The Crossing That Mattered
In December the Vltava began to freeze at the edges. By the second week the company had drawn the small prams out of the water at Na Františku and at Smíchov, and the steamers had gone to winter mooring, and only the two middle-river ferries — hers and number 17 — were still running, the main channel between Rašínovo and Kampa being, in any normal winter, free of ice.
Her hands had changed. She noticed this in December, when she put on her gloves and the leather sat differently on her knuckles. She had done eleven months on the oar in a year in which she had also done a great many things she had not done before, and her hands, in the mirror above her kitchen basin, were her father's hands, more than they had been in March.
Father Vojtěch had been ill in November. He had caught a chill at a late funeral, and for three weeks she had brought him broth every other morning and sat with him a quarter of an hour, and in that time he had asked her for nothing. The parish had been quiet. The system — to the extent that there was a system — had been paused. She had been relieved, and also, she noticed, restless, which had surprised her.
He came back to health in the first week of December, and on the ninth he sent Jiří with a card.
It was Saint Nicholas, which they had agreed on in September for a man to be moved out of the country in stages. It meant a crossing that mattered more