Stefan gasped in anger, spread his hand out in front of him, and folded his fingers one by one.
“Alimony, looking for a nanny, choosing a school…”
Jonathan began to wriggle around on the bench.
“More generally,” he interrupted Stefan’s counting, “I’m scared of asking her whether it’s mine.”
“Want to know what I think? Don’t!”
“But what if it is mine? Surely I’ve a right to know. On the other hand, what about my kids? What about Megi?”
Stefan reached for another can of beer, pretending not to see his friend’s contorted face.
“Don’t think in terms of ‘what if,’” he said earnestly. “Do what I do in such cases: check you haven’t got HIV and don’t phone her any more. Then she won’t leave Simon and it’ll all blow over.”
Megi walks briskly past the Hotel Renaissance façade. Jonathan wanted her to buy Tomaszek a pair of trainers for his gym classes on her way back from work because the boy had grown out of his old pair. They couldn’t go together because the children had swimming lessons that afternoon.
“Can’t you do it tomorrow?” She was sitting in front of a pile of papers, finding it hard to turn her mind to domestic matters.
“If he’s grown out of them, he’s grown out of them.” Jonathan cut her short.
Megi enters the black district; ahead of her, Chaussée d’Ixelles tempts with its lights. A pair of shoes gleam in a display she passes: red, with a huge bow at the toes, patent leather. What if she had a pair like that? And a hairpiece to go with them like the one hanging in the hair salon nearby – black, curly hair, not Afro but thick waves. Megi turns the corner. She’s struck by the ad in the pharmacy window for an anticellulite cream: someone is handing a woman a brand new body, a shape on a hanger, smooth and shiny. Megi shudders. But every wrinkle is a notch made by time, a mark denoting “I’ve been there.” What was there to be ashamed of?
Returning with a package in her hand, she watches men in coats and suits sneak along the walls. Of course, the time for “international relations” is coming to an end; the little hotels and brothels were under siege between five and seven when office workers squeezed in pleasure between work and family dinner. Wasn’t it Przemek who’d told her that?
That day he’d proposed they go to lunch and she’d insisted they meet at the Exki; the speed and transitory nature of the place precluded intimacy.
“I’ve been offered a job back in Poland on excellent conditions,” he began ceremoniously. “I can’t tell you exactly what it involves but if I were to take it I’d have a whole team under me, and also,” he smiled, a strand of rocket lodged between his teeth, “lots of power.”
“Congratulations,” she replied.
“As I mentioned before, I’d like to offer you a position in my future team. A lot of responsibilities, decent money, and no small influence over matters. What do you say?”
Megi picked up a plastic spoon. She had to weigh her words. Przemek was, above all, a player and only after that an admirer.
“When would you be starting?”
He smiled with approval. She hadn’t asked when she would be starting because that would have meant she’d agreed; but neither had she said no.
“Early next year.”
Getting into the metro, Megi decides not to tell Jonathan for the time being; she’ll sleep on it first. When she reaches the apartment, she sees that the windows are dark – Jonathan and the children aren’t here yet. He must have treated them to a hot chocolate after their swimming. Megi climbs the stairs and stands in the silence of her own home. Just like six years ago when, after having seen her lover, she returned late on the pretext of having so much work. She’d stood on the threshold then just as she did now – the threshold of happiness and scruples, sexual fulfilment and moral trembling. Or perhaps simply fulfilment and trembling?
And yet she’d broken up with the other man. She extends her fingers and folds them one by one, silently repeating, “One: decision to leave him; two: sticking with the decision; three: getting stuck because of panic that am killing love; four: physical low, body’s mourning; five: first, tiny signs of picking up.”
Megi walks up to the huge window and gazes out at Brussels’s roofs from the dark shell of her apartment. She had coped, picked herself up. Nobody had told her how to do so, she’d got there herself. Now she is stronger, there is more of her. More of her and more about her.
6
JONATHAN SENT ANDREA fewer messages but didn’t stop completely. He’d worked out this strategy when he’d decided to put Stefan’s advice into practice – and although he had a strong feeling that he’d been given a prescription for a different disease, he couldn’t afford to turn up his nose. He needed a remedy immediately.
He reassured Andrea, hinted that at this stage of pregnancy she ought to look after herself, that he was and always would be there, but that they ought to limit seeing each other. He himself started to obsessively invest in family life. First of all, he had a blood test done.
Sitting in the waiting room, he browsed the leaflets about HIV. Dry sentences began to erase Andrea’s kisses from his memory, changed the meaning of tender gestures, of his tongue’s exploits in the depth of her groin. Now he scrutinized those moments with the possibility of being infected, delved into the details without his former excitement, rewound the scenes of their intertwined bodies from a medical point of view. He left millilitres of blood lighter, a venomous feeling of guilt heavier – if he’d caught the virus, he was endangering not only himself as a father but also the innocent Megi!
He decided to avoid physical intimacy with his wife while waiting for the results. But he deceived himself because, although more and more sexually frustrated, he knew that his desire was not directed at Megi. He still wanted only Andrea, even though he put himself off her in his thoughts as much as possible. He even suspected that she wouldn’t notice his remoteness and if she did she would, as was her wont, allow him to distance himself more. But whether the pregnancy had changed her or whether he was not sufficiently tactful, it was enough to make her start sniffing around. So he met her in order to reassure her – in a church once more, because Simon wasn’t going away so often during the last trimester of her pregnancy.
They stood, hidden behind a pillar, facing the altar, her back against his belly, his arms wrapped below her neck. He studied the stained-glass windows and thought that somebody had to break the infernal circle before it sucked in innocent people, children. He wanted to tell her this but couldn’t, so his eyes merely flitted between his lover – the pregnant atheist, a Czech woman brought up in Sweden – and the motionless Virgin Mary to whom his Polish grandmother had prayed. He even tried to remember the words she’d taught him but got stuck at the beginning of the Hail Mary.
He held Andrea in his arms, filled to the brim with love, and then got into his car and drove away. Fewer and fewer messages came, and he was increasingly convinced that he was in a deadlock; even if Andrea were to leave Simon, he wouldn’t leave the children and Megi. As it was, he’d already cut the branch they were sitting on (if Stefan and Przemek’s theory about Simon blocking Megi was correct). Was he, on top of it all, to leave her knowing how much the professional setback had cost her?