Matthew Salesses - The Hundred-Year Flood

“Excuse me?”

The cab screeched to a stop. Pavel fumed. But he didn’t say another word. He knew about the taxi gangs that sometimes formed.

In the street a young policeman looked Pavel over, wet sweatpants to wet casts. They had been sized up like this at anti-Communist rallies. “My wife is in there,” Pavel said.

“No one is in there,” the policeman said. “Everyone’s been evacuated.”

Pavel imagined the water creeping toward them, the buses headed out a different way, the flood carrying the bodies of people who ignored orders.

“This area will soon be underwater, too. Unless you’ve got a boat, you’re not going anywhere.”

Pavel tapped his painted casts together. “I’m Pavel Picasso,” he said.

The policeman laughed. “Do you have a boat, Picasso?”

Once, during the Revolution, Rockefeller and Katka had gone to a demonstration ahead of Pavel and had distributed his anti-Communist drawings on broadsides. People happily took them, but Rockefeller grew bored. Some of the protest leaders prepared to speak. Rockefeller said they should speak, too — he could get them on stage — but Katka refused, surprising him. He handed her the rest of the copies, letting go too quickly. As the broadsides spilled to the ground, she stooped and retrieved them. He hurried forward.

He remembered this now as a policeman walked an old woman toward a bus. “What will I do when I get back?” the woman said. “My nurse will come tomorrow and think my family took me.” The policeman led her by the arm. “I came to this building to die.”

Rockefeller started after them, but another policeman turned him around by the elbow. “Is there anyone else in your building?” the policeman asked.

“Tell that woman everyone knows about the evacuation,” Rockefeller said. “Tell her that her family will know she is fine.”

The policeman cocked his head. “Who are you?”

Rockefeller remembered how they’d acted under Communism, when no one knew who was Secret Police and who wasn’t. “Do it,” he said, and rushed off to help others.

He turned back once — the policeman was trying to find the right woman.

As he hurried west toward Old Town, Rockefeller pressed apartment buzzers and shouted into intercoms; he carried children to buses in one arm, and held his umbrella over them with the other. People stopped to ask about the flood, or to share news. “They say a tidal wave is coming,” a man told him. “A small tidal wave.”

A boy ran after his father with a dog in his arms. “Look at these scratches,” a woman said, revealing the tops of her breasts. “My cat refused to leave. I knew something was happening when she stayed up on a bookcase all yesterday. I think the scratches are infected.” Another woman said the police had forced her to leave her husband; he was sick and had kicked and screamed as they tried to get him out. “He’ll outlast them,” she said. An old man asked where he was supposed to go; he hadn’t left Karlín in two years and had forgotten the rest of the city. A boy waving a foam sword said the military was going to bomb a ship that might sweep downriver and destroy the Charles Bridge.

Rockefeller directed tourists to trams, told people which parts of the city the news had said would be hit worst. Karlín, the Lesser Quarter, the Jewish Quarter, Old Town: the one, new; the other three, centuries old. A few people railed against him, said to leave them alone, it wasn’t his place. They knew somehow that he had no official role. A few turned and asked advice of others.

Rockefeller wandered down to the river. A metal barrier had been put up along the embankments through Old Town to the Bridge of Legions. The Charles Bridge stood ready to prove an old myth that egg yolks mixed into its mortar meant it would never fall. Legends of Prague fluttered on the lips of evacuees as if to remind everyone of how long the city had existed, but Rockefeller didn’t trust legends. In the Jewish Quarter, a man reenacted King Canute’s prayers for the river to retreat, courting laughs. Tee would have laughed. Rockefeller wondered where Katka and Tee would go to escape. For the second time that day, he nearly wished the flood would get rid of them, leave Pavel to mourn and move on — not doubt, wonder, self-destruct. Rockefeller imagined them on a bus, flipping over in a sudden increase of water. He imagined them hit in the head by flotsam, drowning slowly in a freak accident, one of the military’s bombs gone wrong.

If they survived the flood, maybe Pavel would find his old nerve. Once, a man had insulted his father’s art and Pavel had planned revenge for six months.

Rockefeller passed long lines at ATMs as if cash would solve everything. At one, a man pushed forward. A woman fell to the ground, and Rockefeller was upon him. “What are you doing!” he said. His bag swung down on his arm.

The man shrank backward. “An accident. An accident.”

Rockefeller bent over him, but something touched his ankle. “Please,” the woman said, “just leave us alone.” She trembled. The man shook his head like he didn’t know her.

When he left them there, he felt as if they’d said, as his headmaster had said during a school commemoration of Lenin, that he was too stupid to understand.

The barriers stopped at the Charles Bridge. Food, clothing, furniture, trash, parts of poorly built houses, even a few casually dressed mannequins, swept down the Vltava. A clutch of tourists lined the banks. The water almost reached their feet; the bridge’s arches were submerged. Rockefeller’s face was wet. He must have left his umbrella near the ATM. An explosion rang out upriver, and heads turned. The water smelled strongly now of garbage and sewage, dredged-up filth. The flood covered the islands: he could barely see the top of the museum on Kampa. More explosions sounded. Tourists snapped photos and talked into cell phones. Ambulance workers ferried people across to the Lesser Quarter.

At the hospital, after Pavel’s attack, the doctors had asked Rockefeller questions he didn’t want to answer, like what exactly he had seen. When he told them Pavel’s name, they called colleagues. We can save his career, they seemed to tell each other. They put his wrists back together. But by that time, Pavel had told security to keep Rockefeller away.

Where were their old friends now, and the foreigners Rockefeller had invited over after Pavel’s attack? Where was Vanessa? She had her father to look after her.

Rockefeller crossed the Bridge of Legions into the Lesser Quarter, dripping rain. Along Smetano Nábřezi, a crowd gathered clothes washed downstream from a department store. They wrestled over outfits. A woman shoved a boy away from the river. When he saw Rockefeller, he said, “It’s not fair.” Rockefeller unzipped his bag. He wasn’t sure what he could give the boy, but as soon as the bag was open, the boy ran off with an old pair of shoes far too big for his feet.

The fringes of the crowd turned to Rockefeller, reaching. Rockefeller wished to lead by example. He widened the opening. A wet man took the towel to wipe his forehead. A man with a gash on his arm swiped bandages. And then they were taking anything. As a man pulled the bag away, Rockefeller remembered the deed. He pushed through the crowd. He tore back the bag, and the man stumbled with the force of the movement and fell. Rockefeller shoved his hand inside. “Where is it?” he asked.

“I didn’t get anything,” the man said from the ground, the rain sputtering down on him. The crowd followed.

Rockefeller flung apart the man’s wet hands. Nothing. He carried the bag away from the river, and shook it out. Gauze and a bottle of water dropped in the mud. The deed floated down on top. He closed his fist around the paper and stuffed it in his pocket.