The Hundred-Year Flood

by Matthew Salesses

  Pavel must have called her. Tee noticed Katka’s discomfort. He shook her mother’s hand and asked if the doctor had been in to say when Katka could leave.

  “Who are you, then?” her mother asked Tee. “You are from China?”

  “A friend,” Tee said, telling himself not to react. Pavel grunted, but added nothing.

  “The doctor said she is lucky to survive night and still talk now,” her mother said.

  Finally Katka spoke rapidly in Czech, then seemed to lose her train of thought, then started again. The strange gray from the day before filmed over her irises. Her hair still hung off the back of the pillow. Had she put it up again or had she not moved all night? Tee wished she would give an excuse for why she hadn’t kissed him the day before. What she did say equally thrilled him.

  Pavel banged his casts on the railing of the bed, and Katka reached across her mother for Tee’s hand and said, “He is my American lover,” in English.

  Tee remembered how she had pulled him away from the Thai massage parrot in Old Town. She was always giving him his self back. She mumbled something else, which Tee couldn’t understand, and her mother made a little hiccup of surprise. Rockefeller mumbled in Czech and left the room.

  “Just because you never took a lover, Mum,” Katka said, “does not mean I should not.” Pavel banged his casts on the rail again.

  Katka’s mother rested her hand by her daughter’s neck and said something in Czech that didn’t sound like disagreement, and Katka’s grip tightened on Tee’s fingers. Her skin was wet and cold. He rubbed her hands warm. Pavel rocked on his heels, and then he was waving his casts around. He shouted in Czech, and her mother stroked her head, perhaps comparing her son-in-law to her late husband. Small split-open mounds stuck out from Katka’s infected thigh like rotten peaches half-buried in her skin.

  Katka waited for Pavel to finish. Then she shouted back, her face ghosting away its color. Footsteps rushed down the hall, and Pavel cried. Only a day had passed since Katka was a calm peacemaker, holding their hands together.

  At last she lowered her voice. Her mother went to intercept the nurse. Pavel scratched his casts against his pants. He moved for her hand, and she brushed him away. She muttered relentlessly, until he rubbed his eyes with his shoulder and stepped outside.

  Katka’s mother looked back at Tee from the doorway and said, “I can see she must love you, but I hope you did not do any what her husband says.”

  “It’s all my fault,” Tee said.

  She smiled as if she didn’t understand him, and followed Pavel into the hall.

  When they were alone, Katka’s voice broke down and she said hoarsely, “I cannot concentrate.” She closed her eyes and seemed to disappear for a moment. Her cheeks trembled, the loose skin of a balloon. When she returned to him, she was old, far older than their fifteen-year gap. He saw again the new wrinkle at the corner of her eye, and he could hear the snap of teeth as the disease swam beneath her surface, like in his dream. His fingers went to her cords absentmindedly.

  “I am going to die soon,” she said, her voice getting stronger again. “I know you do not want to hear that, but I am going to die soon. Do you understand?”

  His vision blurred, and he held the railing so he wouldn’t fall.

  “I knew all along,” she said, “you were going to be the end of Pavel and me. I only thought it would be sooner.”

  As his eyes refocused, death was present at last. He remembered her on the stairs behind him as they tried to get on the roof, the mismatched sounds of her steps, he realized now. You will keep me safe, she had said. She had trusted him.

  “I do not know why I cannot forgive you,” she whispered. She seemed to push her breath out with her voice. “In the end we were going to be with each other with or without a flood. You should have let us leave.”

  He wanted to throw up. She had waited until he couldn’t respond, and now, after she said she was going to die, she accused him.

  For an instant, surrounded by the beeping of her machines, he wished they had never been together. He wanted her to be with Pavel. He wanted to say it was her fault—that first time, she had kissed him and he had refused. He wanted her to live forever, without him. He wanted to say he didn’t need her to accuse him. He wanted to hate her because she was alive somewhere, and he couldn’t go to her, not hate her because she was dead.

  She muttered in Czech. He wouldn’t realize until later that she was saying she loved him. “Let me say good-bye to my husband,” she added in English.

