Andrea stirred and stretched herself. They had only seen each other once in the morning, it occurred to Jonathan, a long time ago, in Warsaw. Suddenly he was embarrassed by this new intimacy: he briefly deliberated whether to leap out of bed and brush his teeth, or kiss her first – it was so long since he hadn’t woken up next to another woman.
“Hey,” she said in Swedish. The familiar word, the language of his first love, Petra, greeted him in his lover’s new home.
“Hey,” he replied.
The first morning after their night together, he found three messages from Megi. He rang back, superstitiously stepping out of Andrea’s apartment into the street. Megi’s tone was cold, the same as when she spoke about professional matters. She asked why he hadn’t picked up the phone; he replied that he had run out of battery. She wanted to know how his work on
The Pavlov Dogs
was going; he lied that it was going well. Megi fell silent so he asked about the children, her mother, his
father, Uncle Tadeusz, Aunt Barbara, and the rest of the family, whose names he barely remembered. Odysseus came to his mind, the hero who conquered so many women and islands that his beginnings dimmed in his memory. “What beginnings?” he asked himself, pocketing his phone.
For him, everything began the moment he’d stood at the threshold of his lover’s apartment, on the top floor of an old apartment building where there was a lift with a grille like a birdcage. He had immediately taken to St Gilles, the massive church at the back of her tenement and the market with its weekly stalls.
He didn’t go home after that first night – he lived at Andrea’s for the duration of his stolen freedom. He bought some new toiletries in the corner shop, a few T-shirts and some boxer shorts as a change of underwear; when he put his jeans and sweatshirt into the washing machine, he couldn’t leave the apartment until they dried.
Every morning Andrea left for her new job, bidding him goodbye with a gentle kiss – she wore lipstick and he knew he shouldn’t hug her passionately when she was made-up, which is why he woke up very early in the morning – his erection a fail-safe alarm clock – and fucked her lazily until they were both satiated. He didn’t compare Andrea to Megi, Petra, or any other woman whom he only partially remembered. He took her, his
terra incognita
, and learned from scratch on this isle of freedom – he, a human wreck with a meager supply of underpants.
They argued a great deal during those days; trivial things took on the proportions of stumbling blocks thrown beneath their four uncoordinated legs. A moment later they wrapped their legs around each other and writhed. Many words were left unsaid but this suited Jonathan, and Andrea was similar in this respect. Instead of talking, he preferred to cook her the best dinners possible. Choosing victuals, he milled around the market stalls; he didn’t look around apprehensively to see if there was anyone he knew nearby. He didn’t even have an explanation at hand in case he did meet someone unexpectedly. At last, he felt free – after years of fibbing and hiding, it had started to be all the same to him.
He passed a shop selling vinyl records, a bookshop and a bakery. He entered and bought almond croissants, the ones Andrea liked. And the sight of “bum” rolls, which he bought on rue des Tongres, stirred a longing in him.
He learned about the pre-Christmas party from Megi. The invitation had been emailed to her and she’d thought that since she couldn’t go herself, he might want to drop in. At times, he sensed a certain alienation in her voice – she was going through something, maybe she simply suspected? It seemed more and more obvious to him with every passing day. They were, after all, like the yoked oxen which the priest had, to their disgust, evoked on their wedding day.
He left the apartment and stepped into the lift. Megi was acting just like him who hadn’t yet asked Andrea if he was the father of her child. He pulled the lift doors apart and stood on the stairwell lined with nineteenth-century tiles. He nodded to the neighbor living on the second floor and asked the old man from the first floor after his health. Over the last few days they’d exchanged greetings, comments about the weather, and the negligence of the trash collectors.
He drew the winter air into his lungs. Soon it would be Christmas, presents, his birthday … He pulled up the collar of his jacket and made toward the Brasserie Verschueren. He didn’t want to go to Ludwik’s, who hosted the immortal Commission Christmas parties, but he didn’t like the idea of Andrea going without him. He intended to arrive a little after her and have a glass of mulled wine on the corner beforehand.
When he saw him, Ludwik swept the hallway with his eyes.
“My wife’s in Poland,” Jonathan rattled off. What did the man expect? That she was hiding behind the coat rack?
