The Hundred-Year Flood (2 page)

III

The artist went by the nickname Pavel Picasso. He had become famous during the Velvet Revolution in 1989, when Prague intellectuals had led a nonviolent revolt against the Communists. His art, as one critic had slyly put it, punning on “Communism with a human face,” excelled at a “faceless humanism.” Pavel Picasso was a man of average height, average build, but rare intensity. It seemed to Tee as if some inner measure pulled the outer reaches of the artist’s body and personality toward a central point. Sometimes paint stained Pavel’s mouth as if it started inside him. He chewed his knuckles as he worked. He thought with his hands in his armpits. Tee would spend much of January and February of 2002 posing in the studio in the artist’s bedroom, trying to be worthy of intensity.

While Pavel painted, his wife, Katka, would tell legends like that of the Devil’s Pillar, dropped by the devil through the roof of the basilica in Vyšehrad. She would wave her hand as if to call the past onto stage. She was a tall woman, never awkward about her height, with brown hair to her shoulders and high, round cheekbones. She could sweep out her arms and take over the room. When she wasn’t talking, she brewed tea, cooked breakfast and lunch. But domesticity didn’t seem natural to her. Tee would move to help her, and Pavel would peer down his cigarette and tell him to hold his pose. “Now try to being more American,” Pavel would say. It was nerve-racking to Tee, being objectified by an artist’s gaze—he was used to being an object of dismissal. He tightened his jaw. Sweat under his chin.

Early in the morning before Tee’s first visit to the artist’s house, he stood in front of his bathroom mirror for longer than usual, wondering what Pavel Picasso would see. As soon as Tee turned away from his reflection, he would forget it. He knew this.

Katka had sketched a map to Malešice on his palm. When he arrived at the house, she led him into the bedroom, where light pooled through two high windows. She walked quickly on her tall frame, and he had to hurry to keep up, even for those few steps. He didn’t want them to think he had stopped to examine their lives. On their walls hung completed puzzles, elegantly framed, not paintings. There was a photo from their wedding: only their shaggy hairstyles seemed to have aged. He was surprised at how ordinary the couple seemed, sober and without fireworks. Katka pointed to a chair across from where Pavel was setting up, and Tee sat with his head in his hands, then straightened up so that they wouldn’t think he was having second thoughts.

Katka knelt and looked directly into his eyes. That blue was hypnotic, the inner blue of fire. “Where in America did you leave?” He was glad, at least, that she asked
leave
, that she believed in his dispossession. And who else, when he had stripped all the way down, had wanted to make something of him?

“You’re not expecting me to undress again?” he asked, blushing.

She pointed to his hand. “You could have copied the map.” He hadn’t thought of that. If he had erased the route on his skin, he might not have come.

The first, and best, painting of Tee depicted a dark figure rising off his toes beside the Orloj, a ghost learning to let go of the earth. Below his black bangs, Tee’s cheeks burned red with faith. He had never seen in himself this odd credulity. The recognition stuck in his throat, scratching as he breathed. He wondered if his Korean half—some moment during his first months of life, after his birth mother’s death but before adoption—was responsible. He remembered a piece of family lore about how he had learned to walk. He had refused to crawl, only stood until his legs held up his will. His mother had said it was like watching someone recall who he was. Katka said Pavel painted more real than life.

By the end of his first week, Katka had given Tee a short version of her own history, how she had run off from her mother and her small town, Beroun, in 1984, to go to university in Prague. She spoke English with a slight British accent, inherited from her late father; behind the rising intonation was her mother’s guttural Czech. Hard consonants, throated vowels, rolled, nearly hiccupped
r
’s—Tee found the combination exciting, like a car race in which one watches to see how the next crash might unfold. “I wanted a new life then,” she said. “Heaps of us did.” She reached over and readjusted his pose, and he realized that she and her husband somehow worked together, though only Pavel held a brush. Her confidence was different than Pavel’s—it wasn’t based on a talent. It was more mysterious, like the faith in Tee’s cheeks.

