“There must have been a gate once,” she said after some thought.
“What do you say?” He wanted to laugh. Megi, the lawyer and realist. Her feet were firmly planted on the ground, true enough. But then somebody had to be in this house.
Jonathan brought the mysterious door, alias “there must have been a gate,” into his story and in this way enriched the space with a nebulous zone where the priniciples of firmly fenced-off pieces of land did not reign. The place, however, was not generally accessible – sometimes it was closed, not allowing entry to those who wanted to go in, however high-ranking.
That was why the huge dog, the leader of the pack, was now rooted with his nose to the hole, sniffing, trying to get through to where things were happening, tantalisingly packed away. Since “there must have been a gate here” didn’t want to open for him, he had to try to slip in a different way. The gutter, perhaps? He was shaggy and enormous, yet he tried to squeeze through.
After several days of writing, Jonathan began to study the apartment, as if looking for faults. The state was familiar to him – reality, resentful at being dethroned by fiction, was demanding attention. He let many things go when he was at home alone, and copped it when Megi tracked down the damage.
He went downstairs and threw away the stale bread. He was on the point of opening the washing machine – something was rotting inside – when the telephone rang. His father was passing through London and asked if they could meet.
Two days later, Jonathan settled into a seat on the Eurostar. He loved traveling by train. Ever since childhood, he had found that airplanes disrupted the healthy pace of life; two hours between London and Warsaw seemed a cheap trick, the mind found it hard to accept the
change in reality. The gray barracks visible on landing at Okecie was superimposed over the colorful streets of London. The face of his mother seeing him off at Heathrow all too quickly turned into that of his father greeting him with a wave in Warsaw.
There had been years when he had practically not seen his father because it had been impossible to travel freely to Poland. His mother had been petrified that, although he’d have no problems going in, they wouldn’t let him out. He’d lived in England for years and still the same nightmare haunted her: she was back in a country whose borders had just been closed.
Jonathan didn’t have dreams like that. He was happy both in England, where he had his mother and his friends, and in Poland, in the tiny apartment of his father, whose bachelor existence was sometimes warmed by the presence of his grandmother who cooked
pierogi
and
golabki
for her grandson. He had resented his mother for not wanting him to visit his father. He just couldn’t imagine that a country could be closed. With the blitheness of a teenager, he shrugged off her fears.
When he was older, he had bragged in school about the martyrology of his parents’ fatherland. He corrected the British pronounciation of “Walesa” and mouthed off on the subject of “Solidarity,” which impressed the girls. Only when he returned to Poland after his studies and started living with Megi did he fall out of the habit of joking about Polish history. He almost mocked it a couple of times because of his English sense of humor, and his wife’s uncle, the one who emphasized how much “patriotis” meant in a person’s life, started spitting with indignation when Jonathan cheerfully poked fun at the Pope.
The Eurostar rolled into a tunnel, the interior of the train reflecting in the windows. Jonathan’s face: the high cheekbones and dark hair of his mother, behind glasses the eyes of his father.
An hour later he was at Heathrow, looking out for passengers arriving from Warsaw. There were quite a few people apart from him; they obscured the exit so that although he had glimpsed his father, the latter had still not seen him. Pulling his wheeled suitcase, his father was skimming his eyes tentatively over the faces. Jonathan stood on his tiptoes and raised his arm. That was how they used to greet each other at the airport: his father had raised his arm just as Jonathan was doing now.
They greeted each other awkwardly. He was taller than his father and towered over him in such a way as embarrassed both of them.
“Janusz. How you’ve grown!”
Their regular joke. Jonathan straightened his back but soon slouched again. He took his father to the hotel and from there they made off for their tour of Jonathan’s childhood haunts, along paths trodden with friends during the holidays when he couldn’t go to Poland. Toward the end of the day, seeing that his father was tired although not willing to admit it, he accompanied him to the hotel.
During the night, Jonathan, curled up on the sofa in his mother’s living room, ruminated over the moment in front of the hotel when, saying goodbye to his father, he’d felt the urge to ask his advice about what he should do. “I’ve got two women, Dad, two loves,” he would have said. But he didn’t because he’d never confided in his father.
