Matthew Salesses - The Hundred-Year Flood

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.”

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.

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.