Her brother-in-law and sister spent late pink hours decorating the baby’s nursery, though they knew she might never get a chance to sleep there. The theme they had chosen was swans, serene and graceful, though the only swan she had ever personally met had stared her down outside the Kafka Museum in Prague and then attacked. It had chased her all the way down to the water, its half-a-heart neck stretched out in a scream, but of course, she had understood later, its nest must have been somewhere near.
