Then his father had summoned an air stewardess with his eyes and put his arm around his wife with a decisiveness which was unusual to him. His mother’s grip had weakened, so Jonathan held on even harder. The air stewardess kneeled down in front of him and said something like, “Oh!”
He wouldn’t have noticed her – he was in despair, and his mother’s hand, slipping away, was growing damp in his hands as if it, too, were crying – had it not been for the stewardess’s eyes. They were sky blue, crystal clear, full of northern brightness. Still kneeling, she had taken his other hand – she had had enough tact not to press her hand into the warmth left by his mother’s touch – and silently stroked him on the cheek.
Her eyes had so riveted Jonathan’s attention that his father had quietly managed to persuade his mother to disappear from the departure lounge unnoticed. When they sat Jonathan down at the round window of the airplane, he was no longer crying. He was soaking up the brilliance of the sky which was merely a faint reminder of the other woman’s gaze. From that moment, his mother had ceased to be his entire world; and he avidly began to track down eyes of sky blue.
Some time after this, his parents divorced; his mother married an Englishman. When Jonathan finished primary school, she had him join her so that he could attend an English secondary school. His father agreed, even at the price of not seeing his son for an indefinite period. He desperately wanted Januszek (that is what the boy was called before his English buddies, unable to pronounce his name, had christened him Jonathan) to be a citizen of the world and not of a country constantly invaded by its neighbors.
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.