In an effort to soothe herself, Tzofia retrieves her violin. She bends one finger and then another to the strings, her bow moving slowly as she locates the notes, just as she did in the convent classroom with Sister Nadzieja standing beside her, listening. She lets herself be guided by the swell of voices around her, and soon there are no individual notes, no separable lines of melody or harmony. Tzofia is tucked in the nest of her bed quilt, her parents kissing her cheeks with gentle mama bird and tata bird pecks. She is in the barn loft, her father already gone but her mother there, breath and sweat mingled with hay. She is in the doorway of the barn, her arms extended, reaching out for her mother’s hands. One by one, the singers around the fire trail off as the haunted tones of Tzofia’s violin articulate the displacement that, together, they share.

From that night on, Tzofia plays to see the chestnut hues in her mother’s black hair, the lines around her father’s eyes. Her memories more distinct, her thoughts grow less dissonant, as she continues to play. She remembers a dinner of chicken paprikash—the tips of her grandmother’s fingers were tinged red for two days afterward—and staying up past midnight, her eyes transfixed on her mother’s vibrating wrist as she pressed her fingers to the strings of her cello. No scared whispering that night, but she could feel the distress in her mother’s playing and in the off-tempo bounce of her grandfather’s knee. Her father didn’t even take up his violin, he just paced the room, and her grandmother took to cleaning top to bottom, polishing the wooden sideboard with extra vigor. All of them acted as if they’d forgotten her bedtime, but she sensed that they preferred to be together, huddled in the tight space of the parlor.

In time, she becomes known not as the girl who plays the violin but as the violinist. An elderly man named Yizhai, hunched and graying and smelling faintly of cabbage, claims her for his own.

“How is my little violinist?” he asks her whenever they pass, giving a slight bow of his head. Tzofia smiles a wordless reply.

Maybe Tzofia would never be one for words. But horsehair on string, bow-arm at just the right angle, with her violin, all that Tzofia holds inside floats out of her in long, even strokes. Rather than the mass of her own body, rather than words, choked and dry, it is the heft of the violin upon her shoulder, the smooth rest for her chin, the steady pressure demanded of her hand on the bow, that roots Tzofia in the world.

Chapter 44