The Line Around the Horse

The Line Around the Horse

The horse has a brown line around its knees, and nobody in my family has ever tried to wash it off.

It stands on the third shelf of the bookcase in my front room, between a jar of buttons and a photograph of my grandmother at a dance in 1951. It is about the size of a loaf of bread, carved from linden wood, painted red with white dapples and a black mane that has worn down to gray where children's hands have held it. It has four wooden wheels. One of them wobbles. The line runs all the way around it, level as a carpenter's chalk mark, a little below the belly: a ring of silt the color of weak coffee, sealed in place years ago with a coat of clear wax so it would not flake. Below the line the red is duller. Above it the red is the red my great-great-grandfather painted in a kitchen on Sixteenth Avenue in 1904.

My niece Lucy found it first thing, the way everyone does.

"Is that dirt?" she said. She had come in with her backpack still on, her phone in one hand, her father's car pulling away from the curb behind her. It was the last full week of June, the air already thick at nine in the morning, the cottonwoods along the creek letting go of their fluff so it drifted across the street like a slow snow that would not melt. Somewhere down the block a lawn mower started and stopped and started again.

"It's the river," I said. "Take your shoes off. There's lemonade."

Lucy is thirteen and has her father's ears and my mother's way of standing with one hip out, as if she is about to argue with a customer. My brother Danny dropped her off for two weeks because he and his wife are moving, and because, as he said on the phone, "She has a summer project and you are the summer project." She had to interview a family member about a historical event and make something from it. A video, a poster, a podcast, a website. Her teacher had given the class a list of events. The flood was on the list.

"Dad said you have all the stuff," she said.

"I have some of the stuff."

"He said you have, like, boxes."

I have boxes. They are in the hall closet, four of them, plastic, with lids that snap, labeled in my handwriting from three different decades. The oldest label is on masking tape and says FLOOD 2008 RECORDINGS DO NOT THROW OUT in the round letters I used when I was fifteen and thought capital letters were a form of protection. Inside are two digital voice recorders that no longer turn on, a shoebox of the little memory cards they used, a spiral notebook with a water stain on its cover that is not from the flood, it is from a glass of iced tea in July of that year, and a three-ring binder with sheet protectors full of photographs that were once stuck together and are now not.

Everything on the memory cards has been copied, more than once. The sound files live in our family's private network now, in a folder my mother named "Léto 2008," with the accent on the e because she was typing in Slovak that day and forgot to switch. Léto is summer in both languages, Czech and Slovak. It is one of the words that did not have to choose a side.

Lucy has heard some of those recordings. Everyone in the family has. My grandmother Lorrie's voice saying the word for poppy seed, "mák," four times in a row because I kept asking her to say it slower. My grandfather Milan playing a shepherd's flute that has no finger holes, the notes jumping up the overtones like a dog going up a staircase. A brass band on the Fourth of July, missing half its players, playing a polka in a parking lot. Lucy has listened to them the way young people listen to old recordings of their family, with the volume low, while doing something else, as a kind of weather.

But she had never been told how they were made.

"Okay," she said, sitting on the floor in front of the closet while I lifted the boxes down. "So the river came up."

"The river came up."

"How high?"

"Thirty-one feet and some inches at the gauge downtown. The record before that was twenty, from 1929. Your great-grandmother Lorrie was born that year. She used to say the river had been saving up for her."

Lucy looked at the horse on the shelf.

"And it got to there."

"It got to there on that horse, on that shelf, in that house. In the rest of Czech Village it got higher. At the museum it got above the doors."

She was quiet a minute. Then she did what every interviewer does when the story is too big, which is ask for something small.

"Who carved it?"

So I told her, and then I told her the rest, and it took two weeks.

I am writing down what I told her here because she asked me to, and because I have learned that if you keep a story only in your mouth, it changes shape each time you tell it, until it fits your teeth better than it fits what happened. Most of what follows comes from the notebook I kept that summer, the one with the iced tea stain, and from the recordings. Where the notebook is thin, I have filled in from memory, and where memory and the recordings disagree, I have believed the recordings.

I was fifteen in June of 2008. I had been born ten weeks after Czechoslovakia stopped being one country, which my Slovak grandfather liked to say made me the first citizen of nowhere in particular. My father's family had been Czech in Cedar Rapids for five generations. My mother's family had been Slovak in Cedar Rapids for one. They lived, before the river, on opposite banks of it, a mile apart by the Sixteenth Avenue bridge, and that summer, for eleven weeks, they lived in the same house, which was ours, which was not big enough.

Lucy has a scan of that notebook now, every page, the stain included. She asked me what she should call her project.

"Call it whatever is true," I said.

She has not decided yet. That is all right. Neither had I, at fifteen. I only knew that the water had come up through the floor of my grandmother's house and into the drawers where she kept the things she had never shown anybody, and that somebody had to carry them out into the light and lay them flat and look at them before the mold got there first.

The mold, it turned out, gives you about two days.

Twenty-Two

The river in my notebook begins on Sunday, June 8, 2008, with a number written in the margin and circled twice: 22.

That was the crest the radio had given at breakfast, twenty-two feet at the downtown gauge by the end of the week. Flood stage on the Cedar at Cedar Rapids is twelve. My father said twenty-two the way he said the price of gas, with his jaw a little forward, and went on eating his eggs. My mother, who had worked the night shift in the intensive care unit and was eating her supper while we ate our breakfast, said, "Twenty-two is the 1929 record plus two."

"Plus two," my father agreed.

"Your mother's house is in the 1929 water."

"Everything in Czech Village is in the 1929 water. That's why there's a levee now. Sort of a levee." He tipped his plate to get the yolk. "They'll sandbag. It'll be fine."

I wrote 22 in the notebook because my English teacher, Mrs. Ostrander, had told us on the last day of school to keep a summer journal, and the notebook was new, and I had nothing else to put in it. The first page says: June 7. School out. Hot. Sami says the pool is open Thursday. That was the whole entry. The second page has the 22.

By Monday afternoon the 22 had a line through it and a 24 beside it.

---

I should tell you where everyone lived, because that summer the map of my family came apart and went back together in a different shape, and it helps to see it the way it was before.

The Cedar River runs through Cedar Rapids from the northwest to the southeast, wide and brown and slow most of the year, with a dam just above downtown that makes a long white seam of noise you can hear from the bridges. Downtown sits on the east bank. In the middle of the river, between downtown and the west side, is Mays Island, which holds City Hall and the county courthouse, as though the people who planned the city wanted the government where everyone could keep an eye on it. South of downtown the river bends, and on the west bank of that bend, along Sixteenth Avenue Southwest, is Czech Village: two blocks of brick storefronts with painted signs, a meat market, two bakeries, a restaurant, a little park, and, at the edge of the river, the big white building with the blue roof that is the National Czech and Slovak Museum and Library. Across the Sixteenth Avenue bridge, on the east bank, is the neighborhood people had just started calling New Bohemia, the old Czech working district around Third Street Southeast, with the CSPS Hall and its tall arched windows, and the railroad tracks, and the brick shells of warehouses.

My grandmother Lorrie Kubík lived in Czech Village, on a side street two blocks from the bakery, in a narrow white house with green trim that her father had bought in 1936. My grandfather Milan Ďurica and my grandmother Zuza lived across the bridge, east and a little south, on a street of small square houses near the tracks, in a house with a front porch Milan had rebuilt three times. If you stood on the bridge you could see the corner of Lorrie's roof and the top of Milan's maple at the same time, which meant you could stand in the exact center of my family with the river going under your feet.

We lived on the northeast side, near Bever Park, up the hill, in a brick ranch house my father called "the ranch" even though the nearest horse was a statue at the zoo. Nobody thought about our house that week. It was the place you drove to after.

---

On Monday, June 9, my father drove me to Czech Village to help my grandmother move "a few things."

The sky was the white color it goes before a storm that does not come. The river, from the Sixteenth Avenue bridge, was higher than I had ever seen it, the water climbing up the trunks of the trees on Mays Island so they looked like they were wading, and it was moving fast, faster than the Cedar is supposed to move, carrying whole branches and a blue plastic barrel that turned slowly as it went, like it was looking for something. The noise of the dam was gone. The dam was underwater. You could see only a long smooth hump in the river where the water rode over it.

At the bottom of the bridge a crew in orange vests was filling sandbags from a dump-truck pile of sand. There were men from the city, and high school kids I knew a little, and a woman in a sundress and rubber boots holding the bags open while a boy shoveled. The sand was wet and smelled like a beach and like metal.

"We'll come back and do that," my father said. "After your grandmother."

My grandmother was standing on her front step in her housecoat with her arms folded, as if the river owed her money.

"I'm not moving anything," she said, before my father had his door shut.

"Mom."

"Twenty-four. I heard. My father was in this house in sixty-one when it was nineteen and a half. The water came to the second step." She pointed. "This step. Never in the house. Never."

"It's going to be more than nineteen and a half."

"Then it can come to the third step." She looked at me. "Noruška. Come in. I made buchty. Your father can stand out here and worry at the sky."

Buchty are square yeasted buns baked crowded together in a pan so that they tear apart soft at the sides, with a spoon of filling hidden inside. My grandmother made them with povidla, a thick dark plum butter that she cooked down herself every September in a copper pot on the stove, stirring with a wooden paddle my grandfather had made her for their tenth anniversary. She said "buchty" with the "ch" from the back of the throat, the sound I could make only when I had a cold. I said "bookty." She let me.

Her kitchen was the color of butter, with a linoleum floor in red and white squares and a cuckoo clock that had not cuckooed since 1983. Above the door to the dining room was a shelf my great-grandfather had put up, the highest shelf in the house, and on it, as long as I had been alive, stood the red horse. There is a photograph of that kitchen on our family's map now, pinned to the side street and dated Christmas 1998, with my grandfather Joe at the table in a paper crown. It is the only picture any of us has of the cuckoo clock.

"He's high enough," Lorrie said, seeing me look. "Your great-grandfather put him there so the children couldn't pull him down and play with him. Then all the children grew up and nobody wanted to play with him anyway. That is the history of every toy."

"Can I take him? Just till the water goes down."

"What for? He's wood. Wood floats."

"Babi."

"Eat your buchta."

My father came in and stood in the kitchen doorway, too big for it, the way he always was in his mother's house. He looked at the cabinet in the dining room, a tall glass-fronted thing where my grandmother kept her eggs: thirty-eight eggs, scratched and painted, red and blue and black and onion-brown, in egg cups and on little stands and in a wire tree, every one of them blown out and hollow, every one of them with her initials and a year somewhere on the bottom in letters smaller than a grain of rice. Kraslice. Some were from her grandmother. Most she had made herself, every spring for sixty years, in that kitchen, with a scalpel blade she bought at the hardware store and a magnifying lamp.

"The eggs, Mom," he said. "Let me at least box the eggs and put them upstairs."

"The upstairs is hot. They'll crack in the heat."

"They'll crack in the river."

"The river," said my grandmother, "is not coming in my house."

We moved the photo albums to the top of the bedroom closet upstairs. That was all she would allow. Three albums and a shoebox. She stood at the foot of the stairs and supervised, saying, "Not that one, that one is your Aunt Bess, she can stay down here," and my father carried them up anyway. Then we went down to the sandbag pile and filled bags until my hands were raw inside my borrowed gloves and the sun came out from behind the white sky and turned the street into an oven.

---

On Tuesday it was 25.

I went with my mother to Milan and Zuza's house on the east side, because my mother had the day off and said, in Slovak, so I would not understand, something to the effect that if her father tried to carry his workbench up the basement steps by himself she would kill him before the river did. I understood anyway. You pick up a lot of a language from people telling each other not to die.

Milan was in the basement. Of course he was. My grandfather spent more of his life in that basement than in the rest of the house combined. He was a tool-and-die maker, retired, which meant he had spent forty years making the steel shapes that other machines used to stamp out car parts and refrigerator doors, and in his basement he made everything else. Shelves. Birdhouses. A cradle for Danny and then the same cradle again, repaired, for me. And instruments. On the wall above his bench, on two big wooden pegs, hung his fujara.

A fujara is a Slovak shepherd's flute, but that word "flute" makes you think of something you could hold in one hand. A fujara is taller than a man. Milan's was a little more than five and a half feet long, made of elder wood, dark brown, with a shorter pipe running alongside it near the top to carry his breath down to the mouthpiece. It had three finger holes near the bottom and it was carved along its whole length in geometric patterns, diamonds and zigzags and little suns, burned dark into the wood. He had made it himself in 1974, in this basement, from a piece of elder that a man in Wisconsin had mailed him, because he had left his father's fujara in Slovakia in 1969 and could not go back for it.

When he played it, standing, with the fujara upright in front of him and his eyes half shut, the sound came out low and breathy and enormous, and it seemed to come from the floor and the walls as much as the instrument. My grandmother Zuza said it was the sound of a valley talking to itself.

"Dedko, take the fujara upstairs," my mother said.

"In a minute."

"Take it now."

"Katka." He used her childhood name, the one only he used. "The water in 1993 came to that window. Halfway up the glass." He pointed at the little basement window above the washing machine, a rectangle of gray light at the level of the grass outside. "The fujara is above the window. The bench is above the window. My tools I will carry up tonight. Two hours. Stop looking at me like I am already dead."

"In 1993 the river was nineteen feet."

"In 1993," said Milan, "you were twenty-seven and you thought I was very smart."

My grandmother Zuza was upstairs at the kitchen table with a cup of tea and her embroidery hoop, as though nothing at all was happening. She was working a pattern of red and black flowers on a strip of white linen, the stitches so small and close they looked printed. The radio on the counter was playing a polka from the Saturday morning ethnic hour, which someone at the station had left running, and she was humming along with it in a key slightly to the left of the band's.

"Norinka," she said. "Sit. Your mother and your grandfather are going to have a fight. We don't need to watch."

I sat.

"What are you making?"

"A sleeve," she said. "For a shirt. For a person who doesn't exist yet. Sometimes I make a sleeve and wait to see who it is for." She held it up so the light from the window came through the linen around the stitches. "This is Detva. The flowers. In Detva we make them like this, big and flat and proud, with black around the red so they stand up. Like the people."

From the basement came my mother's voice, rising, and my grandfather's voice, staying where it was.

"What did you do with the sleeves before?" I asked. "The ones that didn't find a person?"

Zuza thought about it. She bit off a thread.

"I put them in the drawer," she said, "and the drawer waited with me."

That night it was 27. Then, by morning, it was a number nobody had a place to put.

Two Kinds of Nora

On Wednesday, June 11, the sirens on the west side went off at a little after four in the afternoon, and my grandmother Lorrie left her house in my father's pickup with her purse, her blood pressure pills, a cardigan, and a ten-pound bag of flour.

"The flour?" my father said.

"If I am going to sit in your house, I am going to bake in your house," she said. "Your wife buys the flour with the bleach in it."

She did not take the eggs. She did not take the horse. She told me afterward that she stood in her dining room with the sirens going and looked at the cabinet for a long time and decided that if she started carrying things out she would not stop until the house was empty and the street was full, and then the river would win twice. So she took the flour, because it was useful, and locked the door, because it was her door, and got in the truck.

I was not there for that. I was a mile away across the river, sitting on a sandbag wall outside a pizza place on Third Street Southeast with my friend Sami Haddad, whose family ran the place, drinking a warm orange soda and watching the water come up the street toward us one curb at a time.

You could see it happen. That was the thing nobody tells you about a flood. I had imagined a wave, something out of a movie. What came was quieter and worse. The water slid out of the storm drains first, brown and thick and smelling like a basement, and spread across the asphalt in a sheet as thin as a fingernail, and then it was ankle-deep, and then it was over the tops of the parking blocks, and it did not stop and it did not hurry. It came the way a bath fills.

"My dad says we're going to lose the ovens," Sami said. Her father was inside with her uncles carrying the dough mixer up a ladder into a crawl space, which was not going to work, because the dough mixer weighed three hundred pounds.

"Mine says it'll be fine."

"Everybody's dad says it'll be fine," Sami said. "That's how you know."

At five o'clock a policeman with a bullhorn came down the street on foot, walking in the middle where the water was shallowest, and told everybody east of the tracks to leave. He said it in English and then, because he had grown up there, he said something else in Czech that made two old men on the porch across from us laugh and wave him off. I asked Sami what it meant. She didn't know. Neither did I. It bothered me all that night, that I had stood on a street my great-great-grandparents had walked down every day and a policeman had made a joke in their language and I had not gotten it.

I wrote it in the notebook. June 11. Cop said something in Czech. Old men laughed. Find out what. I never did find out. It is still on that page with a little box drawn next to it that never got checked.

---

By the time my mother picked me up from Third Street, her car splashing up through water past the hubcaps, the river had come over the Sixteenth Avenue bridge approach on the west side, and Czech Village was gone.

