“I don’t think Zosia can come; it’s still pretty dirty here.” As Adela says this, she upturns the pail of brown water upon the just mopped floor. Before it reaches their feet, Ula and Adela rush down the steps.

Zosia weeps as she cleans herself up and remops the landing. She sees, in the floor’s shine, her own enraged reflection. She is furious at those girls, and she is furious at herself for not fighting back.

Her hands continue to shake even after she wrings out the mop and dumps the pail, as she stores the supplies in the cleaning closet and makes her way to the music classroom.

Chapter 27

Zosia reaches for the little violin, tightening the bow and tuning the strings the way Sister Nadzieja has taught her. Still shaky, she begins searching for the notes.

All her life she has been hearing them, though she’s had to keep them tamped down, muted. Today, reeking of bleach amid school desks dwarfed by walls of cracking white plaster, she hunts. Her fingers clamp, first to this string, then to that one, while her bow rushes in for the test.

One by one, the notes accumulate to take her back, back. She is in the parlor in Gracja, nestled in her grandfather’s lap, the sound of her parents’ music like the whip-up of dust clouds around manic dancing feet. Vibrant melodies. The wild pluck of strings.

Zosia’s own sound comes out alternately scratchy, then airy, and she can’t play at all fast. But she sticks with it, and in time she masters a crisper sound, a steady rhythm: the whirring wind.

Her throat tightens and her chest heaves as she sounds out other melodies, songs she composed in her head in the barn, recalling times when her whole family was together: walking by the riverbank, the water scalloped by a gusting breeze; conversing after dinner, instruments within reach.

Only in this music, wistful and defiant, can she find something of her own without giving herself away. Find her family, her home. Shuttered windows. Yellow stars. Notes like these to bridge the shared night.

Chapter 28

Spring 1943

In the woods, the frozen earth begins to thaw. Róża, Miri, and Chana finally break winter camp and begin the journey southward. The icicles that have bearded the trees all winter drip wet and clear. Róża yanks off a long ice tip to suck on as she navigates the thick spring mud.

Róża’s boots are still hanging on, wrapped in dirt-caked twine. Because her socks have worn thin at the heels and are stiff with dried blood at the toes, her feet chafe inside her boots, causing her flesh to tear and flap. The cracks in her hands have no chance of healing as they bleed anew with each burrow’s digging. Róża wraps herself in her threadbare sweater, its buttons long missing.