When she steps onto the stage, Tzofia looks out over the tight rows of seats, extending upward in lit balcony circles. She joins her pianist for a bow, puts her ear to her violin to tune. Then she closes her eyes, taking in the hushed silence of the hall, and imagines her first notes in her head: the rapping opening, sounds connected with her earliest memories—silence and confusion, but also warmth and touch—which she aims to infuse into every note.

As always when she performs, no matter where around the world, she angles face out beneath the glare. Just before bringing her bow-arm down upon string, she scans the visible rows and allows herself to imagine.

Off to the side, a woman with midnight eyes.

On the woman’s shoulder, a tiny yellow bird.

The music rises as if from the ground beneath Róża’s feet, pulsing through hay and feathers and white rubble. The violin’s rapping, a pounding in her chest; the piano’s rising chords, a restless cry. Notes that Róża once scrawled on hand-drawn staffs, once whispered in the silence of the barn’s high loft, now rush back to her across the hall, across the years: Brahms’s Scherzo reverberating in her every cell like the longing that precedes all memory.

The violin pours out the melody of soulful exultation. Grounded by the piano’s chords, its song swoops from high, generously, tenderly, like the folding of a hand. When the violin and piano switch parts, the violinist plays the accompaniment in soft, rising phrases, each ending higher than the last and trailing off like a searching, unfinished thought. Róża feels herself straightening up in her seat as if to catch the music in the air, lifted by each ascent, wishing to cry out yet staying silent.

The romping start returns, a wild gallop as the piano accelerates, its pitch higher and higher, then stops suddenly as if it has finally reached its destination; and now the violin sings the joyous middle theme. Róża can’t see for her tears as the music tells her all she needs to know: they were as one, from seed within womb to bodies entangled beneath hay to beings apart yet with melodies—this melody—shared between them, always.

The ending comes as a gift, a surprise placed into cupped hands, expressing affection so powerful as to banish all loneliness. Note by note it thickens like glass beads on a strand.

Róża stands up.

With the final chord, Tzofia lets her bow-arm drop and brings her violin to her side. Amid the audience’s applause, she smiles at her pianist and bows.

Patrons rustle, about to start rising from their seats. One, off to the side, is already standing. Tzofia blinks against the stagelights and looks in her direction, faint hope fluttering inside her, like a yellow bird flying its way home.

Note About Polish Surnames