Sister Alicja runs freezing water to the very edge of Zosia’s hairline and the base of her neck. Zosia stares up at a crack in the white ceiling plaster to keep from screaming; she shivers as the water soaks her collar and trickles down her back.

“We don’t have hot water for this. I’m sorry.”

After a few more rinses, Sister Alicja dries Zosia’s hair with a towel. Zosia’s nose burns, and the back of her dress is damp. Her eyes fix on Sister Alicja’s headdress, the tuck of her skin beneath the white rising rim, the fall of black veil. It looks to Zosia as if Sister Alicja has no hair at all.

With a few final pats, Sister Alicja removes the towel from Zosia’s head.

“That’s plenty light.”

Zosia grabs a clump and pulls it forward so she can look at it. She’d thought the washing was to get her hair cleaner, but now she sees it was to change its color: it is near white. She gasps, shocked.

Sister Alicja puts her steady hands on Zosia’s shoulders and speaks kindly.

“It’s just hair. It will be better this way. But wait…” She presses Zosia back into a sitting position with her head tilted back and dabs at Zosia’s eyebrows with a bleach-soaked towel. “I need you to keep still a bit longer, eyes closed. It’s no use if your eyebrows are dark, is it?”

A few minutes later, the nun takes another appraising look, her smile pursed. With a quick nod, she wipes any residue of bleach from Zosia’s eyebrows, then rotates Zosia and, section by section, brushes through her knotty, now-strawlike hair and dries it again with a towel.

Zosia’s eyes sting with tears. She does not understand why Sister Alicja is doing this. But before she can ask, Sister Alicja guides Zosia down a dark corridor, past thick columns and vaulted archways, strange and intimidating. Zosia startles as, with each footfall, Sister Alicja’s stiff-heeled shoes sound loudly upon the wood floor. She looks for windows, a door—a way to escape—but finds herself stopped by the shock of noise everywhere around her. Footsteps and singing. Bells marking off the hour. So much sound after so much silence.

Outside in the courtyard, Zosia hears the shrieks of boys, one tagging another, then running off; the singsong patter of girls, counting as they jump; the sharp-edged admonishments of nuns, instructing and cajoling. She thinks back to Henryk’s boys at play—the sounds that brought no danger. She remembers her own chirp reverberating in the barn—the sound that had cost her everything.

Zosia stands motionless, still fighting back tears, her eyes searching for hiding places in the stone walls, behind the hedges. The children are lanky and fair. Not one has thick dark hair like her mother has. Like she had.