Alicja and Lix, like almost everybody there, enjoyed the city’s altered forms. At lunchtime, when the roof and their apartment were too hot for comfort, they would cycle down to the wharfside market for their vegetables and bread, then sit out on one of the commemorative benches in the Navy Gardens to watch the river’s latest exploits. They were amused at first to see the ducks and water doves quite at home in gentle shallows where just the day before there’d been a lawn and shrubbery
The pedestrian underpasses were unusable as well. Nobody would attempt to wade through their wet history, the discarded bottles and cans, the antique, subterranean, water-activated smells of urine, cardboard, and tobacco. (But nobody used the underpasses anyway, wet or dry, except prostitutes and drunks — and men with urgent bladders.) So city shoes and socks were not yet getting wet. Except children’s shoes and socks, that is. The children went out of their way to paddle home from school. The placid flooding was a treat they’d remember till they died.
The city center was more humid than it should have been, and smellier, and tempers were more frayed than usual. Trade and business are impatient with the slightest inconvenience. No one likes to break routines. But still it felt, in places, as if the countryside had come into the city with no intention more malign than to lap affectionately against our margins for a day or two, provide some gentler contours to the overmanaged waterside, and then subside with no harm done.
One or two of the lowest streets down on the wharf and behind the boat and ferry yards were ankle deep in river by the third day of the rains, but who minds that? You seek such places out. It’s fun to carve up water with your bike. It’s fun to wear your boots in town and splash about, dispersing all your troubles and anxieties with whooping loops of water. It’s better fun than Dry and Safe and Unremarkable. Odd weather stimulates. Such days are dancing lessons from the gods.
By the fifth day, a Sunday, the river had grown more impudent and menacing. Lix and Alicja could finally see water from their rooftop patio. Not moving water yet. Not quite a river view A sheet. The great cobbled Company Square where the old town market halls and narrow Hives abutted the theater district was oddly brilliant with color from the reflected buildings and reflected sky. A rectangular expanse of water, hardly more than ten centimeters deep, architect-designed, it seemed, had turned the square brown-blue, with undulating fringes of marble gray, brick red, and stucco white. The sun, for once, was mirrored and disintegrated on the surface of the city, an idle, rippling shoal of golden fish.
The flooding was an unexpected wonder, too rare and beautiful to miss.
Alicja and Lix hurried out of their apartment to join the paddlers and the watching crowds, and to enjoy the latest dispositions of the streets. You’d only need a pair of skates and freezing temperatures, Alicja said, once they had waded to the dry, raised stand in the middle of the square where once there’d been a statue, already crammed with willing castaways, and “this could be a Dutch masterpiece.”
“Except for the hills,” somebody said. “No hills in Holland.”
“There are no hills here, either. The hills have disappeared.”
She felt absurdly privileged to know so much. Nobody else amongst that crowd could boast such thrilling rooftop views. She felt absurdly privileged as well to be the wife of Lix. She stood behind him on the plinth, her arms wrapped around his waist, her thumbs tucked in beneath his belt, her cheek pressed up against his back. Love is enacted by small things. Love is what you do with what you’ve got.
Lix was admitting to himself with some relief that he had at last become seduced by her. While Freda really had only wanted pseudo-Lix, the fearless and obliging activist — and only for a month! — Alicja provided her husband with moments of true value and true grace as they walked arm in arm around and through the floods. It wasn’t that her every pat and tap, like Freda’s every touch, seemed to settle with a fingertip the riddles of existence. It was rather that his uncruel wife was generous with her caresses, conferring unsolicited gifts and not simply taking pleasure for herself. Her embraces acknowledged Lix’s bloated self-image but recognized as well his hidden but more plausible self, his shortfalls and inadequacies. She welcomed all of it, it seemed, and wanted all of him, peel to core.
On Monday, it was far too deep to paddle in the square. By lunchtime, when Lix and Alicja finally went down to the old town, only a handful of young men had been conceited and foolish enough to wade in up to their knees to reach the central stand, their office trousers ruined but their senses of self enhanced. The sheet had spread beyond the square and was lapping at the rising ground around the narrow medieval side lanes. Basements had been lost already to floodwater, but none of these were residential streets. Only storage spaces had been breached. Cellars full of laundered sheets and laundered banknotes, clamps of vegetables, catering cans, and imported wine below the many restaurants and tourist hotels were underwater. Expensive labels had peeled off. Good unidentifiable wines, which would only sell off cheaply now, were bobbing free just centimeters from the ceiling in the democratic company of tonic water, lemonade, and Coke.
One of the little brasseries, the Fencing Shed, where Lix performed his unaccompanied songs on those evenings, such as now, when he was not working in the theater, was unreachable by anyone who wanted to keep his toes dry.
The Debit Bar just around the corner, another of Lix’s occasional venues, was already closed. It would be on the rising shoreline soon, a waterfront cafe. The day-shift Debit waiters were stacking chairs and lining all the entrances with makeshift flood barriers. Short-tempered policemen, armed with batons and whistles, were turning vehicles away. The ancient drains were overwhelmed. Instead of swallowing the floods, they were regurgitating. For the first time since the rains began, nerves were being lost in our normally lackluster city. The mounting waters were now regarded not with smiles but with shaking heads, and everybody had begun to calculate the cost.
That evening, when Alicja returned from her late shift a little before midnight, she and Lix almost made love. It would have been the first time they’d made love since the weather changed. She wanted to. Making love had been implicit in their holding hands all day as they’d splashed through the town. A flirting conversation she’d had that evening with an older colleague had made her feel desirable, something she was too often missing in her marriage but which was essential for her self-esteem. Lix had had a flirting conversation with himself that night as well when he’d come back much earlier than usual from his shrinking, drowning round of busking venues. Performing, singing, had always made him sexually provoked. Onstage he was a Casanovan balladeer — love songs and songs of loss, intended to arouse. He’d masturbated in their tiny bathroom, dreaming first of one or two of the well-dressed women who’d come into the restaurant in cocktail dresses and knee-high rubber boots, then of Freda, then of a new waitress, scarcely seventeen, and then — a triumph of the married will — of his own wife. It made no sense, to climax thinking of his wife, bringing to mind a body that was not wholly present when she’d be home and completely tangible within the hour. He was impatient, though, and tense. Uncertain anyway if she would share his mood when she returned. He had not been strong enough to stop himself.
So by the time his wife walked through the door, kicked off her shoes, and put her arms around his waist, her thumbs again beneath his belt, his appetite for her or anyone was blunted. He’d make amends, he told himself. He’d truly make amends, some other day. For marriages are rich in other days. He made excuses for himself, sat on the toilet for a while, busied himself preparing coffee, talked too little and too much, and only joined her on the bed when he was sure that he was irritating her, that he had driven her away. Chatter is the cheapest contraceptive.