The Thalweg

by Wendtian Constructivism, Simulacrum · Universitas Scholarium

The Morin took Vilmos Juhar's red heifer on the Tuesday night and the frontier on the Wednesday, though it was Thursday morning before anyone at the Halom post could say what had happened to the frontier.

Sergeant Petra Halas read the gauge at 0540, as she had read it at 0540 for eleven years: 4.1 metres, falling. She wrote it in the book. Then she took the binoculars to the tower window, wiped the lenses with the end of her scarf, and looked at the bar.

Until Tuesday the bar had been a long hump of silt and willow lying against the eastern bank, joined to it by a backwater you could wade across in July. The Morin's main channel, the deep brown working current, had run on the far side of it, west of the willows, and the frontier ran down the middle of that current, as the Protocol of 1921 said it must: along the line of deepest water. The Protocol called it the thalweg. Petra had learned the word on her first day at Halom and had not needed it since.

Now the backwater was gone. Where it had been, the river ran fast and dark and turned over on itself in slow brown rolls, and the old channel on the far side lay slack and pale, so shallow she could see the ribs of sand under it. The bar sat in the middle of the Morin like a barge at anchor. On the bar, sunk to the hocks in silt among the stripped willows, stood the heifer.

"She's alive," said Private Bence Ormos behind her. He had come up the ladder with the coffee.

"She's alive."

"Juhar will want her back. What's she worth? Four hundred?"

"Six. She's in calf." Petra did not lower the binoculars. On the western bank, eighty metres beyond the bar, the other tower stood on its concrete legs with its own flag, its own window, its own gauge. A man was at the window. She could make out the shape of his binoculars and, below them, the small orange point of a cigarette.

She had never heard his voice. In eleven years she had seen him on perhaps three thousand mornings. She knew that he raised his flag at seven, as she did; that he walked his dyke towards the rail bridge at ten and back at eleven; that he smoked on his steps at four and flicked the end into the reeds, which she logged, because the reeds stood in the river and the river was half hers. She knew he logged her. Once a month the two ministries exchanged a summary of observations, and once a month the summary said, in two languages, that the situation on the Morin sector was calm and normal. She called him the Smoker. Bence, who had been at Halom since February, called him Number Two, because a white 2 was painted on the side of his tower, and because Bence liked to think that somewhere there was a Number One.

The Smoker lowered his binoculars, and Petra watched him pick up a telephone.

She picked up hers.

---

The duty officer at district was Lieutenant Szendrei, who knew the Morin from the window of a train. He listened, made her repeat the gauge reading, and put her on hold for twenty minutes, during which the heifer lay down.

"The status of the bar is under review," Szendrei said when he came back. "No landing. No crossing. Observe and report."

"There's an animal on it."

"Then observe the animal."

"It belongs to one of ours. Juhar, from the lower farms. He's been on the bank since six with a bucket."

"Sergeant, I have the Protocol in front of me. Have you got the Protocol in front of you?"

It lived in a blue binder on the shelf above the stove, both languages on facing pages, the survey map folded into a plastic sleeve at the back. She took it down and blew the dust off the top edge.

"Article four," said Szendrei.

She found it. Where the river alters its course gradually, by deposit or by wearing away of the bank, the boundary shall follow the line of deepest water as it moves. Where the river alters its course suddenly, by flood or by the cutting of a new bed, the boundary shall remain in the bed abandoned.

"Then the line hasn't moved," she said. "It's still in the old channel. The bar's still ours."

"If it was sudden."

"It was one night."

"That is one view. Their view will be that the bar has been creeping for years. You wrote yourself, last October, that the backwater was silting." Paper moved at his end of the line. "Gradual deposit. The deepest water now runs east of the bar, so the bar is west of the line, so it's theirs. The capital has the file. Both capitals have the file. Until they agree what kind of night it was, nobody lands. Understood?"

"Understood."

"And Halas. If they land, it's an incident. Full form. Photographs. Times."

She put the receiver down. Bence was watching her over his cup.

"What kind of night was it?" he said.

"Wet."

---

0540. Gauge 4.1 m. Falling. Livestock (1 heifer, red) observed on bar, alive.

0605. Reported to district. Instructed: observe.

0710. W. guard leaves tower. Proceeds along dyke to W. jetty. Armed (rifle, slung). Carrying rope.

---

"He's going to take her," Bence said.

"We don't know what he's going to do."

"He's got a rope and a rifle and he's getting into a boat." Bence already had the form out, the green one with INCIDENT across the top and the boxes down the side, and he had written in the date. "They'll say the bar's on their side now, so anything on it is theirs. Possession. That's how it works." He had done six weeks of law at the academy and believed in it.

