Matthew Salesses - The Hundred-Year Flood

“I wasn’t trying to steal from you,” the man whined. Rockefeller walked past toward the road.

When he could think clearly again, reject the image of another crumpled body, Rockefeller returned to the swollen river. He tried to light a cigarette beside the stretch of land that usually formed a bridge to Kampa Island. An empty refrigerator smashed against the side of the museum. A floral-patterned couch scraped up along what was now the shore, at his feet. He smoothed back his wet hair and threw the cigarette on the ground.

A white face rushed downriver, a white shirt like a flag — and Rockefeller dove into the water. The body caught on some underwater crag. Rockefeller fought forward, churning his arms. The river pushed against him. Finally he drew even. So awkwardly stiff: a mannequin.

He held the mannequin in his arms anyway. He steadied his feet in the current, and threw the body ashore. When a female model followed, he threw her onto land as well. He waded back and lay beside them, the two plastic people dripping with rain and floodwater. Sewage residue stuck to them and to him. He swept a finger under his waistband, wiped off the sludge with the camping bag, and retched.

As he lay on his back, a memory flitted in undesired of the first brave thing he’d ever done, skipping a workers’ holiday in secondary school. His teacher had filed a report about his attitude that might have damaged his family’s reputation. His parents had been forced to use up a favor to get someone to “lose” the report.

He had only been showing off. He knew his parents would come to his rescue.

He stuffed the mannequins under his arms, the man on his right, the woman on his left, and crossed back over the Bridge of Legions toward Karlovo Náměstí. Almost no one was out, except along the river, and the wide absence in the streets seemed the aftermath, not the beginning, of disaster.

It was evening when Pavel walked into The Heavenly Café. The stink of the river rose in his throat. Two mannequins dripped brown water. Rockefeller drank coffee and circled them, a male and a female. Pavel rubbed his casts on his shirt, streaking it with mud, without noticing. Four canvases tilted against the back wall. Pavel pushed past a pile of concrete and, with his casts, tried to slide the frames, the last of the paintings he hadn’t burned, images of the boy his wife loved, through the mess. He couldn’t concentrate. Back in June, Katka had painted him for once, turning the tables. He thought of that now. She put the brush to the canvas, something he could no longer manage. He settled, naturally, into a pose. He even gave some instruction — how to see shadows, how to see what didn’t want to be seen — knowledge he had saved up over the years. She had studied art in college, but when she turned the canvas around, it was the simplest insult. A paintbrush erect from his crotch. “Maybe you were always like this,” she’d said, “but this is what I see now.”

He couldn’t let Americans take both his wrists and his marriage. He wanted an equal revenge — Rockefeller’s wrists broken, his wife brokenhearted, Tee permanently alone. The sound of the rain came from far away. In the rubble in front of Pavel, Rockefeller lowered himself to his knees. His thighs shook, and he hung his head. His hair poufed like a wet bird.

“I’m sorry. I have to tell you something. I saw her with Tee.”

Pavel hooked his fingertips around a painting.

“They’re in his apartment.”

Rockefeller rose and pulled Pavel’s cast away from the painting. He drew out a pack of Marlboros. Pavel sat on a slab of concrete. Rockefeller started two cigarettes and held one between them. Then, remembering, he slipped it directly into Pavel’s mouth. Pavel breathed in. His stomach was empty. It had been days since he’d last smoked. His arms and legs tingled. On the blank back wall, an image started to come to him.

They moved around the café together and rearranged things, searching the slabs of rock and wood for the musculature of a business. Rockefeller stood the mannequins near the window, and Pavel gave them names, Petr and Petra. Pavel turned their backs to each other, slid them in close to kissing, bent an arm to a waist in a way that could have been reaching or pushing.

After a while, Pavel said, “You must do this for me. Get the buckets of paint in my house. Get the towels. Get the clay. Get everything. And promise you’ll help me get her away from Tee.”

In the house in Malešice, Rockefeller found the wreckage of a fight: broken dishes, running water, displaced furniture, scattered clothes. Against the bed leaned a giant canvas. Pavel had mentioned he was painting with his casts. Wide yellow swerves layered one upon another. It was hard to make out shapes or meaning. Rockefeller tried not to care whether or not this painting could convince anyone of a revolution.

He rested an umbrella from the house in the crook of his neck and carried the equipment to the café in several trips. On the second trip, he stumbled on the wet cobblestone and dented a bucket, but the lid held. He pictured himself paint-splashed in the middle of a flood. He tried not to hurry. Sirens wailed, deeper in the city. The rain poured down and he tucked the towels under his jacket. His teeth chattered, though he wasn’t cold.

When Pavel had his supplies, he stood on a ladder and painted a mural over the entire back wall of the café. Those same thick swerves. Rockefeller toweled off the casts and held up buckets of different colors. This was what Katka must have done. She must have hoped, as the guilt from sleeping with Tee ate at her, that Pavel would paint himself back to self-reliance. If they were lucky, the mural could get on the news. Rockefeller still had a few favors he could call in.

“Promise me,” Pavel said. And Rockefeller agreed. He had to know that Pavel forgave him for the attack. “I will paint for you. You must do what you see.”

Along the river, the flood continued. Pavel asked for the radio. Zoo workers euthanized an elephant that might otherwise have rampaged in through the city. Someone got injured in the explosions. Rescue workers canoed downriver into Karlín. Had Tee and Katka gotten out? Pavel scraped his shoes on the ladder and muttered to himself, “You’ll be sorry.” Rockefeller pretended not to hear.

In the morning, Rockefeller would walk back to Pavel’s house to fetch them breakfast, and entering through the kitchen door, would hear voices. In the morning, after painting water all night, Pavel would outline a body in the bottom corner of a flood. Rockefeller would return to the café unsure how to bring up Tee and Katka, but in the mural, he would recognize the tint of the drowned body, the wave of black hair. And Pavel would step down from the ladder and rest his casts on a rung. “You promised. I need you to stop Tee. Blind him, drown him, just make sure he leaves.” Rockefeller would wish he felt more surprised.

The day before the flood, August 12, 2002, the rain fell from early in the morning, but Katka didn’t show. Tee went to an Internet café to escape the wanting. At the top of his in-box was his mother’s e-mail. He read it in a daze. When he left the Internet café, he forgot his umbrella, but he didn’t think this linked him to Katka. He kept moving. Strangers shuttled by in the rain. Back in his apartment, he took down the painting of the Russian tank treading over a woman — over Katka — in Old Town, his final thank-you for modeling. He had meant to do so ever since his trip back to Boston. He hung Mucha’s “Seasons” instead: four half-nude women for a year. From his dresser, he removed the last stolen objects and set them in clear view. He wasn’t hiding. Outside, the streets echoed, and he cursed the constant construction. He swept and mopped and washed dishes and waited for another man’s wife. Once, he almost called the Globe to ask where Ynez had gone, single Ynez. She had quit, at least in part, because of him. How should he understand that? He held his phone like one of the objects on his dresser, like it didn’t belong to him except by whatever mysterious instinct had made him take it. What if Ynez had gotten pregnant? What if Katka got pregnant? Would that unite or split them apart? What was his birth mother like pregnant? The tremor of skin as he kicked inside? By the time Katka appeared on the sidewalk below, in the night, her head bent and water slicking off her dark brown hair, he was dialing his father.