She got out without saying goodbye. “There must have been a gate here, there must have been a gate here,” pounded in his head. It didn’t make sense to him, nor did anything that day, that year, even what his life had brought. All around him rose vertical walls and he obediently climbed them and slid down, climbed and slid down. When he reached the station, he was a wound stitched together in haste.
Megi holds the receiver close to her lips
.
“You know what he comes out with? That I ‘don’t share his passions.’ ”
“What passions?” asks her mother
.
“Exactly, what passions? The need to go diving?”
“Let it go, don’t take it to heart. It’s just a man digging around in the mire of his moods.”
Megi’s thoughts return to their meeting at the station. From the moment she got into the car, she’d felt that something wasn’t right. And in the evening, even though they hadn’t seen each other for a week, Jonathan hadn’t reached out for her. He’d settled on the other side of the bed, neat and tidy as a newly pressed pair of trousers, distant in his smoothness and creases. Only toward morning did he huddle up to her back and then penetrate her in this one, embryonic position
.
Suddenly, Megi is dangerously close to going through his cell
.
“Don’t lower yourself,” she growls to herself. “Nosey parkers get bloody noses.”
If Jonathan had checked her phone six years ago, would she have been able to end the affair in that early stage of besotted madness? Even if she had, Jonathan might have let her down. Not been able bear it. And they wouldn’t be together now
.
Megi forbids herself from making assumptions
.
Jonathan rested the back of his head against the window of St George’s brasserie. He hoped the glass would cool his thoughts. When Andrea had told him that they mustn’t see each other again, he’d fallen first into a stupor, then seethed, and finally fallen into another daze.
“Beer?” guessed the Lion King.
This time it was Jonathan who’d suggested “escaping to George’s” and now he wrapped himself in his friend’s optimism. Stefan poured out his troubles – his daughter, reacting to Monika’s constant control, was rebelling all the more fiercely and letting off steam with numerous piercings. The girl already had rings in her tongue, nose, and belly button. He preferred not to think where else; what he saw was enough to worry him and alienate him from his daughter.
Stefan reached for his beer, froth settling on his moustache.
“I saw Andrea,” said Jonathan and, seeing his friend wanting to say something, added, “Only to hear ‘we mustn’t see each other again.’ ”
“Because she’s pregnant?”
Beer shot from Jonathan’s nose.
“Monika said they had plans, apparently.” Stefan looked troubled.
A motorbike slipped on to the roundabout, one of those little farters that shatter the eardrums. In his imagination, Jonathan ran after the bike, yanked the driver by the neck, dragged him off, and beat him up – for the “planned pregnancy,” for the hunch about what had happened in Sweden when she hadn’t written back, for being rejected.
“Don’t take it the wrong way.” He heard Stefan’s voice. “But didn’t she use you to force Simon into procreation? I heard him myself once saying that he had grown-up children and that was enough. A young chick made him look good. But then she decided she wanted a baby!”
Jonathan turned his eyes to his friend and, in his thoughts, sorted him out like he had the motorcyclist a moment ago.
“And don’t worry about the pregnancy.” Stefan waved it away. “He probably can’t get it up any more. And even if the miracle of the immaculate conception does take place, then Andrea will have the baby and be hotter than ever. Married women are best. They take their moods out on their husbands. For you, they dress up, pamper themselves, buy underwear.”
“Married women?” interrupted Jonathan. “So it’s not Aneta any more?”
Stefan ran his fingers across his upper lip.
“Aneta, no. Martyna.”
Jonathan burst out laughing. The beer made his head spin; the bubbles rose to tickle his throat. He laughed, happy for a while, and light-headed.
“You’re a body-snatcher. You sniff out weak relationships,” he choked out in the end.
“Not a body-snatcher but a beast of prey,” corrected Stefan. “I hunt out weaker specimens. Besides, married women are safe. Trainees might be appetizing but they have one fundamental failing: they’re usually free. I’ve had enough of worrying that I might come across some madwoman who will want me to get divorced, saying I’ve got her pregnant.”
“Don’t you know when you’re getting a woman pregnant?”
