Illegal Liaisons

by Grazyna Plebanek

  He was halfway down when he heard a commotion. First a growl then a scream – only one – that, a moment later, was joined by others. The laughter that had drifted in the air had turned to crying. Jonathan heard a stamping and turned – Tomaszek was running after him, his bare feet slapping the cold stone splashed with autumn mud.

  “They’ve knocked it down, they’ve knocked it down!” he sobbed uncontrollably.

  Jonathan stood still, his eyes fixed on his son’s screwed-up face.

  “What?”

  Tomaszek tripped. Jonathan caught him at the last moment and the little body clung to him, snot smeared over Jonathan’s jacket.

  “Tomaszek?”

  But his son tore himself from his arms and pounded Jonathan’s jacket rabidly, his fair hair flying above his wet face.

  “They ruined our castle, ruined it,” he wept. His words broke off, their endings fading away. “They came and spoiled everything, everything! And you weren’t with me!”

  Jonathan wrote a description of birth in The Pavlov Dogs that turned out so powerful that he had to leave his laptop, pace the room, and clear his throat until the lump in it disappeared and allowed him to breathe again. He didn’t tell anyone, not even Megi, although he knew she’d understand.

  She was the one who’d told him how everything had welled up in her when they’d put the wet Antosia on her belly, how the newborn’s breath had become her breath, and how, suddenly, in one moment, she’d become vigilant. She’d clutched the three and a half kilograms of life and looked around attentively, like a bitch.

  Jonathan had been moved by Antosia’s birth, although he resented the baby a little for squeezing her little head, covered in sparse hair, between himself and Megi. He’d watched as the child sucked his woman’s breast, and experienced a strange tingling under his tongue. Sometimes he had felt separated from them by the growing wall of used diapers, the sleepless nights, and the squawking, of a bundle that had neither his nor Megi’s features, even though everyone tried to convince him the opposite was true.

  After his son had run after him barefoot from the nursery class, Jonathan had taken him by the hand and together they’d gone back to the cushions that had just a moment ago formed a picturesque castle but now lay strewn across the floor. There were snivelling tots all over the place, pulling on their shirts and shoes. Jonathan, Tomaszek’s hand in his, had gathered the remnants of the castle and secured the scattered ammunition in a corner of the class. Together they had put the toys away in the baskets and Tomaszek told him about his idea for a catapult.

  Jonathan sent a message to Andrea from the car. He apologized for having to cancel their meeting – for the first time since they’d met.

  3

  THE QUILT OF FROZEN TWIGS, leaves, and mud crunched beneath the wheels of their bikes and gave way with a spring. Crystals of ice sprayed with an angry hrrt; steam burst from their mouths and rose above their heads. Jonathan tried to overtake Stefan on his bike.

  “There’s a good bar not far from here,” he roared. Stefan’s earmuffs had fooled him; he thought his friend couldn’t hear well because of them.

  “Forget it,” grunted Stefan. “I’ve had too much beer this week. Time to work it off.”

  “You’ve worked enough off; we’ve cycled the whole of Tervuren! You’re steaming so much, you need a horse blanket.”

  Jonathan finally passed Stefan and surreptitiously maneuvered him toward the little eatery. They leaned their bikes against the wall and walked in. It was quite crowded inside; elderly women straight from the hairdresser’s flashed eyeglass frames, the younger generation disciplined their children, waiters served chocolate desserts and wafers.

  “Two beers.” Jonathan held up two fingers and wiped his steamed-over eyeglasses.

  The rustic interior was a trap for fat, middle-class mice; remnants of a laid-back atmosphere survived in a television set flickering above the bar, in front of which some elderly men leaned on the counter, watching a match.

  “England versus Germany?” asked Stefan, just as Jonathan said, “I saw her on television.” They simultaneously, spontaneously leaned back, as though they’d accidentally bumped foreheads.

  “Have you got Swedish channels?” asked Stefan.

  They made themselves comfortable by the fireplace. Stefan yanked his pullover off. In just his vest, he upset the harmony of the Sunday-best aesthetics.

