Matthew Salesses: The Hundred-Year Flood

The wind blew at his back. At the far end of the castle grounds, behind the Basilica of St. Peter and St. Paul where the devil had lost a legendary bet for a soul, Tee stood for a while in a famous cemetery. He watched a boy return to the same statue over and over, a thin, winged girl that couldn’t have meant anything to him. Tee stepped back to give the boy room, or to wonder unobserved. After the boy’s father led him away, Tee touched the wings. They were scaly, almost reptilian. He imagined the boy lifting those wings onto his own back. Making a myth of himself. Later Tee would learn about Queen Libuše, who sent out a white horse from Vyšehrad to look for a king and found a man stooping under a doorframe that would eventually become Kafka’s castle. After that king died, a maidens’ army would fight the men for control of Prague. Beside the cemetery was a prayer maze where children knelt in the center and wished. Tee felt cold with history. He poked a finger in the snow and outlined a man and a woman, a baby slipping out of their arms.

He climbed up and sat on the wall under the flat-bottomed clouds. Below, ancient armies had piled up dead, forever at the edge of what they wanted.

Then Tee was back at his uncle’s wake. His uncle, burned up from crashing his solo plane in a wheat field in New York, had been cremated and kept in a teal urn. Tee’s aunt shrieked with guilt, pressed her forehead to the ceramic. His father buried his face in his shirt. They could no longer hide their affair. The two of them had driven the plane down as effectively as had his uncle’s hands. Yet the affair was many years old. Why had his uncle given up at last?

A piece of brick scratched free under Tee’s nails and tumbled toward the water.

He wandered down the hill, through an arch in the wall. A flash of color in the dark: a picture of fireworks and, underneath, in English, NEW YEAR EVE. In a day, Tee reminded himself, it would be 2002. Other announcements lay scattered on the cobblestone, all in Czech. He wondered why this single English flyer was left on the wall. The type of everyday strangeness that thrived in Prague. He folded the flyer into his pocket.

When he reached the city center, it was dark but not late. Winter curtained Prague at four in the afternoon — so cold sometimes it was like the city was searching out the gaps in his clothing. Though other times he would stumble upon a hidden garden, as if pumped through the arteries of a secret heart.

In his pocket, his fingers found a tiny piece of scaled wing. At some point he had started taking “souvenirs” from the places he went, coasters he doodled on, a loose chunk of brick, severed buttons. He remembered lying in bed after the birthday party in Boston, a candle in his hand, wondering why he had taken it — the number 2. Later, on his first day at the artist’s house, he would steal a pewter Golem, just bigger than a Monopoly piece.

He needed coffee. He needed to believe his exhaustion was only jet lag, though he had woken on the cold floor that morning, as his father would do sometimes. He had slept late despite the rooster that crowed periodically, a rooster in a city in winter. He heard its pecking in his head— shush, shush, shush —its beak slicing vainly through the snow.

In a café down a side street, he let the caffeine wind his spring. He wondered how to make a start: apply at the Prague Post (the local English newspaper); work at an English bookstore; commit to teaching, after all; write a novel; become a tea connoisseur? As if one of those tasks would open a door. It wasn’t about work. After his uncle’s air limo business sold, Tee’s share of the inheritance (a token for a son-like nephew) would be nearly three hundred thousand dollars.

By ten, he had finished his third cup. He trembled as he signed the check. In the dark, on the cobblestone, he didn’t know which way to turn. He smelled smoke, heard a siren somewhere. His heart raced. After an hour he stumbled upon the familiar glass doors of his hotel, as if by coincidence. No one waited inside. He remembered skimming over Boston in the cockpit of his uncle’s water plane, so completely separate from the city below. In the glass doors stood his reflection. The container inside of him filling. Finally he made his way through the web of streets to a beer stall near Old Town Square. As he waited for his Budvar, he heard the explosions, at last. He followed a woman a little older than he. When they reached the crowd, he saw the fireworks. Not high up in the air, but shot horizontally down streets, just overhead. He pushed through the mob under the Orloj astronomical clock, under the streaks that burst into sparks and ash. Inside his coat pocket, his fist tightened on the scaly feather. A stranger slapped his back. The Orloj rang in the New Year with its famous dance of figurines. People sprayed champagne, shook hands, passed bottles, sang Czech folk songs, pulled him into crisscrossing arms. He drank anything he got his hands on. A liquor that tasted like Christmas, which he would later know as Becherovka. A jam jar of homemade slivovice. The champagne wet his clothes, stuck to his skin, and suddenly he wanted everything off. He felt dizzy with the idea of starting out clean of his past, like a baby. Dumping his container for good.

He slipped off his shirt and stepped into a small opening where two businessmen shot industrial-grade fireworks over Týn Church. When he got down to socks and boxers, the crowd cheered him, the foreigner half-naked. He swayed and shuffled to the side to catch his balance. Someone copied his steps, making a dance. Someone handed him another Budvar. He wriggled, trying to force the heat from the alcohol through his limbs. The wind stung his back. He drank and shook and drank and shook — until finally the cheers faded. As if, in the end, he was only odd or sad. People returned to their circles. Hands drew back. Tee shook harder. The glass bottle steamed in his palm. As he kicked off his socks, a couple approached, a shabby-looking man and a much taller, graceful woman, and waved him over. The man pulled a hood over shaggy hair and ducked under a Roman candle. The woman pointed at the sky and caught Tee’s gaze. He was going to cry, but why? When he had gathered his clothes, the woman turned to him with dizzyingly blue eyes and asked if he spoke English. “We think you should be painted,” she said with no introduction or self-consciousness. Tee picked up a fallen piece of a rocket, as if it still had the energy for another burst. He added it to his pile of clothes, dusting them with ash, and followed her.

The artist went by the nickname Pavel Picasso. He had become famous during the Velvet Revolution in 1989, when Prague intellectuals had led a nonviolent revolt against the Communists. His art, as one critic had slyly put it, punning on “Communism with a human face,” excelled at a “faceless humanism.” Pavel Picasso was a man of average height, average build, but rare intensity. It seemed to Tee as if some inner measure pulled the outer reaches of the artist’s body and personality toward a central point. Sometimes paint stained Pavel’s mouth as if it started inside him. He chewed his knuckles as he worked. He thought with his hands in his armpits. Tee would spend much of January and February of 2002 posing in the studio in the artist’s bedroom, trying to be worthy of intensity.

While Pavel painted, his wife, Katka, would tell legends like that of the Devil’s Pillar, dropped by the devil through the roof of the basilica in Vyšehrad. She would wave her hand as if to call the past onto stage. She was a tall woman, never awkward about her height, with brown hair to her shoulders and high, round cheekbones. She could sweep out her arms and take over the room. When she wasn’t talking, she brewed tea, cooked breakfast and lunch. But domesticity didn’t seem natural to her. Tee would move to help her, and Pavel would peer down his cigarette and tell him to hold his pose. “Now try to being more American,” Pavel would say. It was nerve-racking to Tee, being objectified by an artist’s gaze — he was used to being an object of dismissal. He tightened his jaw. Sweat under his chin.