“In the majority of cases, yes,” Stefan agreed carelessly. “Besides, the young ones, often enough, don’t get aroused. They pretend they’re hot stuff in bed but they give you a blow job then think they have to run and get a yoghurt at the corner shop. On the other hand, fucking a
youngster, you feel you’re a right lad! A propos, did I tell you about my rubber bursting?”
“During it?”
“In my car. Going at top speed. It crossed my mind because I changed the tire in a place called Zdrada [Betrayal] near Debki. Write it down, it might prove useful for your book.”
When Andrea wrote to him suggesting they see each other, he experienced a familiar physical reaction – churning in the stomach, dry mouth, tingling in the balls. Over the past two months, since she’d told him that they shouldn’t meet, he’d gone through just about everything there was to experience, at least that’s what he thought. Nevertheless, he agreed to see her.
He left his car near the park where she’d proposed they meet. He was early and couldn’t decide whether to go for a short walk before she appeared or stay in the car. Neither solution seemed right; if someone he knew were to see him it would have been equally hard for him to explain why he was taking a walk right there as to why he sat drumming his fingers on the steering wheel.
Ever since he’d begun to cut the umbilical cord that joined him to his lover, he’d seen his behavior in a much clearer light. Until then, the overwhelming desire to be with Andrea had obscured all risks; now he thought in universally accepted terms: he was betraying his wife, meeting another woman. The dead weight of guilt and punishment crushed his chest to such an extent that he found he was wearing a trench coat for the tryst, like a detective.
When he saw Andrea, admiration drove out self-ridicule. Her skirt emphasized the length of her legs, the blouse discreetly outlined her breasts, brown hair glistened bronze in the sun. She smiled at him through the window, then climbed in, settling in the passenger’s seat as if she’d just come home.
“The park, not the church, this time?” he joked.
She smelled of wind and fruit. He stole a gulp of air with her scent and rested his back against the seat.
“I’ve sinned too much.” She looked at him with a tenderness that slipped beneath his skin and turned into desire.
“But you’re fixing your ways,” he said light-heartedly.
She grew unexpectedly serious. She filled her lungs with air and let loose: “I want you to know before others find out. I’m pregnant.”
Jonathan stared at her, then to the side where a man, probably homeless, was lugging two bulging sacks on his back. He was swaying in a long, too warm coat – a white-bearded comma between balls of luggage. He stopped to rest; he was the color of the road.
“Congratulations,” Jonathan heard himself say.
Andrea opened the car door.
“Come on, let’s talk.”
They climbed the escarpment. The gray-beige man disappeared while they continued down the path, two people out for a stroll. Jonathan’s head was a morass, sentences were not coming together, question marks tottered, pushed aside by exclamations.
“You opened me up.” Andrea’s voice came on a wave. “It’s thanks to what happened between us.”
Andrea stood still, he walked on. Only when several joggers and cyclists had overtaken them did Andrea finish: “It’s my child. Think of it in that way.”
Jonathan made as if to turn back but she caught him by the sleeve. They now stood facing each other, Andrea gazing at him, he in the place where the man with the sacks had been. Suddenly Stefan crossed his mind. Whenever he’d been up to no good, he fawned on Monika, and that’s what she waited for. Jonathan looked at Andrea. She didn’t apologize – she demanded to be understood.
“I wanted a child.”
He nodded, his eyes fixed on the ground.
“I told you about it. Remember? Remember!”
He grabbed her in his arms and held her tight. He wiped her tears with the sleeve of his trench coat, the collar of his shirt. He must have forgotten his tissues.
“I told you.” He barely understood what she was saying. “I wanted one then. Remember? We were lying on top of each other and I said …”
He locked her in his arms and she pressed against him, so hard he stepped back.
“It was then,” he heard.
He looked over her head at the view stretching from the escarpment – at the water and the swan majestically taking possession of it. Closer,
at the turn of the road, stood something that looked like a pen made of bare planks; inside, a heap of brown rags was huddled up.
“If you had said then that you wanted …”
“I do.”
She curled up; he felt her slight shoulder blades beneath his fingers. She was gasping for breath beneath his arm, shaking her head until hair stuck to her wet cheeks.
