The Hundred-Year Flood (4 page)

VI

Once Ynez had left, Tee touched the books she had touched, his fingers still with the warmth of her wrist. In the story he’d wanted to tell her, he had run away from home with a photo of his birth mother.

His parents lived in a renovated farmhouse outside of Boston, the yard bordering a forest where lost dogs were often found. When he was a boy, those woods had seemed to him a fairy world where anything was possible. The winter he turned six, he had a sharp feeling, like an earache, and while his parents fought over his father’s latest indiscretion, he pocketed the sole photograph of his birth mother and snuck into the snow-glistened trees.

The black-and-white Polaroid was the one thing Tee had from Korea, proof he was hers. He’d already memorized her face against his own (her softer angles, her darker skin). He’d memorized the smell, plastic with the slightest trace of coffee—maybe his father had spilled on it. On the back of the photo, his father had written the three syllables she’d said before she died,
Kang Seul Peum.
In the woods Tee chanted these syllables like a spell. He made a circle of snowballs around him. He wondered if, as his father had guessed, she had tried to name him. For a while, under the snow-bent trees, Tee enjoyed the anticipation. He imagined his mother appearing in a blue flame, like in a cartoon he had seen. But once the sun set, the universe shifted. His fingers froze, and the snow blew and melted against his cheeks like tears. He recalled the Medusa from his father’s book of myths, able to turn a boy to stone. All night he waited for some monster to find him, and in the morning, as he made his way to a neighbor’s house in the half-light, cold and sick and wet, the photo had lost its protection.

When he got home, his mother called his father in from the woods. Tee heard a flashlight flick off in the foyer. They rubbed his body until he stopped shivering, but they couldn’t halt the march of illness. Pneumonia weakened him, flooding his lungs until it got hard to breathe, and when red dots burst on his chest, they discovered he’d caught chicken pox as well, from school. In two weeks he lost ten of his fifty pounds. He dreamed of his birth mother stretchered into the hospital, dying, like on TV. She reached for a tall American with a broken leg. Had they made a pact? Her hand covered his, and it was agreed. The half-pale boy emerging in a mix of afterbirth and death would go to America.

For a while, after the flood, Prague would seem to gather back up inside Tee, piece by piece. The paintings. Katka’s legends. Ynez’s warmth. Ghosts. The problem was, there had always been something itching inside him, fluttering like a bird in his throat, waiting to fly out. He didn’t know when the itching had started. He had felt it in those woods when he was six.

In the Globe, as Tee opened a book about Prague’s river sprites, he sensed someone behind him. He was almost afraid to turn around. He remembered the spell of the syllables, how simple his adoption had seemed to him as a boy. His father had fallen in love with him—in the hospital in Korea, after watching his birth mother die—and had taken responsibility for Tee’s life. Even that time Tee got sick, when a priest arrived to give the last rites, his father had walked in, put one hand on the priest’s shoulder and the other on his son’s cheek, and stopped death.

A statuesque Czech stooped under the archway separating the steps down to the bookstore from the open space of the café. It was Rockefeller.

Back when Tee had started modeling, Rockefeller had helped him rent an apartment across the hall in the same building in Karlín, an up-and-coming district east of the Jewish Quarter. As neighbors, they had formed a hesitant friendship. Tee remembered drinking with Rockefeller after the protest against the former prime minister’s acquittal, the one that Pavel and Katka had also gone to. They had to meet aboveground, not in one of the wine cellars Tee was drawn to. Rockefeller stood a thick six foot six, with cabbage-sized shoulders and a shock of brown hair like a toupee, which often displaced light fixtures. By the third Budvar, Rockefeller was bragging about how he had used his university’s press to print samizdats full of Pavel’s paintings—before anyone knew Pavel other than by his father. “You know how he got name Picasso?” Rockefeller asked Tee. The waitress passed by, and Rockefeller lowered his voice, as if they were in danger, and said he had used his parents’ Party connections. He had tricked them and leaked a samizdat to the foreign press.

Tee didn’t know what to make of this brag. Rockefeller was clearly tricking himself. His parents had been high-level Communists who fled the country after the Revolution. They must have known that Communism would end. They had given Rockefeller his name by special permission.

Rockefeller ordered another round. Tee doodled the Czech flag on a napkin, then slipped the napkin into his wallet, as if it would work away there, writing over his Americanness.

In the Globe, Rockefeller’s head hung forward and he held the lapel of his sports jacket closed. He led Tee away from the stacks to a table by the main entrance—the Globe was in a century-old building with bronze banisters and a vaulted ceiling in the front section. Rockefeller ordered them beers and pulled from his bag a hand-drawn blueprint of his and Pavel’s future café. “Advising me,” he said, that same Shakespearean heft to his accent, as if aping the artist. “I want that everyone will come. Americans will come, then everyone.”

His eyes never wavered from Tee’s, two round bulges above his caved cheeks and square chin: a face that seemed composed more of a theme than of genetic traits. Sometimes Tee liked feeling swept along in the current of Rockefeller’s self-assurance. Yet the relentless eye contact, those cabbage shoulders, the way Rockefeller rattled the blueprint in Tee’s face and asked for money, unsettled him. Tee regretted mentioning his inheritance as proof he could pay his rent.

