The Hundred-Year Flood (6 page)

II

The morning of Pavel’s attack, Tee took a taxi to the hospital. Katka met him in the hall. Her brown hair hung unbrushed, and she wore a black coat over a boxy dress. She took a step toward him, then stopped and wiped her hands on her coat. “He doesn’t want to see you.”

Tee’s head split, a Red Sea of alcohol. “Rockefeller wouldn’t tell me everything.”

She said Rockefeller had hidden nearby and let Pavel get beaten.

“He said he couldn’t do anything.”

She stood just out of reach, shaking her head, yet waiting, as if to give Tee a chance to say something to bring her to his arms.

“It’s not your fault,” he said. “And it’s not mine.”

“I have got to take care of him,” she said, “is what I have got to do now.” She buttoned her coat as if suddenly cold and turned her tall figure down the hall with a sweep of her arm.

Tee started after her and called out, “I was wrong, in the closet.” For a moment she put her palm to the wall, as if to brace herself, but she didn’t turn back. He tried to speak so that she would understand what he meant. His voice cracked, and he couldn’t find her scent in all the cleanliness. “I think maybe I don’t have to close the door on myself. It’s like a revolution. You want a revolution to change things. But you really want it because it will make you more yourself.”

“It is not a revolution,” she murmured. She stepped into the room to her husband.

Tee slapped his hand against the wall, and his fingertips rang with pain.

In the corner of his eye, something moved. He remembered the calf the night before. He was about to follow what he had seen when a doctor walked up.

Tee asked about the artist’s condition. The doctor pointed to his wrists. “Broke. Need surgery. How you know Pavel Picasso?”

“Will he paint again?” Tee asked.

“This injury”—the doctor tapped his head—“may be mental impact. Physical he will be okay. We fix him.”

“Mental impact?”

“Mental,” the doctor repeated.

Tee thanked him. Then he walked out through the white halls into the rain.

After the attack, Tee and Rockefeller were no longer welcome at the house in Malešice. Tee blamed himself: he had wanted them all to get drunk. He tried to visit, twice, but no one would let him inside. A policeman showed up at Tee’s apartment to question him. Tee asked what the chances were of catching the attackers. “How you say it?” the policeman said. “Zero.” Tee imagined American faces bearing down on the artist. More and more, he found himself across the hall or at the Globe. Rockefeller brooded, hunched into the collars of sports jackets. Tee asked about the flying horse on the bar sign in Vyšehrad: Šemik, Rockefeller said, that broke its leg jumping over a wall to save its master’s life. Tee went by the Globe even when he wasn’t on schedule. Ynez joked that he had gone back to Boston to fall more in love with Prague. “It’s not like you have to know what you’re running away from,” she teased, “to run away.” Ever since that night of drinking, he had kept his relationship with her to the Globe. As if stepping outside would be more bad luck. He bought a book on the maidens’ army, on the betrayals that led the sexes to war. He wrote myths in the margins of myths. In his, a version of him dammed up the Vltava, a boulder a day, rearranging the map of Prague. A version of him stomped on the hill Blaník to rouse its army of dead. A version of him broke into the Orloj and hung on the enormous gears until everything, everyone, slowed.

Ynez read over his shoulder. “Are you supposed to be Czech in these stories?” She chewed her pen. “Are those our books?”

“If I’m trying to run away from myself,” he said, “can’t you just let me?”

“Now who do you think I am?”

He slipped her pen cap into his pocket. When he didn’t answer her, she said, “Where do pigs park? A porking lot.”

He laughed and clutched at his chest.

“It’s not that funny,” she said. She narrowed her eyes. Finally she said, “What are you afraid of? Is this about your birth mother, your birth father?”

Tee raised a single eyebrow—his father’s gesture, which Tee had copied, at first, because it made him look like a pirate. “What am I afraid of?” He told her how Pavel had stared at him that night, unblinking, before shattering the mug. He had stepped in front of her, Ynez, for fear not of Rockefeller but of Pavel. Ynez seemed confused why he should be afraid of the artist.

Tee remembered what Katka had said about lies. She had rubbed her nose and said, “This means you are telling the truth.” Then she’d rubbed his. “Your nose is too soft,” she’d said. “Do all Asians have soft noses?”

Pavel kept to his bed through most of May. The Globe filled with gossip. Rumor reported a successful surgery: two screws in each wrist, under twin casts. Tee imagined Pavel pulling up the blanket with his teeth, shivering like an addict. His fingers itching for a brush, his lips sucking for a cigarette. Each time Tee called the house in Malešice, Katka waited just long enough to know it was him before hanging up. Tee bought all the books he’d written in in the Globe and hid them under his bed.

