In her disappointment, Zosia runs the back of her hand against the wrought-iron pickets. She traverses the length of the yard, clanging, until she is bruised and aching with a pain she’ll feel most acutely later, when she raises up her violin and sends notes filled with melancholy into the reverberant air.

Zosia still plays every day—lately, both parts of “Rutén Kolomejka” from Bartók’s 44 Duos, hers and Pan Skrzypczak’s, wishing for him to come, to still be her teacher.

Sister Nadzieja explained, over and over, that he wasn’t able to travel the distance to the new convent. Instead, after receiving Sister Nadzieja’s letter about a donated gramophone, he sent several precious recordings with a note: My dear Zosia: Listen to these well and they will teach you what you need to know.

After practicing, Zosia puts on the recordings and listens—to Bach’s Sonatas and Partitas or the Paganini 24 Caprices—while leafing through her workbooks and sheet music. Nearly every page has Pan Skrzypczak’s neat pencil marks, notating changes in tempo or dynamics, emphasizing the rests. One particularly cherished page has a tiny smear of jam from the day he brought her a special cookie at Christmastime. Another looks to have tiny nibble marks at the edge, as if a mouse holed into her cabinet. The pages that still carry the piney, leather smells of Pan Skrzypczak’s briefcase, the ones he brought her just prior to the move, she holds close to her nose and she floods with his presence.

In the careful, looping script the nuns taught her, Zosia writes a letter for Sister Nadzieja to post:

Dear Pan Skrzypczak,

I don’t think the motto Free but lonesome is any good.

I listen to your recordings every day and I play best as I can but I don’t improve without you. I miss our lessons terribly. Please, won’t you come teach me?

Your loving student,

Zosia

She waits anxiously for a letter in return.

One afternoon while Zosia cross-stitches pillow coverings with the other girls, a couple arrives and inquires after Mother Superior. The man wears a black coat and black hat; white fringes stick out beneath his shirt. Zosia recognizes the hunted look in his gray eyes.

“Are there any Jewish children here?”

“No, Rabbi.” Mother Agnieszka’s quick reply has gravel in it.

“Might I nevertheless be permitted to see the children of the orphanage?”

Mother Agnieszka hesitates, but the man strides over to where the girls are gathered. He stands before them and, as they go quiet, he sings.

Oyfn veg shteyt a boym,

Ale feygl funem boym,

Zaynen zikh tsefloygn.

In his voice, Zosia hears the very sound of her mother, a melody that penetrates to her bones.

Perhaps she cries out, for as soon as it is over, the rabbi is deep in conversation with Mother Agnieszka, all the while gesturing toward Zosia.