Genesis

by Jim Crace

  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.

  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 tro
users 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 balladeer—love 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 then—a triumph of the married will—of 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.

  So by the time his wife walked through the door, kicked off her shoes, and put her arms around his waist, her thumbs again beneath his belt, his appetite for her or anyone was blunted. He’d make amends, he told himself. He’d truly make amends, some other day. For marriages are rich in other days. He made excuses for himself, sat on the toilet for a while, busied himself preparing coffee, talked too little and too much, and only joined her on the bed when he was sure that he was irritating her, that he had driven her away. Chatter is the cheapest contraceptive.

  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 ris
ks, 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.