The Hundred-Year Flood (8 page)

VII

Over the last two weeks of July and the first two weeks of August, it would rain all but nine days. The storms would come and go, rarely lingering. The river would swell and rise up the embankments, but no one worried about a flood. Tee and Katka took no notice of warning signs, coming and going with the storms.

After they made love that first evening, he walked her down to Křižíkova station. He held a black umbrella over her and fought the guilt washing in in the wake of desire. They descended the escalators to the metro as a train rumbled by. The wind from the train stung Tee’s eyes. Squinting, he saw a pink shape fly out of her hand and onto the tracks. She’d been holding her rain-soaked socks, and the wind had caught one. She’d let it go. Tee started after it, and a horn rang out. A second train flew up on the heels of the first, with closed doors, and after twenty seconds, went on.

“You looked like in your paintings,” she said as the train departed, “rushing for a piece of clothing.” She held the other sock behind her. The one on the tracks was gone.

“What are those ghost trains? I see them go by with their lights off and their doors shut.” His ears buzzed with the rasp of the horn.

“They are for training drivers. Two people a month kill themselves in the metro. They step off the edge and get run over.” He pictured this. Holding hands with her and stepping out over the tracks as a train crushed to a stop. “You have got to practice.”

As they hugged good-bye, he knew that the next day would bring her back. He offered his umbrella, but she said she wouldn’t be able to explain where it was from. He anticipated the next train, hoping for another dud. She plucked some wet fuzz off her shirt, and his hand went out to catch it.

“Do not worry,” she said, and smiled. Then she reached out and pinched his wrist.

Later he realized she could have said she had bought the umbrella. Maybe she was afraid to have anything of his in her house.

Each time they saw each other, he would write about the stories she told him, about his family and hers, or about the ghost. On July 20, he wrote:

I don’t know why I agreed to see K only when it rains. It can hide us, she says. I wonder what Aunt A.’s excuse was for Uncle H. He pretended like there were two of her. Is that why I see a ghost?

Often they lay in bed and spoke of the chances of bad weather, staring up at the crests of paint on his ceiling. “Seventy percent tomorrow,” Tee would say. They would make love until it looked like the rain was sputtering to a halt.

“Just stay over,” he asked once, counting the time between thunder and lighting. Three, four, five.

“I do not know what Pavel would do to us.” She put an earring—a gold apple—back into her ear.

Nine, ten.

The wind came down fast and hard and the rain drove at the buildings like tiny reckless cars. Sometimes he read to her what he wrote. She stretched across his blankets, long and gangly. He read her his fictionalized stories of her Czech grandfather and Roma grandmother, based on what she told him as she shared more of herself. He could never tell what she thought of his writing. She would hide her face as he read.

It is the early 1900s: Her grandmother gives up her tribe and the life of a gypsy contortionist to settle in Prague and have children. She speaks rapidly, expresses herself with her hands, brushes her hair over her ear when she’s unsure. Her grandfather reads Kafka and Max Brod, writes unpublished novels.

Tee was translating them into the past. He understood this. Katka looked away. He didn’t look away from her, or he would see the ghost.

“Is that right?” he said. “Tell me again?”

She shut her eyes as if the story lived just behind her eyelids. “When the Nazis were here, my granny had to deny she was Roma, and my mum and aunt learned to hate their past. My granny lost her identity—Mum said she became a vengeful woman who took out her loss on her children.”

“And then?”

“When Communism took over after World War II, my family moved into the country. Mum came back during the Prague Spring. And she met my dad. He was a scientist—the borders were suddenly open, and he came to study our ecosystems. Mum was a student of literature; everyone liked her. They got married. Then the tanks trapped him. They fell in love in a time of freedom. They fell out after the Soviets invaded. Later, I suppose, they did not want to risk sneaking off to England with a baby.”

She smoothed the pillow, the sheets. Finally she said, “I grew up a daddy’s girl while he grew violent. Once, when I was seven, he slammed me against the wall. I had said we should escape together and leave Mum. Later that night he cried by my bed and said I was the one he really loved. I am sure Mum heard him. She is a stoic—is that the right word?—a sufferer who hears everything.”

In a way, Tee thought, they’d both been left by a father, had left a mother.