  Tee wanted to stay. But he knew he had to do this—for her, and even for Pavel.

  In the hallway he said, “She wants to talk to you,” and lowered his head as if she’d chosen her husband in the end. Rockefeller walked back with three cups of coffee. Pavel took one and went in. Tee sank to the tile beside Katka’s mother and cried. She waited for him to speak, but a piece of glass was lodged in his voice box and would cut into it at a single word. Inside of him, his organs squeezed like a fist. His chest shuddered.

  Finally he forced himself to say something. “It is my fault,” he whispered.

  Katka’s mother sucked in her breath and said, “It is never fault of who claims it.” But Tee crossed to the other side of the hall. He couldn’t look at her. He had killed her daughter.

  A dozen sobs later, Pavel shouted for help. Katka had slipped into a coma.

  VI

  The doctor gave Katka four days. Tee returned to the hospital each morning and slept in the bed in Malešice each night, while Pavel stayed by her side. Rockefeller gave Tee the same four days. Tee had hoped that Katka’s last words would appease Pavel; of course, they did not. Maybe the coma foretold in Tee’s palms was Katka’s. As the floodwater drained, it revealed billions of dollars of damage, eleven people dead, hundreds of thousands homeless, buildings that had survived wars now in danger. A chemical plant had leaked chlorine gas that caused scratchy throats, as if the city had caught a cold. Karlín was still off-limits.

  In Katka’s hospital room, Pavel glared without talking. Katka’s mother cried tears saved up over a decade of regret. In the house in Malešice, the mural haunted Tee’s dreams. He woke sweating and looking for Rockefeller’s shadow. Rockefeller never seemed to sleep. Tee lay awake in Katka’s bed until early morning. He had carried through the flood two notebooks, some clothes, and his cell phone in a plastic bag, while she carried her disease. He turned off his cell, turned off the outside world, tried to turn off the fluttering inside him.

  The first day of the coma, he felt as if invisible strings hung in the air, wires of life, and if he tripped the right one, she would sit up. He waved his arms above her and ignored Pavel and Rockefeller.

  The second day, he waited until Pavel went to the bathroom, and then he bent in and kissed her. Her mother patted his back, or weakly struck him.

  The third day, he held Katka’s hand and told her everything he could think of, not caring how stupid it sounded, from his first memory—flying in his uncle’s plane—to the last thing he did before coming to Prague—praying, embarrassedly, with his mother, both of them wanting new lives. He told her he wished he’d been able to talk to his uncle, not just to try to change his mind, but to tell him he had meant something important, at least to Tee. Pavel grumbled, at first, but eventually gave up, later speaking to Rockefeller in the hall. Her mother tugged at her sleeves and whispered her own good-byes.

  Tee found himself staring longingly at Katka’s hands, hands that had explored every inch of his body. Those rainy days, she’d seen him exposed—like the inside of a flower as the petals peel away. Now her fingers seemed the phantoms of those petals, the history of his exposure in her skin. He couldn’t lose her. He couldn’t stand to go back to before her touch.

  The third day, he murmured her name again and again, for a moment forgetting when he’d done the same with his birth mother’s name, in the woods.
For a moment Katka was the only Katka there. No distortions in the closet, no ghosts.

  The third day of the coma, as he and Rockefeller left the hospital, Rockefeller said, “So what are you deciding?” Tee wanted to be hurt. He suggested they go for a beer. He remembered the night he’d invited Pavel and Rockefeller for drinks, with Ynez.

  They went to one of the randomly numbered pubs around the city, and Tee drank quickly, tipping back Krušovice, trying to drown out all the possible harm—his head still somehow seemed more frightening than reality. They sat next to the window, and endless strangers passed by, refugees of the flood. Their dull bodies warmed under the light of streetlamps.

  “What was the Revolution like?” Tee asked after the first beer.

  “I knew that once,” Rockefeller said, bags under his eyes. “But now is different. Once, when Pavel saying we did nothing, we not causing Revolution, I did not believe him.”

  “Now, what, you believe in fate?”

  “I am believing freedom comes in end, but each of us aren’t free.”

