He curled up into a pretzel. He was in his apartment – this was his home. He called this period in time home because during it there was
room for his family, Megi, and Andrea. His home was large, sunny, and full of love …
The waiter placed a plate with a hot sandwich covered with minced meat in tomato sauce and melted cheese on the table. Jonathan, with difficulty, shook the recollections aside.
“… the option of going back to Poland.” He heard Stefan’s voice. “And then he might propose that Megi should carry on working for him. What do you think about it?”
“About what?” Jonathan drank a little of his beer, the pleasant coolness tickling his throat.
“Going back to Poland.”
Jonathan looked at Stefan as if he were intending to lip-read from now on.
“It probably won’t come to it, they’re only rumors.” Stefan patted him on the shoulder and bit into his croque.
“Based on what?”
Yellow ribbons of cheese stretched from Stefan’s mouth. The thought of cutting it from the croque flashed through Jonathan’s mind.
“To Poland?” He half stated, half asked.
“Mhm.” Stefan shook his head in all directions.
“Impossible.” Jonathan leaned forcefully back in his chair. “I’m not going anywhere.”
Stefan nodded enthusiastically.
“Anywhere,” repeated Jonathan.
“Of course.” Barely concealed compassion appeared on Stefan’s face.
Jonathan leaned forward then back, and forward again – he rocked like someone autistic. Stefan pushed the plate aside and put his arm on Jonathan’s shoulder, but Jonathan brushed it away.
“I’m not going anywhere.”
Megi thinks she’s running out of eye cream, Tomaszek’s voice is hoarse, the emails are piling up, and she doesn’t know where to buy the small celery she needs for a stock. Oh yes! And the dry-cleaners – she has to drop off their spring jackets. And buy some pretty underwear to surprise Jonathan
.
The sun is shining over Brussels like a light bulb over the chaos of a bedroom, laying bare tricks of make-up and worming its way beneath warm clothes, making people rub their eyes and untie their scarves
.
Megi enters Exki and picks up a sandwich labelled “Romeo et Juliette.” As she makes her way to the check-out she hears someone calling her. The trainee is waving to her from a table; next to her sits a long-haired girl. The girl turns and Megi sees it’s Andrea
.
Something skips in Megi; her sandwiches grow sweaty in her grip. She doesn’t know if she should go up to them; in the end, she forces herself, even manages to say something. Andrea reaches for a serviette; her nails are painted a cherry brown, a color Jonathan associates with old hands. Megi has short nails with a touch of natural varnish. She sees now that they lack expression
.
They leave together and bid each other goodbye beside a window displaying underwear. The trainee says something about the Spaniard. “Jacinto” – the name rasps on her lips with its foreign sound; Megi’s nervousness explodes in a torrent of hysterical giggles. She muffles them; it’s ignoble to laugh like that and she stops her mouth. She’s made a fool of herself; the trainee looks meaningfully at Andrea
.
But suddenly Megi sees that Andrea’s lips are quivering. Or maybe she’s imagining it; maybe Andrea wants to yawn or say something. The laughter dies in Megi. The trainee walks away and, a moment later, Andrea also says goodbye. And Megi struggles with herself. She’s itching to call after her, to look into her face
.
Jonathan felt guilty that he was sparing with sex with Megi so as to have more to give to Andrea. So for several days he fumed, waiting for Simon to get himself off to England, while Megi, in the meantime, was making it increasingly clear that he wasn’t devoting enough time to her. Initially, she was nice to him, cuddled up, and even paid him compliments – which surprised him because he’d thought that that stage in their relationship had passed irrevocably – and, although he was still blinded by his desire for Andrea, Megi’s fawning behavior had an effect. This led to a frightening emotional complication – he felt guilty for being tempted to fuck his own wife; in his eyes this equalled a betrayal of his lover.
Yet Andrea kept calling off their meetings. She wrote about an overload of professional duties that required her attention; her emails became rarer and rarer. Jonathan justified this by saying she was busy, but one night he woke up, needled by the thought that he’d jumped to her every beck and call, regardless of professional deadlines.
