Illegal Liaisons (34 page)

But now she feels as though her other city is betraying her. Fury mounts in her, seethes, is uncontrollable. Megi cries; her mother comes out to her on the balcony where, despite the frost, her daughter tends to sit with a glass of tea; she strokes her hair which is longer now, the highlights growing out. And Megi begins to talk: how rumors closed in on her, from Martyna’s mention of seeing Jonathan and Andrea in the street, through Przemek’s seemingly casual hints, to Jonathan’s reaction on hearing that Andrea had left Simon. And now Martyna had phoned again, asking – as if solicitously – what could have happened to Jonathan to make him leave Ludwik’s party so abruptly
.

“That’s still no reason to …” Her mother tries to comfort her
.

“He was walking with Andrea! Carrying shopping bags!”

Her mother runs her hand down her back, no doubt thinking that her daughter isn’t dressed warmly enough – it is, after all, minus five degrees – but doesn’t say anything, taking on to herself words sticky with tears
.

Suddenly Megi pulls her head away from her mother’s shoulder
.

“I’m going to call that roach! I’ll call and give her a piece of my mind!”

A whirl of suspicions had surrounded her ever since she’d said out loud to her mother, “I think he’s unfaithful.” From that moment all the filings were drawn to the magnet – dates tallied, exchanged glances made sense, even Jonathan’s T-shirt, wet along the spine, had been like that not because he’d been to the gym but because he’d poured a bottle of water down it to make it look credible
.

“I’m going to call her, I’m going to call.” Megi presses the keys on her cell but can’t find Andrea’s number
.

“My God, how stupid I am,” she moans and quickly wipes her tears away because there’s movement in the apartment. Antosia has just woken up and Tomaszek will be up in a moment, too
.

“Go to them,” whispers Megi to her mother. “Please.”

She turns and holds her face to the freezing wind. She is thinking about Jonathan – and is horrified by the boundless love, hatred, contempt, and admiration she feels for him. Because if he leaves them, if he follows his feelings, if he leaves his life for the other woman, Megi will hate him. Yet she will also admire him and despise herself for this admiration, for her own weakness in face of the strength of a man who has the courage to go his own way
.

But if Jonathan stays with them, if he chooses what Megi had chosen not so long ago when she’d dropped the man she’d fallen in love with, she will also understand him. In her loathing and disgust she will understand his scruples, deep love for his own, inseparability from his children, what he feels for her. Is it just habit?

Megi can’t think about it, it hurts too much. Was he repulsed by her, was that why he couldn’t make love to her?

She thinks about her own affair scornfully now – there was no comparison with what Jonathan was doing to her now. That other thing was just a plain old yuppie cock-up, a typical office romance. But although Megi distils the hackneyed truth, hides behind it, she remembers that she’d been in love. If it had come out into the open then, she doesn’t know how it would all have ended
.

She knocks over her mug with her sleeve; the tea spills over the balcony tiles. Megi can’t go to fetch a cloth because her face is all blotchy and Antosia will immediately know she’s been crying and will ask questions. So Megi stands as the brown puddle with tea dregs in the middle freezes over
.

Or maybe I should leave him in peace, to sort it out for himself, she now thinks soberly. Not make a middle-class tragedy of it, not make a song and dance? If she leaves Jonathan people will enjoy the game, will watch two people fight. In return they’ll conscientiously condemn the person Megi loves. And she’ll leap into her role as the betrayed, hurt party. Is that what she wants, other people to lick her wounds?

Megi, the lawyer, orders herself to be pragmatic and wraps her arms around herself because she’s terribly cold. Andrea isn’t one of those crafty pieces of work who use sex to get on; Andrea could only lose by her relationship with
Jonathan. The tea puddle glistens in the sun peeking through the clouds; Megi’s eyes fill with tears again. She hates herself for this understanding of her rival. Because Megi doesn’t really want to lose Jonathan. She’s crushed by hard facts: his trousers rolled up at the bottom of the wardrobe although she’d told him numerous times to fold them, the sink full of stubble, which – as usual – he hadn’t rinsed out after shaving. Him playing football with the children
.

Again she’s in the grips of atavistic hatred
.

