“You’ve got a group of seven. That’s how many registered but things can change. People generally drop out during the course.” She got up and held out her hand to him with a smile.
“Thank you, Mme Lefebure.”
“Cecile,” she corrected.
Leaving
L’Atelier d’écriture
Jonathan made his way along the main axis of the city straight to the stone arch crowned with a sculpture of galloping horses, which stood on the wings of pavilions housing museums and a nightclub. Despite the monumental grandeur of the building, the area was cosy. Mobile stalls selling waffles were parked on the square, cyclists circumnavigated the arch, strollers sat eating sandwiches and reading on the grass and on the steps.
Even though it was autumn, the grass in Cinquantenaire Park was as green as the parrots squawking, in the branches. It was a mystery how those exotic birds could survive European winters and yet they were still here, losing their emerald feathers, which on days like these merged with the background.
Jonathan’s cell beeped in his pocket. He stopped; pigeons scraped at his feet, ruffled in a frenzy of love. Megi was texting him to call. He deleted the message and stared at the one that had arrived the previous day – from Andrea.
Since that first text, messages had filled their small screens more and more frequently. The dramatic tension was like a game of cat and mouse – once he was near her, then she was almost touching him. He remained cold blooded and planned several moves ahead, interweaving wit with tenderness, compliments with elliptical statements, so that even he thought himself attractive. He hadn’t seduced anyone for years and now ideas were popping up with the force of popcorn fried in oil. How it drew him in!
He looked around the park, semiconscious. On the right, a deep blue patch flashed by – a group of cadets from the nearby military academy warming up. They ran with a spring, half-boys, half-men. White and black, they passed elderly gentlemen dressed in white,
à la tropique
.
Jonathan squeezed his cell, sweetness running through his body. He didn’t see the birds in their love dance on the path. To write or not to write to Andrea? He should phone Megi; she had asked how the interview had gone. “Best wishes to the most beautiful woman in Brussels from a new lecturer in creative writing,” he typed on his cell. He broke out in sweat and cancelled the text. A moment later he wrote the same thing adding, “PS You’ve probably not eaten yet.”
He put the phone away and strode briskly ahead. “It’s only a game, we’re not really doing anything.” He slowed his breath. The wind tore at the flags overhead as he crossed to the other side of the arch. The beep of a message. Andrea had written, “I bite but not too hard …”
Stefan lifted weights with loathing. He was sceptical about physical exercise but liked women and that was what brought him here, against his hedonistic nature. With uncomfortable movements that didn’t seem to belong to an intelligent human being, he lifted barbells to prevent an invisible wall building up between him and the opposite sex, like a Venetian mirror used by the police to help victims identify their assailant while remaining unseen by him. Stefan was the victim, beautiful girls his assailants. They tempted him, showing off their suntanned legs, flat bellies, and cleavages while he trembled lest excess kilograms hide him from their sight.
Jonathan sweated on the treadmill next to him. This cheered Stefan, gave him someone to talk to and allowed him to maintain some remnants of dignity in his own eyes.
“And so, did she get through to you?” he said from beneath the barbell.
“Who?” Jonathan roused himself from the stupor of his warm-up.
“Andrea Kunz, the chick from Swedish television.”
The treadmill ran away from Jonathan. Despite the rising temperature of their text messages, he hadn’t yet asked Andrea how she had got his number; one doesn’t ask women such questions.
“She said she was doing a program about house husbands,” panted Stefan, lifting a weight. “Did she ask you?”
Jonathan stepped onto the treadmill and fell into a brisk stride.
“No, we’ve only spoken over the phone. She needed a pithy quote.”
“She’s pithy herself,” Stefan puffed and put the bar-bell aside. Jonathan was still striding with the springy pace of a stroller in a hurry.
“Remember when we just finished college?” Stefan wiped the sweat from his brow. “There were so many pretty girls around! I fucked them but what I really dreamed about was a flawless beauty. There were a few. They flashed by as if they’d arrived from another planet. The better ones didn’t come to the Kic. They were somehow inaccessible. Like the chick who later emigrated to France, remember?”
