“Congratulations,” Jonathan heard himself say.
Andrea opened the car door.
“Come on, let’s talk.”
They climbed the escarpment. The gray-beige man disappeared while they continued down the path, two people out for a stroll. Jonathan’s head was a morass, sentences were not coming together, question marks tottered, pushed aside by exclamations.
“You opened me up.” Andrea’s voice came on a wave. “It’s thanks to what happened between us.”
Andrea stood still, he walked on. Only when several joggers and cyclists had overtaken them did Andrea finish: “It’s my child. Think of it in that way.”
Jonathan made as if to turn back but she caught him by the sleeve. They now stood facing each other, Andrea gazing at him, he in the place where the man with the sacks had been. Suddenly Stefan crossed his mind. Whenever he’d been up to no good, he fawned on Monika, and that’s what she waited for. Jonathan looked at Andrea. She didn’t apologize – she demanded to be understood.
“I wanted a child.”
He nodded, his eyes fixed on the ground.
“I told you about it. Remember? Remember!”
He grabbed her in his arms and held her tight. He wiped her tears with the sleeve of his trench coat, the collar of his shirt. He must have forgotten his tissues.
“I told you.” He barely understood what she was saying. “I wanted one then. Remember? We were lying on top of each other and I said …”
He locked her in his arms and she pressed against him, so hard he stepped back.
“It was then,” he heard.
He looked over her head at the view stretching from the escarpment – at the water and the swan majestically taking possession of it. Closer, at the turn of the road, stood something that looked like a pen made of bare planks; inside, a heap of brown rags was huddled up.
“If you had said then that you wanted …”
“I do.”
She curled up; he felt her slight shoulder blades beneath his fingers. She was gasping for breath beneath his arm, shaking her head until hair stuck to her wet cheeks.
book four
Brussels, autumn 2008
JONATHAN TOOK the same route through the park as he usually did when jogging. There, on the other side of the fence, his thoughts merged with the smell of jasmine toward the end of May, waves of heat in July and August, the beating of his heart, and the sweat on his face. Now the park fence was on his left while on his right was a row of spectacular apartments. One of them, on sale, was lit violet from within so that a chewing-gum wrapper pressed in a niche in the pavement glistened unnaturally white in the light.
Jonathan began to walk faster. His “disciples,” as Megi called them, were waiting in the stuccoed room. He should have left the house earlier but at the last moment Tomaszek had spilled some “elixir,” which he’d secretly prepared, all over himself. The child had kept it beneath his bed for two weeks and when he’d proudly presented it, the stinking mixture had spilled on his shirt, trousers, and shoes. Jonathan had stood his son beneath the shower while Megi had cleaned the floor; the stench still filled the air when Jonathan rushed from the apartment with Tomaszek waving to him from the balcony, his hair wet and, on his face, an insincere expression of guilt.
Jonathan passed the legless organ-grinder who held out a mug to him, shaking his few coins. He had been there forever, longer, no doubt, than Jonathan, longer than most of the passers-by.
The door to the seminar room was ajar; a shaft of light fell diagonally across the floor. Other classes had already begun; the security man in his kiosk was dozing, his little television flickering. Jonathan stopped at the top of the stairs and leaned against the wall near a stand of leaflets. Nobody had noticed him yet; nobody knew he was there. Suspended in the space between home and work he was suddenly thrilled with an excitement not quite erotic yet equally deep. Light fell on him, plucking him out of the dark corridor.
A moment later, everything fell back into place – the security guard smacked his lips and adjusted his cap, individual footfalls resounded in the distance, somewhere a door slammed.
Jonathan peeled himself away from the wall. They were waiting for him.
1
AFTER HIS LAST CONVERSATION with Andrea, he could barely perform the rituals of daily life and, when the pain became unbearable, he got up and left. Beyond the apartment, the stream of unfamiliar faces and languages, those he understood and those that constituted a rapid torrent of sounds, cooled his inner fever; he caught his breath when he was among people, at last able to ask himself whether the world really did end with Andrea. “Yes,” he replied and felt something other than pain – fury.
