He curled up in bed, barely registering the sounds in the apartment. Megi took a few days off but got up early anyway, as if she were going to work, while he lay there pretending to be asleep, short of sleep, aching, sweating. He listened to the swoosh of water in the bathroom, to the children’s pattering, to their scrambling, hushed in vain by Megi’s whispers. The door slammed and he opened his eyes. And again forbade himself to think about Andrea.
After a few days he started to get up, walk around the room. On seeing his own face in the mirror above the sink he thought he looked like an old druid. He hadn’t shaved because he wasn’t sufficiently steady on his feet to risk using a razor.
On Friday, after taking the children to school, Megi knocked on the door to the bedroom, which, for the duration of his illness, had become his own private den. He invited her in with a vague cough and she sat down on the edge of the bed.
“I’d like to tell you something,” she began.
He looked at her from beneath half-closed eyelids; she appeared embarrassed. Jonathan attempted to sit up. Megi leapt up to pull the pillow higher. Suddenly, he wanted to laugh.
“Is the maiden in the family way?” he asked sternly.
Megi smiled; for a moment once more she was a student in love and not a lawyer with furrowed brow. She couldn’t believe how well-read he was in Polish literature and admitted that she, like the majority of her friends at secondary school, had merely skimmed through Sienkiewicz’s Trilogy, but then she wasn’t a born humanist; which is why she loved the ancient Polish interjections that Jonathan had absorbed when he spent weeks of his holiday at his mother’s.
She shook her head now, and told him about Przemek’s offer – that, career-wise, she was tempted because she’d be able to learn new things, because here, after three years working as an administrator, she knew her responsibilities off by heart. Well, and, despite having passed the exams, the promotion had passed her by.
Jonathan listened attentively, from time to time a grimace of pain flitted across his face.
“And what do you think?” she asked in the end.
His eyes turned to the window. A little bit of sunshine pierced the clouds. What she was saying also seemed to come from outer space.
“To Poland?” he finally said.
7
THAT SATURDAY he tried to leave the house. He wanted to escape from the mangled sheets, the sound of the television, the children’s activity and Megi’s domestic pattering around doing household chores. He wanted to escape from the silence that had fallen over them after she’d told him about her offer.
He got dressed and barely managed to make his way downstairs. “Are you going out?” Megi leaned out of the kitchen. “Yes,” he muttered and started putting on his shoes. He picked up the right shoe, thinking he owed Megi the chance to return. It was because of him that she hadn’t got the promotion; he saw her frustration. She was not some dozy office worker; after coming here and relishing the novelty, she had cultivated her patch without much effort and was quickly disheartened by the excess of bureaucracy that inhibited the efficiency of what they were doing. She considered herself too young to be “coming and going with a briefcase,” which was how she described the fate of her fellow officials. She enjoyed challenges, problems. Sharp, she was familiar with power games but hated intrigue.
Jonathan mechanically put the right shoe down again and picked up the left. He couldn’t imagine going back to Poland. It was like steering a ship back to port with its sails unfurled and instructing the crew to enjoy the flapping. Here, his children learned different languages, got what Stefan envied him. Here, they had friends of different nationalities with different roots, histories, skin colors.
He replaced the left shoe on the floor, turned with a groan, and began to rummage around in the pocket of his jacket. He searched and searched but Tomaszek’s map wasn’t there. He sat down, trying to remember where he could have put it. He definitely hadn’t thrown it away. What if it had fallen out?
He hunched over, forgetting about his lumbago, and yanked his head up with a moan.
“Is everything OK?” Megi leaned out of the kitchen again.
He muttered something; she emerged and walked up to him.
“Too weak to go out?”
He nodded, feeling like an idiot.
“I thought so.” She ran her hands over his arm. “It’s too soon. Give yourself time.”
