T
HE
P
AVLOV
D
OGS
fought for their territory. The city where they had been destined to live struggled with such poverty that nobody wanted to feed the four-legged animals any more. Thrown out into the street, they tried to eat scraps found in trash cans but the bins were already occupied by packs of the homeless – people or dogs. Poodles, Pekingese, and Terriers died, torn apart by the fangs of hungry Alsatians, Dobermans, and the fiercest of street brawlers – Caucasian Sheepdogs. Small dogs made poor food but large dogs used them for training a certain movement of their heads – a quick shake – followed by silence as warm blood dripped from their jaws.
Following the dogs as they dragged him through the stinking side streets of the city, Jonathan wrote with his knees pulled in under a small table that, instead of the usual four legs, had three annoying posts. He spun a different story in his messages to Andrea. Her replies acquired, in the heat of the badly ventilated room, the proportions of visions tempting Simon of the Desert. Racked by the impossibility of fulfilment, unable to believe she would agree, Jonathan finally suggested to his lover that she should come to Warsaw for a weekend.
She replied with a brief “yes.” He leapt from the table, bruising his shin, closed down
The Pavlov Dogs
on his laptop and left the room. He walked against a stream of children, bumped into windbreakers and rubber dinghies, rubbed against heated bodies in flip-flops. He scanned the family schedule in his mind: on their return from the seaside, they were going to leave the children with Megi’s mother and go to the Masurian Lakes for a few days instead of taking the diving course he’d so much wanted to attend.
He stopped outside a bicycle rental shop, leaned against a pole in the provisional fence, and started to mechanically peel away remnants of bark.
“Bike for you?” A youngster in a red baseball cap struck up the conversation.
Jonathan shook his head. He could tell his wife he wanted some peace to write, and move into his father’s apartment until the latter returned from Croatia. His mother-in-law could help Megi with the children and he’d spend the time with Andrea.
“If you don’t want a bike why’re you hanging around?” The boy’s voice rose strangely toward the end of the sentence.
Mute, Jonathan automatically thought and returned to his recollections of the morning: Megi had snuggled up to him, encouraging him to enter her, but he’d pretended to be asleep. She’d curled up on the other side of the bed. From beneath half-closed eyelids he saw her hair and detected the neat snip of the hairdresser’s scissors. All of a sudden, he passionately longed for the sight of his own hands ruffling Andrea’s hair as they made love.
A stocky man in Hawaiian shorts, with a tattoo of a mermaid fighting for space among the tuft of hair on his back, peered out from the hut bearing the sign “Bikes for 5 zlotys.”
“Can I help you?” he asked.
“Megi, Megi …” The wheel in Jonathan’s head picked up speed, words merged as though on a roulette wheel.
“If you don’t want a bike why are you hanging around? Move away from the fence!”
The youngster, emboldened by his boss’s presence, took a step forward.
“Right!” he added from beneath his peak.
“What do you mean ‘right’?” Jonathan rebuked him before walking away.
If Megi had cried with disappointment or become really angry, it would have been easier for him. But she merely said, “If you’ve got to write, you’ve got to write.” He almost yelled, “I don’t have to, fight for me! Let’s leave like we’d planned.”
She helped him pack his laptop and clean clothes; she even asked whether she should drop some dinner off to him when she was in the neighborhood.
“No!” Jonathan blurted out.
She looked at him amazed; he leaned over to fasten his bag, saying, “I’ve got to tear myself away from reality.”
“I understand.” He heard the amusement in her voice.
The hardest thing was to say goodbye to the children. They gave him a quick kiss, wanting to hurry back to their granny, who was teaching them how to play poker, but Jonathan clung on to them, hugged them until Megi shouted and laughed, “Maybe you’ll stay with us after all?”
Jonathan stood Tomaszek on the floor and slung the bag holding his laptop over his shoulder.
“May the Force be with you!”
Jonathan gave Megi a kiss on the top of her head, waved to his mother-in-law from the door, and left without delay.
