“Kramer versus Kramer?”
“Yes, something like that. She was different, held herself upright. She said she couldn’t find a job here, that her daughter, I quote, ‘has fallen into bad company”, and Franek has stopped speaking Polish. And that she wants to leave. It’s a shame because she’s set up such a great club for the children of poorer Poles. She’s got people who help them with their lessons, computers…”
“And Stefan?” interrupted Jonathan.
“I think he’s walking on burning coal.” Antosia had not taken her eyes off the Indian. “Even the soles of his feet are black.”
“Or he didn’t wash them before going to bed, yuk!” Tomaszek rattled off, sneaking a crafty look at his parents.
“They’re the man’s shoes,” threw out Megi for the sake of peace and quiet, then said to Jonathan, “I asked her about Stefan, too, but she only shrugged.”
Jonathan scratched his head.
“I ought to phone him.”
Megi looked at her watch and called, “Come on, kids, say goodbye to Daddy! We’ve still got quite a way to go and I bet we’ll get stopped again, like last time when Tomaszek was smuggling his compass.”
Jonathan picked Tomaszek up, ruffled his hair and told him to help Mommy. Antosia hugged him and asked him to feed her tortoise every day.
“What tortoise?” Jonathan worried.
“The plasticine one. He likes lettuce and jelly babies. You will remember, won’t you?” She looked at him sternly.
“Lettuce.” Jonathan clicked his fingers.
“And jelly babies,” added Antosia, menacingly.
“Typical tortoise food.”
Megi walked up and snuggled up to him with her whole body. They hadn’t made love the night before but ended up talking and watching their favorite series. Jonathan grasped her tightly around the waist.
“What do you think, should I tell Stefan or not?” he asked, handing her her hand luggage. “You know, so he’s not the last to know.”
“He’ll find out when the time’s right.” Megi waved it away.
“He’s a close friend.”
“Friendship isn’t just passing on the latest bit of information.”
Jonathan adjusted Tomaszek’s hat, gave Antosia another kiss.
“We didn’t manage to talk again, as usual,” he threw at his wife as she walked away.
Megi handed their passports to passport control, let the children go before her.
“And what was the other piece of gossip?” he called.
“Oh!” She stopped. “Monika said Andrea’s left Simon.”
book five
Brussels, December 2008
JONATHAN WONDERED how his story about the pack of mongrels ought to end. Being superstitious, he opted for a happy ending – poor penmanship perhaps, but full of optimism. On the other hand, a dramatic ending would offer him a chance to leave the shelf of children’s writers and climb to that of adult writers. “Why did you let The Pavlov Dogs get caught by the dog-catchers?” he imagined being asked during a writer’s evening. “Because you can’t live outside the law. At least if you’re a dog,” would be his answer.
But the dogs had had enough of his writer’s strategy. They went where they wanted to go but were happiest in Brussels because here streets branched from roundabouts in five different directions or more. Jonathan could only run after them.
1
ANDREA GREETED HIM at the open door; the light from inside filtered through her lightweight maternity shirt. He gently put his arms around her; her belly barely fitted beneath her bust.
“You found your way all right?” she asked.
He snuggled up to her hair, which had grown even more, and into the crook of her neck. How good she smelled! She herself had a theory that as long as people were attracted to each other by their smell, there was desire; when the smell lost its fragrance, love evaporated. He took her face in his hands and started to kiss – her eyes, her nose, forehead, chin… He nibbled at her ears, licked her hair-line until she started breathing heavily.
At one point she gently pushed him away.
“We’ve probably got to talk first,” he muttered reluctantly.
“No, no we don’t,” she said, took him by the hand and led him into her new apartment.
They were careful with their lovemaking. Jonathan turned her over like a newly acquired treasure; she fitted her new shape to him. If it wasn’t for the fact that he remembered what time Megi’s flight had been, he would have thought he and Andrea caressed with no beginning and no end. It was dark when she let him in, dark when he made himself comfortable within her, dark when he slipped out, dark when he felt the nagging in his groin again. Only toward morning did the light bring out her features and the thought crossed his mind that the problem with beauty was that it existed only here and now. That this moment, too, would fade.
Andrea stirred and stretched herself. They had only seen each other once in the morning, it occurred to Jonathan, a long time ago, in Warsaw. Suddenly he was embarrassed by this new intimacy: he briefly deliberated whether to leap out of bed and brush his teeth, or kiss her first – it was so long since he hadn’t woken up next to another woman.
“Hey,” she said in Swedish. The familiar word, the language of his first love, Petra, greeted him in his lover’s new home.
“Hey,” he replied.
The first morning after their night together, he found three messages from Megi. He rang back, superstitiously stepping out of Andrea’s apartment into the street. Megi’s tone was cold, the same as when she spoke about professional matters. She asked why he hadn’t picked up the phone; he replied that he had run out of battery. She wanted to know how his work on The Pavlov Dogs was going; he lied that it was going well. Megi fell silent so he asked about the children, her mother, his father, Uncle Tadeusz, Aunt Barbara, and the rest of the family, whose names he barely remembered. Odysseus came to his mind, the hero who conquered so many women and islands that his beginnings dimmed in his memory. “What beginnings?” he asked himself, pocketing his phone.
For him, everything began the moment he’d stood at the threshold of his lover’s apartment, on the top floor of an old apartment building where there was a lift with a grille like a birdcage. He had immediately taken to St Gilles, the massive church at the back of her tenement and the market with its weekly stalls.
He didn’t go home after that first night – he lived at Andrea’s for the duration of his stolen freedom. He bought some new toiletries in the corner shop, a few T-shirts and some boxer shorts as a change of underwear; when he put his jeans and sweatshirt into the washing machine, he couldn’t leave the apartment until they dried.
Every morning Andrea left for her new job, bidding him goodbye with a gentle kiss – she wore lipstick and he knew he shouldn’t hug her passionately when she was made-up, which is why he woke up very early in the morning – his erection a fail-safe alarm clock – and fucked her lazily until they were both satiated. He didn’t compare Andrea to Megi, Petra, or any other woman whom he only partially remembered. He took her, his terra incognita, and learned from scratch on this isle of freedom – he, a human wreck with a meager supply of underpants.
They argued a great deal during those days; trivial things took on the proportions of stumbling blocks thrown beneath their four uncoordinated legs. A moment later they wrapped their legs around each other and writhed. Many words were left unsaid but this suited Jonathan, and Andrea was similar in this respect. Instead of talking, he preferred to cook her the best dinners possible. Choosing victuals, he milled around the market stalls; he didn’t look around apprehensively to see if there was anyone he knew nearby. He didn’t even have an explanation at hand in case he did meet someone unexpectedly. At last, he felt free – after years of fibbing and hiding, it had started to be all the same to him.