The movement builds with sentiment and passion, then subsides to a tranquil close. When Zosia brings the violin to rest beneath her arm, the Oberleutnant, flush cheeked, applauds. “Max Bruch?”

“Yes.”

“Do you know that his wife inscribed on his tombstone, ‘Music is the language of God’?”

Zosia didn’t know this. She doesn’t dare answer.

The Oberleutnant stands. From his coat pocket he produces a waxy bag with a jam-filled roll inside, which he hands to Zosia.

Zosia looks at it, stunned. It smells as if it were just baked, with powdered sugar sprinkled on top. There has been so little food at mealtimes, her stomach nearly leaps to her mouth. It takes her a moment to find her voice. “Thank you.”

“Thank you,” the Oberleutnant says. “I will come again.” And with a nod to Mother Agnieszka, he departs.

Zosia looks to Mother Agnieszka for permission to eat the roll.

Its taste is like a cloud, airy and sweet, with a tang of plum jam so perfect as to mix earth with heaven. The last bite is practically in her mouth when she holds back, saving a taste for Kasia, a taste for her mother.

Mother Agnieszka interrupts Zosia’s next violin lesson to confer with Pan Skrzypczak. How much music has Zosia mastered? How quickly can she learn more, if the Oberleutnant keeps asking to hear her play? Mother Agnieszka’s face is pinched with distress, but Zosia is pleased because Pan Skrzypczak agrees to give her an extra lesson every week.

Sister Alicja ushers Zosia to the side chapel for a class on receiving communion. “Because you’re seven,” she says, and Zosia thinks of past birthday parties, hers and her mother’s, with music and frosted cake and treasure hunts along the river. Birthdays in the orphanage are marked with thin slices of spice bread after lunch.

The chapel hovers cavernous and gloomy, its dark crossbeams stark against the white walls. Almost no light enters from the small stained-glass windows that dot the wall just below the pitched ceiling.

Other girls troop in and Zosia hears one of them whisper, “We are meant to consume the blood and body of Christ.”

“What?”

“That’s right.” She points to the wine chalice and wafer cup on the altar. “The wine and wafer are blood and bone.”

Zosia grows dizzy, fearing she might vomit. Sister Alicja kneels beside her. She puts a finger upon Zosia’s cheek, gently, like the flutter of wings.

“You needn’t worry, Zosia. It is a holy sacrament. And it is accompanied by a beautiful chant. Let me teach that to you now.”

Sister Alicja sings it and almost immediately it is conjoined in Zosia’s mind with companion notes, minor in key, that deepen and enrich it. Zosia is calmed, less fearful of her communion, and eager to get to her violin later and play what she hears inside.