Jim Crace - Genesis

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.

“It makes you want to jump in yourself,” said Lix. “Or give someone a push.” Alicja held him firmly by the arm at last. She felt the pull of drowning, too.

Before they’d seen the disappearing hat, Lix and Alicja had not noticed all the detritus. What city dweller ever does? You close your mind to it, or else you have to walk with fury as a constant at your side, offended by the woman and her discarded can, the small child and his lollipop, the thoughtless driver cleaning out his car, the tissues and the cigarettes, the paper bags. But finally, as everybody pushed and pressed to reach their own side of the river, Lix and Alicja took refuge on an observation deck and leaned out over the water to let the more impatient and the more fearful squeeze by. Then they could not help but notice what the muscle of the river had swept up. The sticks and paper first, the evidence of living rooms and kitchens, the tossed-up hanks of hay and rope, the bottles and cans, the sheets of farming polyethylene and plastic bags. A book. A hollowed grapefruit half. A little wooden figurine. A smashed and empty produce box. Vine canes. Bamboo. Nothing large.

Once the crowd had cleared and they’d reached the west side of the bridge, though, where the river was at its (so far) mightiest, the detritus was weightier. Stripped trunks of trees, their branches knocked off by the journey from the hills. Container pallets, lifting up and ducking in the torrent. Sides of boathouses and sheds. A roof. And borne along, as blithe and cheerful as a child’s toy tossed blissfully into a stream, what seemed at first to be a bungalow. It was, in fact, a houseboat still afloat but desperate, its curtains more like flags than sails.

That houseboat silenced everyone. It even silenced the policemen’s bullhorn for a moment. “Evacuate” and “Come ashore” would be no help to anyone. The houseboat seemed alive with possibilities. You could not help but people it. You could not help but think of children sleeping in its only bed, restless with nightmares that could never be as terrible or hopeless as what awaited them when they woke up. You could imagine making love in it, in that sweet wooden house, and never knowing that your moorings had come loose. You’d think the world was twisting just for you. Or, perhaps, you could enliven the houseboat with one old man, too frail and rheumatoid to get up from his deep and ancient chair to save himself. He’d feel the helpless flight of his frail home. He’d see the landscape hurtling by. Perhaps he’d even spot the enfants on the bridge and think the world was coming to an end.

Just as the houseboat swept away, quite disappeared below the swell, just as the call to “come ashore” resumed, somebody said, a lie perhaps, an honest error, or the truth maybe, we’ll never know for sure, “I think I saw a cat on board.” They all turned around to face downstream and hope to catch a final glimpse of the children and the lovemakers, the old man and his cat, in their houseboat on its mad and bundling emigration to the sea.

ON THURSDAY MORNING, no one was surprised to wake to havoc on our streets and the din of rescue boats and helicopters, winching busy people from their penthouses and from their balconies. Flood depths downtown had almost trebled overnight. It was the city’s turn to be submerged. The waters had ignored the basic dictates of geography. Although the distant mocking clouds had finally dispersed, the widow had tossed off her shawl to reveal the sodden, sunbaked shoulders of the hills, Navigation Island was now invisible. Only the tops of tarbonies and pines bending in the flows and disrupted by the weight of squirrels, the green clay roof of the bandstand with half its tiles removed, streetlamps, still lit and sending orange streaks of light downstream, and sodden flags on three-quarters-submerged poles, revealed that this had once — a day ago — been land and home to weasels, rats, and foxes, all long since drowned because they’d never learned to swim or climb or fly.