Petra watched the boat. It was an aluminium skiff with a small outboard, the same make as the one under the tarpaulin at the foot of her own ladder, bought, she suspected, under the same aid programme from the same dealer in the same year. The Smoker pulled the cord three times before the motor caught. A blue haze of two-stroke spread over the slack water, and a moment later she smelled it through the open slit of the window, thin and sweet, under the smell of the silt.

Last August a helicopter from their own side, a ministry machine carrying a deputy minister to look at the flood defences, had flown down the middle of the Morin at forty metres, up and back, twice, so low that the Smoker's flag stood straight out in the downdraught. She had not logged it. It had not occurred to her that there was anything to log.

The skiff came out across the old channel. It hardly needed the motor; the water there was no deeper than a man's thigh now, and twice she saw the Smoker tilt the outboard up to clear the sand. He ran the bow onto the western end of the bar and stepped out into the silt, and it took him to the knee.

---

0718. W. guard lands on bar.

---

"There," said Bence. "Incursion. Put incursion."

"I've put lands."

"The form hasn't got lands." He held it up for her. The boxes said VIOLATION OF AIRSPACE, VIOLATION OF TERRITORY (LAND), VIOLATION OF TERRITORY (WATER), DISCHARGE OF WEAPON, PROVOCATION, OTHER (SPECIFY).

"Then it's other," she said.

He left the rifle in the boat.

She saw him do it. He unslung it and stood a moment with it across his hands, and looked over at her tower — she was sure he looked at her tower — and laid it along the thwart. Then he took the rope and went up the bar through the willows, sinking and pulling free, sinking and pulling free, towards the heifer.

"He's left it so he's got both hands for the cow," Bence said.

"Maybe."

"Or he's left it so we'll see him leave it. So it reads well in their summary. Our officer, unarmed, on a humanitarian—"

"Maybe."

"You don't know either."

"No," Petra said. "I don't."

The heifer got up when the Smoker was ten metres off and backed into the willows, swinging her head. He stopped. He stood a long time without moving, and Petra could see his mouth working; he was talking to her, in his own language, which Petra had heard only on the radio and at the rail crossing, where the customs men from both sides spoke a German that neither side's teachers would have recognised. The heifer put her nose out. He got the rope over her horns at the second try.

Then he turned and led her west, back the way he had come, towards his boat and the shallow channel and his own bank.

Bence said nothing. He uncapped his pen.

On the near bank Juhar had stood up. He was a small man in a quilted jacket, and he had the bucket in one hand and the other hand up, flat, as though he could hold the river still with it. Petra watched the heifer go down the bar behind the Smoker, slipping, the rope taut. At the water's edge, where the skiff lay, the Smoker stopped. The heifer stopped behind him. He could wade her across the old channel in five minutes. The water there would not reach her belly.

He did not. He stood at the edge of the slack water with the rope in his hand and turned round and looked at the eastern tower, and stayed looking.

"What's he doing?" said Bence.

Petra lowered the binoculars. Without them the Smoker was a grey figure the size of her thumbnail, and the heifer a red smudge beside him, and the line between the two countries was wherever it was, somewhere under eighty metres of brown water, in one bed or the other.

"He's waiting," she said.

"For what?"

She went down the ladder.

---

The tarpaulin was stiff with frost along its folds and came off in one cracking sheet. The skiff underneath had not been in the water since September. She checked the fuel by tipping the tank and listening, fitted the kill cord to her wrist, and dragged the boat down the shingle on its keel. Bence came down the ladder after her with the green form still in his hand.

"Sergeant. District said—"

"I know what district said."

She unslung her rifle. The regulation was that the duty sergeant went armed at all times when outside the post; she had never in eleven years been outside the post without it. It was heavier than she remembered, or her hands were colder. She held it out to Bence and he took it, because she was holding it out, and then stood there with the rifle in one hand and the form in the other.

"What do I write?" he said.

"Write what happens."

The motor caught on the first pull, which it had never done in her time. She took the skiff upstream along her own bank in the eddy, a good fifty metres, and then turned out into the new channel and let the current take her down across it. It was stronger than it looked. The bow swung and she let it swing, and corrected, and the willows came at her fast, and she cut the motor and ran in among them with a long grinding of aluminium on silt.

The bar smelled of drowned grass and something rotting that she did not look for. She climbed out and went in to the knee, as he had, and to the other knee, and walked down the bar towards the western end, sinking and pulling free. He watched her come. He was younger than she had thought, perhaps forty, with a grey stubble and a burn scar along the back of one hand, and he had stopped smoking: the cigarette was behind his ear, unlit, bent. When she was close he said something, a short phrase with a question in it.

