Street Person Ivanek was also called "homeless" because he lacked a home. He did not mind, but the lack of socks was killing him now. He was shivering, he felt frozen everywhere, except his soles, which burned as if roastedover cinders. He found Nike running shoes in a garbage can in Lidojedy yesterday—a great find, despite the hole in one. He got so excited that he forgot his socks in the old Hushpuppies he tossed away. You can't  march fifteen rainy kilometers in wet sneakers without socks and feel good.
    When he reached the village Krky he had just about enough and knew he had to find a shelter of some kind soon. It was still drizzling when he crossed the square with the duck pond deserted by ducks, and a chapel, which was always locked. He had tried the door.
Ivanek was a sight. His long black & white mane and three-colored beard flew freely on his head, held mostly high. He sported a checkered woolen sport jacket (with a minor tear) from a garbage can in Strc, which fitted him perfectly and showed quality in details—hand sewn construction, grosgrain ribbon at the lapel and functioning buttonholes, of course.His jeans, from a certain refuse bin in Prst, were of the traditional fit and were fashionably bleached by elements natural, not manufactured. About his T-shirt, nothing more will be said, other than it was found on the clothes-line. The Nike's complemented his attire nicely. Representing the Garbage Can Collection, not Armani or Gianni Campagna, Ivanek looked tres chic, slick for a vagrant, and nobody would guess his fifty years, either.
    Ivanek has been living with street people for several years; he was not sure for how long. He became a street man after his wife left him for a local politician and took their daughter Milus away. The pain from the loss of Milus was not compensated even by the departure of his wife. It was so hard to bear he became unreasonable, left his upholstering business, sold everything, put the money to Milus' saving account and swallowed many pills at once. When he woke up in the hospital he was less sad. A beautiful angel, Doctor Tree, explained that his brain was deprived of oxygen for too long a time. She held his hand and had glossy eyes when she told him that  in the future he will still be able to feel happiness.
He liked it best being with other homeless panhandlers knowing there was no possibility of failure with them. Because he was a kind man, shared things, kept fairly devoid of odors and talked only rarely he was liked well and even called a "friend," by some. As a badge of his social status, and for other reasons, he let his beard and hair grow long, which gave him an appearance of a protester, which was a false image, since he protested nothing and agreed with everybody, most of the time. He did not touch the hard alcohol, so he remained the same.
    Ivanek has been spending winters in the main railroad station in Prague, The Wilson Station. It is not a homey place, it looks like a railroad station, but many people there are nice and happy. People are always happy when departing to the mountains for skiing and making love, they are always upbeat when returning from visits to friends, still mud in their eye, and fragrant of beer and slivovice. And cheerful are the international students arriving on Euro-Pass, all in tennis shoes and speaking English. Leaving the country they empty their pockets of aluminum currency into the waiting hats of Ivanek and Co.
    Summers he has spent hiking and drifting through the country, like a nomadic gatherer from one step back in evolution. But the more evolved hominids in the villages and fields he had to cross had not been as nice as the folks in Wilson Station. When behind their fences they would turn at him their scornful faces and shout things, when in front of their fences they would turn away so as not to look at his face. They had big dogs and big bellies, taut by beer and potatoes. But there was so much beauty in the Czech landscape as if painted by a romantic painter, on Absinth, and  in romantic mood, to boot. Picturesque red and white villages every few miles, a brewery every few kilometers. So Ivanek liked his Summers in the country.
    Nobody paid attention to Ivanek on the square of village Krky. People were pacing with agitation, rushing from place to place like ants scrutinized by an anteater, some raising their arms, some raising their voices: "flood," "river," "evacuation," "jesusmariajoseph" and "aach jo!" Nobody told Ivanek to get lost, to beat it, to make himself scarce, to take a hike. No fat children screamed "bug off, weirdo, scram, scum!" And Ivanek understood what the villagers worried about. This morning, when he passed through Prdy he saw the river Vltava flooding houses up to their roofs, so the Prdy looked like a strange city of red tents.  The stream rushed over the bridge which looked like a spillway, whole trees, barrels, boards floated downstream, he saw a skiff half filled with water without the rover, a roof floating without the house.
