Illegal Liaisons (31 page)

They stood, hidden behind a pillar, facing the altar, her back against his belly, his arms wrapped below her neck. He studied the stained-glass windows and thought that somebody had to break the infernal circle before it sucked in innocent people, children. He wanted to tell her this but couldn’t, so his eyes merely flitted between his lover – the pregnant atheist, a Czech woman brought up in Sweden – and the motionless Virgin Mary to whom his Polish grandmother had prayed. He even tried to remember the words she’d taught him but got stuck at the beginning of the
Hail Mary
.

He held Andrea in his arms, filled to the brim with love, and then got into his car and drove away. Fewer and fewer messages came, and he was increasingly convinced that he was in a deadlock; even if Andrea were to leave Simon, he wouldn’t leave the children and Megi. As it was, he’d already cut the branch they were sitting on (if Stefan and Przemek’s theory about Simon blocking Megi was correct). Was he, on top of it all, to leave her knowing how much the professional setback had cost her?

At least now she had some support from him; she appreciated his looking after the house while she studied for exams, thanked him for serving her salads when she got home from work, depressed, pensive. He was pleased his wife didn’t catch on to what the salads really were – part of his plan as a prodigal husband, a practical version of Stefan’s flowers of apology. If he could, he would have carried her in his arms, but he couldn’t touch her. Not only did he not find her attractive, he found her repulsive – so fair, so sexlessly good – different from Andrea.

He writhed with unfulfilled sex. He had under his nose a woman whom Stefan envied him, at whose sight Przemek slobbered, and he couldn’t force himself to take her; instead of which he coveted his neighbor’s wife, an egoist who yelled that the child was only hers, because of whom he woke up at night with a burning desire or the fear that she’d infected him with HIV. She must, after all, have had as many men as she desired.

As if this wasn’t enough, she pushed him away from her life, had decided she wasn’t going to be with him. And kept him in a state of
uncertainty as to who the father was! Here he stopped his accusations for a moment – it wasn’t her fault that he hadn’t asked if he was the father but had immediately forged ahead with innocence and love. She wouldn’t have told him anyway; at most she would have said that it was her child. It was herself she loved above all, and her freedom, and Simon closed his eyes to this. That was why she was with him. Jonathan was troublesome because he was possessively in love.

He later lay in his bath, gazing at his own body, that looked as though it were immersed in formaldehyde. His thoughts lost mo-mentum, got stuck. Maybe he’d done the wrong thing? After all, things were fine between them now. She’d said herself that everything was finally falling into place. He was accepting of her and an experienced father, she felt safe with him, she’d seen and grown to love the human being in him. She said that, subconsciously, this was probably what had drawn her to him – his inner youth and easygoing nature with, on the other hand, warmth, and the fact that he gave so much of himself to others. He didn’t place power on a pedestal, didn’t pursue high positions, didn’t boast of a trophy wife. With him she would not feel as though she were “somebody’s” she had grown out of that, so she said …

Jonathan abruptly sat up; water splashed on to the floor. He was killing love! Why had he listened to that idiot Stefan? He didn’t understand any of it! He hadn’t ever committed himself like that, not even Monika could drive him crazy with love, only to the altar; Stefan saw his marriage as a matter of honor, not a love-match. If he happened to think too much about a girl, he applied the hair of the dog. He went on about love because some chicks wouldn’t allow themselves to be screwed otherwise, but he himself admitted that he needed women in the plural. He classified them according to color, shape, taste, and smell. He was married to himself, his own “other half.”

Jonathan shuddered. He and Andrea were different. Their love was an exception. In any case, he had more space in his heart – and that’s what he should have held on to.

But Andrea had decided that she didn’t want to break up his family. He remembered how once, when she realized how crazy he was, not only with desire, but with love for her, she’d asked, looking at him with some disbelief, “But you’ve got everything: children, a fine wife, a profession you’re passionate about. What do you need me for?” He hadn’t answered. She
had cuddled up to him, fawned, and then fled. What was he to do? He ran after her.

