Illegal Liaisons

by Grazyna Plebanek

  He dragged himself to the bathroom. He was tall, slender, with his mother’s dark hair, which he didn’t like to cut. He pushed it back, put his glasses on and, although his jaws had grown stubble overnight, he let it go – he didn’t have the energy to shave.

  With a sense of duty unusual for a seven-year-old, Antosia got up without having to be told off; Tomaszek allowed himself to be carried to the bathroom then stood in front of the toilet bowl. Peeing with his eyes shut, he cursed the fate of a preschooler. By the time Jonathan came to make the children’s beds, his son had crept back to his room and buried himself beneath the duvet.

  “Tomaszek,” Jonathan stood over the small mound, hands on hips. “Get up!”

  “Tosia’s in the bathroom,” came from beneath the duvet.

  “Antosia, out with you!”

  “I’m looking for my bobby pin! He’s hidden it.”

  “Then take another one,” shouted Jonathan.

  “I don’t want another one. I want the one he’s hidden!”

  Jonathan fished his son out from beneath the duvet.

  “Tomaszek, give Antosia back her bobby pin.”

  “What bobby pin?” The boy’s gray eyes opened wide.

  Jonathan started to laugh, and Tomaszek, giggling impishly, jumped beneath the duvet again.

  “Get up, we’re late.” Jonathan tried to keep a straight face. “To the bathroom, quick march!”

  “But she’s in there.”

  “Antosia!”

  “I’ll come out when he’s given me back my bobby pin!”

  Half an hour later, they were caught in a traffic jam. A single line of cars crept along the avenue de Roodebeek – both sides of the street were being repaired – and they picked up speed only once they had dived into the tunnel. Getting on to the Montgomery roundabout was like driving a car at a fairground, with everyone barging into the first free space in the outside lane.

  Jonathan kissed Antosia goodbye in front of the school then ran with Tomaszek to his classroom. Tiny Asians, white children, and a few Africans were running down the corridors. Jonathan glanced at one of the mothers, an Italian with a shapely bust beneath her tight blouse. Someone started talking to him: a Canadian woman wanted to arrange for her son to play with Tomaszek in the afternoon. She was not pretty, but Poland for her was not simply associated with plumbers; a lawyer, like Megi, she had read Kosinski and Kapuscinski.

  Seeing the farmer from Ohio approaching, Jonathan leaned over to her. The other rooster in this henhouse, the American had informed Jonathan of his Polish roots on the day they met. He knew the word “dupa” [ass], wore glasses and a hairstyle with a painfully neat parting; the mothers whispered that he was a retired prison guard from Ohio.

  Jonathan said goodbye to the Canadian woman and made his way to the parking lot. He didn’t turn the key in the ignition immediately; he didn’t want to go home. Their possessions had arrived and stacks of boxes were waiting for him in the apartment. He unpacked some every day, yet the stacks didn’t seem to diminish.

  He pulled out of the parking lot only to stop again at a bistro in the nearby square. He bought a coffee and booted up his laptop. One email, from Stefan.

  Before opening it, he looked around cautiously. Jonathan’s friend – one of Megi’s colleagues from student days who, like her, had got a job at the Commission and moved to Brussels – usually attached pages of porn to his emails. This time, too, a pair of breasts loomed on screen. Jonathan closed the laptop a little – he had told Stefan so many times that he was an ass man, that he preferred shapely backsides and long legs.

  After a while, he peeked at the photograph. He distrusted men who claimed not to look at naked girls because they found them crude, or to watch porn films because the dialogue was boring.

  In the end, he beckoned to the waiter. He felt guilty – Megi was working hard at the office while he was sitting in the sun, looking at porn.

  WHEN THEY HAD BOUGHT the air tickets from Warsaw to Brussels in the spring of 2005, a weight fell from Jonathan’s shoulders. For the past ten years he had been living in one place. He had allowed himself to become domesticated by his love for Megi. He didn’t complain but his hankering after travel felt like a gunshot wound. He anticipated that moving to another country with a family of four would resemble Circus Knee on the move but was still tempted by the vision of a sailing ship promising freedom.