His mother … When she was still married but had already fallen in love with Nick, how had she felt? He’d never asked her somehow. He’d found a ready-made world: his father in Poland, mother in England with Nick, and he, Jonathan, in a boarding school. A gap had formed where the stories of his parents met, his own kingdom so envied by Stefan. “You had freedom,” his friend would repeat. “And I’m only tearing myself away from the leash now.”
Jonathan lay on his back and breathed deeply. It was stuffy; the size of London apartments was nothing compared to those of Brussels. He was amazed how very detached he’d grown from what until recently he’d considered his own. It had sufficed to leave and be happy somewhere else.
London, that of today and that of a few years ago, the crossing paths of father, mother and son, all this formed a strong knot in Jonathan. That gesture of the hand, for example, shooting up so his father could find him and follow him into an unknown world – Jonathan’s world.
Returning to Brussels, he clung on to hard facts: Megi was to come back the following day with the children. All of a sudden, he was seized by the fear that he wouldn’t be able to bear it and would end up writing to Andrea. He grasped the telephone and dialled Stefan’s number.
Brussels was hot and humid, and Stefan, at the Poseidon swimming pool, looked like a sea lion, especially as he’d grown a moustache during the holidays.
“What’s all this with the facial hair?” Jonathan struck up a conversation when they sat down on the wall having completed several laps.
Stefan stroked his dripping moustache. Jonathan glanced at a passing girl in a red swimsuit. He couldn’t see her face clearly without his glasses but, as Stefan would have said, that wasn’t the point.
“Did you want to look like a political leader?” continued Jonathan after a while. “Evoke noble principles? Maybe Solidarity’s, with its peasant leaders? Emphasize bestial masculinity? Divert attention away from the broken tooth?”
“Leave my moustache alone.”
“Where do they sell them, Carrefour?”
He fled underwater before Stefan’s fist reached him.
An hour later, they were sitting in front of the St George brasserie on the corner of Emile Max and Victor Hugo. The outside tables stood next to a small roundabout; avenues, full of trees and apartments in the shade of the leaves, branched out in five directions.
“The world has five directions,” Jonathan wondered. “Do you think it’s only like that in Brussels?”
“I come here when I want to escape,” replied Stefan, not following the subject.
“From?”
“Monika.”
Jonathan looked at him in surprise. Stefan’s relationship with Monika was like a mathematical calculation: it gave Stefan relative freedom, Monika status. The condition of it lasting was discretion and assumed ignorance, meaning the prewar recipe for a successful marriage.
“She’s started arguing of late,” muttered Stefan. “That I get home too late after work and so on.”
“Why do you get home late?”
Stefan twitched his moustache as if to check whether it was about to fall off.
“I come here to escape,” he squealed, “and you spout the same things as her!”
He controlled himself and added after a moment, “She carps on, even though she shouldn’t. She’s just found something to do. She tutors children for charity, you know, the poorer ones who have recently arrived
and don’t know the language, whose fathers work on a building site and mothers are out all day cleaning.”
Seeing the waiter who looked like the Lion King coming toward them with a menu, Stefan waved his hand to say no and raised two fingers.
“I’ve been to London to see my father,” murmured Jonathan.
“And Andrea?”
“So as not to see Andrea. Megi’s given me time to write in peace. Her mother’s helping out with the children. They’re back tomorrow.”
The Lion King stood two glasses of beer in front of them.
“I envy you Megi,” sighed Stefan, settling more comfortably in his chair. “A man can grow with such a woman.”
“A woman like that can’t be deceived,” interrupted Jonathan. He was feeling increasingly on edge.
Stefan raised his glass and eyebrows simultaneously.
“Even recently, in London,” continued Jonathan, lighting a cigarette. “I met an old friend at Heathrow when I was seeing my father off. We exchanged a few words, she told me about her kids and husband, I did the same, then she said she’s divorced.”
“And you?”
Jonathan moved away from the table; the chair scraped across the pavement.
“And I nothing.”