He slipped deeper into the bath, water filled his ears. Indeed, what did he need her for – in order to have something of his own apart from what he already had – a family, a tidy life? Was it the same with Andrea’s child, this seed conceived by her “I want,” by Jonathan not being ready and Simon’s acquiescence, and which now dwelled in the waters of her belly. Was it her liberation, a living expression of her will?

Jonathan’s head emerged from the water and he took a gasp of air. Thanks to her he had regained his attraction to risk. That was why he was now waiting for the results of the HIV tests.

He picked up Antosia’s orange sponge. If he hadn’t wanted to risk anything, he wouldn’t have started up with her – Andrea, who didn’t allow anyone, including him, to tame her. He wasn’t longing for warm slippers. He saturated the sponge with water and squeezed as hard as he could. “Was Megi warm slippers?” he asked himself. Or maybe some force was driving her into them?

And then he stopped thinking about it all – at least, that’s what he ordered himself to do. When the thought of Andrea appeared, he threw himself into a whirl of simple, daily activities. It was a good thing he didn’t have to edit the little collection; the short stories written by his disciples lay on Cecile’s desk and Jonathan hoped she wouldn’t have too many comments. He couldn’t use his head now; it was all fogged up, sentences fell apart.

He had lost sight of
The Pavlov Dogs
entirely. When he dipped into what he’d written, he didn’t recognize his own sentences. Somebody else had put the story together, somebody whom the dogs liked, whom they approached, nudged with their noses, at whose sight they wagged their tails. Nobody liked Jonathan – neither his wife, whom he didn’t desire, nor his lover whom he ought to drop, nor his children for whom he had no patience of late. Even the dogs had left him.

He drove the children to and from school, loaded and unloaded the dishwasher, loaded and hung the washing, lugged the shopping, took the children swimming, dragged himself to the gym, and jogged by force of will. The hours dovetailed, duties ground along. “I haven’t got the strength for them,” he thought. He didn’t understand what he was
reading, he set his social life aside because it required too much effort, he didn’t let his wife drag him to the cinema because he no longer liked her. It was because of her that he’d had to relinquish himself. Now neither desire nor friendship held them together.

He trained so intensively at this time that he was finally laid low. Megi said it was the result of jogging in foul weather, Stefan that it was waiting for the results of the HIV test. At moments like these, Stefan always fell into depths of remorse in the form of psychosomatic symptoms, which again cemented his relationship with Monika who had to look after him. Had he allowed himself to think about her, Jonathan himself would no doubt have admitted that it was because he was cut off from Andrea. But he wouldn’t allow such a thought. He had a strong will; he was, after all, a writer. Only his body was now weak.

He let himself fall – the pain gnawed at him and he gnawed at the pain. He wrapped himself entirely in a martyr’s way of thinking; every morning began with it, and the evening ended with it. He thought about the pain and not about Andrea; about his nerve roots and not about her child; about his lumbago and not the freedom she wanted officially to regain.

He curled up in bed, barely registering the sounds in the apartment. Megi took a few days off but got up early anyway, as if she were going to work, while he lay there pretending to be asleep, short of sleep, aching, sweating. He listened to the swoosh of water in the bathroom, to the children’s pattering, to their scrambling, hushed in vain by Megi’s whispers. The door slammed and he opened his eyes. And again forbade himself to think about Andrea.

After a few days he started to get up, walk around the room. On seeing his own face in the mirror above the sink he thought he looked like an old druid. He hadn’t shaved because he wasn’t sufficiently steady on his feet to risk using a razor.

On Friday, after taking the children to school, Megi knocked on the door to the bedroom, which, for the duration of his illness, had become his own private den. He invited her in with a vague cough and she sat down on the edge of the bed.

“I’d like to tell you something,” she began.

He looked at her from beneath half-closed eyelids; she appeared embarrassed. Jonathan attempted to sit up. Megi leapt up to pull the pillow higher. Suddenly, he wanted to laugh.

“Is the maiden in the family way?” he asked sternly.