    When Ivanek  approached Ruzicka's Butcher Shop on the square he stopped as if hitting a concrete wall. Struck by a lightning sight of beauty. The sticks of salamis and handsome sausages  hung in a row behind the shop window arranged by their size like organ pipes in a house of Christian God, capable of heavenly music, no doubt. Underneath, the cuts of ham, bacon, liver pate, blood sausage, roast beef and head cheese were arranged in a row of hillocks of equal elevation, in hues from ebony to earthly browns, warm ochres to shamelessly blood red. The sudden revolt of Ivanek's stomach propelled him into the store without a plan of action. There he stood, assaulted by the scents of cold cuts and the fragrance of smoked pig's feet, his smile making a wide semi lunar opening in the hedgehog' s coat of his beard.
    "What are you doing here!" It was not a question, it was the unhesitant greeting by Mrs. Ruzicka, herself. Ivanek nodded as if in agreement and widened his grin.
    "Hungry," he stated, "and I can work, I can help.... mother," he said quietly, his arms along his hips as if in attention, his eyes firmly on several salamis on the counter in front of him.
    "Get out of here!" The shopkeeper instructed the vagrant in a lower voice (ashamed of her strictness, perhaps.) Then she warned the unwelcome customer that she will call her husband who can deal with the likes of Ivanek.
    "Pepo ! Come here, tato!" She turned around into the open back door of the store.
With an astonishment Ivanek observed his hand, on it's own, independent of the homeless mind, shooting forward and to removing a stick of salami from the counter. It disappeared under the checkered woolen jacket.
    When Mrs. Ruzicka turned back to face the visitor he was on the way out of the store, slowly, shuffling away as if disappointed by the unenthusiastic welcome.  Safely out of the store he increased his pace. He lifted his knees high, felt spring in his calf, felt streams of adrenaline in his veins and capilaries, his gait resembling the march of an Arabian dictator's guardists on parade. The pain  in his soles was forgotten—till he found himself past the last house of the village Krky.
    He stood on an asphalt county road lined by pear trees. In the distance the road dove into the forest of dark spruces straight as candles, packed tightly. They did not promise a cozy shelter for the night in their undergrowth. Ivanek steadied the salami under his belt like a gunslinger would his Colt repeater and surveyed the situation. On his right there were wheat and sugar beets field as far as to the hills. On the left, a pasture, or a field put to rest for a season, sloped down to a vast lake.  But the lake was not a lake, it was flowing with waves on it, it was the river, Vltava, in a flood as mighty as not seen for centuries, moving through the Bohemian landscape quietly, it did not roar, it rushed destroying the land and dwellings with the silence of a mute killer. Ivanek shook his head in wonder but his mind did not linger; he has to find a shelter for the night. It was drizzling, still.
It is said that misfortunes come in threes. For Ivanek the good fortunes were coming in threes, too. After the salami fortune he saw another good fortune in the pasture, a deserted hay storage shack, with three walls and good shingle roof. It was not far, just half way to the edge of the flood. The dream of all hobos: warm, fragrant hay, beckoned the tired man.
    When the traveler made himself a soft, aromatic nest of hay on the platform under the roof, it was getting dark. First he took off the sodden Nike running shoes and rubbed his feet with the hay dry. Still, there was light enough he could read the label on his salami. It was made in Szeged, Hungary, by the survivors of the famous jewish Pick family. In disbelieve he shook his head: he will dine the best salami there is, the pride of Hungary, the favorite of culinary experts of the world, the salami fabled by its secret spices and undisclosed proportion of donkey meat. He used his Opinel knife to cut a couple of five millimeter thick slices and laid them on a slice of the great Czech bread Sumavan, which he carried in the breast pocket of his jacket, wrapped in a polyethylene cling-wrap. He felt totally happy in his heart, stomach, and other internal organs.
