She knocks over her mug with her sleeve; the tea spills over the balcony tiles. Megi can’t go to fetch a cloth because her face is all blotchy and Antosia will immediately know she’s been crying and will ask questions. So Megi stands as the brown puddle with tea dregs in the middle freezes over.
Or maybe I should leave him in peace, to sort it out for himself, she now thinks soberly. Not make a middle-class tragedy of it, not make a song and dance? If she leaves Jonathan people will enjoy the game, will watch two people fight. In return they’ll conscientiously condemn the person Megi loves. And she’ll leap into her role as the betrayed, hurt party. Is that what she wants, other people to lick her wounds?
Megi, the lawyer, orders herself to be pragmatic and wraps her arms around herself because she’s terribly cold. Andrea isn’t one of those crafty pieces of work who use sex to get on; Andrea could only lose by her relationship with Jonathan. The tea puddle glistens in the sun peeking through the clouds; Megi’s eyes fill with tears again. She hates herself for this understanding of her rival. Because Megi doesn’t really want to lose Jonathan. She’s crushed by hard facts: his trousers rolled up at the bottom of the wardrobe although she’d told him numerous times to fold them, the sink full of stubble, which – as usual – he hadn’t rinsed out after shaving. Him playing football with the children.
Again she’s in the grips of atavistic hatred.
“Mom,” she calls. “Mom!”
Her mother stands in the doorway; Megi weeps but can’t cuddle her, stiff with despair.
“I could kill them.” Her lips are contorted, she doesn’t recognize herself. “I could kill them!”
Jonathan sits on the terrace of their Brussels apartment. He is alone, in his love and in his pain. He has no doubt that what’s happened to him is love – and it hurts more than lumbago. Andrea and Simon, Andrea and the prat with three women, Andrea and her Scandinavian freedom, Slavic charm, the need to please.
He dissects his lover into basic elements, after all he knows a good deal about her: the daughter of immigrants, her parents – dissident activists, refugees after Prague Spring. They lasted only a few years together once in Sweden. The mother, an ambitious chemist, couldn’t bear working as a cleaner; the father, accustomed to conspiring, to manning the barricade, had lost the ground beneath his feet. They’d missed Prague and the days that had given their lives sense. Andrea was the last outburst of a love that was falling apart in the stagnation of Swedish life. She was born and the world lit up for a moment, then everything went out.
She didn’t remember her father from her childhood; she’d got to know him better once she’d grown up. She spoke well of him, made excuses for him, justified him. With her mother she had a difficult relationship. Andrea had run away from her, first to university, then to work, finally to Brussels. Her father had died shortly after.
Andrea and Simon. Older than her, charismatic, handsome. And he, Jonathan, who was he in her life? The one with whom she laughed, ate with her fingers, was breathless with delight when he dressed her after they’d made love, tilted his head when he mentioned Antosia and Tomaszek. He tried not to talk about his children because he thought he detected disapproval in her face, boredom – and then she’d told him that she wanted a child by him. But she’d said so many other things, too! That they’d go to the seaside together, that one day he’d show her Warsaw, London, Paris – the places of his youth. And that they’d go to Stockholm – Jonathan would help her get to like the country she’d been brought up in, where she’d been poor, with no money to buy the clothes that her richer, Swedish friends boasted. She wanted him to pour into her some of his admiration for Scandinavia – and much, much more.
She had another, separate world with Simon but, during those years, Jonathan had begun to treat him a little as though he were a character in a comic – a superhero, God’s gift to women, a bit funny in his striving for perfection; an older guy trying to keep up the appearances of youth. And yet it was Simon who was the father of Andrea’s child, he was the one out of the two of them who had, as she would say, “proved himself in action.” It was to him that, as hard as she may deny it, she’d forever tied herself.
“Out of the two of them…” Who else, apart from Simon? Jonathan shakes, his hands wander toward his face, clumsy wooden blocks. He’s cold, even though the winter here is a joke compared to that in Poland and Sweden. He pulls his hands away from his face and his thoughts away from jealousy because they lead to one place only. If he were to touch them with his tongue, it would stick forever.
And yet, through his constant hardening of himself, his opening and closing of wounds, he believes the love has given him strength. Jonathan leans forwards in his chair and stares at the empty apartment opposite. The December sun lights up the sanded floorboards, the decorated walls. The room awaits furniture, movement; the floor is ready for paths to be trodden. A beginning.
Megi wraps the children’s necks with colorful scarves and waves from the window. Tomaszek skips along, Antosia is a little reluctant, she would have preferred to read, but their granny shows them something and they break into a run.
Megi gazes at the snow below, at the playground, and a boy in a white surplice springs to her mind unexpectedly. She’d been not much older than Antosia when she’d seen him walking next to the priest at the head of a funeral procession. Her friend had told her that he went to the technical college; Megi remembered his shapely mouth.
Like Jonathan’s when he’d seen her standing in the middle of the room in a corset. She’d bought it especially to please him; it had been her first outing to the shops by herself after giving birth. Her mother had looked after Antosia and Megi had run off to the shop and squeezed herself into the sexy construction. Before Jonathan returned, she’d drawn the milk from her breasts in order not to leak.
“It’s fine,” he’d said with a slight grimace, and left. She’d remained alone, in the new corset, like a bride waiting to be unveiled. Except there was nobody to admire her.
She’d gone back to work, fallen in love. There isn’t only one man, there are many.
Jonathan entered their bedroom; his eyes fell on what Megi jokingly called the matrimonial bed. It had stood untouched since she left; the throw was still folded over in the corner, a bit of the pillow sticking out like the inside of a dog’s ear. Jonathan perched on the edge as if he were sitting on a sickbed. In his blindness, infatuation, search for sensual pleasure, escape from daily life – he suddenly saw what he’d done to her. So many years, so many lies!
He leaned over, seeking the smell of Megi in the bedclothes, but the pillow no longer smelled of her. He picked up the security pass with her photograph from the floor. Andrea wore a similar one of late, which she carefully placed by the mirror when she came home. Jonathan turned the badge with his wife’s photograph over in his hand. They kept returning to each other, kept thinking about each other – positively and negatively – running the risk of not thinking anything at all.