We drove up the hill toward home, and from the top of the rise by the park I looked back and saw the downtown the way you never see it, from above, in yellow evening light: the river not a river anymore but a lake, a wide brown lake with buildings standing in it, and trees with only their crowns showing, and stoplights still changing from green to yellow to red over streets that were not there. On Mays Island the courthouse and City Hall rose out of the water like ships. The noise was the strangest part. A city is supposed to hum. This one was quiet except for helicopters.

"Is Dedko out?" I asked.

My mother's hands were tight on the wheel. "Dedko is out. Dedko is in the garage at home taking apart the lawn mower so that he does not have to think."

"Is the fujara out?"

She didn't answer, which was an answer.

---

The night of June 11 there were nine people in our house, which had three bedrooms and one and a half bathrooms.

My parents. Me. My brother Danny, who was nineteen and home from his first year at the university in Iowa City and had planned to spend the summer working at a golf course and sleeping, in that order. My grandmother Lorrie, from the Czech side. My grandfather Milan and grandmother Zuza, from the Slovak side. My mother's younger brother, my uncle Pavol, who lived in an apartment near Milan and Zuza and had been evacuated with nothing but a gym bag and a laptop. And Pavol's dog, Hugo, a beagle who considered himself a person and should be counted.

Lorrie got my bedroom, because she was seventy-nine. Milan and Zuza got Danny's, because they were seventy and sixty-eight and married. Danny got the couch. Pavol got the floor of the den with a camping pad and the dog. I got the floor of my parents' room, in a sleeping bag, between their bed and the closet, where I lay awake listening to the helicopters and to my father snoring and to my mother not snoring, which meant she was lying awake too.

At two in the morning I got up for water and found the two grandmothers in the kitchen.

They were sitting at opposite ends of the table under the one light over the sink. Lorrie had a cup of coffee, black. Zuza had a cup of tea with a slice of lemon floating in it and a teaspoon of sugar on the saucer waiting to go in. Neither was talking. The radio was on low, the AM station that had been reading out the street closures all day, a man's tired voice saying the names of streets I had known my whole life as if he were reading a list of the dead.

I had seen my two grandmothers together maybe a hundred times. At my birthdays. At Christmas, which we did twice, once on the twenty-fourth with sauerkraut soup and fried carp and potato salad at Zuza's and once on the twenty-fifth with roast duck and dumplings and sauerkraut at Lorrie's. They were polite to each other in a way that was almost a language of its own. They called each other "Mrs. Kubík" and "Mrs. Ďurica" in front of other people and "Lorrie" and "Zuzana" when it was only family, and I had never once heard either of them say a word to the other in Czech or in Slovak, though both of them spoke one or the other every day of their lives.

"Noruška," said Lorrie. "You should be asleep."

"Norinka," said Zuza, at the same moment. "Sit down. You look like a ghost."

They had said my name two different ways at the same time, and they both heard it, and they looked at each other down the length of the table, and for the first time I saw them both decide, separately, to be amused.

"Noruška is Czech," Lorrie said. "For a little Nora."

"Norinka is Slovak," Zuza said. "For a little Nora."

"Mine is older."

"Mine is softer."

"What does that make me?" I asked.

"Awake," they both said, and Zuza laughed, a short surprised laugh into her tea, and Lorrie pressed her lips together the way she did when she was trying not to.

I sat down between them. Zuza dropped her sugar into her tea and stirred it. The spoon rang against the cup.

"In my house," Lorrie said after a while, to nobody, "the water is in the kitchen now. Probably up to the counters. I keep thinking about the flour bin. I keep thinking, I should have moved the flour bin."

"You took the flour," I said.

"I took the flour in the bag. The bin is my mother's. It's tin. It has the Czech word for flour on it, mouka, in blue letters. It'll rust."

"In my house," said Zuza, "the water is in the basement. To the ceiling, I think. Milan's bench. Milan's tools. The fujara." She said the last word quietly, looking at the doorway, in case he could hear from down the hall.

"He'll make another one," Lorrie said.

Zuza looked at her. "He made that one when he was thirty-six. With a piece of wood he waited two years for. He is seventy now. His hands are not the same hands."

"Joe's hands weren't either," Lorrie said. "At the end. He still played." Joe was my grandfather, Lorrie's husband, who had died when I was six. He had played the tuba in a brass band for fifty years. What I remembered of him was the size of his hands and the smell of valve oil.

"Not in the same key," Zuza said.

There was a pause in which I thought they might be about to argue. Instead Lorrie snorted.

"No," she said. "Never in the same key. Fifty years in that band and he was always half a step behind Hruška's clarinet. He said it was on purpose. To make it sound like two bands."

And Zuza laughed again, and this time Lorrie let herself laugh with her, and they sat there at two in the morning while the city drowned and laughed at my dead grandfather's tuba.

Then Zuza began, very softly, to sing.

I knew the song. Everyone in my mother's family knew it. It was a Slovak dance song, quick, about a girl who should dance and turn and not spare her shoes because her father will buy her new ones. My mother sang it doing dishes. Zuza sang it now slowly, the way you would sing a quick song if you were very tired, so it came out almost like a lullaby. Tancuj, tancuj, vykrúcaj.

Lorrie listened with her coffee cup at her mouth. When Zuza got to the end of the verse, Lorrie said, not looking at her, "We had that one too. In Czech. Almost the same."

"Sing it."

"I don't sing."

"You sing. I heard you at Norinka's first birthday. You sang louder than the whole room."

"That was a long time ago."

"Fourteen years," said Zuza. "That is not long. That is yesterday."

And Lorrie put down her coffee and sang one line in Czech, the same tune, the words a little different, a little harder at the edges, and stopped, and said, "That's all I remember. My mother sang the rest."

I had a voice recorder in my backpack. Danny had given it to me at Christmas because I said I wanted to be a journalist, which I wanted for about three weeks. It was silver, the size of a candy bar, and it took little blue memory cards. I had used it twice, to record myself practicing a speech for history class. It was in the backpack by the front door, ten steps away.

I did not get it. I sat at the table and listened. It is the thing I regret most about that whole summer, more than anything the river did, and I have thought about why I did not get up, and I think it was because I was afraid that if I went for the recorder they would stop, and I wanted, more than I wanted a recording, for them not to stop.

They stopped anyway, of course. Zuza finished her tea and Lorrie said her feet were cold and they went down the hall to bed, Lorrie to my room and Zuza to Danny's, and I sat alone in the kitchen with the radio until it started to get light outside.

On a fresh page in the notebook I wrote: Two kinds of Nora. Noruška (Czech). Norinka (Slovak). Song: Tancuj tancuj. Babi knows one line in Czech. GET THE RECORDER NEXT TIME.

Both of those names are in our family's word list now, each one in the voice of the grandmother who said it. I got them later that summer, one at a time, by asking.

---

On Thursday the railroad bridge went.

We watched it on television, all nine of us and the dog, in the den. The bridge belonged to a short-line railroad that ran between Cedar Rapids and Iowa City, and the railroad had parked a long string of hopper cars on it, filled with rock, to weigh it down so the river could not lift it. It was a good idea. Engineers had done it before on other rivers. The river took the bridge anyway, and the cars with it, slowly, one bent span folding down into the water and the cars going over like dominoes, and the brown water closing over them as though it had been expecting them.

Nobody said anything. Milan, who had spent his whole life working with steel, got up and went out to the garage. After a minute we heard the lawn mower engine being taken apart again, which was not possible, because it was already in pieces on a tarp.

My mother was at work. Mercy, the hospital where she worked, sits up on a rise east of downtown, but the water was coming up the streets around it and into its lower levels, and that day they moved patients out, the sickest ones first, the ones from the intensive care unit, in ambulances and on helicopters, to hospitals in Iowa City and Waterloo and everywhere else. She called at seven in the evening and talked to my father for two minutes and he said "good" and "okay" and "I love you" and put the phone down and stood with his hand on it.

"She's fine," he said. "Everyone made it out."

At night the city announced that only one of its well fields was still pumping and asked everyone to save every drop. My father put a bucket in each bathroom. Lorrie said that in 1936 her family had one tap for six people and nobody died of it. Zuza said in Detva her family had a well in the yard and a bucket and nobody died of that either. It was the closest thing to a contest I had ever seen between them.

On Friday, June 13, 2008, the Cedar River crested at the downtown gauge at thirty-one feet and a little over an inch. Eleven feet higher than it had ever been since people started measuring.

I wrote 31 in the notebook. I drew a box around it, then a second box around the first box. Then I didn't know what else to write, so I wrote down what everyone in the house was doing at that moment, which turned out to be the first useful thing I did all summer.

Dad: on the phone with insurance. Mom: sleeping (worked 22 hrs). Danny: sleeping (worked 0 hrs). Pavol: walking Hugo in the rain. Dedko: garage. Lawn mower. Babka (Zuza): embroidering. Same sleeve. Babi (Lorrie): baking. Something with the flour. Me: writing this.

The something with the flour, it turned out, was kolache. She made four dozen that Friday afternoon in my mother's oven, which ran hot and which she cursed in two languages, and she filled them with the only things she could find in our refrigerator: strawberry jam, a jar of apricot preserves, and cream cheese mixed with sugar and a lemon. They came out uneven and wonderful. Nobody in the house said anything about the river while we ate them. We stood around the kitchen in our socks, nine people and a beagle, and ate warm kolache off a cooling rack, and Hugo got one that Danny dropped on purpose, and outside the rain came down on the drowned city, and for twenty minutes nobody was anywhere but in that kitchen.

"These are not real kolache," Lorrie said, with her mouth full. "Real kolache have poppy seed. I am ashamed of these."

"They're good, Babi."

"They are good," she agreed, and took another one.

The Second Step

The city let people back into the west side by zones, with a paper pass taped inside the windshield, and on the morning of Tuesday, June 17, my father drove Lorrie and me down the hill to see her house.

Before we went, my mother laid out what we were to wear on the bed like clothes for a funeral: long pants, long sleeves, rubber boots, work gloves, and paper masks from the hospital supply closet, the kind with the metal strip you pinch over your nose. She had had four hours of sleep. She made each of us put the mask on in front of her and pinch the strip.

"Do not touch your face," she said. "Do not eat anything down there. Do not drink anything down there. If you get a cut, you come home, I don't care if you're in the middle of carrying out the mayor." She turned to Lorrie. "Mom. You sit on the porch. You do not go into the basement."

"I have gone into my own basement since 1936."

"Not this week," said my mother, who called her mother-in-law Mom and meant it, and who had been an intensive care nurse for nineteen years and could make a surgeon put down his coffee. Lorrie looked at her, and then she said, "Fine," which in our family was the sound of a door closing very gently.

---

You smell Czech Village before you see it. I have tried for eighteen years to describe that smell to people who were not there, and the closest I have come is this: imagine the bottom of a pond, and a gas station, and a refrigerator that has been unplugged for a week in summer, and wet cardboard, and under all of it something sweet and wrong, like fruit that has turned. It came in through the truck's air vents a mile before we got there and it did not leave my clothes for a month. Lorrie sat in the passenger seat with her mask on and her hands in her lap and did not say anything about it, which was how I knew it was bad.

Sixteenth Avenue was a brown street. Everything was brown, the color of the river. The water had gone down, but it had left everything it touched painted in a skin of mud, gray-brown and cracked on top where it had begun to dry and slick underneath. The storefronts had a line on them, the same line, running level down the whole block above the doorways. The signs above the line were bright and painted and cheerful, with their Czech words and their little red and white and blue borders. Below the line was mud.

The bakery on the corner, Novotný's, had its front window broken out. Inside, through the hole, I could see the glass display case tipped over on its face, and a mixing bowl the size of a bathtub sitting in the middle of the floor, full of brown water, and a calendar on the wall above the line still turned to June with a picture of the Charles Bridge.

There were people on the sidewalks. Not many. They moved slowly, in boots and masks, carrying things out of doorways and setting them on the curb: a couch, a dresser, a television, rolled carpet, a child's bicycle. The piles were already taller than I was. Nobody talked much. A man I didn't know was standing in front of the meat market with a garden hose that wasn't connected to anything, just holding it, looking at the end of it.

The museum, when we passed it, was a big white building with a dark band across its whole front at the tops of the first-floor windows, and a crew of people in white suits going in and out of its doors with plastic tubs. I learned later that the water had stood eight feet deep inside, and that the staff had driven out two truckloads of the most precious things in the days before the crest, and that hundreds of other things had gone under. That day I only saw the line, and the people in white, and a long folding table set up on the front steps with something laid on it in rows that I could not make out from the truck.

Lorrie looked at the museum until we were past it. Then she looked straight ahead.

---

Her house was standing. That was the first thing. On her side street some houses had shifted on their foundations, their front steps pulling away like a lip, and one had a tree through its porch roof. Lorrie's narrow white house with the green trim stood exactly where her father had bought it in 1936. The line went across it above the tops of the front windows, just under the eaves. Her front steps were gone under a drift of mud and dead grass and somebody's garbage can lid. The mailbox had a crawdad in it. I am not making that up. A live crawdad, the size of my finger, in the mailbox, waving its claws at us.

"The second step," Lorrie said. "I said it could come to the third." She was standing in the yard in her rubber boots looking at the line on the siding, which was a good eight feet above the top step. "It didn't listen."

My father had to kick the front door to open it. The wood had swelled in its frame.

What I remember most is the light. All the window shades and curtains on the first floor had been pulled down by the water or soaked so heavy that they sagged, and the light came in brown and dim through the mud on the glass, as though the whole house were at the bottom of a jar of tea. The floor was a layer of mud two inches thick, slick as soap. The wallpaper in the front room, which had been cream with little blue flowers, had come away from the walls in long curling sheets and hung down like tongues. The couch was on its side by the stairs, where the water had floated it and set it down. The television was face down in the mud. A lamp was standing perfectly upright on a side table, its shade gone, exactly where it had always been, as if it had refused to move.

Lorrie stood in the doorway in her mask and did not come in. My father went past her into the dining room. I followed him.

The egg cabinet had gone over.

It lay on its face across the dining-room floor, its glass doors shattered under it, mud packed into every crack. My father and I stood and looked at it. I think we were both afraid to lift it. In the end he took one end and I took the other and we tipped it up against the wall, and a sound came out of it that I can still hear when I want to: a soft, dry, broken rattle, like a box of cereal at the end, like a handful of seashells.

Inside, on the mud-caked shelves and in the bottom of the cabinet, were the eggs. Most of them were in pieces. Shells, red and blue and black and brown, in curved fragments the size of a thumbnail, mixed into the mud like confetti somebody had dropped in a parking lot. The wire egg tree was bent flat. The egg cups had rolled everywhere.

But not all of them were broken. That was the thing I could not believe. Here and there in the wreck, in the corner of a shelf, wedged against the back panel, lying in a hollow of mud as though somebody had set it there to keep warm, was a whole egg. Mud-covered. Gray. You could not see what color it had been or what had been drawn on it. But whole.

I picked one up. It weighed nothing. It was full of mud inside, I could feel it shifting. I held it very carefully in the palm of my glove and looked at my father.

"Leave it," he said. "We'll come back for them. We need to get the furniture out before the floors go."

"Dad."

"Nora. They're eggs."

I put the egg in the pocket of my sweatshirt. Then I found another one, behind the bent egg tree, and put that in the other pocket. My father watched me do it. He didn't say anything else. After a minute he went into the kitchen, and I heard him say, very quietly, a word in Czech I had never heard him use, and then the clank of the tin flour bin being lifted out of the mud.

---

The horse was on its shelf.

I saw it when I went into the kitchen to find my father. The shelf above the dining room doorway was the only thing in the house that looked the same, and the red horse stood on it with its wheels together and its painted head up, looking down at the mud and the wreck of the cuckoo clock and the dead linoleum like a horse that had seen a few things in its life and was not about to start making a fuss now. The line went around it, a little below its belly. The water had come up to its knees and gone down again and the horse had not moved.

I don't know why it hit me harder than the eggs. Maybe because it was the only thing that hadn't broken. I stood under it in the dark kitchen and cried into my paper mask until it got wet and stopped working and I had to take it off, and then I was crying in the smell, which made it worse.

"Noruška."

Lorrie had come in. She had not listened to my mother. She was standing in the kitchen doorway in her boots, holding on to the doorframe with one hand, her mask pushed down under her chin.

"Babi, Mom said."

"Your mother is a fine nurse and she is not here." She came across the kitchen one slow step at a time, testing the floor. She stopped under the shelf beside me and looked up at the horse.

"He kept his feet dry," she said. "Almost."

She reached up. She could not reach it; she was five feet tall. I got the step stool from beside the refrigerator, which was still there, which was lying on its side full of water, and I wiped the mud off the top step with my glove and climbed up and took the horse down off the shelf.

It was cold and damp, and heavier than it looked. The line of mud around its legs was soft and came off on my glove a little. I started to wipe it.

