She didn’t reply.
He began to drive home with one eye glued to his cell phone. He drove and hated himself for what he’d grown inside – a tangle of burning jealousy, gnawing expectation, a sea of lurking tears. He didn’t cry because he didn’t usually cry – the routine of daily life helped him to rise above the grit of emotions – but when left alone after taking the children to school, he felt close to imploding.
He wanted to think about something else – a beer with Stefan,
The Pavlov Dogs
, a reading list for his writing group, politics, or the children – but he couldn’t. Nothing, only the pain of uncertainty, a presentiment
of rejection, spasms of imagination. He knew Andrea had taken a day off – a day off from him, too?
Between surges of emotion he noticed with horror how his moods kept changing: from morning euphoria when he picked his best boxer shorts, through pangs of guilt at hurrying the children into the car, to feeling the senselessness of his illegal liaison – because he had even arrived at the point of seeing it made no sense. He saved himself by listening to Tomaszek and Antosia nattering, enumerating in his mind what he’d achieved: his children’s love, his wife’s companionship, their common successes, mutual understanding. Yes, he imagined life without Andrea. There were moments he wished she wouldn’t write to him any more.
But once he’d waved his children goodbye and exchanged a few routine greetings with other parents, the sight of the empty screen on his phone terrified him. He locked himself in his car and forwarded a question; he waited and urged her again. He started driving home but had to stop. When he made love to Andrea he breathed deeply, with his whole lungs; now he climbed out of the car, hunched and, pretending to examine his headlights, started frantically to catch his breath in order not to suffocate.
Suddenly, the trembling of his hands turns into the vibrations of his phone – Andrea sending a text to ask how he is. Jonathan leans on the car door, his arms hanging helplessly. Oh, no, he’s not going to answer the bitch now, not after she left him waiting in fear, a laughing stock unto himself.
He climbs into the car and drives away furiously like many a poor guy who, racked by an excess of testosterone, wears down the car rubbers instead of latex ones. He speeds ahead; it’s good he knows the way so well. He can afford to be reckless, although the family car screeches at the corners.
Jonathan firmly refuses to answer; meanwhile the cell beeps again. Jonathan slows down and reads: Andrea is tender and docile, apologizes for oversleeping but is climbing into her bath, and in a moment will rub oil over her body.
Jonathan stands at the traffic light; someone honkss. Ahead of him the road forks (yet it is only a regular crossroads) – left to his lover, right home. He stands at a red light, and now at a green, cars pass around him, he ought to switch on his hazard lights as the gesticulating drivers urge him to do but he stares at them dumbly; finally, someone stops, lowers his window and asks: “Çava?”
“Çava,” replies Jonathan.
He abruptly steps into first gear and drives into the left lane; cars brake behind him, honk furiously, but he slips across the red light.
Minutes later he is in Andrea’s bed.
Jonathan stared at
Star Wars
even though the film didn’t pull him in this time. He watched Antosia and Tomaszek ape a fight with lightsabers: the boy slashed the air abruptly, the girl moved gracefully, using Megi’s dressing gown as a battle dress.
A wave of pride swept over Jonathan. Although Megi scowled, saying the film was stupid and too brutal, especially for Tomaszek, Jonathan smuggled in scenes from his childhood for the children, certain it was thanks to this that Antosia went horseback riding, rather than walking around in pink like the other girls in her class, and Tomaszek drew warriors and thought up wonderful stories.
The children’s fight moved further down the room; Jonathan clicked the remote control so that Princess Leia appeared on the screen. Secretly returning to his erotic early teenage dreams, he didn’t notice that Antosia, having conquered Tomaszek, had sat down in front of the television again.
“Daddy, not this boring stuff!” she moaned, while Tomaszek started bouncing up and down like a ball next to them, shouting: “Give us a fight, give us a fight!”
Jonathan rewound the film; Darth Vader’s wheeze drifted from the screen. For a moment, he closed his eyes. Stirred sentimentally by Leia – his friends at boarding school had reacted in the same way – he thought back several hours to his morning with Andrea. He drowned in visions and when he emerged, realized his lover had not only replaced Leia but had also taken the place that had until then been reserved for Megi.
