Matthew Salesses: The Hundred-Year Flood

“Just a woman in the fog,” his father said. Pavel hid his disappointment. The figure was a man.

The first bird asked if Pavel’s father was changing his style.

“I’m going to look around,” the second bird said. He walked into the other rooms.

“There’s a lot of variety in these paintings,” the first bird said. He searched the stacks. Pavel could smell how clean the man was, as if he’d just taken a shower, through the muddy smell of his jacket. The jacket didn’t seem right, as if it belonged to someone else.

As his partner emerged from the bedroom, the first bird said, “I would hate to have to take them away.”

“What do you know about the Vybor na obranu nespravedlivě stíhaných ?” the second bird asked Pavel’s father.

His father was still holding the brush and palette. He put these down and joined Pavel and his mother. “I know that if you put me in jail,” he said, “the Vybor na obranu nespravedlivě stíhaných will know about it.”

“But why would they put you in jail, Táta?” Pavel asked. His mother’s grip loosened as if he had fallen away from her.

His father said they would put him in jail because they felt threatened by him. “Always remember that,” he said. “ I am dangerous to them .”

The second bird laughed. Pavel’s mother said, “Not my husband,” as if agreeing with the bird.

The first bird stepped around Pavel’s painting and wiped his finger across it: a gray streak. He tapped a fingerprint in the middle of the fog, and said, “Tell me which paintings are yours.”

“They’re all mine,” Pavel’s father said, resting his hand on Pavel’s shoulder.

Pavel felt his father’s grip tighten, saw his father’s eyebrows scrunch together, but still he felt ashamed. His father had claimed his bad art. He felt worse than he could reason or hope away. His arm hurt from people holding him, but he found it impossible to complain. It was as if his father stood alone with the bird-men now, as if his mother and he didn’t exist, his arm didn’t exist.

“You’re not building a little army inside your home?” the first bird asked.

“The boy can’t paint,” his father said. “He never learned. He’s horrible.”

Something burned behind Pavel’s eyes. He looked away from the bird-men. Outside, the fog was the same as in his painting. Then he could smell tears running down his face, greasy and sour, though he was far too old to cry. Even later, when he understood his father had meant to protect him, the memory of those words could make him well up.

The two bird-men were quiet now, and Pavel’s parents were quiet, his sniffling the only sound. Finally the first bird shrugged and pushed Pavel’s father toward the door. “I guess he means it,” he said. The second bird flipped open a knife, slashed a few canvases from their frames, and stuffed them under his arm.

In the hospital in Boston, Tee would remember Pavel’s story. Somehow, he hadn’t seen the rage in it. He had imagined Pavel as a little boy who felt betrayed. He’d forgotten the Pavel telling the story, the man who understood his father and held on to the memory because that was the day his father was taken from him, unavenged.

At the end of February, Tee picked up the evening shifts at an English bookstore, the Globe, which stayed open late to serve coffee and beer in the adjoining café. He liked how the staff would read aloud, like songbirds calling to one another in sonorous paragraphs. In the interview, he sat in a tiny office overflowing with stock. Boxes of books covered the desk, only a thin gap in the middle through which two people could see each other. A short-haired girl with an endearing lisp sat across from Tee and asked his favorite book. When he mentioned Clea , she smiled and pushed a box aside. She unclasped a green barrette and pinned her dark hair higher on her head. He told her how his mother had worked part-time at a library, the musty scent of the stacks. He rested his hand on a poetry book with a lifeguard on the cover. He admired how the woman’s, Ynez’s, voice seemed to crest into questions like a wave. For some reason he told her about the set of encyclopedias his uncle had given him on his tenth birthday. He was supposed to write down what he learned each day. His uncle had taped one of Tee’s notes inside the cockpit of a favorite plane. Airplanes fly by obstruction. The air that flows over the round top of the wing has to flow even faster than the particles abandoned beneath. His uncle had underlined obstruction . Tee wondered whether the celebrities his uncle had piloted around had ever seen what he had written.

Ynez had moved to Prague from New York, in July. They got to talking about America. She told him one of her friends had worked in the World Trade Center; her friend’s dog had fallen ill the morning of the attack, and she had taken the dog to the vet instead of going to work.

Tee tapped his fingers on the desk. The chair bit into his back. Then he found himself saying that his uncle had flown a plane into the ground while his family was distracted by the attacks, that his father and his aunt had caused the suicide. As Ynez put a book in his hands, he saw that he was trembling. For a moment her eyes seemed as blue as Katka’s. She fluttered her five fingers through the air. “What is this?” she asked. He shook his head. She said, “A flock of these,” and repeated the pattern with only her pinky. “Why do seagulls fly over the ocean and not the bay?” she asked. “Because then they would be bagels.” He wanted to pull her toward him and hold those jokes in his arms. He didn’t know why she offered him the job.

He intended, at first, to read for his final semester: biographies of Romantic poets for his undergraduate thesis. Instead he bought fabulist novels and books of myths and fables. More real than life. The passages the staff read aloud shared a disconnectedness, a lonesomeness, characters lost in changing worlds. Maybe because they, the staff, faced such misunderstandings in Prague. Once, on the Bridge of Legions, a man in a patched coat had taken an apple from Tee’s hand before Tee could eat it, pulled a switchblade from the coat, and sliced the fruit open to a star pattern, nodding gravely. “Good luck,” the man said, “Asian.” Tee didn’t know if the man was wishing him luck or calling his race lucky. Unlike the others, though, Tee trusted Prague’s strangeness. Ynez was the only one at the Globe like him. She had planned to travel through Europe, but had changed her plans after a single walk through Old Town, a giant metronome ticking on the hill above. She told Tee that the star was lucky. Soon he was coming in an hour early so their schedules overlapped.

Once the paintings of Tee were finished, Pavel’s friend Rockefeller helped look for an art dealer who could arrange an exhibit in New York. The revenue would go to a new café the friends had decided to open in the fall. Tee didn’t know what to say about the paintings of him traveling the opposite route he had come. His desire to keep being painted, like his job, was mostly a desire not to disappear. He continued to visit the house in Malešice. Sometimes Pavel squinted at Tee in the doorway, as if trying to recall what he had seen on New Year’s. But he didn’t offer another thank-you painting or mention that Tee could or should stop coming. Each morning on the tram, Tee would jot down things to say, wanting to contribute without art. They would sit around the kitchen table as if in a café. Occasionally Pavel would drift into the bedroom to paint, and Tee, alone with Katka, would try to deny the floating sensation: as if they were two boats tied to the same dock.

The afternoon that Pavel announced Rockefeller had found an American dealer, Katka clunked her empty teacup on its saucer and said she missed the old distribution, hanging the paintings in public, inspiring people to action. She had to disagree, once again, that a gallery in New York was a better venue than Prague. The cup rattled the saucer — somehow she was still holding it delicately. Then she muttered something indelicate in Czech. Pavel stormed into the bedroom. It was the first time Tee had seen them fight.