Illegal Liaisons (32 page)

Megi left them pondering where to bury the bird and went for a walk; a week’s “leave” had left her drained.

When she got back, they were waiting for her with a white box in a carrier bag, all dressed to go out.

“What’s that?” she asked, indicating what looked like a box of doughnuts from Blikle patisserie.

“The dove,” replied Antosia, putting on her hat. “We’re going to bury it. You’ve got to drive, Mommy, because Daddy can’t.”

“He’s all twisted up.” Tomaszek was more precise as he prepared to go out without his gloves.

“I’m worried about whether we did the right thing, leaving that poor bird out in the freezing cold,” Jonathan whispers into Megi’s ear. “The children are taking its death so hard.”

“And what were we supposed to do, take it to bed with us?” asks Megi in an unexpectedly argumentative tone
.

She watches Jonathan grip the banister. He’s pale; it’s the first time he’s going out since being ill. He’s doing it for the children, so that they remember
the dove’s burial. Megi walks up to him and impulsively puts her arms around his waist
.

She ought to ask him whether he’s thought about Przemek’s offer of eventually going back to Poland, but instead she thinks of Emile Max Street, blossoming with pink flowers. In the background flash the displeased faces of her cousin Adelka and her husband Robert. “Oh my God, and Uncle Tadeusz?” pounds in her head. On the other hand, shouldn’t she go back to Poland, shouldn’t she stretch herself professionally? After all, how long could she be an administrator?

Megi sighs and lets Jonathan go. She doesn’t ask him anything. She goes downstairs and he follows, a fairy tale writer with a white dove in a Delhaize plastic bag
.

The next day, Monday, Jonathan dialled his doctor’s number.

“Hello?” A Flemish accent echoed in the receiver.

“I’m calling about my HIV results.” Jonathan only just managed to give his details; his mouth was so dry.

“And how’s your back?” the doctor asked as she searched for his name on the computer.

“Better, thank you.”

He was practically in working order thanks to painkillers and was intending to go out by himself that day, without anyone’s assistance. Unless …

“Negative,” she said lightly, and Jonathan sank into his armchair with a groan.

“Still hurts?” He heard her concerned voice.

“No, it’s the relief.”

“Everything’s negative,” she repeated. “Although you ought to watch your cholesterol.”

He replaced the receiver and opened the terrace window. He took a deep breath of fresh air. Good news, a new beginning. He turned his eyes to a corner of the terrace – the rubber plant had not survived the winter. They’d forgotten to bring it inside and now blackened leaves hung from its branches. Jonathan stretched his arms up; when his back was better he would bin the flower pot with its label: “Rubber plant, perennial.”

T
OMASZEK
’
S MAP
turned up in the backpack. Jonathan hadn’t looked in there for several days. He walked along rue de Linthout, reached the roundabout where rue des Tongres joined Georges Henri, and stood beneath the tree. He wanted to walk on, following the instructions, but momentarily lacked strength. He glanced at the brasserie to which he usually went and the other on the opposite side of the street, which he considered pretentious. Surprising himself, he chose the latter.

Waiting for his coffee, he began to wonder whether the romance that had started exactly on this street, in the bakery a few meters away, had not been a typical result of coincidences: family, routine, suppressed sense of self, impaired creative expression. He thanked the waiter for the coffee, raised the cup to his lips, and scanned the winter sky. He was no good at such dilemmas, had no idea how to get a grip on the crisis in his relationship. The affair, all that, when captured in words, seemed both flat and shameful.

He smoothed out the map. “And dat way to …”

And suddenly he saw a ginger tail in front of him, followed by another, fluffy one. They were wagging them, panting as they looked at him with eyes in which he could find no trace of guilt. So it was here the pack had moved to! He’d finally caught sight of them in the backstreets of rue des Tongres, amid the meandering walls, behind pillars. It was here they roamed, here they ran with their noses to the ground. They had been here all the time but he hadn’t seen them!

The mongrel that looked like a toilet brush ran right past him, brushing Jonathan’s trouser leg with its coarse hair. Another, like an Alsatian, rested its paws on a concrete trash can and was foraging for something. Finally, further down the street, Jonathan saw a familiar shape – the leader of the pack trotting lightly, his muscles defined beneath his fur, the hair on his nape gently bristling.