This time he didn’t stop sending her messages. He knew from experience that the worst thing he could do to himself was to condemn himself to a detox, which was why he covered the screen on his cell with endless complaints, frightened that Andrea would be consistent and back out of their contact or, like a psychiatrist, would merely grunt. But she scrupulously replied – explained, apologized. There was only one thing she didn’t deny: that the child growing in her belly was not his.
“I’ve had enough of you. I don’t like you,” he wrote and asked one last question: why did she present him with a fait accompli; why, when she’d assured him that it was him, Jonathan, she loved did she get pregnant with Simon? “I told you I wanted one with you,” she wrote back. “Then why didn’t you wait?” he tapped out in despair. “For what?” she parried.
He recalled how she’d kneeled with her mouth filled with his hardness. She’d licked and blown, then let his penis out of her mouth only to take hold of it again with sadistic slowness. He’d turned her on to her back, moved her leg diagonally across his belly and entered her from above, slowly. He’d crushed her with his body until she’d stopped moving. The master of her orgasm, he’d been so aroused he’d had to slip out of her. She’d rolled on to her belly and kneeled in front of him on all fours; he’d screwed her from behind from all angles until she was wet, juices running down her groin. She’d lowered herself onto her elbows; he’d pressed his finger along the groove between her vagina and her anus until she’d squealed in rapture.
“I quite like you,” he muttered later, stroking her back.
“Quite?” She’d raised her head from his damp belly. Bubbles of happiness had burst in him with a quiet “puck!” He’d started to laugh, infecting her with his laughter, and together they tumbled across the blue sheets, the white clouds of linen.
As he neared the seminar room, Jonathan thanked fate for this course, for these people. They’d been faithful to him for over two years – unlike his lover. And yet he kept writing to her, wanted her, even pregnant. Andrea’s baby was growing in him, too – the fourth month, the fifth … He stroked her belly and made love delicately, didn’t let her straddle him.
“Could it harm the baby?” she asked, as though he were an expert, while he slipped into her gently and rocked forward, backward.
“Break up with me!” he wrote afterward but received only smiling faces. She didn’t take his words seriously. She told him she loved him and was going to have a baby, and that these were two different things. A baby meant a belly and waiting. He was her love, her difficult love.
Jonathan didn’t say much but diligently covered her body with kisses. He stopped at every hollow, at every swell, gentle and tender. He didn’t look her in the eyes; he didn’t want her to see how much he longed to screw her – so hard he’d go right through – and get rid of the intruder inside.
At times, it dawned on him how it must have looked from the outside – he was fucking someone else’s pregnant woman. But, practically at the same time, he also knew that they weren’t an ordinary couple. They created their own laws, discovered new paths, made love on the flipside of legality, at the limits of society’s good taste, in the maelstrom of their own scruples.
He nodded to the security guard and opened the door. Geert’s eyes were drifti
ng across the stucco, Jean-Pierre was texting someone, Ariane was leaning over the table to hear what Kitty was saying.
“… I remember, the same thing happened to me.” Ariane nodded.
Kitty watched her with fascination. Jonathan couldn’t fathom whether she was really interested or whether it was a former journalist’s professional ability to listen. On the other hand, one couldn’t but help look at Ariane. Jonathan often thought there was a little windmill in her that turned at variable speeds.
Jonathan’s eyes returned to Geert, still sitting in the same position and paying no attention to the women. Neither their glances nor their outbursts of laughter disrupted his concentration.
“Sorry I’m late.” Jonathan closed the door. “I don’t even have a decent excuse because it won’t sound credible.”
“Anything could prove inspiring,” smiled Ariane.
“Maybe one of us will write a story about it?” added Kitty.
