The Hundred-Year Flood (7 page)

IV

The next day, Katka called to thank Tee for climbing after her. They met in a café in Karlín, an out-of-the-way basement Pavel and Rockefeller hated. A series of chambers extended underground. Tee dressed in a blue designer button-down, though with his usual khaki shorts and thong sandals. He wore the cologne his ex-girlfriend had given him, the only bottle he owned, though he didn’t know if this was a good idea. He got to the café early. He wanted, for once, to be waiting for Katka. He ordered a Pilsner to calm his nerves. Fifteen minutes passed. She might have changed her mind. Someone stepped down the stairs, then turned on one glowing heel and headed back up. Tee sprang from his chair, spilling his beer, and went after. He poked his head into the higher chamber. He heard the bartender behind him shouting about foreigners. Katka was nowhere in sight. Tee crossed the chamber, and just as he wondered what he had seen, he nearly knocked her over—in a short blue summer dress, inches taller than him in her boots. They sat at a nearby table, and she ordered a glass of wine and he another beer. “How are you?” he asked. “Any better?”

“Better? I am not sure what you mean.”

They sat for a while in the silence his question had raised. The waitress came, and he ordered a cheese platter.

“You did not answer me yesterday,” she said finally, twisting the stem of her glass. “What do I mean to you? Why did you climb that tree?”

“I like you,” he said. “I told you already. Why did you climb it?”

“Do you want me to say because of Pavel?”

Tee started to apologize.

“I told you,” she said. “Do not be sorry.” She took his hand, her skin unusually warm, as if she had been drinking already.

But he did need to hear about Pavel, for some reason. He didn’t want to sound whiny, young, but he needed to know. His fingers, under hers, seemed bony and thin, as if his skin had grown transparent. Had his aunt seen through his father like this?

The waitress delivered their cheese, and before they ate, Tee clinked his glass to Katka’s. Neither of them let their eyes drop. She’d told him that breaking eye contact while toasting meant bad intentions. “Tell me how you met,” he said.

“Tell you how I met who?”

“You know who I mean.” He tried to stop himself. He had seen that foot change direction, though, and he had to follow it to an end.

She drew a breath and seemed to decide. “After I graduated university,” she said, “I ran messages for the artists and writers leading the protests. Pavel’s father had just died in jail, and Rockefeller had printed their drawings side by side in a samizdat. I knew Rockefeller from when I was a girl, from before his family moved to Prague. His parents were important Communists, so no one suspected him, or they pretended they did not.” Her other hand rubbed a stain on the table.

“He arranged a message. I took a letter to Pavel—that was how I met him. I believed in him then as an artist and a hero and a politician, though he only ever wanted to be one of those. I begged Rockefeller for the chance to meet him. I was like all the others: I listened to Plastic People of the Universe, I followed the news out of East Germany.”

Three months before the Revolution, she said, she’d gone to Pavel’s house and met a young man the same age as she, with shaggy hair and a jutting chin. He stood to the side and read suggestions from the artist Vašíček—she’d opened the letter out of curiosity—an old friend of his father’s. He was stooped and timid at first, and she was disappointed. But once he finished reading, he said Vašíček’s was an old aesthetic, and he wouldn’t paint like his father. He would represent youth. As he ascended into surety, the fear she’d originally had, that she might embarrass herself before him in some way, pleasantly returned. His wiry frame seemed to grow sturdy before her, and when he asked her opinion of his art, her voice betrayed her. Only her body would react—she turned him around by the shoulder, so he couldn’t see her. Then she pressed a single fingernail to the back of his T-shirt, and electric with boldness, wrote her name. He arched in a way that embarrassed her, though no one was around, and he spoke her name aloud.

“After we married,” Katka said, “the May after the Revolution, he said I had hurt him that day. He said he had been afraid I would be able to do anything to him, and he would want it to happen. That was what we were like.”