Tee drew in his notes, in the margins of books, on coasters and napkins and peeled-off labels of beer bottles. People with children. Planes. Self-destruction. Whenever he noticed what he was drawing, he stopped himself. As soon as Katka arrived, he would cocoon himself in her visits. He had heard once that a caterpillar had to die in order to become a butterfly. A butterfly was an entirely new life.

When he asked about Pavel, about the state of her house, Katka never answered. Sometimes, after she left, he ran a finger over the pewter Golem he’d taken from her bedroom, as if it would grant a wish. For example: not to see the ghost, at least, when Katka and he were making love. According to legend, the Golem had been molded from the clay of the Vltava riverbanks. It wouldn’t stop killing, so its creator had stopped it by rubbing out the word
truth
from its forehead.

July 29:

G’ma said it was like her two sons married versions of each other. Mom the quiet, tolerant girl; Auntie the restless, yearnful one. Each other’s shadows. Doubled legends. A woman and a ghost. I have to stop this. Stop doubling the past with the present. They’re two things in a line, not two versions of something else.

One evening when it didn’t rain, Tee knocked on Rockefeller’s door, and inside, he found Vanessa. She was a year older than he, an honest girl with a barely reserved mean streak. She had graduated from NYU and flown to Prague to assist her father. Rockefeller’s hair stuck up in back, and the room stank of sweat. Vanessa lit a cigarette with a deliberate spark. What was Rockefeller trying to tell him . . . ? Tee didn’t feel trusted now. He felt as if they had gone back to a time when one awkward visit meant your name on a list.

“How’s life,” Vanessa asked. Before he could answer, she pulled him into the hall, poked a finger into his chest, breathed smoke past his ear, and scowled. “What is your plan? To get with Picasso’s wife? You’re even more lost than I am.”

Later Tee would wonder which afternoon Rockefeller found them out.

August 4:

Today I forgot to buy water and K mumbled to herself like Mom. Bit her teeth like Mom, too, that same click. Or did I imagine that? I remember, that time I got lost in Stop & Shop, I found Mom by that click. She was watching a man at the pay phone in front of her. She snapped her teeth together, and I heard it from all the way down the aisle. I couldn’t call out to her, though. She had this sneakiness about her. When I got close, I knew why. The man at the phone was Dad. He didn’t know she was there. She had forgotten I was there. “I hate you,” she said under her breath. “I hate you. I hate you.” And then, “I love you.”

Tee would picture, later, Rockefeller walking across the street for a coffee, too lazy to take the metro to Flora where his own café was under construction. Maybe as he walked back, a woman ran out without an umbrella, and he thought he recognized her.

Or maybe he saw Katka as she arrived. A woman went up to the door ahead of him. He only recognized her when she stood too close to the building, which she did so that no one at their windows above could see her, or when she checked inside first before entering, or when she didn’t look back to hold the door. Rockefeller paused then, not yet knowing why, before following a minute behind. In the stairwell, he heard sounds from Tee’s apartment, a voice he knew.

For three straight days, it didn’t rain. Tee drew Katka inside a raindrop. He worried about Pavel finding them out and burning the house this time. Tee took the coasters from the drawer and tossed them out the window like flying saucers. He slipped the Communism Museum matchbook back under Rockefeller’s door, and left the rabbit’s foot in an Internet café. The third night, he saw the ghost around every corner, always a step ahead of him. Katka herself was nowhere to be seen. He turned off the lights, and the sun behind the gray clouds outside seemed no brighter than the glow inside. The past—if that was what a ghost was, the past that haunted the present—should have stayed fixed as it was, suspended by time. But whenever he got near that glow, it was already coming from another room. When he couldn’t take this game of tag anymore, he went to an Internet café and e-mailed his mother.

Tell me, are you happy now—divorced? I keep remembering the trip we all took together to the monuments in DC—I think I was 8? In the video Dad saved, we’re like caricatures. Me a lovesick kid running to Dad or Uncle H. or Auntie only to return to you. Dad a lens on each of us just long enough not to seem pathetic. Uncle H. a soft-spoken vet who paid for everything as if embarrassed by $. Auntie, as soon as the attention left her, stuck in a mood, her color waning. You either pulling Dad or me aside or lingering at the back, always scarily aware.

