Matthew Salesses - The Hundred-Year Flood

“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.

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.