A loud burst of real singing interrupts Zosia’s reverie. She twists around to see a group of nuns standing in two lines at the back of the church. Zosia doesn’t know the language of the song, but her heart delights at the joyous interweaving of voices, some deep and resonant, others high and bell-like. She stops crying and sits up. The sound is miraculous, like the broke-open sky—the sky they sat under, she and her mother, in the hills and the pastures, before all the walking stopped. Before the rafters and roofs trapped them in. Before her mother sent her away.

Chapter 24

Winter 1943

Róża heads for the deepest forest, praying that the bitter cold will keep patrolling soldiers nearer to the perimeter. As a distraction from her hunger, she invents a story to remember the convent location, a story about a brave prince named Józef, who at thirty-three crosses a long bridge while looking up at the heavens. She thinks how Shira would like this story—with the clues for ul. Poniatowskiego 33, Celestyn, contained within it—and how she would have questions about the ways Józef was brave, and what the heavens looked like, and what his family did to celebrate his thirty-third birthday. The actual address card, too dangerous to be loose, she has sewn invisibly into the waistband of her pants. She trains her eyes on the crystallized tree branches, a glittering wonderland despite a world gone wrong.

In this vast primeval wood, trees lean in every direction. Bare trunks rise out of the thick undergrowth; others lie crosswise on the floor, lined with snow. Fallen boughs are everywhere. Róża skirts patches of bramble as she hauls loose branches to the mouth of a recessed rock cave. She burrows inside and attempts to fashion a bow using a thin but sturdy stick and long threads from Henryk’s jacket. At first, the contraption reminds her of a violin bow, Natan’s, until she cuts the tip sharp enough to kill a small animal.

She attends to the sounds of the woods. It is far from silent here, her own presence marked by the shrieks of birds and the warning kuks of squirrels. She notices patterns in the wind; for a long time she tracks the movement of a grouse.