Jonathan nodded. That was before he had met Megi. The girl had been phenomenal. He’d even managed to get hold of her phone number but when they’d met – he was passing through France – he’d been disappointed. He’d forgotten to tell Stefan.
“I approached her once, after a couple of beers,” continued Stefan, “and said, ‘You probably think I’m too short for you’ …”
“Were you mad?”
“… and she looked at me like this, up and down, and said through her teeth, ‘I do.’
Stefan smoothed his fair hair until Jonathan stopped laughing.
“Then I avoided beauty,” he went on, “and screwed girls who were simply pretty but had small flaws. But they immediately wanted to get married!”
Jonathan slowed the treadmill.
“I remember,” he muttered. “And then there were only ugly and desperate ones left.”
“You were already living with Megi while I had just met Monika for the second time,” sighed Stefan.
Jonathan bit his lip.
“And a good thing too, old man,” he assured him, accelerating.
Stefan looked at him blindly.
“I regret – to this very day – that I didn’t really go all out to get a perfect chick.” He made his way to the rowing machine.
Jonathan stopped and again the belt nearly threw him. He gave up with the rest of his warm-up, followed Stefan and squatted next to him.
“How’s that?” he asked.
“Be happy you’ve got Megi,” Stefan murmured, struggling with the adjustable saddle. “You don’t have to think, ‘I’m nearly forty and still up for it.’ ”
“How’s that?” Jonathan repeated.
But Stefan had already started to row on the spot.
Jonathan stopped at the lights and watched the tram drive away. The electronic sign
Louiza
changed from French to Dutch and back again. There was something charming in the name, the giddiness of a woman who could be a queen from Europe or a teenager from New Orleans, hide her cheek with a fan or conceal the large teeth of a smile with her hand.
An affair on the side for a tepid marriage, erection lifting.
Another tram pulled up, flashing the sign
Montgomery
.
There was, however, the matter of honor, a basic principle he’d carried away with him from books he’d read as a boy: do not take a woman away from another man.
He pulled the cell from his pocket – Andrea hadn’t written anything that day. Very good; he, too, wouldn’t write. After all, nothing had happened between them; he hadn’t even suggested they meet. It was only a game, neither foreplay nor anything criminal.
His eyes followed a bus with a NATO sign that changed into OTAN, short for
Organisation du Traité de l’Atlantique Nord
.
Perhaps it would all somehow peter out of its own accord. Please!
J
ONATHAN RINSED HIS RAZOR
, splashed his face with water and patted the rest of the Victor & Rolf scent into his skin. Megi clattered some cutlery downstairs, no doubt cleaning it; they had taken it out of the boxes just that day. She’d also found the dinner set they got as a wedding present from her family: plates covered in a floral design, more suited to a grandmother’s household than a young family’s.
He brushed his hair and put the brush back on the shelf below the mirror. Sometimes he caught himself doing little things that reminded him of his father, an unpleasant feeling that he counteracted with a shrug of the shoulders. But the fear remained – like that in dreams about going back to school.
He opened the bathroom window and took a deep breath as he looked out at the Brussels street. He had more hair than his father had even in photographs when he was young. The latter had grown bald quickly and Jonathan hoped this was not a question of genes but of getting up for years at daybreak in order to go off to the same socialist institution. It must have been difficult for him to bring up an only child alone.
Jonathan pulled on his jeans and fastened his shirt. Megi bustled around downstairs preparing the Saturday party. She’d invited her new colleagues from work and it was important for her that all went well. Jonathan had promised to fry salmon in dill sauce, his culinary masterpiece.
When he went down, Megi looked at him from over a pile of plates. In a pair of tight jeans which highlighted her bottom and with her hair, straight from the stylist, cut in a bob in order to show off her neck, she looked like a girl.
“Jonathan?” she hesitated. “Would you please not ask anyone your usual question, “But what is it exactly that you do?” ’
“It makes it easier to find a subject in common,” muttered Jonathan distractedly, taking the dill out of the fridge.
Megi left the plates and watched him. Jonathan was once more struck how the color of her irises could change from – theoretically warm – brown, to cold, almost graphite.