And then there was the affair with the dove. Jonathan trudged upstairs, step by step, groaning like an old man. He was on the half-landing when a white bird fluttered in through the open window. Its legs slid apart on the smooth surface of the parapet but it didn’t flee, merely stared at Jonathan. Only the stamping of Tomaszek’s feet alerted the dove; still it didn’t fly away.
It was then – as he later recounted – that Jonathan understood the bird was sick or dazed. Tomaszek stopped short and watched his father, who himself had difficulty moving, help the bird find its way out and close the window behind it. But when, some time later, Antosia ran past, she noticed the bird was still there, perched by the window-frame. She called Megi but her mother was getting dinner ready so Jonathan dragged himself downstairs.
Together with the children, he inspected the bird through the window pane, then went down with them. Together they constructed a cardboard “house,” lining it with a soft rag and placing a saucer of water and some bread in the corner.
“Shall we make him a microwave as well?” asked Tomaszek.
They left the cardboard shelter outside, Megi helping them because Jonathan couldn’t bend down. They sheltered the bird from the wind and rain, while making it possible for it to get out.
The following day, the children leapt out of bed and ran down to see how the dove was. But the bird was already dead. Jonathan did his best to console them but the sight of the white feathers covered with the first snow of the winter upset them all.
“And it didn’t even die in the house we made especially for it,” snivelled Tomaszek.
“It must have needed some fresh air,” deduced Antosia.
Megi left them pondering where to bury the bird and went for a walk; a week’s “leave” had left her drained.
When she got back, they were waiting for her with a white box in a carrier bag, all dressed to go out.
“What’s that?” she asked, indicating what looked like a box of doughnuts from Blikle patisserie.
“The dove,” replied Antosia, putting on her hat. “We’re going to bury it. You’ve got to drive, Mommy, because Daddy can’t.”
“He’s all twisted up.” Tomaszek was more precise as he prepared to go out without his gloves.
“I’m worried about whether we did the right thing, leaving that poor bird out in the freezing cold,” Jonathan whispers into Megi’s ear. “The children are taking its death so hard.”
“And what were we supposed to do, take it to bed with us?” asks Megi in an unexpectedly argumentative tone.
She watches Jonathan grip the banister. He’s pale; it’s the first time he’s going out since being ill. He’s doing it for the children, so that they remember the dove’s burial. Megi walks up to him and impulsively puts her arms around his waist.
She ought to ask him whether he’s thought about Przemek’s offer of eventually going back to Poland, but instead she thinks of Emile Max Street, blossoming with pink flowers. In the background flash the displeased faces of her cousin Adelka and her husband Robert. “Oh my God, and Uncle Tadeusz?” pounds in her head. On the other hand, shouldn’t she go back to Poland, shouldn’t she stretch herself professionally? After all, how long could she be an administrator?
Megi sighs and lets Jonathan go. She doesn’t ask him anything. She goes downstairs and he follows, a fairy tale writer with a white dove in a Delhaize plastic bag.
The next day, Monday, Jonathan dialled his doctor’s number.
“Hello?” A Flemish accent echoed in the receiver.
“I’m calling about my HIV resu
lts.” Jonathan only just managed to give his details; his mouth was so dry.
“And how’s your back?” the doctor asked as she searched for his name on the computer.
“Better, thank you.”
He was practically in working order thanks to painkillers and was intending to go out by himself that day, without anyone’s assistance. Unless …
“Negative,” she said lightly, and Jonathan sank into his armchair with a groan.
“Still hurts?” He heard her concerned voice.
“No, it’s the relief.”
“Everything’s negative,” she repeated. “Although you ought to watch your cholesterol.”
He replaced the receiver and opened the terrace window. He took a deep breath of fresh air. Good news, a new beginning. He turned his eyes to a corner of the terrace – the rubber plant had not survived the winter. They’d forgotten to bring it inside and now blackened leaves hung from its branches. Jonathan stretched his arms up; when his back was better he would bin the flower pot with its label: “Rubber plant, perennial.”
