She steals glances at the children on the streets. She watches a baby in a pram, a toddler clasping her mother’s skirt, teetering toward a park bench. The resemblances to Shira transcend all logic—this would be the season of Shira’s eighth birthday—yet Róża continues as the resonances accrue in her mind and, collage-like, Shira rises up before her. Almond eyes, a heart-shaped face, a thick brown braid. It is for this that she walks on, block after block. Róża’s heartbeat quickens, a wild happiness builds. Until, without warning, like a balloon overfilled, her hope bursts.

Róża closes herself back into her squat. She tells herself it’s best to lie down, to breathe deeply, to try to relax. But rather than relaxing, she is beset by another vision—a memory of her first night in the woods.

She is in her forest dugout, feeling not so much bereft of Shira as relieved to be without her. And she had felt relief. After all of the holding and calming and whispering and shushing. It had been such a strain, a constant strain due to Shira’s every creak and sneeze, her every swallow. Her chirp.

To be alone, even on the run, even in grave danger—yet without that extra needy weight, that other body on hers—was liberating. And oh. To eat. To eat anything and everything that she could find, without sparing, denying, saving, giving over.

The day she, Miri, and Chana stole meat from a villager’s smoker perched at the edge of the woods, she ate until her belly was full to bursting without regard for anything—not the villager’s family, not the laws of kashruth—she’s sure it was pig that she ate. It was only afterward that she considered how severely reduced the convent rations might have become. How her child could be near to starving and she hadn’t thought to cache even a scrap of the preserved meat.

Róża paces the squat, unsettled, music pulsing in her head. She reaches for the found pen and paper. Turning the paper sideways, she lines it with staffs, adds in treble clefs and bass clefs. She scratches out notes—wholes, halves, quarters, eighths. Like everything else in this life, infinitely divisible.

She writes lines for cello and violin, interwoven like two fluid bodies that form a single, silent tangle in the hay, each note a star in the constellation of her life’s anguish. She searches for Shira’s face in the array.

Clouds plunge the room into semidarkness, all colors an octave lower. Róża stands up. As she does, she knocks over her tin cup of water, and the droplets set the ink to running: black notes drip down her legs, streak her shins, spot her toes. More agitated than ever, she heads once again for the streets.