Matthew Salesses: The Hundred-Year Flood

“Close eyes,” Pavel said again.

Tee didn’t make any move until Katka’s palm lifted. When he had broken up with his ex in Boston, she had said he was the same as his father. “You will only ever want the wrong woman,” she’d said, meaning she should have known they weren’t right for each other.

Katka stood and went to her husband’s side. She hummed some Czech tune, and Pavel’s frown faded.

After lunch, Pavel again tried to hand over the thank-you painting. “Why stop now?” Tee said. “You could do a bigger series. You could try a gallery in New York.” Without the sessions, Tee might simply return to New Year’s, trying and failing to explode. Pavel clamped his hands in his armpits and said Tee’s suggestion was what his closest friend, a Czech with an American name, Rockefeller, had been advising for years.

Katka turned Tee gently by the shoulder. “Wait a second. Do you mind?” she asked. He hesitated, then stepped outside beside the big maple tree dusted with snow. He walked around it several times, until he lost count. He made a snowball, but had no target. His hands grew numb. Finally he held the snow to his face, the cold waking him up.

When Katka called him back, the smell inside the kitchen still thick with meat and cabbage, she said he could return tomorrow. She pulled apart a knot in her hair and grimaced. He didn’t know who had wanted him and who hadn’t.

That night, he lay in bed picturing Pavel’s hands curled into claws. Could , Katka had said, not should. Though she was speaking her second language. Tee hadn’t even looked at the thank-you painting. He didn’t know what exactly Pavel had been trying to give him. Maybe it wasn’t a painting but one of the puzzles Katka had hung around the house. Tee was intrigued by her puzzle-making, the things about her that didn’t make sense with her legends. Once every other week, she went to the cinema, but she only watched documentaries. She looked up the story beforehand. She wasn’t interested in the mystery of what happened but in its representation, in how it was put together by someone else.

After that could , Pavel had said the subject should choose the next pose — that was why Tee couldn’t sleep now. He had thought this was a serious request. He had spread his fingers across his chest, and then he hadn’t known what to do with his other hand. He hadn’t known whether to sit or to stand. He held his palm stiffly over his heart, as if to pledge allegiance. For the first time, he heard Pavel laugh. When Tee woke, he couldn’t find pants to match his shirt, though he had worn that shirt a dozen times and had laid out an outfit the night before.

On days Pavel was happy with his work, he would join them in telling legends. His accent was like a Shakespearean character’s, iambic, weighted with beats. He liked to talk about a famous Czech hero, Jára Cimrman, who had never actually existed. “So Cimrman crossed ocean in a steamboat,” he would say. Or “So Cimrman took submarine to moon.” Cimrman had climbed the Andes, braved the Arctic, suggested the Panama Canal but never got the credit. Katka teased these stories out of him, laughing, but Tee didn’t get the joke.

Tee wished they would tell him more about life under Communism. Whenever the subject came up, his hip twinged as if he might walk, by accident, into a decades-old rally. One afternoon a small group protested a former Communist prime minister’s acquittal. Pavel and Katka went with their friend with the American name, Rockefeller. The next morning, when Katka described how Pavel had seemed ready to smash a painting over a policeman’s head, Tee made his way across the room. “What was it like?” he demanded, “the Revolution?” He imagined falling in love over art, brushstrokes inciting a nation to freedom, Pavel’s paintings hanging on the facade of the museum in Wenceslas Square, an idealist burning himself beneath.

Pavel sighed and traded brush for cigarette. “It was like something, history, could never being stopped.”

Tee felt his armpits sweat, a change in circulation. “I want to understand,” he said. “There was so much against you. You must have had a lot of conviction.” His elbow bumped the easel. He ignored the shiver up his arm.

Pavel steadied the canvas. “Impossible to understand,” he said. “When I’m eleven, I saw boys I knew once try to kill a man in alley. They are taking nothing, only putting knife in him and running. Maybe he is living, maybe not. I didn’t know they Secret Police or he was, maybe no one.”

“What did you do?” Tee asked.

“I ran away.”

“We all did what we had to do,” Katka said. “You lived. You survived.”

Pavel blew thin darts of smoke, one after another.

Tee wanted more. Maybe he could offer a story of his own. His uncle had suddenly committed suicide after putting up with an affair for more than twenty years. A story with no moral and unclear conviction. What would they make of that? But then Katka rested her hand on the back of her husband’s neck, and Pavel went on. He talked about the political art that got his father killed, about his own paintings denouncing Communism, about how Rockefeller and Katka had placed his art around the city. They had been a family, the three of them.

“Is different than you think,” Pavel said. He said that Tee reminded him of how they used to “risk self” to print their samizdats. They had risked more than Tee ever would.

“I’m painting boy here,” Pavel said, “who is holding door for somebody and then forgets and closes it. But the somebody behind of you is you.”

“You painted me holding a door for myself?” Tee tried to translate Pavel’s English. “And then shutting it on myself?” He pictured coming upon a door like the glass doors of his hotel. He sensed a person behind him, so he held it open. Yet after a moment, he gave up and stepped inside.

Of course, it was a paradox. He couldn’t hold the door for himself and still enter. He remembered an afternoon in Old Town Square, a man in a parrot suit. “Thai massage,” the parrot yelled, approaching him. “You Thai. This your massage.” For a moment the parrot and the door combined. Maybe Tee could only ever belong to Prague as a foreigner, as the one Asian in the entire city, someone with another self waiting in the wings.

But that lesson, as Pavel had said, Tee would soon forget.

Katka seemed to study Tee with the same critical eye as her husband’s. Heat radiated off their bodies. Tee felt her heat separate from Pavel’s, or maybe that was an illusion. He waited for more explanation, for some final clarity. He waited for an explanation of their beautiful revolution. He wanted to know how they had risked so much. But instead, Pavel described the first time the Secret Police took his father, in 1978, a story Tee would always remember, always imagine, as a moment of definitive loss.

In the story Pavel told, he was fourteen. Art filled the apartment. Canvases leaned against the couch, were stacked against one another by the walls. Pavel’s paintings had just begun to resemble his father’s. His father squeezed out a tube of blue paint. “Hear that?” he kept asking, glancing at the door. His mother winced from the arm of the couch. It wasn’t until later that Pavel would realize his parents had been expecting the Secret Police.

Pavel had been painting a gray man for a half hour when the doorbell rang unmistakably. His father sent him into the bathroom to wash and smeared his own hands with paint. Pavel hurried. When he got out of the bathroom, his mother took his arm. Two men hovered in their living room like birds, sharp-beaked and feathered in plaid.

“Please sit down,” the first bird said, as if it were his house. He asked what Pavel’s father was painting.