"No," Lorrie said. "Leave it."

"It's dirt."

"It's the river. Leave it." She took the horse from me and held it in both arms against her chest, the way you would hold a baby or a loaf of bread, and looked at the line. "My grandfather carved this in 1904, in his kitchen on Sixteenth Avenue, above his shop, for my father, who was three. He made it from a piece of linden wood left over from a cabinet he was building for a family on the east side who were rich enough to have a cabinetmaker. Lípa. Linden. In the old country lípa is the national tree. My grandfather said that was the reason he used it. My father said that was a story and the real reason was it was free." She turned the horse in her arms. "My father played with this horse. I played with this horse. Your father played with this horse until he broke a wheel off, and his father fixed it, and that is why it wobbles. And now it has been in the river. So now that is part of what it is. If you wash it off, you are telling a lie about it."

In our family's collection, the horse is the only thing with two dates beside it for when it was made. 1904. June 2008.

I didn't say anything. I didn't know what to say.

"You took eggs," she said. "I saw. In your pockets."

"Two. They're whole. I think. I don't know what they are."

"Give them to me."

I gave them to her. She held each one up toward the brown light from the window over the sink, turning it, squinting. Then she gave them back.

"Find the rest," she said. "All the whole ones. And the pieces. Bring me the pieces too. In a box. Not in the mud. In a box, with paper." She looked around her kitchen. The refrigerator on its side. The wallpaper hanging. The cuckoo clock fallen face down in the mud under the place it had hung. I saw her look at it all and take it in and put it away somewhere, and decide.

"And then the drawers," she said. "In the dining room. In the buffet. You will find things. Don't throw anything out. Don't read anything. Just bring it all to me." She paused. "Your mother is right. I should be sitting on the porch."

"There's no porch, Babi. It's mud."

"Then I will sit in your father's truck," she said, "and you will bring me my house."

Clothespins

The woman with the clothespins found me on the second day.

Her name was Hana Pelikán, and she was the first person that summer who told me the truth about mold. She was in her fifties, with short gray hair and reading glasses pushed up on top of her head and a man's work shirt with the sleeves rolled to the elbow, and she had driven up from Iowa City that morning with the back of her station wagon full of window screens, plastic tubs, rolls of white paper, gallon freezer bags, and four bags of wooden clothespins. She told me she worked with old paper for a living, mending books and maps for a library, and that she had taken a week of vacation days to come and do what she called "triage." She said it like my mother said it, which made me trust her at once.

I was sitting on the tailgate of my father's pickup in front of Lorrie's house with a stack of photographs on my knees, trying to pull two of them apart with my fingernail.

"Stop," Hana said, from the sidewalk. "Please. Stop. Don't do that."

I stopped.

She came over and looked at what I had. It was the first batch from the bottom drawer of the buffet: a wad of black-and-white photographs about two inches thick, soaked through, the edges curled, the whole stack fused into a single gray brick the way wet paper sticks to itself. I had managed to peel the top one halfway off. Under it, where the emulsion had come away and stuck to the back of the photo above, was a blank smear where somebody's face had been.

"That one's gone," Hana said gently. "That's all right. You didn't know. But the rest of them aren't. Not yet. Do you have a freezer?"

"At home. My mom's got one in the garage."

"Is there room in it?"

"It's full of deer meat. My uncle hunts."

"Take the deer meat out," said Hana, "and put your grandmother in."

---

What she taught me, sitting on the tailgate for an hour, is something I have taught a dozen people since, in two other floods and a burst pipe, and I want to put it down here exactly, in case Lucy or anyone else ever needs it.

Wet photographs and wet paper have about forty-eight hours before mold begins to grow on them in summer heat. After that it spreads fast, and once it is in the emulsion of a photograph you cannot get it out. So you have two days to do one of two things: dry them, or stop the clock.

To dry them, you rinse them gently in a tub of clean cold water to get the mud off, never rubbing, then lay them face up on something that lets air through, a window screen is best, or hang them from a line by their white borders with clothespins, never by the picture. You keep them out of direct sun, which curls them and bleaches them, and you put a fan in the room but not pointed at them. You do not use a hair dryer. You do not iron them. You do not try to flatten them under books while they are still wet. They will curl as they dry, and that is all right. Curl can be fixed later. Mold cannot.

If there are too many to dry in two days, and there are always too many, you stop the clock. You put them in the freezer. You slide a sheet of wax paper or freezer paper between each one if you can get them apart, and if you can't, if they are stuck in a brick, you leave them stuck, you do not pull, you put the whole brick into a freezer bag, squeeze the air out, write on the bag with a marker what it is and where it came from, and freeze it. Frozen, it will wait. Weeks. Months. Then later, when there is time, you take out one bag at a time and let it thaw slowly, and as it thaws, the photographs will sometimes let go of each other by themselves, the way ice lets go of a tray.

Letters are the same, except you lay them flat on paper towels and change the towels when they're wet. Ink sometimes runs. Pencil doesn't. Ballpoint mostly doesn't. Fountain pen usually does.

"Who are these people?" Hana asked, touching the edge of the photo brick with one finger.

"I don't know. My grandmother said don't look."

Hana looked at me over her glasses. "Well," she said, "you're going to have to look a little. You can't rinse them with your eyes shut."

---

We set up in our garage at home. My father moved his car into the driveway and my uncle Pavol, who had not been told about the deer meat, came home from his job at the bank to find six white packages of venison in a cooler of ice on the back step and the chest freezer half full of gallon bags labeled in my handwriting, BUFFET DRAWER 3 PHOTOS BRICK A and BUFFET DRAWER 3 PHOTOS BRICK B and LETTERS BLUE ENVELOPES.

He looked at the bags and then he looked at the cooler and then he looked at me.

"It's your grandmother," I said.

"It's my deer."

"It's Babi's whole life, Strýko."

He thought about that. Then he got a beer out of the kitchen refrigerator, came back out, and sat down on an overturned bucket in the garage with his tie loosened and said, "What do you need me to do?"

He was my mother's brother, Slovak side. Strýko is the Slovak word for uncle, and specifically for your father's brother; for your mother's brother there is another word, ujo, and Pavol had spent my entire childhood correcting me. That afternoon he didn't correct me. He hung window screens on sawhorses across the garage, borrowed from every neighbor on our street, and strung clothesline in three rows from the garage door rail to the pegboard on the back wall. My father and Danny ran back and forth to Czech Village in the truck. And I sat at a folding table with a dishpan of cold water and a stack of white paper towels, and opened my grandmother's drawers one wet handful at a time.

---

Lorrie had said not to read anything. Hana was right that it was impossible.

You have to look at a photograph to know which side is the face. You have to look at it to know whether the image is coming away. You have to look at it, as it comes up out of the dishpan with the mud sliding off it in a brown cloud, and you see, emerging the way a picture used to emerge in the developing tray in a darkroom, which I had only ever seen in movies, a face. A wedding. A man in a uniform. Two little girls in white dresses on a porch, squinting at the sun. A brass band in a row, twelve men in caps holding instruments, standing in front of a brick building with tall arched windows that I recognized, after a second, as the CSPS Hall on Third Street. Somebody had written on the back in pencil, which did not run: Sokol Band. 1923. Second from right Tata.

Tata is Czech for Dad. Daddy. I knew that word. Second from the right was a young man with a trombone, thin, with ears that stuck out under his cap, grinning like somebody had just told him a joke.

Lorrie's father. My great-grandfather. I had never seen a picture of him younger than sixty.

I clipped him to the clothesline by the white border, by one corner, next to the two girls on the porch and the wedding and the uniform, and he hung there dripping onto the garage floor, grinning, with his trombone, eighty-five years old and twenty-two.

By the end of that first day there were a hundred and twelve photographs on the lines and screens in our garage, and the garage looked like a place where a party was about to happen, strung with little gray flags. The fan in the corner turned them slightly, all together, one way and then back, like a crowd of people turning their heads to see who had just come in.

---

In the evening, Lorrie came out to the garage.

She had not been out all day. She had stayed in my bedroom with the door closed. My mother said she was sleeping. Zuza said, in Slovak, to my mother, when she thought I wasn't listening, that she was not sleeping, she was sitting on the bed looking at the wall, and that was something that needed to be left alone.

Now she stood in the door between the kitchen and the garage in her housecoat and slippers, and looked at the lines of photographs hanging in the yellow light of the work lamp.

I waited for her to be angry. I had looked. I had looked at all of them.

She came down the two steps into the garage holding the rail. She walked slowly along the first line, her hands behind her back like somebody at a museum, and stopped in front of each picture and looked at it, and moved on. Nobody spoke. Hana had gone home to Iowa City; she would be back in the morning. Pavol had gone in. It was only me and my grandmother and a hundred and twelve people, most of them dead, turning gently in the fan.

She stopped in front of the brass band.

"Who wrote on this?" she said.

"It was on the back. Already."

"That's my mother's writing. She wrote on the back of everything. She said someday nobody will know who anybody is." She looked at the young man with the trombone for a long time. "He was twenty-two," she said. "He played trombone in the Sokol band until 1932, and then he sold the trombone to keep the shop open, and he never played again. I never asked him why. You think you will ask later. You think there will be a later."

She moved to the next line. The two little girls on the porch. She put her hand to her mouth.

"That's me," she said. "On the left. And Jarmila on the right. My cousin. That is the summer she came from Písek, in 1937, with her mother, to visit. She was eight and I was eight. We were going to be best friends forever. They went home in September. Then there was the war, and then there was everything else." She was quiet. "I have her letters. In the blue envelopes. In the drawer."

"They're in the freezer, Babi. Hana said to freeze them."

"In the freezer." She almost laughed. "Jarmila would like that. She always said America was a cold country." She turned and looked at me. "You read them?"

"No. I can't read them. They're in Czech."

"Of course they are in Czech." She looked at me for a long moment over her mask, which she was still wearing for some reason, pushed down under her chin like a scarf. "Noruška. When they come out of the freezer, I will read them to you. Out loud. Bring your little machine."

I didn't say anything. I was afraid if I said anything she would take it back.

"Not for anybody," she said. "For the family. You understand? For you, and your children, and whoever. Not for the newspaper. Not for the museum. For the family."

"For the family," I said.

She nodded. She looked once more along the line, at the girls and the band and the wedding and the uniform, and her own face at eight, squinting at an Iowa sun in 1937, and she said, "Who is going to remember which ones are which, when you take them down?"

I hadn't thought of that. I looked at the lines. A hundred and twelve photographs, and I knew who perhaps nine of them were.

That night, at the kitchen table, I drew a family tree on a piece of butcher paper from the roll Hana had left, beginning with myself at the bottom and going up, and taped it to the garage wall above the folding table. I put question marks where I didn't know names. There were more question marks than names. Over the next two weeks, as Lorrie came out to the garage each evening and walked the lines, the question marks started to go away, one by one, and the photographs, as they dried, came down off the clothesline and went up onto the tree, each one held by a little loop of tape next to the name of the person it showed, until the butcher paper was so heavy it began to pull away from the wall and my father had to put up a sheet of plywood behind it.

Years later I scanned every one of them into our family tree online, where they still are, each face beside its name, with the date and the place and, where she had written it, my great-grandmother's handwriting from the back. But I like to remember the butcher-paper one better. You could stand in front of it and see everybody at once, the way you see a crowd.

Letters About the Weather

The blue envelopes came out of the freezer on the last Sunday of June, one bag at a time, the way Hana had said.

I took the first bag out in the morning and laid it on a cookie sheet on the kitchen counter, still sealed, and by afternoon the frost on the plastic had gone to beads of water and the letters inside had gone from a stiff blue brick to a soft blue stack. Hana had come by on her way back to Iowa City for the last time, with a box of blotting paper she said she had "liberated" from her workroom, and she showed me how to slide a thin spatula, the kind you use for frosting, between the envelopes while they were still cold, so that they came apart without tearing. Most of them came apart. Some did not, and those we left, and I put them back in the freezer for later, and some of those are still in a freezer today, in my own garage, in a bag with my fifteen-year-old handwriting on it, waiting for somebody who knows more than I do.

There were sixty-three letters that came apart that summer. Air mail envelopes, the thin blue kind, and later a few white ones, and some that were not envelopes at all but single sheets of very thin paper folded in three and gummed along the edges, so that the letter was its own envelope. The stamps were Czechoslovak: a man's face on the oldest, then birds, castles, a tractor, a rocket. Every one was addressed in the same hand, small and slanted and very neat, to Mrs. Lorraine Kubík or, on the oldest ones, Miss Lorraine Vondráček, at one of three addresses in or near Czech Village, Cedar Rapids, Iowa, U.S.A.

Every one was from Písek.

---

We set up in my bedroom, which was Lorrie's bedroom that summer. She sat in the armchair by the window that my mother had carried in from the living room. I sat on the end of the bed with the silver recorder in my hand and the notebook on my knee. The letters lay on a bath towel on the bed between us in a fan, in order, oldest to newest. My grandmother had put on her good blouse for the occasion, the cream one with the small buttons, and her reading glasses, and a little lipstick, as though somebody was going to take her picture.

"Is it on?"

I showed her the red light.

"Say who is here," she said. "My mother always said, on a photograph, write who. So say who."

So the first thing on the first recording, which you can still hear, is me in a voice that cracks in the middle, saying, "This is June 29, 2008. This is Nora Kubík. I'm with my grandmother, Lorraine Kubík. We're at our house on the northeast side because of the flood. She's going to read letters from her cousin Jarmila." And then a pause, and Lorrie saying, much closer to the microphone than she needed to, "Jarmila Benešová. Write that down. She married a Beneš. Not that Beneš."

And then a crinkle of paper, and the first letter.

---

She read them in Czech first, slowly, and then she put the letter down on her knee and told me in English what it said. Sometimes she translated sentence by sentence. Sometimes she summarized. Sometimes she stopped in the middle of a sentence and looked out the window at the street, where Hugo the beagle was barking at a squirrel, and didn't say anything for a while, and I let the recorder run.

The first letter was from April 1946. Jarmila was seventeen. The war was over. She wrote that Písek was standing, that the stone bridge over the river was standing, the old one with the statues, that her father had come home thin from somewhere and was getting less thin. She wrote that she was going back to school. She asked if Lorrie still had the doll with the blue hat. She asked if it was true that in America everybody had a refrigerator. She said, at the end, Write to me about everything. Everything. Even boring things. Especially boring things. We have had enough of interesting.

"I sent her a package," Lorrie said. "Coffee. Stockings. Chocolate. A lipstick. My mother said a lipstick was a waste and I sent it anyway. Jarmila said later she didn't wear it, she kept it in a drawer for three years and smelled it."

There were nine letters from 1946 and 1947. They were long, three and four pages, both sides, full of the names of schoolfriends and boys and a teacher who was strict and a dress that had been made from a parachute. Then there was one letter from March 1948 that was half a page long.

Lorrie read it in Czech and then sat with it in her lap.

"What does it say, Babi?"

"It says the weather is very changeable this spring." She folded it. "It says her father is well. It says she will not be able to write as often. It says do not send any more packages for now." She looked at me. "In February 1948 the Communists took the government. You learn that in school?"

"Kind of."

"Kind of." She shook her head. "Write it down in your book. February 1948. After that, the letters were read. By somebody. Somebody in an office opened them and read them and closed them up again, and Jarmila knew it, and I knew it. So after that she never wrote anything in a letter that she wouldn't say to that person in the office. Everything is weather. Everything is her father is well."

The next letter was dated 1951. Then 1954. Then 1956, 1957, and after that one or two a year, every year, until 1989. They were short now, a page, sometimes less. The handwriting got older. Jarmila married. She had a son, Petr, and then a daughter, Věra. She sent photographs, small and square with white deckle edges, of a boy on a tricycle, a girl in a sailor dress, a woman in a cardigan standing next to a small car in front of a block of apartments. She sent pressed flowers. Once she sent a recipe for a cake, which Lorrie said she had never made because it called for a kind of cheese you could not get in Iowa.

And she wrote about the weather.

"Listen to this," Lorrie said, picking up a white envelope from August 1968. She read it in Czech, slowly, and I listened to the sound of it, which was not like the sound of the 1946 letters. It was flatter, the sentences shorter. Then she translated. "Dear Lorrie. The weather here this week has been very unusual. We have had many visitors from the east, more than anyone expected, and they have stayed longer than they were invited. The children are well. Petr asks why the visitors don't go home. I tell him visitors always go home in the end. Your Jarmila."

"The visitors," I said.

"Tanks," said Lorrie. "Russian tanks. August twenty-first, 1968. They came in the night. She wrote this the next week. Every word is true and there is nothing in it a man in an office can put his finger on." She held the letter a moment longer. "I read this letter at that kitchen table, in that house, and I went down to the bakery and stood in line, and everyone in the line was talking about it, in Czech and in English, and old Mrs. Novotný behind the counter was crying into the kolache. Everybody in Czech Village had somebody over there. A cousin. An aunt. And we all had letters about the weather."

