The Hundred-Year Flood (13 page)

IX

Near midnight she pulled him into the kitchen with their long-neglected hunger, and as they made sandwiches, he asked about her father. For a long time, she said finally, she didn’t know, or at least understand, that her father was hurting her mother.

Once, when she was eight, she had walked home from school with two girls who said they’d seen her father standing around in the square looking at birds. She told them he’d started collecting feathers instead of butterflies, though this was a lie. When she got home, she found her father scrubbing a stain on the bedroom doorframe. He wiped his eyes as she walked up. On the dark wood, the stain looked almost purple.

“Your mum spilled the wine,” her father said, scouring the spots with an old toothbrush. “She’s in a bit of a mood.”

“Can I help?” Katka asked. She was used to helping with chores.

“No, love,” he said. “I’ll have got it done in a second.”

She fetched two towels anyway and wet them with bleach as she’d seen her mother do. Returning, she said, “These will help, Daddy, won’t they?”

He stood. “What are you doing?” he said, fingering his whitening sideburns.

“I can help,” she said.

“You know you’re not to use bleach.” His nose wrinkled, and then the meanness was there.

“What is bleach, Daddy?” she asked. She only knew the word in Czech.

“Bleach,” he said. “In your hand, you stupid girl. Bleach. Bleach.” He pushed her away and began to cough.

“Stay away from here,” he called after her. “Just stay away from here. Please.”

When she looked back, his head was slumped against the wall.

She ran to find her mother but couldn’t, probably upstairs at their neighbor’s. Her father hated the woman upstairs, her gentle questioning.

Outside their neighbor’s apartment, Katka heard the woman tut-tutting and the clink of metal and her mother’s sharp breaths. When Katka knocked, her mother’s voice said, “It is him.”

There were scuffling feet and the neighbor’s voice behind the door. “It’s not him—it’s Katka. Should I send her away?”

“Yes,” her mother said, then: “No, don’t.”

Her neighbor said, “Poor girl.” The door opened, and Katka ran in.

Her mother held a towel to her face. When she spoke, Katka saw a tooth missing, an imperfection in her cold beauty. “What are you doing here?”

“Maminka,” Katka said, “I’m hurt.”

“Me, too,” her mother said. “Can’t you see? Me, too.”

Their neighbor took her arm. “Are you okay, Kateřina?” the woman asked.

“Maminka,” Katka said, “what happened to your face?”

“Your father,” their neighbor said.

Her mother said, “Hush.” She walked over and pinched Katka’s earlobe lightly. “It was an accident. You know he slams the door. I was chasing after him.” The edges of the towel were red. “Come here,” she said, bending down.

Katka reached up to her mother’s chin. “Does it hurt a lot, Maminka?” The towel shifted slightly and she could see a cut running from the bottom of her mother’s eye to the middle of her cheek, before her mother covered it up. “Daddy said you spilled your wine. Are you drunk?”

Her mother stiffened. “Let’s go,” she whispered. She led her out as their neighbor sighed behind them. They descended the stairs until the door closed.

“Were you drunk, Maminka?” Katka asked again.

Her mother walked down ahead of her until they were at eye level. “Do not say things like that to me,” she said.

“I’m sorry,” Katka said, not meeting her mother’s eyes, that shared blue.

“Look at me, Kateřina. Daddy didn’t want to tell you he hurt me, right?”

“I’m sorry,” Katka said again, and her mother cupped her two cheeks. She locked their gazes.

“Right?”

Later Katka lay in bed with the wooden doll her father had carved from a branch in the spring, holding the doll’s face the way her mother had held her, her hands dwarfing its head. She shook the doll and said, “Bleach. Bleach,” as if the word were a curse.

People always said she took after her mother: their eyes, their quiet defiance. But in the end, long after her father killed himself, she left her mother and their secrets behind.

X

The candles blinked out one by one. They could do nothing but wait. He took a candle into the kitchen. They made sandwiches. She offered to cook, but in his refrigerator were only fish sticks, spaghetti sauce, hard-boiled eggs, peanut butter, jelly, half a loaf of bread, shredded cheese, leftover French fries, beer, and milk. They drank the beer. “What are you getting me into?” she asked. “How did you expect to last through the flood?”

“This is what I always eat,” he said, then flushed.

They drank a bottle of Krušovice each before another candle burned out. He hadn’t expected her to talk about her father’s violence. His hands darted over the table. In the dark, she said, “Pavel is not outside the door.” She mumbled, as if to herself, but he knew she was talking to him.