“I told you I’m not an investor,” he said. “My uncle died just six months ago.”

“You’ll changing mind. Here, look at this. I’m putting space for talking here. Real talking needs this shape of room. And Pavel’s paintings. Here, on wall, Picasso.”

There was beer on Rockefeller’s breath, and he could go on about Pavel Picasso for hours if drunk. Tee had to change the subject. But he said, “Paintings of Katka? I’ve seen them in the museums. Are they all of her?”

Rockefeller touched thumb to forefinger. “I’m putting them together.”

“A perfect couple?” Tee asked.

Tee couldn’t picture this giant match-making. Rockefeller smoothed his lapel and asked how anyone could be perfect. Then, as if he had just thought of it, he said, “Why Prague? Why not you going to Korea?”

Tee had heard this question from the bookstore staff, from Pavel. He sketched spire after spire on his coaster, under an empty sky. In Korea there was nothing for him that wasn’t already buried deep underground. “Stop drawing,” Rockefeller said, covering the pen with his hand.

“Pavel and Katka aren’t perfect?” Tee asked again.

“
Proč?
” Rockefeller said. “Why, you wanting her?”

Tee was relieved he’d already reddened from the alcohol. His Asian blush.

Rockefeller pulled his hand away and studied the blueprint, laughing. But after a sip of beer, he fell silent. Tee’s breaths quickened. For some reason he couldn’t look up. He scooped the drawing into his lap. The café seemed to grow louder, busier. Then a woman walked in—the daughter of Pavel’s art dealer, a New Yorker full of the indifference of skyscrapers—and glanced around until she found them. She adjusted her skirt and waved. Rockefeller crumpled the blueprint in one bearish paw.

“What’s Vanessa doing here?” Tee asked.

The paper lay crippled on the table as Vanessa strode toward them. “I need that money,” Rockefeller whispered, “please.”

That same evening, Tee sat on the edge of his bed, in the dark, as Rockefeller knocked at his door. Tee recalled how Rockefeller’s fingers, on the café table, curled into fat fists. On the bed lay the blueprint, the creases smoothed flat. Tee had taken it. He shivered, aware of how stupid it was to be hiding, and from what? He would run into Rockefeller the next day, or the next.

When the knocking stopped, Tee waited for fifteen minutes, and then he called Ynez and got out of the building. Ynez said she had wanted him to call for a while, but wasn’t he going to America soon? They talked and talked, until it was clear he was not returning to his apartment.

VII

On the last day of March, Tee would again meet the artist and the artist’s wife in Old Town Square. He was walking back to Karlín, not watching where he was going, when a colorful wing dropped on his shoulder. The Thai Massage parrot grinned and repeated that Tee was Thai. It was so sudden that Tee slipped and caught his hand on the cobblestone. His container filled. He wished to accept this strangeness, but for some reason he could not. At that moment, someone shouted in Czech and the parrot flapped off, fearing the tall woman—it was Katka. Like on New Year’s, she had appeared when Tee needed someone. She helped him up, and his pulse sprang to her touch. Pavel walked out of a nearby shop. She squeezed Tee’s hand. They were running errands, shopping for Pavel’s café. He and Rockefeller were going to choose a location the next morning. Tee said casually that he could keep Katka company while Pavel was out. Pavel stomped his cigarette, closed his hands in his armpits, and said they could have a “see you alligator” party.

That night, Katka appeared in Tee’s dreams again and again, until he could see her flaws. The hint of cruelty in her stare. One side of her body slightly longer than the other. In one dream she was Korean. She led him up to a rooftop. From the roof Tee could see Boston, his ex-girlfriend mouthing, “Wrong woman.” His nose itched, and he scratched until it fell off in his palm. Upon descending the staircase, he and Katka were inside his apartment in Karlín. He switched on the lights; she switched them off. When he tried to speak, the words exited his lips, like tiny scraps of paper, and entered hers. He woke aching with desire.

In the morning, he rode the tram to Malešice. The entire winter, his painted selves had hopped out of their canvases and into his sleep as if to offer other lives, or as ghosts of lives he’d already lived somewhere else. He wondered which of those canvases Katka would say was most like him. He trusted her instinctively.

In the first, he shone with faith beside the Orloj as he left his feet.

In the second, a black bird clawed his shoulder, its feathers shiny and metallic. He lit its tail like a rocket, waiting for it to explode.

In the third, he stood at a mirror. The canvas was long and wide. In the mirror was Old Town, his reflection half-naked in the night streets, and in the corner, a door.

In the fourth, Pavel had exaggerated Tee. As tall and skinny as a skyscraper, as brown as a wet sand castle. But his eyes were not his. They were blue.

From the tram stop, Tee walked down to Pavel and Katka’s yard, past the gnarled maple tree she loved, and knocked at the kitchen door. She opened it, aproned. The scent of gulaš and cabbage trailed her like a loyal pet. Her stare flashed past him at first, then focused on his face. She pursed her lips in an incomprehensible whistle. On an impulse, he shook her hand, and she smiled at his awkwardness. She had bladelike cheekbones, sharp enough to halt a trespasser in his tracks.