I wrote, in the notebook: Visitors = tanks. Weather = politics. Father is well = I can't say.

"And your other grandfather," Lorrie said. "Milan. Your mother's father. He came here because of that. Because of the visitors. You know that? He came in 1969 with Zuzana and your mother, who was three, with one suitcase. He had a Slovak passport that said Czechoslovak on it and a fujara he couldn't carry, so he left it. You should ask him about that. Not me. Him."

"He won't talk about it."

"No," said Lorrie. "Men like that don't. You ask him anyway. You ask him four times. On the fifth time he'll tell you, because he'll be tired of being asked."

---

There was one letter in the stack that was different from all the others. It was the last one, dated December 1989. It was on lined paper torn from a school notebook, four pages, both sides, and the handwriting, which in every letter for forty years had been small and slanted and careful, was big and loose and running downhill, as if it had been written fast at a table where people were talking.

Lorrie looked at it for a long time before she read it.

"I can't read this one in Czech for your machine," she said. "I will cry, and then you will have a recording of an old woman crying, and nobody needs that."

"You don't have to read it at all, Babi."

"I'll tell you what it says." She took off her glasses and held the pages against her chest. "It says the weather has changed. It says she was on the square in Písek with ten thousand people jingling their keys. That was a thing they did, in November. Everybody took out their keys and shook them, all at the same time, all over the country. It sounds like a million little bells. It meant, time to go home, it's over, we're locking up. It says she took Petr's son with her, he was six, and he shook his keys over his head, and he asked her why everybody was crying if everybody was happy, and she told him that was a question he would understand when he was old. And then it says that she can tell me now. Everything. All the things she didn't write for forty years. And she starts. Four pages. About her father, who was not well, all those years, who was in a prison for two years in the fifties because of something he said in a pub. About her husband. About a friend who was taken away. About everything." She opened her eyes. "Four pages. And at the end she says, I am out of paper, I will write the rest in the next letter."

"Did she?"

"She came. In 1991. To visit. She sat in my kitchen for three weeks and told me the rest. We never needed a next letter." Lorrie put her glasses back on and laid the pages on the towel with the others. "She died in 1999. We talked on the telephone every Sunday until then. It was expensive. Joe complained every month and paid every month."

The recorder was still running. I looked at it. Fifty-one minutes.

"Turn it off now," Lorrie said. "That's enough for one day."

I turned it off.

---

That night I could not sleep, again, on my parents' floor, and I lay in the sleeping bag listening to the recording through my earbuds with the volume very low. Lorrie's voice saying the Czech words. The crinkle of the thin paper. Hugo barking at the squirrel in the background. My own voice, small, asking "what does it say." I listened to the whole fifty-one minutes, and when I got to the end, I listened to the first letter again, from 1946, and the line at the end, which I had written in the notebook in English: Write to me about everything. Even boring things. Especially boring things.

I took out the notebook and turned to a new page and started what I called then my Word List, which is the beginning of something our family still uses. A list of the words. Not every Czech word, or every Slovak word. The family words. The ones we actually said in our own kitchens. I wrote them in three columns: the word, what it meant, and who said it.

Babi. Grandma. Czech, short for babička. Me to Lorrie. Babka. Grandma. Slovak. Me to Zuza. (Mom says some people in Slovakia say stará mama.) Dedko. Grandpa. Slovak. Me to Milan. Děda. Grandpa. Czech. What Dad called Grandpa Joe. Tata. Dad. Czech. Babi's mother on the back of the photo. Noruška. Me. Lorrie. Norinka. Me. Zuza. Mák. Poppy seed. Povidla. Plum butter. Lorrie makes it in the copper pot. (Made. The pot was in the basement.) Mouka. Flour. On the tin. Lípa. Linden. The horse wood. Počasí. Weather. In the letters it doesn't mean weather.

That last one I asked Lorrie for the next morning, and she said it into the recorder for me three times, slowly, with the accent on the first syllable the way all Czech words have it: po-cha-see. "Weather," she said afterward, in English. "And everything else."

When I copied the list into our family's word list years later, I put her recording beside each word she had said, so that if you tap it you hear her voice, in my bedroom, in the summer of the flood, saying the word slowly for a girl who couldn't get her mouth around it. Lucy has played počasí, I think, about forty times. She says it's the way Babi says it, like the word is a little bit of a joke that only Babi gets.

That is exactly right. It was.

The Willow Pipe

My grandfather's basement on the east side held water for nine days after the river went down, because the storm sewers on his street were full of mud and the water had nowhere to go. When the city finally came with a pump truck and a hose as wide as a man, the water that came out of the basement window was the color of chocolate milk and smelled worse than anything in Czech Village. Milan stood on the sidewalk in his rubber boots with his arms folded and watched it go into the gutter, all of it, for two hours, and did not say a word.

When it was done he went down the basement stairs with a flashlight. My mother and I waited at the top.

He was down there for twenty minutes. We heard him moving. We heard things being set down. Once we heard him say something sharp in Slovak, and once we heard him laugh, a short laugh, which was worse. Then he came up the stairs carrying the fujara in both arms like a man carrying a ladder, and he walked past us without stopping and out the back door and laid it on the grass in the sun.

It had been under water to the ceiling for nine days. Elder is a soft wood. It had drunk the river. The fujara was swollen and dark, nearly black, and slick with mud, and along almost its whole length, following the grain, through the carved diamonds and suns and zigzags, ran a crack. You could have slid a dime into it.

"Dedko," said my mother.

"Leave it," said Milan. "Leave it in the sun."

He went back down into the basement and started carrying up his tools.

---

That was the last week of June. For the next week Milan worked on his house the way he had worked on steel all his life, without hurry and without stopping. He and my father and Danny and Pavol carried out the ruined furnace and the water heater and the washing machine and his bench, which had come apart at the joints, and two rusted filing cabinets, and a box of something that had once been his records, his LPs of Slovak brass bands and folk ensembles and a singer from Bratislava he loved, all fused into a single black disk, and they piled it all at the curb with everything else on the street. They tore out the drywall upstairs to four feet, so you could see the studs, and the inside of the walls, and the old newspaper somebody had stuffed in for insulation in 1923. They hosed out the basement. They hauled in fans and a dehumidifier that ran day and night and filled its tank every four hours.

And every evening, when they came back to our house, Milan went into our garage, where the photographs had come down off the lines by then and gone up onto the butcher-paper tree, and sat on the overturned bucket in front of the fujara, which he had brought home in the back of the truck and laid across two sawhorses, and looked at it.

He didn't touch it. He looked at it. Some evenings for an hour.

On the first evening I asked him about 1969.

He didn't answer. I wasn't sure he had heard me.

On the second evening I asked him again.

"Norinka," he said, not looking away from the fujara. "Go help your mother."

On the third evening I didn't ask. I brought the recorder and sat on the floor of the garage with my back against the freezer full of my other grandmother's life and turned it on and held it in my lap, red light up, and did not say anything. He saw it. He looked at it, and looked at me, and went back to looking at the fujara. After forty minutes I turned it off. That recording is still in the family folder. It is forty minutes long and contains the hum of the freezer, a car going by, Hugo scratching at the kitchen door, and once, at the twenty-two minute mark, my grandfather clearing his throat as if he was about to speak.

On the fourth evening I asked him again.

"Your other grandmother told you to ask me four times," he said.

"Five times. She said the fifth time you'd be tired of it."

He laughed. It was a real laugh, a rusty one. "Lorraine Kubík," he said, "is a very smart woman and I have never once told her so." He was quiet. "Ask me tomorrow."

---

The fifth evening was the Fourth of July, and I will come to the Fourth of July, because there was a brass band in a parking lot and it matters. But before the band, in the afternoon, Milan came and found me in the backyard, where I was sitting in the grass with Hugo trying to teach him to shake, and said, "Come. Bring your machine."

He was carrying a pocketknife and a pair of pruning shears.

We walked down our street to where it dead-ends at the creek, a little tributary that runs down through the park and on to the river. The creek had flooded too, though not like the river, and the grass along its banks was flattened and gray, and there were plastic bags and a lawn chair hung up in the bushes. But the willows were fine. Willows like a flood. They were thick along the bank, their long leaves silver underneath, the new shoots green and whippy and as tall as I was.

Milan walked along them, looking, bending branches with his hand to see how they moved. He chose one, a straight shoot about as thick as my thumb, and cut it with the shears, and cut off the leaves, and sat down on a concrete storm-drain outlet with the stick across his knees.

"Is it on?" he said.

I turned on the recorder.

He didn't say anything about 1969. He said, "This is a koncovka. Some people say a willow pipe. In Slovakia, every boy who watches sheep knows how to make one. In spring, when the sap is running, the bark comes loose from the wood. You tap it, like this." He tapped the willow stick all over with the handle of his knife, turning it, firmly, the way you would tap a melon. "Then you twist, and it slides off, like a sleeve." He twisted. The bark slid off the white wood in one piece, a green tube. He held up the bare stick, wet and shining. "This is June, it's late, but the river made the willows think it is spring again." He cut a notch in the stick and shaved a flat place at one end and slid the bark tube back on, and cut a window in the bark over the notch, and it took him perhaps four minutes, sitting on a storm drain by a flooded creek in Cedar Rapids, Iowa, with his knife moving as though he had done it a thousand times, which he had, sixty years before, on a hill above Detva.

"There are no holes," I said. "For your fingers."

"No holes." He put the end in his mouth. He put the first finger of his right hand over the open bottom end of the pipe. And he blew.

You can hear this on the recording. A clear, high whistle, and then he blew harder, and it jumped to a higher note, and harder, and it jumped again, and then he took his finger off the bottom end and the whole ladder of notes shifted, and he was playing, playing a tune, running up and down the overtones like a dog going up and down a staircase, the notes jumping in a way that no piano or flute I had ever heard could make them jump, wild and bright, the tune of the song Zuza had sung at two in the morning in our kitchen. Tancuj, tancuj. He played it twice through. Hugo, who had followed us, sat on the bank with his head tilted. Across the creek a woman in a garden stood up with a trowel in her hand and listened.

He took the pipe out of his mouth.

"In 1969," he said, "I was thirty-one years old. I was a machinist in a factory in Bratislava. Zuzana was a nurse, like your mother. Your mother was three. On August 21, 1968, I went to work in the morning and there were tanks in the street outside the factory. Soviet tanks. Boys, eighteen, nineteen, sitting on top, who didn't know what city they were in. One of them asked me where the river was. He thought it was somebody else's river." He turned the willow pipe in his hands. "We had a spring. You know about the spring? In 1968, before the tanks, for a few months, they let people talk. Newspapers wrote what they wanted. We thought, now, maybe. And then the tanks. And after the tanks, for a year, the border was still a little bit open, because they were still deciding how to close it. So in September 1969, we took a train to Vienna, with one suitcase, for a holiday, and we didn't come back."

"Why didn't you bring the fujara?"

"Because you can't take a fujara on a holiday. A fujara is as tall as a man. If you carry a fujara onto a train to Vienna, the man at the border knows you are not coming back. So I left it with my brother, on the wall of my father's house, near Detva, and I took a willow pipe in my pocket, like this, that I made in the yard the morning we left, and when they asked me at the border what it was, I said it was a toy for my daughter." He smiled. "Your mother played it all the way to Vienna. Very badly. A whole train car of people wanting to kill her."

He held out the willow pipe to me. I turned off the recorder, and then I was sorry I had and turned it on again.

"When we got here," Milan said, "there was a family in Cedar Rapids who sponsored us. Czech people, from the Village. They didn't have to. Slovaks and Czechs, in the old country, you know, it was one country but two peoples, we argued about everything, who was in charge, who was taking advantage of whom. Here, nobody cared. A Czech man named Joe Kubík, who played the tuba, gave me a job at the factory where he worked, and a Czech woman named Lorraine Kubík brought us a pan of kolache and a box of dishes the first week. That is how your mother met your father. They were three and seven, playing in the yard of the Kubíks' house while the grown-ups talked. They didn't like each other. He threw a crab apple at her."

I stared at him. I had known my parents had known each other forever. Nobody had told me it was because of the tanks.

"Your other grandmother brought us kolache," Milan said again. "I have never forgotten. I have never told her I remember." He stood up from the storm drain with a grunt and dusted off his trousers. "So. Now you asked five times. Now I'm tired. Let's go home."

---

That night, after the band, after everything, I found him in the garage again on his bucket in front of the cracked fujara. But this time he had his hands on it. He was running his thumb along the crack, slowly, from one end to the other, feeling it.

"Can you fix it?" I said.

"I don't know." He pressed the two sides of the crack together and it closed, a little, and opened again when he let go. "When the wood dries, maybe the crack closes. Maybe it opens more. Elder is like a person. You don't know what it will do after a shock until it does it." He looked up. "If I glue it, it will never sound the same. It will sound like a fujara that was in a flood. Maybe that is all right. Maybe that's the sound it should have now."

He let go of it. He reached into his shirt pocket and took out the willow pipe from that afternoon and handed it to me.

"Keep this one," he said. "It will dry out in a week and split and never play again. A willow pipe lives one summer. That is the point of a willow pipe."

I still have it. It split down one side in exactly a week, as he said it would, and the bark shrank and went brown, and it has not made a sound in eighteen years. It is in the same box as the dead recorders. But on the recording it plays forever, wild and bright, by the creek, on the afternoon of the Fourth of July, and a woman in a garden across the water stands up with a trowel in her hand to listen.

Oom

The tuba came out of my grandmother's basement on the third of July, in its case, and the case was full of the river.

Danny found it. He had been carrying things up the basement stairs at Lorrie's house for two days in hip waders he had borrowed from a man at the golf course, because the basement had drained but left a foot of mud on the floor that sucked at your boots and did not want to give them back. Most of what came up went straight to the curb: the wringer washer nobody had used since 1970; the copper pot for povidla, which was copper and so could be saved, and went into a tub of vinegar in our garage; my grandfather Joe's workbench. And at the back, under the stairs, a long black case, the size of a child's coffin, with the latches rusted shut.

Danny carried it up into the yard by himself, which took him ten minutes, and set it on the grass, and pried the latches with a screwdriver. When he lifted the lid, brown water ran out of the corners. Inside, nested in what had been red velvet and was now the color of a scab, was my grandfather Joe's tuba.

It was silver, or had been. It was a big old upright tuba with four valves and a bell as wide as a bicycle wheel, and it was coated inside and out with gray-brown silt, and a small fish, dead, was lying in the bell. Danny took the fish out with two fingers and threw it into the street.

Lorrie, sitting in the cab of the pickup with the door open and her feet on the running board, looked at the tuba across the yard and said, "Oh, Joe."

---

There was a brass band in Czech Village for most of the twentieth century. There were several, at different times, some from the Sokol hall and some from the lodges and some just men from the same block who liked to play together on Sunday afternoons. The one my grandfather played in, for fifty years, from 1947 until a few months before he died in 1999, was called the Village Brass, and it was run, for all of those fifty years and the nine after, by a clarinet player named Rudy Hruška.

In 2008 Rudy Hruška was eighty-four. He had a white mustache that he waxed at the ends and a voice like a gravel driveway, and he lived in a house on Fifteenth Avenue that had taken six feet of water. In his garage, where the band rehearsed every Tuesday night for thirty years, the river had gotten into every instrument case the members had left there between rehearsals: two trumpets, a baritone horn, two trombones, the bass drum, and a rack of music in folders, hundreds of polkas and waltzes and marches handwritten and copied out over half a century, some of them in Rudy's father's hand.

On the evening of July 3 Rudy called my grandmother at our house. I answered the phone. He said, "This is Rudolf Hruška. I'm looking for Lorraine." When she came to the phone, he talked for a long time, loud enough that I could hear his voice from the other side of the kitchen though not the words, and Lorrie said "yes" and "no" and "Rudy" and "you are crazy" and, finally, in Czech, something that made her laugh and put her hand over her eyes.

She hung up and turned around.

"Rudy says the band is playing tomorrow," she said. "At four o'clock. In the parking lot of the old grocery store on Collins Road, where the church people and the Red Cross are giving out hot dogs to everybody who's been flooded. He says they have five players and seven instruments and none of the instruments belong to the players. He says the high school lent them some horns. He says." She looked at Danny, who was at the table eating cereal for dinner. "He says he needs a tuba."

Danny looked up with his spoon in his mouth.

"I played trombone," he said. "In eighth grade. For like a year."

"Your grandfather played trombone for a year before he played tuba for fifty," said Lorrie. "It's the same thing. It's bigger."

"It's not the same thing."

"Rudy says it's the same thing."

"Rudy's eighty-four."

