Free The Hundred-Year Flood by Matthew Salesses Page B

Pavel and Rockefeller hated. A series of chambers extended underground. Tee dressed in a blue designer button-down, though with his usual khaki shorts and thong sandals. He wore the cologne his ex-girlfriend had given him, the only bottle he owned, though he didn’t know if this was a good idea. He got to the café early. He wanted, for once, to be waiting for Katka. He ordered a Pilsner to calm his nerves. Fifteen minutes passed. She might have changed her mind. Someone stepped down the stairs, then turned on one glowing heel and headed back up. Tee sprang from his chair, spilling his beer, and went after. He poked his head into the higher chamber. He heard the bartender behind him shouting about foreigners. Katka was nowhere in sight. Tee crossed the chamber, and just as he wondered what he had seen, he nearly knocked her over—in a short blue summer dress, inches taller than him in her boots. They sat at a nearby table, and she ordered a glass of wine and he another beer. “How are you?” he asked. “Any better?”
    “Better? I am not sure what you mean.”
    They sat for a while in the silence his question had raised. The waitress came, and he ordered a cheese platter.
    “You did not answer me yesterday,” she said finally, twisting the stem of her glass. “What do I mean to you? Why did you climb that tree?”
    “I like you,” he said. “I told you already. Why did you climb it?”
    “Do you want me to say because of Pavel?”
    Tee started to apologize.
    “I told you,” she said. “Do not be sorry.” She took his hand, her skin unusually warm, as if she had been drinking already.
    But he did need to hear about Pavel, for some reason. He didn’t want to sound whiny, young, but he needed to know. His fingers, under hers, seemed bony and thin, as if his skin had grown transparent. Had his aunt seen through his father like this?
    The waitress delivered their cheese, and before they ate, Tee clinked his glass to Katka’s. Neither of them let their eyes drop. She’d told him that breaking eye contact while toasting meant bad intentions. “Tell me how you met,” he said.
    “Tell you how I met who?”
    “You know who I mean.” He tried to stop himself. He had seen that foot change direction, though, and he had to follow it to an end.
    She drew a breath and seemed to decide. “After I graduated university,” she said, “I ran messages for the artists and writers leading the protests. Pavel’s father had just died in jail, and Rockefeller had printed their drawings side by side in a samizdat. I knew Rockefeller from when I was a girl, from before his family moved to Prague. His parents were important Communists, so no one suspected him, or they pretended they did not.” Her other hand rubbed a stain on the table.
    “He arranged a message. I took a letter to Pavel—that was how I met him. I believed in him then as an artist and a hero and a politician, though he only ever wanted to be one of those. I begged Rockefeller for the chance to meet him. I was like all the others: I listened to Plastic People of the Universe, I followed the news out of East Germany.”
    Three months before the Revolution, she said, she’d gone to Pavel’s house and met a young man the same age as she, with shaggy hair and a jutting chin. He stood to the side and read suggestions from the artist Vašíček—she’d opened the letter out of curiosity—an old friend of his father’s. He was stooped and timid at first, and she was disappointed. But once he finished reading, he said Vašíček’s was an old aesthetic, and he wouldn’t paint like his father. He would represent youth. As he ascended into surety, the fear she’d originally had, that she might embarrass herself before him in some way, pleasantly returned. His wiry frame seemed to grow sturdy before her, and when he asked her opinion of his art, her voice betrayed her. Only her body would react—she turned him around by the shoulder, so he couldn’t see her.