Matthew Salesses: The Hundred-Year Flood

Early in the morning before Tee’s first visit to the artist’s house, he stood in front of his bathroom mirror for longer than usual, wondering what Pavel Picasso would see. As soon as Tee turned away from his reflection, he would forget it. He knew this.

Katka had sketched a map to Malešice on his palm. When he arrived at the house, she led him into the bedroom, where light pooled through two high windows. She walked quickly on her tall frame, and he had to hurry to keep up, even for those few steps. He didn’t want them to think he had stopped to examine their lives. On their walls hung completed puzzles, elegantly framed, not paintings. There was a photo from their wedding: only their shaggy hairstyles seemed to have aged. He was surprised at how ordinary the couple seemed, sober and without fireworks. Katka pointed to a chair across from where Pavel was setting up, and Tee sat with his head in his hands, then straightened up so that they wouldn’t think he was having second thoughts.

Katka knelt and looked directly into his eyes. That blue was hypnotic, the inner blue of fire. “Where in America did you leave?” He was glad, at least, that she asked leave , that she believed in his dispossession. And who else, when he had stripped all the way down, had wanted to make something of him?

“You’re not expecting me to undress again?” he asked, blushing.

She pointed to his hand. “You could have copied the map.” He hadn’t thought of that. If he had erased the route on his skin, he might not have come.

The first, and best, painting of Tee depicted a dark figure rising off his toes beside the Orloj, a ghost learning to let go of the earth. Below his black bangs, Tee’s cheeks burned red with faith. He had never seen in himself this odd credulity. The recognition stuck in his throat, scratching as he breathed. He wondered if his Korean half — some moment during his first months of life, after his birth mother’s death but before adoption — was responsible. He remembered a piece of family lore about how he had learned to walk. He had refused to crawl, only stood until his legs held up his will. His mother had said it was like watching someone recall who he was. Katka said Pavel painted more real than life.

By the end of his first week, Katka had given Tee a short version of her own history, how she had run off from her mother and her small town, Beroun, in 1984, to go to university in Prague. She spoke English with a slight British accent, inherited from her late father; behind the rising intonation was her mother’s guttural Czech. Hard consonants, throated vowels, rolled, nearly hiccupped r ’s — Tee found the combination exciting, like a car race in which one watches to see how the next crash might unfold. “I wanted a new life then,” she said. “Heaps of us did.” She reached over and readjusted his pose, and he realized that she and her husband somehow worked together, though only Pavel held a brush. Her confidence was different than Pavel’s — it wasn’t based on a talent. It was more mysterious, like the faith in Tee’s cheeks.

That first week, Katka told a legend about the Orloj’s maker, Hanuš. Upon the clock’s completion, an executioner blinded him with a hot poker. “The city’s orders,” Katka said, “so that he could never make another.” She smiled, and turned her wrist as if to bore Tee through each eye. “Then the story splits in two. At some point the clock broke. Some say Hanuš took revenge. He threw himself into the gears. Others say the clock broke on its own, and no one but Hanuš could fix it. He fixed what he had got blinded for making.”

“Either way,” Tee said, “that’s a man who knew what could live forever.”

Pavel snapped his fingers. “Stop moving.”

For a moment Tee had nearly forgotten he was being painted.

“Tell me,” Katka said, “do you know a book called The Giving Tree ?” She folded her hands.

“Are you asking because it can help Pavel paint me?”

“She asking anyone who’s speaking English,” Pavel said.

Katka explained that The Giving Tree had been her father’s favorite book to read to her. Tee knew it. The tree gives up its apples, its branches, its trunk, for a boy.

“I always thought that story was so beautiful, but my dad read it like a warning. Later, he killed himself.” There was a long pause. “What were you like as a kid?”

Tee rubbed his eyebrow and marveled that she could mention suicide so easily. Was that when she had left for Prague? They might understand each other. “Most of the time, I did what I was told. Then all of a sudden, I would break a window or run away.”

He asked if she believed in her legends, and she shrugged. Then she tousled his hair. “You are too young for these old stories to interest you.” She and Pavel were fifteen years his senior. Tee wondered again why they had chosen him to model.

Once, about a week into their sessions, she said, “Are you ready to say why you came here yet? Was it because of the terror attacks? You seem like you have got some dark past.”

“I came here,” Tee started — but then he didn’t want to look like a kid sighing about his uncle—“because here my past doesn’t matter.”

He wished to explain better. Prague had resisted centuries of violence with a peaceful revolution. He tried again. “I came here because here I’m the only one who determines who I am.” Why did that sound like finding himself ? He wasn’t wasting his uncle’s money, or affection. His container grew fuller. With a start, he couldn’t remember if he had undressed, after all. He glanced down, though, of course, he was clothed.

“You look like you saw a ghost,” Katka said.

Pavel reminded him, once again, to keep still.

Each day, as his body came to life on the canvas, Tee would wait to hear about Katka’s and Pavel’s pasts, and the city’s. His own past he avoided — nothing about him seemed equal to either of them. His accomplishments were Most Sportsmanlike at soccer camp, two years on the school newspaper, one TV appearance to give his reaction to a series of campus robberies, the ability to drink a beer faster than anyone else in his book club. Pavel and Katka would never have seemed equal to each other without art. Her length and self-assurance; his tics and self-containment, always curled up, seeming smaller than he was. At times, Tee wasn’t sure if it was the stories or being painted that he liked more. Her crashing voice kept him still and rapt. But taking shape, as the artist saw him, Tee almost felt he had a purpose in Prague.

It wasn’t long, though, before Pavel handed over an old painting as a thank-you and said Tee didn’t have to come anymore. Katka leaned forward. Tee smelled cocoa butter, noticed her lipstick printed on her cup. He wanted to rub a piece of paper over the print. How long did it take to finish a painting? Surely years, or at least months.

“What is it?” Katka asked, squinting.

It was just as she had said. In the paintings, he was more real than life. His original self had been replaced. He pointed to her cheek. “You have something there.” She ran her finger along her nose, and without thinking, he licked his thumb and pressed it to her skin. He lifted off an eyelash. Before he could pull away, she held his wrist and blew on his thumb.

Pavel stomped, and his brown hair flopped over his craggy brows. He puffed it aside. He said these were the last touches and Tee should shut his eyes if he couldn’t stop.

Tee felt like a child, but he did shut them. With his eyes closed, he realized how tired he was. Though he’d done nothing all day but pose. He heard Katka start a new legend, about the hill Blaník, as if nothing had changed, at least for her. In the darkness, he became terrified of losing them, of losing that gaze on him and the stories that contextualized the city. He didn’t realize yet how much he needed them to contextualize him. He squeezed his eyelids tighter and the room expanded and then contracted. He pictured his father with a camcorder, taking one of his home videos: Pavel Picasso painting furiously, Katka narrating some deeper mystery, Tee a stranger in a strange land. His father, who had slept with his aunt. That had nothing to do with Tee. Heat pressed his thigh, and he opened his eyes. His leg was touching Katka’s. She put a hand on his knee, to reassure him or to question his alarm.