The Hundred-Year Flood (11 page)

VII

They moved around the café together and rearranged things, searching the slabs of rock and wood for the musculature of a business. Rockefeller stood the mannequins near the window, and Pavel gave them names, Petr and Petra. Pavel turned their backs to each other, slid them in close to kissing, bent an arm to a waist in a way that could have been reaching or pushing.

After a while, Pavel said, “You must do this for me. Get the buckets of paint in my house. Get the towels. Get the clay. Get everything. And promise you’ll help me get her away from Tee.”

In the house in Malešice, Rockefeller found the wreckage of a fight: broken dishes, running water, displaced furniture, scattered clothes. Against the bed leaned a giant canvas. Pavel had mentioned he was painting with his casts. Wide yellow swerves layered one upon another. It was hard to make out shapes or meaning. Rockefeller tried not to care whether or not this painting could convince anyone of a revolution.

He rested an umbrella from the house in the crook of his neck and carried the equipment to the café in several trips. On the second trip, he stumbled on the wet cobblestone and dented a bucket, but the lid held. He pictured himself paint-splashed in the middle of a flood. He tried not to hurry. Sirens wailed, deeper in the city. The rain poured down and he tucked the towels under his jacket. His teeth chattered, though he wasn’t cold.

When Pavel had his supplies, he stood on a ladder and painted a mural over the entire back wall of the café. Those same thick swerves. Rockefeller toweled off the casts and held up buckets of different colors. This was what Katka must have done. She must have hoped, as the guilt from sleeping with Tee ate at her, that Pavel would paint himself back to self-reliance. If they were lucky, the mural could get on the news. Rockefeller still had a few favors he could call in.

“Promise me,” Pavel said. And Rockefeller agreed. He had to know that Pavel forgave him for the attack. “I will paint for you. You must do what you see.”

Along the river, the flood continued. Pavel asked for the radio. Zoo workers euthanized an elephant that might otherwise have rampaged in through the city. Someone got injured in the explosions. Rescue workers canoed downriver into Karlín. Had Tee and Katka gotten out? Pavel scraped his shoes on the ladder and muttered to himself, “You’ll be sorry.” Rockefeller pretended not to hear.

In the morning, Rockefeller would walk back to Pavel’s house to fetch them breakfast, and entering through the kitchen door, would hear voices. In the morning, after painting water all night, Pavel would outline a body in the bottom corner of a flood. Rockefeller would return to the café unsure how to bring up Tee and Katka, but in the mural, he would recognize the tint of the drowned body, the wave of black hair. And Pavel would step down from the ladder and rest his casts on a rung. “You promised. I need you to stop Tee. Blind him, drown him, just make sure he leaves.” Rockefeller would wish he felt more surprised.

CHAPTER 4
THE HUNDRED-YEAR FLOOD: TEE AND KATKA

I

The day before the flood, August 12, 2002, the rain fell from early in the morning, but Katka didn’t show. Tee went to an Internet café to escape the wanting. At the top of his in-box was his mother’s e-mail. He read it in a daze. When he left the Internet café, he forgot his umbrella, but he didn’t think this linked him to Katka. He kept moving. Strangers shuttled by in the rain. Back in his apartment, he took down the painting of the Russian tank treading over a woman—over Katka—in Old Town, his final thank-you for modeling. He had meant to do so ever since his trip back to Boston. He hung Mucha’s “Seasons” instead: four half-nude women for a year. From his dresser, he removed the last stolen objects and set them in clear view. He wasn’t hiding. Outside, the streets echoed, and he cursed the constant construction. He swept and mopped and washed dishes and waited for another man’s wife. Once, he almost called the Globe to ask where Ynez had gone, single Ynez. She had quit, at least in part, because of him. How should he understand that? He held his phone like one of the objects on his dresser, like it didn’t belong to him except by whatever mysterious instinct had made him take it. What if Ynez had gotten pregnant? What if Katka got pregnant? Would that unite or split them apart? What was his birth mother like pregnant? The tremor of skin as he kicked inside? By the time Katka appeared on the sidewalk below, in the night, her head bent and water slicking off her dark brown hair, he was dialing his father.

He hung up and pressed the buzzer to let Katka in. He timed his steps to the door with her steps on the stairs. Then he pulled her inside. He kissed her rain-wet lips and hugged her as she shivered. What had happened in Korea twenty-two years ago didn’t matter like the woman in his arms now. He slipped his hand up under the wet back of her blouse. Her cool skin, her cold lips, grew warm. He kissed her neck, swept her hair over her ear, and when a knock came at the door, he answered it as if there were two of her.

Rockefeller stood before them. For a moment Tee thought he was dreaming. He’d exposed Katka—he could read this in Rockefeller’s trembling chin, though Rockefeller had said he knew about them. The difference between knowing and seeing. Katka shivered in her wet clothes and covered her chest.

A flood? Tee felt flooded by memories that could confirm or disprove his mother’s e-mail. “What are you talking about?” he asked. Rockefeller whispered in Czech, and Katka slipped into the bedroom. Briefly Rockefeller’s face reddened. He backed out.

