The Hundred-Year Flood (10 page)

IV

In the morning, the rain still pelting down, Katka still gone, Pavel stood before his latest painting. He dripped on the hardwood floor. He listened to the slaps of the rain, and then he bent to the modeling clay, and with his teeth, worked the clay into the space between his casts and his wrists. The sour taste made him gag. He stepped onto the chair in front of the canvas, then dipped his arm into a bucket of yellow paint. He raised that cast above the curves of Katka’s body, the speckles made by the rough texture of the plaster, intimating dust—but he couldn’t destroy it. In that moment, he didn’t believe their marriage was over. He got out of that room, where Katka had lain naked, on the bed, in the dust, and he collapsed on their sofa, numb. With the point of his elbow, he switched on the TV, for the sound, any sound.

What he found was the flood. Immediately he hoped Tee would protect her and get her home. Then he banged his cheeks with his casts. He couldn’t even wipe his tears. There was no way he could let Tee get away with this. But how to stop the boy? Become like the Secret Police, drag him away in the night? On the TV, helicopters followed the river washing over sandbags into lower-lying streets. A cyclist sped out, water splashing his waist. The news said the flood carried sewage—Pavel would remember that, later. He fumbled the phone off its hook and, with a fingertip, dialed Katka. He bent his ear to the receiver. She’d turned off her mobile.

The news showed workers evacuating animals from the zoo on Císařský Island, in the north of Prague; a hippo dangled from a crane, black rubber wrapped around its belly. A zoo worker discussed where the animals would go, how they might handle the stress. The news showed water full of debris, furniture smashing bridges, wood paneling splintering into dangerous shards. An architect and a former construction worker talked about faulty bricks.

Pavel bit the clay out of his casts and dialed a taxi. He was crossing the city, from one image of his wife to another. He had to show her he could save her. Once, she’d believed he could save the country.

When the taxi pulled up, he was struggling with his clothes. He shouted for the driver to wait. He inched his sweatpants up his thighs, using the friction of his casts. The cab honked, twice. Pavel knocked his wallet over, squeezed some money between his wrists, and left the house as the car pulled away.

After calling another taxi company, he waited outside, wet and cursing. When the second car came, he knocked a cast against the handle until the driver understood. Though how was he to rescue anyone when he couldn’t open a door?

They drove north through Malešice toward the river valley. As they drew closer, the smell of dirty water made Pavel cough. He tried to remember what the news had said about the evacuation, but then the police blocked them off from Karlín. “That’s it,” the driver said. “We can’t go any farther.”

“You’ve got to be kidding me,” Pavel said. “What are you getting paid for?”

“Excuse me?”

The cab screeched to a stop. Pavel fumed. But he didn’t say another word. He knew about the taxi gangs that sometimes formed.

In the street a young policeman looked Pavel over, wet sweatpants to wet casts. They had been sized up like this at anti-Communist rallies. “My wife is in there,” Pavel said.

“No one is in there,” the policeman said. “Everyone’s been evacuated.”

Pavel imagined the water creeping toward them, the buses headed out a different way, the flood carrying the bodies of people who ignored orders.

“This area will soon be underwater, too. Unless you’ve got a boat, you’re not going anywhere.”

Pavel tapped his painted casts together. “I’m Pavel Picasso,” he said.

The policeman laughed. “Do you have a boat, Picasso?”

V

Once, during the Revolution, Rockefeller and Katka had gone to a demonstration ahead of Pavel and had distributed his anti-Communist drawings on broadsides. People happily took them, but Rockefeller grew bored. Some of the protest leaders prepared to speak. Rockefeller said they should speak, too—he could get them on stage—but Katka refused, surprising him. He handed her the rest of the copies, letting go too quickly. As the broadsides spilled to the ground, she stooped and retrieved them. He hurried forward.

He remembered this now as a policeman walked an old woman toward a bus. “What will I do when I get back?” the woman said. “My nurse will come tomorrow and think my family took me.” The policeman led her by the arm. “I came to this building to die.”

Rockefeller started after them, but another policeman turned him around by the elbow. “Is there anyone else in your building?” the policeman asked.

“Tell that woman everyone knows about the evacuation,” Rockefeller said. “Tell her that her family will know she is fine.”

The policeman cocked his head. “Who are you?”