His father’s apartment was a collection of treasures from the former, socialist regime – a fake samovar with flaking patches of “silver,” curtain rods to which the clips would cling for good, a drying fern on the sill. The arrival of another woman in his father’s life – perhaps there’d been more after Jonathan’s mother disappeared from his life and his son had gone to school in England – had left no mark on the apartment. Perhaps because his father’s partner of several years, Helena, had two rooms on the same housing estate, thanks to which they could be together while retaining their independence.
On seeing the practically unchanged colors of the walls and fittings that had greeted him when he visited his father during the holidays, Jonathan suddenly missed home. He walked up to the window from which stretched an uninteresting view over the other blocks. His mother’s apartment in London, the different rooms of the boarding school, his father’s apartment, the rented studio in Warsaw where he and Megi had first lived, even the apartment they’d bought with their first earnings, didn’t seem close enough to him to call home. But now, unexpectedly, at the sound of the word “home” the façade of their Brussels apartment building appeared in front of his eyes.
He drew the curtain, from late in the Gierek era. The patter of a dog running downstairs, the scrape of the rubbish chute lid, the groan of the lift starting up – all resonated with the memories of childhood.
Andrea didn’t want him to pick her up at the airport so they arranged to meet on Krakowskie Przedmiescie, where he counted on not meeting anyone he knew. People from Warsaw didn’t venture along the Trakt Królewski, but left the attraction to visitors.
Before going out he phoned the children to ask them about their plans. He was afraid Megi’s mother might decide to remind the children of their national heritage and take them to the Old Town. He replaced the receiver, went to the bathroom, and scrutinized his reflection,
fragmented by the edges of the mirrors on the cabinet doors: did his father experience similar moments here? Did he stand here tentatively studying his features, a little similar to Jonathan’s?
He glanced at his watch and picked up the shaving foam. Everything he did – daily, trivial activities – today seemed like a transgression of boundaries, an entry into a mystery or sacrilege. Covering his cheeks with foam, he clumsily knocked off his glasses, which fell on the bathroom surface. “Pan Hilary,” the poem his mother had read to him when he was little, leapt at him from somewhere. “
Pan Hilary zgubil swoje okulary …”
Mr Hilary lost his glasses …
A drop of blood appeared on the white froth. “And what if Andrea’s got HIV?” He swore out loud, held the shaver beneath running water, and sat on the edge of the bathtub. Enough! Enough worrying and guilt! He was going to screw the woman – that was all.
She walked into the café and he burned. The men stared at her as usual but she took Jonathan’s upturned face in her cool hands and kissed him where he’d once kissed her, that first time, almost on the lips.
A couple of hours later, he lay with his eyes open. Suddenly conscious of his own body, he listened to it, discovered it anew. Usually he fell asleep shortly after ejaculating; now he lay next to Andrea and contemplated the gulf of orgasms, stroked her body and his, and when she fell asleep, he stroked her harder, jealous of time lost in sleep, the looks not given him, angry at time wasted.
Then the alarm clock rang and Andrea had to leave. She hastily gathered her clothes and threw amused glances at him from over the mug of coffee he’d prepared in his father’s worn espresso pot. She pointed to the built-in room-divider shelf, saying, “Oh, it’s like those in the photo of my mother’s apartment in Prague!” and to the radiator with the words, “Dad said things were better in Poland but all this looks just like Czechoslovakia.”
Jonathan told her that things were better in Poland because he was only in primary school when the tanks had appeared on the streets. He hardly remembered them; it was not really his generation’s experience but that of people who were a few years older, students at the time. The first free elections, seven years later, had been more important for his generation. He hadn’t been in Poland at the time but he knew about the
events from news in France where he’d been studying. He’d itched to return to Poland, especially when the Berlin Wall fell, but had been in love with Petra, a Swedish girl, and couldn’t imagine leaving her.
Andrea told him about how, after her father’s death, she’d visited Czech villages in search of distant family. Her father had been eighteen when he ended up in a camp for dissidents. He was not allowed to study, even though he painted beautifully. For the rest of his life he had to be treated for a lung disease he’d caught in prison. She hadn’t found any relatives; all she took with her from Czechoslovakia were handmade lace curtains.
“Your tanks, my tanks,” Jonathan whispered into her hair.