“Rockefeller,” Katka said, when she returned to the hall. She rubbed her lips, and Tee kissed her bitterly. When their mouths parted, she said, “I was not trying to make you to kiss me.”

He held his breath and kissed her again. “I’m sorry,” he said. “Rockefeller already knew about us.” He remembered the bustle, earlier, outside his window.

“I have left Pavel,” she said.

Immediately Tee was in Korea. His father stood over him, deciding. Tee’s container filled. He tugged at Katka’s wet blouse. The fabric bunched and stuck to her skin, as he rolled it upward, awkwardly. It covered her eyes, and he kissed her while she was still blind. She shivered and slipped free of the blouse, turned for him to get her bra. He licked one nipple, then the other. Her breaths grew louder. She peeled off her underwear and he led her toward the bedroom. They made it as far as the couch—she still had on her boots, he still had on his shirt and socks. She bit his shoulder as he moved inside of her, and he said, “You have left him.”

“You heard that, then. My marriage is over.”

He pressed her against the arm of the couch. He felt her hip bones, hard sharp curves under his fingers. She was his birth mother, he admitted in that instant. He was his father. Her long black hair, three freckles beside her mouth. He didn’t even have to transform—in his mind’s eye, he had always been a white kid with a curved nose and raised eyebrow.

He kissed her collarbone. She moaned. He fit his hips into hers, pulling her waist with both hands. He wanted to be deeper. He pushed against her. He wanted to be so deep they might switch bodies: he white, she Asian. He shut his eyes, and she pulled him onto the cushions. He slipped an arm around her, under her armpits. Her back was strong and athletic. She raked her nails down his ribs. He moved faster, panting now. She arched her chest into his, he felt their sweat and heat. Her skin slick already. She was turning her hips slightly, in rhythm. His eyes were still shut. He wondered if she had noticed he wasn’t looking at her. But then she called his name—and he heard her voice, he kissed her mouth, he felt her breasts. She held him still for a moment, and he opened his eyes. She rocked her hips again, cradling her arms around his back, and he returned to his senses.

II

As soon as Katka had stepped away from the house in Malešice, just after midnight, she had heard the signs of the flood for the first time. All day she and Pavel had moved from one room to another, not eating, yelling at each other to stop, please, and listen. Around sunset the phone interrupted them, twice, and then a third time, and he kicked the cord free of the wall. She insulted his art, then she forced herself not to apologize, then she pitied him. They argued in the kitchen, alarmingly close to the knives.

When she said at last that she was cheating, he paled and said, “You’re lying? The American?” She could hardly believe it when he mumbled that she was a gypsy whore like her grandmother. His casts crashed the dishes on the counter to the floor, and she grabbed her calf. Her leg pulsed. Her fingers came away red. She reached past him for a kitchen towel, held her breath, and pressed the towel to the cut. He reached forward, as if to help. She heard his casts scratch together, his latest tic, and he stepped back again. She pictured Tee’s wide forehead, which already wrinkled when he grew skeptical. Once, sweeping up after a meal, she’d told Tee to keep his feet on the floor or he would never marry, and his forehead had creased so deeply he didn’t look like himself.

“He doesn’t even know who he is,” Pavel said.

Later, after she left him, she walked alone under the streetlamps to the stop for the 51 night tram. The light shone close to the posts in the rain. She had forgotten an umbrella. The rain beat down, wetting her hair to her head. A couple stumbled along drunk, talking about the flood. A siren rang out in the distance. She would catch the 51 and then the 52, and hopefully, Tee would be awake when she surprised him. He would be in the same private space as she, ignorant of natural disasters, his Czech poor and his flat without telly or radio.

Her heel caught an edge of the cobblestone, and the pain in her calf squirmed up her leg and into the roots of her teeth. Rainwater slid down the side of her boot and stung her. She walked slowly, watched where she placed her feet.

She tried not to feel alone.

The tram came after five minutes, pulling up without its lights on—malfunction, she wondered, or error. She recalled an accident weeks earlier. A tourist had crossed the tracks without looking, and the tram flipped over trying to avoid him. She sat by the door and held the safety bar over the seat in front of her. Her hands still trembling from leaving her husband. Water dripped off her hair into her lap.

She imagined Tee, asleep in his apartment in the middle of Karlín. Soon she would be beside him—at night, for once—his warmth against her cold skin. She saw his smooth shut eyelids, under that wide forehead, as he slept. She didn’t worry yet about the flood. Though legend had it that Old Town would be destroyed by water, the believer in her was all burned up.

As the tram neared the city center, wooden blockades appeared, many with white sandbags piled in front of them, especially closer to the river. They pulled into Karlovo Náměstí. In the square, she noticed people arguing, a tension in the night, fewer cars than usual. She stepped down to change trams. Nearby, two skateboarders argued with a policeman. They said their families wouldn’t leave home for a flood that would never come. The policeman said he was only passing through. He said evacuation orders were, as far as he knew, rumor. She saw more sandbags, piled up like the city was in a war.