Rockefeller remembered how they’d acted under Communism, when no one knew who was Secret Police and who wasn’t. “Do it,” he said, and rushed off to help others.

He turned back once—the policeman was trying to find the right woman.

As he hurried west toward Old Town, Rockefeller pressed apartment buzzers and shouted into intercoms; he carried children to buses in one arm, and held his umbrella over them with the other. People stopped to ask about the flood, or to share news. “They say a tidal wave is coming,” a man told him. “A small tidal wave.”

A boy ran after his father with a dog in his arms. “Look at these scratches,” a woman said, revealing the tops of her breasts. “My cat refused to leave. I knew something was happening when she stayed up on a bookcase all yesterday. I think the scratches are infected.” Another woman said the police had forced her to leave her husband; he was sick and had kicked and screamed as they tried to get him out. “He’ll outlast them,” she said. An old man asked where he was supposed to go; he hadn’t left Karlín in two years and had forgotten the rest of the city. A boy waving a foam sword said the military was going to bomb a ship that might sweep downriver and destroy the Charles Bridge.

Rockefeller directed tourists to trams, told people which parts of the city the news had said would be hit worst. Karlín, the Lesser Quarter, the Jewish Quarter, Old Town: the one, new; the other three, centuries old. A few people railed against him, said to leave them alone, it wasn’t his place. They knew somehow that he had no official role. A few turned and asked advice of others.

Rockefeller wandered down to the river. A metal barrier had been put up along the embankments through Old Town to the Bridge of Legions. The Charles Bridge stood ready to prove an old myth that egg yolks mixed into its mortar meant it would never fall. Legends of Prague fluttered on the lips of evacuees as if to remind everyone of how long the city had existed, but Rockefeller didn’t trust legends. In the Jewish Quarter, a man reenacted King Canute’s prayers for the river to retreat, courting laughs. Tee would have laughed. Rockefeller wondered where Katka and Tee would go to escape. For the second time that day, he nearly wished the flood would get rid of them, leave Pavel to mourn and move on—not doubt, wonder, self-destruct. Rockefeller imagined them on a bus, flipping over in a sudden increase of water. He imagined them hit in the head by flotsam, drowning slowly in a freak accident, one of the military’s bombs gone wrong.

If they survived the flood, maybe Pavel would find his old nerve. Once, a man had insulted his father’s art and Pavel had planned revenge for six months.

Rockefeller passed long lines at ATMs as if cash would solve everything. At one, a man pushed forward. A woman fell to the ground, and Rockefeller was upon him. “What are you doing!” he said. His bag swung down on his arm.

The man shrank backward. “An accident. An accident.”

Rockefeller bent over him, but something touched his ankle. “Please,” the woman said, “just leave us alone.” She trembled. The man shook his head like he didn’t know her.

When he left them there, he felt as if they’d said, as his headmaster had said during a school commemoration of Lenin, that he was too stupid to understand.

The barriers stopped at the Charles Bridge. Food, clothing, furniture, trash, parts of poorly built houses, even a few casually dressed mannequins, swept down the Vltava. A clutch of tourists lined the banks. The water almost reached their feet; the bridge’s arches were submerged. Rockefeller’s face was wet. He must have left his umbrella near the ATM. An explosion rang out upriver, and heads turned. The water smelled strongly now of garbage and sewage, dredged-up filth. The flood covered the islands: he could barely see the top of the museum on Kampa. More explosions sounded. Tourists snapped photos and talked into cell phones. Ambulance workers ferried people across to the Lesser Quarter.

At the hospital, after Pavel’s attack, the doctors had asked Rockefeller questions he didn’t want to answer, like what exactly he had seen. When he told them Pavel’s name, they called colleagues. We can save his career, they seemed to tell each other. They put his wrists back together. But by that time, Pavel had told security to keep Rockefeller away.

Where were their old friends now, and the foreigners Rockefeller had invited over after Pavel’s attack? Where was Vanessa? She had her father to look after her.

Rockefeller crossed the Bridge of Legions into the Lesser Quarter, dripping rain. Along Smetano Nábřezi, a crowd gathered clothes washed downstream from a department store. They wrestled over outfits. A woman shoved a boy away from the river. When he saw Rockefeller, he said, “It’s not fair.” Rockefeller unzipped his bag. He wasn’t sure what he could give the boy, but as soon as the bag was open, the boy ran off with an old pair of shoes far too big for his feet.

