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At St Ludmila's they lost three sopranos in one winter, one to Ostrava, one to her knees, one to the cemetery at Olšany, and Mr Kubát, who conducts in his scarf because the loft is never heated, asked Jarmila after Thursday practice whether she would try the top. She had sung alto there for thirty-one years. She said, I'll squeak. He said, Then squeak. We have five weeks to the Rorate.

For most of that Advent you could hear her doing both at once, the high line carried out in front of her like a tray of full glasses and under it, a hair late, the inner part her throat still knew, so that the altos beside her kept turning, thinking someone had come in. Nobody said loss. Mrs Pešková said, You sound like two women arguing, and Jarmila said, We are, and the one on top is winning on points.

By Candlemas the argument was over, or it had moved somewhere the loft couldn't hear. She took the descant in the Gloria the way you take the last stair in the dark, trusting it. Kubát stopped looking at her on the entries. That's how you know.

Here is the part I'd tell you if you asked me what it cost her: the loft has to keep asking. Every Thursday he gives her the note first, every Thursday she climbs to it, and in August, when the choir breaks up and she goes to her sister's in Sázava and they wash up after the pig roast with the radio on, she sings along an octave under the woman on the radio, low and easy, the alto back in the kitchen as if it had only stepped out for a cigarette, and her sister says, There you are,

and she says, I was never anywhere. I was just upstairs.