"Rudy," said my grandmother, "has played at every wedding, funeral, Fourth of July, and street dance in Czech Village since Truman. If Rudy says it's the same thing, it's the same thing."

---

Danny and my father spent the night of July 3 in our garage cleaning the tuba.

I helped, some. Mostly I watched. You take out all the slides, which takes an hour because they have seized, with a rubber mallet and a rag and my father saying words in Czech that I added to my word list in a column marked DO NOT USE. You lay the valves on a towel in order. You lower the tuba into the bathtub, bell first, in warm soapy water, while my mother stands in the bathroom door and says she is not going to ask. You run a long brush called a snake through all eighteen feet of tubing, and what comes out is river: silt, sand, a pebble, a snail shell. Then you oil the valves, and the smell of valve oil filled the bathroom and then the hallway and then the whole house, and Lorrie came out of my bedroom in her nightgown at one in the morning and stood in the hallway and said, "That's Joe," and went back in and shut the door.

At two in the morning Danny put the mouthpiece in and blew.

It made a sound like a cow that had been surprised. Then a sound like a cow that was less surprised. Then a low B-flat, round and buzzing, that you could feel in the floor through your socks. Hugo, who was asleep on the couch, woke up and barked at it.

"It works," said my father.

"I don't," said Danny. "I don't know any of the music."

"You'll play the oom," said my father. "The band plays the pah. That's the whole tuba. Oom. You can do oom."

---

The parking lot of the old grocery store on Collins Road was hot on the Fourth of July in a way that only an Iowa parking lot in July can be hot, the heat coming up off the blacktop in waves you could see, so the cars at the far end looked like they were underwater. There were white tents and coolers and a grill made from a barrel cut in half, smoking, and hundreds of people: families who had been flooded, families who had come to help, kids running between the parked cars with sparklers they weren't supposed to have yet, a woman from the Red Cross in a vest writing names on a clipboard. And at the far end of the lot, on a square of shade under the old grocery store's overhang, where the shopping carts used to be, there were five folding chairs and five old players.

Rudy Hruška, clarinet. A trumpet player named Wally Sedlacek, who was seventy-eight and had lost his house. A second trumpet, a woman named Bev Tichá, who was the only woman who had ever played in the Village Brass and who had joined in 1974 after, she told me, sitting in Rudy's driveway every Tuesday night for six months until he gave up. A baritone horn, Frank Petrik, sixty-nine. And a drummer named Ed Novotný, with a snare drum borrowed from the high school and a bass drum borrowed from a marching band in Marion, the only one of them under sixty, who was also, it turned out, the baker from the bakery on the corner of Sixteenth Avenue, whose broken window I had seen, and who I will come back to.

Danny walked across the parking lot carrying the tuba against his chest, the bell up over his head like a giant silver flower, and the five of them stood up out of their chairs.

"Joe's horn," said Rudy Hruška. He came forward and put his hand on the bell, flat, the way you would put your hand on a horse's neck. "I'd know it anywhere. There's a dent on the second branch where he dropped it at the Houby Days parade the year it hailed." He found the dent. He smiled under his mustache. Then he looked at Danny, up and down, slowly. "You're the grandson?"

"Yes, sir."

"You play?"

"No, sir."

"Good," said Rudy. "Then you won't have bad habits. Sit there. Watch my foot. When my foot goes down, you go oom. When it comes up, you don't. That's all. Don't think. Thinking is for clarinets."

They played for two hours.

I don't know how to describe a dechovka band to someone who has never stood near one. Dechovka is the Czech word, from dech, which means breath: a breath band, a brass band. They play polkas and waltzes, mostly, and marches, and the old folk songs set for brass. It is loud. It is cheerful in a way that is almost aggressive, like an uncle who will not let you leave a party. The trumpets carry the tune high and bright and the clarinet runs around above it in curls and the baritone sings a second tune underneath that you don't notice until it stops, and then you miss it like a missing tooth. And the tuba goes oom, and the drum goes pah, and the whole thing goes forward in two, oom-pah, oom-pah, like a person walking quickly somewhere they are glad to go.

They played "Škoda lásky," which everyone in America knows as the "Beer Barrel Polka" and which my grandmother told me, at the top of her voice over the trumpets, was written by a Czech man in 1927 and stolen by the whole world. They played waltzes I didn't know and polkas I half knew. Danny went oom when Rudy's foot went down and didn't when it came up, and he got it wrong about a third of the time, and nobody cared. By the third song people had started to drift over from the hot dog cart. By the fifth song there were a hundred people standing in the parking lot in the heat listening. By the seventh song someone started dancing.

It was a couple in their eighties, a little woman in a sun hat and a tall bent man in suspenders, and they polkaed across the blacktop between the parked cars, hop-step-step, hop-step-step, turning, the way people dance who have danced together for sixty years and don't need to look at each other's feet. Then another couple. Then a young mother with a baby on her hip. Then two little girls holding hands, spinning until they fell over. Then the woman from the Red Cross with a man in a hard hat.

And then my grandfather Milan, Slovak, seventy years old, in his good shirt, walked across the parking lot to where my grandmother Lorrie, Czech, seventy-nine, was sitting in a folding chair in the shade with her purse on her knees, and bowed to her from the waist, which I had never seen anyone do in real life, and held out his hand.

She looked at his hand. She looked at Zuza, who was standing behind her with a paper cup of lemonade.

"Go," said Zuza. "He dances like a goat. I need a rest."

So Lorrie put her purse on the chair and stood up and took Milan's hand, and they went out onto the hot blacktop of a closed grocery store parking lot in front of five old players and my brother, and danced a polka. She was stiff. He was stiffer. They were not a good match; she was a foot shorter, and she led, though he was supposed to. But they knew the steps the same way, the Czech way and the Slovak way being, for a polka, close enough. They went around twice. Halfway through the second time, I saw Lorrie say something up at Milan, and Milan threw back his head and laughed.

I had the recorder. I had remembered it this time. It was in my pocket, on, and you can hear the whole thing: the trumpets, the oom, the shouting, the scrape of shoes, the kids screaming, and if you turn it up loud and listen very carefully at the right moment you can hear, under everything, my grandmother saying something in Czech, and my grandfather laughing.

I asked her afterward what she said.

"I told him he still dances like a man who left in a hurry," she said. "He said I still dance like a woman who brought kolache."

It is one of my favorite things on any recording our family has.

---

At six o'clock the band stopped because Rudy said his lip was finished, and Wally Sedlacek said his lip had been finished at five, and Danny put down the tuba and looked at his hands, which were shaking, and his mouth, which had a red ring around it from the mouthpiece. People clapped. Some of the people who had been flooded were crying, and some of the volunteers were crying, and a little boy came up to the tuba and put his whole head inside the bell and shouted his own name into it, and everybody laughed.

Ed Novotný, the drummer, was packing up his borrowed snare drum. I went over to help him because I had seen his bakery with its window gone and its mixing bowl full of river, and I wanted to say something and didn't know what.

"You're Lorrie's granddaughter," he said. He was a big man in his fifties with a gray crew cut and forearms like bread loaves and a burn scar across the back of one hand. "The one with the eggs."

"How do you know about the eggs?"

"Everybody knows about the eggs. You carried them out in your pockets." He snapped the drum case shut. "I'm going to open the bakery," he said. "Not in the bakery. The bakery is gone. In somebody else's kitchen. I don't know whose yet. I'm going to need somebody at four in the morning who doesn't complain."

"I'll complain," I said.

"Yeah," said Ed Novotný. "But you'll come."

Four in the Morning

The kitchen Ed Novotný borrowed belonged to a panadería on the southeast side called La Espiga, on a stretch of Mount Vernon Road between a tire shop and a laundromat, up the hill and a long way from the river. It had two deck ovens, a proofing cabinet, a steel table twelve feet long, and a family named Ortiz who baked conchas and bolillos and orejas from three in the morning until six and then opened the front for customers. Mr. Ortiz had come to Ed's bakery every Saturday for eleven years to buy a poppy seed roll for his wife, who was from Puebla and had decided in 1997 that Czech poppy seed was the best thing in Iowa. When he heard about the window and the mixing bowl, he drove down to Czech Village in his van and found Ed standing in the mud on Sixteenth Avenue and said, "From six to ten, my ovens are cold. Use them."

So from the second week of July until the end of August, Novotný's Bakery existed from six to ten in the morning in somebody else's kitchen, and I was there at four.

Not six. Four. Because Ed said the dough had to be made before the ovens were free, and the dough had to rise, and the filling had to be cooked and cooled, and anyway he had been getting up at four since 1971 and his body did not know any other way to do it.

My mother drove me the first morning. After that I rode my bike, two and a half miles in the dark through a city that still smelled like the river, under streetlights with moths spinning around them, past houses with their insides piled at the curb. I remember the quiet. I remember a fox crossing Mount Vernon Road in front of me, unhurried, as though it had heard the people were all gone. I remember the first smell of the panadería from a block away, sugar and yeast and anise, cutting through the river smell like a window opening in a hot room.

---

Ed made kolache the way his father had made them and his father's father, in the bakery on Sixteenth Avenue that had been there since 1932. He did not use a recipe. That was the first thing I learned, and the thing I want to be clear about, because people always assume there was a recipe card somewhere, stained and precious, that I saved from the mud. There was not. Ed had recipe cards, he told me, a whole metal box of them, his grandfather's and his father's, and they had been on the shelf under the counter, and they were gone, and he did not care.

"I haven't looked at those cards since I was nineteen," he said, cutting butter into flour with his hands in a bowl the size of a bathtub. "My hands know. If my hands forget, I'll retire."

What he did not know, without the bakery, was who was coming back.

That was the real thing that happened in La Espiga that summer. Ed's bakery had stood on the corner of Sixteenth Avenue for seventy-six years, and in seventy-six years it had become the place where you found out how people were. If old Mrs. Holub didn't come in for her prune kolache on Wednesday, somebody went to check on her. If a young couple came in for a dozen with cottage cheese and asked for a box with a ribbon, everybody knew there was a baby. Ed knew the orders of three hundred families by heart. He knew who wanted apricot and who wanted poppy seed and who wanted the posypka on top, the sweet crumble of flour and sugar and butter that he scattered over each kolach before it went into the oven, and who thought posypka was for Moravians and wanted theirs plain.

And now the corner was mud, and the families were scattered across the city and the county and the state, in motels and in their kids' basements and in FEMA trailers and on cousins' couches in Des Moines. And they did not know where the bakery was.

So he gave me a job that was not baking.

"You have that notebook," he said, the second morning. "Always writing. Good. Write this."

He made me a list. Every morning, while the first trays of kolache were in the Ortiz ovens and the panadería smelled like apricot and anise, I sat at the end of the long steel table with a cup of Mrs. Ortiz's coffee, which was sweet and had cinnamon in it, and wrote down every name Ed could remember. Three hundred and four names, by the end of the summer. Next to each name I wrote their order. And then, as the summer went on and people found out where the bakery was, which they did, the way news travels in a place like that, through the hot dog line and the Red Cross tent and the church basements and the line at the hardware store, I put a check mark next to each name when that person walked in the door of La Espiga at six in the morning and stood in line between a construction worker buying conchas and a nurse coming off shift, and ordered their kolache.

Holub, Marie. 1 doz. prune. W. Checked July 16. "In her daughter's basement in Marion. Says the daughter's cat hates her."

Sedlacek, Wally. 1/2 doz. poppy seed, 1/2 apricot. Sat. Checked July 12. Lost house. Staying with Rudy.

Kral family. 2 doz. assorted. Sun. Checked July 20. Moving to Texas. "Last order."

Some names didn't get checked. There were thirty-one of those at the end of August. Ed called around for some of them. A few had gone to their children in other states. A few had died, that summer or the summer before, and Ed hadn't heard. One was a man named Bohumil Rada, who had ordered six cottage cheese kolache every Friday since 1964, and who, Ed found out in August, had moved into a nursing home in Iowa City after the flood took his house. Ed drove down there with a box of six on a Friday afternoon. He didn't tell anybody. I found out because I saw it in the notebook, where he had written in his own block letters next to the name: DELIVERED.

That list is in our family's private files now, scanned, with a note at the top in my handwriting from fifteen saying what it is. It isn't our family's, exactly. But it is the best record I know of who was still in Czech Village after the river, and who wasn't, and Ed's son, who runs the bakery now, asked me for a copy and keeps it under the counter.

---

The second thing I learned at La Espiga was the difference between a koláč and a koláč.

I was rolling dough balls. That was my job after the list: I rolled the dough into balls the size of a walnut, very fast, between my palms, and set them on the greased trays in rows, eight by six, and Ed came behind me and pressed a hollow into each one with two fingers, and Mrs. Ortiz's daughter Yesenia, who was seventeen and had been rolling bolillos since she was nine and could roll twice as fast as me with her eyes closed, came behind him and filled the hollows with a spoon. Apricot. Prune. Poppy seed. Cottage cheese with lemon and a raisin on top. Then the posypka, a pinch on each, like snow.

One morning, Zuza came with me.

She had asked to. She had been awake at three anyway, she said, she was always awake at three now, and she wanted to see this famous Czech bakery in a Mexican kitchen. So I walked my bike beside her the two and a half miles in the dark, which took an hour, and she held my arm and told me the names of the stars in Slovak, and we arrived at the back door of La Espiga at four in the morning to find Ed Novotný and Mr. Ortiz arguing in English about the temperature of the proofing cabinet and Yesenia asleep with her head on a sack of flour.

Zuza watched for a long time. She watched the dough balls and the hollows and the filling and the posypka. She watched the first tray go into the deck oven and come out twelve minutes later, golden, the filling bubbling, the whole kitchen smelling of butter. She took one from the cooling rack when Ed offered it. She ate it, slowly, in four small bites, and wiped her fingers on a napkin.

"Very good," she said. "Very good little koláčiky."

Ed looked at her. "Little?"

"In Slovakia," said Zuza, "a koláč is a cake. A big one. Round, like this." She made a circle with her arms the size of a steering wheel. "For a wedding. With all different fillings in a pattern, like a flower, and a braid around the edge. Or a long roll, with poppy seed or walnut, cut in slices. That is a koláč. What you make here, so small, one bite, two bites, we would call koláčiky. Little koláče." She smiled at him. "It's not wrong. It's Czech."

"In Bohemia," said Ed, who had never been to Bohemia, "a koláč is exactly this."

"Yes," said Zuza. "That's what I said. It's Czech."

Ed thought about it. Then he laughed, a big laugh that woke Yesenia up.

"Mrs. Ďurica," he said, "you can come to my kitchen any day you want. You can't criticize my kolache. But you can come."

"It isn't your kitchen," said Zuza. "It's Mr. Ortiz's kitchen."

"It is mine," said Mr. Ortiz, from the oven. "And she can criticize."

---

On the last Saturday of July, Zuza brought a wedding koláč.

She had made it the night before, in my mother's kitchen, from memory and from a phone call to her sister in Detva, which cost my parents fourteen dollars. It was round, the size of a steering wheel, as she had promised, on a borrowed pizza pan. The edge was a braided rope of dough, glossy with egg. Inside the braid, the whole surface was divided into sections like the petals of a flower: poppy seed, black; tvaroh, the soft fresh cheese, white; povidla, dark purple-brown, from a jar of plum butter that Lorrie had made the September before and had kept in the pantry upstairs, not in the basement, and that had survived; and walnut, golden. In the very center was a circle of apricot, orange, like a sun.

She set it on the end of the steel table at La Espiga, between a tray of conchas and a tray of Ed's kolache, and the line at the front counter, which had been moving, stopped moving. People leaned to see.

"What is that?" said a construction worker in a reflective vest.

"That," said Zuza, "is a Slovak koláč. For a wedding."

"Who's getting married?"

"Nobody," said Zuza. "I made it because there was no wedding this summer. Everyone's weddings were canceled. There was a wedding in the Village at the end of June, a granddaughter of the Kral family, and the hall was under water, so they were married in a judge's office in Marion. Ten minutes. No koláč. So here is the koláč. Late."

Ed Novotný cut it with a long knife into forty pieces, every piece with some of each filling, the way Zuza showed him, from the sun in the middle out through the petals to the braid. Mr. Ortiz took a piece and Mrs. Ortiz took a piece and Yesenia took two. The construction worker took one. The nurse coming off shift. Bev Tichá from the band, who came for her Saturday order. And when the Kral family's granddaughter came in for the last order before Texas, with her new husband, both of them in shorts and sneakers, Ed wouldn't let her pay for the kolache, and Zuza handed her the last piece of the wedding koláč on a paper napkin, the piece with the most of the sun in it, and said in Slovak something that made the bride's grandmother, who was with her, put her hand on her heart.

I asked her afterward what it was.

"It's what you say," said Zuza. "At a wedding. It means, may you have a long life together and a full table. Something like that. It sounds better in Slovak." She thought. "Everything sounds better in Slovak."