  In 2005, Megi had received a gift from fate: an offer to work in Brussels. She had, in fact, been preparing for the EU exams for a long time, and had passed them; even though her relatives, who wanted to see in her above all a wife and mother, were prone to put the Brussels offer down to coincidence and to what Uncle Tadeusz liked to call ‘sheer luck’.

  When Megi found out that she had passed the exams and been offered a job – thanks to which she could support a family of four in the middle of Europe – she initially cowered, as though she had shouted and brought down an avalanche. Then she locked herself in the kitchen for a few evenings and jotted down arguments for and against. Jonathan, who knew all too well that trying to persuade Megi to do anything could bring about the opposite effect, chose to wait. Finally, she scrunched up the pieces of paper, sat down at the kitchen table, and called Jonathan. A few days later, they invited their more distant family to tea in order to inform them – amid the sweet fumes of apple pie – that they were moving to Brussels.

  The first to take offence was Uncle Tadeusz; this was not, in his opinion, what true patriotism should look like. He pronounced the word like “patriotis,” and Jonathan would have readily bitten him in his fat leg because, ever since Jonathan had resigned from his job, the uncle had been casting doubt on his masculinity. “Real men don’t act like that,” grumbled the pensioner, while other relatives asked, “What do you want to go live among strangers for?” and, “Why go to that Belgium?”

  Megi and Jonathan left behind the Wedel chocolate cakes – “so that you have something sweet to eat in Belgium” – entrusted the children to their grandmother, and one spring day in 2005, stood on an unfamiliar square, squinting in a light familiar from great Flemish paintings. The moment was like a safe haven in his memory, a moment of respite, until daily routine reasserted itself.

  4

  A FEW WEEKS AFTER the move, the rhythm of work was regulating Megi’s new life; Jonathan, on the other hand, was still all over the place. Too many boxes and numerous domestic duties, to which he was no longer accustomed in Warsaw, fell on his shoulders, as if in revenge for his escape from paternity leave. Slowly, it dawned on him that the travels he had been used to in his youth and after which he hankered, were now different. The sailing boat had turned out to be a barrel-shaped barge.

  The apartment, inundated with cardboard boxes, began to force him out into the city, but the paths outside were not yet smooth. Jonathan, who had enjoyed the life of a freelancer in Warsaw, decided to seek a permanent job. He had to tame the city not as a tourist but as a resident. And, more importantly, most of his income as a journalist had been cut off when he left Poland so he had practically nothing in his account. Jonathan discovered he didn’t like taking money from his wife’s account. It made him feel – what, precisely?

  He didn’t analyze his state of mind too deeply; he wasn’t one to delve into himself to such an extent. He sent his CV out to umpteen places and soon emails started to arrive, until one day he came across a letter that excited him. It wasn’t an attachment from Stefan but an offer of work – riveting to the last paragraph. When he reached the bit about pay, he groaned with disappointment.

  He went home to put up some shelves but the thought of the strange job did not leave him. Every now and again, he grabbed a notebook and, using one of Tomaszek’s crayons, jotted down ideas that came into his head. Unable to bear it any longer, he phoned Megi. He bounced off her answering machine and pressed the next number on his list – Stefan’s.

  They had met in Warsaw over ten years ago. Stefan, a regular at the parties thrown “chez
Kic,” the student hostel on Kicki Street, ran into Jonathan who was staying there unregistered. Their last student kicks brought them together and at every occasion they exchanged stories like the one about Stefan trying to deflower a young lady from the depths of Poland, in the dark mistaking her tights for her hymen.

  Jonathan would have called Stefan his best friend had it not sounded in Polish like an avowal. The institution of best friends seemed bookishly pretentious to him (Winnetou and Old Shatterhand), which is why he just called Stefan, Stefan.

  They arranged to meet on rue Franklin. Already late, Jonathan rushed, ignoring his cell phone as it swelled with messages from Stefan. At last, in the garden of a little eatery, he caught sight of a well-kept figure constrained by the discipline of a suit, and with fair hair scarcely anyone knew was thinning.