That first week, Katka told a legend about the Orloj’s maker, Hanuš. Upon the clock’s completion, an executioner blinded him with a hot poker. “The city’s orders,” Katka said, “so that he could never make another.” She smiled, and turned her wrist as if to bore Tee through each eye. “Then the story splits in two. At some point the clock broke. Some say Hanuš took revenge. He threw himself into the gears. Others say the clock broke on its own, and no one but Hanuš could fix it. He fixed what he had got blinded for making.”

“Either way,” Tee said, “that’s a man who knew what could live forever.”

Pavel snapped his fingers. “Stop moving.”

For a moment Tee had nearly forgotten he was being painted.

“Tell me,” Katka said, “do you know a book called
The Giving Tree
?” She folded her hands.

“Are you asking because it can help Pavel paint me?”

“She asking anyone who’s speaking English,” Pavel said.

Katka explained that
The Giving Tree
had been her father’s favorite book to read to her. Tee knew it. The tree gives up its apples, its branches, its trunk, for a boy.

“I always thought that story was so beautiful, but my dad read it like a warning. Later, he killed himself.” There was a long pause. “What were you like as a kid?”

Tee rubbed his eyebrow and marveled that she could mention suicide so easily. Was that when she had left for Prague? They might understand each other. “Most of the time, I did what I was told. Then all of a sudden, I would break a window or run away.”

He asked if she believed in her legends, and she shrugged. Then she tousled his hair. “You are too young for these old stories to interest you.” She and Pavel were fifteen years his senior. Tee wondered again why they had chosen him to model.

Once, about a week into their sessions, she said, “Are you ready to say why you came here yet? Was it because of the terror attacks? You seem like you have got some dark past.”

“I came here,” Tee started—but then he didn’t want to look like a kid sighing about his uncle—“because here my past doesn’t matter.”

He wished to explain better. Prague had resisted centuries of violence with a peaceful revolution. He tried again. “I came here because here I’m the only one who determines who I am.” Why did that sound like
finding himself
? He wasn’t wasting his uncle’s money, or affection. His container grew fuller. With a start, he couldn’t remember if he had undressed, after all. He glanced down, though, of course, he was clothed.

“You look like you saw a ghost,” Katka said.

Pavel reminded him, once again, to keep still.

Each day, as his body came to life on the canvas, Tee would wait to hear about Katka’s and Pavel’s pasts, and the city’s. His own past he avoided—nothing about him seemed equal to either of them. His accomplishments were Most Sportsmanlike at soccer camp, two years on the school newspaper, one TV appearance to give his reaction to a series of campus robberies, the ability to drink a beer faster than anyone else in his book club. Pavel and Katka would never have seemed equal to each other without art. Her length and self-assurance; his tics and self-containment, always curled up, seeming smaller than he was. At times, Tee wasn’t sure if it was the stories or being painted that he liked more. Her crashing voice kept him still and rapt. But taking shape, as the artist saw him, Tee almost felt he had a purpose in Prague.

It wasn’t long, though, before Pavel handed over an old painting as a thank-you and said Tee didn’t have to come anymore. Katka leaned forward. Tee smelled cocoa butter, noticed her lipstick printed on her cup. He wanted to rub a piece of paper over the print. How long did it take to finish a painting? Surely years, or at least months.

“What is it?” Katka asked, squinting.

It was just as she had said. In the paintings, he was more real than life. His original self had been replaced. He pointed to her cheek. “You have something there.” She ran her finger along her nose, and without thinking, he licked his thumb and pressed it to her skin. He lifted off an eyelash. Before he could pull away, she held his wrist and blew on his thumb.

Pavel stomped, and his brown hair flopped over his craggy brows. He puffed it aside. He said these were the last touches and Tee should shut his eyes if he couldn’t stop.

Tee felt like a child, but he did shut them. With his eyes closed, he realized how tired he was. Though he’d done nothing all day but pose. He heard Katka start a new legend, about the hill Blaník, as if nothing had changed, at least for her. In the darkness, he became terrified of losing them, of losing that gaze on him and the stories that contextualized the city. He didn’t realize yet how much he needed them to contextualize him. He squeezed his eyelids tighter and the room expanded and then contracted. He pictured his father with a camcorder, taking one of his home videos: Pavel Picasso painting furiously, Katka narrating some deeper mystery, Tee a stranger in a strange land. His father, who had slept with his aunt. That had nothing to do with Tee. Heat pressed his thigh, and he opened his eyes. His leg was touching Katka’s. She put a hand on his knee, to reassure him or to question his alarm.