They had been Tee’s age when they met. “Thank you for telling me,” he managed.

“Sometimes you look at me like that.”

In one of the oldest home videos of Tee’s mother, she was washing dishes, and with each plate finished, she batted her eyes as if waiting for Tee’s father to step out from behind and help her. After a few minutes she put down the sponge and pulled him in front of the lens and kissed him. Tee thought of that now, against his will.

“Why did you climb up to me?” Katka asked again.

“When I was a child,” Tee said, “I was very sick once and almost died. In my sickness, I dreamed my dad took me to Manhattan and up to the roof of a skyscraper. He refused to wait in line for the Empire State Building. A woman rode the elevator all the way to the top with us, without talking, and when we got off, I held my dad’s hand in fear. The wind blew so hard you could feel shapes in the shifting air, and I felt the woman run past us before I could see her face. She ran to the edge of the roof, and then she leapt off, arms out like she was diving into a pool.” Tee tore off the top layer of his coaster. Katka wrinkled her eyes, confused, but she knew suicide.

“After I got better, I couldn’t get the dream out of my head, it was so real. I bothered my dad until he agreed to a trip to New York. I don’t know why he indulged me. In the end, after hours of walking, we found the same building, exactly as I had dreamed it, and we went up to the roof and the rooftop was the same, too, and I knew something had happened there. I’d known it all along. I’m not so easy to understand.”

“You had a girlfriend,” Katka asked after a pause, “in Boston?”

“There was a girl I thought loved me once. But she was just in my head.”

“What do you call that? Puppy love?”

Katka finished her glass and the waitress came by. Tee’s face was hot. He wondered what had made Katka mention her father so early on and then never again. As the waitress wrote down their orders, she stared at Tee; finally she asked if he was American.

“Truth?” she demanded when he nodded. He frowned and drank the rest of his beer. “You have phone call.”

Katka pinged her wineglass with her fingernail. Tee hadn’t told anyone where he was. She swept her hair over her ear and glared as he followed the waitress to the front desk.

Could he simply ignore the call? Maybe Ynez was in another chamber, hating him. Or Rockefeller had seen him leaving the apartment building and followed for some reason—but why phone? Maybe one of the regulars at Rockefeller’s parties had spotted them and suspected something. Tee had nothing to hide.

“
Prosím,
” he said, picking up the phone.

“You said you wouldn’t tell her about us,” whined a woman with a New York accent.

“I’m sorry?”

“Come on, Tee, I saw you in there. You promised you wouldn’t say anything.”

“Vanessa?”

“Listen,” Vanessa said.

“I’m not going to tell anyone about you and Rockefeller. Where are you?”

There was a pause, and then: “Then what are you two talking about, the day after she climbs a tree and her husband burns his art?”

“Good-bye, Vanessa,” he said, and hung up.

He looked around but couldn’t see her. There was no reception underground, which was probably why she hadn’t called his cell phone. Rockefeller had trusted him with their secret relationship back in March. Vanessa had said her father hated her dating and would sell Pavel’s art on eBay or something if he found out. The last of Pavel’s unsold paintings, still intact, were at her father’s apartment.

Back at the table, the drinks had arrived before Tee. He thought about what he could say to Katka, but she didn’t ask. She wiped her lips and drained her second glass of red.

He shouldn’t have hung up so abruptly. What would Pavel do if Vanessa told him she had seen Tee and Katka together, alone? Tee remembered the shattered mug, the night of the attack. That was nothing compared to what Pavel could be capable of now, an artist who would burn his own art.

Katka leaned toward him. The scent of cocoa butter. “Remember that day,” Tee said, “in Vyšehrad, with the dogs? Pavel and Rockefeller appeared, and then you took off and pulled me along, and they ran after us. I didn’t even know why we were running.” Several dogs had jumped their leashes and joined the chase. Strange Prague everydays. “I’ve always been ready to follow you.”