8
TOMASZEK’S MAP turned up in the backpack. Jonathan hadn’t looked in there for several days. He walked along rue de Linthout, reached the roundabout where rue des Tongres joined Georges Henri, and stood beneath the tree. He wanted to walk on, following the instructions, but momentarily lacked strength. He glanced at the brasserie to which he usually went and the other on the opposite side of the street, which he considered pretentious. Surprising himself, he chose the latter.
Waiting for his coffee, he began to wonder whether the romance that had started exactly on this street, in the bakery a few meters away, had not been a typical result of coincidences: family, routine, suppressed sense of self, impaired creative expression. He thanked the waiter for the coffee, raised the cup to his lips, and scanned the winter sky. He was no good at such dilemmas, had no idea how to get a grip on the crisis in his relationship. The affair, all that, when captured in words, seemed both flat and shameful.
He smoothed out the map. “And dat way to …”
And suddenly he saw a ginger tail in front of him, followed by another, fluffy one. They were wagging them, panting as they looked at him with eyes in which he could find no trace of guilt. So it was here the pack had moved to! He’d finally caught sight of them in the backstreets of rue des Tongres, amid the meandering walls, behind pillars. It was here they roamed, here they ran with their noses to the ground. They had been here all the time but he hadn’t seen them!
The mongrel that looked like a toilet brush ran right past him, brushing Jonathan’s trouser leg with its coarse hair. Another, like an Alsatian, rested its paws on a concrete trash can and was foraging for something. Finally, further down the street, Jonathan saw a familiar shape – the leader of the pack trotting lightly, his muscles defined beneath his fur, the hair on his nape gently bristling.
It seemed to Jonathan that the cars stood still and people froze at the sight of the enormous dog. He got to his feet in order to get a better view.
“Is the table going to be free?” somebody asked in French.
Jonathan blinked.
“No,” he said, not very politely, and pulled a notebook out of his pocket.
When Jonathan picked the children up that afternoon, he no longer felt any pain in his back but his fingers were stiff. The story was writing itself, the coffee growing cold, the waiter had approached twice asking if he could fetch anything but didn’t dare approach a third time. Left in peace, Jonathan caught the dogs, immortalising their adventures, shaking his head at their moves. What they were doing didn’t depend on him; he could only watch and take note.
He might even have forgotten to collect the children from school had it not been for Megi, who called, prompted by intuition (she was handing over the domestic helm carefully, knowing how difficult it was to get a grasp of it all at once). He went for them, still agitated by his work. His mind undulated and skipped, metaphors ousting real details. A child is the fruit of the home, its content, pulp, seeds, he thought as he watched Tomaszek and Antosia playing in front of the school. It ripens, hangs, grows heavier and heavier until it falls. A certain percentage of fruit hangs on the branch until it becomes wrinkled, and even when blackening won’t fall off. But a healthy fruit rolls, rolls, until it ends up near or far from the mother tree. Sometimes it will rest against another fruit – and the ground beneath the tree is sown with them – and then it becomes like the one next to it. If it rolls further away, it becomes an independent fruit. Independent to what extent?
Jonathan ushered Tomaszek and Antosia into the car, put their backpacks into the trunk then, stepping back, thumped the back of his head against the trunk. As if in reply, a thought flashed beneath his aching skull: what a good thing Andrea didn’t want to break up his family!
It was Megi who offered to take the children to Poland for two weeks so that they could meet their more distant family before Christmas. He would be able to write in peace.
“I want to get a finished copy of The Pavlov Dogs under the Christmas tree.” She pecked him on the cheek as they stood at the airport.
He smiled and stroked her hair. She’d stopped using lacquer recently and had said she was growing her hair. At the moment it was at the in-between stage with strands of hair pulled behind her ears and, although neither pretty nor tidy, it was – as Jonathan consoled her – getting there.
“Apparently it’s terribly cold in Poland.” She cuddled up to Jonathan.
“Buy yourself an electric blanket.”
