Jim Crace - Genesis

The campuses across the bridges were standing in a glistening lake. The MeisterCorps Creative Center for the Arts was closed. The utility corridor where once a Lix-in-love had planned a kidnapping was little more than a cloudy sump. A brown-gray river ran where they had waited in their rental van. It ran and spread into the banking district and beyond, into the army barracks even, and the zoo. The one hundred famous green koi carp in the open pool escaped. One ended up — or so the story goes — in an eel trap ninety miles downstream. The zoo’s three missing Nile crocodiles, four meters long and volatile, were never found, however, although they gave the city much to talk about. As did the mosquitoes.

On the west side, all the old parts of the city, the valued and expensive parts, the tourist sights, the markets and the galleries, the narrow medieval squints, were flooded and cut off, and blocked by tumbled and abandoned cars. Even Anchorage Street was under four meters of water.

Alicja and Lix had river views at last.

It was approaching midday and they were on the rooftop, still in their granddad shirts and nothing else when they heard the shouting from the street — the new canal — below. A voice they recognized. Her father’s voice. A voice they did not want to hear, not when they were almost making love, nothing spoken yet but certainly implied when Alicja had dropped her head on Lix’s shoulder, the misunderstandings of two nights before forgiven, and pulled her shirt up above her knees to sun herself. He’d said she had attractive legs.

Reluctantly, she got up from their breakfast spot and found the space between the pots where they could look down on the street, where normally they could drop their key to friends or call out to acquaintances.

“It’s my father,” she said. “He’s in a boat.”

“Is it a gondola?”

“A motorboat.”

“Ignore him. Come back here.”

“He’s seen me already.”

“What’s he selling? Has he got bananas? Ask him to sing some Verdi. Bel canto, Signor Lesniak. Ask him to dive for coins.” Lix was in the best of moods. Their decision earlier that morning not to get on evacuation boats like every one of their neighbors from the more vulnerable lower floors of the building but to sit the crisis out had made him almost joyful. He and his wife would stay exactly where they were, at home, and watch the river from their windows and the roof, the entertainment of the unexpected regatta, the kayakers who’d waited all their lives for this, the uptown fishermen turned ferrymen who’d find that people were a better catch than perch, the firemen in their dinghies fighting water for a change, and looters with their craft tied up to balconies that now were jetties. They wouldn’t miss such mayhem for the world.

Clinging to their own nest like breeding grebes was not the timid thing to do, Lix thought. Staying put was a risk, surely. His choice had been adventurous for once. No one could tell how long the floods and their supplies of food and clean water would last. No one could guarantee, indeed, that the river would not sweep the street away, like it had swept away the little houseboat and (as it had turned out, overnight) every strut and stay of the wrought-iron walkway where they’d chanced their lives the day before. Perhaps that’s why Lix felt so weightless and alive.

“Ask him to call someone to have the flood removed within the hour.” Lix spoke in perfect Lesniak. “‘Dry streets are just a call away. I’ll put some pressure on someone in Forecasting. I’ve got some favors I can cash in. I only have to whisper in a friendly ear and there’ll be drought. I only have to say our name. Polish parents are the very best.’”

Alicja did not allow herself to laugh. Lix’s imitations could be wearying, she thought. She’d always thought. She did not like to hear her father so accurately mocked. “Stay out of it,” she said, in a voice that warned a steely afternoon if Lix did not comply, and felt guilty straightaway. When it suited her — she never moved until it suited her — she would apologize. First she had to see her father’s back. She formed a tranquil face, leaned out into the street, and listened to his lecture and advice.

Mr. Lesniak, it seemed, had borrowed someone’s launch and had come to evacuate his daughter, drawing up like a Venetian merchant against the balustrade of the second-floor apartment. He was determined to call out until she showed herself, and then stay until she did what he asked. He could not understand why the couple had not moved out of their apartment the night before, like everybody else with any sense. “You don’t play games with water,” he said gnomically.

“We’ve made our minds up anyway,” Alicja shouted to him, cupping her hands around her mouth and trying to ignore her husband’s running commentary. They’d considered all their choices when the hastily appointed flood wardens had directed them to leave and take their allocated places and their allocated camp beds in the Commerce Hall with all their neighbors, she explained. At least that would have been amusing and sociable, she thought but did not say out loud. More fun than moving out to the bone-dry suburbs and her parents’ overfurnished house, where gated entry kept everything at bay, including the unruly river, probably. “No Floods Except by Appointment.”

No, their own home was best by far, she said. The floods would never reach their attic rooms, which were too high even for the mosquitoes, she’d told the warden earlier that day and repeated to her father now. “That is not guaranteed,” the warden had said. “I’m not responsible for you if you don’t come. You might not drown, but you’ll be stuck indoors until the floods go down. We won’t come back.” Her father said very much the same except he thought he was responsible for her. It was possible that he’d come back, again and again, until his daughter did as she was asked. “You think I’m going to let you starve?”

“How can we starve?” Even if their food ran out, she said, hoping to amuse her father and disarm him, they’d swim for bread like spaniels or dive for vegetables like ducks or hunt for fish with barbecue forks.

“That’s being childish, Alicja.”

Exactly so. The prospect of having the building all to themselves for a few days seemed irresistible, a private island where they could be kids again. Juveniles had all the fun. The trick for adults, then, was to act like juveniles. “Walk naked if we want to,” Lix had said. That was a more appealing prospect, to him at least, than eating and sleeping in a hall with ninety other refugees or living with the Lesniaks. What could be safer than their Private Patio?

Alicja called out to her father, trying to suppress her irritation with the man, all men. “Stop fidgeting. We’ll take good care of ourselves,” she said again. “I’m twenty-nine, for heaven’s sake!”

“I’m sixty-nine, for heaven’s sake. You think I don’t know best by now?”

Lix listened to his wife discussing safety with her father, three stories below, occasionally lapsing into Polish when Mr. Lesniak was irritated or baffled. “We’ll be all right,” she said again, leaning forward over the balustrade. “Go home. Don’t worry. We’ll not drown, you know. We’ll not even catch a chill.” And then a daughter’s tease, exasperated, though. “I’m a married woman. I do not need the inshore lifeboat, thank you very much, Captain Lesniak.”

Her sensible and knee-length granddad shirt had ridden some way up her thigh as she leaned forward to shout down to her father. Lix shuffled forward on his haunches, ducking down below the balustrade, and sat amongst the pots beside his wife. He did not want to be seen by Mr. Lesniak. Being charming and polite was wearying. And Mr. Lesniak was more successful at bullying his son-in-law than his daughter. Before they knew it Lix would have agreed to pack a bag and climb out the window on the second floor into their rescue boat. The flood would be an opportunity lost.