  “I’m going to become an alcoholic because of you.” Stefan pointed to the empty glass of beer and gestured for another.

  “It’s the nanny, she couldn’t find her way.” Jonathan collapsed into a chair.

  “Pretty?”

  “She’s got a gold tooth.”

  “My aunt had gold canines.” Stefan lost himself in thought.

  Jonathan silently raised two thumbs. He had got the nanny’s details from a Polish plumber but this was not what he wanted to talk about.

  He had just opened his mouth to say something when a round from a machine gun resounded.

  Stefan dug out his cell and read the text.

  “Kalashnikov fire?” Jonathan leaned back in his chair. “Poland, the Christ of Nations, as our poet says?”

  Stefan made nothing of it and slipped the phone into his pocket.

  “It goes off when there’s a text from Monika.”

  The waitress stood their beers in front of them.

  “How is she?” Jonathan reached for his packet of cigarettes. “Found a job?”

  Stefan fished out a bit of dirt from his glass. Monika, Stefan’s wife of over ten years, was born twenty years too late. In the ’60s she would have been, as Jonathan’s father said, to his son’s linguistic horror, a typical dolly bird; twenty years later, next to her long-legged, blonde classmates, she looked middle-aged.

  Stefan had gone out with her during his first year of studies but could not endure the monogamy. When they met again, two years after college, Monika consoled him after a heavy-going relationship he had had with a domineering French philology student. She fell pregnant. Stefan treated her honorably: he proposed and she accepted.

  After their daughter’s birth, Monika brought her mother over to help with the child; the mother lived with them, taking turns with several aunts. The elderly women all dunked pieces of bread roll in milk in exactly the same way and smoked forty cigarettes a day; Stefan could not tell them apart. The two-room apartment grew gray from smoke and Stefan’s pleas to smoke on the balcony because of the child met with a shrug. Stefan, who was not sure which of the aunts he was addressing, soon hung a notice up in the kitchen prohibiting smoking in the apartment. The notice disappeared, and the apartment continued to turn gray with smoke.

  Stefan had no access to his daughter. The short, buxom women with tight perms kept strolling with his child through the gardens of the housing estate, until he felt superfluous in his own apartment. Monika, meanwhile, had found employment with a leasing company and held a position the name of which nobody was capable of remembering.

  When several years later Stefan was besotted with a colleague from work, Monika – with infallible instinct – fell pregnant again. The result was a son, Franek. Stefan bought a larger apartment because the number of carers at home doubled.

  When offered a job in Brussels, Stefan deluded himself that he would go alone, but Monika packed up herself, their teenage daughter and the younger Franek, bade farewell to leasing, and was ready for the move. Stefan merely managed to negotiate that no one from their village should accompany them.

  “Monika?” Stefan glanced at his cell. “She’s not found any work yet. It’s hardly surprising, she doesn’t speak any languages.”

  “And how are things with you at work?” Jonathan quickly changed the subject.

  Stefan came to life. He could talk for hours about work; he observed and played out personal relations with a passion. He pointed out his empty glass to the waitress and started to summarize the latest reshufflings in the Directorate General for Enlargement, where he was a senior administrator. All that Jonathan remembered was the abbreviation used for the place where his friend worked – “enlarg” from “enlargement,”

  When Stefan paused to drink, Jonathan confessed.

  “I’ve been offered a job.”

  “In the Commission?”

  “No.”

  “Media?”

  Jonathan remained silent, building suspense.

  “They want me to run a course in creative writing.”

  Stefan squinted. His pale eyes, which usually expressed a certain wickedness that women found attractive, showed careful thought.

  “How much?”

  “Don’t ask.” Jonathan lowered his head.

  “That bad?” Stefan reached for a cigarette. “What does Megi say?”

