He couldn’t let Americans take both his wrists and his marriage. He wanted an equal revenge — Rockefeller’s wrists broken, his wife brokenhearted, Tee permanently alone. The sound of the rain came from far away. In the rubble in front of Pavel, Rockefeller lowered himself to his knees. His thighs shook, and he hung his head. His hair poufed like a wet bird.
“I’m sorry. I have to tell you something. I saw her with Tee.”
Pavel hooked his fingertips around a painting.
“They’re in his apartment.”
Rockefeller rose and pulled Pavel’s cast away from the painting. He drew out a pack of Marlboros. Pavel sat on a slab of concrete. Rockefeller started two cigarettes and held one between them. Then, remembering, he slipped it directly into Pavel’s mouth. Pavel breathed in. His stomach was empty. It had been days since he’d last smoked. His arms and legs tingled. On the blank back wall, an image started to come to him.
VII
They moved around the café together and rearranged things, searching the slabs of rock and wood for the musculature of a business. Rockefeller stood the mannequins near the window, and Pavel gave them names, Petr and Petra. Pavel turned their backs to each other, slid them in close to kissing, bent an arm to a waist in a way that could have been reaching or pushing.
After a while, Pavel said, “You must do this for me. Get the buckets of paint in my house. Get the towels. Get the clay. Get everything. And promise you’ll help me get her away from Tee.”
In the house in Malešice, Rockefeller found the wreckage of a fight: broken dishes, running water, displaced furniture, scattered clothes. Against the bed leaned a giant canvas. Pavel had mentioned he was painting with his casts. Wide yellow swerves layered one upon another. It was hard to make out shapes or meaning. Rockefeller tried not to care whether or not this painting could convince anyone of a revolution.
He rested an umbrella from the house in the crook of his neck and carried the equipment to the café in several trips. On the second trip, he stumbled on the wet cobblestone and dented a bucket, but the lid held. He pictured himself paint-splashed in the middle of a flood. He tried not to hurry. Sirens wailed, deeper in the city. The rain poured down and he tucked the towels under his jacket. His teeth chattered, though he wasn’t cold.
When Pavel had his supplies, he stood on a ladder and painted a mural over the entire back wall of the café. Those same thick swerves. Rockefeller toweled off the casts and held up buckets of different colors. This was what Katka must have done. She must have hoped, as the guilt from sleeping with Tee ate at her, that Pavel would paint himself back to self-reliance. If they were lucky, the mural could get on the news. Rockefeller still had a few favors he could call in.
“Promise me,” Pavel said. And Rockefeller agreed. He had to know that Pavel forgave him for the attack. “I will paint for you. You must do what you see.”
Along the river, the flood continued. Pavel asked for the radio. Zoo workers euthanized an elephant that might otherwise have rampaged in through the city. Someone got injured in the explosions. Rescue workers canoed downriver into Karlín. Had Tee and Katka gotten out? Pavel scraped his shoes on the ladder and muttered to himself, “You’ll be sorry.” Rockefeller pretended not to hear.
In the morning, Rockefeller would walk back to Pavel’s house to fetch them breakfast, and entering through the kitchen door, would hear voices. In the morning, after painting water all night, Pavel would outline a body in the bottom corner of a flood. Rockefeller would return to the café unsure how to bring up Tee and Katka, but in the mural, he would recognize the tint of the drowned body, the wave of black hair. And Pavel would step down from the ladder and rest his casts on a rung. “You promised. I need you to stop Tee. Blind him, drown him, just make sure he leaves.” Rockefeller would wish he felt more surprised.
CHAPTER 4. THE HUNDRED-YEAR FLOOD: TEE AND KATKA
I
The day before the flood, August 12, 2002, the rain fell from early in the morning, but Katka didn’t show. Tee went to an Internet café to escape the wanting. At the top of his in-box was his mother’s e-mail. He read it in a daze. When he left the Internet café, he forgot his umbrella, but he didn’t think this linked him to Katka. He kept moving. Strangers shuttled by in the rain. Back in his apartment, he took down the painting of the Russian tank treading over a woman — over Katka — in Old Town, his final thank-you for modeling. He had meant to do so ever since his trip back to Boston. He hung Mucha’s “Seasons” instead: four half-nude women for a year. From his dresser, he removed the last stolen objects and set them in clear view. He wasn’t hiding. Outside, the streets echoed, and he cursed the constant construction. He swept and mopped and washed dishes and waited for another man’s wife. Once, he almost called the Globe to ask where Ynez had gone, single Ynez. She had quit, at least in part, because of him. How should he understand that? He held his phone like one of the objects on his dresser, like it didn’t belong to him except by whatever mysterious instinct had made him take it. What if Ynez had gotten pregnant? What if Katka got pregnant? Would that unite or split them apart? What was his birth mother like pregnant? The tremor of skin as he kicked inside? By the time Katka appeared on the sidewalk below, in the night, her head bent and water slicking off her dark brown hair, he was dialing his father.
He hung up and pressed the buzzer to let Katka in. He timed his steps to the door with her steps on the stairs. Then he pulled her inside. He kissed her rain-wet lips and hugged her as she shivered. What had happened in Korea twenty-two years ago didn’t matter like the woman in his arms now. He slipped his hand up under the wet back of her blouse. Her cool skin, her cold lips, grew warm. He kissed her neck, swept her hair over her ear, and when a knock came at the door, he answered it as if there were two of her.
Rockefeller stood before them. For a moment Tee thought he was dreaming. He’d exposed Katka — he could read this in Rockefeller’s trembling chin, though Rockefeller had said he knew about them. The difference between knowing and seeing. Katka shivered in her wet clothes and covered her chest.
A flood? Tee felt flooded by memories that could confirm or disprove his mother’s e-mail. “What are you talking about?” he asked. Rockefeller whispered in Czech, and Katka slipped into the bedroom. Briefly Rockefeller’s face reddened. He backed out.
“Rockefeller,” Katka said, when she returned to the hall. She rubbed her lips, and Tee kissed her bitterly. When their mouths parted, she said, “I was not trying to make you to kiss me.”
He held his breath and kissed her again. “I’m sorry,” he said. “Rockefeller already knew about us.” He remembered the bustle, earlier, outside his window.
“I have left Pavel,” she said.
Immediately Tee was in Korea. His father stood over him, deciding. Tee’s container filled. He tugged at Katka’s wet blouse. The fabric bunched and stuck to her skin, as he rolled it upward, awkwardly. It covered her eyes, and he kissed her while she was still blind. She shivered and slipped free of the blouse, turned for him to get her bra. He licked one nipple, then the other. Her breaths grew louder. She peeled off her underwear and he led her toward the bedroom. They made it as far as the couch — she still had on her boots, he still had on his shirt and socks. She bit his shoulder as he moved inside of her, and he said, “You have left him.”