Matthew Salesses - The Hundred-Year Flood

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 Her grandfather reads Kafka and Max Brod, writes unpublished novels.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