Jonathan looked around the familiar interior – the floor gleamed with unhealthy brightness, the Christmas tree looked as if it had been bought in a shop selling appropriate accessories.
“Don’t worry, we’ll soon puke all over this place,” he heard Stefan’s voice at his side.
From the balcony where they had gone to smoke, the Eurocrats’ district looked like Lódz in the previous century after its manufacturers had gone bankrupt – dark windows illuminated by street lamps, no pub music, no twenty-four-hour
alimentation générale
.
“Martyna saw you going to Andrea’s apartment with her.” Stefan blew a few impressive smoke rings, pursing his lips like a carp. “Apparently you were lugging a shopping bag.”
“And they say I try to dodge cooking.” Jonathan reached for a Gauloise.
“But is it true? I told her she must have been seeing things, I even blew up at her.”
“Good.” Jonathan nodded.
Nothing else came to his mind, he felt light and empty inside. Something told him that this feeling preceded another, painful sensation but he couldn’t, of his own volition, leap from his balloon of indifference.
“Eh!” Stefan tapped him on the shoulder. “So how are things with you two?”
Jonathan turned his eyes on him. Megi would ask the same question when she returned.
“I’m living with Andrea,” he replied.
“Does Megi know?” asked Stefan after a long while.
Jonathan held on to the barrier, pretending he was gazing at the dark street. He shook his head.
“And what’s going to happen now?” His friend’s voice reached him.
Jonathan shrugged. He was in no state to stammer out anything else. “I’m living with Andrea.” Those four words released into a space full of guests at the Commission Christmas party, even though separated from it by a pane of glass, drained him of strength.
“I’ve never gone that far.” There was helplessness in Stefan’s tone. “The furthest I got was when that crazy woman came flying up to Monika.”
“What really happened to you then?” Jonathan choked out, trying to focus on the story that he couldn’t care less about right now.
“Don’t ask.” Stefan waved it away. “But going back to you … Think it over carefully, old man.”
“Meaning?” Jonathan gripped the barrier again, his cigarette going out several meters below them on the pavement.
“You don’t really know her.” Stefan’s forehead furrowed. “Don’t announce anything until you’re a hundred percent sure.”
Stefan went in, returning a moment later with two bottles of beer. He clearly wasn’t himself that evening, didn’t intend to circulate among people or sort out professional matters.
“Monika wants to go back to Poland, as you probably know,” he mumbled in the end, tilting a bottle into his mouth. “Martyna told me, do you see? Monika hasn’t said a word to me since that time and it was
only when everybody started asking me what I thought about it, that I realized I was the only one who didn’t know. Like a total idiot!”
He gestured at Jonathan with the bottle and added, “I even resented you for not telling me but then I heard that you’re having it off with her again.” He indicated Andrea who was standing next to a dark-haired stranger.
Jonathan tore himself away from the barrier and practically glued his forehead to the window.
“Who is he?”
Stefan followed his gaze.
“You know, the guy who’s got three chicks here and a wife and children at home. I told you about him.” He shrugged. “Apparently he’s just getting a divorce.”
“Does he know Andrea?”
“Oh, yes!” began Stefan and broke off suddenly.
Jonathan turned to him.
“You know something. Talk.”
“Everybody knows.” Stefan had the expression of a dog caught peeing. “Rumor has it that she’s been going with him ever since she left Simon. But if I know him, he was the one chasing her, he’s always wanted a go at her.”
Stefan said no more. Jonathan stood with his head bowed; the balcony swayed beneath his feet. The horizon seemed to expand and expand in front of him and, finally, there was a vast space there. A moment longer and he would have an attack of agoraphobia.
“Why didn’t you tell me?” He barely recognized his own voice.
“Because you said you weren’t together any more! The last time we spoke you said you had lumbago and had ditched her, remember?”
“Kurwa, kurwa …”
Jonathan put his hands over his face. Polish curses seemed foreign to him, he switched to English.
Stefan stood with his hands spread out helplessly, one holding beer, the other a cigarette.
“I had that whole Monika mess hanging over me.”
Jonathan didn’t hear him; fragments of scenes ran through his head, snippets of conversations fell into place, suddenly clear and logical: the muted ring on Andrea’s cell, the conversations she ended on the stairs, a man’s disposable razor in the cupboard beneath the sink, which she
apparently used for shaving, although she had once told him she had her legs waxed.