  “I’ve got the one with her program,” replied Jonathan.

  Stefan looked at him without a word and Jonathan quickly added, “Only for a month! She’s great,” he sighed. “Professionally speaking – don’t look at me like that – I’m speaking objectively as a former journalist. Drop in and have a look.” Stefan picked up his glass of beer.

  “News in Swedish? Not for me, thanks.”

  “She really is good – professional, stunning.”

  “Aneta’s not bad either.”

  Jonathan froze, his glass midway to his lips.

  “Aneta?”

  “The trainee.”

  “You’ve fucked her?”

  “That’s not the point,” began Stefan.

  “What’s she like?”

  “Oh, I don’t know.” Stefan frowned. “Like a bun from the Co-op – sticky on the outside, insipid on the inside. But she tastes of holidays.”

  “Aren’t you worried she’s going to go and brag to Monika?”

  “Why should she? She’s got a boyfriend!”

  “Have you already forgotten your madwoman with the eczema?”

  “It wasn’t eczema but psoriasis,” Stefan corrected. “Apparently it got worse when she got stressed.”

  “I dread to think what she looked like after talking to Monika.”

  “You’ve always got something against my chicks,” Stefan flared up. “And all yours are Madonnas, I suppose? Holy Megi, divine Andrea! Oh, never mind.” He waved it aside and reached for a cigarette. “Whatever! I’ve seen the way Andrea looks at you when she thinks nobody’s looking.”

  “She’s been so devoted lately.” Jonathan cheered up. “It scares me at times.”

  “No need to be scared. She’s not going to want to change anything officially, if that’s what’s worrying you.”

  “What makes you think that?” Jonathan bristled.

  Stefan leaned across the table and lowered his voice as though announcing something highly confidential.

  “No offence, you’re a really nice guy and all that, but to her you’re also … from Poland.”

  “Everybody’s from somewhere.” Jonathan shrugged.

  “You’ve no professional standing in Brussels.”

  “Maybe that’s what she likes about me?”

  Beads of sweat appeared on Stefan’s forehead.

  “You do realize who Simon is, don’t you?” he asked.

  “Yes.”

  “Well, and you’re from Poland.”

  Jonathan leaned toward him; they now looked like conspirators, two puffed-up cockerels.

  “You think you’re better, don’t you, because you went to school abroad, and don’t have a Polish accent, in your element wherever you go?” Stefan threw out. “But for people here, you’re still one of us, a Pole, a cousin of the lad who carries bricks, the guy who can give you the number of a cheap, hardworking Polish cleaner. You’ve got so many advantages but aren’t doing anything with them. You don’t care about work or a position, you don’t want to show that we, Poles …”

  Jonathan stared at him in silence.

  “You think we enjoy all this?” Stefan said, riled. “That life’s easy when colleagues laugh about Poland being ruled by the clergy and a couple of twins, and lunch in Poland means vodka and sausages? If anyone’s got the strength they challenge it, if not they watch Polish television and keep inviting their family and friends to visit. And why? So that they can see for themselves what a civilized country looks like. And bring poppy-seed cake.”

  Stefan leaned back, wiped the sweat from his forehead with his wr
ist.

  “That’s what life’s like among strangers. Understand?” He reached for his beer.

  Jonathan said he did but a moment later asked, “What strangers?”

  Jonathan walked home, pushing his bicycle. Although blue with cold, the city had miraculously retained its coziness. Cinquantenaire Park seemed vaster than in summer; the sky broke through the leafless branches on which green parrots swung. Usurpers in a world of satiated starlings and sparrows, forbidden goods which had given a smuggler the slip, they had multiplied and adapted to their new environment. Now they flew in green flocks, squawking, and sweeping their long tails. Only the emerald of their feathers linked them to the “lost little parrots.” With hooked beaks they hammered the local birds on the head, not afraid of even the magpies.

  “You live in a world of fairy tales!” Stefan had thrown at him before they parted ways. They had quarrelled, not for the first time, but so fiercely that Jonathan was deeply stung.

