Yitgadal v’yitkadash sh’mei raba.
B’alma di v’ra chirutei,
v’yamlich malchutei,
b’chayeichon uv’yomeichon
uv’chayei d’chol beit Yisrael …
* * *
She sits for a long time before she surveys the ground for digging. She can’t imagine carrying Miri back through the woods, burying her in that hole—the one that didn’t hold her too. She starts on a new hole, sparing Chana the preparation of a burial site.
She cries as she digs, thinking she never had the chance to bury her parents or Natan. And who knows about Shira, how she is really doing at the orphanage?
She cuts at the soil and hurls it in heaps. It gives way as the frozen ground did not the night she set to covering the barn rabbit, its blood mixed with hers and what life, stopped short, had started inside her.
When she hears mud squelching, she turns to see Chana approaching, face contorted, legs buckling. Róża scrambles to her feet and rushes toward her, but Chana passes her by and lands on Miri, head upon her chest.
* * *
Róża tears at the collar of her shirt until it rips. Chana stands and makes a rip in her shirt, too, rending the left collar above her heart.
When it is time to put Miri in the grave, Chana holds her sister from beneath the shoulders and Róża takes her legs. Rather than drop her into the hole, they sidestep together down into it, still keeping hold of her, and kneel low before letting her go. They grasp piles of soil with their fingers and place it on top of her, covering her legs and torso. Gently, Róża rotates Miri’s face to the side before placing dirt over her neck, her cheek, her ear.
They cover Miri slowly, handful by handful of loose earth. Neither can bear to hear even a plunk, the ground’s weight upon her. Róża’s feet and calves get buried too. For several minutes she stays planted there, squatting beside Miri, before she slowly dislodges one foot and the other and climbs out.
Chapter 31
Autumn 1943
The lessons Pan Skrzypczak gives Zosia in Mother Agnieszka’s private chambers are the highlight of Zosia’s week. She counts the days, then hours, to their appointed meeting times, and she practices every free moment she can. Scales, études, trills, and every shifting and bowing exercise he gives her. When she plays her arpeggios, she focuses on the accuracy of the notes rather than on the endless repetition, trying her hardest to achieve richness of tone with every stroke.
Sometimes Pan Skrzypczak plays along with Zosia in a duet, and she thrills at the harmonies they create together. Other times he keeps his violin tucked beneath his arm and taps a foot or bobs his head, causing his sideburns to puff and billow; or he places his fingers over Zosia’s to guide her bow. Zosia likes how he smells of rosin and pipe tobacco; how he listens with his head cocked slightly to the left; how he teaches her pieces by Bartók and Bloch and also Sarasate, music that reminds her of her family in Gracja.
At one lesson, Pan Skrzypczak asks Zosia if she is wearing her hair a different way. Sister Alicja had re-dyed her hair and eyebrows the previous night. Unsure of what to say, Zosia mutters, “I don’t think so”; then she tells a story that her mother told her, about Joachim’s friends and the music they wrote for him.
“Yes, Joachim’s devotion to music was paramount.”
Zosia thinks of the other stories her mother told her: the little girl’s adventures in the enchanted garden, the invisible daisy chain, the promise that she’d come back for her. None of them true.
Pan Skrzypczak looks as if he could read her thoughts.
“Joachim’s motto may have been ‘Free but lonesome,’ but I think his friends’ musical gifts made him feel less alone. Why don’t I teach you the Brahms?”
“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.”
Just two short sounds—squeak, thump!—issue from Pan Skrzypczak’s violin: the squeak he makes by running the bow upon the strings behind the bridge, and the thump he makes by tapping the top of the violin. It’s such a quick “concerto”—poor mouse!—Zosia bursts out laughing. After that, he shows her how to make all sorts of animal sounds with her violin: a cow’s moo, a lamb’s bleat, a chicken’s cluck, a donkey’s bray.
Another afternoon, he tells her the story of a recital he’d prepared for as a young student.
“I was very nervous because I was to play my teacher’s own composition, which was terribly complicated. The recital was held in a mansion house, with a banquet beforehand for which I had no appetite. All I wanted was to warm up my violin and practice! As soon as I could reasonably leave the table, I made my way to a practice room. I had to walk through a winding maze of corridors, not unlike the walkways of this convent. When I finally got settled and began to practice, I found that I didn’t remember how the piece was to start. I knew every note after the first measure, but as for the beginning—my mind was an utter blank! So I weaved my way back through the maze to the banquet room. My teacher was still lounging at the table, talking to friends and colleagues, and drinking. I whispered my problem to him.
“‘Go back and practice some more. It will come to you,’ he said, and waved me away.
