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.
IV
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.
“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.
V
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 d
ealer 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.
Dishes littered the table: the aftermath of fresh bread, gulaš soup, tea, merciless appetites. On the dishes were paintings Pavel’s father had done: portraits of the family in the 1970s, his only personal pieces. “Cimrman invented the airplane cabin but had to wait for someone to invent an airplane,” Katka said to Tee. She tore off a piece of bread but didn’t eat it. “Pavel has forgotten the Czech sensibility. Yours are his first political paintings since Communism, and the best.”
“They aren’t mine.” Tee imagined Andy Warhol at the table.
Katka drifted to the window. The fringe of her skirt brushed his side. “The model is the painting’s ex-lover,” she said. “The artist is its current one.” Some admission gathered behind her eyes, but quickly disappeared.
As she touched the glass, Tee remembered: wrong women. But he reached toward her waist.
“What are you doing?” she said sharply.
They heard something crash in the other room. His uncle’s plane, twisted, in flames.
After a moment Katka said, “I love him,” as if to answer a question Tee hadn’t asked.
Later that evening, in the Globe, Tee ran his finger along a row of book spines as Ynez organized the shelf beside his counter. He took down a book and read. The presence of want awakens in him nostalgia for wholeness. He knew desire was just around the corner. What kept it hidden—setting? time? Ynez shifted her hips toward him. He couldn’t talk in the Globe about what it felt like to be painted, to be seen. He never mentioned Pavel and Katka to Ynez. Around her, his container got all mixed up. He told her about his father’s “business trips”; his aunt, at the funeral, glancing over her bony shoulder as if waiting to be accused. He asked Ynez what it might mean if someone said he was holding a door open for himself, and then closed it. She was quiet for a while. Finally she said, “Sometimes our passion is so strong that it makes a fool of us.” Her Castilian lisp (she had grown up in Spain before studying sociology at Cornell) made him lean in to catch every word. She evened the books on the shelf until she was inches from his face. Why did he want to stay here, he asked himself again, in Prague? Heat breathed from her skin. She was probably an expert on passion, her parted lips and long lashes. He imagined pulling her into the stacks, a corner of books no one ever looked for. “Your Anne Carson has written plenty about that.” Slowly she pivoted and rested her slim white arms on the desk. “Though, I don’t know, I’m not saying we don’t make the choice of who to love for ourselves.”
“We don’t make the choice for ourselves,” Tee repeated. He clasped his hands behind his back. “In Boston I dated older women who must have reminded me of my aunt.”
“I know what you’re thinking,” Ynez said after a moment. “You don’t have to prove yourself.”
He wasn’t trying to prove himself, though. He suppressed a strong urge to share a story about his childhood: a night he had spent alone in the woods, because he was six and had thought he could find his birth mother there. “You know what I want more than anything else?” he said. “I want to be old, and to rock on the porch with my wife. To look back and have everything figured out.”
“You want to skip your youth?” she lisped.
He took a pen from his shirt pocket and drew on a bookmark. “At the time you make a decision, you have no idea how it will turn out. Life would be so much easier if you knew what you could do with it.”
Ynez reached for the pen and tucked it above her ear. On the bookmark, a baby lay at a man’s feet. She frowned. “You mean like holding the door for yourself?”
He swept the bookmark away from her. He felt stung, like he had slapped a little kid and she had caught him, like she had seen him go too far.
He made an effort, and rested his fingertips on her wrist. He could feel her pulse quicken. “I may have to go back for a few days. My mom is set on divorce. She keeps e-mailing me that she means it.”
“Don’t worry,” Ynez said. “Your job will still be here when you get back.”
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 boo
k 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.
The Hundred-Year Flood Page 3