  The previous evening flashed before Jonathan’s eyes. Frequent dealings with his wife’s answering machine had led him to hope that the modulated voice of the machine might have undertones of sexual promise. In reality, instead of arousing the imagination, it pushed his thoughts into a gutter as narrow as a sledge track. Megi had finally answered late into the evening but her voice had sounded distorted and distant. She was still at a meeting that was meant to finish past midnight. She could not talk for long. She merely asked about the children and Jonathan sensed some of the energy, bubbling in him since the morning, turn into anger. He pressed the cell button hard, bidding goodbye to the word “wife” with his eyes.

  “We didn’t even have an opportunity to talk,” he muttered. “Megi works till late.”

  “Someone has to,” laughed Stefan and Jonathan stared at him thoughtfully. Everyone had faults and Stefan’s was a lack of tact. “Anyway, if the pay’s poor, don’t bother. Look for something else.”

  “But it’s interesting! I can put the curriculum together myself. It grabs me.”

  Stefan thanked the waitress with a nod as she stood a beer in front of him.

  “How old are you? That’s what can grab you.” He indicated the girl as she walked away. “Work sets you up. You’ve got a degree, experience as a journalist, languages. Am I to tell you what to do? After all …”

  He stopped as his cell started ringing in his pocket.

  “I’m at work,” he said into the phone. “Dinner. Business. What do you mean you don’t understand what the mail from school says? All right, I’ll be finished soon.”

  He hung up, downed his beer, and turned to Jonathan.

  “Think of a sensible job. Oh, and the vice-head of the task force is holding a party on Friday. Megi’s probably got an invitation. Make sure you come!”

  5

  JONATHAN’S THOUGHTS rarely turned to the first time he had met Andrea. The moments in which they later immersed themselves occupied more space in his memory; and they had leapt into something more intense – they insisted – than ever before.

  Jonathan’s memory turned out to be a clever device that didn’t prompt comparisons, at least not when he was with Andrea. She was his goal, his oxygen, and his delicacy; he mounted her, lived by her breath, eagerly licked the nipples adorning the olive-skinned spheres of her breasts. Images of the bodies of women with whom he had been in the past, including the pale recollection of his wife’s body, lay forgotten at the bottom of his memory.

  Jonathan set out to climax with Andrea carrying no burdens, only his ego, which never physically let him down – something that filled him with pride. When later they lay side by side – and these were limited minutes of pure happiness, which disappeared as soon as they parted – Andrea, as women are wont to do, would say something like, “I r
emember the first time I saw you.” In her postcoital stupefaction, she could think of nothing else. She, so intelligent, witty, wise, wanted to whisper only about them. And so Jonathan, who had a similar vacuum in his head, hid behind the smoke of his cigarette and murmured, “Yes, yes, I remember.”

  The truth came out when it turned out that “when I first saw you” meant something different than him and to her. Andrea counted their days together from their first meeting, he from their first lovemaking.

  “Two different calendars!” shouted Andrea, knitting her dark brows. Did they have anything in common whatsoever? She was angry but a moment later forgave him, and Jonathan suspected that the abyss which proved his masculine lack of sensitivity in some way excited her.

  Jonathan did, in fact, remember the first time he saw Andrea but he didn’t tell her because he didn’t want her to have any power over him. He had already realized that she could be cruel when she caught a whiff of blind attachment. He didn’t want her to wave a sheet stained with blood, his blood, in front of his nose, so he let her refresh this “forgotten” memory for him.

  Each time she spoke about the first time, Andrea added something new, some element she had previously overlooked. In this way she constructed their mythical beginning. Jonathan, meanwhile, silently struggled to hold on to his own. Frankly, he was afraid of her myth. He sensed that in repeating her story, his lover was spreading her web around him. And he was scared of it, just as every man is scared when he suspects he’s being trapped, even though all she tied him with was the thread of a story.

  When he thought about his first meeting with Andrea, Jonathan tried to recall facts: the well-kept apartment with its stained-glass window over the stairwell and enormous hall ending in a garden. As always, the size of living areas in Brussels staggered him. Unfortunately, the large room reminded him of a toilet bowl festooned with dried turds, and Jonathan would readily have scoured the knick-knacks and growths of souvenirs with steel wool.