“So I weaved my way back to the practice room and picked up my violin to start. But again, I had no memory of the first notes. I went a second time to my teacher.
“‘Please—my recital is in less than an hour!’
“‘All right, all right,’ he grumbled, and he left the table and walked with me through the twists and turns of the halls, to the practice room
.
“When he picked up his violin, he played something entirely unfamiliar, a wild improvisation as far as I could tell. It was then that I realized: He—my great teacher and renowned composer—didn’t remember the start of his piece, either!”
Zosia looks shocked. “What did you do? What did you play at the recital?”
“I improvised my own first measure! I joined it to the rest of the piece as best I could, and kept going.”
Today, Pan Skrzypczak is far quieter after the lesson as he pulls a sheet of paper from his briefcase.
“I wrote out a folk song you might know.”
He hands Zosia a piece of composition paper filled with notes drawn in thin pencil. Sight-reading as she can, it conjures the dance of light on her red-and-white-stitched bed quilt; the cinnamon-sugar smell of mandelbrot wafting in from the kitchen. “Oh,” she exclaims, “my grandmother always hummed this while she did her Friday baking!”
As soon as the words are out of her mouth, Zosia looks up anxiously. Her teacher’s expression holds pure kindness in it, but she floods with fear.
Revealing details of her past even to Pan Skrzypczak, who supports her in what she loves, feels threatening.
“I’m sorry, thank you,” she says in a jumbled rush, and, paper in hand, she runs to her hiding closet and curls up in the front compartment among the robes. After several minutes, hands still shaking but her breathing calmed, she peers at the music page. In its notes she hears her grandmother’s voice, the interwoven sounds of her mama’s cello, her tata’s violin.
Through tears Zosia sees that with the title space left blank, it appears as an entirely nondescript piece of sheet music. No danger in it.
Zosia vows that, next lesson, she will express her heartfelt thanks to her teacher.
Chapter 32
Soldiers arrive at the convent in the middle of the night to search the children’s rooms. Zosia is unsure where to go—to her hiding closet? or into the line with the other girls?—until Sister Alicja swoops in and rushes her to the lavatory, where, in the window glass, illuminated by a single bulb, Zosia sees the reflection of her hair, newly dark at the crown, white to the tips.
Sister Olga can be heard pacing up and down the line, shushing the children. Zosia is terrified that Adela will once again ask why she isn’t in line. A loud clatter ensues as bureau drawers are opened and shut, possessions turned out from trunks. Then a strangled silence—a moment in which Zosia remembers waiting for her mother’s hands to fold over hers—before Mother Agnieszka’s voice, alarm overlaid by a pronounced steadiness, dismisses Sister Olga to her chamber and summons the soldier into the corridor, away from the line of children, close to the lavatory. Sister Alicja stiffens upon hearing the soldier just on the other side of the door, speaking about a discrepancy in ration cards. Zosia’s thoughts still fix on Adela: perhaps she won’t have a chance to say anything now?
“Why is there an extra bed?”
“I beg your pardon?” Mother Agnieszka asks.
“I counted eighteen beds but only seventeen children.”
Sister Alicja’s face blanches white. Zosia feels a rising panic. Mother Agnieszka’s voice, when it comes, is a pitch higher.
“One of our little girls has typhus, poor dear. I can take you to the infirmary to see her if you’d like.”
“No—that won’t be necessary.”
“Very well. Herr Kommandant, I beg of you, these late night raids frighten the chil—” Mother Agnieszka’s plea is lost to a pounding of boots on the front stair.
Sister Alicja gathers Zosia and bounds through the lavatory’s back door—the nuns’ entry, forbidden to the children—before soldiers can barge through the front. Down the nuns’ corridor, Alicja slips them into a small side room packed with spare sewing machines. She tugs open a wardrobe, covers Zosia over with the stiff brown fabric of habits, and shuts her in until—after offering watery coffee, but coffee nonetheless, to the soldiers upon their departure—she returns to usher Zosia back through the two lavatory doors, into the quiet dark of the children’s room.
Zosia, a knotted pounding in her chest that will linger for hours after, prays for the end of roll call lines.
* * *
For the next several weeks, there is less to eat for everyone. The children complain of hunger and the sisters preach piety in suffering—except for Sister Alicja, who complains, too, and is made to fast—until bombs explode nearby, causing them all to forget their stomachs. Zosia overhears the nuns speak of Red Army advances in Ukraine—snatches from Mother Agnieszka’s wireless radio. But none of this seems to matter here in Celestyn. Sirens wail ceaselessly. The children practice drills. They walk in hurried lines to the cellar rooms and squeeze to fit within door frames. They dive under their beds when shellings shake the ground.
Once, Adela dives under Zosia’s bed. Zosia twists and wiggles to position herself at the opposite end, but Adela says, “I see you. I see everything.”
Zosia looks away, quavering. At snack time, Adela demands Zosia’s piece of bread and Zosia gives it to her, that day and each day following.
* * *
Zosia finds refuge from Adela’s tormenting in her lessons with Pan Skrzypczak—and in Kasia’s friendship. Once, when Zosia arrived late for her laundry chore—she was supposed to be folding bedsheets, not playing violin, and she was frantic that she’d be punished—she found that Kasia had managed the whole job without her and had even covered for her with Sister Olga by saying she was at a different chore with Sister Nadzieja.
On the day that Kasia tore an altar cloth, Zosia repaired it, trying her best to replicate the close, even, nearly invisible stitches she’d seen her mother make. Kasia thanked Zosia by nabbing two pairs of wool socks from the knit bin and teaching her to “skate” on the slippery, just polished floors. As they careened past the low corridor wall, Kasia spotted two stray cats huddled inside the convent gate. She stopped abruptly, Zosia nearly crashing into her, and observed them for several seconds while catching her breath.
“Who do you think they look like?”
“Hmm?”
“I think the littler one looks like Sister Nadzieja. And the bigger one—see how her paws move as if kneading dough—like Sister Halina.”
Zosia giggled to be imagining the cats in dark habits with headdresses tucked around their ears, teaching lessons and baking bread.
Now, they check on the cats daily, and while walking to evening prayers they name what they see in the clouds: an angel with feathery wings, a dragon’s head, mashed potatoes, a dollop of cream. They whisper—or, in the case of food likenesses, moan—and if one of them laughs, the other squeezes her hand. They bite their tongues and bow their heads and rush along.
They cover for each other if one drifts back to sleep after morning call, or dallies too long outside, or needs the washing done quickly to remove a careless stain. But there is no cover for Zosia the day Sister Olga takes it upon herself to inspect the children’s room. Her stomach churns with dread as the nun brusquely opens the tops of the trunks and lifts the mattresses to expose what’s been tucked beneath: two uncooked potatoes wrapped in a napkin.
“Zosia, come over here right now. Explain this—”
“It is food that I saved.” Zosia rushes over; she wants to put it back where she’d stowed it, but Sister Olga holds it up high, out of her reach.
“I can see perfectly well that it is food. How dare you save food for yourself when we are all going hungry?”
“It’s not for me. It’s for my mother, in case—” She grasps for it.
“For your mother? What a hideous lie!”
“It is not! If she comes for me, I—”
“You must be punished for this. I’ll do it myself.” Sister Olga takes Zosia’s arm and shoves her toward her bed.
Zosia begins to cry. She can feel the eyes of the other girls on her.
“Stop your crying. You are a bad child. You deserve this.”
In the corner of the room,
there is a long wooden ruler used for taking the heights of the children. Sister Olga grabs it, brings it down hard upon Zosia’s outstretched hands once, twice, three times. A stinging, burning pain rises—along with the despairing thought that it may take days before she will be able to play her violin.
Zosia crumples onto her bed. Kasia runs to her side but steps back when Sister Alicja rushes in.
“Zosia, what happened?”
“I hid food under my bed. But it wasn’t for me!”
“Oh, Zosia.”
“I wanted to have it for my mama when she came for me. Sister Olga took it away. And she punished me.” Her face contorts.
“Now, now. We can get more. You are a good girl, Zosia.” Sister Alicja strokes her hair, moving it away from her face.
“No. I am not. I’m bad just like Sister Olga said.”
Ever since the priest’s Epiphany homily, she’s felt stained. But it’s remembering what she did in the barn—tapping and chirping when she was meant to be silent and gobbling Krystyna’s treats while her mother starved—that shames her most. She can’t take a bite of food anymore without thinking about it. Only stowing little bits from her meals, bread crusts and potatoes, makes her feel better.
“Zosia, let me take a look at those hands of yours.”
Zosia hears a catch in Sister Alicja’s voice as she looks at her fingers, swollen and already bruising.
“Stay still now, you hear me? I’ll be right back with Sister Nadzieja. The two of us will get you fixed up.”
Zosia nuzzles her shred of blanket with her cheek and stares up at the high rectangular window, the drifting clouds. Kasia steps close and reaches for her arm.
* * *
Róża shuffles straight legged to minimize the sound of her movements in the woods. The leaves, high in the branches and full of color just a week ago, are gone from the trees. Winds have swept the trees bare, the remains of autumn delivered to the forest floor, dried and curled, a thick carpet announcing her every step with a riot of rustling. Chana, wearily oblivious, lets herself get whisked along.
The Yellow Bird Sings Page 12
