Absolute Sunset Read Online Free Page B

disasters: spinal injury, paralysis, cuts. She held onto her father and screamed.
    “Hanka!” Janusz was starting to get angry now. “Stop it!” his tone brought the girl around a bit. “I’m going to dive!” he said, then sat Hanka on the grass and walked to the edge.
    “No!” Hanka whispered and leapt towards him. She pushed her father with her small hands, sweeping him off his feet and knocking him down. As he fell, he knocked the stand and the fishing rod trembled and fell from the bank into the water. It stuck into the sludgy bottom far from the edge.
    “Are you crazy?” Janusz demanded, slowly standing. Hanka felt terribly stupid.



4
    Janusz—Beneath The Surface
    Get the rod back! That’s what he wanted. It was valuable, after all. It was almost new—he was using it for only the third time—and Janusz had saved for almost a year to buy it. He sold his old equipment and that, plus his savings and a well-timed sale, had been enough for him to get it. A good rod, hooks, mills, nice leaders and weights. He simply loved it. Sometimes, when Sabina wasn’t home, he pulled it out of the wardrobe and cast bait from the balcony—carefully, so as not to hurt anyone or break the line. Just for a moment so he could feel like he was actually fishing.
    Now the rod was stuck, upright, in the muddy bottom, jammed between the underwater roots of a nearby oak or caught up in the whirl of algae. And Hanka kept on whining.
    “Don’t jump, Dad, don’t jump here!” she sputtered snotty-nosed.
    Janusz looked into water, then tried again. It was cloudy, because the current raised fine sludge from the bottom.
    “Hanka,” he repeated. “I’m getting the rod.”
    “No!” Hanka yelled. “Don’t go in here! Please, just don’t!”
    “How can I get it then? I can’t reach it from here.”
    “Let’s go over the bridge!” the girl pointed to a footbridge over the water. Rickety, but fairly safe. “You can climb down the bridge beside the sand bar.”
    Janusz rolled his eyes. He waited while his daughter carefully shook the grass from her skirt, then took her by the hand.
    “Well. Let’s go,” he said and moved towards the small bridge.
    The footbridge swayed wildly, but this didn’t seem to upset Hanka. Cautiously, she stepped from one board to another, jumping over the gaps and humming. She had calmed down immediately as soon as her father had agreed to use the small bridge. Janusz smiled. “Oh, let it be!” he thought and started humming, too.
    “Here!” Hanka finally made up her mind and stopped. She sat down and dangled her legs.
    Janusz peeked down. The river flowed about half a metre below. It was quite shallow here. Hanka had been right: the current had deposited quite a bit of sand and gravel at this spot, so that a sand bar stuck out above the surface. In two or three months it would undoubtedly become a small island. Water grass would hold it steady in the fast-moving river, until the autumn rains came, when the water would rise high and wash the sand away, leaving it somewhere else.
    He took off his plimsolls and socks. He rolled up the socks carefully and put them inside the shoes.
    “I’m going,” he said cheerfully to Hanka and slipped down onto the sand bar.
    The water was freezing, as usual. Janusz had expected it, so he didn’t react. He simply waited, breathing calmly, until his body got used to the temperature. Then he slowly moved up the current towards the tree, where his fishing rod was stuck. He floundered along slowly, as pondweeds that grew on the riverbed rubbed against his calves. It seemed to Janusz that they were trying to grab his legs. “Hair of a drowned body,” his friends called it. At times his ankles were so firmly entangled in the plants that it was hard for him to take the next step.
    When he was almost at the tree, he glanced back. Hanka was sitting where he had left her, watching swallows flitting above the riverbank. They zipped around in pursuit of insects,