bags of laundry she was taking across to her sister in Malá Strana. A young man in a clerk's suit, the ink still on his cuff, crossing late for work at the records office. A boy of perhaps nine who had run onto the landing with a ten-heller piece clutched in his fist and a face she recognised as belonging to the youngest of the Polák children from the building behind the fish market — she had not asked why he was crossing alone and he had not offered. The nuns. An old man with a violin case who never paid and whom she never charged.
She took them across in the order they had come. The boy sat at the bow with his knees pulled up and watched the water pass beneath the gunwale with the solemn attention of a small child observing something he has not yet been told is ordinary. The violin player nodded to her as he stepped off at Kampa, and she nodded back, and neither of them spoke because they had not spoken in three years and to begin now would have required a reason.
Between crossings she sat on the stone step of the landing with her hands pushed into her sleeves and she looked upstream toward the Charles Bridge, where the statues of the saints stood blackened with two centuries of coal smoke, and the gulls worked the surface of the water around the pilings. A barge went down towards the weir with a load of coal under a canvas, and the bargeman raised his cap to her from the stern and she raised her hand to him. She did not know his name. She knew the set of his shoulders, the way he favoured his left arm, the particular angle at which he held the tiller in a high current. There were perhaps forty men on the river whom she knew in this way — as bodies without histories — and she counted the barge among the things that were still as they had been.
By four o'clock the
🤖 The author declared this story as written with the help of AI.