Matthew Salesses - The Hundred-Year Flood

Pavel pounded the counter, shattering his mug. Tee went quiet. The bartender waved an imaginary paintbrush at the shards. Rockefeller said, “Katka,” and what Tee seemed to recall were the words for love and art . Ynez reached for Tee’s hand, but he shook her off and swept up the glass with a Staropramen coaster.

Pavel’s eyes narrowed, and he dug a thumb into Tee’s arm. “Is maybe good you go away,” Pavel said. Tee stumbled, confused. He didn’t yet know how resistance built up in Prague secret by secret, symbol by symbol. But he had noticed the calf slipping out the door. He sent Ynez home and returned to Karlín alone.

In Boston, when Tee woke from his flooded dreams, he would try to follow the ghost over that threshold into reality. He would try to remember when he had first seen the ghost. Was it that night, drinking with Pavel and Rockefeller and Ynez, but not Katka? Or was the ghost the same as the shadow in Pavel and Katka’s house, the shadow he had seen from the closet?

After drinking in Vyšehrad, Tee woke to Rockefeller pounding his door. Pavel had gotten into a fight with a group of Americans. At the time, the ghost was quickly forgotten.

Tee had to imagine what happened. He didn’t know for sure. Pavel and Rockefeller left Vyšehrad and gambled at a Herna bar in Malešice until four A.M. They crossed the street to the Flora mall, where they had chosen a storefront for their café, and balanced on the steps, in the dark, smoking. They spoke English — they liked then to practice running their tongues around the flat alien sounds in inflated iambs, as if each word were a stone. It was their third language after the Russian forced on them as children. Rockefeller blew out a long stream of smoke and said they would call the café “The Heavenly Café.”

“I thought we calling it in Czech,” Pavel slurred. He was having second thoughts about New York. He knew Katka was right: he should focus on his own country. He had the feeling that Tee was in love with his wife. It had just come to him, that night, watching Tee turn down Ynez.

That was when Rockefeller said Americans were the only ones who would buy Pavel’s art now. Pavel tossed his cigarette down a grate and cursed. Once, Rockefeller had risked arrest to hang Pavel’s art around Prague. As the sun rose, Pavel stumbled away from his friend. Over his shoulder, he called Rockefeller a blbec . It wasn’t Rockefeller funding the café. Pavel walked down beside the Flora cemetery with his hands in his armpits and waited for Rockefeller to follow. A thin shadow stretched toward him — but not from behind, from out of the graves ahead.

Pavel wanted a fight. Urine gushed against a gravestone, and Pavel rushed in, shouting about respecting the dead. He must have seen only one American, not three. In the dark, in his drunkenness, was he fighting Rockefeller, or Tee, or himself?

The sun rose over the marble headstones. The three men surrounded him. A fist cracked his ribs. A fist hit him in the neck. Pavel screamed. He sobered immediately. He screamed his name, at first, hoping that they would recognize it or that Rockefeller would come. They shoved him onto a gravestone. When he tried to brace himself, his wrists struck hard. The first wrist, perhaps, broke then. On the ground, he screamed that he was a painter, as if realizing what he stood to lose. They beat him until he went quiet — or they heard him and his screams told them what to break.

He grabbed a leg and someone stomped his second wrist. He gave up and lay still. Only after the three men left him did Rockefeller step from the shadows. When the giant body approached, Pavel feared another attacker. He only recognized who it was as Rockefeller cradled him like a baby.

In September, in the hospital in Boston, when his parents’ visits ended, Tee would sit in bed with a lap tray and an old automatic typewriter they’d brought him, and search the past. That attack on Pavel had led (somehow) to Rockefeller attacking Tee. Tee had found two rules to fates: one) if you hurt someone, that person will eventually find a way to hurt you back; and two) if you want anything, you have to hurt someone to get it.

One night Tee saw the ghost dart past his open door through the corridor to the bathroom. He pushed into the hall just in time to catch a ratty jean jacket and a black knee-length skirt, both unfamiliar. As he hurried after the woman, he could taste a change in the air, as if she had slipped a key under his tongue. The hall filled with rain. He tried to make the floor stay the floor. From somewhere he heard an instrument twanging — like the mouth harp his father had given him on his eighth birthday. But what he thought about was Katka and Ynez and Pavel and Rockefeller. Who are you, he asked in his head. Let me see you.

The bathroom was empty, except for him. In the mirror shone the five chicken-pox scars on his chest, the white bandage around his skull.

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.