“Electric blankets are sex for the elderly. A propos, thank you for yesterday’s dinner!”
Jonathan had chased the children to bed early the previous evening and prepared a special dinner, first making sure that Megi would be home at the normal time. He had, in fact, been prepared to wait even until midnight if she’d phoned, as she often did, to apologize that she was running late. He wanted to celebrate his return to writing with her, his agreement to go to Poland, and – perhaps – their first intercourse for some weeks.
“You complained that I don’t cook,” he now said frivolously, keeping his eyes on Tomaszek,, who had somehow found himself at the very center of a group of Orthodox Jews.
“You were eavesdropping! My mother’s the only one I told, I remember perfectly well!”
“Men always eavesdrop, that’s what they build their worldly power on.”
“I thought it was oppression and captivity.” She caught hold of Tomaszek as he ran past and told him to behave. She glanced at her watch – they ought to start saying goodbye, it always took quite a while.
“I’ll just fill you in on two rumors,” she threw. “Firstly: Monika wants to go back to Poland.”
“Why don’t I know anything about it?”
“I’m not even sure Stefan knows.” Megi shrugged her shoulders. “It seems she’s going through some revolutionary changes. She didn’t look at all like the Monika of old when I bumped into her in the street last night.”
“Daddy, can I touch that man?” Tomaszek tugged at Jonathan’s jacket and pointed to a poker-faced Indian.
“No,” Jonathan automatically retorted.
“Is he a fakir?” asked Antosia. “I doubt it.”
“Do you know, when I saw her,” Megi continued, “I had the impression it was as if, well, as if she’d fallen in love with a lesbian.”
“What’s a lesbian?” whined Tomaszek, whose father was holding him by the hand to stop him running off again.
“Maybe she really has fallen in love?” Jonathan raised his eyebrows.
“It’s not that.” Megi shook her head, trying to find the right words. “It looks to me like one of those cases when someone who’s submissive has finally called it a day.”
“Kramer versus Kramer?”
“Yes, something like that. She was different, held herself upright. She said she couldn’t find a job here, that her daughter, I quote, ‘has fallen into bad company”, and Franek has stoppe
d speaking Polish. And that she wants to leave. It’s a shame because she’s set up such a great club for the children of poorer Poles. She’s got people who help them with their lessons, computers …”
“And Stefan?” interrupted Jonathan.
“I think he’s walking on burning coal.” Antosia had not taken her eyes off the Indian. “Even the soles of his feet are black.”
“Or he didn’t wash them before going to bed, yuk!” Tomaszek rattled off, sneaking a crafty look at his parents.
“They’re the man’s shoes,” threw out Megi for the sake of peace and quiet, then said to Jonathan, “I asked her about Stefan, too, but she only shrugged.”
Jonathan scratched his head.
“I ought to phone him.”
Megi looked at her watch and called, “Come on, kids, say goodbye to Daddy! We’ve still got quite a way to go and I bet we’ll get stopped again, like last time when Tomaszek was smuggling his compass.”
Jonathan picked Tomaszek up, ruffled his hair and told him to help Mommy. Antosia hugged him and asked him to feed her tortoise every day.
“What tortoise?” Jonathan worried.
“The plasticine one. He likes lettuce and jelly babies. You will remember, won’t you?” She looked at him sternly.
“Lettuce.” Jonathan clicked his fingers.
“And jelly babies,” added Antosia, menacingly.
“Typical tortoise food.”
Megi walked up and snuggled up to him with her whole body. They hadn’t made love the night before but ended up talking and watching their favorite series. Jonathan grasped her tightly around the waist.
“What do you think, should I tell Stefan or not?” he asked, handing her her hand luggage. “You know, so he’s not the last to know.”
“He’ll find out when the time’s right.” Megi waved it away.
“He’s a close friend.”
“Friendship isn’t just passing on the latest bit of information.”
Illegal Liaisons Page 25