  “So what?” he’d fumed.

  “So,” Stefan had yelled heatedly, “they’re not Polish fairy tales!”

  “Are you mad?” Jonathan was stunned. “And Andersen’s tales are Danish, are they?”

  But Stefan had only waved it aside. The splash of nationalism he’d spilled on the table of the Belgian eatery was an unknown aspect of Stefan. Jonathan had suddenly seen the hard face of a football fanatic before him.

  The deeper he went into the park, the more vengefully he thought about his friend. Was Stefan jealous of his love for Andrea? He lived from fuck to fuck, just like his father had and his grandfather.

  Jonathan stood still and studied the criss-crossing alleys of the park, their geometrical forkings, their evenly trimmed hedges. Did Andrea also think of him as a Pole? And what kind of a Pole: one proud of his history or one who represents a nation of collaborators, like some people from “the West” considered Poles to be? He’d been made aware of this variant by a certain American woman who, when he’d taken offence, had patted him on the shoulder and said, “Don’t worry, the French also collaborated with the Germans.”

  As he strolled down the alley, he thought anxiously that, after all, Stefan and Andrea were similar in a way. He reset his mind with a grind, trying to see Andrea from a different perspective. If he closed his eyes to her beauty, education, the fact that she knew several languages fluently and coped perfectly well with working abroad, who was she? The daughter of Czech immigrants, one who associated churches with empty shells of the past. A child with a key around its neck, running around between blocks where an apartment had been allocated to refugees. The poorest girl in class who never felt at home in sated Sweden and was fed stories about a distant revolution by her parents. An ambitious scholarship holder, curious about the world, aesthetically in love with the apartments of Brussels, a snob collecting English tea sets and cutlery, the partner of a financially and professionally well-placed Briton, head of cabinet for the Commissioner, the trophy wife of a charismatic fifty-year-old.

  He stood still. Holding on to that perspective, who in that case was he? A writer untainted by official connections, an artist and outsider, “a warrior’s respite.” an idealist thanks to whom she returned to the dreams of her past? No, no, that’s how he liked to think of himself when looking at himself through the eyes of his Andrea. But now he wanted to look at himself through the eyes of Stefan’s Andrea. Was he for her (whoever she was) a handsome, trouble-free lover, but also – and here in a rather secondary guise – a Pole?

  A couple of hours later, the children already washed, he came downstairs. Megi was still reading to them and, while waiting for their evening together – two hours blissfully vegetating with an unambitious film and pistachios at hand – he opened his computer. Stefan had emailed, explaining that he’d lost his temper and shouldn’t have yelled like that. He attached “something as an apology.”

  Full of foreboding, Jonathan moved the mouse to “attachment.” Enormous breasts filled the screen, gaudy advertisements floated across the nipples. Half-blinded, Jonathan searched for where to click to turn them off but the mouse froze, fixing the arrow at the groove between the breasts.

  “Right!” He heard his wife’s voice behind him.

  “Ay, ay!” Jonathan nervously rubbed the mouse over the table surface.

  “I knew it.” Megi put her hands on his chair.

  “And you still stand there,” groaned Jonathan. “As if I wasn’t humiliated enough! A moment later and you’d have caught me with my hand down my trousers.”

  “I wonder,” Megi kneaded her chin and bent over, squinting, “what it’s really advertising.”

  “That’s what you’re wondering?”

  “Some sort of liquid no doubt. Yes!” She pointed to the writing. “There it is. Liquid for washing car windows.”

  Jonathan clicked on the cross, the breasts vanished and Megi straightened herself, giggling.

  “You caught me out,” Jonathan said without guilt.

  “Good thing it was only that,” she muttered, moving off to the kitchen.

  Jonathan unwittingly froze, then reluctantly made after her.

  “Good thing it wasn’t the same as Stefan …”

  Jonathan slipped his hands into the pockets of his jeans.

  “Okay, we’ve got the background, we’ve got the suspense, now let’s have the climax,” he said.

