The Hundred-Year Flood (9 page)

X

The day before the flood, the day the ghost disappeared in Prague, not to reappear again until the hospital in Boston, Tee received the following e-mail from his mother:

You asked if I am happy to be divorced. Well. I’m happy to stop pretending to be happy. I’m happy to stop waiting for your father to love only me. Can I give you some divorcée advice? Do not deny what you know. There is a reason I’m telling you this, of course—as there is a reason you asked. I must tell the whole truth before I stop myself. You have always asked to know more about yourself, I believe. You were curious about us, your dad and me, from the moment you could talk. You used to ask us, “Is Mom my real mom or is Dad my real dad?” as if one of us must be. You used to ask us to tell you the story of your adoption again, and I would listen to your father miss details he had given before. I remembered everything—you did too, then. You pointed out his errors! How could you forget that? Isn’t memory a trespasser to the heart? I have to admit, I’ve imagined telling you this many times. I used to ask your father, too. Ask why we didn’t go through any adoption process. Ask why you looked so much like him. Ask and ask and already know the answer. Of course he was the same cheater in Korea as he was in America. He will always need other women. He will always hate himself. He will never satisfy whatever there is in him telling him he hasn’t suffered enough. I’m sorry he, and later, I, pretended our secrets didn’t affect you. I’m sorry I have to tell you like this, when I’m a little drunk. I’m sorry I didn’t tell you before, when you and your father and I were all in the same house. But now that I’m divorced, and trying to be happy, I’ve realized—we need to know as much as we can about ourselves. You’re your father’s son, Tee. I mean his biological flesh and blood. You would have found out eventually.

CHAPTER 3
THE HUNDRED-YEAR FLOOD: PAVEL AND ROCKEFELLER

I

After his first week in Boston, Tee transferred to a rehabilitation center, a fat, low building like a hospital chopped in half. The inside like a retirement home. He would walk through the themed atriums at the end of each wing: rainforest, mountain, beach, jungle. Fake trees in brown cement. The staff ran a post office, a library, a restaurant, more for reorientation than utility. Twice a week an occupational therapist taught Tee life skills he’d never learned a first time, like how to tie your shoes so they never fall off, or how to speak to someone who holds power over you, or how to record dreams. He attended meetings more like support groups. Love was a common subject. A veteran with a re-aggravated head wound said they used to tell each other, “Cupid marches on.” Hell or high water, Cupid marches on. In which war, he didn’t say. A man who thought he was everyone’s twin said, “So that’s what I look like,” and pawed Tee’s face. “So sad.”

At least once a week, in their meetings, one of the longer-term patients would urge self-forgiveness. Another patient always argued the value of regret. In their private sessions, Tee’s OT spoke in metaphors, which she said patients could more easily understand. She said Tee was treating the past and the present like two magnets, forcing their ends together to see if they attracted or repelled. Tee said time seemed more like a house. He was in one room, a room that was the rehab center, and the room just next door was Prague. Of course, then he recalled what Pavel had said about shutting the door on himself. His OT asked him to tell her what day of the week it was. She hid the calendar behind her hand. He shook his head.

The way Tee wrote about Prague, it was like he was building that one room in the house of time. He started with a cobblestone floor. Then he added a golden roof, spires, an artist’s canvas, books, a maple tree, water. But each time he built the room, it didn’t seem right. How do you build in a ghost, or regret? He tore down the spires and the bookshelves and the fireworks and started over.

Tee’s second night in the rehab center, he picked through a book he found in the library, on peaceful revolutions. The appendix had a page about Czechoslovakia. He wanted to imagine Pavel and Rockefeller overthrowing Communism, together, without violence.

The start of the Revolution, November 17, 1989, International Students’ Day, was also an important day to Pavel and Rockefeller’s relationship. They had joined twenty thousand Czechs and Slovaks, students with banners and flowers, in a march against Communism. Riot police cut off the marchers in Národní Třída, cordoning the square. The sudden panic squeezed Pavel between parked cars, away from Rockefeller. He wished Katka was beside him, but she had stayed home sick.