He felt Stefan’s hand on his shoulder.
“She doesn’t know anything.” Jonathan picked up four recurring words. “Megi still doesn’t know anything.”
“I haven’t got any strength left,” said Jonathan and swayed above the barrier.
Stefan grabbed him by the shirt; Jonathan straightened himself and turned. He now stared through the balcony window at the group around Andrea – Rafal was sneaking a meaningful look at Przemek, who was hiding a smirk, and only crooked Ludwik and the dark-haired man were talking, oblivious to everything, and gazing at Andrea.
Jonathan tore himself from the barrier and for a moment looked as if he was going to plunge head first through the windows of the balcony door.
“What are you doing?” He heard Stefan’s cry.
“What?” Jonathan was looking at him as if he didn’t see him.
“You’re not going to do anything foolish, are you?”
Jonathan shook his head rhythmically in a futile search for words.
“No,” he retorted finally. “I’m only fucking off out of here.”
He didn’t switch the lights on at home; he entered the living room in the dark and collapsed on the sofa. He slept in his jacket and shoes, dreamless, just as when he’d sat difficult exams. When he woke up in the morning, he was afraid to move – everything in him was dispersed. He cast his eyes around. The plants had dried up, the rubbish he hadn’t thrown away stank, a pile of letters lay strewn by the door.
It was on this pile that Andrea’s eyes fell as she stood at the threshold.
“Who let you in?” asked Jonathan. He was in the kitchen, unwashed, with no jacket but still in his shoes.
“Your neighbors. And the door was open.”
He stared at her, made-up, hair neatly brushed, innocent, in a so-called blessed state.
“Stefan didn’t want to say what happened but …”
“But you guessed,” he interrupted her.
He didn’t invite her in; he couldn’t bear her entering the room where his children sat at the table.
“One of your attacks of jealousy, is it?” She studied him tenderly, almost curiously. He was on the point of raising his arm to tell her to leave when she said, “What do you want from me? Just tell me once and for all and at last I’ll know.”
“Have you slept with him?”
“That’s my business.”
“Is it his child?”
“No, it’s mine,” she replied calmly.
“And who else’s? Mine?”
Andrea’s hand roams toward her belly, rests on it like a shell on a shelf
.
“No,” she finally says, slowly and clearly. “I wanted it to be yours but you weren’t ready. The child’s mine and Simon’s.”
“I don’t believe you!” yells Jonathan, alarmed by the squeaky pitch of his voice. “I don’t believe you about anything, you’re terrible, terrible …”
He yells so that his legs give way; he sinks to the chair and from the chair, lower. He doesn’t feel the touch of her hand on his hair; it’s as if he is turning numb, his tissues despairing in the distress of being rejected
.
She bends over him but it isn’t concern that speaks through her. She forms questions, but so quickly that she hasn’t got time to add question marks. They sound senseless
.
“I was supposed to wait, was I,” she hisses, “but what for? You knew that I loved you, that I wanted a child with you. Is it fair to want that? I can’t fill in gaps with words like you; I act, it’s actions with me, you don’t see that, you don’t see …”
“What actions?” Jonathan hides his face with his elbow; his glasses are askew, the floor digs into his ribs. “Like yesterday?”
“What are you talking about?” Andrea wants to lean over him to hear better but her belly is too large, so she straightens her knees and asks from above, louder, “What?”
“You’re always going to be like that, unfaithful, remote! I don’t want you like that.”
“It’s not me.” She shakes her head above him. “It’s your lack of will. And your family.”
Jonathan rises, first to his knees, then gets up; now he looms over her, unshaven, exhausted
.
“No, no, no,” he repeats. “It’s not my family, not me. It’s you! You’re the one who’s like that, you’ll always be like that! I’m scared of you. I don’t want you when you’re like that.”
M
EGI LISTENS
to the sounds of Warsaw – the screech of trams, ambulance sirens, the rattle of garbage trucks. Her city. And yet, when her cousins had asked her whether she missed the place, she’d nodded – because she did but it was Brussels she missed. Her local patriotism is muddled: she can’t stand visitors speaking badly of Warsaw, she defends it, then leaves and doesn’t think about it, head over heels in love with Brussels
.