  They were silent for a minute, and Tee recalled that first evening he and Katka rushed up to his apartment in the rain, the inevitability. “You don’t have to do this,” he said.

  He went for another beer. At the bar he thought about slipping out and finding a hotel that still had vacancies. How far would he have to go? He spun the coaster on the counter. When he looked up, Rockefeller was there.

  “I have to,” Rockefeller said. “Please leave.”

  Tee couldn’t let Katka die without him, though—even his father had claimed that right of his birth mother. Rockefeller ordered a slivovice. Tee’s breaths shortened. He sucked through the foam on his beer.

  When Tee said there was a choice, Rockefeller said, “I chosen Pavel.”

  With the third beer, Tee realized Rockefeller’s resolve was never going to soften. Tension rolled like a ball, hard and smooth, through his shoulders. “Let’s get out of here,” he said. “I have to do something before the end.” Rockefeller thudded his empty glass on the table and sighed. As they left the bar, Tee heard a man say one of the seals from the zoo had managed to swim to Western Europe. But once there, it had died of exhaustion.

  They walked through Vinohrady into New Town, nursing a bottle of Becherovka they bought at a convenience store. Rockefeller trailed slightly behind, as if he might attack at any moment. Tee wanted to ask for a little longer, at least, but he didn’t dare. The sun set quickly. The alcohol tasted like pine trees. “Christmasy,” he said, recalling the drink from New Year’s.

  Rockefeller’s shadow would sometimes stretch from a streetlamp and engulf Tee’s. Six and a half feet.

  By the time they reached Wenceslas Square, they’d both “pulled an elephant,” as the Czech saying went. The lights spun. They stood beside the National Museum with the wide legs of the Elysées-like boulevard below them. People still went to clubs, still talked in the streets, still made plans for tomorrows. Tee stood before a monument to the protesters who’d burned themselves. “You think they got what they wanted?” he asked. He wished to empty his container for good, return everything he’d taken, set the past on fire.

  “Where we are going?” Rockefeller said. “Dark is coming soon.” He stumbled a little. He thumped his hand on Tee’s back to catch himself.

  Tee stumbled, too, and turned quickly. But Rockefeller was wiping his face. Tee pretended he hadn’t forgotten to breathe. He took the bottle from Rockefeller and said he could still smell the flood.

  The roads wound them into Old Town, where the fireworks had whizzed over his half-naked body and a beautiful woman had waved at him. In the square, couples sat on the benches around the statue of Jan Hus, who’d been burned at the stake as a heretic. Prague turned villains into heroes, and vice versa. “Pavel told me a joke about the presidential flag once,” Tee said. The slogan on the flag translated to “Truth will win,” but without one accent mark, it would be “Truth belongs to the winner.”

  “Why you are staying here?” Rockefeller said, taking back the bottle.

  “You were my friend,” Tee said. Was.

  When they came to the front of the Rudolfinum, Tee turned left along the river. He kept feeling objects hurtling at his back. He resisted the urge to duck. He pictured Katka in the nothingness of her coma, searching for a way out. Did she hear him and her mother and Pavel and Rockefeller outside?

  Rockefeller muttered loudly to himself. The sky was dark and the streetlamps seemed to get brighter and brighter. The scent of sewage and cleaning missions clung to the air. Tee coughed, his throat sore with chlorine. If only the river had been chlorinated earlier. Ahead was the Charles Bridge. The swollen Vltava roared. Several mechanical cranes perched on the bridge. One of them dipped into the river and fished out a tree trunk, and someone clapped.

  Tee walked under the Old Town bridge tower and over the water. Both sides of the bridge were lined with statues. He recognized St. Jan of Nepomuk by the oiled bronze of the plaque, well worn by superstitious hands, by the drawing Katka had done for him during the flood. Rockefeller tipped back the Becherovka, and Tee ran to rub the saint who promised to return him to Prague. When he reached the statue, though, he wanted more than a return. He felt the smooth plaque under his hand. The river swept below. He pulled himself up as if Katka was still in her tree above and Rockefeller still at the bottom.

  “What you are doing?” Rockefeller said. “You are tourist after all.”

