A River At The Wrong Hour
The message came on a Thursday in the last week of October, not through Jiří and not through a holy card. A boy of perhaps ten whom she had never seen stood on the landing and said, very quickly, as though he had been practising, "Father says today at four. Father says it is not a passenger." Then he turned and ran.
She looked after him for a long time. The river was brown that week with the rains, and a branch went by, turning slowly in the current, its leaves still yellow.
At four o'clock she was on the landing alone. Pan Ryba had, by a small unobtrusive arrangement that she had not asked about, scheduled her last afternoon crossing for three fifty, which meant she had no passenger waiting for the four o'clock. The Old Town side was empty but for two elderly men on the bench at the top of the steps, who were arguing in low voices about a football match from before the war.
A man she did not know came down to the landing. He was perhaps fifty, a bargeman by his coat and by the angle at which he carried his shoulders, and he spoke to her quickly and quietly without introducing himself.
"Paní. Can you take the pram as far as the Mánes bridge. On the water. Now."
She looked at him.
"There is a thing in the water at the second piling. Father asks whether you will see it before the river police do."
She did not ask what the thing was. She had understood already. The boy's