Instead of making love, then, they lay apart in their twin shirts, not even holding hands, and listened to the radio — the midnight news, the weather report, and “music from the studio”—in their dark attic room. Between a polka for accordions, some jailhouse jazz, a French chanson, and music from Alfredo Busi’s Tamborina, the weather pundits and one of the city senators warned that people ought to stay away from the floods (and from the riverside especially). Matters would get a little worse, perhaps, before they could get better. We should not panic, though. Talk of cholera was wildly mischievous. No one would drown if everyone was sensible. The easterly winds would soon dislodge the distant rain.
Anyway, according to an expert from the university, the worst would pass us by. The towns and villages downstream might soon be underwater, though, she said. Floods always find the lowest ground. The farmers could expect widespread waterlogging in their fields, a decimated harvest, and costly winter vegetables for us. “Everything invades the wallet.”
The city itself, however, was not vulnerable, she added. No need to construct an ark or walk about with flotation jackets on. Or drag your mats and furniture upstairs. No call for goggles yet. The streets would not be jammed with snorklers or bathyspheres instead of cyclists and streetcars. We’d not have ducks indoors. The dictates and principles of urban geography would keep us almost dry. If you build a city on a river’s floodplain and then defend yourself with embankments, as our ancestors had, as the local governments had continued to do for the past four hundred years, replacing, adding, and extending until the only open ground was parks, she explained, then the floods would be rebuffed by “solid surfaces” and hurried off elsewhere by drains and conduits and canals. These were the benefits of cobblestones, asphalt, and cement, especially in gently sloping cities such as ours. The rushing river always rushes to the sinks and basins of the fields where the hospitality is softer and the waters more at home.
Alicja and Lix, though, were young and free enough not to be discouraged from an adventure by the advice of senators, geographers, and forecasters. The next morning, they did not feel intimate enough to breakfast on the roof. Indeed, Alicja was beginning to fear that Lix was not the moodless paragon she had hoped. Instead, they walked in silence down to the river’s edge, soon after eight o’clock, turned their trousers up above their knees, and, carrying their shoes in knapsacks, waded through the thigh-deep and now traffic-free streets — streets where the Lesniaks had wanted their daughter to rent some rooms — six blocks below their own apartment building to reach the stairs of the flimsy wrought-iron walkway that ran alongside Deliverance Bridge onto Navigation Island and then across the farther stream into the campuses. They had to see for themselves what all the excitement was about and walk off their ill tempers.
There was excitement. A city’s seldom livelier than when things are clearly going wrong. At dawn, all five of the east-west bridges across the river had been closed to traffic. Some brickwork on a single central pier had been dislodged by the force of the flooding. The mortar pointing in the stonework of the oldest bridge below the wharf was being washed away. The engineers detected shifting in the wider spans. So there was very little choice but to put up traffic barricades until the floods retreated and repairs could be carried out.
Half of the city’s drivers couldn’t get to work, unless they were prepared to travel out of town up to the high suspension bridge and its high tolls. Or else they’d have to dump their cars and walk between the eastern and the western banks by joining Lix and Alicja on the wrought-iron walkway, which, as yet, had not been closed. Anyone with any sense — that’s everyone not desperate to work — would see this as the perfect opportunity to shrug their shoulders, phone the boss, and thank the gods of mischief that dangerous bridges stood between their workplace and their home, and that the sun was shining in a kind blue sky.
Here was an unexpected holiday. They could take pleasure in the drama of the streets with all the other addicts and devotees of the flood, with Lix and his Alicja, with all the ne’er-do-wells who’d never done a decent hour’s work but saved their energies for days like this. With good advice to be ignored (“Stay away from water. It is dangerous”) and nothing else to do till after dark except to witness the more expensive parts of their hometown submerge, how could they not enjoy themselves?
As Lix had suspected, though, the warnings on the radio that they should stay away from the river itself had been alarmist. Appeared so, anyway. The flooding waters, viewed from above on the walkway, did not seem so threatening. They were more beautiful than threatening. The crowds of pedestrians trying to get to work were much more dangerous and unpredictable. The two impatient counterflows made it almost impossible to progress on the walkway except by taking risks, except by leaning out, and squeezing past, and shoving. But the progress of the swollen currents speeding only meters below their feet seemed unstoppable and satisfying. So, despite the urgency, the atmosphere was festive on the footbridge. There was good reason to rejoice. It seemed as if the problems of the world were riverborne and would be swept away and out of view. Any true disasters would only manifest themselves in someone else’s neighborhood, too far away to count, everybody said, repeating the good news from the radio. No cost to us. Besides, the river was far too spirited and glorious that day to seem anything other than a brief and welcome visitor. It was the placid uncle who’d suddenly turned hilarious and boisterous with drink. How could anybody — in this regular and regulated city, suppressed by laws and protocols — not enjoy the drama of the freshly sinewed river, its inflammation, its chalky, swept-up smell, its shots of clay-red coloring and the unexpected noise it made, thunder rendered into skeins, a din made muscly and physical?
By eleven o’clock, Alicja and Lix had crossed to the east side, bought breakfast at the campus cafe as they’d done so often as students, attended an exhibition at MeCCA, and started on the journey back to their apartment. Not touching yet. Not holding hands. The great panicking throng of workers had dispersed to work. The pedestrian bridge was still busy, though. The walkway was a perfect gallery for the city’s enfants du paradis to observe the drama, feel the spray even, watch the rare and disconcerting spectacle of traffic-free bridges. These were images of old. Premotorcar. The walkway’s ironwork, which earlier had groaned almost silently from the burden of so many workers, now creaked and grumbled out loud as it shrugged itself back into shape. It had never carried such a weight before or hosted such a cheerful party of sightseers.
No one was glad to hear the bullhorn of the police instructing everybody on the wrought-iron bridge to “come ashore,” an inappropriate but thrilling phrase. The walkway was “unstable” and would be closed. Anyone who’d walked to work that morning would not get home that night. So, finally, the city had been sliced in two, disunified by water.
“Evacuate. Evacuate,” the bullhorn said. But no one wants to be the first to leave the spectacle. A fire, a crash, a flood — we want to be the last to stay and watch the world go wrong. The crowd of gawkers on the bridge slowed down and might have taken all morning to disperse. Except there was a little accident, a loss, which made their vantage point seem unreliable and fragile. A woman’s hat fell in. Her immediate cry gave everybody time to spot it tumbling, halfway down between her stretched hand and the flood. Its fall seemed glacial, a lifeless flight of peaked denim. Its disappearance in the water, though, was instantaneous. It vanished like a slug in a frog, as they say. Then, seconds later, fifty meters downstream, it showed itself again, blue cloth against the white-gray-green.