Illegal Liaisons (2 page)

A few years later, both parents used the same argument and, once he had finished school, pressed him to study in France. There, he found a second pair of intensely blue eyes – he met the Swedish girl, Petra. The first time he saw her, she was hanging onto the back of a friend, too drunk to stand upright. She had the face of Grace Kelly, straight nose and classic, arched eyebrows. A shiver ran down his back when she looked
at him – icy irises, misty with an excess of alcohol. He helped to lay her down on the couch in the student hostel, and stretched out next to her.

He didn’t sleep that night, only watched her and dreamt of putting his lips around her clitoris. When he could no longer bear the girl’s heavy sleep, he touched her lips with his fingers.

Nothing happened between them that morning but from then on, Jonathan didn’t leave her. Everything about her excited him, even the fact that she wouldn’t let herself be fathomed. Taciturn, reserved, only in bed did she turn warm. She wasn’t very keen on experimenting but when he took her on all fours, she stuck her rump out like a cat until her thighs trembled and a quiet whine escaped her lips. As soon as she climaxed, he would slip out of her, turn on his back and gaze into her pupils, the cold blue of her irises becoming black.

Every night he warmed the angelically pale, slender body until it had started to tire the girl. It seemed she welcomed her periods with relief, so as to be able to forbid him access, but blood didn’t put him off; he liked the heightened sliminess of her vagina, the metallic scent mixed with the smell of sex. He pumped hard until his skin grew damp and, seized with tingling excitement, sucked her tongue with abandon.

In spring, Petra was on edge for a month, didn’t allow him to touch her; finally, she told him she was pregnant. For an instant, he imagined a tiny person with blue eyes, but Petra wouldn’t hear of it. He helped her a little after the abortion; the girl’s face, as usual, didn’t betray much, only her eyes looked as if all color had seeped from them.

They remained together another two months. Petra’s beauty inspired general admiration, and Jonathan was prompted by an atavistic instinct to keep an eye on her. On the other hand, he already knew what she was capable of in bed.

After graduating in France, Jonathan went to Poland for a holiday. He lived with his father, visited relatives, enjoyed the taste of Polish sausages and the accessibility of Polish vodka. He felt “warm” in Poland. People opened up the moment they ceased to smell deceit in his accent; they rubbed against each other on buses and trams, yelled and hooted, sweated in anger at the government and at their neighbors, and laughed at drunkards anchored to bus and tram shelters.

He was about to go back when he met Magda at a party. Younger by a year, she was just writing her Master’s dissertation. She had brown eyes and full lips. Although he had had a good number of girls before – there was even a time when he was attracted by neurotics as fragile as chipped vases (he tried to put them together but as soon as he left they fell apart again) – she was exceptional.

It was because of Magda – nicknamed “Megi” by his buddies because she was Jonathan’s girlfriend – that he stayed in Warsaw. He found a job as a journalist and began to earn good money with which they rented a studio apartment. They got married; in 1998 Megi gave birth to Antosia and four years later to Tomaszek.

When they left Poland in 2005, Jonathan had already acted out several stages of adult life. He had chanced upon a turning point in history, and when capitalism had opened its jaws to young, unaffected people with a knowledge of languages, he had begun to earn decent money working first as a translator, then as a journalist. He had taken out a loan at the right moment and bought an apartment; later, when he was selling it, the price of real estate had gone up and Jonathan had made a fair profit.

He also had a few irrational phases behind him. Although an unbeliever, he feared that – having been born on December 24 with a name beginning with “J” – he would not live to see his thirty-fourth birthday. Things turned out otherwise, and Jonathan, who had a son at this critical age, became euphoric and made a decision that his friend, Stefan, said was a result of postnatal shock – he resigned from his job on a widely read newspaper in order to stay at home with the child.

Care of the newborn turned out to be the hardest task he had ever undertaken. He tried to focus on nothing but that, yet when he was offered an article to write, he kissed the hand which offered it. Then came another offer and another; finally, he started translating. Soon it was clear that he was backing out of paternity leave. And since his wife, counting on him, had gone back to work six weeks after the baby was born, they had to hire a nanny to look after Tomaszek. The woman’s wage was almost as much as Jonathan was bringing home as a freelancer.

