Matthew Salesses - The Hundred-Year Flood

He hung up and pressed the buzzer to let Katka in. He timed his steps to the door with her steps on the stairs. Then he pulled her inside. He kissed her rain-wet lips and hugged her as she shivered. What had happened in Korea twenty-two years ago didn’t matter like the woman in his arms now. He slipped his hand up under the wet back of her blouse. Her cool skin, her cold lips, grew warm. He kissed her neck, swept her hair over her ear, and when a knock came at the door, he answered it as if there were two of her.

Rockefeller stood before them. For a moment Tee thought he was dreaming. He’d exposed Katka — he could read this in Rockefeller’s trembling chin, though Rockefeller had said he knew about them. The difference between knowing and seeing. Katka shivered in her wet clothes and covered her chest.

A flood? Tee felt flooded by memories that could confirm or disprove his mother’s e-mail. “What are you talking about?” he asked. Rockefeller whispered in Czech, and Katka slipped into the bedroom. Briefly Rockefeller’s face reddened. He backed out.

“Rockefeller,” Katka said, when she returned to the hall. She rubbed her lips, and Tee kissed her bitterly. When their mouths parted, she said, “I was not trying to make you to kiss me.”

He held his breath and kissed her again. “I’m sorry,” he said. “Rockefeller already knew about us.” He remembered the bustle, earlier, outside his window.

“I have left Pavel,” she said.

Immediately Tee was in Korea. His father stood over him, deciding. Tee’s container filled. He tugged at Katka’s wet blouse. The fabric bunched and stuck to her skin, as he rolled it upward, awkwardly. It covered her eyes, and he kissed her while she was still blind. She shivered and slipped free of the blouse, turned for him to get her bra. He licked one nipple, then the other. Her breaths grew louder. She peeled off her underwear and he led her toward the bedroom. They made it as far as the couch — she still had on her boots, he still had on his shirt and socks. She bit his shoulder as he moved inside of her, and he said, “You have left him.”

“You heard that, then. My marriage is over.”

He pressed her against the arm of the couch. He felt her hip bones, hard sharp curves under his fingers. She was his birth mother, he admitted in that instant. He was his father. Her long black hair, three freckles beside her mouth. He didn’t even have to transform — in his mind’s eye, he had always been a white kid with a curved nose and raised eyebrow.

He kissed her collarbone. She moaned. He fit his hips into hers, pulling her waist with both hands. He wanted to be deeper. He pushed against her. He wanted to be so deep they might switch bodies: he white, she Asian. He shut his eyes, and she pulled him onto the cushions. He slipped an arm around her, under her armpits. Her back was strong and athletic. She raked her nails down his ribs. He moved faster, panting now. She arched her chest into his, he felt their sweat and heat. Her skin slick already. She was turning her hips slightly, in rhythm. His eyes were still shut. He wondered if she had noticed he wasn’t looking at her. But then she called his name — and he heard her voice, he kissed her mouth, he felt her breasts. She held him still for a moment, and he opened his eyes. She rocked her hips again, cradling her arms around his back, and he returned to his senses.

As soon as Katka had stepped away from the house in Malešice, just after midnight, she had heard the signs of the flood for the first time. All day she and Pavel had moved from one room to another, not eating, yelling at each other to stop, please, and listen. Around sunset the phone interrupted them, twice, and then a third time, and he kicked the cord free of the wall. She insulted his art, then she forced herself not to apologize, then she pitied him. They argued in the kitchen, alarmingly close to the knives.

When she said at last that she was cheating, he paled and said, “You’re lying? The American?” She could hardly believe it when he mumbled that she was a gypsy whore like her grandmother. His casts crashed the dishes on the counter to the floor, and she grabbed her calf. Her leg pulsed. Her fingers came away red. She reached past him for a kitchen towel, held her breath, and pressed the towel to the cut. He reached forward, as if to help. She heard his casts scratch together, his latest tic, and he stepped back again. She pictured Tee’s wide forehead, which already wrinkled when he grew skeptical. Once, sweeping up after a meal, she’d told Tee to keep his feet on the floor or he would never marry, and his forehead had creased so deeply he didn’t look like himself.

“He doesn’t even know who he is,” Pavel said.

Later, after she left him, she walked alone under the streetlamps to the stop for the 51 night tram. The light shone close to the posts in the rain. She had forgotten an umbrella. The rain beat down, wetting her hair to her head. A couple stumbled along drunk, talking about the flood. A siren rang out in the distance. She would catch the 51 and then the 52, and hopefully, Tee would be awake when she surprised him. He would be in the same private space as she, ignorant of natural disasters, his Czech poor and his flat without telly or radio.

Her heel caught an edge of the cobblestone, and the pain in her calf squirmed up her leg and into the roots of her teeth. Rainwater slid down the side of her boot and stung her. She walked slowly, watched where she placed her feet.

She tried not to feel alone.

The tram came after five minutes, pulling up without its lights on — malfunction, she wondered, or error. She recalled an accident weeks earlier. A tourist had crossed the tracks without looking, and the tram flipped over trying to avoid him. She sat by the door and held the safety bar over the seat in front of her. Her hands still trembling from leaving her husband. Water dripped off her hair into her lap.

She imagined Tee, asleep in his apartment in the middle of Karlín. Soon she would be beside him — at night, for once — his warmth against her cold skin. She saw his smooth shut eyelids, under that wide forehead, as he slept. She didn’t worry yet about the flood. Though legend had it that Old Town would be destroyed by water, the believer in her was all burned up.

As the tram neared the city center, wooden blockades appeared, many with white sandbags piled in front of them, especially closer to the river. They pulled into Karlovo Náměstí. In the square, she noticed people arguing, a tension in the night, fewer cars than usual. She stepped down to change trams. Nearby, two skateboarders argued with a policeman. They said their families wouldn’t leave home for a flood that would never come. The policeman said he was only passing through. He said evacuation orders were, as far as he knew, rumor. She saw more sandbags, piled up like the city was in a war.

A woman walked up to her and asked if she had a light while her brother or boyfriend or husband held a golf umbrella over the three of them. Katka shook her head, but asked about the weather. The umbrella kept the water out of her boots.

“Oh, you poor dear,” the woman said, noticing her lack. “Keep it over her.” She touched the arm of the man, probably her lover. He held the umbrella higher so Katka didn’t have to hunch.

The man said hadn’t she heard? The rain was supposed to fall all day again tomorrow, and maybe the day after as well. He said the Vltava would rise up into Old Town and throughout the Jewish Quarter to Karlín.

Katka shivered and thanked them for the shelter.

“We’re here on vacation from Plzeň,” the woman said. “What bad timing!”

The man smiled and kissed her forehead. Katka stayed under the umbrella until the 52 came. As the couple walked away, the woman said there were still kind strangers out there, as if Katka had said there weren’t.