“Close eyes,” Pavel said again.

Tee didn’t make any move until Katka’s palm lifted. When he had broken up with his ex in Boston, she had said he was the same as his father. “You will only ever want the wrong woman,” she’d said, meaning she should have known they weren’t right for each other.

Katka stood and went to her husband’s side. She hummed some Czech tune, and Pavel’s frown faded.

After lunch, Pavel again tried to hand over the thank-you painting. “Why stop now?” Tee said. “You could do a bigger series. You could try a gallery in New York.” Without the sessions, Tee might simply return to New Year’s, trying and failing to explode. Pavel clamped his hands in his armpits and said Tee’s suggestion was what his closest friend, a Czech with an American name, Rockefeller, had been advising for years.

Katka turned Tee gently by the shoulder. “Wait a second. Do you mind?” she asked. He hesitated, then stepped outside beside the big maple tree dusted with snow. He walked around it several times, until he lost count. He made a snowball, but had no target. His hands grew numb. Finally he held the snow to his face, the cold waking him up.

When Katka called him back, the smell inside the kitchen still thick with meat and cabbage, she said he could return tomorrow. She pulled apart a knot in her hair and grimaced. He didn’t know who had wanted him and who hadn’t.

That night, he lay in bed picturing Pavel’s hands curled into claws.
Could
, Katka had said, not
should.
Though she was speaking her second language. Tee hadn’t even looked at the thank-you painting. He didn’t know what exactly Pavel had been trying to give him. Maybe it wasn’t a painting but one of the puzzles Katka had hung around the house. Tee was intrigued by her puzzle-making, the things about her that didn’t make sense with her legends. Once every other week, she went to the cinema, but she only watched documentaries. She looked up the story beforehand. She wasn’t interested in the mystery of what happened but in its representation, in how it was put together by someone else.

After that
could
, Pavel had said the subject should choose the next pose—that was why Tee couldn’t sleep now. He had thought this was a serious request. He had spread his fingers across his chest, and then he hadn’t known what to do with his other hand. He hadn’t known whether to sit or to stand. He held his palm stiffly over his heart, as if to pledge allegiance. For the first time, he heard Pavel laugh. When Tee woke, he couldn’t find pants to match his shirt, though he had worn that shirt a dozen times and had laid out an outfit the night before.

On days Pavel was happy with his work, he would join them in telling legends. His accent was like a Shakespearean character’s, iambic, weighted with beats. He liked to talk about a famous Czech hero, Jára Cimrman, who had never actually existed. “So Cimrman crossed ocean in a steamboat,” he would say. Or “So Cimrman took submarine to moon.” Cimrman had climbed the Andes, braved the Arctic, suggested the Panama Canal but never got the credit. Katka teased these stories out of him, laughing, but Tee didn’t get the joke.

Tee wished they would tell him more about life under Communism. Whenever the subject came up, his hip twinged as if he might walk, by accident, into a decades-old rally. One afternoon a small group protested a former Communist prime minister’s acquittal. Pavel and Katka went with their friend with the American name, Rockefeller. The next morning, when Katka described how Pavel had seemed ready to smash a painting over a policeman’s head, Tee made his way across the room. “What was it like?” he demanded, “the Revolution?” He imagined falling in love over art, brushstrokes inciting a nation to freedom, Pavel’s paintings hanging on the facade of the museum in Wenceslas Square, an idealist burning himself beneath.

Pavel sighed and traded brush for cigarette. “It was like something, history, could never being stopped.”

Tee felt his armpits sweat, a change in circulation. “I want to understand,” he said. “There was so much against you. You must have had a lot of conviction.” His elbow bumped the easel. He ignored the shiver up his arm.

Pavel steadied the canvas. “Impossible to understand,” he said. “When I’m eleven, I saw boys I knew once try to kill a man in alley. They are taking nothing, only putting knife in him and running. Maybe he is living, maybe not. I didn’t know they Secret Police or he was, maybe no one.”