That evening, at home, I added two things to our family's calendar, which was then a paper one on the refrigerator and is now the one we all share. The first was the Kral granddaughter's wedding date, June 28, 2008, with a note: Koláč came late. The second was something Zuza told me on the walk home, in the early light, past the moths and the piles at the curbs: that in Slovakia and in the Czech lands every day of the year belongs to a name, and on the day of your name, your svátek, people bring you flowers and a cake, almost like a birthday. Zuza's name day was August 11. Lorrie's, she thought, was in May. Mine, Nora, wasn't in either calendar at all.

"Then you will have to pick one," said Zuza. "Pick a day nobody else has. Make it yours."

I picked June 13. The crest. My family thought that was morbid. I still think it was right. Every June 13, somebody in my family brings me a kolach. Usually poppy seed.

Seventeen Eggs

Of my grandmother's thirty-eight eggs, seventeen came out of the river whole.

I know because I counted them, in the first week of August, on the dining room table at our house, on a bath towel, in rows. I had brought them all home from Czech Village in a shoebox lined with paper towels, the whole ones and the pieces, the way Lorrie had told me to, and they had sat on a shelf in the garage for five weeks while everything else happened. Now Lorrie said it was time.

"Time for what?"

"Time to find out what they are," she said. "Bring a bowl of warm water. And a soft toothbrush. Not your toothbrush. A new one."

A blown egg is light, but an egg full of river is not. The seventeen whole ones had mud inside them, which had gone in through the small holes at either end where my grandmother, or her mother, or her grandmother, had blown out the yolk and white long ago with a straw. Lorrie showed me how to get it out: hold the egg under the warm water, let it fill, cover both holes with your thumb and finger, shake it gently, like a tiny maraca, and let the brown water run out into the bowl. Again. Again. Ten times, twenty, until the water ran clear. Then the outside, with the toothbrush, so lightly it was almost not touching, the way you would brush the hair of a baby.

The first one I cleaned was black.

Under the gray film of silt, as it came off in a little cloud into the bowl, the shell was a deep shiny black, and scratched into the black, in lines as thin as hair, were white flowers. Tulips, five of them, around the egg's waist, their stems curving down to meet at the bottom, and between the tulips, tiny birds with their beaks open, and around the top and the bottom, a band of little zigzags like teeth. The lines were not drawn. They were cut. The white was the white of the shell itself, showing where the black dye had been scraped away.

"That's my mother's," said Lorrie, taking it from me. She held it up to the light from the window. "1934. She was twenty-eight. That's the year she taught me." She turned it, and on the bottom, in letters so small I had to get the magnifying glass from Milan's toolbox to read them, was scratched: A.V. 1934.

"A.V.," I said.

"Anna Vondráčková. Look, she put the little birds. She always put birds. She said an egg without birds was a sad egg."

---

That took all day, the cleaning. Seventeen eggs. When they were all clean and dry, laid out on a fresh towel in a row, they looked like something from a jewelry store. Black and white, red and white, onion-skin brown and white, two that were deep blue, one that was green, which Lorrie said was a mistake her aunt Bess had made in 1952 with the dye and liked so much she did it on purpose forever after. All of them scratched with lines so fine that when you held them close you could see the tiny ridges where the blade had gone, like the grooves on a record.

Then Lorrie got out her blade.

It was a scalpel, the kind with a handle like a pencil and a replaceable blade, curved, that she bought at the hardware store, she said, because the ones at the art store cost three times as much and were the same thing. It had been in her purse. She had carried it out of the house on June 11, with her pills and her cardigan, and never mentioned it.

"Sit," she said. She was at the dining room table. In front of her were six fresh white eggs, raw, from the refrigerator, and a pin, and a drinking straw, and a bowl.

"Babi, it's August."

"Yes."

"You make the eggs in spring. For Easter."

"The eggs are made in spring," said Lorrie, "because in spring there are many eggs and the hens are laying and you are sick of winter and want to make something beautiful. That's all. Nobody will arrest us for making eggs in August." She picked up a raw egg and the pin. "This year there was no spring. The river took it. So we will have a spring now."

She showed me how to blow an egg. You make a small hole in the top with the pin, turning it, and a slightly bigger one in the bottom. You push the pin in and stir to break the yolk. Then you put the straw against the top hole, not in your mouth, and blow, and the inside of the egg comes out of the bottom in a long slow yellow string into the bowl. It is disgusting and it takes forever, and Lorrie laughed at my face while I did it, the first real laugh I'd heard from her in days.

"Now we have six eggs and a bowl for an omelet," she said. "Very economical, the Czechs."

The dye was onion skins. She had saved them in a paper bag since June, from every onion anybody peeled in our kitchen, without telling anyone. She simmered them in my mother's old saucepan with a splash of vinegar until the water was a deep red-brown, the color of strong tea, and dropped the blown eggs in, holding them under with a slotted spoon because they wanted to float, and left them in for an hour. When they came out, they were a rich, even, glowing brown, like a chestnut, like the river, and she set them on a rack to dry.

"Now," she said. "The scratching."

---

Kraslice is the word for the decorated eggs, Czech, and there are many ways to make them. There is wax, where you draw with hot beeswax and dye and draw again. There is straw, where you cut tiny shapes from flattened straw and glue them on. There is wrapping with thread. And there is scratching, škrábání, which is what my grandmother did, and her mother, and her grandmother, in a village near Písek, until my great-grandmother Anna came over alone at eighteen, in 1924, with a penknife for scratching in her suitcase. You dye the egg dark first, the whole thing. Then you scratch the design out of the color with a blade, line by line, so that the white of the shell shows through. You can't erase. If you slip, the slip is in the egg forever.

Lorrie's hands shook. They had shaken a little for a few years, my mother said, a small tremor, nothing serious; I had never noticed it. Now, with the scalpel, I noticed. The tip of the blade trembled above the brown shell like a dragonfly that couldn't decide where to land.

She put it down.

"You do it," she said.

"Babi, I can't."

"Yes, you can't. Now. In a week you can. Do it."

So I did it. I held the brown egg in my left hand, resting my wrist on the table the way she showed me, and the scalpel in my right like a pencil, and I scratched a line. It was supposed to be the first stem of a tulip. It went crooked. It was too deep and the blade caught and a tiny flake of shell chipped off.

"Good," said Lorrie.

"It's terrible."

"It's your first line. It's supposed to be terrible. My first egg looked like a chicken walked on it." She leaned in, close, and watched. "Shallower. You are not carving wood. You are taking off only the color. Like taking the skin off milk. There. There. Yes. See the white come. You feel it? Under the blade? The color is soft and the shell is hard. You stop at the hard."

I scratched for an hour, and I made a lopsided tulip and two leaves and a bird that looked like a potato with a beak. My grandmother watched every line and said nothing except "shallower" and "slower" and "good." Then she took the egg from me, and turned it over, and with her shaking hand, very slowly, holding her own wrist with her other hand to steady it, she scratched on the bottom, tiny, two letters and a year.

N.K. 2008.

"There," she said. "Now it's real."

---

Over the next week I made six eggs. All six were bad, and each one was less bad than the last. Lorrie sat beside me for all of them, every afternoon at the dining room table while the dehumidifiers roared in the houses down in the Village and the city argued about levees on the evening news, and told me what she knew. The names of the patterns. The tulip, which she called tulipán. The little rake-shaped mark she said was for the field. The zigzag she called vlnky, waves, which she said, looking at me over her glasses, she had always thought meant the sea that her grandparents crossed, and now thought might mean something closer to home. The star with eight points. The bird, which was always a bird and never any particular bird.

And she told me who had made each of the seventeen eggs that survived.

I wrote it down. I wrote down every egg: the color, the pattern, the initials and the year on the bottom, who had made it, what Lorrie remembered about them, what Lorrie remembered about the year. The black egg with the birds, Anna Vondráčková, 1934, the year she taught Lorrie. The green one, Aunt Bess, 1952, the year she got the dye wrong and decided she liked it. A red one with a ring of eight-pointed stars, Lorrie, 1969, the spring after the tanks, the year she said she had scratched a star for every person in Jarmila's family because she couldn't write it in a letter. A blue one with a single tulip, Lorrie, 1999, made the April after Joe died, the only egg that year. A brown one, onion skin like mine, with waves all the way around, no initials, no year, which nobody knew anything about at all.

"Somebody made it," Lorrie said. "Somebody's hand. Leave it in. Write: unknown."

That list became, years later, the start of our family's collection: every object we have that somebody's hand made, each with a photograph and its story beside it in the words of whoever told it. There are a hundred and nine things in it now. The horse. The fujara. Zuza's sleeves. A tuba. Seventeen eggs and one bowl of pieces. And six bad eggs made in August by a fifteen-year-old with a scalpel, each with N.K. 2008 on the bottom in a shaking hand that was not mine.

---

The pieces, the shards of the twenty-four eggs that had broken, Lorrie would not let me throw away.

They were in a shallow bowl on the dining room table, washed, every curved fragment, red and black and blue and brown, some no bigger than a fingernail and some as big as a quarter, some with half a tulip on them, some with a bird's wing, one with half of the initials M.K. and the year 19 and then nothing. A whole bowl of broken spring.

"What do we do with them?" I asked.

Lorrie looked at the bowl for a long time.

"In the old country," she said, "when an egg broke, sometimes they put the pieces in the garden. In the furrows. For the field to grow. That was a story my grandmother told; I don't know if anybody did it." She picked up a fragment with a bird's wing on it and turned it in the light. "We don't have a garden. My garden is under the mud."

"We have a garden," I said. "Mom has tomatoes."

So on the evening of August 9, my grandmother and I went out into my mother's backyard garden with the bowl, and walked along the rows of tomatoes and peppers and the one hill of zucchini that had taken over everything, and pushed the eggshell pieces into the dirt between the plants, one by one, with our fingers. Not all of them. She kept a handful in a little dish; she said one should always keep a few. The rest we planted. The light was going orange and long across the yards, and the cicadas were so loud in the trees that we couldn't hear each other, and Lorrie knelt in the dirt in her good slacks, which my mother would later have something to say about, and pressed in the pieces of her mother's and her grandmother's and her aunt's and her own sixty springs, and didn't say anything at all.

My mother grew tomatoes in that garden for another nine years. Every spring, when she turned the soil, she found pieces of colored eggshell. A red curve. A scrap of black with a white line. She saved them in a jar on the kitchen windowsill, and the jar is on my windowsill now, half full, the colors faded almost to nothing by the sun. Lucy asked me what it was. I told her it was the garden, and she said, "That's not a garden, that's a jar," and I said, "It's both," and she rolled her eyes, the way thirteen-year-olds do when you say something they will understand later.

The Hyphen

The only real argument between my grandparents that summer was about a hyphen.

It happened on a Sunday evening in the middle of August, in our backyard, over a map. Pavol had brought home a big folding map of Central Europe from the library downtown, which had flooded, and which had set out a table of soaked, unsalvageable maps and atlases on the sidewalk on the east side with a sign that said FREE, TAKE. The map was stiff and wavy from drying and had a tide mark across Poland. He spread it out on the picnic table and weighed the corners down with beer bottles, because I had asked him where Písek was and where Detva was, and he couldn't remember which one was farther east.

The map was from 1985. Across the middle of it, in big spaced capital letters, was the word ČESKOSLOVENSKO, and below that, smaller, CZECHOSLOVAKIA.

Milan looked at it and grunted.

"That's not a country anymore," he said.

"It was a country for seventy-four years," said Lorrie, from her lawn chair.

"It was a country for seventy-four years," said Milan, "if you don't count the six years in the middle when it wasn't, and the forty years when it was somebody else's."

"You lived in it."

"I lived in Slovakia. Czechoslovakia lived in Prague."

Zuza, who was sitting beside Lorrie with her embroidery, said, "Milan," in a particular voice, and Milan held up both hands like a man who was going to keep talking anyway.

"Norinka asked a question," he said. "So. She should know." He put his finger on the map, on the right side, the east, where the mountains were drawn in brown shading. "Here is Detva. Below the Poľana, the mountain. Slovakia. Here," and he moved his finger far to the left, most of the way to the German border, "is Písek. Bohemia. Lorraine's family. Between them, Moravia, and then the Morava River, and the Little Carpathians. Different land. Different language. Close, like cousins. You understand each other, mostly. But for a thousand years Slovakia was part of Hungary, and Bohemia was part of Austria, and they did not live in the same house."

"Then 1918," said Lorrie.

"Then 1918," Milan agreed. "After the war, the big one, the first one. The Czechs and the Slovaks made one country together. Czechoslovakia. Some people wanted a hyphen: Czecho-Slovakia. Two pieces joined. Other people said no, no hyphen, one word, one people. And seventy years later, in 1990, after the keys, the parliament argued about the hyphen again for months. People called it the Hyphen War. I am not joking. Then in 1938 and 1939, Hitler. The country broken. Bohemia taken. Slovakia made a separate state that did what Hitler said. Then after the war, one country again, with no hyphen. Then 1948, the Communists. Then 1968, the visitors." He glanced at Lorrie. She lifted her chin a quarter of an inch. "Then 1989, the keys. Then, January 1, 1993, two countries. The Czech Republic. And Slovakia. Quietly. Nobody died. They called it the Velvet Divorce."

"And then you," said Lorrie to me. "Ten weeks later."

"Yes," said Milan. "And then Norinka. A Czech father and a Slovak mother. Born in Iowa, in the spring, after the divorce. That's you. You are the hyphen."

Everybody laughed except Lorrie.

"She is not a hyphen," Lorrie said. "She is one word."

"Lorraine."

"One word," said Lorrie. "I don't care what they did in Prague. In Cedar Rapids we were one word. Your family lived with mine. Your daughter married my son. When the museum was built, the museum is Czech and Slovak. Both. Not hyphen. And."

"The museum has an and," Milan admitted.

"Because here, in the Village, after the divorce, people argued about it in their kitchens too. You remember. Some said, the Village was always Czech. Some said, the Slovaks came too, and worked too, and gave too. And the museum put the and. National Czech and Slovak Museum. And on the day it opened, three presidents came: Bill Clinton, Václav Havel and Michal Kováč. The American one, and the Czech one, and the Slovak one, all three of them standing on a stage in Cedar Rapids, Iowa, by the river. Seven thousand people on the grass. I was there, Joe was there. Zuzana was there. You were there. Norinka was two, in her stroller, in a little hat."

"I was there," said Milan. "I stood next to Joe. He said, look at that, Milan, two countries came to see our museum. I said, Joe, they came to see your kolache." He paused. "October 1995. It was cold."

"It was cold," said Lorrie. "And we were all together. In the same crowd. On the same grass. That's what I want her to know. Not the hyphen."

---

I didn't understand, then, why it mattered so much to her. I think I understand now.

Lorrie's family had been in Cedar Rapids since 1890. Her father's parents had come from a village in southern Bohemia and lived on Sixteenth Avenue and built cabinets and spoken Czech at home and English at the shop, and their children had spoken English at school and Czech at home, and their grandchildren, Lorrie's generation, had spoken English everywhere and Czech only to the old people, and then the old people died. Her mother, Anna, came later, in 1924, from Písek, and spoke Czech to Lorrie all her life, so Lorrie had more of it than most of her friends. She had kept it the way you keep a coat that doesn't fit anymore, in the back of the closet, for the letters from Jarmila and the jokes in the bakery line. By 2008 there were fewer and fewer people to speak it to.

Milan's family had been in Cedar Rapids since 1969. His Slovak was the Slovak of a man who had left a country at thirty-one and kept every word of it exactly as it had been on the day he left, like a room nobody is allowed to rearrange. When he went back to visit, for the first time, in 1991, his brother's grandchildren laughed at the way he talked. He said it was like walking into a museum and finding that he was an exhibit.

Two families, from the two ends of a country that didn't exist anymore, sitting on lawn chairs in my parents' backyard, each with a language that was going quiet in them for a different reason. And me, between them, with a notebook, not speaking either one.

---

After the argument, which ended when my mother came out with a plate of sliced tomatoes from the garden and salt and told everyone to stop being historical and eat, I sat at the picnic table with the map and the notebook and did something I hadn't done yet. I asked them both, at the same time, for the same words.

"How do you say thank you?"

"Děkuji," said Lorrie.

"Ďakujem," said Milan.

"Good day."

"Dobrý den."

"Dobrý deň." Milan said it with a softness at the end, like the n was leaning on something. "You hear? Deň. The n is soft. Slovaks are softer."

"Slovaks are lazier with their n's," said Lorrie.

"Grandmother."

"Babička," said Lorrie.

"Stará mama," said Milan, "or babka, or baba, depends what valley. In Detva we said stará mama."

"Bread."

"Chléb."

"Chlieb."

"Water."

"Voda," they both said together, and looked at each other, and Lorrie almost smiled.