“Fairy tale more like,” muttered Jonathan, hanging up his jacket. “Imagine a little boy who creates an elixir out of Coca-Cola, egg shells, sunflower seeds, and dishwashing powder. Oh, and I forgot salt and pepper as ‘seasoning.’ ”
“Who is this magician?” asked Ariane.
“Tomaszek, my son.”
“He didn’t drink it, did he?” Kitty feared.
“No, but he kept the muck under his bed until it turned rancid. I’d rather not talk about the smell.”
“It’s the egg shells.” Jean-Pierre nodded like an expert. “Good thing the eggs weren’t raw. My daughter used them in an experiment once.”
Jonathan had already opened his mouth when he saw Geert was passing some pages over to him. His eyes skimmed over the first lines of English text.
“Mother was wearing a pair of white, open-toed slippers that glistened in the sun as it fell through the car window. Every now and again a black face obscured the yellow sphere. Mother’s shoes then grew dull, surrendering the glint to bloodshot eyes and teeth. Suddenly the window cracked, the glass scattered on her fair hair. The door sprang open and hung obliquely on its hinges. One white slipper touched the dust, the other flew idly after it.”
“Shall I read it out loud?” asked Jonathan quietly.
Geert nodded; Jonathan continued reading.
“The car stood inclined to the left, far from the town center, on the outskirts of Kinshasa. The boy crawled along the grass, further and further away from the rebels’ cries. His mother’s guttural sobs grew quieter. His father was still waiting for them there, where they had not arrived.
“The boy grazed his elbows and knees so they bled; chirping pounded in his ears; the stench of rubber reached him from afar. He had no strength left. He stopped moving in the damp grass then turned slowly; the burned-out car was growing black by the road, a cloud of smoke drifting from it.
“He rolled onto his back and stared at the sky shimmering in the heat. Somewhere over there the sun was caressing white patent slippers and the tin can of a car filled with the scent of his mother’s perfume, guarding the treasures of childhood. Although aflame, it was closed tight. Beneath the lava of strange faces, what was good set within her.”
The following day, Jonathan phoned Cecile. They had to publish a book of stories written by his students; the two years had matured his people’s talents.
“Your people?” Discreet laughter rang out in the receiver.
He couldn’t write that morning; excitement chased him out of the apartment. For the first time in a long while, he didn’t feel any pain. “It seems my nerve roots have stopped doing me in,” he noted on a piece of paper that he extracted from a side pocket of his rucksack. There was a drawing by Tomaszek on the back: a map of favorite places sketched in the sprawling hand of a seven-year-old. Jonathan orientated the piece of paper – and here he was, halfway down a road decorated with crooked houses, in front of him a roundabout coming into view. He knew there had to be a laundromat there, a shop selling olives and chocolates, and one of Brussels’s numerous pharmacies, but it was only thanks to the little map that he noticed that the roundabout lay in the shade of an enormous tree.
He walked on ahead. Rue des Tongres started with a sweet turn, which led to the delicacies of his youth: French cheeses and wines appeared behind glass. In the next window was a meat roast like the one Nick, his mother’s husband, used to prepare, while in the GB shop on the other side of the street were pickles and a mock-up of the works of art his paternal grandmother had fed him. “And dat way to films,” prompted Tomaszek’s writing. Jonathan looked down the street: cars glided in a narrow thread toward a crossroads where trams clattered. Beyond the crossroads the street descended more steeply but must have ascended somewhere again because at its far end towered a church – the one where he had met Andrea so frequently.
He put the vibrating phone to his ear. It was Cecile Lefebure with some good news: a friend of hers, working for a publisher, had promised to ask if they’d be interested in publishing the work of a group of beginners. The money would have to come from grants.
“So it’s possible?” he asked.
She laughed, won over by his enthusiasm.
“I can’t promise anything.”
“But maybe?”
Because of the fuss, he lost sight of his Dogs. They had not fled completely, but he felt them scampering away and panicked that he wouldn’t be able to catch up with them.
“You’ve got too much on your plate,” Megi consoled him.