    But as always, Ivanek's happiness was of a very short duration. He had this problem with happiness: whenever he saw something beautiful, felt goodness, appreciation, good luck—She always visited his mind, an image, emerging from the hypocampus, from memory. And because he loved her—his happiness became sadness. She was Milus, his lovely redheaded daughter, who left him, with her mother, Ivanek's ex-wife. When joy is shared it usually doubles but when it is not shared it shouldn't disappear or turn to sadness. But that was the sad and strange case of Ivanek.
To abolish the pain he had trained himself in different ways of distraction. This time he used the distraction of sleep. He might have heard the river coming but he was trying to direct his brain waves to the dream world. The night of the Big Flood was without stars.

    Ivanek dreamt of a swim in the tiny pool in the public bath, Karlovy Lazne. Suddenly, the water became too cold and it woke him up. First, he thought he entered another, a nightmarish dream, but it took only seconds to recognize dream for a dream and reality for .... a disaster. The water reached up and covered his platform under the roof of the shack. He did not know that early this morning  State Meteorologist, Marticka Kotrmelcova, changed her forecast from "The 100 Years Flood" to "The 300 Years Flood."
    He made sure the salami was firmly under his belt and then, without much hesitation, slid into the deep water and swam out of the shack to the dim light of the early morn. When   he emerged from the building the strength of the current took him by surprise—in few seconds his night shelter was far away. Of the village Krky he glimpsed only roof tops and the steeple of the chapel. The nearest shore could be imagined somewhere under the tops of trees. The opposite shore was not visible to the eyes at the water level because of the curvature of Earth, so it seemed the river had only one shore left. The river smelled of mud, on moderate waves the debris of leafs, branches, and boards revealed the great velocity of the torrent—which rushed in the collision course with Prague.
    Ivanek realized he was in trouble. His strokes in the direction of the nearest shore lacked determination to move him forward. The waterlogged jacket and jeans seemed to pull him down. The thought of death did not yet enter his mind because he was overwhelmed by the wonder about his situation, its seeming unreality. The effort to keep his face above water kept him from desperate thoughts. When a large floating platform appeared nearby he exerted a burst of his best effort and mightily breaststroked the few yards to salvation. He managed to climb up, then lay motionless for some time to recover. He sat up and concluded he was floating on a whole floor of some cabin, a nice hardwood, waxed just recently. It was no Noah's job but It did not sink under his meager weight and swayed only a little when he changed position.
    Street children, gamines of Bogota and Rio, and homeless people everywhere seem to develop survival strategies similar to those of animals living in the extreme environments, the extremofiles. They preserve energy in many ways, and find satisfaction, even happiness, in relatively small achievements. So Ivanek showed his incisors in the wide smile of a happy man, and hollered over the waters, "Ship Ahoy!" It came out as a squeak—he repeated again in mightier voice: "Ship Ahoooy!"
    "Now, we have to get dry, a little." He announced in a businesslike tone to a brown snake curled on a wooden cabinet floating nearby, stiff by cold and with eyes covered by membrana nictitans, giving him the look of blindness. He is in worse shape than me, Ivanek thought, took off the waterlogged jacket saved from the garbage can in Strc, and wrung out the water off it. His T-shirt he left on, the water in it was warmed by his body heat. The Nike's from the garbage can in Lidojedy were gone, drowned in the flooded hay-storage shack. How inhuman his big toes looked destroyed by the fungus, he wondered, unconcerned about the disastrous flooding situation of Central Europe, at the moment. He stood up erect, stretched his arms for ballance, he made a living cross above the deluge.
    When a wicker chair arrived alongside his raft, Ivanek managed to retrieve it. It had a rattan palm frame and armrests, it was in mint sitting condition. He placed the easy chair in the exact center of his float and slumped into it. From then on he navigated not floating debris—but a "ship," his own vessel, sailing helm-less on automatic pilot downstream, to final destination somewhat unknown.
    The ship passed the half flooded Zkrz and then the fully submerged Prcice. When he recognized the mouth of the Berounka river by the color change of the flood from black mud to brown mud Ivanek knew that the capital of Bohemia, Praha, will appear soon, announced by the Fortress Vysehrad on the starboard, high above the river, unreachable by any flood water, save the biblical one. He cut himself a slice of the pride of Hungary and chewed it slowly with narrowed eyes. It stopped raining and a flock of swans flew over in the V formation, copying the geese.