For a long time Megi reproached him for not staying with the child like she had, sacrificing two years of her career for their daughter. It was easy for her to talk. She claimed it hadn’t been easy but, as Jonathan saw
it, she had blended effortlessly into the landscape of the sandpit. After a month of changing diapers, he, on the other hand, felt his buddies were no longer treating him as one of their own, and that the mothers, rhythmically rocking their prams, did not see him as a man.

Yet there was something at which he had succeeded. During his failed paternity leave, he had written a book. It was a children’s story, born of the rapture he felt for his daughter and son, seasoned with a sense of guilt that he was unable to give them one hundred percent of his time even though women could – some men, too – and even though it was growing fashionable throughout the world.

He wrote another story to go with the first and then a third; and before he knew it he was being invited to literary evenings where mothers of gap-toothed fans pressed books at him to sign. And somehow, without great plans, he had become a writer of fairy tales. As a counterbalance, he dressed, at the time, like a war correspondent, until he found out that camouflage waistcoats were a hit in health spas.

W
HEN THE ALARM RANG
, Jonathan hoped for a moment it might be Saturday. The smell of breakfast and the barely perceptible scent of Megi’s perfume drifted upstairs. The front door slammed. Monday.

He dragged himself to the bathroom. He was tall, slender, with his mother’s dark hair, which he didn’t like to cut. He pushed it back, put his glasses on and, although his jaws had grown stubble overnight, he let it go – he didn’t have the energy to shave.

With a sense of duty unusual for a seven-year-old, Antosia got up without having to be told off; Tomaszek allowed himself to be carried to the bathroom then stood in front of the toilet bowl. Peeing with his eyes shut, he cursed the fate of a preschooler. By the time Jonathan came to make the children’s beds, his son had crept back to his room and buried himself beneath the duvet.

“Tomaszek,” Jonathan stood over the small mound, hands on hips. “Get up!”

“Tosia’s in the bathroom,” came from beneath the duvet.

“Antosia, out with you!”

“I’m looking for my bobby pin! He’s hidden it.”

“Then take another one,” shouted Jonathan.

“I don’t want another one. I want the one he’s hidden!”

Jonathan fished his son out from beneath the duvet.

“Tomaszek, give Antosia back her bobby pin.”

“What bobby pin?” The boy’s gray eyes opened wide.

Jonathan started to laugh, and Tomaszek, giggling impishly, jumped beneath the duvet again.

“Get up, we’re late.” Jonathan tried to keep a straight face. “To the bathroom, quick march!”

“But she’s in there.”

“Antosia!”

“I’ll come out when he’s given me back my bobby pin!”

Half an hour later, they were caught in a traffic jam. A single line of cars crept along the avenue de Roodebeek – both sides of the street were being repaired – and they picked up speed only once they had dived into the tunnel. Getting on to the Montgomery roundabout was like driving a car at a fairground, with everyone barging into the first free space in the outside lane.

Jonathan kissed Antosia goodbye in front of the school then ran with Tomaszek to his classroom. Tiny Asians, white children, and a few Africans were running down the corridors. Jonathan glanced at one of the mothers, an Italian with a shapely bust beneath her tight blouse. Someone started talking to him: a Canadian woman wanted to arrange for her son to play with Tomaszek in the afternoon. She was not pretty, but Poland for her was not simply associated with plumbers; a lawyer, like Megi, she had read Kosinski and Kapuscinski.

Seeing the farmer from Ohio approaching, Jonathan leaned over to her. The other rooster in this henhouse, the American had informed Jonathan of his Polish roots on the day they met. He knew the word “dupa” [ass], wore glasses and a hairstyle with a painfully neat parting; the mothers whispered that he was a retired prison guard from Ohio.

Jonathan said goodbye to the Canadian woman and made his way to the parking lot. He didn’t turn the key in the ignition immediately; he didn’t want to go home. Their possessions had arrived and stacks of
boxes were waiting for him in the apartment. He unpacked some every day, yet the stacks didn’t seem to diminish.

He pulled out of the parking lot only to stop again at a bistro in the nearby square. He bought a coffee and booted up his laptop. One email, from Stefan.

