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breathed expectation, as before a death, or a birth. She thought about that for a while, feeling it settle as she sat sideways in her father's chair at the dining table, fingering idly the scalloped edge of the white tablecloth.
    Hilde wedged two candles in the silver candle sticks, arranged the Delftware basin and pitcher on the sideboard for washing the hands, dug a dust rag one last time into the sideboard carving and flicked it along the lower edge of the picture frame.
    "You know what she's looking at out the win dow, don't you?" Hilde said. "Her future hus band."
    Naturally she'd think that, Hannah said to her self.
    "What do you think?" Mother asked from the kitchen doorway.
    "Pigeons. Just pigeons," Hannah said.
    "Pigeons? What do you mean by that?" Hilde said.
    "I mean it doesn't matter what she's looking at. Or what she's doing, or not doing." She looked Hilde dead in the eye. "It only matters that she's thinking."
    "Is that why you like her?" Mother asked in sur prise.
    "And because I know her."
    Hannah stood up, went down the hallway and up the attic ladder. Leo was closest, dozing. She grabbed him first, and in a frenzied flapping of wings, twisted his neck until its tightness released under her fingers. Squawks of the others rang in her ears. She lunged to catch Henriette and skinned her knee. Two, three, four, each time that same soft popping underneath the feathers.
    She came down the hallway staring straight ahead. Her hands trembled so much Mother no ticed. Hannah looked down too and saw a wisp of feather underneath the nail of her forefinger, the smallest bit of gray breast down. She flicked it away. Mother and Hilde gaped at her, apparently unable to move. Hilde's lips pinched into a purple wound.
    "Go wash your hands," Mother murmured.
    Hannah turned, caught her foot on the hall runner, and lunged into the bathroom. She heard her mother's voice. "This is one time, in your son's home, you will say nothing, Hilde. Nothing." Hannah turned on the water. She didn't want to hear what would come next. She washed up to her elbows, and her skinned knee. After a while she slipped into her room and lay on her bed. When she heard through the air vent Mother sweeping the coop, she felt a trickle of moisture creep toward her temple. She waited for the chop-chop of the charoseth. Then she changed her dress and gave her hair a good brushing.
    When Father and Toby came in, she couldn't look directly at them. The two German families were awkward, not knowing where to put them selves. A boy younger than Toby stood wordless and clinging to his father. Mother had Toby intro duce each guest to Hilde, had him pass out the Haggadahs, had him bring the white kittel to his father to put on. She had him arrange on the Seder plate the celery, the shank bone, the charoseth, a withered root of horseradish and a small peeled potato carved narrower at one end to look like an egg, and then she asked him to watch on the porch for sunset in the western sky. All this, Hannah knew, so he wouldn't think to take the little German boy upstairs to show him the birds.
    Mother rummaged in the sideboard and brought out the old Delftware candlesticks. "Here," she said to Hannah. "These were your great-grandmother Etty's, but tonight and forever, they'll be yours. Wash them and put them on the table."
    And Hannah did.
    "Sunset's coming," Toby announced from the porch. "The sky's all goldy."
    Her mother struck a match and held it to an old candle stub until a flame rose, touched it to the two tapers in the silver candlesticks and handed it to Hannah. She did the same with hers. Watching her candlelight illuminate the girl in the painting, she knew why this night was different from all other nights. Real living had begun.

Adagia
    Walking with his wife Digna along the narrow canal, Laurens van Luyken kept a discreet distance behind the young lovers, as if to give them privacy, but he watched their every move. Just be yond his neighbor's oxcart, he saw