The police advanced, truncheons swinging. People sat, in protest, or tried and failed to run. Pavel searched for Rockefeller’s mop of brown hair above the other heads. A man rushed past, in the direction they had come, holding his mouth. Teeth dropped like coins at his feet. A woman tried to escape down a guarded alley, and a policeman smashed her between the shoulder blades. A sharp pain bloomed in Pavel’s neck—an elbow, or a fist—and with it sprang the smell of vomit, as if the bloom had traveled from his neck to his nose. A pair of arms wrapped around him from behind, and when he tried to shake them off, the flat of a bone in his back shoved him forward.

He almost fell, struggling against the crowd, before he heard the familiar voice in his ear. Rockefeller helped him onto a hood. Rockefeller steadied him with one big arm, kept people away with the other. Some student in the crowd recognized Pavel and she chanted his nickname, like a war cry. The chant got louder and louder—to Pavel’s surprise, part of the crowd joined her. “See a way out?” Rockefeller said, shaking him. Pavel searched, as the car rocked beneath him, until he spotted a woman slip out down a side street, unharmed.

He shouted over his name. A harelipped boy climbed the car as Rockefeller tugged Pavel down. Metal scraped Pavel’s skin, and he stepped on an arm or a leg. Rockefeller swam through bodies, chanting with the others now. Around them rose the scent of blood and bile and crushed petals.

At the alley Rockefeller towered over two short guards.

In the rehabilitation center in Boston, Tee wrote a room for the Velvet Revolution. In that room was Pavel’s belief that Rockefeller would always help him. On the walls hung two paintings, one for each time the Secret Police abducted Pavel’s father—after the second time ended in death, in 1987, Rockefeller had tracked down anyone still hiding the older artist’s paintings in their homes, and had returned the art to Pavel. Fifteen years later Rockefeller stood by as Pavel’s wrists were broken.

A month after Czechoslovakia became a democracy, Pavel and Katka married and Rockefeller started the first of six failed businesses, with revenue from Pavel’s museum sales. The rest of their friends moved on with their lives. The more the world moved on, the more Pavel and Rockefeller clung to each other. To the two of them, Pavel’s art was still an active influence, Rockefeller was still a force for change. They were each other’s best reminders of their own importance. They must have come to resent how much they relied on each other, and the nagging sense that alone, they, too, would have been able to move on.

Tee touched the bandage around his skull. His fingers smelled like gauze. He put the typewriter away for the night. Before he fell asleep, the ghost woman glowed past his door. In the dark, Tee’s hand crept to the typewriter paper. He wanted to get out of bed and give chase, or at least write another room, but he was heavy with sleep. A few minutes later, he was dreaming of Katka in the flood.

In the morning, he returned the library book. As he stepped into the hall, the ghostly leg turned a corner in front of him. He ran after it, though his balance had barely improved. He could smell the difference in the halls: water. Then he slipped into someone’s arms, never touching ground.
Wake up
, he thought,
you’re still asleep
. Nothing happened. The arms were real. He panicked at first that it was Rockefeller, until he heard the nurse’s voice. She asked if he was okay. His father had called to say that he would be late. Tee reset his feet. He didn’t want to lose the ghost this time—he felt as if those arms around his chest might erase the ghost’s existence. But the next day, the calf again passed by his room. What had made it disappear in Prague? What had made it come back? If he caught it, could he return to who he was?

Tee didn’t know. He imagined and imagined.

II

Pavel stood in the mud outside his house, in his bathrobe. Rain dripped down his casts. The gap was wider than a month before; his forearms had thinned. He searched for Katka in the distance, for a figure fading into the early-morning rain, but saw nothing. She had left him to go to Tee.

His wife.

They had fought the entire day—how terribly short a day was—and into the night. He wished, at least, that he could stop thinking of her as art. She had called him controlling, and her words had splashed bright yellows and reds, then dark blues and grays. He had always known the dramatic moments of his life as paintings. But at the end, he had wanted her to stay skin and bones. His wife. The woman who had slept with him, talked with him, hurt him.

She had left him for a foreign, dark-skinned boy, whom Pavel had given shape, color, texture. Pavel had burned her shape, color, texture. Was that why she’d left? She had begun to waver—when? As soon as they saw Tee stripped to his boxers in Old Town Square, under the fireworks? Or the morning she appeared in the hospital room, her blue eyes darting to Pavel’s bruised, swollen wrists? Near the end of their fight, he’d said she was always a gypsy, stealing a heart and fleeing. He had been sure that would sting enough to give her pause, but she had lowered her voice and said Tee would never say that.

