The Vltava In March
In March the Vltava ran the colour of weak tea, thickened at the banks with the last brown ice, and Zdenka Kocourková could read the temperature of the water through the soles of her boots before she had untied the boat. She had learned this from her father in the summer she turned eleven, standing on the landing at Rašínovo nábřeží while he held her shoulder and named the currents the way other fathers named saints. The eddy beside the third piling of the bridge. The slow pull under the willow. The place where the bottom dropped and the river argued with itself. She had not needed him to tell her a second time.
Her ferry was a flat-bottomed wooden pram with a single oar at the stern, painted the dull green the company required, the number 14 stencilled in white on both sides of the bow. It carried six people if they sat close, eight if one of them was a child. The licence, signed by the magistrate in 1919 and renewed each January, had belonged to her father until the pneumonia took him in the winter of thirty-seven, at which point it had passed to her because there had been no one else and because the clerk in the river office had been at school with her and had signed the paper without looking up.
She worked the short crossing between the Old Town bank and the Kampa landing, ten crowns for an adult, five for a child, free for the postman and the two nuns from the convent at