Matthew Salesses - The Hundred-Year Flood

Her mother stiffened. “Let’s go,” she whispered. She led her out as their neighbor sighed behind them. They descended the stairs until the door closed.

“Were you drunk, Maminka?” Katka asked again.

Her mother walked down ahead of her until they were at eye level. “Do not say things like that to me,” she said.

“I’m sorry,” Katka said, not meeting her mother’s eyes, that shared blue.

“Look at me, Kateřina. Daddy didn’t want to tell you he hurt me, right?”

“I’m sorry,” Katka said again, and her mother cupped her two cheeks. She locked their gazes.

“Right?”

Later Katka lay in bed with the wooden doll her father had carved from a branch in the spring, holding the doll’s face the way her mother had held her, her hands dwarfing its head. She shook the doll and said, “Bleach. Bleach,” as if the word were a curse.

People always said she took after her mother: their eyes, their quiet defiance. But in the end, long after her father killed himself, she left her mother and their secrets behind.

The candles blinked out one by one. They could do nothing but wait. He took a candle into the kitchen. They made sandwiches. She offered to cook, but in his refrigerator were only fish sticks, spaghetti sauce, hard-boiled eggs, peanut butter, jelly, half a loaf of bread, shredded cheese, leftover French fries, beer, and milk. They drank the beer. “What are you getting me into?” she asked. “How did you expect to last through the flood?”

“This is what I always eat,” he said, then flushed.

They drank a bottle of Krušovice each before another candle burned out. He hadn’t expected her to talk about her father’s violence. His hands darted over the table. In the dark, she said, “Pavel is not outside the door.” She mumbled, as if to herself, but he knew she was talking to him.

“If we were out there,” he whispered, “we would have nowhere to go but your house or the café. His house.”

“We could go to a hotel,” she said.

He remembered the college the policeman had mentioned. “You don’t believe I could take care of you.”

They stood in the kitchen blindly. Then there was a crash outside, followed by a metallic creaking, and they rushed to the window. Barely any moonlight shone through the clouds. Their eyes adjusted slowly — until they could see a lamp pole hunched over in the water, what looked like a metal bench clinging to the bend.

She turned away. He pressed his forehead to the cold glass.

What if — he said in the dark — in the morning, we see a yellow raft float to the wall and we climb down into it? Years from now, the flood is the beginning of our story. We live in the countryside and grow cabbages and cook gulaš and dumplings and visit your mother.

Katka left the kitchen, in the shadows, her gait unsteady, and he worried he’d upset her. Had he mentioned her mother because of his birth mother? When she returned, she had the pewter Golem he’d stolen from her house. Another double legend, a creature that had killed either by nature or because of lost love. Tee trembled, though he had left it out on his dresser. She placed the figure on the counter. “Pavel has one just like this . We can use it to tell the future, if your hob still works.”

She lit the stove with the candle. The gas worked. She took his hands and said this fortune could replace the one in his palms. She kissed the Golem’s fat belly. “It is the wrong metal,” she said. “It should be that metal they used to think could turn into gold.”

“Lead,” he said, still trembling.

She wiped a pot with a towel, placed it on the burner, and rested the Golem inside. He reached for it automatically and she knocked his hand away.

“I took it,” he said. “I didn’t mean to. It was just there, in my pocket, when I got home. I meant to give it back.”

“And now,” she said, “you cannot.”

When the pewter had melted down, she asked for a bowl of water. He turned the faucet on and it sputtered weakly — the water, like the power, would soon fail. She poured the liquid metal into the bowl. The pewter swirled in the water in beautiful gray patterns. He held the candle and waited for her to tell him what she saw. But she was choking back tears. “An early death or a coma,” he said, reminding her what was in his palms. “Deep loves.” She weighed his hands as if they carried the heaviness of his fate. She, too, she said, could picture them with a garden, though in a different country, far from Prague, with flowers instead of cabbage.

“I had bad luck from birth,” he said. “My birth mom died, and my dad must have felt like he was stuck with me.”

She said: “I wanted a baby, and Pavel put everything else before that.”

The candle burned out and they spoke in the dark. “Tell me a legend,” he said out of nowhere, and he realized they were making stories of each other, or themselves. “Never mind. Don’t.”

But she told him about St. Jan of Nepomuk, the queen’s confidant, who, despite being tortured, died refusing to expose her confession. The king had him thrown off the Charles Bridge. Katka said Jan’s tongue was later found washed up on the banks of the Vltava. If you rubbed his statue on the bridge, you were fated to return to Prague.

“What is he the saint of?” Tee asked.

“Of swimmers. His body swam away and became a ghost.”

He asked her to draw the statue. He copied her strokes. A ghost, a fortune, fate. He should have been sick of myths.

When he lit the third-to-last candle, Katka said she had never learned to swim. She avoided standing water. He could see she was ready to reveal something. “I’m listening,” he said. She took his hand and said her father had liked baths, and near the end, the baths had grown longer and longer. She said whenever her father bathed, her mother was unhappy. Her mother used to claim unhappiness marked people’s skin, and she would show the marks to Katka: freckles, bruises, scars. Her mother would roll up a sleeve, point to a contusion, and say, “This is from Communism” or “This is from you drawing on the mirror with my lipstick,” but never “This is from your father.”

One day, the same year her mother’s face was split open, Katka sneaked into the bathroom to see her father’s bruises, wanting to know how unhappy he was. Her mother had a purple bloom on her thigh because Katka had mouthed off at school for the third time that month. Her father had been in the bath for an hour. After her mother went up to their neighbor’s, Katka tiptoed to the bathroom. Her father hated to be interrupted. She put her ear to the wood. Hearing nothing, she cracked the door. Her father’s towel, his dirty clothes, wet hair he’d pulled from the drain lay on the floor. She nudged the door a little farther until she could get her head around it.

Steam rushed hot on her face and hazed the air. She was afraid of her father, but she couldn’t leave. At first she thought her father’s unhappiness must be so bad it leaked, like popped blisters. Dark streaks marbled the water. He didn’t respond to her voice. She stepped farther inside, and then she screamed. When her mother finally rushed in, Katka was in the tub, holding her father’s wet body.

The candle had gone out again. Tee shivered. Their families’ stories twisted around each other. He had the feeling — as he had when she first told him about her father’s suicide — that she knew him by heart. That she had known him, all along, better than anyone else ever could.

“Fathers,” she said.

And as if in answer, the ground moaned and shook and the sound of collapsing outside shook them. They hurried to the window. Outside, they could see, at first with difficulty and then all too clearly, an empty space across the street. The green building that used to be there was now a pile of rubble sticking up out of the water, half of the far wall still standing, the lowest apartments settling into the flood with a brick groan. He couldn’t help but remember the video of the towers collapsing in New York. Pieces of the building washed along in the current. He imagined a tipping-over like dominoes.