Matthew Salesses - The Hundred-Year Flood

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.

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.

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.