Megi smiled; for a moment once more she was a student in love and not a lawyer with furrowed brow. She couldn’t believe how well-read he was in Polish literature and admitted that she, like the majority of her friends at secondary school, had merely skimmed through Sienkiewicz’s
Trilogy
, but then she wasn’t a born humanist; which is why she loved the ancient Polish interjections that Jonathan had absorbed when he spent weeks of his holiday at his mother’s.

She shook her head now, and told him about Przemek’s offer – that, career-wise, she was tempted because she’d be able to learn new things, because here, after three years working as an administrator, she knew her responsibilities off by heart. Well, and, despite having passed the exams, the promotion had passed her by.

Jonathan listened attentively, from time to time a grimace of pain flitted across his face.

“And what do you think?” she asked in the end.

His eyes turned to the window. A little bit of sunshine pierced the clouds. What she was saying also seemed to come from outer space.

“To Poland?” he finally said.

T
HAT
S
ATURDAY
he tried to leave the house. He wanted to escape from the mangled sheets, the sound of the television, the children’s activity and Megi’s domestic pattering around doing household chores. He wanted to escape from the silence that had fallen over them after she’d told him about her offer.

He got dressed and barely managed to make his way downstairs. “Are you going out?” Megi leaned out of the kitchen. “Yes,” he muttered and started putting on his shoes. He picked up the right shoe, thinking he owed Megi the chance to return. It was because of him that she hadn’t got the promotion; he saw
her frustration. She was not some dozy office worker; after coming here and relishing the novelty, she had cultivated her patch without much effort and was quickly disheartened by the excess of bureaucracy that inhibited the efficiency of what they were doing. She considered herself too young to be “coming and going with a briefcase,” which was how she described the fate of her fellow officials. She enjoyed challenges, problems. Sharp, she was familiar with power games but hated intrigue.

Jonathan mechanically put the right shoe down again and picked up the left. He couldn’t imagine going back to Poland. It was like steering a ship back to port with its sails unfurled and instructing the crew to enjoy the flapping. Here, his children learned different languages, got what Stefan envied him. Here, they had friends of different nationalities with different roots, histories, skin colors.

He replaced the left shoe on the floor, turned with a groan, and began to rummage around in the pocket of his jacket. He searched and searched but Tomaszek’s map wasn’t there. He sat down, trying to remember where he could have put it. He definitely hadn’t thrown it away. What if it had fallen out?

He hunched over, forgetting about his lumbago, and yanked his head up with a moan.

“Is everything OK?” Megi leaned out of the kitchen again.

He muttered something; she emerged and walked up to him.

“Too weak to go out?”

He nodded, feeling like an idiot.

“I thought so.” She ran her hands over his arm. “It’s too soon. Give yourself time.”

And then there was the affair with the dove. Jonathan trudged upstairs, step by step, groaning like an old man. He was on the half-landing when a white bird fluttered in through the open window. Its legs slid apart on the smooth surface of the parapet but it didn’t flee, merely stared at Jonathan. Only the stamping of Tomaszek’s feet alerted the dove; still it didn’t fly away.

It was then – as he later recounted – that Jonathan understood the bird was sick or dazed. Tomaszek stopped short and watched his father, who himself had difficulty moving, help the bird find its way out and close the window behind it. But when, some time later, Antosia ran
past, she noticed the bird was still there, perched by the window-frame. She called Megi but her mother was getting dinner ready so Jonathan dragged himself downstairs.

Together with the children, he inspected the bird through the window pane, then went down with them. Together they constructed a cardboard “house,” lining it with a soft rag and placing a saucer of water and some bread in the corner.

“Shall we make him a microwave as well?” asked Tomaszek.

They left the cardboard shelter outside, Megi helping them because Jonathan couldn’t bend down. They sheltered the bird from the wind and rain, while making it possible for it to get out.

The following day, the children leapt out of bed and ran down to see how the dove was. But the bird was already dead. Jonathan did his best to console them but the sight of the white feathers covered with the first snow of the winter upset them all.

“And it didn’t even die in the house we made especially for it,” snivelled Tomaszek.

“It must have needed some fresh air,” deduced Antosia.