repeat everything I say three times, and even then she looks bewildered.”
Miklós said that, yes, he and Zita would like to take a ride down the mountain with him, if possible. Before he left, though, he wanted to have a word with the village’s mayor, a Herr Schirrmeister. Miklós found him near the river, directing cleanup operations. His brother lived in Glashütte, the mayor told Miklós, where the scale of the disaster was beyond comprehension. A passenger train had been swept off the station siding into the river; its coaches became uncoupled and were washed up onto the Hauptstrasse, severely injuring a number of people, killing several. Every fifty or hundred years a catastrophic flood occurred, he said, and this was because of the region’s geology: narrow, rocky waterways could not contain the water generated by these summer cloudbursts. In twenty-four hours, more than three hundred millimeters of rain could fall. And this was the result. He broke off. “Look, over there. A woman has fallen in. She was helping another woman, and now she’s gone in herself.”
The woman was Zita. Herr Schirrmeister picked up a plank of wood and handed it to Miklós, who held it out. Zita grabbed it and was able to pull herself out of the water. But right away she slipped in the mud and went back into the river, and this time the current carried her away. Miklós threw his jacket on the ground and waded into the water. His old adversary, floodwater. Rivers choked with ice, the land a wide sea darkening, spilling out across the pastures to the forest’s edge. Every spring the river that cut through his land in Hungary flooded. In 1912, he remembered, it rose to new heights, flooding tenants’ cottages, chicken coops, hay wagons, pigpens, stranding cows on islands of dry ground. The child of one of the estate’s workers was swept into the water. Miklós and his brother, László, had swum out to her. He reached the little girl first, and then the water closed over his head, and László had to rescue him as well as the child. But they were too late. László had carried her body out of the water to her mother, whose cry of anguish Miklós would never forget.
When the flood receded, he had seen how the river had carved out a new path for itself. It was no longer the river he had known as a boy.
But this was a mountain stream in a village in Saxon Switzerland in summer, and he couldn’t let Zita drown in it. He held her head above the water, and somehow they were on solid ground, if mud could be termed solid. Zita bent over, her hands on her knees, and coughed up some water.
“Good, that’s good,” he said, smoothing her wet hair away from her face.
“I lost my shoes,” she said.
“Shoes can be replaced,” a woman said. “We must get you into dry clothes. Look how you are shivering.” Her name was Frau Kappel. Because her house was flooded, more with mud than with water, she took Miklós and Zita and Richard Houghton to the home of her husband’s parents, a distance above the village. Frau Kappel’s father-in-law showed Miklós to an outbuilding behind the house, where he was able to shower off the mud from the river. He got dressed in clean pants, a shirt, socks, and sandals loaned to him by Herr Kappel. In the house, Frau Kappel invited him to sit, to sit and rest. You and the Fräulein were heroes today, she said. She told him the Fräulein was upstairs, having a nice hot bath. The older Frau Kappel had set the table with bread, sausage, and cheese from their dairy, which Miklós was urged to taste. It was very good, he said. Zita came downstairs, dressed in a blouse with gathered sleeves, a skirt cinched in at the waist with a leather belt. He sat beside her at the table. He wanted to embrace her, and in lieu of this he kept turning to regard her with the greatest pleasure. If anything had happened to her, if she had drowned, he could not have gone on living. What madness in him, what idiocy had allowed him to bring her here in the first place?
When they’d finished eating, Richard Houghton stood and, in his Berlitz School German, gave a speech, thanking the Kappel family for their hospitality and wishing them well, wishing the village a quick recovery from the disaster.