  Megi rested her elbows on the work surface, which extended into the living room. Jonathan was tickled by the thought that she must have known how good she looked in that position. The breasts on the screen were nothing compared to her tits, as shapely as apples, and her butt – a little flatter than Andrea’s – took on womanly shapes when she bent forward.

  “I caught him red-handed with Aneta,” she whispered secretively.

  “No!” exclaimed Jonathan.

  Megi scrutinized him; finally she poked an accusatory finger at him.

  “You knew! You knew and you didn’t say anything! I always tell you!”

  “Why do you tell me now, years later?” countered Jonathan. “Stefan’s already managed to tell me himself.”

  “I couldn’t any earlier!”

  “Why not? Bound by oath, were you?”

  Megi lowered her eyes.

  “I couldn’t because I was worried.”

  Jonathan gave her a searching look; a moment later, he burst out laughing.

  “I almost believed you!”

  “No, really,” Megi defended herself but his smile was infectious. “I really was upset. And on top of that, Monika came up and I had to deflect her.”

  Jonathan walked up to the fridge and extracted two bottles. Later, they sat on the floor drinking beer, chatting a little, laughing a little. Jonathan stroked Megi’s hair, thinking she was dear to him even though he couldn’t watch porn with her or visit the red light district of Amsterdam.

  Before putting on a film, he told her about his argument with Stefan, how his friend had suddenly brought up the subject of being Polish. Megi listened and stroked his hand; the threads of understanding tickled pleasantly. Then, of her own accord, she started telling him how much she liked Brussels where even Masses were celebrated in five languages, and subtitles in three languages were projected in theaters so that everybody could understand.

  “And as for being Polish …” She lost herself in thought. “We’re the first lot to have been able to leave Poland really out of choice. Not because of money but because we’re curious about the world.”

  “Stefan says that those who are here miss Poland.”

  “Nah.” Megi tipped the beer bottle. “Ask any of them if they’d go back. Just ask!”

  Megi watches Jonathan walk up to Andrea, start to undress her. He rubs against her olive skin with teasing slowness, drills her groin with his tongue, examines her nipples with his fingers, sucks her ear lobes and whispers something, but what? Megi can’t hear because she’s saying something herself.

  “Jo … Jon …” Megi’s words turn to dust, ch
oke her; she spits, “Yyyyuuuuck, eeeh!”

  “Shhh, shhh,” she hears the voice on the other side of the bed. She sits up, drenched in sweat. Above her is the window, a calendar hangs on the wall, days ordered into a uniform grid. There’s no way to say whether one is better than another, she is the only one who knows – once they’ve passed.

  Megi lies on her back; anger runs through her body, explodes in her lower belly. She’s the one he should be making love to in that way! Megi wants him to put it in her pussy and press his hips against her buttocks. That’s what she wants!

  But how can she get through to Jonathan when he’s asleep, lost in dreams about himself – everything’s about Jonathan, through Jonathan’s eyes. Hey, I’m here, too, listen to me, hear me, be – obedient!

  But he sleeps on, his mouth half open, his breath stale, as happens at night, down below an erection, perhaps. A dark shape, a man.

  4

  THE GRASS SMELLED GOOD in Geert’s story. Jonathan read the beginning several times and each time was struck by the fact that there was no continuation.

  “What happened next?” he asked yet again; Geert looked at him helplessly.

  “That’s the best question possible,” sighed Ariane, straightening herself on the chair.

  Jonathan thought that if texts were to reflect a writer’s personality, hers ought to be full of details, although a little angular. But when he picked up what she’d written during the Christmas break, he couldn’t conceal his surprise. Something tender had crystallized, which he’d have believed more likely to come from Kitty had she been more daring in her range of subjects. Because this one was strong: the story of a dying peasant who reaches the decision to reconcile himself with his son.

  “Ariane,” he said, placing the pages on the table. “This is something entirely new to you. Where did the story come from?”

  Ariane smiled, pleased. Jean-Pierre observed her with curiosity, Kitty with attention.

  “Did writing a diary help?” Kitty asked affirmatively.

  Ariane nodded her head again.