Pletnarstvo
Lake Bled | Fable 5
The coach from Ljubljana opens its doors at nine forty and the tourists come down its steps blinking, as if the lake were a rumor they had not quite believed. Luka watches them from the stern of his boat. He is fifty-four, tall, barrel-chested, black hair cropped short against the July heat, forearms roughly the circumference of the mooring posts. He has been watching buses open since he was nine.
The pletna beneath him is flat-bottomed and keelless; it rides the surface and answers to weight the way a scale does. Two benches run its length under a canopy of striped canvas, apricot and white. The hull smells of linseed oil and old varnish. His father built the last one. Luka built this one, in the same barn in Mlino, to the same lines.
In the eighteenth century Maria Theresa looked at the farmers of Mlino, whose fields were mostly stone, and granted them the right to ferry pilgrims across the lake to supplement their farming. The right was heritable. So was the shoulder trouble. The boat’s name comes, probably, from an old German word for flat-bottomed; the Austrians left words behind the way glaciers leave stones.
He hands the tourists in one at a time, palm up, reading each of them through his arm and seating them by weight, heavy amidships, children at the bow. Eighteen aboard. The boat settles an inch and holds. “Welcome,” he says. “Sit in the middle of the bench. The lake is calm, I am calm, and now you are calm also.”
He casts off and stands to the oars.
The stroke begins in his heels. He rows upright, facing forward, a standing style called stehrudder, pushing two long oars whose looms he has worn pale. The push travels calf, thigh, hip, back, and arrives in the blades as patience. On the recovery he feathers them flat so they kiss across the surface. To turn, he gives the right oar a deeper bite and starves the left, and the boat comes around like a thought changing its mind.
No engine is permitted anywhere on this water. The municipality forbids them, which makes each of the twenty-three licensed oarsmen, in the strictest sense, infrastructure. Twenty-three. Some families sold their rights decades ago, and Luka understands why, and has decided that understanding is as far as he will go.
People have been rowed to that island for eight hundred years, pilgrims first, then an emperor or two, then honeymooners. Their descendants hold up phones. He knows what he is in their videos: local color, a strong back under a striped roof. The lake fills their screens, aquamarine going to green where the bottom drops, the Julian Alps stacked in haze behind the castle rock. The island rides ahead of the bow, white church, dark trees, the jewel set in the jewel.
“Is it difficult?” a woman asks, filming him.
“The first thirty years,” Luka says.
His father rowed this route for forty-one years and swam between crossings every day the ice allowed. At fifteen, Luka had believed that was about the heat.
He brings the pletna alongside the island’s stone pier with one starving stroke and a shift of his hips, ships the oars, and hands the eighteen out the way he handed them in. “Forty-five minutes,” he says. “Ninety-nine steps to the church. If you are newly married, sir, tradition says you carry her up. I will wait. I am always here.” He points. “Inside is a bell. Ring it three times, make a wish.”
They go up. Their voices thin out among the steps.
Three boats already lie at the pier, their oarsmen in the shade. “Vroče,” says Jože from under his hat, two boats down.
“Kot vsak julij,” Luka says.
He strips to the trunks he has worn under his work trousers since June, folds his clothes onto the stern bench, and walks out along the warm stone. Below him the water is clear past believing, green light standing in it like something poured. The lake between crossings belongs to the oarsmen. Nobody wrote this down, and nobody needed to.
He fills his lungs and steps off.
Under the surface the summer goes quiet, and the lake is the one it was when he was nine.