    If only she could see him, now, Milus, his love, his daughter. Would she be worried about his fate, would she call for help? Maybe, she would be proud of him, admire him, a little. And if they saved him, would she hug her old man? She had hugged him only once in her life. It was when she wrecked their first car, Fiat 800, dark blue, bought used. She had hit a lamp post at midnight in Dejvice, Prague -6. She called home crying and Ivanek rushed to her by taxi, found her desperate and confused, but unharmed. He told her not to worry about anything. Milus cried, bit a streak of her red hair, and threw her arms around him. He held her tight, for a long time, did not move. He just repeated, "it's nothing, it's nothing."
    A loud voice woke him up from his daydream. It came from a loudspeaker, from a man in yellow oilskins, with may-west and cap with big letters on it.  The rescuers were approaching in a fast moving boat.  Then the boat's motor stopped. Ivanek watched the agitation of rescue men, their failed attempts to revive the engine by kicking it. Their obscenities about the motor's mother were so loud they carried over the water to Ivanek, unaltered.
His voyage continued past the steep rock of Vysehrad. Crowds of onlookers gathered on the stretch of the road not flooded yet. Some waved at Ivanek, some covered their mouth with hand in astonishment, some held their head in both hands in the worry for the poor man's life. Fathers pointed to the sailor instructing their children on bravery, one mother slapped her boy's face because he did not want to look. Cell phones covered many an ear.
    Ivanek rose from the wicker chair, buttoned up his jacket to enhance his wet elegance and bowed to the crowd. He did not wave, since captains do not wave, but half-raised his hands in modest surrender—little bow, little smile. Then he sat down facing forward, his face expressing profound concentration of a man drowning in applaus.
    Some single-handed sailors, on their passages to Europe, are said to suffer short lasting delusions and visions at about the mid-Atlantic. Ivanek developed a vision at about the level of Podskali. It was a vision of Milus seeing him, recognizing him, exclaiming to the crowd around her, "This is my dad, the brave sailor there, he is MY dad!"
    Because of the enormity of the flood and approaching spillways and Prague bridges barricaded by debris, Ivanek's chance of survival had been decreasing progressively with time. So his vision became, in a way, his last wish. His subconscience knew. He mumbled aloud: "Ivanek's last wish—Milus. Ivanek's last meal—Hungarian salami." He shook his head disbelieving his destiny.
    Farther downstream he enjoyed magnificent architecture of art nouveau apartment houses and the rare cubist villas on the starboard. In open windows, the inhabitants, in a state of excitement, pointed at him, some with their small silver cameras, some bearded men with binoculars. And several beautiful women made gestures of invitation and leaned over to exhibit the snow-white contents of their decolletage. Ivanek acknowledged their kind attention by a nod of his head and by raising his hand in a gesture of greeting used by Roman legionaries, while leasurely leaning back in his wicker chair, suggesting a calm enjoyment of the cruise. (Handel's  "Water Music" might have been appropriate at this moment.)  The news of his arrival has had spread through the city.
When Ivanek approached the National Theater there were alrerady thousand people waiting. Police and fire-rescue crews were prepared to exert their full effort to save the life of the celebrated navigator. Everyone in the city, except the hobo himself, knew with certainty that if the rescuers would fail to extract him from the torrent at this moment he will die. Not more than a kilometer farther down, the Charles Bridge was almost submerged, and the debris, uprooted trees and splintered construction material created a tangle and violent whirls where Ivanek's "ship" would be broken and he would drown, most likely first dismembered alive. But the innocent sailor enjoyed his ride still, elated by the adoration of multitudes.