They sat at the kitchen table, out of habit, and ate slowly. He asked about the paintings, and she said the first was the best. After he’d praised her cooking a third time, she said, “I want to know something about you that no one else knows.”

He wasn’t sure what to tell her, and then he was talking about his father’s affair. “You want to know why I left Boston? My uncle committed suicide. Afterward I searched my dad’s office. I needed some sign of who he really was. He was always filming things. I pulled these boxes down from the top of his closet, and inside were old textbooks, geology books he probably knew by heart. It was a strange place for them. I got this hunch, and when I emptied the last box, in the very bottom was a reel of film older than I am.” He waited for her to comment on the suicide or his age, but she ignored both.

He told himself to shut up. Was he trying to relate to her or to warn her? He knew, suddenly, how he gazed at her, why he had dreamed of her. Yet he had chosen Ynez.

“You can tell me what was on it,” she said, sliding her hand over the table onto his with scary timing.

“Forget it.” He dipped a dumpling into the sauce and ate it. “It’s not something about me, it’s about my dad.”

He remembered hooking up the old projector as his father had taught him. He had known from the tightness in his chest, even before the film flickered on, to lock the door.

“I will not force you to talk,” Katka said. Her hand was cold.

“On the film was my dad telling my aunt that my mom couldn’t get pregnant.”

After a moment Katka said, “And?”

Tee coughed with surprise. He tried to move for his beer, but Katka held him still. “You want to know?” he said. His father’s dream had always been to make films, documentaries where the camera was the eye of the beholder. He was obsessed with this idea, a way of seeing twice. The film Tee had found held two perspectives: his father’s and his aunt’s. The screen shook as his aunt recorded his father.

I married Zoe because she understood me. But that wasn’t enough.

Tee tried to reach for his beer again. Katka didn’t let go. She wanted to stand beside him in his memories. She wanted his past. When his aunt had come on screen, her sunken cheeks, she had said,
It’s not your fault
. Then her arm had stretched out, and the screen went black.

Katka held Tee’s hand until he didn’t think of pulling away anymore. He kept silent. He had come to Prague to resist. “The thing,” he said finally, “no one else knows about me is that I like you.”

He refused to blush or look away.

Her grip tightened, and then it eased and she began to sweat. He had rattled her for a second. “So young,” she said softly. “Come on. I want to show you something.” And like in his dream, she led him into the bedroom.

She’d cleaned the paint-specked newspaper off the floor. The hardwood gleamed. When she opened the closet, he saw immediately. Inside were dozens of paintings, each of a part or the whole of her body. She flicked on the light and pushed him in, though there was barely room to stand. She surrounded him, the same ivory of her skin, the same sharp cheeks and penetrating blue irises. He was in a room of mirrors reflecting only her.

“Pavel painted these,” he said.

She nodded.

“Why are they hidden away in here?” To his left, her pink nipples winked at him.

“He does not think they are good enough.” She came up behind him and lifted his elbow. His fingers brushed one of the canvases. Her face and neck and shoulders. He felt the rough brushstrokes that made the smooth look of her skin. Her hand moved up his forearm, nudging him closer. “He has always painted me. From the very beginning. The paintings of me in museums are distortions. These are the truer ones, which he refuses to show.”

Tee saw how important Pavel’s art was to her. Pictures of her had helped make a revolution. That was love. She would never let that go. She was sharing a secret, but a secret between her and Pavel. On the back of the closet door hung a long sketch of her body, nude.

“You do not know what he was like then,” she said. “He was brilliant. People responded to him, and he took the attention and turned it into something useful. Art was useful then. His more than any other.” She touched a spot on the painting, too, tenderly, like she’d never touched it before. An inch above where Tee’s finger had been. He was reminded that she was a little taller than he. Then she swept her arm out as if to include all the paintings in what she had said.

“Rockefeller told me,” Tee said. “Pavel is someone to entrust a nation to.”

“He was.”

As Katka lowered her arm, Tee registered the tense.
Is. Was.
“So sweet and so young,” she muttered. Then she was kissing him, her tongue parting his lips, her hands already clutching his back. He shut his eyes and leaned into her. He pushed her up against the images of herself, or she drew him down on top of them. She was a rough kisser, biting his lips. She said something he didn’t catch. She tasted like almonds, though they hadn’t eaten almonds. It was strange, how he could feel his veins. He had never felt his veins before. She made him more aware of himself. She slipped one hand under his belt. She licked his throat and wrapped her fingers around his limp penis. Then across the frame of the door darted someone’s shadow. Katka stroked him, trying to make him hard, but the shadow glowed in the hall.

“Stop,” Tee managed. “Your husband.”

She bit his earlobe. “Do not be stupid.”

He pushed out of her closet, past the images of her body and into the bedroom. In the hall he dusted off his clothes as if his desire had stuck to him.

No one was there.

“What is wrong with you?” she said, behind him.

He remembered Pavel’s father imagining the Secret Police at the door. She spun him around, and he thought now she would continue kissing him and he would never be able to stop. But she only glared and told him to get his coat.