Part II, Chapters 4–5: "The Shawl" by Cynthia Ozick

Stella was ravenous. Her knees were tumors on sticks, her elbows chicken bones.

The face, very round, a pocket mirror of a face: but it was not Rosa's bleak complexion, dark like cholera, it was another kind of face altogether, eyes blue as air, smooth feathers of hair nearly as yellow as the Star sewn into Rosa's coat.

One mite of a tooth tip sticking up in the bottom gum, how shining, an elfin tombstone of white marble gleaming there.

Without complaining, Magda relinquished Rosa's teats, first the left, then the right; both were cracked, not a sniff of milk.

Magda flopped onward with her little pencil legs scribbling this way and that, in search of the shawl; the pencils faltered at the barracks opening, where the light began.

Rosa saw that today Magda was going to die, and at the same time a fearful joy ran into Rosa's two palms, her fingers were on fire, she was astonished, febrile: Magda, in the sunlight, swaying on her pencil legs, was howling.

Ever since the drying up of Rosa's nipples, ever since Magda's last scream on the road, Magda had been devoid of any syllable; Magda was a mute.

Rosa believed that something had gone wrong with her vocal cords, with her windpipe, with the cave of her larynx; Magda was defective, without a voice; perhaps she was deaf; there might be something amiss with her intelligence; Magda was dumb.

Even the laugh that came when the ash- stippled wind made a clown out of Magda's shawl was only the air-blown showing of her teeth.

Even when the lice, head lice and body lice, crazed her so that she became as wild as one of the big rats that plundered the barracks at daybreak looking for carrion, she rubbed and scratched and kicked and bit and rolled without a whimper.

Even when the lice, head lice and body lice, crazed her so that she became as wild as one of the big rats that plundered the barracks at daybreak looking for carrion, she rubbed and scratched and kicked and bit and rolled without a whimper.

But now Magda's mouth was spilling a long viscous rope of clamor.

But now Magda's mouth was spilling a long viscous rope of clamor.

The light was placid, mellow.

The lamenting voices strummed so convincingly, so passionately, it was impossible to suspect them of being phantoms.

The voices told her to hold up the shawl, high; the voices told her to shake it, to whip with it, to unfurl it like a flag.