Again he was in the grip of jealousy and suffered like an old man riddled with arthritis. Lack of sexual fulfilment added to his tension. How he missed the feeling of satisfaction in his body, the delicious pain in his groin that came from screwing Andrea. Didn’t she miss it, too? The image of his beloved woman in someone else’s arms extinguished his joy in life.
He recalled their last meetings, searched for a place, a situation in which he might have offended her, said or done something untoward. He blundered on – for her sake. Waiting for stupid messages, suffering so much pain, uncertainty, imagining a younger, more attractive, better dressed, more successful … oh!
One day, when he got back after dropping the children off at school, he found Megi at home.
“Don’t you feel well?” he asked when he saw her pottering around in her dressing-gown, making coffee.
“Do I look ill?” She smiled flirtatiously; her hair was slightly damp after her morning shower.
Jonathan put his bag on the floor and studied her.
“So what makes you stay at home?” he asked.
“I wanted to surprise you.” She nervously tightened the cord of her dressing-gown.
He walked up to her, put his hands on her shoulders and kissed her on the head. Megi sighed and returned to brewing coffee.
He sliced the bread, she laid out the butter. As they prepared breakfast, they exchanged comments and joked. Jonathan told her that Cecile had offered him the course next year with extended hours; Megi summed up Przemek’s strategic maneuvers in two fields – to get close to the politicians who looked as though they might win the next elections, and to get a girl.
“Both long-term strategies?” Jonathan bit into his sandwich.
Megi pulled a plate from the cupboard and handed it to him.
“His problem with women is that they instinctively sense what’s most important to him,” she replied, sitting down on the high stool. “Meaning power.”
“In my opinion, his problem with women is that he’s hideous.”
“And yet he does have girlfriends.” Megi’s dressing-gown slipped open a little; a long thigh showed beneath the towelling.
“A good subject for a nature program.”
“Some find him attractive,” she muttered.
“Get real. Would you like to have it off with him?”
She laughed; her leg slipped out completely from beneath the white towelling; Jonathan’s eyes rested on the smooth skin. He wondered whether she had any panties on.
“You don’t understand what makes some men attractive, that’s the whole problem.”
“It would be a problem if I did understand.”
“Don’t you fantasize about doing it with guys?” she asked.
Jonathan shook his head, staring at the band of skin above her thighs. He moved closer.
“And with two women?” she questioned.
“Mmm!”
“A propos, I met Andrea recently. We bumped into each other in Exki.”
The sandwich shot out of Jonathan’s hand. He bent over, apologising under his breath. “We,” in a sentence where his wife put herself in the same category as his lover, upset his balance, and not only mentally. But he was struck by something else in what she’d told him.
“When did you meet her?” He picked the bread up from the floor and threw it into the bin; his face pulsated.
“I can’t remember.” Megi shrugged. “Last week? Two weeks ago?”
“Two?”
“What’s the difference?”
He spun on his axis and swiftly began to clear the kitchen surface.
“Aren’t we eating any more?” Megi was surprised.
“I’ve got to go and write, the Pavlov Dogs are being dogmatic.”
He made toward the hall; Megi pattered behind him, her dressing-gown hanging off her slender shoulders.
“Are you going out? You just said you were going to write.”
“I’ll be back in a minute. The printer’s run out of ink, I’m going to get some more.” He pecked her on the cheek and ran downstairs.
Andrea didn’t want to let him in but he sat out in the hall and stayed there until she poked her head through the door. Seeing him hunched there, she told him they had to stop seeing each other.
“I know what happened,” he said, getting to his feet.
She stepped back and shook her head.
“I know, I really do know,” he whispered, slowly coming close to her.
Again she shook her head but he stretched his hand out to her and gently immersed his fingers in her hair.
“Andrea …”
He took her by the head, then by the hands. He cuddled her as they stepped over the threshold, crossed the living room; he laid her on the bed. She didn’t look at him, said nothing, her lips and fists clenched. He stroked them until they began to yield. He licked and kissed her fingers, one after another, carefully, tenderly. He held her in his arms, rocked her until she no longer curled in on herself.