I remember maybe 2/3 into the video, the shots got shorter. Dad was running out of film. He tried to conserve and kept missing the action. In the scene I can’t forget, Auntie has a rubber egg from some novelty shop and is squeezing it behind you—did you know about this?—somehow so lewdly. “If I had a baby,” she says to me. I take the egg from her and throw it down the street. When you kneel beside me, you tuck in my shirt but never ask why I did it.

I was always missing something. There was that day Dad took me to the library when he was supposed to be watching me at home. You came around your counter, as if you had expected us, and told Dad to go. He kept acting like he’d won something, but what? After he left, you put me in a corner with a book about geysers. Remember that? “Learn about your dad,” you said. What was I supposed to learn?

I am serious. I am okay.

Love, Thomas

Maybe Rockefeller saw her on one of these days:

On the first, Katka stood at the kitchen counter, slipping mandarin slices into her mouth two at a time. She ate everything two bites at a time. “I know him again,” she said. “He is painting again. He does not realize I am with you, because he is too busy thinking. He believes I am giving him time to paint.”

“What do you do when he kisses you,” Tee asked quietly.

“I make him believe I still want him. What else can I do?”

They made love that time too furiously, perhaps.

On the second, she said, “I think he has never done a better painting”—she was Pavel’s subject again; he’d started to use the casts as brushes, started to return to art—“so how can he hate us?”

“How can he hate us?” Tee wondered how she could think their impact was less than it was. Less real than life.

Was that the time Rockefeller saw her, as Tee walked her out?
Promise me we will not pretend
, Tee had thought, shuttling her into the rain with an arm around her twitching shoulders. Three weeks and she had stopped taking her own advice.

VIII

These are the things Tee learned about Katka before the flood:

1. She ate well, a strong appetite always.
   
2. When she wasn’t with Tee, she liked to go outside after dinner, briefly, for the changing light. Not to walk, though she liked walking. Not to garden, though she liked gardens. Sometimes, to stretch. She didn’t like organized exercise, but she would exercise spontaneously.
   
3. Her father had studied butterflies. Her mother had studied literature.
   
4. She knew her neighbors, though they seemed surprised that she did, as if she was the type not to know.
   
5. She hated to lose. She was hardly ever jealous, but she was competitive. She avoided games. If she played games, she would exploit the rules ruthlessly.
   
6. Her puzzles were a way of recovering meaning. She enjoyed the work of physically rebuilding what her mind had already interpreted.
   
7. She could be simultaneously anxious and composed—her nervous tic was to brush her hair back over her ear, cleaning away her face.
   
8. She believed Hanuš had saved his clock, not destroyed it.
   

IX

Pavel was indeed painting again. He even invited Tee to see. “I had nothing to do with this,” Katka said on the phone. On the tram to Malešice, a crowd got off in Náměstí Republiky and a leg glowed between them. Shouts carried from the square, but Tee didn’t try to follow now. He went straight to Pavel and Katka’s house, and Katka met him outside by the brown patch of earth where the paintings had burned. She warned him to be careful. She burrowed her heel into the patch and went to tussle his hair—he could tell—and stopped herself.

In the bedroom, Tee choked on dust. Pavel stepped down from a wooden chair. Behind him stood a giant canvas, eight feet high and four feet across, propped up against the bed. Tee wondered how they’d gotten it into the house. Bands of yellow, as wide as Pavel’s casts, swept across the surface, one after another. The color bothered Tee. He recognized the curve: it was Katka, lying on her side. Katka again and again, slightly altered each time but always her. He could almost feel her hips. Pavel’s casts were coated in yellow. The mess in the studio, if it had ever been there, was gone.

“You guess how I am doing it,” Pavel said, waving his casts at Tee. “You guess.”

Tee stepped backward, his stomach twisting. The casts couldn’t create detail. What Tee saw was more like half a silhouette. Above were the ripples of yellow, tints from gold to dust, as if Pavel had dropped her in a yellow pond.

“It is his best,” Katka said reluctantly.

Pavel wiped his casts on an already yellow towel and said he wanted Tee to talk to his dealer for him, instead of Rockefeller, about a new series. In the corner, a smaller canvas leaned against the wall, freckled by the same texture but a dark shadowy gray, a depiction of anger, or fear. It was as if Pavel had started painting himself and then switched to his wife.