The few expats the artist did allow over, Rockefeller invited to his apartment. He hosted dinner party after dinner party. The art dealer’s daughter, Vanessa, said the bedroom studio was a mess of clothes, dishes. She’d seen an easel, in one corner, kicked in half. Pavel wouldn’t let Katka touch it. Vanessa said she had lit cigarettes and placed them in his mouth; he’d nearly bitten her. She had gotten the feeling he wanted to. “Jára Cimrman lit his cigarettes with lightning,” Tee said. No one mentioned the specifics of the attack.

In the Globe the staff sometimes went quiet when they saw Tee coming. Once, he overheard a woman with a book on Pavel’s art say she was buying it because the artist was going crazy. Someone she knew in the Czech art world had gone by the house in Malešice, and Pavel had shouted for a full hour about certain young artists borrowing culture from the Americans, as if he blamed her friend and was about to stab him through the heart with a paintbrush. The cashier glanced in Tee’s direction. But Tee knew Pavel couldn’t lift a brush; that must have been embellishment. After the woman left, the cashier asked if Tee was okay, as if he was the one to be pitied, not Pavel. Ynez crept closer to hear his answer. Tee said the book the woman had bought was a good one.

One afternoon, while Tee killed time in an Internet café before work, he found an e-mail from his father. A link to a blog, of all things.
Finally in Hollywood
, his father wrote.
Apologies to my wife. Must get this film made or die trying. Heck, it’s my best attempt to forgive myself.

A couple of days later:
Had lunch with a film guy
.
I drew him a picture of my brother’s crash. If only he knew everything I knew, he’d back this movie in a second. Why doesn’t anyone see things as I see them? If you’re out there, pray for me.

Tee wondered if his father meant him, or maybe his uncle.

Finally Tee set a date with Ynez at the Cuban-Irish bar in New Town, O’Che’s, where they stood no chance of running into Katka or Pavel or Rockefeller. They sat under the arched ceiling in the back, beside a stained-glass window of Che Guevara. Ynez asked what had taken so long; couldn’t he tell she was waiting for him? He remembered his aunt and uncle babysitting once while his parents saw a movie. Half-asleep, he’d heard his aunt enter the master bedroom. Drawers squeaked open. Then his uncle’s footsteps came upstairs, and the room quieted. Tee had tiptoed across the hall and heard the bed squeak. What had his aunt found that she’d tried to erase through sex?

In the bar, Tee noticed the noise of other Americans, the bravado. “I don’t know what’s wrong with me,” he said, scratching the lip of the table. “You’re right, I should have noticed.”

Ynez said, “You’re starting this date with ‘It’s not you, it’s me’?”

He ordered shots of absinthe.
Just be a tourist
, he thought.
Someone who can take things or leave them.
Ynez modeled how to wet the sugar and light the spoon on fire, waiting out the flame before stirring sweet into the bitter licorice liquor.

The bar blurred at the edges. “Why did you choose this place?” she asked. “It’s awful.”

Outside, as they walked toward the night tram, he pulled her into him. She stumbled against his chest. A tenor sax whined over Wenceslas Square. It rained.

“For someone with a fear of abandonment,” she said when he covered her with his body. Then she stopped, one heel catching against the cobblestone.

“Is that what I have?” he asked, his heart pounding.

In her bedroom he pressed his face between her breasts, breathing her in. He would not be his father, not drive people away and pretend he was the one who’d left. He didn’t have anything to deny or atone for. But he kept premeditating his kisses. Beside her ear, under her chin, in the hollow of her throat.

She dug her nails into his back. “What are you staring at?”

She had a girlish room, unembarrassed by stuffed animals. He realized he was looking for the ghost.

“Fuck me,” she said, surprising him.

He twisted awkwardly and slid off the bed. She sucked in a sharp breath. He bit his lips and felt for the pile of clothes with his foot in the darkened room. When she pulled the comforter over her head, he carried the pile into the bathroom.

He lay in his bed that night cursing himself.

The next day, Tee climbed over the railing in Vyšehrad and sat on the cliff above the Vltava. Sailboats struggled to tack against the wind. Back in the ruins, a little boy knelt in the prayer maze, eyes closed. When the boy left, Tee walked into the center. He found a tiny blue thimble, just big enough to catch a drop of rain.

III

The tree was a magnificent sugar maple at least a century old. “It makes the garden come together,” Katka had said, meaning
garden
in the British sense. The maple reached up from the middle of the yard like a many-fingered hand beneath the green glove of leaves. It was weeks after Pavel’s attack. A neighbor had called Rockefeller for help in the middle of a party, and all the guests had gone down to Malešice together. Katka balanced on a branch twenty feet above the ground, in the tree because of her husband.

Later she would tell Tee how Pavel had gotten the paintings out of the closet, somehow, and into the bedroom, how she had found him in the middle of them, as Tee had been months earlier. She had been cooking lunch. Pavel asked her to move his art into the kitchen. He often had strange requests for his work. She set the canvases in four rows, the painted sides to the wall, protected from the splattering gulaš. When she was done, he stood in front of her and kissed her.

