Vlatva River.

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Vlatva River

 A short story by Mark Buchanan

It was a dirty and miserable street.  Dirt and grime caked the stone and smoke was coming from the factory chimneys.  The street lamps cast pools of light on the wet cobbles, illuminating the heads of the saints as they keep their stony vigils on the walls of Charles Bridge. Fog rising from the river curls its tentacles between the statues, wreathing a head for a few seconds or obscuring entire sections of the ancient walls. The Vltava flows oily and invisible thirty feet below. A bell somewhere in Hradcany strikes three.
    

The sound of running footsteps batters the muffled air, and then a cry. Jacob, his bare feet filthy and bleeding, almost catches his wife's shoulder as she flees under the gothic archway of the Bridge Tower. But a chipped cobble tears the ball of his foot and he sprawls on the wet stones. By the time he heaves himself upright again, she is poised on the wall between the statues of St Joseph and St Francis Xavier. She briefly turns her face towards him, her features blurred by the fog into a pale moon partially eclipsed by black hair.
    

"Witch!" he screams, "Whore! Come back here and..."
    

Just as he thinks she is about to step into the air, the drifting mist obscures her figure only to part again as he reaches the place where she stood. The wall is empty.
    

Fifteen-year-old Katrina pulls her coat close round her thin body and slips back out of sight under the Bridge Tower. She runs home through the streets of Prague's Old Town and sits shivering in her bed.
    

The next day, her grey-faced father says,
    

"Your mother's gone. Gone like the cheating whore she is."
    

He glances at Katrina's crushed expression and adds,
     "It's no use crying. She's gone for good this time. Off with one of her men."
    

It is possible this is what has happened. He's heard nothing from his neighbours about a drowning and he could easily have imagined what he thinks he saw. Katrina says nothing. But then, she always says nothing. She hasn't spoken since she was two years old.
    
With Josefina gone, Jacob has another problem. Although her crystalline voice was untrained, his wife had earned much more than he by singing in the vestries of churches, at private parties or on the bridge, accompanied by her scratchy cassette recorder.
    

When the weather is fine he earns a few crowns sketching tourists on the bridge, just as he has always done, but it is very little compared to what his wife, with her waist length black hair and wide red mouth, could make. Sometimes she would come back with more money than he could make in a week. Visiting Americans and Japanese were, she told him with her glittering smile, extremely generous.

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From her room in the attic, Katrina had often heard her mother's melodious, tinkling laugh when Jacob was away. Creeping down the creaking stairs, she had seen candlelight flickering on the windowsills in her parents' bedroom, the heavy crimson wrap sliding off her mother's shoulder, the entwined limbs. Later, finding her daughter on the bottom step, Josefina would sit next to her and pull the girl's head onto her shoulder. Katrina would watch as the man dropped bank notes on the bed side table and, his face averted, hurry down to the front door and out onto Kamzikova Street. ...

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