“You wanted me to see a naked painting of Katka?” Tee asked.

Pavel’s eyes narrowed and he sucked in his cheeks. Tee wanted to say more, but he was suddenly afraid, more afraid than he could explain. The yellow painting of Katka, the gray painting pushed to the corner. Tee leaned his shoulder against the wall. “This art,” Pavel said, “is something new. Tell Rockefeller—how you say it?—he is dead to me.”

Tee heard a faint grinding that seemed to come from the small, dark painting. Then he caught Pavel’s jaw shifting back and forth, his earlobes wobbling.

When Tee got home that day, he had a voice-mail message. “Why don’t you answer?” came his mother’s voice. “You and your dad were always running or hiding from me.” He pictured the expression where her face went from gentle to cutting in an instant, as if even her freckles rearranged. That look had cured him of his nail-biting, another of his father’s habits. “Ignore that. I just wanted to hear your voice.”

Tee’s lights flickered, and in the dark, he remembered his mother hovering at his elbow when he was eight, as he held a homemade card over a candle for the first time. Halfway through, she snatched the card away, so that the last two edges burned more neatly. When Tee complained that the girl he liked would know he hadn’t done those sides, his mother’s eyes seemed to unfocus—as if she had another set behind the first, through which she really saw—and she said, “Because of these two sides, she will know you did some of it.” As if mistakes were what people knew him by. He hadn’t known how to undo her logic.

Was it that night, he wondered, the card tucked into his backpack, that she had determined he was too old for bedtime stories? She set a folding chair beside his bed instead of climbing in with him, and said it was time he read to her. He stumbled over words; she didn’t correct him. She kneaded her palms as if she wanted to touch him but couldn’t bring herself to. He wanted to tell her he loved her, but his voice was in her hands. When he woke in the middle of the night, the chair was still there, the lamp still glowed. He put a finger to the seat. It was warm.

He realized now: the glow of the candle flame, of the lamp, of Katka rippling through the painting, of the ghost that wouldn’t leave him alone—somewhere in his mind, they were all the same.

Tee imagined Katka sprawled on the studio floor, nude and covered in dust. Pavel balanced on his chair above her and swiped his casts across the canvas. The bed propping up the painting stood in the middle of the room. They hadn’t moved the bed in years. Underneath it, they’d found the layers of filth in which Katka now posed.

The dust itched; it stirred into the air; it made her cough. But Pavel painted a beauty she had never—even during the Revolution—seen in his art before. She modeled for him because she was cheating on him with Tee.

Pavel had been searching for undestroyed art and had reached under the bed with his cast. When his arm came out gray-yellow, he’d called to her, shouting dimensions. For his art, she’d bought the canvas and a dozen buckets of paint and batches of cheap towels. For his art, she’d cleared the room and pulled out the bed and set the open paint buckets around the chair and stacked the towels beside him, in two piles, one wet, one dry. To change colors, Pavel wiped his casts on a wet towel, then dried them, then, the space around his skin sealed with modeling clay, dipped his arm into a new bucket of paint, up to the elbow. She itched on the floor. At the end of each session, thirty towels went into the wash, gallons of yellowed water swirled down the drain into the Vltava.

In the evening after Tee had seen the painting, Katka arrived in the rain and they lay in bed talking. She told him how each time she posed and itched, she admired Pavel again. Though she longed to wash off the dust, then to let the rain wash her, then after meeting Tee, to wash again. Suddenly she was crying. He imagined the constant water meant baptism, meant forgiveness. Once, she had actually gotten off the metro to go back to Malešice, before a clap of thunder reminded her that Tee was counting the seconds. He didn’t know how to respond to this—the ghost was about to appear, he could feel it. There were footsteps in the hall. He took Katka into his arms.

Tee imagined Katka watching Pavel climb onto a chair to work on the top of the canvas, jump down to work on the bottom. Pavel hadn’t been this energized in a long time. He had grumbled and sat up in his sleep, panting, scraping his casts along the bed frame or the walls. Katka had asked him what would make him happy now. He’d rested his casts on her shoulders, one on either side of her neck. “If I found those Americans,” he said. “I would kill them one by one.”