It seemed to Jonathan that the cars stood still and people froze at the sight of the enormous dog. He got to his feet in order to get a better view.

“Is the table going to be free?” somebody asked in French.

Jonathan blinked.

“No,” he said, not very politely, and pulled a notebook out of his pocket.

When Jonathan picked the children up that afternoon, he no longer felt any pain in his back but his fingers were stiff. The story was writing itself, the coffee growing cold, the waiter had approached twice asking if he could fetch anything but didn’t dare approach a third time. Left in peace, Jonathan caught the dogs, immortalising their adventures, shaking his head at their moves. What they were doing didn’t depend on him; he could only watch and take note.

He might even have forgotten to collect the children from school had it not been for Megi, who called, prompted by intuition (she was handing over the domestic helm carefully, knowing how difficult it was to get a grasp of it all at once). He went for them, still agitated by his work. His mind undulated and skipped, metaphors ousting real details. A child is the fruit of the home, its content, pulp, seeds, he thought as he watched Tomaszek and Antosia playing in front of the school. It ripens, hangs, grows heavier and heavier until it falls. A certain percentage of fruit hangs on the branch until it becomes wrinkled, and even when blackening won’t fall off. But a healthy fruit rolls, rolls, until it ends up near or far from the mother tree. Sometimes it will rest against another fruit – and the ground beneath the tree is sown with them – and then it becomes like the one next to it. If it rolls further away, it becomes an independent fruit. Independent to what extent?

Jonathan ushered Tomaszek and Antosia into the car, put their backpacks into the trunk then, stepping back, thumped the back of his head against the trunk. As if in reply, a thought flashed beneath his aching skull: what a good thing Andrea didn’t want to break up his family!

It was Megi who offered to take the children to Poland for two weeks so that they could meet their more distant family before Christmas. He would be able to write in peace.

“I want to get a finished copy of
The Pavlov Dogs
under the Christmas tree.” She pecked him on the cheek as they stood at the airport.

He smiled and stroked her hair. She’d stopped using lacquer recently and had said she was growing her hair. At the moment it was at the in-between
stage with strands of hair pulled behind her ears and, although neither pretty nor tidy, it was – as Jonathan consoled her – getting there.

“Apparently it’s terribly cold in Poland.” She cuddled up to Jonathan.

“Buy yourself an electric blanket.”

“Electric blankets are sex for the elderly. A propos, thank you for yesterday’s dinner!”

Jonathan had chased the children to bed early the previous evening and prepared a special dinner, first making sure that Megi would be home at the normal time. He had, in fact, been prepared to wait even until midnight if she’d phoned, as she often did, to apologize that she was running late. He wanted to celebrate his return to writing with her, his agreement to go to Poland, and – perhaps – their first intercourse for some weeks.

“You complained that I don’t cook,” he now said frivolously, keeping his eyes on Tomaszek,, who had somehow found himself at the very center of a group of Orthodox Jews.

“You were eavesdropping! My mother’s the only one I told, I remember perfectly well!”

“Men always eavesdrop, that’s what they build their worldly power on.”

“I thought it was oppression and captivity.” She caught hold of Tomaszek as he ran past and told him to behave. She glanced at her watch – they ought to start saying goodbye, it always took quite a while.

“I’ll just fill you in on two rumors,” she threw. “Firstly: Monika wants to go back to Poland.”

“Why don’t I know anything about it?”

“I’m not even sure Stefan knows.” Megi shrugged her shoulders. “It seems she’s going through some revolutionary changes. She didn’t look at all like the Monika of old when I bumped into her in the street last night.”

“Daddy, can I touch that man?” Tomaszek tugged at Jonathan’s jacket and pointed to a poker-faced Indian.

“No,” Jonathan automatically retorted.

“Is he a fakir?” asked Antosia. “I doubt it.”

“Do you know, when I saw her,” Megi continued, “I had the impression it was as if, well, as if she’d fallen in love with a lesbian.”

“What’s a lesbian?” whined Tomaszek, whose father was holding him by the hand to stop him running off again.

“Maybe she really has fallen in love?” Jonathan raised his eyebrows.