She was sitting on the stairs, her arms wrapped around her knees. It was two o’clock in the morning and he was flitting like a moth between his computer and the kitchen.
“You’re editing your disciples’ stories, applying for a subsidy to publish the collection, looking after the children, and still harbor ambitions to write. It’s hardly surprising you’re uptight.”
He stopped short in front of her as if seeing her for the first time.
“I don’t harbor ‘ambitions,’ ” he let out through his teeth, angry, “only characters who are going all over the place!”
“So why did you pick ones with four legs?” giggled Megi, but seeing his expression turned serious. “I meant to say that they’ll come back to you. When you whistle. Nomen omen.”
Jonathan grabbed the end of a bread roll Antosia had rejected and started to nibble at it absentmindedly.
“If only that were possible, to whistle and that’s it,” he said indistinctly. “Some things have a time and place, but if you miss them …”
Megi adjusted herself on the stairs, buttoned her pajamas higher. She sat in front of him, warm with sleep, devoted. He moved as if to stroke her but stopped mid-gesture.
She went back to bed; Jonathan remained downstairs on the pretext of gathering his notes. He pulled his cell out of his pocket and exchanged a few messages with Andrea. Unlike him she didn’t need much sleep; that’s where they differed. “And in many other ways,” he thought.
He took a beer from the fridge and opened the window. The inner courtyard, lit by the gentle glow of windows, chirped quietly with holidays. Their Brussels apartment was unusual – if he crossed to the other side of the room, and opened the huge balcony window, the shrill sounds of the city entered, music from the pub on the corner, the din of motorbikes. One apartment with windows on two worlds.
He stood in the middle of the room, and took a gulp of Leffe. His eyes wandered over the stucco. Why had he built all of this – to demolish it? Is that the eternal meaning of constructing something? He ought to be grateful to Andrea, in fact, for not pressing him for anything. If she’d gone to Megi, like Stefan’s lover, and demanded that his wife get out of the way of their love … He took a draught of beer and leaned against the window frame. The air was not cooling. It was the hottest month of the year and the city lay to its side, panting lazily.
Andrea hadn’t gone to Megi asking for him because women like her didn’t have to fight for anyone. They forged ahead and everybody else ran after them, catching c
rumbs of attention, the sweetness of their glance, scraps of conversation. He slapped his forehead and yanked the cap off another beer with his teeth. Andrea laughed whenever he did that, Megi too, although she worried about his teeth.
“You can see straight away that you went to an English boarding school,” giggled Andrea, and he grimaced as if he really had broken a tooth. “Simon does it too, does he?” he asked, and when she said yes, added, “Then I’ll ask them to replace my molars with a bottle opener when I’m his age.”
Andrea was never spiteful about Megi. Jonathan loved her for it all the more. There was something noble about her, which he would willingly have told his friend-wife. He knew Megi would have been pleased to have her theory proved that intelligent women today fought over a position in the company where they worked rather than over men.
He spat the cap out of the window. Everything would be simpler if he could finish with the duplicity in his life. But how could he ditch Andrea? Or Megi? Harmony with Megi, passion with Andrea: the mixture gave him wings, allowed him to live life to its fullest.
Paradoxically, it was now that his relationship with Andrea had assumed an unexpected equilibrium. The fact that he hadn’t broken up with her when he found out about someone else’s baby like many men would have done, had started a new phase in their love. He became dear to her; he saw this and, although the man in him would most willingly have got rid of someone else’s foetus, it was his humanity that won Andrea over.
Jonathan stood the half-empty bottle on the sill and stared at the lights opposite as they went off, one by one. What a brittle equilibrium! Her swelling belly and with it his pain; messages by night, life by day and, in the evenings, trips to churches where he avoided people’s eyes like a vampire avoided daylight.
2
JONATHAN STOOD downstairs in his jacket, but Megi still wasn’t coming down. Finally, he heard the rhythm of her heels on the stairs.
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