Shrieks of children at play come from a nearby yard. Soon it will be time for Krystyna to bring their meal pail. Shira hopes there will be bread to dip into the weed soup and an apple each. Yesterday she nibbled her apple so slowly it lasted all afternoon, the juice of each tiny bite spraying in her mouth and onto her lips, the smell of autumn sticking to her fingers.

She halts her solitary game to peer again through the crack of the loft wall. The nearest tree branches wave their silvery undersides; the tall brown grasses tick in the breeze. Shira strains to listen for the sap flowing within the blue bark of the maples. She hopes, in vain, for Krystyna to come take her out of the barn.

Eventually Shira settles back into the hay, shifting against the sharp press of her mother’s hip, inhaling her pungent odor. She wonders when Henryk will bring another bathing bucket. She enjoys the feel of the warm water, how her mother rubs the tickly cloth between her fingers and toes. One time Shira got to eat an egg outside the barn and have a sponge bath in the very same day. She tries to figure out, How many days ago was that? but her mother interrupts.

“Shirke, it’s time for lessons.” Her mother smooths out the alphabet page and sets it aside. She begins on a new sheet, drawing columns. “Today we are going to learn numbers. I’d like to teach you to count all the way to fifty, because you’re five years old and fifty is ten times five!”

“Am I ever going to school?”

“We have to stay here for now.”

“But other kids—”

Her mother’s voice is low. “If you’re very quiet, we can play a letters game.”

Shira wants to protest—she wishes to go outside, to go to school—but her mother’s eyes, blinking hard like window shutters, close her out.

Later her mother reads from In Desert and Wilderness, low and close to Shira’s ear, pointing to the words as she goes and encouraging Shira to sound out the smallest ones. Shira likes shaping her mouth around each sound. She is eager to learn to read, even if, with this Polish book, it feels a bit like pretending. The books on her bedside shelf at home are in Yiddish.

After a few more pages her mother puts aside the book, open winged. Circles ring the hollow of her eyes, blue black like the sky at midnight, and lines etch her mouth. Shira feels the worry in her mother’s breath. She disentangles herself.