3
WHEN 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.
WHEN 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.
4
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?