“It’s not that he wanted them to be lonesome. He thought that music would be even better company.”

“Dora got a dog as a birthday gift.”

“Hmm.” From a neighbor’s window Róża had witnessed the roundup that took Shira’s friend Dora and her family away—this, the day before Natan didn’t return home. She stares hard at Shira, forcing a small smile. “Well, as a gift for Joachim, his friends composed a sonata for him based on the musical notes F-A-E, for Frei aber einsam. Dietrich wrote the first movement; Schumann wrote the second movement; and Brahms wrote the third. A scherzo.”

“I wish I could hear it.”

She doesn’t mention that Shira has heard Brahms’s Scherzo. Natan used to practice it, repeatedly and meticulously. “If you promise to be very quiet, I can hum the first bars for you. It’s in minor mode, which is tricky, and it starts off very dramatically.”

Though her own eyes are closed, Róża feels Shira’s eyes roaming her face as she hums the beginning of the violin melody. Róża wonders if Shira composes equally exceptional music in her head.

“Mama, will you write it on the paper? I promise I’ll keep it tucked in my pocket, I won’t make a noise.”

Chapter 10

Shira purses her lips tight so the notes won’t escape. Over and over, she hums what her mother hummed for her of Brahms’s Scherzo—the start, like branches rapping against a window, then a soulful, happy melody. She keeps her eyes trained on the crack in the loft wall. Pale orange light bleeds into the gray. It is just before dawn.

The first commotion of the morning comes from the birds: the kiuks of woodpeckers, the krekks of terns. At daybreak, Henryk trudges to the fields. The older boys do their chores, then Piotre departs for church. Krystyna bustles about, pulling stiff shirts from the clothesline, with Łukasz perched on her hip. Łukasz squeals when she puts him down, so she picks him up again and steps into the farmhouse, and Shira imagines him swaying amid the folds of Krystyna’s skirt, pressing a hard crust against his tender new teeth.

The usual villagers canter past on their errands—the white-haired lady whose flowery housedress ruffles between her long coat and boots, the two stringy blond girls, late as always, for work.

For a long stretch of time, Shira occupies herself hiding “treasures”—bits of broken blue-and-white china she’s dislodged with a stick from an earthen corner of the barn. Each shard she turns over and over in her hand, considering where she might stow it, undetected. One she snugs into the nook where a crosstie meets a rafter; another she places inside a wood knot of a floorboard. Two oblong bits that nearly fit together Shira hides along the back wall, farthest from the ladder, deep beneath hay.