“I already—” She almost tells him how her mother hummed Brahms’s Scherzo for her in the barn and even wrote down the first bars. But she stops herself. She promised not to say anything about the past. Yet again, he seems to know.

“Maybe you’re familiar with it already?” In his crinkly smile Zosia recognizes that he feels pride in her. Shyly she returns his smile and nods. “You’ll learn it even more quickly, then.”

At the start of her next lesson, Pan Skrzypczak takes coins from his pocket and hands Zosia a particularly shiny one. On one side, a crowned eagle inside the words Rzeczpospolita Polska 1938; on the other side, 1 grosz, decorated with floral curls. The last time Zosia saw coins of any kind, her mother was sewing them into her jacket lining. She remembers being surprised when they didn’t jangle. Zosia can’t think where that jacket is now.

“Do you know what I do to practice as best I can?”

Zosia waits to learn.

“I put five coins, just like that, to one side of a table and I play the part I’m working on. If I play it the first time through without mistakes, I move the first coin over. Then I play it a second time; and if again I play it without mistakes, I move the second coin over. However, if I make any mistake at all, both coins go back! And so on. When I have four coins moved over, the pressure is really on, because with the next playing, I’m either finished, or all the coins go back and I have to start over.”

Zosia is eager to follow her teacher’s suggestion.

“You can hold on to these coins for your practice sessions. They’ll remind you of how important it is to me that you continue with your playing.”

As she works through the lesson, trying her very best, Zosia keeps her eyes on the single most curious thing in the austere space—a white crocheted doily on Mother Agnieszka’s desk, perhaps a memento of her mother?—and doesn’t ask her teacher the questions she wants to ask: Does he have a daughter, a family? Even as the pads of her fingers grow callused and her shoulder starts to ache, Zosia continues to play. She wishes to be good, to be great. She doesn’t say it aloud, but she wishes to play in concert halls all around the world, with recordings on the radio like those her grandfather listened to while he worked, so that anyone who tunes in to the broadcast will hear her.

Pan Skrzypczak tasks Zosia hard, but after their lessons, he reveals a more lighthearted side. One afternoon he asks, “Have you ever heard the Mousetrap Concerto?”

“No.”

“Ah, listen carefully.”