“Mom,” she calls. “Mom!”

Her mother stands in the doorway; Megi weeps but can’t cuddle her, stiff with despair
.

“I could kill them.” Her lips are contorted, she doesn’t recognize herself. “I could kill them!”

Jonathan sits on the terrace of their Brussels apartment. He is alone, in his love and in his pain. He has no doubt that what’s happened to him is love – and it hurts more than lumbago. Andrea and Simon, Andrea and the prat with three women, Andrea and her Scandinavian freedom, Slavic charm, the need to please.

He dissects his lover into basic elements, after all he knows a good deal about her: the daughter of immigrants, her parents – dissident activists, refugees after Prague Spring. They lasted only a few years together once in Sweden. The mother, an ambitious chemist, couldn’t bear working as a cleaner; the father, accustomed to conspiring, to manning the barricade, had lost the ground beneath his feet. They’d missed Prague and the days that had given their lives sense. Andrea was the last outburst of a love that was falling apart in the stagnation of Swedish life. She was born and the world lit up for a moment, then everything went out.

She didn’t remember her father from her childhood; she’d got to know him better once she’d grown up. She spoke well of him, made excuses for him, justified him. With her mother she had a difficult relationship. Andrea had run away from her, first to university, then to work, finally to Brussels. Her father had died shortly after.

Andrea and Simon. Older than her, charismatic, handsome. And he, Jonathan, who was he in her life? The one with whom she laughed, ate with her fingers, was breathless with delight when he dressed her after they’d made love, tilted his head when he mentioned Antosia and
Tomaszek. He tried not to talk about his children because he thought he detected disapproval in her face, boredom – and then she’d told him that she wanted a child by him. But she’d said so many other things, too! That they’d go to the seaside together, that one day he’d show her Warsaw, London, Paris – the places of his youth. And that they’d go to Stockholm – Jonathan would help her get to like the country she’d been brought up in, where she’d been poor, with no money to buy the clothes that her richer, Swedish friends boasted. She wanted him to pour into her some of his admiration for Scandinavia – and much, much more.

She had another, separate world with Simon but, during those years, Jonathan had begun to treat him a little as though he were a character in a comic – a superhero, God’s gift to women, a bit funny in his striving for perfection; an older guy trying to keep up the appearances of youth. And yet it was Simon who was the father of Andrea’s child, he was the one out of the two of them who had, as she would say, “proved himself in action.” It was to him that, as hard as she may deny it, she’d forever tied herself.

“Out of the two of them …” Who else, apart from Simon? Jonathan shakes, his hands wander toward his face, clumsy wooden blocks. He’s cold, even though the winter here is a joke compared to that in Poland and Sweden. He pulls his hands away from his face and his thoughts away from jealousy because they lead to one place only. If he were to touch them with his tongue, it would stick forever.

And yet, through his constant hardening of himself, his opening and closing of wounds, he believes the love has given him strength. Jonathan leans forwards in his chair and stares at the empty apartment opposite. The December sun lights up the sanded floorboards, the decorated walls. The room awaits furniture, movement; the floor is ready for paths to be trodden. A beginning.

Megi wraps the children’s necks with colorful scarves and waves from the window. Tomaszek skips along, Antosia is a little reluctant, she would have preferred to read, but their granny shows them something and they break into a run
.

Megi gazes at the snow below, at the playground, and a boy in a white surplice springs to her mind unexpectedly. She’d been not much older than Antosia when she’d seen him walking next to the priest at the head of a funeral
procession. Her friend had told her that he went to the technical college; Megi remembered his shapely mouth
.

Like Jonathan’s when he’d seen her standing in the middle of the room in a corset. She’d bought it especially to please him; it had been her first outing to the shops by herself after giving birth. Her mother had looked after Antosia and Megi had run off to the shop and squeezed herself into the sexy construction. Before Jonathan returned, she’d drawn the milk from her breasts in order not to leak
.

“It’s fine,” he’d said with a slight grimace, and left. She’d remained alone, in the new corset, like a bride waiting to be unveiled. Except there was nobody to admire her
.

She’d gone back to work, fallen in love. There isn’t only one man, there are many
.

