Rockefeller directed tourists to trams, told people which parts of the city the news had said would be hit worst. Karlín, the Lesser Quarter, the Jewish Quarter, Old Town: the one, new; the other three, centuries old. A few people railed against him, said to leave them alone, it wasn’t his place. They knew somehow that he had no official role. A few turned and asked advice of others.
Rockefeller wandered down to the river. A metal barrier had been put up along the embankments through Old Town to the Bridge of Legions. The Charles Bridge stood ready to prove an old myth that egg yolks mixed into its mortar meant it would never fall. Legends of Prague fluttered on the lips of evacuees as if to remind everyone of how long the city had existed, but Rockefeller didn’t trust legends. In the Jewish Quarter, a man reenacted King Canute’s prayers for the river to retreat, courting laughs. Tee would have laughed. Rockefeller wondered where Katka and Tee would go to escape. For the second time that day, he nearly wished the flood would get rid of them, leave Pavel to mourn and move on — not doubt, wonder, self-destruct. Rockefeller imagined them on a bus, flipping over in a sudden increase of water. He imagined them hit in the head by flotsam, drowning slowly in a freak accident, one of the military’s bombs gone wrong.
If they survived the flood, maybe Pavel would find his old nerve. Once, a man had insulted his father’s art and Pavel had planned revenge for six months.
Rockefeller passed long lines at ATMs as if cash would solve everything. At one, a man pushed forward. A woman fell to the ground, and Rockefeller was upon him. “What are you doing!” he said. His bag swung down on his arm.
The man shrank backward. “An accident. An accident.”
Rockefeller bent over him, but something touched his ankle. “Please,” the woman said, “just leave us alone.” She trembled. The man shook his head like he didn’t know her.
When he left them there, he felt as if they’d said, as his headmaster had said during a school commemoration of Lenin, that he was too stupid to understand.
The barriers stopped at the Charles Bridge. Food, clothing, furniture, trash, parts of poorly built houses, even a few casually dressed mannequins, swept down the Vltava. A clutch of tourists lined the banks. The water almost reached their feet; the bridge’s arches were submerged. Rockefeller’s face was wet. He must have left his umbrella near the ATM. An explosion rang out upriver, and heads turned. The water smelled strongly now of garbage and sewage, dredged-up filth. The flood covered the islands: he could barely see the top of the museum on Kampa. More explosions sounded. Tourists snapped photos and talked into cell phones. Ambulance workers ferried people across to the Lesser Quarter.
At the hospital, after Pavel’s attack, the doctors had asked Rockefeller questions he didn’t want to answer, like what exactly he had seen. When he told them Pavel’s name, they called colleagues. We can save his career, they seemed to tell each other. They put his wrists back together. But by that time, Pavel had told security to keep Rockefeller away.
Where were their old friends now, and the foreigners Rockefeller had invited over after Pavel’s attack? Where was Vanessa? She had her father to look after her.
Rockefeller crossed the Bridge of Legions into the Lesser Quarter, dripping rain. Along Smetano Nábřezi, a crowd gathered clothes washed downstream from a department store. They wrestled over outfits. A woman shoved a boy away from the river. When he saw Rockefeller, he said, “It’s not fair.” Rockefeller unzipped his bag. He wasn’t sure what he could give the boy, but as soon as the bag was open, the boy ran off with an old pair of shoes far too big for his feet.
The fringes of the crowd turned to Rockefeller, reaching. Rockefeller wished to lead by example. He widened the opening. A wet man took the towel to wipe his forehead. A man with a gash on his arm swiped bandages. And then they were taking anything. As a man pulled the bag away, Rockefeller remembered the deed. He pushed through the crowd. He tore back the bag, and the man stumbled with the force of the movement and fell. Rockefeller shoved his hand inside. “Where is it?” he asked.
“I didn’t get anything,” the man said from the ground, the rain sputtering down on him. The crowd followed.
Rockefeller flung apart the man’s wet hands. Nothing. He carried the bag away from the river, and shook it out. Gauze and a bottle of water dropped in the mud. The deed floated down on top. He closed his fist around the paper and stuffed it in his pocket.
“I wasn’t trying to steal from you,” the man whined. Rockefeller walked past toward the road.
When he could think clearly again, reject the image of another crumpled body, Rockefeller returned to the swollen river. He tried to light a cigarette beside the stretch of land that usually formed a bridge to Kampa Island. An empty refrigerator smashed against the side of the museum. A floral-patterned couch scraped up along what was now the shore, at his feet. He smoothed back his wet hair and threw the cigarette on the ground.
A white face rushed downriver, a white shirt like a flag — and Rockefeller dove into the water. The body caught on some underwater crag. Rockefeller fought forward, churning his arms. The river pushed against him. Finally he drew even. So awkwardly stiff: a mannequin.
He held the mannequin in his arms anyway. He steadied his feet in the current, and threw the body ashore. When a female model followed, he threw her onto land as well. He waded back and lay beside them, the two plastic people dripping with rain and floodwater. Sewage residue stuck to them and to him. He swept a finger under his waistband, wiped off the sludge with the camping bag, and retched.
As he lay on his back, a memory flitted in undesired of the first brave thing he’d ever done, skipping a workers’ holiday in secondary school. His teacher had filed a report about his attitude that might have damaged his family’s reputation. His parents had been forced to use up a favor to get someone to “lose” the report.
He had only been showing off. He knew his parents would come to his rescue.
He stuffed the mannequins under his arms, the man on his right, the woman on his left, and crossed back over the Bridge of Legions toward Karlovo Náměstí. Almost no one was out, except along the river, and the wide absence in the streets seemed the aftermath, not the beginning, of disaster.
VI
It was evening when Pavel walked into The Heavenly Café. The stink of the river rose in his throat. Two mannequins dripped brown water. Rockefeller drank coffee and circled them, a male and a female. Pavel rubbed his casts on his shirt, streaking it with mud, without noticing. Four canvases tilted against the back wall. Pavel pushed past a pile of concrete and, with his casts, tried to slide the frames, the last of the paintings he hadn’t burned, images of the boy his wife loved, through the mess. He couldn’t concentrate. Back in June, Katka had painted him for once, turning the tables. He thought of that now. She put the brush to the canvas, something he could no longer manage. He settled, naturally, into a pose. He even gave some instruction — how to see shadows, how to see what didn’t want to be seen — knowledge he had saved up over the years. She had studied art in college, but when she turned the canvas around, it was the simplest insult. A paintbrush erect from his crotch. “Maybe you were always like this,” she’d said, “but this is what I see now.”