“If we were out there,” he whispered, “we would have nowhere to go but your house or the café. His house.”

“We could go to a hotel,” she said.

He remembered the college the policeman had mentioned. “You don’t believe I could take care of you.”

They stood in the kitchen blindly. Then there was a crash outside, followed by a metallic creaking, and they rushed to the window. Barely any moonlight shone through the clouds. Their eyes adjusted slowly—until they could see a lamp pole hunched over in the water, what looked like a metal bench clinging to the bend.

She turned away. He pressed his forehead to the cold glass.

XI

What if—he said in the dark—in the morning, we see a yellow raft float to the wall and we climb down into it? Years from now, the flood is the beginning of our story. We live in the countryside and grow cabbages and cook gulaš and dumplings and visit your mother.

Katka left the kitchen, in the shadows, her gait unsteady, and he worried he’d upset her. Had he mentioned her mother because of his birth mother? When she returned, she had the pewter Golem he’d stolen from her house. Another double legend, a creature that had killed either by nature or because of lost love. Tee trembled, though he had left it out on his dresser. She placed the figure on the counter. “Pavel has one
just like this
.
We can use it to tell the future, if your hob still works.”

She lit the stove with the candle. The gas worked. She took his hands and said this fortune could replace the one in his palms. She kissed the Golem’s fat belly. “It is the wrong metal,” she said. “It should be that metal they used to think could turn into gold.”

“Lead,” he said, still trembling.

She wiped a pot with a towel, placed it on the burner, and rested the Golem inside. He reached for it automatically and she knocked his hand away.

“I took it,” he said. “I didn’t mean to. It was just there, in my pocket, when I got home. I meant to give it back.”

“And now,” she said, “you cannot.”

When the pewter had melted down, she asked for a bowl of water. He turned the faucet on and it sputtered weakly—the water, like the power, would soon fail. She poured the liquid metal into the bowl. The pewter swirled in the water in beautiful gray patterns. He held the candle and waited for her to tell him what she saw. But she was choking back tears. “An early death or a coma,” he said, reminding her what was in his palms. “Deep loves.” She weighed his hands as if they carried the heaviness of his fate. She, too, she said, could picture them with a garden, though in a different country, far from Prague, with flowers instead of cabbage.

“I had bad luck from birth,” he said. “My birth mom died, and my dad must have felt like he was stuck with me.”

She said: “I wanted a baby, and Pavel put everything else before that.”

The candle burned out and they spoke in the dark. “Tell me a legend,” he said out of nowhere, and he realized they were making stories of each other, or themselves. “Never mind. Don’t.”

But she told him about St. Jan of Nepomuk, the queen’s confidant, who, despite being tortured, died refusing to expose her confession. The king had him thrown off the Charles Bridge. Katka said Jan’s tongue was later found washed up on the banks of the Vltava. If you rubbed his statue on the bridge, you were fated to return to Prague.

“What is he the saint of?” Tee asked.

“Of swimmers. His body swam away and became a ghost.”

He asked her to draw the statue. He copied her strokes. A ghost, a fortune, fate. He should have been sick of myths.

When he lit the third-to-last candle, Katka said she had never learned to swim. She avoided standing water. He could see she was ready to reveal something. “I’m listening,” he said. She took his hand and said her father had liked baths, and near the end, the baths had grown longer and longer. She said whenever her father bathed, her mother was unhappy. Her mother used to claim unhappiness marked people’s skin, and she would show the marks to Katka: freckles, bruises, scars. Her mother would roll up a sleeve, point to a contusion, and say, “This is from Communism” or “This is from you drawing on the mirror with my lipstick,” but never “This is from your father.”

One day, the same year her mother’s face was split open, Katka sneaked into the bathroom to see her father’s bruises, wanting to know how unhappy he was. Her mother had a purple bloom on her thigh because Katka had mouthed off at school for the third time that month. Her father had been in the bath for an hour. After her mother went up to their neighbor’s, Katka tiptoed to the bathroom. Her father hated to be interrupted. She put her ear to the wood. Hearing nothing, she cracked the door. Her father’s towel, his dirty clothes, wet hair he’d pulled from the drain lay on the floor. She nudged the door a little farther until she could get her head around it.