Jonathan entered their bedroom; his eyes fell on what Megi jokingly called the matrimonial bed. It had stood untouched since she left; the throw was still folded over in the corner, a bit of the pillow sticking out like the inside of a dog’s ear. Jonathan perched on the edge as if he were sitting on a sickbed. In his blindness, infatuation, search for sensual pleasure, escape from daily life – he suddenly saw what he’d done to her. So many years, so many lies!

He leaned over, seeking the smell of Megi in the bedclothes, but the pillow no longer smelled of her. He picked up the security pass with her photograph from the floor. Andrea wore a similar one of late, which she carefully placed by the mirror when she came home. Jonathan turned the badge with his wife’s photograph over in his hand. They kept returning to each other, kept thinking about each other – positively and negatively – running the risk of not thinking anything at all.

Passing each other, patching up, endless effort.

Megi turns from the window. It’s stuffy in her mother’s apartment; heating in the blocks can’t be regulated. Communist levelling still holds strong. Megi rests her thighs against the radiator; heat spreads to her hips
.

It wasn’t her lover who’d given her strength to get out of the stalemate of rejection, the euphoria and shock of motherhood, and the sense of being socially lost. She’d thought, at the time, that she was drawing strength from the illicit infatuation. But she, Megi the lawyer, drew her sap from her work. She’d
passed the exam, gone to Brussels. Perhaps somebody else would have sucked strength from love. Her fig leaf was independence
.

J
ONATHAN ASKED
T
OMASZEK
and Antosia at the airport how they’d enjoyed their stay at Granny’s, whether Father Christmas had already delivered presents in Poland, and what was bulging beneath Tomaszek’s jacket.

“A surprise!” cried the little boy, making himself comfortable in the back seat.

Jonathan fastened the seat belt around him. “Is it alive?” he asked carefully.

“Nah!” giggled Tomaszek.

“They almost didn’t let us on the plane,” informed Antosia grimly. “Because this fathead made a collar out of Granddad’s bullets.”

“Bullets?” This time Jonathan didn’t have to feign surprise.

“Blank ones,” Tomaszek corrected. “Granddad said that they don’t shoot any more.”

“But the customs officers didn’t know that,” snorted Antosia. “That’s why they interrogated Mommy and held us so long that …”

“That Antosia peed herself!” laughed Tomaszek.

“No I didn’t!” Antosia lunged to thump her brother.

“Quiet, children!” Megi spoke for the first time since she’d climbed into the car.

“Don’t swing your legs, Tomaszek,” added Jonathan.

“I didn’t, I only wanted to, you idiot, fathead, twit!”

“That’s enough, Antosia!”

“You peed yourself, you peed yourself!”

“Not a word from now on!” thundered Megi and the car fell silent.

When the children went to bed in the evening, Megi started to unpack the suitcases and Jonathan went to the living room. He stood his present, Tomaszek’s surprise, next to his laptop – a dog made of colorful rags, its throat squeezed by a collar of blank bullets. Tomaszek had wailed so much at the airport that, after they’d carefully inspected the blank
bullets, the crew had agreed to put the dog in the baggage hold. Antosia claimed that it was because the soldier had taken a fancy to Megi, Megi assured him that it was because of Tomaszek’s howling, while Tomaszek swore it was thanks to Antosia peeing herself.

Jonathan gazed at the dog, sewn on Granny’s sewing machine. On an impulse, he switched on his computer, found his text, and began printing it. He was sitting on the floor among scattered pages when Megi entered.

“Are you going to tell me what’s going on?” Her voice sounded hard.

Jonathan raised his head from the papers. He was overwhelmed by chaos, how out of touch he was with his text. How could he have let it come to this again?

“If I only knew.”

Megi came closer, her feet almost touching the scattered pages.

“What’s up with you and Andrea?”

He lifted his eyes to her. She stood there, looming over him like the Statue of Liberty; beneath her, the adventures of his dogs lay jumbled.

“What on earth is going on?” she yelled.

Jonathan knows he has to answer her.

Megi stares at him.

They argue, sharp words, hard as stones. She screams about his affair; he repeats, “It’s not true, not true, not true!”