Just a hundred meters downstream from the Theater, in front of Cafe Slavia, there gathered a lineup of video cameras on heavy tripods for the television news. One could recognize CS TV2, Television NOVA, even a BBC crew was present (and admired.) Reporters in leather jackets from CS Radio and Radio VLTAVA talked into their tape recorders modulating their voices in unnatural ways,  then eliciting comments from stuttering bystanders. Ludek Plecity, the Mayor of Prague, arrived with his entourage, alerted to this excellent opportunity to use the occasion for the media exposure and pre election publicity. (He knew one or two things about that.)
Ivanek, the drifter, again raised from his chair, brushed his hair backwards with fingers, turned the collar of his jacket up—and bowed. The whole class of nursing students just arrived and cheered him wildly, and since they were liberated females they used obscene gestures to appeal to the navigator. Encouraged, and beeing somewhat typical variety of Czech (Homo sapiens Bohemicus, var. musicalis) he started to sing a Bohemian folk song, one of the national cultural treasures : "......My peachy cute Marushko,
                                                                                you know it's May,
                                                                                I wonder if I may,
                                                                                to lay you in the hay,
                                                                                and spread your alabaster knees..." He did not
finish the story, this hounding melody of piercing beauty, in his pretty good baritone .... he was interrupted, when four steely hands lifted him into the air and deposited him onto a large rubber Zodiak with a roaring  outboard four-cycle Yamaha motor. In just seconds the rescue team landed by the railing of the embankment and those steely, schwartzeneggerish hands lifted Ivanek over the banister onto the sidewalk. One of the professional rescuers said in a low voice: "Welcome between the living, weirdo," and gave  a smile to Ivanek, who wavered on firm land on uncertain sailor's legs, feet bare.
    Uniformed policemen held the crowds back, cameramen were alowed to approach to about three meters away to take the extreme close-ups with their teleobjectives. Reporters were shouting questions and argued with the men of the law. Then more space was claimed by the uniformed men for the Mayor of the city and his people. Somebody pushed Ivanek forward and hissed that Mr. Mayor would like to speak with him.
    "Mayor himself! Do you understand?"
    Ivanek nodded, rechecked the salami, his fly, curled the big toes inward and straightened up. Tension of the media folks increased.
    "His Excellency !" Ivanek exclaimed loudly. His hand shot up for a brisk military salute.
    "Oh no, my friend," the physically diminutive executive retorted with a kind smile for the objective of TV NOVA camera. "Call me ...just ... Mr. Mayor, please." He stepped forward further and extended his hand for a handshake. At the same time Ludovik Vaculavik, the writer well known for his courageous stand against communists and for his less than mediocre writing ability tried to position himself in an advantageous angle to the cameras. His face was strained by the effort to come up with a witty and important sentence with which to insert himself upon the situation. Two Mayor's body guards (with two indisposable and indispensable tools of their trade—walkie-talkie and sunglasses ),  squared their shoulders and turned the corners of their mouth downward. Idiots in the mob behind the officials made faces and gestures hoping to be seen on the TV screens.
The Mayor's extended hand, which remained suspended in the space, would appear, later, on a photograph on the web site  "www. ceskenoviny. cz"  with the text disputing why the hand was not taken by the now famous survivor.
    The Mayor's hand was not taken and shaken because Ivanek was stunned into a stupor, catatonia, suddenly. He saw her forehead with bangs the color of freshly minted copper. Her red hair was plaited into a single oldfashioned braid she laid in front of her shoulder. Her face was pale and very beautiful, her eyes on him, intently. Ivanek took hold of himself and tried to step toward her—but his legs refused to obey.
    "Milus," he whispered.  "Milus?" He asked louder. She gazed at him calmly, her face expressionless. Then a reporter stepped in front of her. When he moved away she was gone. Not even a vacant space remained of her. She disappeared with the disappearing crowd. People started to run away, pushing and shouting, pointing at their feet, stepping high. The hungry, wild river spilled over the sidewalk. The flood arrived onto the street and everybody was on the move. At that moment the Old Town became an infinity-edge swimming pool for feces, rats and buts.