Her expression hardened. “Follow? Is that why you climbed the tree? That day in Vyšehrad, you rescued a girl no one else would, remember that? The dog had her in its jaws, and you let it snap at you so she could get free. Even her dad would not do that. On New Year’s you seemed brave, going under the fireworks nude.”

“Naked,” he said. He remembered doing those things, only he hadn’t seemed himself then.

“I had not thought you needed to follow,” she said. “I thought you were more mature than your age, you were different than anyone else. You left your home behind. You left Korea. You left America.”

People stared now, as her voice rose. And he was reminded, horrifyingly, of his mother. Like always: an Asian boy with an older white woman. Katka gripped his hands, and he wanted to let go, but he didn’t.

She seemed to be accusing him. She brought his hands to her cheeks, as if he would slap her. “You’re so young,” she said, but she didn’t look away. He knew by now that this was desire, an attempt to distance herself from what she wanted. She brushed his fingers over her lips. He knew what he’d agreed to by meeting her here, by climbing the maple. He leaned in and kissed her.

She shook him off and stood. “I have got to go,” she said suddenly.

He shoved back his chair. Then he stepped in front of her, not caring who saw them, and kissed her again.

V

They got out of the cab in front of his building in Karlín, the rain coming on, and she said, “No one will know who we are. The rain will hide us.” On the stairs, they shushed each other. They put their fingers to each other’s lips. He went first to check that Rockefeller’s door was closed. Then he waved her up. His heart thudded like a third pair of footsteps. He recalled what she’d told him about the truth, hard and soft cartilage. He rested his finger on her nose.

Wrong women. But he was defying, not repeating, the past. He touched Katka lightly on the arm, and she shivered. At the top of the stairs stood two ghostly feet. He stopped short. The feet didn’t move. They weren’t Rockefeller’s. And Katka couldn’t be in two places at once. Tee touched her arm again, solid and real. When he kept moving, the feet were no longer there.

In his bedroom, he whispered with a sharp ache, “This is right.”

“No,” she said, “promise me we will not pretend.”

He pulled her toward him. He twisted her blouse in his fingers, and lifting it off, brought his darker skin to her lighter skin. He ignored the ghost passing his doorframe now. Katka moved his palms to her ribs, her breasts. He imagined his desire gathering her up, piece by piece. In her closet those pieces had been separate, a conspiracy of art. Now she was in his arms, whole. His fingers brushed the curve of her waist. Goose bumps rose on her cold chest. She kissed him harder, then softer, than before. He could hear the change in her breath. He bit her nipples, and she tugged his hair. He tried to make her same deep sounds, to hold nothing back. When she moved her mouth over his skin, she left cold, wet spots where her breath had been. She kissed his neck, he called her name, and she pulled him on top of her, locking her legs around the small of his back.

Afterward, they lay naked, staring out at the rain-scratched sky, hoping the storm would last. He traced a finger down her thigh, and she shuddered and said again, “Tell me something about you that no one else knows.”

He opened his palm as if to wave hello. And then he knew what he could tell her.

“I heard my fortune once,” he said, “after my Korean friend translated my birth mom’s last words. My dad had said it was a name:
Kang Seul Peum
. But what it meant was ‘river of sorrow.’”

He had left his friend with the words shattering in his lungs. “There was this restaurant in Chinatown someone had told me about, where a woman told the future. One look and you believed her. That woman said the break in my life line meant an early death or a coma, and my love line was so deep, I would never let anyone go.” He brought Katka’s fingers to his sternum.

“See these five scars on my chest? After the fortune-telling, I called my mom, remembering when I was six and almost died. Chicken pox and pneumonia. I had thought of my dad as saving me. A priest had come to say the last rites, and my dad stopped him. I guess I thought of it like adoption, a second time he kept me alive. But Mom said she was the one who made him go in that day, that Dad had thought I was a goner.”

They made love again. The ghost stomped around in other rooms. He could hear it banging in his kitchen, but he didn’t care.