J
ONATHAN TOOK
the same route through the park as he usually did when jogging. There, on the other side of the fence, his thoughts merged with the smell of jasmine toward the end of May, waves of heat in July and August, the beating of his heart, and the sweat on his face. Now the park fence was on his left while on his right was a row of spectacular apartments. One of them, on sale, was lit violet from within so that a chewing-gum wrapper pressed in a niche in the pavement glistened unnaturally white in the light.
Jonathan began to walk faster. His “disciples,” as Megi called them, were waiting in the stuccoed room. He should have left the house earlier but at the last moment Tomaszek had spilled some “elixir,” which he’d secretly prepared, all over himself. The child had kept it beneath his bed for two weeks and when he’d proudly presented it, the stinking mixture had spilled on his shirt, trousers, and shoes. Jonathan had stood his son beneath the shower while Megi had cleaned the floor; the stench still filled the air when Jonathan rushed from the apartment with Tomaszek waving to him from the balcony, his hair wet and, on his face, an insincere expression of guilt.
Jonathan passed the legless organ-grinder who held out a mug to him, shaking his few coins. He had been there forever, longer, no doubt, than Jonathan, longer than most of the passers-by.
The door to the seminar room was ajar; a shaft of light fell diagonally across the floor. Other classes had already begun; the security man in his kiosk was dozing, his little television flickering. Jonathan stopped at the top of the stairs and leaned against the wall near a stand of leaflets. Nobody had noticed him yet; nobody knew he was there. Suspended in the space between home and work he was suddenly thrilled with an excitement not quite erotic yet equally deep. Light fell on him, plucking him out of the dark corridor.
A moment later, everything fell back into place – the security guard smacked his lips and adjusted his cap, individual footfalls resounded in the distance, somewhere a door slammed.
Jonathan peeled himself away from the wall. They were waiting for him.
A
FTER HIS LAST CONVERSATION
with Andrea, he could barely perform the rituals of daily life and, when the pain became unbearable, he got up and left. Beyond the apartment, the stream of unfamiliar faces and languages, those he understood and those that constituted a rapid torrent of sounds, cooled his inner fever; he caught his breath when he was among people, at last able to ask himself whether the world really did end with Andrea. “Yes,” he replied and felt something other than pain – fury.
This time he didn’t stop sending her messages. He knew from experience that the worst thing he could do to himself was to condemn himself to a detox, which was why he covered the screen on his cell with endless complaints, frightened that Andrea would be consistent and back out of their contact or, like a psychiatrist, would merely grunt. But she scrupulously replied – explained, apologized. There was only one thing she didn’t deny: that the child growing in her belly was not his.
“I’ve had enough of you. I don’t like you,” he wrote and asked one last question: why did she present him with a
fait accompli;
why, when she’d assured him that it was him, Jonathan, she loved did she get pregnant with Simon? “I told you I wanted one with you,” she wrote back. “Then why didn’t you wait?” he tapped out in despair. “For what?” she parried.
He recalled how she’d kneeled with her mouth filled with his hardness. She’d licked and blown, then let his penis out of her mouth only to take hold of it again with sadistic slowness. He’d turned her on to her back, moved her leg diagonally across his belly and entered her from above, slowly. He’d crushed her with his body until she’d stopped moving. The master of her orgasm, he’d been so aroused he’d had to slip out of her. She’d rolled on to her belly and kneeled in front of him on all fours; he’d screwed her from behind from all angles until she was wet, juices running down her groin. She’d lowered herself onto her elbows; he’d pressed his finger along the groove between her vagina and her anus until she’d squealed in rapture.
“I quite like you,” he muttered later, stroking her back.
“Quite?” She’d raised her head from his damp belly. Bubbles of happiness had burst in him with a quiet “puck!” He’d started to laugh, infecting her with his laughter, and together they tumbled across the blue sheets, the white clouds of linen.
As he neared the seminar room, Jonathan thanked fate for this course, for these people. They’d been faithful to him for over two years – unlike his lover. And yet he kept writing to her, wanted her, even pregnant. Andrea’s baby was growing in him, too – the fourth month, the fifth … He stroked her belly and made love delicately, didn’t let her straddle him.