Then he started to stroke the whole of her – from her smooth hair, down her shoulders, breasts, belly, hips, thighs, and knees. He slipped off her socks, caressed every toe, licked the spaces between them, kissed her toenails. When she groaned, he rolled up her skirt, lowered the rim of her panties and entered her, without undressing – only his cock and her pussy. Andrea arched and started to cry but he scooped her beneath him and came without a single thought, his face wet with happiness and fear.
Jonathan stood behind the glass and watched the group of children practising aikido. Little hands parried blows; this child and that tumbled under sudden swings. Tomaszek brandished his limbs enthusiastically; Antosia carefully copied the instructor’s moves. Her precision, his spontaneity, Jonathan’s and Megi’s genes merged.
He glanced aside checking that nobody had caught him in his rapture. But other parents were gazing at their children with similar bliss. Jonathan smiled to himself – they were shameless! There was a time when he hadn’t been able to understand it, but now, along with other
parents, he allowed himself to be carried on the wave of indescribable happiness that moments such as these brought.
Megi kept saying that the instant she first saw Antosia, and then Tomaszek, when the tiny babies lay on her belly in the delivery room, was the very essence of life for her. She said that never before or since had she experienced anything so strong.
He believed her; he’d been there with her, seen her reaction. He’d experienced it differently. What he most remembered of the births was his own helplessness, the fact that he couldn’t help his woman, had nothing to do, nothing concrete, nothing he was good at. When he took the three-kilogram bundle into his arms, he wept with fear – the newborn was so fragile.
Later, he changed the diapers with Megi, got up in the night, fed the babies, and taught them how to walk, but in truth it had taken him longer to be ready for fatherhood than it had taken her for motherhood. Now, he watched Antosia and Tomaszek through the glass and thought that moments such as these were the sun of life, fragments from a limited series, treasures.
“It’s a shame adults don’t enjoy themselves,” he thought, observing the children. “Adults plan and execute.”
Andrea appeared in front of his eyes. From the moment he saw how humane she was and realized that, in spite herself, she was trying to break it off with him because she did not want to take him away from his family, he loved her even more. She was a beautiful woman and a wonderful human being. The thought of her brought on an erection and tears welled in his eyes. When he’d taken her – that time after finding out that she and Megi had bumped into each other – she’d written to him saying he ought to leave her. “How can I leave you,” he wrote back. “You’re in me deeper than ever. Can’t you see what you’re doing to me? I want to fuck you and kneel before you. I can’t believe that you,
you
, are with me.”
He looked at the children again. Such strong emotions had sprung up within him lately. How he’d matured as a father, as the man of a beloved woman. Once he’d thought that fresh experiences washed away the color of previous ones; now he knew they deepened them.
Megi runs doubled over beneath her umbrella as hail pounds the fabric and the rain spits even beneath it; but when she stops outside the shop the sun is already shining to the accompaniment of birdsong. A mannequin stands in the display window in front of which she and Andrea had parted a few days ago. Today it is dressed in a silk vest. Not only Jonathan but she, too, associates silk – especially imitation silk – with old age
.
Megi pushes the door and walks alongside the row of hangers. Something sexy but not kitschy. In no way must Jonathan laugh at her. She wanders around, restless as a bee, until she grabs a bra and pair of panties and dives into a changing room. The black triangles of underwear contrast sharply with her pale skin. Megi joins her hands and unconsciously rubs one against the other
.
“Is the size right?” the saleswoman asks from behind the curtain
.
“Yes, yes.” She rubs her hands harder
.
A memory comes back: they used to rub their hands like that at the summer camps then shove them under each other’s noses saying, “Look! That’s how corpses smell.” Megi smiles; the mirror registers the change. She bends over and pulls her phone out of her bag. She’d told her mother of her suspicions about Jonathan and Andrea – she’s close to her mother – and they both decided that Megi should phone Andrea to sense whether the panic in the latter’s eyes had only been an illusion
.
She dials Andrea’s number, which she obtained from the trainee, and cringes. What’s she going to talk about? The smell of corpses? What’s Swedish for “corpse”? Or Czech? She knows nothing about this partner of Simon’s
.