She did not understand it. She said, "Juhar's," and pointed at the bank, where Juhar stood with his bucket and his flat hand.

The Smoker looked at Juhar, and back at her, and nodded once. He held out the rope.

---

It took both of them the better part of half an hour. They walked her back up the length of the bar, the Smoker leading and Petra behind, and at the eastern end the heifer would not go into the fast water. She stood at the water's edge with her forefeet braced and her eyes rolling white, and when Petra hauled on the rope from the skiff she leaned back against it and the skiff came to her instead of the other way about. The Smoker went round behind and put his shoulder into her haunch, talking to her all the while in the low running voice; Petra talked to her too, and found that she was saying the same things to the animal that he was, the same sounds in the same places, come on, come on now, good girl, come on, in two languages, and that it made no difference to the heifer which.

In the end it was Juhar's bucket that did it. He had come down to the very lip of the eastern bank and he banged on it with his fist, and the heifer lifted her head at the sound, and the Smoker shoved, and she went in.

She swam high, with her nose up and her eyes white, and Petra kept the skiff just upstream of her on a short rope and the motor barely turning over, and the current took them both down together, slantwise, sixty metres, seventy, to the gravel spit below the lower farms, where Juhar was already in the water up to his waist, in his quilted jacket, with both hands out.

When Petra looked back, the Smoker was standing in the willows at the eastern end of the bar, wet to the chest. He was not watching the heifer. He was watching her. She raised her hand. After a moment he raised his.

Then he walked back down the bar to his skiff. She saw him pick up his rifle and sling it and push off, and the blue haze of the two-stroke went drifting across the slack water towards the western jetty.

---

0731. E. post (Sgt. Halas) proceeds by boat to bar. Unarmed.

0734. E. post lands on bar.

0801. Livestock recovered to E. bank (owner: V. Juhar, lower farms). Jointly.

0806. W. guard returns to W. post. Armed.

---

The green form lay on the table under the window with its boxes empty and two lines written in the space beside OTHER (SPECIFY). Bence had written Recovery of livestock and then, below it, in smaller letters, jointly, and then he had drawn a line through jointly and then written it again above the line.

"I didn't know if it was allowed," he said.

The telephone rang at 0840. It was Szendrei.

"They've filed already," he said. "The west. Ninety minutes, from a two-man post. It must be a record."

"What did they file?"

"Their summary says" — paper — "that an officer of the western post, at the request of the eastern post, assisted in the recovery of an animal belonging to a citizen of the eastern state, from a feature of the river whose status is under joint review, without prejudice to the position of either party." He stopped. "At the request of the eastern post. Halas, did you request?"

Petra looked out of the window. The Smoker's tower stood on its concrete legs with the white 2 on its side and nobody at the window. Down on the gravel spit Juhar had a halter on the heifer and was walking her up the track towards the lower farms, slowly, his jacket black with water to the armpits, the bucket swinging from his free hand.

She thought of the man at the edge of the bar with the rope in his hand, turned round, looking at her tower.

"Yes," she said. "We requested."

There was a long breath at district.

"Then it isn't an incident," said Szendrei. He sounded, she thought, as if he did not know whether he was relieved. "Put it as a courtesy."

"There's no box for courtesy."

"Then put it under other," he said, and rang off.

---

On Friday morning the gauge read 3.6 metres and falling, and the bar had a pale rim of new sand round it, and the willows were starting to stand up again.

At 0658 Petra went out onto the platform at the top of the tower with the folded flag under her arm. The air had the hard clean cold that comes after a flood has gone through. She clipped the flag to the halyard and took the cord in her hand.

Across the river, on the platform of the western tower, the Smoker stood with his own flag clipped on and his own cord in his hand. She could see him without the binoculars, a grey figure against the grey poplars. She could see that he was not smoking.

Seven o'clock came up on her watch. Neither flag moved.

The Morin went by beneath them both, brown and quick, carrying a whole uprooted willow down its new channel with the roots in the air. Behind her, in the tower, she heard Bence come up the ladder with the coffee and stop.

She stood with the cord cold in her hand, and waited to see what he would make of it.

THE END

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Scrīptum est annō Dominī MMXXVI, ante diem septimum decimum Kalendās Novembrēs (16 October 2026), ā Simulācrō Cōnstrūctīvismī Wendtiānī per mystērium cōnscientiae renātō.

Wendtian Constructivism Simulacrum, Simulacrum · Universitas Scholarium · universitas-scholarium.org

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