“… our tanks,” she concluded with a smile.
Jonathan loved her all the more for it. They resembled each other – they spoke other languages, easily found their place in other countries, their thinking was not determined by any national reading list. They never said, as did Megi, “because back home” or “look how they …” Jonathan and Andrea knew what it meant to think in two or three languages at the same time. They knew what parting meant, and how painful coming back could be.
It was thanks to their conversations that Jonathan realized that, just as half of him dwelled in England and France, so his childhood was only here, in Poland. And Andrea had clearly understood that boy’s soul because she leaned over him before leaving, looked him in the eyes, and said, “Oh!”
After she left, Jonathan spent the entire day without leaving the divan. Images surrounded him like mock-ups; when he dozed off they became more tangible. From time to time, he picked himself up and went to the kitchen to make himself some tea but he couldn’t eat; not a mouthful would pass his throat, not a word.
That day he didn’t send her a text. She, too, didn’t write yet. He wasn’t in the least worried. Was it possible to exchange more than they already had over the past day and night? They were a joint, consummated dyad – mutual owners of each other’s interior lives.
The following day he got down to some writing but his thoughts were still tangled around their bodies. He tried to shift them on to the
track of the Pavlov Dogs but they came back; light and fluttering, they flew above his dark head, over her raised thighs.
He didn’t phone home until three days later, when Megi sent him a message, worried whether everything was all right, whether he was eating, whether he was inspired, and whether he missed them a little. Jonathan felt a pain as though someone were forcing an extracted tooth back into his gum. He put his phone aside and, after a moment’s hesitation, phoned the children.
From then on, he talked to them every day until their voices ceased to sound alien. Finally, he started missing his routine – putting Tomaszek and Antosia to bed, reading them stories – and went back.
I
N THE MORNING
, Jonathan felt himself to be part of the Brussels landscape. He joined the flow of fathers and mothers and proudly led his two children, asking them about their day, smoothing down their hair, and gently pulling them along by the hand, weaving in and out between rushing pedestrians. Fluorescent waistcoats flashed along the cycling paths; with a briefcase in their front pannier, a toddler in the seat behind, parents hurried to nurseries and work.
Motorcycle headlights reflected in cars; someone was walking their dog; the warm September wind tore at tricolored flags suspended from windows. The people opposite waved to him. The older man, already in a suit, was finishing his coffee; the younger, in jeans and a pale T-shirt, was starting work later that day. Holding on to Antosia’s backpack as it slipped off her shoulder, Jonathan greeted various neighbors.
He rarely thought about Megi now. And when he did it was to find fault in her and blame her for the routine that he considered was causing their infrequent and poor sex of the past few weeks. He grew stiff when with her – not from desire as before, but from alienation. He was repelled by her naturalness, her fluids, secretions – everything that he adored in Andrea. He avoided his marital duty, angry at the world for having delegated it to him. “People are divided into those who are sexual and those who are asexual, and the latter rule the world. Or those who want
to be taken as such,” he bridled. “They’re the ones who demand sex be kept out of sight, and when it shows shout, “Pervert! Whore!” ’
In the meantime, the Pavlov Dogs changed into a pack of unruly mongrels. A new element had crept into their territorial wars – the fight over bitches. Jonathan had planned to describe the laws governing dog gangs with greater insight, to sketch more clearly the characters of the dogs who survived by using the intelligence of tamed animals and awakened ancestral instincts. He wanted to describe how efficiently they terrorized the city but the only thing he thought about of late was making love; which is why the tale veered off course and Jonathan, happily enchanted by love, ceased to envy Andersen his ability to change personal failures into the sad stories of his fairy tales. The Pavlov Dogs leapt at each other’s eyes, while a certain supple bitch, that looked like an Alsatian, stood on the side, beneath a tree, and gave herself to as many dogs as managed to cover her.
Stefan pressed drinks into the hands of new arrivals, chatted, and turned lame phrases into jokes, marking his path with spontaneous outbursts of laughter. People were drawn to him, forming a buzzing crowd while he, the good host, kept appearing at the door to welcome more guests.