Maybe Pavel should have taken her hand, gotten down on his knees and begged. The affair with the American could never last. Later she would want her marriage back, but how could Pavel accept her again? At least if she hadn’t told him she was cheating, he wouldn’t hate her. Grief would be better.

Just before she left, she said it would be okay. A stack of dishes sat on the counter, and before he knew what he was doing, he had swept a cast into them and knocked them to the floor. Ceramic flew everywhere. Her hand darted to her calf. But then she simply wiped off the blood, pulled on her boots, and towered over him. “You had to turn violent,” she said, “in the end?”

He’d said, “If we divorce, you’ll get nothing, since you’re at fault.” She’d said now she knew what kind of person he was. He’d said, “I’ll find you and get you back if it’s the last thing I do.” She’d said, “You really think I would get back together with someone like that?” She’d thought about getting back together. He’d made himself easier to dismiss.

He plunked out into the muddy yard. He pushed down one bare foot as hard as he could, as if to be sure he left a mark. The rain washed over the city, dirtying and distorting. The prints of Katka’s boots already faded in front of him. She had bought those boots after publishing a single art review, in a British magazine—the only money she ever made in her life. Maybe she’d planned ahead for this day. Under the mud was the charred grass where he’d kicked out the burning paintings. He dipped his casts into the mud until they were browner than Tee’s skin, and then he slammed them together. He clutched the casts tight to his chest, in pain. On an impulse, he pressed his lips to one cast, extended the tip of his tongue to the mud, and swallowed.

III

A week before the flood, Rockefeller had gone to Vanessa’s father’s flat to discuss the gallery in New York. Vanessa was the only one there. They’d started fooling around on the sofa, his pants thrown off and her skirt hiked up. That was how her father found them. Rockefeller saw the threat in the man’s curled lips, in his wide white teeth. Then it was simple instinct: in an instant he had one big arm against her father’s throat. He asked where Pavel’s paintings were. He had to save them. He would sell them himself or find another dealer.

Vanessa tugged at his elbow. He realized they must have been reckless on purpose. They must have both wanted to see what they would do if her father caught them. He didn’t feel bad about this. What he felt bad about was that for a moment, he kept pressing the bulge of her father’s Adam’s apple.

A few days later, Rockefeller asked Tee to come to The Heavenly Café—the name-to-be stenciled in black on the café windows, white sheets covering the glass from the inside, islands of concrete slabs and two-by-fours and scrap metal sticking up from the floor. Without Pavel’s money, the construction was on hold. Rockefeller kept listing his past business failures in his head: newspaper, gallery, bookstore, radio program, real estate, city tour.

Tee arrived full of confrontation. “I saw Vanessa the other day,” he said. “She said you guys broke up and Pavel’s deal is off? What the hell?” He closed his hands in his armpits, as if mocking Pavel. He didn’t seem to notice what he was doing.

Rockefeller pointed to the four paintings against the back wall. “You listen,” he said. The paintings of Tee were the last of Pavel Picasso’s unsold art. Rockefeller pulled Tee through the rubble until they were almost touching the canvases. “I could tell Pavel your affair, that you with Katka . . .”

Tee started to back away. Rockefeller held him gently but firmly. He could still feel the arch of Vanessa’s father’s throat.

A moment passed, and then Tee mumbled, “Why do you have those?” He reached for a canvas. Rockefeller knocked his hand away. “If you still want me to invest,” Tee said quickly, “I’ll give you whatever you want. Just don’t act like I’m the only guilty one.”

Rockefeller had considered Tee’s bribe, the café still a purgatory. Without more money, there would be no whine of cappuccino machines, no rustle of pages, no clink of cups on saucers, no conversation. The only options were to take Tee’s investment or to tell Pavel about the affair and hope that won back the artist’s trust.

Early the first morning of the flood, Rockefeller shifted his attention between his TV and the dark windows until the announcement that Karlín would be evacuated. On the news a scientist scratched his ear and said floods of this magnitude hit once every hundred years, and they were due. The scientist didn’t expect the rain to stop, or the river to stop rising, for days. Other cities had already flooded; the debris was washing downriver into levees. It would break into Prague with enough force to smash windows or kill waders trying to escape. A city official warned that the floodwater would rise through the sewage system and infect open wounds, cause serious illness if swallowed in excess. The water level would reach five to ten meters.