We did it for an hour, until it got too dark to see the map. I wrote two columns, Czech and Slovak, and in the margin I wrote S for the same and A for almost and D for different. There were more S's and A's than I had expected. There were some D's that surprised both of them. The Czech word for a raincoat that Milan had never heard. The Slovak word for a potato pancake that made Lorrie laugh out loud because in Czech it sounded, she said, like a very rude word that she would not tell me.

"You see," said Zuza from her chair, without looking up from her needle. "One family. Two dictionaries. Lots of jokes."

---

Later that night, I took Pavol's wavy library map up to my parents' room and spread it on the floor next to my sleeping bag and lay on my stomach with a flashlight, and with a pencil, very lightly, I put a dot on Písek and a dot on Detva and drew a line between them. It went across the whole country. It was about two hundred and fifty miles, Pavol told me in the morning, about the same as from Cedar Rapids to Chicago.

When I made our family's map of where we came from, years later, I put pins on those two places first. Then I put the photographs in, where we had them. Jarmila and Lorrie on the porch in 1937 at the pin for Cedar Rapids, and Jarmila's square deckle-edged pictures of her children at the pin for Písek, with the years she sent them. A photograph of a wooden house on a hillside below a mountain, from 1991, at the pin for Detva, with Milan standing in front of it, a gray-haired man in a windbreaker, fifty-three years old, outside his father's house for the first time in twenty-two years, holding something tall against his shoulder that you can't quite see, because whoever took the picture cut it off at the top.

"What's he holding?" Lucy asked me, the first time she saw it on the map.

"His father's fujara," I said. "His brother kept it on the wall for twenty-two years. When he went back, they took it down and gave it to him, and he played it in the yard. Then he gave it back. He said it belonged on that wall. He said he had his own now, in Iowa."

"So where's that one now?"

"Still on the wall in Detva, as far as I know," I said. "You could go and find out."

She looked at the map. "Maybe," she said, the way Lucy says maybe, which means she is thinking about it seriously and doesn't want you to know.

Waiting for a Flood

Zuza's drawer was the bottom drawer of a pine dresser in the front bedroom of the house on the east side, and the river had come up through the floor and into it and filled it and stayed for a day and gone down again. She didn't tell anybody. She didn't ask anybody to carry it out. For six weeks, while everyone else was carrying things out of everywhere, the drawer sat closed in the gutted house with the dehumidifier roaring beside it, and Zuza sat in my parents' kitchen working on the same sleeve with the red and black Detva flowers, and when anybody asked about her things, she said, "My things are fine. My things are things."

It was my mother who found it, in the middle of August, when she went over to the house to meet the man about the new furnace. She came home with the drawer itself, the whole drawer, pulled out of the dresser and carried to the car, and set it on our kitchen table in front of Zuza without a word.

Zuza looked at it for a long time.

Then she said, in Slovak, so quietly I almost didn't hear, "Katka. Why."

"Because you were going to let it rot, Mama," said my mother, in English. "And then you were going to be sad about it for twenty years and never say."

---

Inside the drawer were sleeves.

I had thought, when Zuza told me in June about the sleeves that waited for people, that she meant three or four. There were thirty-eight. Thirty-eight strips of white linen, each about as long as my forearm and as wide as my hand, each covered in embroidery, folded in tissue paper that had gone to gray pulp in the water. Some were red and black, Detva, the big proud flowers. Some were only black, very fine, in tiny crosses and diamonds. Some were blue and white. Some were every color, green and yellow and orange and pink, in flowers and leaves and little birds and hearts, which Zuza said were from other regions, other villages, patterns she had learned from women at the Slovak club in the seventies who were from all over and who traded patterns the way other people traded recipes.

And the water had gotten into all of them.

The white linen had gone the color of weak tea. And the red, on the Detva sleeves, the red that had been the proud red of the flowers, had run. On some of the sleeves the red had bled out from the stitches into the linen around them in a soft pink cloud, like a sunset, like a bruise. On some of them it had bled from one sleeve into the next one, through the wet tissue paper, so that a blue-and-white sleeve from Myjava had a pink ghost of a Detva flower lying across it that it had never had before.

Zuza took them out one by one and laid them on the kitchen table, and did not say anything.

"Babka," I said. "Hana said cold water. Cold water and a little gentle soap, and lay them flat. She said with textiles sometimes the color comes out if you rinse it right away."

"Right away," said Zuza, "was June."

---

We washed them anyway, that afternoon, in the bathtub, the way Hana had told me for the photographs, cold water and a capful of a gentle soap my mother bought for her good sweaters. Zuza knelt on a folded towel on the bathroom floor with her sleeves pushed up, and I knelt next to her, and we laid the strips of linen one at a time in the water and pressed them gently with our flat hands, never rubbing, and watched the brown come out into the water in clouds. We changed the water nine times. The tea color mostly came out. The linen went back to nearly white, a soft old white like a sheet that has been washed a hundred times.

The pink did not come out. The red that had run had gone into the linen and stayed.

We laid them all on clean towels on the dining room table, where the eggs had been, to dry. Thirty-eight sleeves in rows. Zuza walked along them the way Lorrie had walked along the photographs on the clothesline, slowly, with her hands behind her back.

"Ruined," she said.

"They're not ruined."

"Norinka. Look." She pointed at a Detva sleeve, the pink haze spreading out from every red flower like heat off a road. "In Detva, a woman sees that, she thinks, who made this? Somebody who doesn't know how to wash. Somebody who used cheap thread."

"Nobody in Detva is going to see it."

Zuza looked at me. Then she laughed, surprised, the way she had laughed at the kitchen table at two in the morning in June.

"That's true," she said. "Nobody in Detva is going to see it."

---

She didn't go back to the sleeve she'd been working on all summer. The next morning, when I came home from La Espiga at eleven with flour on my shirt and a bag of broken kolache Ed couldn't sell, she was sitting at the dining room table with one of the ruined Detva sleeves in her hoop, the one with the worst of the pink, and her needle, and a skein of black thread.

She was stitching around the pink.

Not covering it. Following it. Wherever the red had run out from the flowers into the linen, she was outlining the edge of the stain, the soft shape where the pink faded into white, with a line of tiny black stitches, so that each flower now had a second shape around it, a pink cloud with a black edge, like the shadow of the flower, or the place where the flower had been before it moved.

"What is it?" I asked.

"I don't know yet," said Zuza. "Sit. You'll do the next one."

I said I couldn't embroider. She said, "Yes, you can't. Now," which is what Lorrie had said about the eggs, and I wondered for a second whether they had been comparing notes at two in the morning. Then she threaded a needle with black thread and put it in my hand and put a sleeve in a hoop and put the hoop in my other hand and taught me a stitch.

It is called stem stitch, or that is what we call it in English, and it makes a line that looks like a twisted rope. You bring the needle up, go forward a little, go down, come back up halfway along the last stitch, always on the same side. Over and over, small, even. Zuza's stitches were the size of a grain of rice. Mine were the size of a grain of rice that had been cooked. She didn't care.

"Even," she said. "Not small. Even. Small comes later. Small comes when you are sixty."

So I sat with her at the dining room table every afternoon for the rest of August, after the bakery, while she did the hard sleeves and I did the easy ones, following the pink with black. While we sewed, she sang, and I recorded it, because I had learned by then to just leave the recorder on.

She sang everything. The Slovak folk songs that every Slovak child knows, about shepherds and mountains and girls at the well and boys going off to the army. Songs from Detva in particular, which have a sound I have never heard anywhere else, a kind of long held shout at the start of the line that drops down like a hawk, which she said was how you called across a valley to someone on the next hill. A lullaby her own grandmother had sung, about a little bird, very slow. A song she said was from the radio in 1962 and was very silly. And sometimes she didn't sing words at all, only hummed, and the humming went on and on and the needle went in and out and I followed the pink line with my black thread and the afternoon light moved across the table and over the eggs on their shelf and the horse on the windowsill, and that is what I remember as the sound of that August. My grandmother humming and the pull of the thread.

Once, between songs, she said, "In Detva, every woman's shirt was different. You could tell from across the square whose shirt it was. Not which village. Which woman. Because every woman stitched her own life into it, a little, her own mistakes, her own way of doing the flower." She held up the sleeve she was working on, the pink and the black. "Now, these, you can tell from across the square. These are the ones from the flood."

---

On the Thursday before the last Saturday of August, when they were all done, Zuza gave the sleeves away.

Not all of them. She kept six, she said, for the drawer, so it would have something to wait with. The rest, thirty-two sleeves, she sorted into piles on the dining room table, and she said a name for each pile, and I wrote the names down.

One for Lorrie. A Detva sleeve with a pink shadow around every flower.

One for my mother. One for Pavol, who said, "What do I do with it?" and Zuza said, "You put it in your drawer, and you wait to see who it's for," and Pavol, who was thirty-seven and not married and had a beagle, went pink himself.

One for Danny, who said thank you and meant it.

One for Ed Novotný. One for Mrs. Ortiz at La Espiga and one for Yesenia. One for Hana Pelikán, mailed to Iowa City, with a note in my handwriting that I wrote and Zuza signed. One for Rudy Hruška, who hung it, I learned later, on a nail in his rebuilt garage above the music stands. One for Bev Tichá. One for the Kral granddaughter in Texas, mailed, with a note that said, in Slovak and English, the thing you say at a wedding. And the rest, one by one, for people I knew and people I didn't, women from the Slovak club, neighbors from the east side, a nurse my mother worked with who had lost her whole house, the woman from the Red Cross with the clipboard, whose name I had to go and find out.

And one for me. The one I had done first, my worst one, with stitches the size of cooked rice going lopsided around a pink cloud.

"Babka, that one's terrible."

"Yes," said Zuza. "That's why it's yours. You keep it until your stitches are small, and then you look at it, and you see how far you came." She pressed it into my hands. "That's what the sleeves were waiting for. Did you know? Forty years in the drawer, waiting. I always thought they were waiting for a person. They were waiting for a flood."

I put that sleeve in the box with the dead recorders and the split willow pipe, and I still have it. My stitches are smaller now. Not small. Even. The photograph of it in our family's collection shows the pink cloud and the lopsided black line very clearly, and under it, in Zuza's words, the way she said them to me, typed out in both languages: Waiting for a flood.

Recovered

The letter from the city came on the twenty-first of August, in a long white envelope addressed to Mrs. Lorraine Kubík in care of my parents, and Lorrie read it at the kitchen table twice and then folded it in thirds and put it in the pocket of her cardigan and went for a walk.

She didn't go far. To the end of our street and back, to the creek where Milan had cut the willow, and back again. Three times. It was ninety-one degrees. My mother watched her from the window over the sink with a dish towel in her hands and said, "Nora. Go walk with your grandmother," in the voice that meant it wasn't a suggestion.

I caught up with her at the creek. The willows had grown since July. The flattened grass along the bank had stood back up and gone green, and the plastic bags in the bushes were gone, somebody had cleaned them out, and there were dragonflies over the water, blue ones, darting and stopping.

"They want to buy my house," Lorrie said, before I could say anything. "The city. And then knock it down."

I knew about the buyouts. Everybody knew. It had been on the news all summer, and in the line at La Espiga, and at the Red Cross tent: that the city was going to offer to buy the houses that had flooded worst, the ones nearest the river, with money from the federal government, and tear them down, and leave the land empty, green, so the next time the river came up it would have somewhere to go that wasn't someone's kitchen. You didn't have to sell. It was voluntary. But if you didn't sell, you had to fix the house yourself, and raise it, maybe, and pay for flood insurance that cost more every year, and live in a neighborhood where half the houses around you were gone.

"Are you going to?"

"I don't know." She stopped at the edge of the creek and looked at the dragonflies. "My father bought that house in 1936. Two thousand one hundred dollars. He paid it off in 1951. I was born in the house on Sixteenth Avenue over the shop, and when I was seven we moved there, and I lived there until I married Joe, and then Joe and I lived on Fifteenth for twenty years, and then my mother got old, and we moved back in to take care of her, and then she died, and then Joe died, and then it was just me." She was quiet. "Seventy-two years that house has been in my family. And now the city wants to give me a check and make it a lawn."

"It's not just the city," I said. "It's the river."

She looked at me sideways. "Who told you that?"

"You did. You said the river had been saving up for you."

Lorrie made a sound that was almost a laugh. She put her hand on my shoulder, which she didn't do often, and left it there.

"Come with me tomorrow," she said. "I want to go see something."

---

The next morning, my father drove us down to Czech Village, and Lorrie did not go to her house. She asked him to stop at the museum.

The big white building by the river was fenced off now, with a chain-link fence and a sign, and inside the fence the lawn where seven thousand people had stood in 1995 to see three presidents was brown and cracked and covered with the tracks of heavy machinery. The line on the building was still there, high, well above the doors, as high as the top of the first floor windows. Most of the windows below it had been taken out and covered with plywood. A dumpster sat on the grass, full of wet drywall and carpet and the guts of the building. Two men in white suits were carrying a long roll of something out the side door.

Lorrie got out of the truck and walked to the fence and stood with her fingers through the chain-link, looking.

"In 1995," she said, "when they opened it, they asked people to give things. For the collection. Old things. From your family. So people would see." She didn't look at me. "I gave my mother's kroj."

A kroj is a folk costume. Every region in the Czech lands and in Slovakia had its own, and every village had its own version of the region's, and in the old days you could tell where a woman was from by her skirt and her apron and her headscarf and the embroidery on her sleeves. My great-grandmother Anna brought it from Písek in 1924, at eighteen, folded in the bottom of a trunk: a full dark skirt, an apron of white with white embroidery, a velvet bodice with red ribbons, a white blouse with puffed sleeves, and a big starched headscarf like wings. She had worn it to every Sokol festival and every street dance in Cedar Rapids until 1950. Lorrie had worn it once, in 1951, at a dance at the Sokol hall, and there was a photograph of her in it, at twenty-two, laughing, with her hands on her hips. That's the photograph that stands next to the horse on my shelf now.

"It was in a case on the first floor," said Lorrie. "In the Czech room. With a little card. Gift of Lorraine Kubík, in memory of Anna Vondráčková. I used to come and look at it." She tightened her fingers on the fence. "The first floor was under eight feet of water."

I didn't say anything. There was nothing to say.

A woman came across the brown lawn toward us. She was in her thirties, in jeans and a museum T-shirt and a paper mask hanging around her neck, and she looked like someone who had not slept in two months. She had a clipboard.

"I'm sorry," she said. "We're not open. We're not going to be open for a while."

"I know," said Lorrie. "I'm looking for my mother."

The woman blinked.

Lorrie told her. The kroj. The case. The Czech room. 1995. The woman listened. She wrote something on her clipboard. Then she said, carefully, the way my mother talked to families in the intensive care unit, that she couldn't promise anything, that hundreds of objects had been in the water, that the staff had moved as much as they could to the upper floors and out of the building before the crest, but not everything. That the textiles that were in the water had been taken out by conservators, as fast as they could, and frozen, or sent to a conservation center in Chicago, where people who knew how to do this were working on them one at a time. That it would take years. That some things would not come back. That they were keeping a list.

"What's your name?" she said. "I'll check the list. I'll call you."

Lorrie gave her name. And my parents' phone number. And, after a pause, mine.

"For when I'm not here," she said to the woman, and the woman looked at her and at me and wrote it down without asking what that meant.

---

On the way back to the truck, Lorrie walked slowly, with her hand on my arm.

"I'm going to sell it," she said. "The house."

"Babi."

"I'm going to sell it, and they'll knock it down, and it will be grass. And the river will come up again, someday, and it will come into the grass and nobody will cry about it. That's good. That's better than my father's house standing there with its feet in the water every twenty years like an old man who won't come in out of the rain."

"Where will you live?"

"Your father has a den," said Lorrie, "with a door that closes. Your mother has already said yes. I asked her a month ago. She said, Mom, I've been waiting for you to ask since 1999." She sniffed. "Nurses. They think they know everything because they usually do."

At the truck, my father was leaning on the hood. He straightened up when he saw her face.

"I'm going to sell it, Tomáš," she said. She only called him Tomáš when it was serious. "Don't argue. I'm seventy-nine. I'm not going to rebuild a house. I want to spend whatever years I have left making eggs with this one and teaching her to say ř."

My father looked at her for a long time. Then he nodded. Then he turned around and put his forehead down on the hot hood of the truck and stood there like that for a minute, and Lorrie put her hand on his back between his shoulders, and neither of them said anything, and I looked at the river, which was down now, back in its banks, wide and brown and slow and ordinary, going on toward the Iowa River and the Mississippi and the Gulf as if nothing had happened at all.

---

The museum called in October 2010. Two years later. The woman with the clipboard, who by then was in charge of the collections, called my mother's cell phone and asked for Lorraine Kubík, and my mother said, gently, that Lorraine was at a doctor's appointment, could she take a message, and the woman said, "Tell her we found her mother."

