The Hundred-Year Flood Read Online Free Page B

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