THE RIVER

The results still hadn’t come in, even after a week of waiting. The physician was brusque, saying they would just have to wait for a diagnosis. Franz could not sit in the room of his boarding house for more than a few minutes, so he abandoned the unfinished manuscript on his desk and went for long walks alone. Autumn was offering him a few more warm days but he knew winter was close every shivering evening. The coughing was now almost constant. It had begun when he was still able to blow plumes of smoke into last year’s spring mornings.

He came down to the Danube and stopped only because there wasn’t a bridge at this part of the river. Franz remained standing by the water. It was some time before he roused himself from his daze and saw how many groups of people there were all up and down the river. There were families on picnic blankets, clusters of friends lounging in conversational circles, couples sharing wine, pet dogs released to scamper around, even a couple dressed as French nobles with a monkey on a leash. The woman had a parasol on her shoulder and the man puffed on a cigar. They didn’t talk to each other except to remark on the tethered monkey’s endeavours to catch a tabby cat loitering nearby.

The river had many boats drifting on it. Small sailing ships for children. Rowboats with propped fishing rods and their bright-red floaters bobbing in the water. Rowing teams sculled along to the calls of men with small cones held to their mouths. Ducks lifted into the air on a whim and came swooshing down again. Women in long dresses, wearing large hats with flowers pinned to their brims, threw breadcrumbs to the ducks from boxes they’d prepared at home.

A man with a scarlet robe, similar to the kind boxers wear, walked in a stately way towards the river and stopped by the water’s edge. The children were the first to reach him and they formed an excited circle of onlookers as he began to disrobe. Beneath, he was wearing a blue-and-white-striped bathing suit. The image of a whale in green was stitched on his back. When Franz got closer he saw that below the leviathan was the name Jonah. The man sat on a rock beside the wide river, with his legs dangling in the water. He was breathing deeply yet rapidly and the whale on his back looked as though it was swimming through a blue and white ocean.

Franz and a large group of people gathered around the Swimmer. Franz asked a gentleman with a monocle next to him what was happening. The man replied that the Swimmer was going to swim across the Danube, from one bank to the other. When Franz shrugged, the man with the monocle explained that the swimmer would swim below the water, without coming up for air. It was over seventy metres wide at this point of the great river and he would usually carry something in his mouth when making his crossing. He had been known to carry a man’s silver pocket watch, a blue robin’s egg, and once he’d even carried a wedding ring over and back—at which point a gentleman had proposed to his prospective bride.

‘What’s in his mouth today?’ asked Franz.

‘Nothing. Today the Swimmer is going to go all the way to the other side—and return—without coming up for air.’

‘That’s impossible,’ said Franz.

‘I know,’ agreed the man with the monocle. ‘It’s impossible.’ He smiled.

More people gathered to watch the Swimmer prepare. The smallest of the children took turns patting the whale on the back of the Swimmer’s bathing suit, gently, as it seemed to swim below the deepest ocean. Those who could already read mistakenly assumed the Swimmer’s name to be Jonah, but he and his costume still filled them with a sense of wonder.

‘How is he going to prove he went to the other side and back?’ asked Franz.

The man with the monocle looked surprised by the question and couldn’t answer it. Franz kept asking people until a young man with a very new, shiny top hat said that he had a white balloon shaped like a star attached to his waist, which he would release when he got to the other bank.

The Swimmer folded the scarlet robe that had been keeping his legs warm and politely asked a red-headed girl to hold it for a little while. People began to clap. As he made his way deeper into the water the applause grew louder. It petered out when he was fully submerged. The Danube was dark today and nothing more could be seen of the Swimmer.

People began to estimate how long it would take him to cross from one side of the river to the other. They looked for the white balloon that was sure to bob up soon on the distant bank. They did not spot it for all their eager searching. This fact was eventually dismissed, one man who had the bearing of a judge pronouncing that it would be as difficult to see as a snowflake landing on the water—picking out a white balloon on a river so busy with boats, fishing floats and ducks.

They all waited.

‘But it’s impossible,’ said Franz.

‘Yes, it’s impossible,’ people assured him with expectant smiles on their faces.

The gathering stood by the water for fifteen minutes before everyone began re-forming their original clusters of family and friends. They continued to talk as though they were all still part of an audience, if only for a few moments longer. They speculated on how long it was possible for a man to hold his breath. What was the outer limit for a fellow with good lungs, and then for someone who had trained for such endeavours as crossing the Danube or especially deep-sea diving? They had real professionals doing that kind of breath holding. Conversations ranged over the things men found below water, from sponges and pearls to sunken ships and treasures.

The children also dispersed from the water’s edge after a while. The red-headed girl placed the Swimmer’s scarlet robe on the rock he had sat on, breathing deeply, just a little time before. She asked her father whether a sponge was a type of fish and what kind of creature produced a pearl. Perhaps they were a special kind of egg. She asked if there were sunken treasures in the wide, deep Danube as well.

Franz hadn’t coughed for the whole time he was waiting for the Swimmer to cross the river but he now pulled out a handkerchief and began coughing. He carried a number of handkerchiefs. Franz could feel his lungs struggling, tired from a battle that had been raging for months. His eyes were closed as the coughing fit went on and on. Franz opened his eyes and saw spatters of blood soaking into the white fabric resembling an image of a surfacing leviathan.