Katherine Klein was born in Detroit, into a family of Detroiters.  She graduated from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop in 2008 and now lives and writes in Hamilton, New York.  The Fifth Voice is her first novel.

Prologue

I stole my name and my violin off a train platform in Kiev.

No one was looking, at least at the moment.  Two Soviet officers were after a young woman and she made the mistake of running.  To where, she probably didn’t know, but people do funny things in moments of panic.  She got as far as the street, where two more police were detaining her husband.

There was a small scuffle—a bad sign for someone being arrested—and for ten or fifteen seconds all eyes were on the four police and the young, well-dressed couple.  Well-dressed, that is, for Kiev in 1928.  Their once-fashionable coats were frayed and their shoes were polished but patched.
In her panic the young woman had left a violin case on the platform.  While everyone else was watching the arrest  I went over to it and grasped its handle, which was still warm from her leather-gloved hand.  My first impulse, and I say this with all my heart, was to help her.  I recognized her.  It had been ten years but I still knew her face, and her husband’s.
The man was still slight and neat, his mustache a bit gray but still trimmed.  The woman was a little thinner than she’d been—everyone was thinner those days—but she had the same round, rosy face that used to color when she performed and was coloring now as one police officer got her quiet with a strong hand to the back of the neck and lowered her into the waiting car.
By 1928 I’d witnessed a handful of these arrests.  I wandered at night to get some peace, often into the wrong areas of the crowded city.  When the police come for you, I’d learned, the best way to go is quietly.  I’d rehearsed in my head what I would do if they came for me.  Of course, they had no reason to arrest me, a 16-year-old factory girl, but in those days one never knew.  And one kept her eyes open for opportunities.
You must understand this now, you must: my heart did want to help her and that is why I went over, without thinking, to the violin case and grasped the handle.  But as I felt the warmth from her hand I wondered what I hoped to do.  Rush to her?  Send her to prison with her violin?  There was nothing, I realized, I could do to save her.  So I saved myself.
I lifted.  The case was heavier than I expected a violin to be but I didn’t let that show.  The police drove off with their new arrests and people on the platform averted their eyes.  The bell sounded: five minutes until the train would leave.  Like everyone else in the station, I turned back to my own business.
The case had a pocket on the outside.  I reached inside and found—can you guess?—a ticket, but not to a nearby city as you might expect of a musician carrying only a violin.  No, this ticket would take me west all the way past the Polish border.  With the ticket was a passport.  It looked valid.
I rubbed a little rosiness into my cheeks and stepped to the train.
“Name?” the conductor said drowsily.
How does one speak her own name?  It is more difficult than you might imagine, to say your name for the first time.  Try it, say your own name now.  How easy it is, how thoughtlessly you do it.  Yet how much it means, how those syllables carry the past on their backs.
I’ve always been good at roles but this required more than pretending.  So, as the unfamiliar syllables rolled off my tongue, I not only took a new name but became a new person.
“Reason for travel?” the conductor said.  He’d been drinking.  He tore my ticket.
“To perform a concert.”
“To the left.”
As the train pulled into the night I thought of what I was leaving behind, and dismissed it all: a single cot in a smoky room, a week’s supply of tea and chocolate in a tin.  A few sweaters, some bland magazines, four crude flat mates and the men they brought home.
The girls I lived with wouldn’t notice I was gone until the time for work came the next morning.  Even then they might not say anything.  They’d wonder about me and keep their mouths shut.  Even sluts from the villages knew when to keep their mouths shut to save their own skins.  I tried not to think about them.
Instead, as the train carried me farther west than I’d ever been (which wasn’t far) I thought of my father, something I seldom did, like pulling a treasure out of a box.  I was only four when he was taken away to be a soldier, so I had few memories of him.  Those I had were a four-year-old’s memories, and therefore fragile.  They seemed to fray and change every time I touched them, so I didn’t touch them often.
My favorite and most vivid memory was this:
My father and I were in the big salon.  The new electric chandeliers were lit even though it was early afternoon and the tall windows were open.  Sunlight spilled across the blue and yellow parquet floor.  My father needed all the light he could get, because he was polishing this beautiful floor.  He was a servant—and so was my mother—for a famous violinist who lived in a fine house in Kiev.  The furniture was pushed back and covered with dust clothes.  My father wore clothes on his feet, and he skated across the floor on these clothes, pushing sudsy water as he went.  He was a lithe man, raised on a farm, and he danced, almost, as he polished.  He sang a wild song.  His voice swooped and yelled.  It gave me prickles on my arms.
He was showing off for me, I could tell, and I liked this.  He would finish a section of the floor—it seemed to go on forever—then would come back to me and kiss me on the forehead.  I was helping him, I suppose, by watching the bucket of hot, soapy water.  Then he picked me up and together we whirled and whirled across the bright, soapy floor.  His arms were strong.  My feet didn’t touch the ground.  He put me back and skated away, singing.
I can’t remember the wild song he sang but scraps of it stick in my mind like threads in a pair of scissors.  In this way I remember, even now, the colors of the song but the melody and the words are gone.  I will never remember that song but something in me keeps trying.
I rode the train into the night, holding the threads of my father’s voice, all I cared to take with me.  If I was afraid of soldiers or border guards it was that they would take these threads from me.  Which they couldn’t—the threads were tangled in the gears of my mind—so I stopped being afraid.
Around me in the dark train car people slept or murmured to each other.  The wheels kept up a steady, reassuring beat, a beat I could feel in my bones.
When dawn appeared I got up and went to the little toilet in the back of the car—it was quite a nice train, very modern.  With the door locked I looked inside the case.  The violin was covered with two silk scarves and stuffed with woolen socks and underclothes.  I wasn’t just traveling to a concert after all.  I arranged a scarf around my neck to dress up my plain sweater and changed my socks.
Later on and further west the violin case gave up more surprises: a ruby tennis bracelet sewn into the velvet lining, a pair of diamond earrings folded into a seam of the pocket.  I started to realize that when I picked up that violin case up off the train platform I had inherited more than an instrument.  I had inherited a carefully-planned escape.
I have a gift for being in the right place at the right time.  It’s a two-sided gift.  First, the chances come to me.  This is luck, or fate or maybe God.   Who knows how many people get chances like this?  Perhaps everyone.
But how many people take those chances when they come?  I am not like many people, I think.  I take those chances.
For this, you might call me selfish or foolhardy and you would be right.  But I am writing all this down for you because I hope you will choose, someday if not right away, to call it bravery.  I depend too much, I think, on this elusive gift and I’m depending on it now.  This might be the night fate fails me.  It’s a chance I take every time I run away.
But fate favored me on that train to Warsaw and then to Berlin.  At the Polish border I told them, putting a little fear into my voice, that I had a concert to play in Warsaw.  They checked my papers and let me through.  As I got farther east I must have looked, to Polish and German eyes, more and more like my accidental benefactor, the woman whose passport I held: just another round-faced, round-eyed Ukrainian girl, lifted from the fields by her violin.
What is it they say about the Japanese now?  That they all look the same?
They could have easily found me out, but no one, it seemed, had the heart to stop a small girl with a violin for further questioning.  In Warsaw I told them I had a concert to play in Berlin and again I was allowed to pass. It seemed as though, in that dark time, music gave them little scraps of hope and the meanest of them did what they could to let it through.