Steam rushed hot on her face and hazed the air. She was afraid of her father, but she couldn’t leave. At first she thought her father’s unhappiness must be so bad it leaked, like popped blisters. Dark streaks marbled the water. He didn’t respond to her voice. She stepped farther inside, and then she screamed. When her mother finally rushed in, Katka was in the tub, holding her father’s wet body.

The candle had gone out again. Tee shivered. Their families’ stories twisted around each other. He had the feeling—as he had when she first told him about her father’s suicide—that she knew him by heart. That she had known him, all along, better than anyone else ever could.

“Fathers,” she said.

And as if in answer, the ground moaned and shook and the sound of collapsing outside shook them. They hurried to the window. Outside, they could see, at first with difficulty and then all too clearly, an empty space across the street. The green building that used to be there was now a pile of rubble sticking up out of the water, half of the far wall still standing, the lowest apartments settling into the flood with a brick groan. He couldn’t help but remember the video of the towers collapsing in New York. Pieces of the building washed along in the current. He imagined a tipping-over like dominoes.

He pulled the shade, and as the sound outside quieted, there was a soft snap in the dark, then a few more in quick succession. He reached his hand out for hers, to where she’d been when he pulled the shade, and he felt the broken pieces of the last two candles drop through his fingers to the floor.

“Oh,” she said. “I do not know why I did that.”

But they both knew.

He stumbled closer to her and her footsteps padded away. They moved across the room, then went silent. Her breath, her smell, her heat remained. He led out with his arms, and without a word, with nothing but his sense of her, he made his way until her shoulder was against his hand, her fingers rippling through his hair, her lips at his chin, closing in on his mouth.

Later in that darkness, after they made love but before they fell asleep, he said, “When I was young, my uncle used to take me up in his plane and fly me out over the countryside. He only ever seemed happy up there. Sometimes with you, I feel like we’re that free. Like we will never come back down.” He tried not to think about the buildings falling, or her warnings that they should leave, or her husband on the other side of the city.

“Pavel and I were always stuck,” she said. “We were never good for each other. We were trapped in his art.”

He shivered, hearing what he’d been hoping to hear since he’d kissed her in the underground café, since she’d pushed him into her closet and he’d seen the ghost.

XII

Katka woke with her leg in her mouth. The cut on her calf ached in her gums. She’d hoped sleep would heal her, seal the skin back together. Instead she felt the boot leather stuck to her wound. The blood had congealed. She’d dreamed of leaving Pavel in the house in Malešice. A large dog blocked her path. As it barked, it changed colors: black, red, green, yellow. It jumped at her throat. She dodged, and it flew past her and landed on Pavel. Suddenly she worried for Pavel’s life. She turned back, but the dog was licking his face. She felt the licking on her own face; her cheeks, her nose, melted into water.

Beside her, Tee slept peacefully on top of the sheets. She tried her boots on the floor—before she fell asleep, he’d asked about them, raising the eyebrow he said was from his father. But she saw that they turned him on.

She ground her teeth and lowered her right foot first, then carefully stepped onto her left. Sparks shot up to her hip, and she fell. She clutched the boot and lay on the floor, afraid that she’d woken him. It was too late to leave the apartment, and she didn’t want their time together to focus on injury. The cut was not why she’d left Pavel.

When she was sure she wouldn’t wake Tee, she limped to the bathroom, groggy with a hangover and the stabbing pain, much worse than before. At the bathroom door, her toes felt wet again. At first she panicked that she’d slept too long—but the floor was dry. The wound had reopened. She’d planted her foot, and the toilet paper must have torn away from her skin, ripping apart the blood clot.

She tried the sink. Nothing came out. She needed to wash the wound. She needed aspirin. Yet somehow the flood was the only water. She rechecked the medicine cabinet—still shockingly bare, still nothing to deserve her faith—then opened the shower curtain.

She poured blood from her boot as if a new ritual, to bleed out each day over her husband. She unwrapped the toilet paper. When she pressed a finger to the cut, something shifted under her skin. She clamped her teeth together. She squeezed the raised flesh beside the cut and covered her mouth to muffle the scream. A sliver of ceramic poked out, just barely, a hint of blue. It must have been working its way out as she slept—how deep it must have lodged. She shivered, her chest shuddered as she breathed, but she held her mouth with one hand, and with the other, she pinched the piece between her fingers and worked the ceramic free until it dropped into the tub.

She couldn’t wash the wound. Either she left off the boots and listened to Tee wonder aloud her thoughts—why hadn’t she told him before, before the flood got so high?—or she put the boot back on and kept her secret. She rewrapped the cut and wiped the boot dry before replacing it.