“It’s not that.” Megi shook her head, trying to find the right words. “It looks to me like one of those cases when someone who’s submissive has finally called it a day.”

“Kramer versus Kramer?”

“Yes, something like that. She was different, held herself upright. She said she couldn’t find a job here, that her daughter, I quote, ‘has fallen into bad company”, and Franek has stopped speaking Polish. And that she wants to leave. It’s a shame because she’s set up such a great club for the children of poorer Poles. She’s got people who help them with their lessons, computers …”

“And Stefan?” interrupted Jonathan.

“I think he’s walking on burning coal.” Antosia had not taken her eyes off the Indian. “Even the soles of his feet are black.”

“Or he didn’t wash them before going to bed, yuk!” Tomaszek rattled off, sneaking a crafty look at his parents.

“They’re the man’s shoes,” threw out Megi for the sake of peace and quiet, then said to Jonathan, “I asked her about Stefan, too, but she only shrugged.”

Jonathan scratched his head.

“I ought to phone him.”

Megi looked at her watch and called, “Come on, kids, say goodbye to Daddy! We’ve still got quite a way to go and I bet we’ll get stopped again, like last time when Tomaszek was smuggling his compass.”

Jonathan picked Tomaszek up, ruffled his hair and told him to help Mommy. Antosia hugged him and asked him to feed her tortoise every day.

“What tortoise?” Jonathan worried.

“The plasticine one. He likes lettuce and jelly babies. You will remember, won’t you?” She looked at him sternly.

“Lettuce.” Jonathan clicked his fingers.

“And jelly babies,” added Antosia, menacingly.

“Typical tortoise food.”

Megi walked up and snuggled up to him with her whole body. They hadn’t made love the night before but ended up talking and watching their favorite series. Jonathan grasped her tightly around the waist.

“What do you think, should I tell Stefan or not?” he asked, handing her her hand luggage. “You know, so he’s not the last to know.”

“He’ll find out when the time’s right.” Megi waved it away.

“He’s a close friend.”

“Friendship isn’t just passing on the latest bit of information.”

Jonathan adjusted Tomaszek’s hat, gave Antosia another kiss.

“We didn’t manage to talk again, as usual,” he threw at his wife as she walked away.

Megi handed their passports to passport control, let the children go before her.

“And what was the other piece of gossip?” he called.

“Oh!” She stopped. “Monika said Andrea’s left Simon.”

J
ONATHAN WONDERED
how his story about the pack of mongrels ought to end. Being superstitious, he opted for a happy ending – poor penmanship perhaps, but full of optimism. On the other hand, a dramatic ending would offer him a chance to leave the shelf of children’s writers and climb to that of adult writers. “Why did you let
The Pavlov Dogs
get caught by the dog-catchers?” he imagined being asked during a writer’s evening. “Because you can’t live outside the law. At least if you’re a dog,” would be his answer.

But the dogs had had enough of his writer’s strategy. They went where they wanted to go but were happiest in Brussels because here streets branched from roundabouts in five different directions or more. Jonathan could only run after them.

A
NDREA GREETED HIM
at the open door; the light from inside filtered through her lightweight maternity shirt. He gently put his arms around her; her belly barely fitted beneath her bust.

“You found your way all right?” she asked.

He snuggled up to her hair, which had grown even more, and into the crook of her neck. How good she smelled! She herself had a theory that as long as people were attracted to each other by their smell, there was desire; when the smell lost its fragrance, love evaporated. He took her face in his hands and started to kiss – her eyes, her nose, forehead, chin … He nibbled at her ears, licked her hair-line until she started breathing heavily.

At one point she gently pushed him away.

“We’ve probably got to talk first,” he muttered reluctantly.

“No, no we don’t,” she said, took him by the hand and led him into her new apartment.

They were careful with their lovemaking. Jonathan turned her over like a newly acquired treasure; she fitted her new shape to him. If it wasn’t for the fact that he remembered what time Megi’s flight had been, he would have thought he and Andrea caressed with no beginning and no end. It was dark when she let him in, dark when he made himself comfortable within her, dark when he slipped out, dark when he felt the nagging in his groin again. Only toward morning did the light bring out her features and the thought crossed his mind that the problem with beauty was that it existed only here and now. That this moment, too, would fade.