The kroj had been in the water. The skirt had been ruined; the wool had shrunk and felted and could not be saved. The velvet bodice had lost its nap in patches. But the white apron and the white blouse and the starched headscarf, which were linen, had gone to Chicago and come back. Washed, flattened, mended where they were torn, by hands that knew how. The white embroidery on the apron, white thread on white linen, had survived the river entirely.

When the museum reopened, in July 2012, in its new place, after the whole building had been jacked up off its foundation and rolled four hundred and eighty feet on rails along the riverbank to higher ground and set down eleven feet higher than before, the apron was in a case on the first floor. Lorrie was eighty-three. I was nineteen and home from college for the summer. We went on the first day. We stood in front of the case for a long time. That day is on our family calendar now, every July, as Anna's apron day.

The card said Gift of Lorraine Kubík, in memory of Anna Vondráčková. And underneath, in smaller print, a line that had not been there before: Recovered from the flood of 2008.

"You see," Lorrie said to me. "Now that's part of what it is."

A Valley Lying Down

The fujara played again on the last Saturday of August, on the front step of my grandmother's empty house, at sunset, and half of Czech Village came to hear it.

It was Lorrie's idea, though she said it was Milan's. The house was gutted by then, down to the studs on the first floor, every wall open so you could see straight through from the front door to the back, the floors torn up to the joists, the whole inside smelling of bleach and fresh air and, faintly still, of the river. My father and Danny had done the work, with Pavol on the weekends and Milan supervising from a lawn chair in the yard, because the city said the house had to be cleaned out before the buyout people could inspect it. It would be another year before the papers were signed and two more before the machines came and the house came down, but nobody knew that yet. That summer we thought it would be gone by Christmas.

"Before it's grass," Lorrie said, "I want to have people in it one more time."

"Babi, there's no floor."

"Then they'll stand in the yard," she said. "People in Czech Village have stood in yards before."

---

Milan had finished the fujara the Tuesday before.

He had worked on it through the second half of August, in our garage, in the evenings, while Zuza and I sewed and Lorrie scratched at eggs she couldn't finish and Danny practiced the tuba in the backyard because Rudy Hruška had told him that if he was going to keep the horn he was going to have to come to Tuesday rehearsals in Rudy's rebuilt garage, and Danny, to everyone's astonishment, including his own, had said yes.

When the elder dried, the crack in the fujara had closed by itself to about the width of a hair. Milan said that was luck. He opened it again with a thin blade, just enough, and cleaned it, and filled it with hide glue, which he cooked on a hot plate in the garage in a little pot from crystals that smelled like a barnyard, and clamped it with rubber straps cut from an old bicycle inner tube, every six inches, all the way down the five and a half feet of it, so that for three days it lay on the sawhorses wrapped in black rubber bands like a patient in a cast. When the glue had cured he took the straps off and bound the fujara, at four places along its length, with rings of thin copper wire, wound tight and twisted closed with pliers, the way he said the old shepherds bound a fujara that had split in the frost. Then he oiled the whole thing with linseed oil, and the carved diamonds and suns and zigzags, which had gone gray in the water, came up dark again, and the copper rings shone.

He didn't play it in the garage. He said the first time should be outside, because a fujara was made for outside, for hills, for calling to the next valley.

"Iowa doesn't have valleys," I said.

"Iowa has a river," said Milan. "That's a valley lying down."

---

They came in the evening, when the heat let go a little and the light went long and gold down the side street. Rudy Hruška and the band, with their borrowed horns and Joe's tuba, and Danny with it. Ed Novotný with four flat boxes of kolache baked that morning at La Espiga, and the Ortiz family behind him, Mr. Ortiz carrying a tray of conchas because he said a party without conchas was a meeting. Bev Tichá. Wally Sedlacek. Hana Pelikán came up from Iowa City with her husband and a bottle of wine. People from the Slovak club whom Zuza had given sleeves to, two of them wearing them pinned to their blouses like corsages. Neighbors standing in their own gutted yards across the road with lawn chairs. Sami Haddad, my friend from the pizza place on Third Street, which was gutted too, with her father and her two little brothers. About sixty people in all. More than the yard could hold. They spread out onto the sidewalk and into the street, which the city had cleared of mud by then, though the line was still on every house, at the same height, all the way down.

The band played first. Polkas, then a waltz, then the Czech song my grandmother had sung one line of in our kitchen in June, which Rudy, it turned out, had in a folder, and which Lorrie sang with them all the way through, every verse, standing in the yard with her hands folded in front of her. She had found the rest of the words, she told me afterward, in one of Jarmila's letters from 1947, where Jarmila had written them out because Lorrie had asked her to and then had forgotten she'd asked.

I had the recorder on. I always had it on by then.

Then Ed's kolache went around, and the conchas, and paper cups of lemonade and beer, and people ate standing up in the street the way people do at the end of summer when nobody wants to go inside. Kids ran up and down the empty sidewalk. Somebody's dog found Hugo and they sniffed each other with great seriousness. The sun went down behind the houses on the west side of the street and the sky over the river turned a deep orange and then pink, the pink of the run red on Zuza's sleeves, and the cicadas started up in the trees.

And when it was nearly dark, Milan came out of the open front door of the gutted house, where he'd been waiting in the shadows between the studs, carrying the fujara upright against his shoulder.

He stood on the front step. The second step, the one Lorrie had said the river could come to. He set the foot of the fujara on the concrete and held it upright in front of him with both hands, the mouthpiece at his lips, the long body of it rising above his head, the copper rings catching the last of the light. He closed his eyes.

People stopped talking. The kids stopped running.

The first note came out of the bottom of the world.

I don't know how else to say it. A fujara doesn't sound like an instrument at first. It sounds like weather. A low breathing roar, huge and soft, that seems to come from the ground under your feet and from the walls of the houses, and then out of the roar a note climbs, clear, sad, then jumps higher, and higher, the overtones stepping up the way they had on the willow pipe but slower, heavier, a man's voice instead of a boy's. And then, at the end of each phrase, Milan did the thing that fujara players do, a kind of rough tumbling cascade of notes falling back down, like water over stones, like a man laughing and catching his breath.

It did not sound like it had before the flood. I knew that, even though I had only heard it a few times before, at Christmas, at my parents' anniversary. There was something new in it. A buzz, a roughness, at the bottom of the low notes, like a voice that has been shouting. Like a seam.

He played for maybe six minutes. A song from Podpoľanie, the region below the mountain around Detva, a shepherd's song with no words, and then the same tune Zuza had sung in our kitchen, slow, the way she'd sung it, and then something I didn't know, something that I think he made up there on the step. When he finished, he stood a moment with his eyes still closed and the fujara still at his lips, as though listening for the next valley to answer.

Nobody clapped right away. Then everybody did.

Zuza, beside me, had her hand over her mouth.

"It sounds different," I whispered to her.

"Yes," she said. "Like an old man. Good. So does he." She took her hand down. "It sounds like it's been somewhere."

---

Later, when people had started to go home and the band was packing up and the street was blue with dusk and the first fireflies were coming up out of the brown grass in the yard, Lorrie found me sitting on the curb.

She had an envelope in her hand. A white one, sealed, thick, with something written on the front in her small, careful, old-fashioned handwriting, the handwriting of a woman who had been taught penmanship in 1936.

"Noruška," she said. "Keep this."

I took it. On the front it said, in Czech and then in English underneath: Pro první dítě, které se zeptá, kdo vyřezal koně. For the first child who asks who carved the horse.

"What is it?"

"A letter." She lowered herself down onto the curb beside me, slowly, with a hand on my shoulder, and sat with her knees up like a girl. "For later. Not for you. You asked if you could take him, you never asked who made him; I told you anyway. For somebody else."

"Who?"

"I don't know. That's the point." She looked at the house across the yard, its windows dark, the line under them. "Jarmila used to say, the most important letters are the ones you write to somebody you'll never meet. Because those you have to make sure you say everything." She patted my knee. "I wrote it in Czech and in English. Both. In case they don't know Czech. In case they do."

"What does it say?"

"It says what it says." She smiled. "Put it with your little machine. Don't open it. Don't lose it."

I didn't open it. I didn't lose it. I put it in the plastic box with the label that says FLOOD 2008 RECORDINGS DO NOT THROW OUT, under the recorders and the willow pipe and my terrible sleeve, and later I scanned the envelope, the front only, and put the image in our family's letters for later with a note: Sealed by Lorraine Kubík, August 30, 2008. To be opened by the first child who asks who carved the horse. I set it to come up whenever anyone in the family looks at the horse in our collection, so that nobody can forget it is waiting.

It waited eighteen years.

Lorrie died in March of 2015, at eighty-five, in my parents' den with the door that closes, with the horse on the shelf above her bed and seventeen eggs and six bad ones on the windowsill. Milan died in 2019, at eighty-one, after playing the fujara for the last time at my wedding, in a park by the river on a hot June day, on the step of a picnic shelter. Every summer at the end of August, on the last Saturday, the Village Brass plays a street dance in Czech Village, on Sixteenth Avenue, in front of the bakery, which reopened in its old building in the spring of 2010 with a new window and a photograph of the old one, broken, framed above the register. Danny played the tuba in that band for nine years. He's in Des Moines now, with his family. He still comes back for the last Saturday in August.

The lot where Lorrie's house stood is grass. There is a bench on it. Nobody knows who put it there. Every spring the city mows around it, and every June, the week of the thirteenth, somebody leaves a kolach on it, poppy seed, in a paper napkin.

It's me. I suppose it's time I said so.

The First Child Who Asks

On the last day of Lucy's two weeks, I took the white envelope out of the plastic box and put it on the kitchen table in front of her.

She had finished her project the night before. She had not decided on a title until almost midnight, and then she had come into the front room, where I was reading, and said, "Okay. It's called 'The Line.' Because of the horse. And the museum. And the houses." She thought. "And because I'm the next one in it. In the line. Like a family line." She frowned. "Is that too much?"

"It's exactly enough."

The project was a website, a small one, with eleven pages. On each page was a photograph and a recording. The horse, with the line around its legs, and my voice telling her about 1904 and linden wood. The black egg with the birds, A.V. 1934. The tuba in the parking lot. The willow pipe, split, and the sound of it playing by the creek, wild and bright. The fujara with its copper rings, and the sound of it on the step. The sleeve with the pink cloud and the lopsided black line. Ed Novotný's list, with the check marks. Each page had a few paragraphs Lucy had written herself, in a thirteen-year-old's plain, sharp English, about what the thing was and what had happened to it and who had told her. At the bottom of each page she had put the word for it, in Czech and in Slovak, where there were two, and a button to hear it said.

She had made the recordings for those words herself, that week. Not from the old ones. New ones.

Because on the Tuesday of her second week we had driven out to see Zuza.

---

Zuza was eighty-six. She had turned eighty-six on the twenty-fourth of June, two days after Lucy arrived, and the whole family had sent wishes to the private page Pavol made for her birthday, the way we do now for every birthday that ends in a six or a zero: a photograph of her at twenty, in Detva, in her embroidered sleeves, at the top, and below it messages from everyone. Danny's family. My parents. My husband and me. Cousins in Bratislava and in Detva and one in Toronto who none of us had met but who had found us. Ed Novotný's son, who runs the bakery. Yesenia Ortiz, who has her own panadería now, in Marion, and who sends Zuza a box of conchas every June. Hana Pelikán, retired, from Iowa City, who wrote, I still have my sleeve. It is the most beautiful thing I ever got from a flood.

Zuza lives with Pavol now, in a house on the east side, on high ground, a good way from the river. Pavol married, late, at fifty-three, a widow named Renata with two grown sons. He gave her the sleeve from his drawer at their wedding. Zuza told me later that she knew it was for Renata the minute she'd stitched it, in 2008, and had waited sixteen years for Pavol to work it out.

She was sitting on the back porch when we came, in a wheelchair she uses for long days, with a hoop in her lap. Her hands are slower now. Her stitches are not as small. They are still even.

Lucy had brought the silver recorder. Not the old one, which doesn't turn on. A new one I bought her, because she said she didn't want to use her phone, she wanted something that did only one thing. She held it up in front of Zuza the way I had held mine up in front of Lorrie, eighteen years before, with the red light toward her.

"Is it on?" said Zuza.

Lucy showed her the light.

"Say who is here," said Zuza. "Lorraine always said that. Say who."

So Lucy said who. Her name. Zuza's name. The date. The place. Her voice did not crack in the middle, the way mine had. Then she held out her list of words, the eleven words for the eleven pages, and Zuza said each one, in Slovak, slowly, three times, and where there was a Czech word that was different, Zuza said that too, though she said she was saying it "like a Slovak pretending."

"Lorraine would have said it better," she said. "Lorraine would have said my Czech was lazy." She smiled. "She was right. She was usually right. I never told her."

When they were done, Lucy turned off the recorder. Zuza looked at her for a long time, and then she said, "Norinka. Go inside. In my bedroom. The bottom drawer."

There were six sleeves in the bottom drawer. There had been six since 2008. They had been waiting. Zuza went through them with her slow hands and chose one. It was blue and white, from Myjava, the region by the Moravian border, where Slovak and Czech sound almost the same. It had a pink ghost of a Detva flower lying across it from the flood, outlined in black thread, stitched by Zuza in August of 2008.

She gave it to Lucy.

"Two places on one sleeve," she said. "The Slovak one and the one by the border. And the river. For a girl with a Czech grandfather and a Slovak grandmother and a mother from Ohio." Lucy's mother is from Ohio. Zuza says Ohio the way she says Detva, as if it were a region with its own embroidery. "It waited for you."

Lucy held it in both hands. She didn't say anything. She is thirteen; she doesn't, always. But she held it.

---

Now, on her last morning, she looked at the envelope on the kitchen table, and then at me.

"What's that?"

"Read the front."

She read it. Pro první dítě, které se zeptá, kdo vyřezal koně. And underneath, in English. For the first child who asks who carved the horse.

She looked at the horse on the shelf in the front room, through the doorway. Then she looked back at me.

"I asked that," she said. "On the first day."

"You did."

"Didn't anybody else ask?"

"Everybody asks if it's dirt," I said. "You're the first one who asked who made it."

She picked up the envelope. She turned it over. The flap was still sealed, the glue gone yellow and brittle. She looked at me again, as though I might take it back.

"Go ahead," I said.

I am not going to put down what the letter says. It's hers. I'll tell you only that it is four pages, both sides, two in Czech and two in English, in a small, careful, old-fashioned hand, and that it begins with the name of a man who carved a horse out of linden wood in a kitchen on Sixteenth Avenue in 1904, and ends with the word for weather, and that at the bottom of the last page in English Lorrie had written: I am out of paper. You will have to write the rest.

Lucy read it twice. Then she folded it and put it back in the envelope and held it against her chest the way Lorrie had held the horse, the morning in the kitchen in the mud, and didn't say anything for a while.

"Can I have it?" she said finally. "The letter. Not the horse."

"It's yours. It always was."

"Can I scan it? For the page?"

"Whatever is true," I said.

She thought about that. Then she shook her head. "No. Just the front. Like you did. The inside is for whoever's next."

---

Danny's car pulled up at noon. Lucy carried her backpack out to the curb with the sleeve in a plastic sleeve on top and the envelope inside her notebook, and the recorder in her pocket, and I gave her the folder.

Not a box. The plastic boxes stay in my hall closet, with the dead recorders and the split willow pipe and the bag of letters that never came apart, still in the freezer, waiting for somebody who knows more than me. What I gave her was the keys. The family's private network has a folder for that summer, the one my mother named Léto 2008, with the accent on the e, and I made Lucy a keeper of it, like me, so she can add to it and look after it and decide, someday, who else should. She can see every recording. Lorrie reading the letters about the weather. Milan by the creek. The band. The step. Zuza humming at the dining room table, the needle going in and out, the long August afternoon. And now Lucy's own: Zuza saying the eleven words, slowly, three times each, on a back porch on the east side, eighteen summers after the river.

"So I'm in charge of it now?" she said, at the car.

"You and me. And whoever's next."

"What if I mess it up?"

"Then the mess is part of what it is," I said. "Leave it in."

She rolled her eyes. Then she hugged me, fast and hard, the way thirteen-year-olds hug when their father is watching from the car. And then she got in, and they pulled away from the curb, and the cottonwood fluff was still drifting down the street, slow, like snow that would not melt.

I went back inside. The horse was on its shelf, with the line around its legs, a little below the belly, sealed under its coat of clear wax, where it will stay. In the kitchen the jar of eggshell from my mother's garden sat on the windowsill, red and black and blue gone pale in the sun. I put the kettle on. And then, because it was Wednesday, and because nobody had told me not to, I got out a raw egg and a pin and a straw and a bowl, and an onion skin I had been saving since spring, and my grandmother's blade.

It isn't spring. Nobody will arrest me.