Illegal Liaisons (3 page)

They had met in Warsaw over ten years ago. Stefan, a regular at the parties thrown “chez Kic,” the student hostel on Kicki Street, ran into Jonathan who was staying there unregistered. Their last student kicks brought them together and at every occasion they exchanged stories like the one about Stefan trying to deflower a young lady from the depths of Poland, in the dark mistaking her tights for her hymen.

Jonathan would have called Stefan his best friend had it not sounded in Polish like an avowal. The institution of best friends seemed bookishly pretentious to him (Winnetou and Old Shatterhand), which is why he just called Stefan, Stefan.

They arranged to meet on rue Franklin. Already late, Jonathan rushed, ignoring his cell phone as it swelled with messages from Stefan. At last, in the garden of a little eatery, he caught sight of a well-kept figure constrained by the discipline of a suit, and with fair hair scarcely anyone knew was thinning.

“I’m going to become an alcoholic because of you.” Stefan pointed to the empty glass of beer and gestured for another.

“It’s the nanny, she couldn’t find her way.” Jonathan collapsed into a chair.

“Pretty?”

“She’s got a gold tooth.”

“My aunt had gold canines.” Stefan lost himself in thought.

Jonathan silently raised two thumbs. He had got the nanny’s details from a Polish plumber but this was not what he wanted to talk about.

He had just opened his mouth to say something when a round from a machine gun resounded.

Stefan dug out his cell and read the text.

“Kalashnikov fire?” Jonathan leaned back in his chair. “Poland, the Christ of Nations, as our poet says?”

Stefan made nothing of it and slipped the phone into his pocket.

“It goes off when there’s a text from Monika.”

The waitress stood their beers in front of them.

“How is she?” Jonathan reached for his packet of cigarettes. “Found a job?”

Stefan fished out a bit of dirt from his glass. Monika, Stefan’s wife of over ten years, was born twenty years too late. In the ’60s she would have been, as Jonathan’s father said, to his son’s linguistic horror, a typical dolly bird; twenty years later, next to her long-legged, blonde classmates, she looked middle-aged.

Stefan had gone out with her during his first year of studies but could not endure the monogamy. When they met again, two years after college, Monika consoled him after a heavy-going relationship he had had with a domineering French philology student. She fell pregnant. Stefan treated her honorably: he proposed and she accepted.

After their daughter’s birth, Monika brought her mother over to help with the child; the mother lived with them, taking turns with several aunts. The elderly women all dunked pieces of bread roll in milk in exactly the same way and smoked forty cigarettes a day; Stefan could not tell them apart. The two-room apartment grew gray from smoke and Stefan’s pleas to smoke on the balcony because of the child met with a shrug. Stefan, who was not sure which of the aunts he was addressing, soon hung a notice up in the kitchen prohibiting smoking in the apartment. The notice disappeared, and the apartment continued to turn gray with smoke.

Stefan had no access to his daughter. The short, buxom women with tight perms kept strolling with his child through the gardens of the housing estate, until he felt superfluous in his own apartment. Monika, meanwhile, had found employment with a leasing company and held a position the name of which nobody was capable of remembering.

When several years later Stefan was besotted with a colleague from work, Monika – with infallible instinct – fell pregnant again. The result
was a son, Franek. Stefan bought a larger apartment because the number of carers at home doubled.

When offered a job in Brussels, Stefan deluded himself that he would go alone, but Monika packed up herself, their teenage daughter and the younger Franek, bade farewell to leasing, and was ready for the move. Stefan merely managed to negotiate that no one from their village should accompany them.

“Monika?” Stefan glanced at his cell. “She’s not found any work yet. It’s hardly surprising, she doesn’t speak any languages.”

“And how are things with you at work?” Jonathan quickly changed the subject.

Stefan came to life. He could talk for hours about work; he observed and played out personal relations with a passion. He pointed out his empty glass to the waitress and started to summarize the latest reshufflings in the Directorate General for Enlargement, where he was a senior administrator. All that Jonathan remembered was the abbreviation used for the place where his friend worked – “enlarg” from “enlargement,”

When Stefan paused to drink, Jonathan confessed.

“I’ve been offered a job.”

“In the Commission?”

“No.”

“Media?”

Jonathan remained silent, building suspense.

“They want me to run a course in creative writing.”

Stefan squinted. His pale eyes, which usually expressed a certain wickedness that women found attractive, showed careful thought.

“How much?”

“Don’t ask.” Jonathan lowered his head.

“That bad?” Stefan reached for a cigarette. “What does Megi say?”

The previous evening flashed before Jonathan’s eyes. Frequent dealings with his wife’s answering machine had led him to hope that the modulated voice of the machine might have undertones of sexual promise. In reality, instead of arousing the imagination, it pushed his thoughts into a gutter as narrow as a sledge track. Megi had finally answered late into the evening but her voice had sounded distorted and distant. She was still at a meeting that was meant to finish past midnight. She could not talk for long. She merely asked about the
children and Jonathan sensed some of the energy, bubbling in him since the morning, turn into anger. He pressed the cell button hard, bidding goodbye to the word “wife” with his eyes.

“We didn’t even have an opportunity to talk,” he muttered. “Megi works till late.”

