In his bedroom in Karlín, Tee felt something, or someone, behind him, but he didn’t turn around. He had locked his door. He picked up a red matchbook from Rockefeller’s apartment. It advertised a Museum of Communism: PRAY WE DON’T CATCH YOU AT ANOTHER MUSEUM. Why would Rockefeller go there? Tee struck a match, and singed the edges of a piece of notepaper, as his mother had taught him to do once to impress a girl. Ash rubbed off on his fingertips, dusted the bed. What he was doing was not safe. He blew out the flame. In the center of the burned page, he sketched two eyes. He recalled the legend of Straba, who cut off the ears of his masked enemy, only to find, upon returning home, that the ears belonged to his wife.
That night before Katka arrived in the rain, Tee wrote in his notebook about Korea. As if telling her about the fortune in his palm had cleared up something about the past.
When Dad took the job in Pusan, he sent letters to Mom. He must have been trying to change. Soon, wasn’t Mom sniffing the brown envelopes, imagining the Pusan beach and the hot springs beneath? But it wasn’t long before the letters stopped. She would run at night, looking up at the windows and picturing windows in Korea. 2 months until he wrote again. Then the return address bore a hospital cross. She tore the envelope in her hurry, but he only had a broken leg. The end of his letter she reread again and again. He offered her what they had lost. A baby. When she called the number he’d given, what did she ask — why did he stop writing and where did he find a half-white baby? how much did he love her? did he already love the baby, me? He was in the hospital, had been in Korea just 6 months, after 2 quick trips to settle the contract. He said to make up her mind.
VII
Over the last two weeks of July and the first two weeks of August, it would rain all but nine days. The storms would come and go, rarely lingering. The river would swell and rise up the embankments, but no one worried about a flood. Tee and Katka took no notice of warning signs, coming and going with the storms.
After they made love that first evening, he walked her down to Křižíkova station. He held a black umbrella over her and fought the guilt washing in in the wake of desire. They descended the escalators to the metro as a train rumbled by. The wind from the train stung Tee’s eyes. Squinting, he saw a pink shape fly out of her hand and onto the tracks. She’d been holding her rain-soaked socks, and the wind had caught one. She’d let it go. Tee started after it, and a horn rang out. A second train flew up on the heels of the first, with closed doors, and after twenty seconds, went on.
“You looked like in your paintings,” she said as the train departed, “rushing for a piece of clothing.” She held the other sock behind her. The one on the tracks was gone.
“What are those ghost trains? I see them go by with their lights off and their doors shut.” His ears buzzed with the rasp of the horn.
“They are for training drivers. Two people a month kill themselves in the metro. They step off the edge and get run over.” He pictured this. Holding hands with her and stepping out over the tracks as a train crushed to a stop. “You have got to practice.”
As they hugged good-bye, he knew that the next day would bring her back. He offered his umbrella, but she said she wouldn’t be able to explain where it was from. He anticipated the next train, hoping for another dud. She plucked some wet fuzz off her shirt, and his hand went out to catch it.
“Do not worry,” she said, and smiled. Then she reached out and pinched his wrist.
Later he realized she could have said she had bought the umbrella. Maybe she was afraid to have anything of his in her house.
Each time they saw each other, he would write about the stories she told him, about his family and hers, or about the ghost. On July 20, he wrote:
I don’t know why I agreed to see K only when it rains. It can hide us, she says. I wonder what Aunt A.’s excuse was for Uncle H. He pretended like there were two of her. Is that why I see a ghost?
Often they lay in bed and spoke of the chances of bad weather, staring up at the crests of paint on his ceiling. “Seventy percent tomorrow,” Tee would say. They would make love until it looked like the rain was sputtering to a halt.
“Just stay over,” he asked once, counting the time between thunder and lighting. Three, four, five.
“I do not know what Pavel would do to us.” She put an earring — a gold apple — back into her ear.
Nine, ten.
The wind came down fast and hard and the rain drove at the buildings like tiny reckless cars. Sometimes he read to her what he wrote. She stretched across his blankets, long and gangly. He read her his fictionalized stories of her Czech grandfather and Roma grandmother, based on what she told him as she shared more of herself. He could never tell what she thought of his writing. She would hide her face as he read.
It is the early 1900s: Her grandmother gives up her tribe and the life of a gypsy contortionist to settle in Prague and have children. She speaks rapidly, expresses herself with her hands, brushes her hair over her ear when she’s unsure. Her grandfather reads Kafka and Max Brod, writes unpublished novels.
Tee was translating them into the past. He understood this. Katka looked away. He didn’t look away from her, or he would see the ghost.
“Is that right?” he said. “Tell me again?”
She shut her eyes as if the story lived just behind her eyelids. “When the Nazis were here, my granny had to deny she was Roma, and my mum and aunt learned to hate their past. My granny lost her identity — Mum said she became a vengeful woman who took out her loss on her children.”
“And then?”
“When Communism took over after World War II, my family moved into the country. Mum came back during the Prague Spring. And she met my dad. He was a scientist — the borders were suddenly open, and he came to study our ecosystems. Mum was a student of literature; everyone liked her. They got married. Then the tanks trapped him. They fell in love in a time of freedom. They fell out after the Soviets invaded. Later, I suppose, they did not want to risk sneaking off to England with a baby.”
She smoothed the pillow, the sheets. Finally she said, “I grew up a daddy’s girl while he grew violent. Once, when I was seven, he slammed me against the wall. I had said we should escape together and leave Mum. Later that night he cried by my bed and said I was the one he really loved. I am sure Mum heard him. She is a stoic — is that the right word? — a sufferer who hears everything.”
In a way, Tee thought, they’d both been left by a father, had left a mother.
Tee drew in his notes, in the margins of books, on coasters and napkins and peeled-off labels of beer bottles. People with children. Planes. Self-destruction. Whenever he noticed what he was drawing, he stopped himself. As soon as Katka arrived, he would cocoon himself in her visits. He had heard once that a caterpillar had to die in order to become a butterfly. A butterfly was an entirely new life.
When he asked about Pavel, about the state of her house, Katka never answered. Sometimes, after she left, he ran a finger over the pewter Golem he’d taken from her bedroom, as if it would grant a wish. For example: not to see the ghost, at least, when Katka and he were making love. According to legend, the Golem had been molded from the clay of the Vltava riverbanks. It wouldn’t stop killing, so its creator had stopped it by rubbing out the word truth from its forehead.
July 29: