Shira falls asleep with three glasses stuck to her back. Róża does not know how long they are supposed to stay on, so after a few more minutes she wrestles a finger beneath each rim to break the suction and pulls them off. Shira’s skin is welted, red, and angry, but she sleeps on.

Henryk uses his sleeved arm to sweep the shattered glass into the box.

“I’m sorry we broke that one.” Róża wraps the three intact glasses in rags and places them by Henryk’s legs.

“I hope Shira will get well.”

Róża sees the uncertainty still in his eyes.

By morning, Shira’s rattled wheezes give way to smoother, less jagged breaths. Her forehead is sticky with sweat. She awakens late in the day, still flushed but clear-eyed and focused. Róża floods with relief when, at nightfall, Shira asks her to hum a lullaby.

Her back has three rounded welts, bruises circling the edges.

As Shira recuperates, Róża skips her usual lessons on words, sums, and maps and instead teaches Shira about music. She starts by drawing two staffs, each with five lines and four spaces, and explains how the lower-pitched notes sit on the lower part of the staff and the higher-pitched notes sit higher. She draws a treble clef on the top staff and a bass clef on the bottom.

“What are those for?”

“They tell you where to place your notes on the staff.”

“Why are they different?”

“They’re for writing music for different instruments.”

“Why?” Shira’s stare doesn’t veer from the page.

“Different instruments have different pitch ranges. It would be impossible to fit them into a staff with just one clef.”

“Which is used for violin music?”

“The treble clef. You know how the violin can go very high, while the cello can go very low?”

Shira takes the pencil and tries over and over to draw a treble clef.

“I can’t do it.”

“It takes practice. The treble clef tells you that the note G appears on the second line, like this.” Róża writes the G note into the treble staff, then places the other notes around it. “Now look at how it is for the bass clef, where much of the music for cello is written. The F note appears on the fourth line.”

When Róża writes notes into the bass staff, she varies them, using wholes, halves, quarters, and eighths.

“What are those?”

“They’re all notes, but they last for different lengths of time.”

“Why?”

Shira never asks this many questions about places on the map!

“Sometimes you want the notes to be long and continuous and sometimes you want them to be short and quick, right?”

Shira nods.