The Hundred-Year Flood (12 page)

IV

She listened to him talk about affairs as she pictured the progress of the flood, how high and how far into Karlín, and where they and her husband and Rockefeller were in it. It would have been easier for his father to abandon him, but she didn’t say this. He shifted over and knelt above her. He felt the same desire she’d felt, to lose himself in making love. He kissed her and slid his hands under her. Her skin tightened. She would forget, eventually, the times Pavel had lifted her in his arms—on their wedding night; out of the Bay of Angels, on their honeymoon in France; up from the dust, her fingers around his casts. Tee laid her down on the bed and tried to take off her boots, but she brought his hands to her chest.

When they finished, it was day. The sun shone through the window and her hips ached pleasantly. She tried to think about the flood, but she couldn’t concentrate. He slept with such whimpering relief that she couldn’t keep her eyes open, either. She knew she should wake him and say they must leave, but she longed for sleep. She longed to sleep beside him.

V

He pretended to sleep until she slept, and then he slept lightly enough to hear the knock on the door. He dressed and went to answer it, not wanting to wake her and still in his dream. He’d been running through his parents’ house and had fallen between the slats of hardwood into a strange land he knew was Korea but which looked like the half-formed set of a movie, full of uncompleted machines.

At the door, a policeman spoke firmly in Czech. Tee wondered if he was being arrested, before he remembered the flood. A train rumbled in his mind. He felt in his pocket for his cell and saw the message from Rockefeller:
Send her to husband.
Tee remembered being brought home by an officer, once, when he was seven, for shoplifting. His father had said, “He’s not my kid. Better take him to jail,” and Tee had felt lost and drifting, as if he really was at the wrong house, instead of how he should have felt:
confined,
like a prisoner.

He heard a sound in the hall behind the policeman, but nothing was there. He hadn’t seen the ghost once since—when? Since he knew Katka was his alone? If the water did rise and cut them off from the rest of Prague, they would be unreachable, even from text messages, even from e-mail, even from their pasts.

“
Nerozumím
,” Tee said, waving his hand. “
Nerozumím
.” What did he look like to the policeman? A half-white foreigner who couldn’t be bothered to learn Czech. Tee kept the door closed enough so the policeman couldn’t get a foot inside.

The man lowered his hands to the floor, saying, “Vltava, Vltava,” and lifted them, faster and faster, up his body. He pointed to Tee. “You.” He drew the level of his hands up over Tee’s head and blew out his cheeks as if to hold his breath before he drowned.

“
Nerozumím
,” Tee said again, though he understood.

The policeman jabbed his finger down the stairwell and Tee heard the word for
water
. The man took out a cell phone. “
Moment
,” he said, dialing. Tee tried to think of a way to get him to leave. Then a voice said, “Hello? Hello?” The man held the phone through the crack of the door. When Tee took it, a voice said in broken English that it was the police. The flood had gotten into the first-floor apartments and he must pack a single suitcase and evacuate to government housing at one of the selected universities.

Tee pushed the phone back through the crack. The danger of the flood was nothing compared to the danger of someplace Pavel could reach them. As he searched for a way to avoid evacuating, he realized he hadn’t said anything yet in English. Before he could change his mind, he bowed a deep Korean bow. “
Annyeong haseyo
,” he said.

Now the policeman was the one who said “
Nerozumím
,” faltering.

Tee took the opportunity to throw his weight into the door, afraid of Katka waking but more afraid of Katka waking before the policeman left. He surprised the man, and was able to get it shut. He shifted the dead bolt, locked the handle. He held his breath as he imagined the policeman breaking down the door.

From the other room, Katka whimpered with sleep, and he made himself wait to go to her. Outside came a frustrated huff, and then footsteps.

Still he waited. The morning sun shone brightly. In the end it was clear Tee wasn’t worth the trouble.

VI

Later Tee would wish he had pulled off Katka’s boots as she slept that day. He watched her chest rise and fall, the curve of her body the same as in Pavel’s painting. She had kept her boots on as they made love, and now she slept in them. He wondered if she planned to walk out again so soon. The wet boots should have felt awkward, but they thrilled him. That pornographic trope.

After the flood, he would wish she’d simply shown him the cut. Maybe she didn’t because she was afraid he would want to protect, or avenge, her. Or she thought showing him the cut meant letting Pavel into the room with them, her leg as clear a warning as a third eye. Maybe she wanted to avoid Pavel and Rockefeller as badly as he did.

