Jim Crace - Genesis

Lix was mightily relieved to find that three months after their hasty and impulsive marriage — no church, no Lesniaks, no honeymoon, just three good friends as witnesses, a short civil ceremony, two shaky signatures, and a bottle of spacchi — he was growing more attracted to his wife. More sexually attracted, that is, less fearful of the lovemaking. He’d always liked, then loved, her gentleness, of course, her quiet efficiency, her many skills, her pluckiness, her company. His fixed vision of happiness had encompassed her. Her mood was not tempestuous. She was not cruel. But he had doubted in those early days whether he was truly passionate about her. He’d found with Freda, all those years before — and barely for a month, it’s true! — that they’d possessed a kind of private ideology, beyond the politics, a set of common condescending principles and prejudices, a shared vocabulary of phrases and signs that they regarded as superior to anybody else’s. Oh, pity everybody else; those diminished, longing looks when he and she walked past, those dull and compromising lives. Not so with Alicja. She did not make Lix feel superior. She might love him more than Freda ever had, if such a thing were measurable, but somehow, so far, all her love seemed lesser than the passion he had felt in 1981.

It worried him at first, of course. Love minus true sexual desire is little more than friendship, he had thought. It’s a lager without gas. Preferable in a marriage to true desire without the friendship, of course — a marriage such as that could not survive the honeymoon. But it was still not total love, still not quite the brimming liter. He understood only too well whose fault it was. He dared not say this even to himself — but his new wife was not his type. Not the type he’d dreamed of sleeping with, still dreamed of sleeping with. In those days he liked a woman who was tall, bony, small-breasted, unconventional, and slightly and capriciously cruel. A woman just like Freda actually. Alicja was none of these things. That made her good and chastely lovable, of course. But not desirable. Not arousing. He did not feel like a hero in her company. Her qualities, he sometimes felt, especially her homeliness, her coziness, her patience, were sexual liabilities. They blunted his desire. She was not the actress he would cast to play his wife in his stage fantasies. That part belonged elsewhere.

She’d surprised him, though. She might not turn as many heads as Freda on the street. She dressed too casually and too timidly, neither elegant nor bohemian, neither striking nor mysterious, and wary of adornments such as jewelry or hats. Her underclothes were functional. She wore amusing T-shirts — perhaps the only way in summer that she could draw attention to her breasts. Lix was not amused. An entertaining T-shirt was not a flattering accessory, in his precise opinion. Also, she was too plump and healthy to be anything other than agreeable to the eye.

But naked she was beautiful. Plump’s only plump in clothes. Released from her unexceptional garments, her serviceable shoes, her sensible pants, Alicja was curved and silky and irresistible. Solid, comely, yes — but not unpleasingly overweight at all. If only everybody knew how beautiful she was with nothing on, and how substantial.

Naked she was unpredictable. What greater stimulation can there be than that?

THE ONLY PROBLEM with the weather and the outlying storms was a pretty one, at first. Within a day or two, the city’s river was engorged. It heaved itself out of its bed. It didn’t break its banks exactly. It merely ventured here and there into a waterside parking lot, cleaning tires, activating litter, or nosed across the running track to show its idle interest in the bird pavilion and the children’s jungle gym.

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.