The Hundred-Year Flood Read Online Free Page A

shirt a dozen times and had laid out an outfit the night before.
     
    On days Pavel was happy with his work, he would join them in telling legends. His accent was like a Shakespearean character’s, iambic, weighted with beats. He liked to talk about a famous Czech hero, Jára Cimrman, who had never actually existed. “So Cimrman crossed ocean in a steamboat,” he would say. Or “So Cimrman took submarine to moon.” Cimrman had climbed the Andes, braved the Arctic, suggested the Panama Canal but never got the credit. Katka teased these stories out of him, laughing, but Tee didn’t get the joke.
    Tee wished they would tell him more about life under Communism. Whenever the subject came up, his hip twinged as if he might walk, by accident, into a decades-old rally. One afternoon a small group protested a former Communist prime minister’s acquittal. Pavel and Katka went with their friend with the American name, Rockefeller. The next morning, when Katka described how Pavel had seemed ready to smash a painting over a policeman’s head, Tee made his way across the room. “What was it like?” he demanded, “the Revolution?” He imagined falling in love over art, brushstrokes inciting a nation to freedom, Pavel’s paintings hanging on the facade of the museum in Wenceslas Square, an idealist burning himself beneath.
    Pavel sighed and traded brush for cigarette. “It was like something, history, could never being stopped.”
    Tee felt his armpits sweat, a change in circulation. “I want to understand,” he said. “There was so much against you. You must have had a lot of conviction.” His elbow bumped the easel. He ignored the shiver up his arm.
    Pavel steadied the canvas. “Impossible to understand,” he said. “When I’m eleven, I saw boys I knew once try to kill a man in alley. They are taking nothing, only putting knife in him and running. Maybe he is living, maybe not. I didn’t know they Secret Police or he was, maybe no one.”
    “What did you do?” Tee asked.
    “I ran away.”
    “We all did what we had to do,” Katka said. “You lived. You survived.”
    Pavel blew thin darts of smoke, one after another.
    Tee wanted more. Maybe he could offer a story of his own. His uncle had suddenly committed suicide after putting up with an affair for more than twenty years. A story with no moral and unclear conviction. What would they make of that? But then Katka rested her hand on the back of her husband’s neck, and Pavel went on. He talked about the political art that got his father killed, about his own paintings denouncing Communism, about how Rockefeller and Katka had placed his art around the city. They had been a family, the three of them.
    “Is different than you think,” Pavel said. He said that Tee reminded him of how they used to “risk self” to print their samizdats. They had risked more than Tee ever would.
    “I’m painting boy here,” Pavel said, “who is holding door for somebody and then forgets and closes it. But the somebody behind of you is you.”
    “You painted me holding a door for myself?” Tee tried to translate Pavel’s English. “And then shutting it on myself?” He pictured coming upon a door like the glass doors of his hotel. He sensed a person behind him, so he held it open. Yet after a moment, he gave up and stepped inside.
    Of course, it was a paradox. He couldn’t hold the door for himself and still enter. He remembered an afternoon in Old Town Square, a man in a parrot suit. “Thai massage,” the parrot yelled, approaching him. “You Thai. This your massage.” For a moment the parrot and the door combined. Maybe Tee could only ever belong to Prague as a foreigner, as the one Asian in the entire city, someone with another self waiting in the wings.
    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