CHAPTER 3. THE HUNDRED-YEAR FLOOD: PAVEL AND ROCKEFELLER
I
After his first week in Boston, Tee transferred to a rehabilitation center, a fat, low building like a hospital chopped in half. The inside like a retirement home. He would walk through the themed atriums at the end of each wing: rainforest, mountain, beach, jungle. Fake trees in brown cement. The staff ran a post office, a library, a restaurant, more for reorientation than utility. Twice a week an occupational therapist taught Tee life skills he’d never learned a first time, like how to tie your shoes so they never fall off, or how to speak to someone who holds power over you, or how to record dreams. He attended meetings more like support groups. Love was a common subject. A veteran with a re-aggravated head wound said they used to tell each other, “Cupid marches on.” Hell or high water, Cupid marches on. In which war, he didn’t say. A man who thought he was everyone’s twin said, “So that’s what I look like,” and pawed Tee’s face. “So sad.”
At least once a week, in their meetings, one of the longer-term patients would urge self-forgiveness. Another patient always argued the value of regret. In their private sessions, Tee’s OT spoke in metaphors, which she said patients could more easily understand. She said Tee was treating the past and the present like two magnets, forcing their ends together to see if they attracted or repelled. Tee said time seemed more like a house. He was in one room, a room that was the rehab center, and the room just next door was Prague. Of course, then he recalled what Pavel had said about shutting the door on himself. His OT asked him to tell her what day of the week it was. She hid the calendar behind her hand. He shook his head.
The way Tee wrote about Prague, it was like he was building that one room in the house of time. He started with a cobblestone floor. Then he added a golden roof, spires, an artist’s canvas, books, a maple tree, water. But each time he built the room, it didn’t seem right. How do you build in a ghost, or regret? He tore down the spires and the bookshelves and the fireworks and started over.
Tee’s second night in the rehab center, he picked through a book he found in the library, on peaceful revolutions. The appendix had a page about Czechoslovakia. He wanted to imagine Pavel and Rockefeller overthrowing Communism, together, without violence.
The start of the Revolution, November 17, 1989, International Students’ Day, was also an important day to Pavel and Rockefeller’s relationship. They had joined twenty thousand Czechs and Slovaks, students with banners and flowers, in a march against Communism. Riot police cut off the marchers in Národní Třída, cordoning the square. The sudden panic squeezed Pavel between parked cars, away from Rockefeller. He wished Katka was beside him, but she had stayed home sick.
The police advanced, truncheons swinging. People sat, in protest, or tried and failed to run. Pavel searched for Rockefeller’s mop of brown hair above the other heads. A man rushed past, in the direction they had come, holding his mouth. Teeth dropped like coins at his feet. A woman tried to escape down a guarded alley, and a policeman smashed her between the shoulder blades. A sharp pain bloomed in Pavel’s neck — an elbow, or a fist — and with it sprang the smell of vomit, as if the bloom had traveled from his neck to his nose. A pair of arms wrapped around him from behind, and when he tried to shake them off, the flat of a bone in his back shoved him forward.
He almost fell, struggling against the crowd, before he heard the familiar voice in his ear. Rockefeller helped him onto a hood. Rockefeller steadied him with one big arm, kept people away with the other. Some student in the crowd recognized Pavel and she chanted his nickname, like a war cry. The chant got louder and louder — to Pavel’s surprise, part of the crowd joined her. “See a way out?” Rockefeller said, shaking him. Pavel searched, as the car rocked beneath him, until he spotted a woman slip out down a side street, unharmed.
He shouted over his name. A harelipped boy climbed the car as Rockefeller tugged Pavel down. Metal scraped Pavel’s skin, and he stepped on an arm or a leg. Rockefeller swam through bodies, chanting with the others now. Around them rose the scent of blood and bile and crushed petals.
At the alley Rockefeller towered over two short guards.
In the rehabilitation center in Boston, Tee wrote a room for the Velvet Revolution. In that room was Pavel’s belief that Rockefeller would always help him. On the walls hung two paintings, one for each time the Secret Police abducted Pavel’s father — after the second time ended in death, in 1987, Rockefeller had tracked down anyone still hiding the older artist’s paintings in their homes, and had returned the art to Pavel. Fifteen years later Rockefeller stood by as Pavel’s wrists were broken.
A month after Czechoslovakia became a democracy, Pavel and Katka married and Rockefeller started the first of six failed businesses, with revenue from Pavel’s museum sales. The rest of their friends moved on with their lives. The more the world moved on, the more Pavel and Rockefeller clung to each other. To the two of them, Pavel’s art was still an active influence, Rockefeller was still a force for change. They were each other’s best reminders of their own importance. They must have come to resent how much they relied on each other, and the nagging sense that alone, they, too, would have been able to move on.
Tee touched the bandage around his skull. His fingers smelled like gauze. He put the typewriter away for the night. Before he fell asleep, the ghost woman glowed past his door. In the dark, Tee’s hand crept to the typewriter paper. He wanted to get out of bed and give chase, or at least write another room, but he was heavy with sleep. A few minutes later, he was dreaming of Katka in the flood.
In the morning, he returned the library book. As he stepped into the hall, the ghostly leg turned a corner in front of him. He ran after it, though his balance had barely improved. He could smell the difference in the halls: water. Then he slipped into someone’s arms, never touching ground. Wake up, he thought, you’re still asleep. Nothing happened. The arms were real. He panicked at first that it was Rockefeller, until he heard the nurse’s voice. She asked if he was okay. His father had called to say that he would be late. Tee reset his feet. He didn’t want to lose the ghost this time — he felt as if those arms around his chest might erase the ghost’s existence. But the next day, the calf again passed by his room. What had made it disappear in Prague? What had made it come back? If he caught it, could he return to who he was?
Tee didn’t know. He imagined and imagined.
II
Pavel stood in the mud outside his house, in his bathrobe. Rain dripped down his casts. The gap was wider than a month before; his forearms had thinned. He searched for Katka in the distance, for a figure fading into the early-morning rain, but saw nothing. She had left him to go to Tee.
His wife.
They had fought the entire day — how terribly short a day was — and into the night. He wished, at least, that he could stop thinking of her as art. She had called him controlling, and her words had splashed bright yellows and reds, then dark blues and grays. He had always known the dramatic moments of his life as paintings. But at the end, he had wanted her to stay skin and bones. His wife. The woman who had slept with him, talked with him, hurt him.
She had left him for a foreign, dark-skinned boy, whom Pavel had given shape, color, texture. Pavel had burned her shape, color, texture. Was that why she’d left? She had begun to waver — when? As soon as they saw Tee stripped to his boxers in Old Town Square, under the fireworks? Or the morning she appeared in the hospital room, her blue eyes darting to Pavel’s bruised, swollen wrists? Near the end of their fight, he’d said she was always a gypsy, stealing a heart and fleeing. He had been sure that would sting enough to give her pause, but she had lowered her voice and said Tee would never say that.