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By Root 23032 0

’s first leap into music. Eva was mad for the flute, and after four months or so Zaorski had begun to dote on the little girl, amazed at her natural gift, fussed over her as if she were a prodigy (which she might have been), another Landowska, another Paderewski, another Polish offering to music’s pantheon—and finally even refused the trifling amount that Sophie was able to pay. Zaorski popped up now down on the street, appearing as if from nowhere, astonishingly, like a blond genie—a half-starved-looking, limping, florid-faced, broomstraw-haired man with jittery concern in his pale eyes. The woolen sweater he wore, a sooty green, was a mosaic of moth holes. Sophie, startled, leaned forward against the window. The generous, neurotic man had obviously followed Eva, or rather, chased as well as he could after the children, hurrying these many blocks out of some preoccupation or reason which Sophie could not possibly divine. Then all of a sudden his mission became clear. Ever the passionate pedagogue, he had hobbled after Eva in order to correct, or explain, or elaborate on something he had taught her in her most recent lesson—a matter of fingering or phrasing—what? Sophie didn’t know, but she was both touched and amused.

She pushed the window open slightly in order to call down to the group, now huddled near the entrance of the building next door. Eva wore her yellow hair in pigtails. She had lost her front teeth. How, Sophie wondered, could she play a flute? Zaorski had made Eva open her leather case and remove the flute; he flourished it aloft in front of the child, not blowing on it but merely demonstrating some soundless arpeggio with his fingers. Then he put his lips to the instrument and blew several notes. For a long moment Sophie was unable to hear. Huge shadows swept across the wintry heavens. Overhead a squadron of Luftwaffe bombers droned deafeningly eastward toward Russia, flying very low—five, ten, then twenty monster machines spreading their vulturous shapes against the sky. They came late every afternoon as if on schedule, shaking the house with clattering vibrations. Wanda’s voice was drowned out in their roar.

When the planes had passed, Sophie looked down and was able to hear Eva play, but only for the barest instant. The music was familiar but unnameable—Handel, Pergolesi, Gluck?—an intricate sweet trill of piercing nostalgia and miraculous symmetry. A dozen notes in all, no more, they struck antiphonal bells deep within Sophie’s soul. They spoke of all she had been, of all she longed to be—and all she wished for her children, in whatever future God willed. Her heart swooned in those depths; she grew faint, unsteady, and she felt herself in the grip of an aching, devouring love. And at the same time joy—joy that was inexplicably both delicious and despairing—swept across her skin in a cool blaze.

But the small, perfect piping—almost as soon as it had begun—had evaporated on the air. “Wonderful, Eva!” she heard Zaorski’s voice. “Just right!” And she saw the teacher give first Eva then Jan a tender pat on the head before turning and moving jerkily up the street toward his basement. Jan tugged at one of Eva’s pigtails and she gave a yell. “Stop it, Jan!” Then the children rushed into the hallway downstairs.

“You must come to a decision!” she heard Wanda say insistently.

For a time Sophie was silent. At last, with the sound of the children’s tumbling, ascending footsteps in her ears, she replied softly, “I have already made my choice, as I told you. I will not get involved. I mean this! Schluss!” Her voice rose on this word and she found herself wondering why she had spoken it in German. “Schluss—aus! That’s final!”

During the five months or so before Sophie was taken prisoner the Nazis had made a vigorous effort to ensure that the north of Poland would become Judenrein—cleansed of Jews. Beginning in November, 1942, and extending through the following January, a program of deportation was instituted whereby the many thousands of Jews living in the northeastern district of Bialystok were jammed onto trains and shipped to concentration camps throughout the country. Funneled down into the railway complex in Warsaw, the majority of these Jews from the north eventually found themselves at Auschwitz. Meanwhile, in Warsaw itself there had come a lull in the action against the Jews