Rockefeller went across the hall to warn Tee.

Rockefeller could imagine the flood washing Tee out of Prague, the affair ended, Pavel saved from that pain—but then he would have no café.

When the door opened, Rockefeller stepped in ready to shake hands. In a few hours the sun would rise and Karlín would be underwater. Tee probably had no idea. Other expats had called earlier, seeking translation. They could go to the café together, revisit the blueprint Rockefeller had lost, make the best of things. He had Pavel’s art, Tee’s investment.

But there was Katka, soaking wet, at night and not with Pavel.

Rockefeller’s hand drew up as if reaching for a balloon that suddenly floated away. Katka stepped behind Tee. Rockefeller’s mind raced: she must have left Pavel. She stared at the floor, twisting her rain-dark hair over her ears with both hands. Her fingers netted at the back of her neck so her elbows stuck out like wings.

“We all must go,” Rockefeller said when he could speak. “The flood is coming. Karlín soon will underwater.”

“Flood?” Tee said. “What are you talking about?”

“Get out,” Rockefeller said. “You must go now.” He pushed other words back down into his lungs, and then he was whispering in Czech:
Aren’t you ashamed?
He straightened to his entire height.

Katka’s eyes flashed as blue as if the ground had blinked open to an underground river. Rockefeller turned, for a moment embarrassed. When he looked back, she had disappeared into another room.

His hands squeezed into fists, the balloon back in his grasp. “Forget it,” he called in Czech. “I didn’t see you.”

Tee glanced around. Rockefeller had to get the money now—before it could be withdrawn, the affair out in the open. His palm itched. An old proverb predicted violence. But as his breaths quickened, shallowed, he stepped back and closed the door behind him.

Outside, he imagined them in there. Those dark hands on that light face. Sweat beading on Tee’s forehead, Katka’s fingers in his black hair. Rockefeller sent Tee a text:
Send her to husband.
He hefted the phone like a rock meant for a window. Hours later, in Old Town, he would receive Tee’s reply:
She has left him for good.

Rockefeller returned to his apartment to pack. He found the old camping bag he’d taken on kayak trips downriver from Česky Krumlov, with Pavel and Katka and their other friends from the old days, since lost. Pavel and Katka had once seemed an ideal. At their wedding reception, Pavel had stolen his wife away from their party, and when they returned, all the guests had gotten him to bend down and propose again, as if they could have the day twice. The morning after, Rockefeller had even proposed to the bridesmaid beside him.

Into the bag Rockefeller put his father’s collection of beer steins, the box of photos he’d long stopped adding to, the deed to The Heavenly Café. The radio repeated the evacuation orders. Rockefeller gripped his father’s favorite stein, made by a glassblower who’d turned out to be Secret Police, turning the glass over in his hand. He wondered where his parents were, in a cabin in the Alps perhaps, his father learning to ski, coming home from the mountains to his mother’s cooking. He imagined they thought of themselves as retired, too proud to work or to write to him, too proud to forgive their son for sending them away instead of trying to get them pardoned. Rockefeller had hoarded his connections, writing the names of people who owed him favors in a tiny brown notebook, only to lose those favors over time. At least he’d made his parents leave before they were arrested.

When he opened the box of photos to a picture of Pavel and Katka and him, on top, Rockefeller emptied the bag and packed survival gear instead. Tins of food, the bottles of water lying around in case of hangovers, extra pairs of shoes, clothing, a towel, bandages, first aid equipment. Out there, people would need help.

Then Rockefeller realized that with Katka gone, Pavel would need him, too, would need his last good friend to make him less alone. Maybe need Rockefeller enough to forgive. Rockefeller slung the bag over his shoulder and took an umbrella from the closet. He felt certain he would see Pavel before the flood ended. At the last moment, he repacked the deed to The Heavenly Café. Just in case. A streak of dark blue light loped along the sky’s border. He imagined Katka inside Tee’s apartment: saying, “I do not care about Pavel anymore,” saying, “Pavel does not care about me, only art,” in English, while Tee touched her greedily. But she had fallen for Pavel’s paintings and ideas, things Tee could never give her.