Shira rehearses the plan to move, if need be, from the barn to the root cellar—a ziemianka with the stork’s nest above it, at the side of the farmhouse—where she is to wait for her mother on the floor behind the barrels, unmoving (no matter the cold or damp) for however long it takes: neck straight, not crooked, or else she’ll get sore. She also rehearses what her mother told her over and over about her sounds, how they can be no louder than a whisper except when she says that it is safe, very late at night, to speak pianissimo rather than piano pianissimo. If her mother wakes her suddenly, she is not to raise her voice. She must control her breathing: no heaving sighs. Absolutely no sneezes.

Whenever Shira so much as shifts her weight, the floorboard creaks and the air grows thick and humid, hard to breathe. But then her yellow bird skitters out of her hands and scuttles through a hole in the loft boards. He darts about, looking for danger, and returns with his bright feathers ruffled by the wind. Shira searches his bead-black eyes and finds reassurance: Her sounds went unheard.

She settles back into the hay and tries again to be still until notes, snippets of song, and soon whole passages take shape and pulse through her, quiet at first, then building in intensity and growing louder. A story told with strings and woodwinds: a glacial night, a flickering fire, sounds like black water beneath bright ice, basses and timpani and a violin’s yearnings, and, finally, a crescendo, the frozen earth cracking—

Her mother waves an arm, her forehead furrowed. Shira realizes she is tapping again.

Chapter 3

Time blurs and swells in the barn. The day’s hiding is indistinguishable from the night’s, and the tick of each silent minute feels like an eternity in the shadowy darkness. Yet Róża continues with the sleep-time routine she started for Shira when they first ran from Gracja, when they kept to the outskirts of villages, crossing fields and meadows on their way to Henryk’s barn.

First they peer at the photographs in the card fold: Natan at university in an image grainy and dark; Róża’s parents, soft eyed despite their stiff, formal postures; and Shira in her ankle-length dress. Róża wishes she could have grabbed other photographs, better ones of Natan and of their extended family. But these were in reach.

In whispers, Shira asks Róża to tell her about each one.

“This is your papa the day he earned his pharmacology degree; this is your bobe and zayde at Aunt Syl and Uncle Jakob’s wedding; this is you at cousin Gavriel’s bar mitzvah.”