    Ivanek found himself alone, his bare feet ankle high in the flowing dirt, a pair of soaked unused cigarettes floated by his feet, one lonely used condom, this everpresent whitefish of Vltava, following behind. Because he still saw the copper hair and her face he could comprehended only a little of what was happenning around him. It took some time before he turned around to survey the river but he did not worry, he arrived with the flood. While stooping in dejection at this moment he was not a case of hopeless homeless, no, not Ivanek, the man with friends.

    A young man ran to Ivanek, splashing, "Wanna a ride, somewhere?" He shouted. He had to repeat his offer: "I'll give you ride!"
    "That will be nice, very nice, " Ivanek whispered. He seemed to wake up. In contrast to everybody else's panic, they walked to the parked Skoda deliberately. The car started well and soon they reached the dry pavement of Narodni Boulevard heading to Vaclavske Square.
    "Sorry, Ivanek is my name. I'd like to go to the railroad station. To Wilson Station, please."
    "No problem with that, Mr. Ivanek. I'm going in that general direction, anyway." The young man introduced himself as Ivan Ketner. " Where are you traveling?" He asked.
    "Oh, home." Ivanek nodded with a quizzical expression on his face.
    "And where is your home, if I may ask?"
    "The Wilson Station."
    The young man, Ivan Ketner, shook his head and smiled in incomprehension, politely. Ivanek started to shiver so Ketner switched on the heating. He wanted to say something nice to his passenger, so he said: "It was a great voyage, Sir. Such a dangerous flood. Your's will become a celebrated navigation, Sir, Captain."
    Ivanek's face lighted up just a little. He nodded. He thought so, too.
    "Is somebody waiting for you?" The driver asked.
    "They always are!" Ivanek's smile widened. "They are, always. A few will be bumming around the countryside, mind you, till the fall, but surely Mita will be waiting for me. He's got one leg, so he stays put ... and plays. You should hear him to play his ukulele; like Russians he plays, so good." Ivanek looked at the driver to see if he believes.
    "And Pretty Boy Joseph might be there waiting for me. He is the one who believes in supernatural beings and God, like Americans and Arabs. But he is a nice man, anyway. They say he hides from two of his rich ex-wives, I don't know.
    "I think, Vladimir might be back from the country, by now, he is an alcoholic and big time smoker, so the country air is too thin for him, like the chemical oxygen, that's what he says, but everybody likes him. He always agrees and smiles ......."
Ivanek wanted to talk, talk, to talk fast, it felt so good. Drifting through the countryside he has not said more than a sentence per week. Not counting sentences in songs, of course. His eyebrows were raised, now, his eyes wide open, sparks on shiny corneas. It felt very good, the talking.
    "Jura smiles too," he continued. "He stays on the bench near the ticket counters. He is Slovak, you know, but thinks Slovaks are sorta village nationalists with a complex of inferiority, that's what he says. So he loves Prague, where people feel superior, you know yourself, Mister ... Ketner. Jura goes panhandling to Lesser Town and then shares with all of us, Wilson people." Ivanek looked out of the window. "We'll be there soon, there is Opera! We'll be there in a minute!"
    "You've got many friends, Mr. Ivanek. Rare thing for a man nowadays!" Ivan Ketner remarked with a grimace of appreciation.
    "Recon I do. Yes, Sir, I have ... and I forgot Violetta. Do you wanna hear? They call her "bag lady" but she ain't no bag ... and  carries none, that's the truth. You would like her, yes Sir. Mostly, she stays on the benches by the toilets, always dressed like for a carnival. Man ... so nice and colorful!"
    Ivanek showed the excitement of a kid bragging about a new bike. The car stopped in front of the station's main entrance and Ivanek continued still: " And you just wouldn't believe her dog Luna. She is the smartest mutt you ever saw, walks on her hind legs like a man and—listen to this- she speaks! She, Luna I mean, barks ‚Äògood night'  in English .... like an Englishman! Unbelievable, I know, but I've heard it myself. Good night, that's what she barks, my friend. Like an Englishman......"
.........then Ivanek waved till the car disappeared in the traffic. Being from the railroad station he knew everything about waving. Waving is a must—and must be done with smooth, wavy movements. But it was time to go in now, friends might be waiting.