The fringes of the crowd turned to Rockefeller, reaching. Rockefeller wished to lead by example. He widened the opening. A wet man took the towel to wipe his forehead. A man with a gash on his arm swiped bandages. And then they were taking anything. As a man pulled the bag away, Rockefeller remembered the deed. He pushed through the crowd. He tore back the bag, and the man stumbled with the force of the movement and fell. Rockefeller shoved his hand inside. “Where is it?” he asked.

“I didn’t get anything,” the man said from the ground, the rain sputtering down on him. The crowd followed.

Rockefeller flung apart the man’s wet hands. Nothing. He carried the bag away from the river, and shook it out. Gauze and a bottle of water dropped in the mud. The deed floated down on top. He closed his fist around the paper and stuffed it in his pocket.

“I wasn’t trying to steal from you,” the man whined. Rockefeller walked past toward the road.

When he could think clearly again, reject the image of another crumpled body, Rockefeller returned to the swollen river. He tried to light a cigarette beside the stretch of land that usually formed a bridge to Kampa Island. An empty refrigerator smashed against the side of the museum. A floral-patterned couch scraped up along what was now the shore, at his feet. He smoothed back his wet hair and threw the cigarette on the ground.

A white face rushed downriver, a white shirt like a flag—and Rockefeller dove into the water. The body caught on some underwater crag. Rockefeller fought forward, churning his arms. The river pushed against him. Finally he drew even. So awkwardly stiff: a mannequin.

He held the mannequin in his arms anyway. He steadied his feet in the current, and threw the body ashore. When a female model followed, he threw her onto land as well. He waded back and lay beside them, the two plastic people dripping with rain and floodwater. Sewage residue stuck to them and to him. He swept a finger under his waistband, wiped off the sludge with the camping bag, and retched.

As he lay on his back, a memory flitted in undesired of the first brave thing he’d ever done, skipping a workers’ holiday in secondary school. His teacher had filed a report about his attitude that might have damaged his family’s reputation. His parents had been forced to use up a favor to get someone to “lose” the report.

He had only been showing off. He knew his parents would come to his rescue.

He stuffed the mannequins under his arms, the man on his right, the woman on his left, and crossed back over the Bridge of Legions toward Karlovo Náměstí. Almost no one was out, except along the river, and the wide absence in the streets seemed the aftermath, not the beginning, of disaster.

VI

It was evening when Pavel walked into The Heavenly Café. The stink of the river rose in his throat. Two mannequins dripped brown water. Rockefeller drank coffee and circled them, a male and a female. Pavel rubbed his casts on his shirt, streaking it with mud, without noticing. Four canvases tilted against the back wall. Pavel pushed past a pile of concrete and, with his casts, tried to slide the frames, the last of the paintings he hadn’t burned, images of the boy his wife loved, through the mess. He couldn’t concentrate. Back in June, Katka had painted him for once, turning the tables. He thought of that now. She put the brush to the canvas, something he could no longer manage. He settled, naturally, into a pose. He even gave some instruction—how to see shadows, how to see what didn’t want to be seen—knowledge he had saved up over the years. She had studied art in college, but when she turned the canvas around, it was the simplest insult. A paintbrush erect from his crotch. “Maybe you were always like this,” she’d said, “but this is what I see now.”

He couldn’t let Americans take both his wrists and his marriage. He wanted an equal revenge—Rockefeller’s wrists broken, his wife brokenhearted, Tee permanently alone. The sound of the rain came from far away. In the rubble in front of Pavel, Rockefeller lowered himself to his knees. His thighs shook, and he hung his head. His hair poufed like a wet bird.

“I’m sorry. I have to tell you something. I saw her with Tee.”

Pavel hooked his fingertips around a painting.

“They’re in his apartment.”

Rockefeller rose and pulled Pavel’s cast away from the painting. He drew out a pack of Marlboros. Pavel sat on a slab of concrete. Rockefeller started two cigarettes and held one between them. Then, remembering, he slipped it directly into Pavel’s mouth. Pavel breathed in. His stomach was empty. It had been days since he’d last smoked. His arms and legs tingled. On the blank back wall, an image started to come to him.