As she walked back, another building groaned. She caught the end of the collapse in the window: the roof wobbled as if trying to balance itself, like a drunk; then its bottom fell out and the river sucked the structure under. Slowly.

“You saw it,” he said, as if he sensed her in the hall.

She walked into the bedroom, trying to relax her jaw. The floodwater surrounded them, like an ocean around an oil rig, dirty and brown and awash with trash. She was dehydrated—in all this water. The rain had stopped. “It is okay,” she said, anticipating him.

“I’m sorry. More than I can say.”

She turned and went to the kitchen for the last couple beers she remembered were there. In front of the refrigerator, the tile was wet. A puddle spread over the whiteness to the toes of her boots. The flood had gotten into the apartment.

It took her a while before she realized the refrigerator was leaking, defrosted. Like with the blood in her boot.

He was behind her. “Just the fridge.” He took her in his arms, as afraid as she was. “The flood must be washing out the foundations.”

She nodded.

He swept one arm backward and into the wall. He shook his hand and they stared at the small dent.

“It doesn’t mean this building will fall,” he said.

She returned to the bedroom, slowly, to hide the pain, and dressed. He stared at her boots, conspicuous until she was fully clothed. Then he dressed, too. He opened and closed his hand. The red flat of his palm.

When their building didn’t collapse after an hour, or a half hour, or fifteen minutes, a long short time, she took off her wedding ring, which she hadn’t done before, and left it on the chest of drawers where the Golem had sat. She wished she hadn’t slept on the same side of the bed as always.

“You said
potopa
before,” Tee said. “What does that mean? Flood?”

She sat on the bed and forced a smile. “I have already told you it is okay. I have already said it is not your fault.”

“My aunt tried to jump from the roof the day I got to America,” he said, arcing one finger like a diver. “I think she must have known about me. My mother—”

Finally she interrupted him. “Stop it!” she said. “That is enough. Do you see your family here?”

He looked at her in shock. She bit a little flake of skin off her lip until it bled. He opened his mouth to speak, and she said, “If you say you are sorry one more time, I will hate you.”

They ate sandwiches again for breakfast, and when they took their dishes back to the kitchen, the flood was there, at last. The water had crept over the linoleum, along the molding in the hall, under the apartment door and across the uneven hardwood. The floor was not flat—Tee had only begun to live on his own.

She pulled him into the kitchen, heaped the peanut butter and jelly and remaining bread into his arms, and nudged him back into the hall, ahead of her. In the bedroom, she pushed him onto the bed. His legs strong from walking all over the city. If the water rose above the mattress, they wouldn’t have any choice but to swim. She clambered up beside him. She imagined people in the falling buildings, holding their noses until the magic of survival ran out. Her cheeks rusted. “Do you love me?” she asked suddenly, keeping her fingers from her calf. “Because you had better love me.”

When the flood was halfway up the bed, another building fell. Tee got down off the mattress and splashed through the water, his bare calves in the brown river in the bedroom. As he danced through the debris, she smiled that he was still the kid in his boxers in Old Town, the fireworks exploding around him, his black hair flashing like flint under the sparks.

He rescued a few floating books and piled them on the bed, water seeping into the mattress. She smelled the sewage without knowing yet what it was. Her leg beat like a second heart. She imagined them in a country that meant nothing to them—Australia, Papua New Guinea—the paintings and pity and need for secrets fading away. He would write books, and she would learn piano, and eventually they would raise a baby, a red-cheeked, black-eyed surprise. The baby would crawl, stumble to her feet, run around speaking Australian English.

Or at least they would adopt a cat, or a dog—not to wish for too much—take it for walks and let it free in their yard. They would give it a Czech name, and never need to say anything else about their old countries.

At least they would get out of this flood.

One of his books fell open in the water, and she saw, in a margin, her name. She’d violated her rule to not pretend, and she wondered if this meant only pretense was left.

By the time she recognized the long low notes accompanying Tee’s dance as the shouts of rescue workers, she was confused again. She dreaded the water—either outside or inside. She wanted to wait for unmistakable danger before she risked swimming. Half-tipsy, half-hungover, she balanced on the mattress and looked out the window. City employees canoed through Karlín. She smelled the water, saw the trash and flotsam in the current, and suddenly, she was sure they must stay.

Tee had noticed the canoes, too. “Who is it?” he asked. “The police?”

