear her father’s notes floating up through the rooted earth.

To ask about him would cause her mother to fold in upon herself like a paper swan. So Shira bites her lips and closes her eyes against the scene outside.

Shira and her mother devise silent games. Guess how many swallows are nesting in the barn. Count the knotholes in the wallboards. When it is time to sleep, Shira snuggles close, hands cupped, as her mother begins the story.

Tonight a white-spotted deer has entered the garden, hoping to feast on enchanted flowers. The little girl and her bird fear (rightly) that a giant will want to eat the deer for dinner, so they devise a plan: the girl conducts and the bird chirps a pastorale of bleating fawn calls. The deer lifts her head, alerted—she’s sure her baby is calling—and scampers off just as the giant’s thundering steps can be heard in the distance.

Shira begs her mother to continue—she loves imagining the girl and her bird in the garden with white daisies, with deer and symphonies, dark sounds to warn of danger—but her mother is firm.

“Tomorrow, Shirke. We’ll have to wait and see what excitement comes tomorrow.”

Her mother whispers her lullaby, and Shira stretches out her hands, watching as her mother’s fingers fold over hers like a promise. Then she settles with her hay-coated shred of blanket and Shira drifts off to sleep, listening as always for the sound of footsteps.

Chapter 6

While Shira sleeps, Róża lies motionless beneath mounds of hay, straining to hear the world outside the barn. The distant clop of horses. Indistinct voices from the tavern down the road.

People pass by day and night; yet no matter how Róża tries, she cannot keep Shira entirely silent and still. It is hardest in the morning when Shira first wakes. Róża must constantly signal. A finger to the mouth: Be quiet. A hand to the leg: Don’t move. Shira chews on her lips in response, yet her every breath, her every swallow, seems to ring out.

The hours stretch before them, endless, and each minute demands vigilance as Shira’s imagination flutters and darts and her body pulses, irrepressibly, with song.