He pulled out his cell and quickly tapped: “You move me and I’m stiff for you.” She swiftly wrote back; he got up and slipped out of the room.
“Aren’t you watching with us, Daddy?” Tomaszek called after him.
“In a minute.” Jonathan’s voice came from the hall, muffled.
“What?”
“One moment!”
Megi returned from work just as he was coming downstairs, his phone buried deep in his trousers pocket.
“I asked you not to show them
Star Wars,”
she said at the threshold. “And you weren’t supposed to leave them alone to make sure they didn’t see the heavy scenes.”
“I went to the bathroom,” mumbled Jonathan.
“Tomaszek pretends to be brave but he’s frightened of all those hideous things. Don’t you remember when he wet his bed a couple of times because of those horrible faces?”
Antosia stopped short and held out her sword, which just then stopped flashing, to her father.
“Daddy, has the battery gone?”
Jonathan tapped the sword and pressed the switch but the light didn’t go on.
“Is it broken? Completely?” Tomaszek risked a new word.
“Will you fix it, daddy?” asked Antosia, squatting so that the dressing gown spread on the floor like a plumed headdress in front of her. “It can be mended, can’t it?”
Jonathan walked up to the chest of drawers and found some new batteries; he unscrewed the flap in the toy. He glanced at Megi’s tired face – he wasn’t attracted to her, everything in him wanted Andrea. Could the pop-anthropological theory that men need to impregnate successive females be proving true? No, this was something else.
Tomaszek rolled the old batteries along the floor and leapt after them like a cat; Antosia didn’t move, watching her father’s hands. Jonathan pressed the switch – the toy flashed.
“Ha!” He slashed the air with the plastic blade.
“Thank you, thank you!” Antosia sprung from the floor.
Jonathan looked at the sword he held, its direction steered by his hand. In the same way, something in him directed the vector of desire toward Andrea. He felt himself drawn to her by a power as persistent as the call of water beneath the earth, a blind, eternal “I want,” rooted in something mightier than him.
“Daddy, I want a go now.” Antosia stretched her hand out for the toy.
Jonathan cleared his throat and handed her the sword.
Megi removed her jacket and threw it on the arm of the armchair.
“I met Monika.”
“Ah! Did she draw you into the black hole?”
“Don’t be silly. Didn’t Stefan tell you?”
“What?”
“Simon’s holding a party tonight.”
“And …”
“Simon Lloyd, the head of cabinet for the Justice Commissioner, the Simon who was here.” She was almost speaking in syllables. “Don’t you get it? They were here but they haven’t invited us.”
Her voice broke and Jonathan was amazed to see Megi cry. In her tights, skirt, and white blouse she looked like a frightened schoolgirl.
Before Jonathan managed to react, Tomaszek had run up to Megi and wrapped his arms around her hips.
“Don’t worry, we’ll invite you, we love you!”
“Yes, we’ll throw a party for you.” Antosia joined the boy.
Megi ruffled their hair and made toward the hall.
“Megi,” Jonathan followed his wife hesitantly. “Don’t worry.”
She nodded and wiped her eyes.
“Przemek tried to cheer me up at work saying it might be because of our French. But that’s a lot of rubbish, you speak better than that prat and his Czech-Swede, and I can get by, too. So why?”
Jonathan walked up to her and put her head on his shoulder.
“Don’t worry, don’t worry about it,” he repeated, out-talking his thumping heart.
“It’s not because so much depends on Simon, promotions and various … It’s just that I feel cut off, you understand, like a helium balloon cut loose from its string,” snivelled Megi.
He stroked her hair, a little stiff with lacquer.
“Do you miss your family, friends?”
She pulled herself up and wiped the smudged mascara with her fingers.
“Are you kidding? Not them.”
“Is it because you’ve never lived anywhere apart from Poland?”
Megi shrugged.
“It’s not because of Poland! We’re not immigrants, we’re free individuals, we can buy pickled gherkins at the nearest corner. It’s a sort of feeling, oh, I don’t know? The umbilical cord being cut?”
“That you’re suspended between one and the other? One thing’s coming to an end, while the Other …”
“Exactly, a transition. And during the transition, total uncertainty.”