He never understood why she didn’t say the one thing that would have made him focus and say, yes, they should leave, of course, his past had to wait.

As he watched her, his breaths matched rhythm with hers, and the rise and fall of her breasts mirrored something within him. Outside, he heard an explosion, but the danger was far off. Even the ghost was gone.

VII

Somehow, somehow, she’d fallen asleep. The flood covered the streets now, rubble washing into Old Town. She sat up and stared across the room at Pavel’s Golem. She’d bought it as a joke and he’d kept it as a good luck charm. She looked for his latest painting, but then her leg throbbed and she remembered where she was. Rain tapped at the window. Tee sprawled across the sheets, snoring lightly, a cute, predictable snore. Her toes were wet. It was the first time in a dozen years that she hadn’t slept beside Pavel. Where had Tee got the Golem?

She stepped slowly toward the bathroom. Out the window, Prague was a layer of water. Inside, the room was as small as her leg. Her calf stung. She wriggled her toes, and she wanted to get rid of the remaining rainwater from the walk over. She felt dirty, a part of the flood. On the couch, Tee’s phone rang. She picked up quickly, not wanting to wake him, and it was his father.

“Are you my son’s girlfriend?” his father said, his tone patronizing. She realized he must think she was a twenty-two-year-old girl. “Put him on.”

“Do you think you have got the right to ask me that?”

“Excuse me? Tee called me earlier.”

“You need to be a better father to him,” she said, and hung up. From the whine in his voice when he said Tee had called him earlier, she knew that his father would not call again. She felt sorry for Tee, but no matter what he said about accepting the past, she wanted him to think about her when he looked at her. America was too much on his mind. Maybe that was what Pavel had meant about Tee holding the door for himself, not even long enough to let himself through. Or maybe it was just about how Tee looked Korean but was American.

She turned the phone to vibrate. Tee had two messages. One was from a woman, Ynez. The other was from Pavel:
You be sorry.
In the bathroom, Katka ran the faucet over a facecloth, then wiped down her body. She was naked except for the boots.

The name Ynez was familiar, but she couldn’t think why. She sat on the edge of the tub and pictured a girl in a hotel. She wondered what Pavel had meant by
You be sorry
—you will be sorry, or you are sorry? It seemed a crucial difference. She eased off the boots, the right first, over her uninjured leg. When her right foot came out dry, her mind emptied of any other question. Not water inside. She didn’t want to see what was there, yet she wanted it away from her. She got the left boot off in the tub and a palmful of blood spilled out. The blood stained the porcelain red. She didn’t want to look, but she wiped the tub clean with the facecloth and rinsed the cloth in the sink. She opened the medicine cabinet. Empty. How young and unprepared Tee was. She wrapped some toilet paper around her calf and slipped the boot back on.

The leather rubbed the wound, and she bit down the pain. She hobbled back to the bedroom. Outside, a family at the end of the street stepped into a plastic raft, father lifting daughter. It was late afternoon now; the sky was already dark. She and Tee had slept through the entire day as the river rose toward them—she should never have fallen asleep. She should have convinced him to leave immediately. They should have gone to a hotel near the Castle, on high ground.

She shook Tee awake. “
Potopa
,” she said, gathering her clothes. She dressed, not wanting him to see her in only her boots, wanting to get out quickly. She would deal with the cut later. “
Potopa
.”

“What?” he asked. “Where are you going?” His voice strained.

She slipped her blouse over her head.

“Please,” he said. “Come back to bed.”

“We must leave.” She pointed out the window, at the water instead of the street. The family pushed down into Old Town in their raft. “We cannot get stuck here.”

“You’re panicking,” he said. He got off the bed and picked up her jean skirt. He held it away from her.

Then she realized. “You want to get stuck.”

He tossed the skirt on the bed and put his arms around her. She wanted badly for those arms to make her forget the rest of the city—but she refused to regret that forgetting later. She pushed him away.

“It’s true,” he said, his black eyes shining. “I want to be stuck here.”

She darted forward, twisting her leg. She got hold of the skirt and pulled it on, then rested her hand on her chest, breathing deeply. She brushed off her skin as if a bug had landed on her.

“Would it be so bad?” Tee said, frowning. “Just to stay here with me? Until the flood has passed?”