“Not one secret for another?” risked Stefan.
“I ran when she started putting her hand on my arm.”
“That’s quick.”
“Don’t rub it in.”
Jonathan glanced at the Lion King who, with infallible instinct, was walking in their direction again, this time with a snack menu.
“You’re honest,” said Stefan, unconvinced.
“With who?” mumbled Jonathan.
He returned home tipsy, thoughts melting in the pot of memories. Megi – even that rascal Stefan envied him. Hardly surprising, she was so clever and pretty! His best friend – not his father, not his mother – only her. When she made tea, she also brewed some for him. In the mornings, she laid her head in the crook of his elbow so that they could
get up and support each other when it was still dark outside. Megi – so good, so humanly good.
And Andrea? She flirted with whoever was there, screwed left, right and center. And who fucks, fucks, and will go on fucking; such was the truth of folklore and the objective truth.
Jonathan lowered his head, full of invective, and noticed with amazement that, despite the weakness that came with alcohol, he was swelling in his trousers. He hissed, looked around and discreetly adjusted the tip of his cock upward. He even had to take his cell out of his pocket; there was no room for it. And when he took it out, he wrote without much thought, “Kisses from Brussels, what are you doing?”
The intercom woke him in the morning – the organ-grinder asking for money. Jonathan refused and went to the bathroom. He found it hard to arrange the blocks of the coming day. He was to collect Megi and the children from the station, do the shopping before that, and set the apartment to rights. And see Andrea. He shook his head, spraying drops of water across the bathroom. He glanced at his phone – the envelope was pulsating, within it the hour and place of his tryst with his lover. Jonathan looked at his watch. He had less than an hour. If he managed to sort himself and the neglected apartment out on time, he would just be able to see her before collecting his family.
Fernand Cocq Square, usually buzzing with life, was exceptionally deserted, even though awnings tempted with their shade. As he saw Andrea approaching, Jonathan impulsively regretted his scruples. He’d had the house to himself for a few days; he could have had her there! Instead, he had sat and written.
“Ahoj,”
said Andrea in Czech.
Something clutched at him. She looked tired from close up; pallor broke through her olive skin.
“Czesc,”
he replied in Polish.
Her eyes turned to him but her face expressed no amusement.
Not knowing why, Jonathan remembered an occasion when they’d lain in bed. “You’re a sexavore,” he’d said, and she’d laughed. He’d asked whether it was true, as rumors had it, that she and Simon were swingers. “My sweet, bourgeois hypocrite.” She had stroked him behind the ear.
“I’ve missed you,” she said now as she sat in the passenger seat.
He touched her hair, tucked a stray lock behind her ear. She shook her head – he’d forgotten she couldn’t stand having her hair behind her ears. He withdrew his hand and rested his back on the seat.
“And I was in Normandy.”
For a moment, he thought she was going to get out. He turned to her and already his lips were embracing hers, he was sucking the softness of her tongue, slipping his hand beneath her skirt, and finally touching her pussy. He groaned – she was not wearing any panties.
Later they sat dazed, sweating. Jonathan’s thoughts drifted above Fernand Cocq Square, Ixelles, Brussels. “The cock and the vagina are both feminine in Dutch –
roede
and
schede,”
he recalled. Geert had once explained to him the intricacies of Belgium’s second official language. He’d said that the older generation still knew the gender of specific words, but the younger had to search in dictionaries. “Genders are getting blurred,” Geert had concluded.
Jonathan glanced at Andrea – he knew she would have found it funny. But she was so serious now he didn’t dare mention it.
“I’ve got to go,” he said instead.
She sat as if she hadn’t heard him. Her lips were swollen, her neck covered with dark marks left by kisses.
“I’m going to the station,” he added. “The kids are coming back from holiday.”
He cast his eyes at her hands. She held them strangely, palms upward, like the hard-worked hands of a peasant.
“How was Sweden?” he asked, his voice unexpectedly sharp.
“We mustn’t meet any more,” she said.
A gust of wind ruffled the branches on the trees, the church bells chimed. “Twelve,” rattled in his head.