Jonathan looked at her and raised his hand, which froze in the air. He clenched his fist and gently lowered it on Megi’s shoulder. After a short hesitation, Megi replied with the same gesture.
They were still standing like that, staring at each other in silence, when whispering and clattering reached them from the room.
“What are you doing there?” Jonathan asked suspiciously.
“Ta-da!” Antosia stood in the doorway, ceremoniously pointing behind her.
Jonathan peered into the room. On the table stood little bowls of sweets, in the center towered Belgian chocolates and
ptasie mleczko
, Polish speciality chocolates.
“Sweets? Before going to bed?” Jonathan feigned outrage.
Megi burst out laughing; Tomaszek leapt from behind his sister and stood in line with her.
“Mommy’s party!” He stood straight as a ramrod and looked at Jonathan. “Mommy’s!”
As long as Andrea sought a reply, Jonathan didn’t return her messages, but when finally she fell silent, he plunged into despair. He couldn’t enjoy the regained clarity of his situation. He drove the children to school, came home, sat on the edge of the sofa, and stared in front of him. He craved the love of this one and only woman and, although Megi gave all of herself to him, his body howled for Andrea.
During the first days of blossoming summer, Jonathan cursed being in love, the plague that for months had given him wings but now devoured him, more biting than soap in a wound, salt on a cut, a blister in a shoe. He ceased jogging, did just what needed to be done, and only the Pavlov Dogs held him upright as they milled around in his head, ignoring his moods.
Jonathan sat and wrote but when he tore himself away from the laptop, the awareness of loss stabbed at him twice as hard. Unable to bear it any longer, he called Stefan. He briefed him about the metaphorical slap on the cheek his lover had dealt him – she hadn’t invited them to dinner, which devastated Megi. He also poured out what hurt him most:
they had made great love that morning yet Andrea hadn’t uttered a word about the party in the evening.
“To which I’m not invited,” he fumed. “From which, in fact, I’m going to be excluded! And along with me, my wife.”
It took Stefan a few seconds to assess the situation accurately.
“So, you’re not going to have it off with Andrea any more?”
Jonathan moved his lips closer to the receiver and said, almost begging, “She’s false and evil, do you understand?”
“Well, she’s a fibber, that’s for sure.”
“Imagine if it was you she’d treated like that, not Megi. Should I go on seeing her? What about loyalty to friends?”
“Well, yes, I forgot that you and Megi are so close.”
“That’s not the point, that we’re close,” bridled Jonathan. “Wouldn’t you ditch a woman if she’d treated Monika like that?”
There was silence on the line.
“No,” said Stefan finally.
Jonathan lit a cigarette although he held to the firm principle of not causing a stink in the apartment.
“I think you’ve done the right thing,” said Stefan after a while. “You’ve broken off with her, and … well, and good.”
“ ‘Good,’ what do you mean ‘good’? I can’t even be happy I’ve ended it. I’m not in the least bit relieved.”
Stefan started tapping something on his side of the line. Jonathan was just about to tell him to stop when Stefan said, “Remember when we were going to the Masurian Lakes, a policeman stopped us once and demanded a fine?”
“I remember, you bribed him.”
“And he, being grateful, said to me, “Keep your eyes open on the bushes twenty kilometers from here. They’re there, too. What if you come across an honest officer?” ’
Jonathan stubbed out his half-smoked cigarette.
“You’re a decent officer,” declared Stefan. “You’ve broken off and stick to it.”
“But I can’t go on without her.” Jonathan hardly understood what he was saying himself.
Stefan put his hand over the phone and answered something to somebody in French at the other end.
“What am I supposed to do?” asked Jonathan.
Something scraped in the receiver.
“Maybe fuck her one more time …”
T
HE CAR RAN ALONG
the motorway zipping western Europe away and unzipping its central-eastern part. Jonathan watched the receding landscapes in the mirror; the children, in the back seat, made a racket, then after stormy negotiations agreed to watch
Home on the Range
.
“Lord, what blissful silence!” sighed Megi now that Antosia and Tomaszek, headphones on, were staring at the small televisions attached to the headrests in front of them. “My neck was beginning to hurt with all that turning round passing juices.”
“Best leave them in peace,” muttered Jonathan.
“They’ll kick up hell! I’ve got to shut them up somehow.”