“You don’t have any subjects in common.” Her tone was calculated to cut any discussion short. “They have their own EU subjects, which are as finely set apart from normal, universal ones as those of astronauts. You’re to rely on the knowledge I’ve been feeding you over the last few days.”
“And what if someone tells me they’re the head of the Eastern Partnership task force again? What does it mean? That he goes to the office and what?”
“Don’t try to understand. Ask about general things.”
“For example?”
“Oh, for God’s sake, you used to be a journalist, do I have to tell you how to talk to people?”
Jonathan held the dill under the tap.
“My grandfather was a lawyer,” he said, placing the bunch on a chopping board and picking up a knife. “My father’s an engineer and my mother a physicist. The first defended clients in court, the second designs purification plants, the third researches.”
“And now people work in leasing, audit, PR, and human resources.” Megi, annoyed, blew at her blonde bangs.
“Those aren’t professions.”
“But you don’t have to tell them that!”
Jonathan shrugged and pulled the rust-colored cuts of salmon out of the fridge. He seasoned them, laid them on baking foil, and doused them with wine. He washed his hands and walked up to the stereo. What music to choose? He ran his fingers down the records.
The intercom buzzed. Jonathan switched on the sound system, and Megi, on her way to the hall, glanced at him in surprise.
“Music from
Stealing Beauty
? But that’s music for lovers!”
He did not have time to answer because at the door stood the head of cabinet for the Justice Commissioner, Simon Lloyd, and his partner, Andrea Kunz.
Jonathan kept glancing at the guests from behind the kitchen worktop. On Megi’s right-hand side sat Simon, the focus of the gathered group. Rafal, who had hosted the party at which Jonathan had met Andrea, won Simon over within minutes with his knowledge of literature; his wife, Martyna, although she’d asked Megi at the door if she had anything for
constipation, told interesting stories. Mainly about herself, but in three languages.
On Simon’s left sat Przemek. Jonathan couldn’t say much about him because they hadn’t had a chance to exchange more than a couple of words. He remembered that Megi, who worked with him, had praised his open mind and nose for politics, which, combined with a knowledge of French and English, “boded well for Poland,” as she said.
Jonathan tore his eyes away from Przemek’s elongated skull and observed the sympathetic journalist who had come with his partner. Next to them sat a trainee who worked with Megi, and next to her, a Spaniard, an employee at the brewery. Stefan wasn’t there because he’d had to go to Luxembourg on business.
“Have you been to Thailand?” Sentences flew across the table, too light to grasp.
“Yes, it’s really super!”
“It is, isn’t it? And Costa Rica?”
“We discovered a place last year …”
Jonathan looked at the Spaniard, who was getting bored because he didn’t speak any Polish. Jonathan, too, was bored and was grateful to the fish for requiring so much attention.
“What about the Canaries? Because next year we can’t …”
“Pretty bad. Besides, how much can one take?”
“Nothing’s authentic there any more. Everything’s touristy …”
“Yes, but basking in a deck chair by the pool …”
“Now, that’s different.”
When they switched to Commission jargon, Jonathan started to clear the table and the trainee took advantage of the commotion to move closer to Simon Lloyd.
“He’s unbelievable!” he heard her say to the journalist’s partner.
“ ‘Unbelievable’ why?” Jonathan, joining them, couldn’t take any more.
The trainee turned to him in amazement.
“My friend really wanted to work for him,” she replied as if this explained everything.
Jonathan looked across the table but instead of Simon his eyes rested on Andrea, who was talking to the young journalist and Przemek. They were laughing, exchanging quick repartee.
“And what do you do?” Jonathan heard.
He turned his eyes to the trainee girl. Her face was shaped like a Kaiser roll; she was stocky but in her own robust way could be considered attractive.
“I write.” Again he glanced across the table. Rafal had joined in Andrea’s, the journalist’s, and Przemek’s conversation.
“And what do you write?”
“Books,” he mumbled distractedly.
Instead of an “oooh!” a squeal resounded at his side.
“Well, I’ve never yet, never yet …” The girl put her hand over her mouth in an effort to control her joy.