VI

In the morning, Tee worked up the nerve to stop by the Globe. He’d been skipping his shifts. A man with horse teeth sat at Ynez’s desk. The expats in Prague changed weekly.

“Tee,” the man said—he was Irish.

“Do I know you?”

“I’ve heard of you. There aren’t many Asians in Prague who come in here.”

“I’m American.”

The man winked. “Didn’t know the word
Asian
would ruffle your feathers.”

“Maybe you could take a message?” Tee had wanted to apologize to Ynez, but now he didn’t know how. What message could he possibly leave?

“I heard you were with that artist the night he got beat,” the man continued as if Tee hadn’t spoken. “You and that big oafish lad who comes into the café, Rockefeller. Countrymen of yours, wasn’t it? I hear that artist is plotting against you lads.”

Later, Tee called back on his cell.

“You should talk to Ynez,” a new voice said.

“I want to.”

“Except she doesn’t want to talk to you. She quit two days ago.”

A cruel trick.

Tee wondered what Ynez had said when she left. He should have felt better to know that she was moving on.

After he hung up, he studied the objects in his dresser drawer: the blue thimble and the piece of the statue from Vyšehrad, the pewter Golem from the house in Malešice, the husk of the rocket from Old Town Square, the Pilsner and Budvar and Staropramen and Gambrinus and Krušovice coasters, two shot glasses, a few matchbooks, pencils and pens, stray buttons, an empty photo frame, a crumbling brick, a rabbit’s foot from God knows where. Was this what he filled his container with? Or was it simple proof of where he’d been?

He spread the objects out on his bed. He remembered the shavings from his uncle’s beard, the ash and bone in the urn. He remembered the Easter after he was accepted to Boston College, when his aunt had told him about her freshman year, the first time any of the adults in his family had ever talked openly about sex. Suddenly she had touched her cheek and said sex was all an act—she still dyed her hair every month, for men—and as she turned toward the living room, he was aware of a vulnerability he had never known before, in anyone. “All of this wanting and wanting,” she’d said, nearly crying. “All of this not knowing what you want.” At first he’d been embarrassed for her, trying so hard to connect with his youth when he couldn’t help feeling put off by her sexuality. Later he’d been unable to shake the feeling that they had shared something, that she was keeping some secret for him, and he owed her.

In his bedroom in Karlín, Tee felt something, or someone, behind him, but he didn’t turn around. He had locked his door. He picked up a red matchbook from Rockefeller’s apartment. It advertised a Museum of Communism: PRAY WE DON’T CATCH YOU AT ANOTHER MUSEUM. Why would Rockefeller go there? Tee struck a match, and singed the edges of a piece of notepaper, as his mother had taught him to do once to impress a girl. Ash rubbed off on his fingertips, dusted the bed. What he was doing was not safe. He blew out the flame. In the center of the burned page, he sketched two eyes. He recalled the legend of Straba, who cut off the ears of his masked enemy, only to find, upon returning home, that the ears belonged to his wife.

That night before Katka arrived in the rain, Tee wrote in his notebook about Korea. As if telling her about the fortune in his palm had cleared up something about the past.

When Dad took the job in Pusan, he sent letters to Mom. He must have been trying to change. Soon, wasn’t Mom sniffing the brown envelopes, imagining the Pusan beach and the hot springs beneath? But it wasn’t long before the letters stopped. She would run at night, looking up at the windows and picturing windows in Korea. 2 months until he wrote again. Then the return address bore a hospital cross. She tore the envelope in her hurry, but he only had a broken leg. The end of his letter she reread again and again. He offered her what they had lost. A baby. When she called the number he’d given, what did she ask—why did he stop writing and where did he find a half-white baby? how much did he love her? did he already love the baby, me? He was in the hospital, had been in Korea just 6 months, after 2 quick trips to settle the contract. He said to make up her mind.