She turned and walked into the hall. “I am afraid of drowning,” she said, not wanting to fight. He followed.

“There’s no way you’re going to drown. We’re on the second floor.” He grabbed her wrist. “Please.”

“How can you be so sure it will never reach us?”

He leaned in, and kissed her neck, and she tried not to feel angry, like she’d only fallen asleep because of him. She reached for the chicken-pox scars on his chest, but then she dropped her hand to her side.

“The water’s not that high,” he said.

She opened the door, blinking, and stepped down the first few stairs. If it was not that high, they could still walk out. The throbbing was bearable.

“Stop,” he said. Below, the light in the hall reflected back at her.

He stomped down behind her and she imagined the splashes he would kick up as they left. Her eyes adjusted to the dark stairwell. Then she saw what made the reflection. Water. Already up to her knees, at least. Almost to her waist.

No, she thought. She kept descending.

“Whenever my dad left the house,” Tee said, “someone got hurt.”

She lowered her boot into the flood, testing its depth. But after weeks of climbing up to his door, she knew these stairs. His footsteps stopped just behind her. The water rose to her ankle, her shin, a couple centimeters from the lip of her boot, and he coughed behind her until he was choking. Like longing had caught in his throat. Or he had realized at last that they were not safe.

If she wanted out now, he would have to carry her. She knew enough not to let the water in her cut.

“Let’s go up to the roof,” he said. He stepped into the water, barefoot, and put a hand on her shoulder. “The flood will never reach us.”

“You promise,” she said.

“I promise.”

If it was between protection or rescue, she would rather be protected. She was tired of running into danger, climbing up trees with no way down. “Okay,” she said. “The roof.”

He turned and went up. Of course the roof would never flood. She couldn’t let him carry her. She took the steps gingerly. Tee’s black hair dissolved into the stairwell shadows. He was in boxers, as if stepping out to swim. She allowed herself a little hope. He could do that for her. When she was with him, even the history films she liked seemed still undecided.

“Slow down,” she said. Then she thought of something else. “Can we even get up there?”

“I am going slow,” he said.

On the roof they would only get a little wet from the rain. They’d forgotten an umbrella again.

“If worse comes to worst,” he said. “I can swim for both of us.”

“You will keep me safe?”

At the top, he tried the door while she waited below, her hand on the stairs and her leg raised slightly, trying not to gasp. For a moment the knob seemed to move in his hand, a trick of the light. Then he put his shoulder into it. Twice. It wouldn’t give.

VIII

At sunset they tried to turn on the lights, but the power had failed. He took down birthday candles from a kitchen cabinet, set them in shot glasses on the dining table, and lit one. He rubbed another over the tablecloth, a wax outline: a woman with a baby in her arms. He had never felt his birth mother hold him. The candlelight flickered on Katka’s face. She pointed outside and said, “My mum used to say the sunset was as red as a broken heart. She used to say each time you were very sad, you got a freckle.”

He had been thinking, he said. Maybe his mother had told him now, after so long, because she had to—something was forcing her hand. Maybe his father had said he would tell, or his aunt had threatened.

“We promised we would not pretend,” Katka said.

“What if she’s not such a fucking Sherlock Holmes, though?” he said. “What if she’s wrong?” But no, he was still pretending. “My dad always said he didn’t know my birth mom, that meeting her in the hospital was a coincidence.”

He lit another candle and it burned out as he talked. In the shadows, he thought he might see the ghost. Outside, the water rose. His hand sweated in Katka’s.

When the sun had set completely, they had nine more candles left from Rockefeller’s thirty-sixth birthday in March. They drank warm Krušovice. The refrigerator had sputtered its last cool breath when they opened it an hour earlier. They were hungry but didn’t eat. Tee imagined Korea, his birth mother in the bed behind his father, the smell of the beach where a hotel was building a spa to his father’s designs. The woman in that bed, touching the swell of her stomach, had been kicked out by her parents. She had put everything on the line for her baby, or for its father. Tee went to light another candle, striking a match that flared up in the dark with a sudden blinding light. A siren rang in the distance, and Katka winced and blew out the flame.

“Save them,” she said.

He felt for her in the dark. He elbowed over a bottle and the little beer left spilled across the table. When she lit another match, to clean up, they saw in the spill the wax shape he’d rubbed into the cloth.