The Song of Broken Glass

In We the Living Kira finds an anthem that is at the heart beat of her life. Even before times got hard for Kira she knew that this song embodied all that she wished for and it became her “last battle-march.” The music was her promise, “a promise at the dawn of her life. That which had been promised then, could not be denied to her now.” Even though Rand and Kira would probably deny it, I would argue that this song was her life’s hymn that accompanied the, “fragile girl in the flowing, medieval gown of a priestess.”

The song was The Song of Broken Glass.

It comes from a real operetta that is still preformed in Russia to this day. It is from Emmerich Kalman’s Die Bajadere.  "It was the most wanton operetta from over there, from abroad. It was like a glance straight through the snow and the flags, through the border, into the heart of the other world.”  "There were women in shimmering satin from a place where fashions existed, and people dancing a funny foreign dance called 'Shimmy,' and a woman who did not sing but barked words out, spitting them contemptuously at the audience, in a flat, hoarse voice that trailed suddenly into a husky moan--and a music that laughed defiantly, panting, gasping, hitting one's throat and breath, an impudent drunken music, like the 'Song of Broken Glass,' a promise that existed somewhere, that was, that could be."

Kira searches throughout the story, unknowingly to find this song, the answer to her unspoken prayer of what life could be. At the end of the story she hears the song at first the song trembles even hesitates but then it burst forth in “fine waves, like the thin, clear ringing of glass.” The song was of consummate human joy. The song and the end of her life showed how much had been possible and that “Life, undefeated, existed and could exist.”