“No,” she said.

“Rescuers.”

“What are we going to do?”

“We can’t stay here,” he said. “Can we?” He ran out of the bedroom as if he’d been waiting for them, and came back with a couple of plastic bags and stuffed some clothes and books and their cell phones into them.

Her face grew hot and then cold, and a minute passed in which she could have changed his mind but she didn’t know what to do.

“Let’s go?” he said.

He waited, and finally, she said, “Let us go.”

He tossed her one of his hoodies, and she pulled it on over her head. His musty scent in the fabric. “We’ll have to jump out the window,” he said. She knew Prague’s past of defenestration, but perhaps he did not.

He wiped his legs with old clothing and got onto the bed. His skin smelled like the dirty river. He pointed out the window. “Five of them.”

She didn’t know why she felt wrong about leaving. Had she taken on his beliefs in the end, his earlier us-in-here, them-out-there mentality? “They could be anybody.” He shook his head.

When she reached for his fly, he said, “You’ve kept those boots on since you got here,” and, for a liberating instant, she thought that he knew. Yes, she could say, what about her bleeding wound? Then he went on: “I guess I understand holding on to one last piece of your past.”

“One last piece of my past?” Maybe it was easiest for him to think she wasn’t in danger, simply unable to give up her husband completely.

He called out the window, and the rescuers paddled and shouted back.

“What if you were right and the water never gets to the top of the bed?”

“You don’t want me to say sorry,” he said, “but this is my fault. And now I can get us out.” She let go of him. She hated that he was so eager to save her.

He held up the window, waving at the approaching rescuers. “Can you get some more plastic bags?” she asked. He said there wasn’t anything of hers in the flat. She sighed and repeated her request.

When he went to the kitchen, she formed her plan. She would tie bags around her legs so the water wouldn’t get in. Then they would swim out to the canoes and leave Prague, visit her mother after all, row out through the rivers into the rest of Europe.

He climbed back onto the bed, wiping himself off with the sheets this time. He never expected to use them again. He smelled even more like the flood. She took the bags from him. The rescue workers shouted warnings. They called, “Titanic. Titanic.” They had seen that Tee was a foreigner. A hum rose in Tee’s throat and she tied the bags over her boots—both calves, to keep up the illusion. He shot her a questioning glance, but she said, “I know what I am doing,” which, unbelievably, kept him quiet. She felt again that he must know. Wind blew in, crinkling the bags. Outside, she thought she saw a yellow bird flap out over the water.

“Ready?” he said. She nodded. He glanced again at what she’d done, frowning, but then he kissed his palm and pressed it to the ceiling. “Good-bye, apartment.” He stepped onto the window ledge, his right foot turned sideways. He shoved his plastic bags down the front of his jeans and held out his hand for her.

A desperate longing stopped her breath, as if he’d jumped already, leaving her behind.

“Please,” he said.

She took his hand and stepped beside him. She should have run away with him as soon as she could. Maybe every act of faith, as they got older, was meant to make up for an earlier lack of faith. In one movement she made herself small enough to fit through the window and she dropped into the water less than a meter below.

She heard him plop into the river beside her. “Stay there,” he said, but she stroked out as fast as she could. She felt the water seep in—inevitably—through the tied-up neck of the bag, and she swallowed the river with a pained gasp. The alcohol in her blood did nothing to dull the burning and pulsing inside her boot. She felt tired, unable to keep churning her limbs. Then, at last, he was there. His arm wrapped beneath her breasts, and he pulled her toward the canoe. A rescue worker helped her in.

“Are you okay?” the man asked in Czech.

“Afraid of water,” Tee said, gesturing. He bent over the side, fishing out coasters that floated, trapped, between the canoe and the neighboring building.

This, Katka thought, was how she would leave Karlín: in a lie. She hardly recognized where she was. The river had washed in a brown tide, and the area would never completely recover. The buildings would be abandoned, torn down and rebuilt if they didn’t collapse, and the residents, at least many of them, would take the insurance money and move.

Tee was still in the river beside the canoe. She reached between them. In his hoodie, she felt like a second Tee. She was one of her kind, the most American she would ever be, the last American left in this hundred-year flood. She was an identity rising to the surface, as she’d seen him on New Year’s. The canoe rocked lightly as he climbed in beside her, and the water dripped off his nose. She managed a smile, and then a grope of fear reminded her that water was unsafe, and she passed out.