Before opening it, he looked around cautiously. Jonathan’s friend – one of Megi’s colleagues from student days who, like her, had got a job at the Commission and moved to Brussels – usually attached pages of porn to his emails. This time, too, a pair of breasts loomed on screen. Jonathan closed the laptop a little – he had told Stefan so many times that he was an ass man, that he preferred shapely backsides and long legs.

After a while, he peeked at the photograph. He distrusted men who claimed not to look at naked girls because they found them crude, or to watch porn films because the dialogue was boring.

In the end, he beckoned to the waiter. He felt guilty – Megi was working hard at the office while he was sitting in the sun, looking at porn.

W
HEN THEY HAD BOUGHT
the air tickets from Warsaw to Brussels in the spring of 2005, a weight fell from Jonathan’s shoulders. For the past ten years he had been living in one place. He had allowed himself to become domesticated by his love for Megi. He didn’t complain but his hankering after travel felt like a gunshot wound. He anticipated that moving to another country with a family of four would resemble Circus Knee on the move but was still tempted by the vision of a sailing ship promising freedom.

In 2005, Megi had received a gift from fate: an offer to work in Brussels. She had, in fact, been preparing for the EU exams for a long time, and had passed them; even though her relatives, who wanted to see in her above all a wife and mother, were prone to put the Brussels offer down to coincidence and to what Uncle Tadeusz liked to call ‘sheer luck’.

When Megi found out that she had passed the exams and been offered a job – thanks to which she could support a family of four in the middle of Europe – she initially cowered, as though she had shouted and brought down an avalanche. Then she locked herself in the kitchen for a few evenings and jotted down arguments for and against. Jonathan, who knew all too well that trying to persuade Megi to do anything could bring about the opposite effect, chose to wait. Finally, she scrunched up
the pieces of paper, sat down at the kitchen table, and called Jonathan. A few days later, they invited their more distant family to tea in order to inform them – amid the sweet fumes of apple pie – that they were moving to Brussels.

The first to take offence was Uncle Tadeusz; this was not, in his opinion, what true patriotism should look like. He pronounced the word like “patriotis,” and Jonathan would have readily bitten him in his fat leg because, ever since Jonathan had resigned from his job, the uncle had been casting doubt on his masculinity. “Real men don’t act like that,” grumbled the pensioner, while other relatives asked, “What do you want to go live among strangers for?” and, “Why go to that Belgium?”

Megi and Jonathan left behind the Wedel chocolate cakes – “so that you have something sweet to eat in Belgium” – entrusted the children to their grandmother, and one spring day in 2005, stood on an unfamiliar square, squinting in a light familiar from great Flemish paintings. The moment was like a safe haven in his memory, a moment of respite, until daily routine reasserted itself.

A
FEW WEEKS AFTER
the move, the rhythm of work was regulating Megi’s new life; Jonathan, on the other hand, was still all over the place. Too many boxes and numerous domestic duties, to which he was no longer accustomed in Warsaw, fell on his shoulders, as if in revenge for his escape from paternity leave. Slowly, it dawned on him that the travels he had been used to in his youth and after which he hankered, were now different. The sailing boat had turned out to be a barrel-shaped barge.

The apartment, inundated with cardboard boxes, began to force him out into the city, but the paths outside were not yet smooth. Jonathan, who had enjoyed the life of a freelancer in Warsaw, decided to seek a permanent job. He had to tame the city not as a tourist but as a resident. And, more importantly, most of his income as a journalist had been cut off when he left Poland so he had practically nothing in his account. Jonathan discovered he didn’t like taking money from his wife’s account. It made him feel – what, precisely?

He didn’t analyze his state of mind too deeply; he wasn’t one to delve into himself to such an extent. He sent his CV out to umpteen places and soon emails started to arrive, until one day he came across a letter that excited him. It wasn’t an attachment from Stefan but an offer of work – riveting to the last paragraph. When he reached the bit about pay, he groaned with disappointment.

He went home to put up some shelves but the thought of the strange job did not leave him. Every now and again, he grabbed a notebook and, using one of Tomaszek’s crayons, jotted down ideas that came into his head. Unable to bear it any longer, he phoned Megi. He bounced off her answering machine and pressed the next number on his list – Stefan’s.