Out of nowhere he lodged one cast against her chest, already holding her back, and with the other cast, he tipped the largest painting into the stove. When it caught fire, he kicked the canvases out of the house and into the wet grass. He was lucky he hadn’t burned down the neighborhood.

Beneath the tree, Tee didn’t know where to look: what was left of the paintings smoldered nearby; Katka’s white limbs shone through the leaves as she swayed in the sway of the wind; Pavel yelled below, stomping in a bathrobe; the other guests pulled bottles from pockets and predicted a storm; the neighbor stepped back, rubbing his cheeks; Rockefeller yanked his jacket off his wide shoulders and beat at the dying flames. Tee guessed a storm would only affect Katka’s grip. The art was beyond saving. The already damp ground had contained the blaze. The smoke itched in Tee’s eyes, and when he wiped them clear, there was a second glow at the base of the tree. For a moment he thought he had been wrong and the tree was about to light up. But then the glow became a foot, as if the tree had flipped upside down and was about to walk away. Tee wiped his hands on his shorts and stepped forward, and the foot disappeared. Tee reached for the lowest branch, putting the ghost out of his mind. He swung a knee over. Katka waited in the middle of the branches, one place Pavel’s casts could never reach her.

“How did you get so high?” Tee called up to her. “Are you okay?” Sap stuck to his skin. One off-move might send both of them falling. Her eyes shone clearly, even from fifteen feet above. She had tan shorts on, and her legs were scraped red by the bark.

Pavel circled the maple and yelled up in iambic English: “Stay out of it. It’s privacy. I told you never coming back here.” He tried to cross his arms, then remembered his casts and gave up. One of the guests asked if they should get a blanket for Katka to jump into. Pavel shouted that he would make Tee sorry. The wind carried his warning.

It was the first time since his uncle had died that Tee had felt the force of the wind. On the flight simulator on his parents’ computer, he had nosed down again and again, never able to save himself. Katka wrapped herself completely around her branch, shivering.

Rockefeller stomped toward Pavel, and the two of them shouted in Czech, arguing or threatening. Their voices grew, then softened. Tee focused on the climb, shutting out everything else. “Hold on,” he said. “I’ll help you.” He climbed another few branches before the voices drew back into the house. Maybe Rockefeller would get forgiveness after all, the thing he most wanted.

When Tee was four or five feet beneath her, Katka asked, “What do I mean to you, that you would climb up to me?”

He felt a strange mixture of anticipation and regret, as if the question of
meaning
was a mysterious box they’d been saving to open.
I want to know something about you that no one else knows
, she had said before she showed him the same paintings that now burned below them.

“Rain’s coming,” he said stupidly.

He managed to stand on his branch and get closer. The wind pulled at the threads of his balance. He waited for his container to give him weight, but he was light, emptying.

“He burned the paintings,” she said, “and all I could say was ‘fire.’”

Tee wrapped one arm around the trunk and pictured Pavel standing over the images of her, which he had made and then destroyed. Tee pictured Katka running past the fire to the tree, not knowing what she was doing. She hid herself where everyone could see her. Tee didn’t want her to feel more exposed.

“Remember
The Giving Tree
?” she said. “I gave everything to Pavel.”

“I’m sorry. I don’t know where to begin.”

“Do not say you are sorry. Do not ever be sorry. The thing about pity is you can never take it back.”

“I wasn’t pitying you.” The sky seemed to close its jaws. Had she climbed the tree then because of that book? Once, while Pavel was painting in the bedroom, she had said that she
wanted
to love like the giving tree—without reservation. “Come down,” Tee said, fumbling upward. “Things will change now.”

She blinked and her eyes opened somehow bluer than before.

Below, a shout went up, and then Pavel sprinted across the lawn. Rockefeller close behind him. The air was full of static, like a TV channel had gone dead. Someone didn’t want to watch anymore, Tee thought. Katka coughed, or stifled a hurt cry.

“Get out!” Pavel shouted as he ran toward them. “Get out of Prague!”

The sky dropped as if drawn to the smoke from the paintings.

Rockefeller reached forward. But at the crack of thunder, Pavel leapt and threw his back against the trunk. Tee held on as the tree shuddered. He heard the hiss of the fire as water washed down the bark. He looked for Katka. For an instant, he thought of Pavel’s art, but it was black with ash, irrecoverable.

Katka shouted from her branch. Even in the chaos, Tee sensed she had more to say. He wished he could wait for her, forget the wind and the rain and the height. He wanted to listen without reservation. But he had lost his hold. Pavel and Rockefeller stood out like airbags, ten, eight, six feet below. Tee slammed into someone’s shoulder, and they collapsed together, in a heap. Tee’s ribs clanged like a bell. They lay on the grass, and the rain plunged into their eyes, tiny divers aiming for mistaken pools.