Room to Stop

Eliška wants to cut the engine early and drift the ferry in the way she's seen it done in her head, the hull arriving at the pontoon with nothing left over, a kiss, a teacup set on a saucer by somebody's aunt.

Standa, who has run the little boat below Vyšehrad for twenty-two summers, lets her try it twice. The first time the river takes her a boat's length past, and an old man in a flat cap on the bench says, Ahoj, Smíchov, very dry. The second time she has to go round again in front of a swan, who says worse.

If you want to arrive at nothing, Standa says, you have to start in Braník. You'd need the whole Vltava and a hill to roll up. We've got forty metres and a bloke with a dog who wants to be on the other side before the tram.

So she learns the ugly way, the real one: come in a bit too fast, then throw it in reverse, the whole boat shuddering and complaining, the water boiling white at the stern like somebody stirring a pot too hard, spending diesel to stop inside the room there is.

Listen to it, he says, and she does: the engine's argument with itself, the rope thrown and the soft clap of it caught, the rubber of the old lorry tyres along the pontoon squeaking like a shoe on a gym floor, and then the give, the whole pontoon going down an inch under them and coming back, a long creak in the chains, as if it had been holding its breath for them.

A pigeon lands on the rail beside her while she's tying off, all noise, wings going like a man shaking out a wet coat, feet out, grabbing, the rail ringing a little under it, and it doesn't look graceful and it doesn't fall in.

That's the one, says Standa. Not the swan. Him.

On the last crossing she comes in fast and brakes hard and the tyres squeak and the pontoon dips and lifts, and the old woman with the shopping trolley who has crossed here every Tuesday since the floods, and never once said a word, stands up, and pats the rail like the flank of a horse, and says to Eliška, Thank you, dear. He always does it like he's apologising.