  Tee heard the murmur of bystanders. He balanced on the lower tier of the statue and tried to reach higher, away from the chorus. “You touch him and you always come back. He’s the saint of swimmers.”

  “Is only legend,” Rockefeller said. “And is not to climb.” He tugged Tee’s pant leg. He said the Church had de-sainted Jan. The tongue from the Vltava had only been a piece of brain, maybe not related, and the murder had been political.

  “That can’t be true,” Tee said, but Rockefeller had no reason to lie. The hair at the peak of Rockefeller’s head was starting to fall out and it stuck up as if he were too tall even for mirrors. One big hand wrapped around Tee’s ankle. The throng on the bridge clamored. “Now,” Tee said. “Do it now. Drown me.”

  The water below was dark and loud. Rockefeller’s other hand clasped Tee’s back. Tee imagined haunting the river after his death, calling people back to Prague. He sucked in air and prepared for eternal swimming. But Rockefeller was pulling him down, not pushing him over. Tee tried for a second longer to cling to the statue, to stay up, to start to fall. Rockefeller was too strong.

  On the bridge Tee steadied himself, then walked quickly away as he heard cheers. They thought he had been rescued. He snatched the bottle off of the wall, where Rockefeller had left it, steadied himself again, and took a long pull. Rockefeller followed and drank with him.

  Tee slumped onto one of the benches and wept.

  CHAPTER 7

  HOMECOMINGS

  I

  In Boston, in the rehabilitation center, Tee would try to figure out what had happened to him. From an article in the Prague Post, he learned that Rockefeller was in jail—described as “a former proponent of the Velvet Revolution whose parents are suspected Communists.” Pavel’s new series of paintings made its way to New York, but Tee didn’t care to see the “groundbreaking” works.

  As his balance improved, he was cleared for a day out. His parents took him to the Cape for the afternoon, as they used to do when he was little. He walked along the beach and remembered colliding with a random white kid as they both ran for a seagull. The boy had started to cry, and the boy’s father had come up and demanded to know where Tee’s parents were. Tee had pointed at his parents at the top of the beach, but the man hadn’t believed him. The man had scanned the crowd, and then had seemed suddenly to pity Tee. He had shouted for his son to follow, and had turned away. The boy called Tee a Chink as he took off. Tee had
made his way back to his parents and had asked them why the man didn’t believe him. His parents could have told him then, perhaps, about his birth mother, but his father had given the old sticks and stones line instead.

  What had that pity been? Had the man recognized the similarity between his father and him, and seen no mother? Or was their skin color enough that the man couldn’t see the similarity at all?

  A conch shell glinted on the beach, and Tee reached for it and toppled into the water. His mother rushed in and pulled him out. She said the Cape might not have been the best idea.

  Back in the rehab center, Tee sat in the library and tried to hear the twanging he’d heard before, to call the ghost woman to him with his imagination. The door opened. It was the man with the old war wound. When the man asked what he was doing, Tee decided to tell him the truth. The man said he often saw people. He’d even learned to accept it when they shot at him, to imagine the bullets passed right through, though really, they lodged in his guts and jiggled like coins as he walked. And then, as if that had conjured her, the woman glowed past the door, her nose small and her cheeks like a short cliff dropping down to the pool of her mouth. Tee thanked the man, and ran after her. “Katka,” he called, but as his voice trembled and his legs held steady for once, he knew it wasn’t her.

  That night on the Charles Bridge, the last moments Tee could remember in Prague, he had cried on the bench and Rockefeller had rested a hand on his shoulder. Then Tee had either blacked out, or the force of the impact had blacked him out. He remembered Rockefeller’s hand, flashes of a Czech hospital, not the one Katka was in, his father’s ear against his chest, the long flight home. He imagined what Rockefeller had been thinking. At some point Rockefeller had understood that his promise could not be undone. Maybe as they drank too much and pitied themselves, Tee said that Rockefeller was a fraud, never a friend to Pavel or him or anyone. Or maybe Pavel called and asked if it was over, or called about Katka. Rockefeller swigged the Becherovka, and as he brought his hand down, he saw how easy it could be, and he surprised himself by cracking the bottle over the back of Tee’s head.