A woman walked up to her and asked if she had a light while her brother or boyfriend or husband held a golf umbrella over the three of them. Katka shook her head, but asked about the weather. The umbrella kept the water out of her boots.

“Oh, you poor dear,” the woman said, noticing her lack. “Keep it over her.” She touched the arm of the man, probably her lover. He held the umbrella higher so Katka didn’t have to hunch.

The man said hadn’t she heard? The rain was supposed to fall all day again tomorrow, and maybe the day after as well. He said the Vltava would rise up into Old Town and throughout the Jewish Quarter to Karlín.

Katka shivered and thanked them for the shelter.

“We’re here on vacation from Plzeň,” the woman said. “What bad timing!”

The man smiled and kissed her forehead. Katka stayed under the umbrella until the 52 came. As the couple walked away, the woman said there were still kind strangers out there, as if Katka had said there weren’t.

The tram went through Wenceslas Square, where a number of drunk youths crowded on, and she thought about her husband, rubbing his casts together in the rain. It was a simple decision
,
she thought. She felt the press of Tee’s hands on her waist. Tee had climbed the tree after her; Pavel had tried to knock them down. The best Pavel could manage anymore was a painting of Tee.

A man on the tram leaned in and asked if she was okay, and she wiped her eyes and said, “And what would you do if I am not?” He turned away.

She got off the tram in Karlín and walked along the street toward Tee’s flat. She remembered him coming to the hospital to check on Pavel’s wrists—she’d tried to love only her husband, but as she walked away, she carried Tee with her, like a word on the tip of her tongue.

Later, in his apartment, when they lay on the floor beside each other, cooling off and turning transparent, like a glass slid out of a kiln, he turned on his side and went quiet. He pulled off his shirt, rolled his socks off his feet. He needed to say something but couldn’t. Through the doorway to the bedroom, she caught the shape of Pavel’s Golem on his chest of drawers—the same statue? She ignored the pain in her leg that returned as the endorphins from making love faded. She waited, and knew they should leave, but decided not to say so until he talked himself out. Tiredness soaked through her, as wet and heavy as the rain. All day she’d been leaving: one place for another, one lover for another, one generation for another. She wanted to stay, she didn’t want to go anywhere that held even the threat of her husband, but she also knew they had to get out of Karlín.

III

He touched the five chicken-pox scars on his chest. Then he spread her fingers out with his own until their two hands formed five little steeples, like in a children’s rhyme he couldn’t quite recall. He moved her fingers over the scars and she stretched her fingertips to align with the dots. “What is wrong?” she asked.

When her hand moved, he told her about his birth mother’s photograph, how he’d caught the two diseases in the woods, trying to share as much as he could. He said when he was fifteen, he’d found his mother alone in his room—his adoptive mother—staring at the photo. “I discovered it under your socks?” she said. “You have her eyes, at least?” She seemed about to add something more, to explain that lingering “at least,” but his father’s car hummed in the drive. She dropped the photo and sucked her lips between her teeth. He felt his container filling. After she left, he threw the photo away in the bathroom, so she wouldn’t find it in his bedroom again. He thought she was angry with him, or heartbroken. He worried that she might think he cared more about his birth mother than about her. But he was also ashamed to be caught, ashamed that he’d been looking at the photograph night after night. Later he dug it out of the trash can and hid it in a wallet he never used.

He told Katka he’d made his birth mother, in his mind, into a woman who wished to leave Korea; he’d made lives for her in which she met foreigners and fell in love. He said, “I wanted my birth to be planned, I guess. I wanted to be born out of love. Even if that meant my birth father had broken her heart by the time I was born.”

He held Katka’s hand over his chest again. “Now I know I had nothing to do with love. I found out today—yesterday. My mom sent me an e-mail. She didn’t even call. My dad never adopted me. He slept with my birth mother.”

He rubbed his face on his shoulder. “How could I not have known?” he asked. “We look similar. Mom said I used to ask about my adoption when I was a kid, and later, I just stopped.”

Katka swerved her boots across the floor, and grimaced. “Go on,” she said when he paused. He shook his head.

“I don’t have anything else to say,” he said. “Dad used to say the instant he saw me, he knew we were family. He used to say that all the time. I thought his love was a choice.”

She said, as if reading his mind, “Your life is your own.”

“Yes,” he said. “But only if you admit what you’re doing. I went to the same college as him, I left my mom behind, I got into an affair. I didn’t even realize, until now, that I was replaying my past.”

“You have not got into an affair,” she said, her eyes red. “I have done. And it is not an affair. I left him.”

“Maybe you’re right,” he said. “It’s not the same.” But the words died in his mouth.

“You are an asshole if you think you are just replaying something with me.”

A feather caught in his throat. The rain echoed around them, drumming on as the sun rose. He lay with his back flat on the floor, and after a while, she rested her head in the crook of his arm. The hardwood was cool as he smoothed his hand over it, but there was nothing to hold or stow or take.