There were other more pressing reasons that made hers a bold and unwise response. The money her uncle had given her had not been much to begin with, though more generous than his meager living as a Warsaw piano tuner ought to have allowed. Two months before, on the day she turned 19, he had abruptly announced that his role as her guardian was finished, and that it was time to seek a new life in the west. She chose Italy because she wanted warm weather and beauty, and refused to follow the stream of Poles migrating to England. The grubby, slow bus to Rome had cost 50 euros, and the room in a squalid student house in San Giovanni swallowed up a further 200 each week, as did the language-school lessons in Italian. Her adequate English meant she could get some bar work but only in tourist dives at what the owners called “the Polish rate”—four euros an hour, less than the legal minimum wage. She ate like a sparrow, pizza rustica, precooked, often disgusting, but less than two euros a slice. She never went out and had yet to make a friend. Still each week the money from Uncle Henryk went down a little further. She could not, in all conscience, call and ask for more.

“I know it’s a song,” the tramp replied with an unpleasant sneer on his half-hidden face. Then he crooned a line of it, in the voice of a long-dead American singer she’d heard when her mother and father played music on their cheap hi-fi to remind themselves of their days in the States, before they returned to a new, free Poland in search of different lives. The name of the singer came back to her: Dean Martin. And the tune too, so she played it, pitch perfect, from memory, improvising a little after the fashion of Stéphane Grappelli, putting a leisurely jazz swing on each inflected run of notes until the original was only just recognizable.

She was good at the fiddle. Sometimes, if she was bored or there seemed to be someone musical in her audience, she would pull out some sheet music stuffed into the case, ask a spectator to hold it, then play Wieniawski’s Obertass mazurka, with its leaping fireworks of double stopping, harmonics and left-hand pizzicato. Both of her parents were musical, her mother a violinist, her father an accomplished pianist. Together they had provided her with a musical education from before she could remember, in a household where music was as natural and easy as laughter, right up until the black day they disappeared and she found herself under the wing of Uncle Henryk.

The tramp stared at her as if she’d committed a sin.