Except he could not see the hills in early May.
Rain had fallen on the prosperous and slanting plains that embraced the city in a semicircle of shale-on-clay-on-sand and the grand estates of manacs, vines, and tournesols which kept the owners rich and their tenants busy. Rain had fallen in the far-flung hills and stripped the valleys of their oaten topsoil and their undergrowth. The fields were silver and the rivers bronze. Nine days of it. Rain had fallen everywhere, it seemed, except on us. We had blue skies. The whole of May was mocking blue for us, disdainful of the countryside. The city's blessed, we told ourselves, in shirtsleeves, eating out in sidewalk cafes, getting tanned, getting overconfident. We have the nation's summer to ourselves.
So the hills were virtually invisible to Lix and to Alicja from their high and costly patio. A heavy mass of slaty clouds had gathered discreetly in the first few days of the month like a sieging army, patient and bullying, softening the countryside with rain, but still just far enough away from the outer suburbs not to appear too menacing. No wind. The clouds just seemed to darken, breed amongst themselves, and fatten on the washed-loose produce of the plains, reluctant to depart, unwilling to invade the determined patch of urban blue that kept our weather fine and caused the Dern rooftop to snap and crack unseasonably with
heat. Their true horizon had been smudged away by clouds, and so even in the rain-free city, untouched it seemed at first, the days were shorter than they should have been. The dawns were late and dusk was early. A sweating wintertime in May. The rising and the setting sun, to use the finest phrase of a newspaper columnist, was “smothered by a black-brown shawl and swathed in widow's cloth.” Wet wool!
These were dramatic days for Lix and for Alicja. The weather made them feel grandiloquently loving. The fitful romance and the ecstasy of early married life can only benefit from breakfasting amongst the rooftop pots under such sensual, operatic skies. By chance, they'd rented happiness. Their midmorning light was startling that May, low and sharp enough to give the cloudsâespecially in the photographs they tookâtheir own ravines and cols and peaks and scarps that seemed as permanent and sculpted as the granite ones which they'd obscured. These were clouds you could trek in, ski down, climb. You'd think that you could mine in them for tin and silver, sink great shafts through fissures, plates, and strata to haul up spoils of solid oxygen and fossil rain.
The clouds were full of riches and rewards.
Lix and Alicja watched an aircraft fly too close to that great granite cliff of wet suspended atmosphere. They watched it disappear, illogically intact. They watched through his binoculars the flocks of geese and plovers, displaced by rain, the jazz quintets of buzzards extemporizing on the thermals against the backdrop, blackdrop of the clouds, the laboring of herons, and, closer, with the naked eye, they watched the resigned and stoic flight of crows, forced into town for once. They were puffed up themselves
like clouds, puffed up with massive confidence, with everything-is-possible, with an affection that Lix at least had never felt before. The weather was a prelude, so they thought with all the arrogance of newlyweds, to something grand and memorable for them.
Lix was mightily relieved to find that three months after their hasty and impulsive marriageâno church, no Lesniaks, no honeymoon, just three good friends as witnesses, a short civil ceremony, two shaky signatures, and a bottle of spacchiâhe 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 beforeâand barely for a month, it's true!âthat 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 courseâa 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 himselfâbut 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-shirtsâperhaps 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, yesâbut 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?
Â
Â
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 drunksâand 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 activistâand only for a month!âAlicja 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 balladeerâlove 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 thenâa triumph of the married willâof 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.