“Someone has to,” laughed Stefan and Jonathan stared at him thoughtfully. Everyone had faults and Stefan’s was a lack of tact. “Anyway, if the pay’s poor, don’t bother. Look for something else.”

“But it’s interesting! I can put the curriculum together myself. It grabs me.”

Stefan thanked the waitress with a nod as she stood a beer in front of him.

“How old are you? That’s what can grab you.” He indicated the girl as she walked away. “Work sets you up. You’ve got a degree, experience as a journalist, languages. Am I to tell you what to do? After all …”

He stopped as his cell started ringing in his pocket.

“I’m at work,” he said into the phone. “Dinner. Business. What do you mean you don’t understand what the mail from school says? All right, I’ll be finished soon.”

He hung up, downed his beer, and turned to Jonathan.

“Think of a sensible job. Oh, and the vice-head of the task force is holding a party on Friday. Megi’s probably got an invitation. Make sure you come!”

J
ONATHAN
’
S THOUGHTS
rarely turned to the first time he had met Andrea. The moments in which they later immersed themselves occupied more space in his memory; and they had leapt into something more intense – they insisted – than ever before.

Jonathan’s memory turned out to be a clever device that didn’t prompt comparisons, at least not when he was with Andrea. She was his goal, his oxygen, and his delicacy; he mounted her, lived by her breath, eagerly licked the nipples adorning the olive-skinned spheres of her breasts. Images of the bodies of women with whom he had been in the past,
including the pale recollection of his wife’s body, lay forgotten at the bottom of his memory.

Jonathan set out to climax with Andrea carrying no burdens, only his ego, which never physically let him down – something that filled him with pride. When later they lay side by side – and these were limited minutes of pure happiness, which disappeared as soon as they parted – Andrea, as women are wont to do, would say something like, “I remember the first time I saw you.” In her postcoital stupefaction, she could think of nothing else. She, so intelligent, witty, wise, wanted to whisper only about them. And so Jonathan, who had a similar vacuum in his head, hid behind the smoke of his cigarette and murmured, “Yes, yes, I remember.”

The truth came out when it turned out that “when I first saw you” meant something different than him and to her. Andrea counted their days together from their first meeting, he from their first lovemaking.

“Two different calendars!” shouted Andrea, knitting her dark brows. Did they have anything in common whatsoever? She was angry but a moment later forgave him, and Jonathan suspected that the abyss which proved his masculine lack of sensitivity in some way excited her.

Jonathan did, in fact, remember the first time he saw Andrea but he didn’t tell her because he didn’t want her to have any power over him. He had already realized that she could be cruel when she caught a whiff of blind attachment. He didn’t want her to wave a sheet stained with blood, his blood, in front of his nose, so he let her refresh this “forgotten” memory for him.

Each time she spoke about the first time, Andrea added something new, some element she had previously overlooked. In this way she constructed their mythical beginning. Jonathan, meanwhile, silently struggled to hold on to his own. Frankly, he was afraid of her myth. He sensed that in repeating her story, his lover was spreading her web around him. And he was scared of it, just as every man is scared when he suspects he’s being trapped, even though all she tied him with was the thread of a story.

When he thought about his first meeting with Andrea, Jonathan tried to recall facts: the well-kept apartment with its stained-glass window over the stairwell and enormous hall ending in a garden. As always, the size of living areas in Brussels staggered him. Unfortunately, the large room reminded him of a toilet bowl festooned with dried turds, and Jonathan
would readily have scoured the knick-knacks and growths of souvenirs with steel wool.

He took a glass of champagne from the tray offered by a waiter and merged in with the crowd. People stood in groups in the middle of the room, some dressed in suits, others in jeans, yet Jonathan sensed that they were not quite as at ease as they pretended to be. He was just about to share his thoughts with Megi, who had come up to him with a glass, when she grabbed him by the arm and pulled him toward the nearest gathering.

“This is my husband, Jonathan,” she introduced him.

“Delighted …” Jonathan shook hands with the slim man.

“This is Ian, who looks after European parliamentary relations in the organization of employers.”

“My pleasure …”

“This is my husband, Jonathan. Jonathan, meet Peter. Peter is the spokesman for …”

“Aha …”

“I’m Megi, and this is my husband, Jonathan. We’ve been in Brussels for over a month. No, we haven’t seen the Atomium yet. Jonathan? Have you met Margit? She is deputy spokesman for …”

“For?”

“At the European Commission.”

“In the European Commission …”

“From the Commission …”

“Excuse me a moment, I’ve an urgent call.” Retreating, Jonathan reached into the pocket of his jacket.

He leaned against a table laden with snacks, mown down by social apathy. A private apartment and waiters, people in jeans but on stiff legs, a host with the handshake of a wet fish and a hostess with the face of Cinderella’s sister. Were they having a good time here, or working?

He grabbed a carrot and nibbled it quickly.

“You’re not from the Commission?” The question sounded like an affirmation.

Next to him stood a woman he didn’t know.

“It’s that obvious, is it?” he sighed.

She laughed and held out her hand.

“Andrea.”

Much later, he noticed that her hands were different from the rest of her body; they were wide, as if older, which she tried to disguise with a neat manicure. He hadn’t noticed at the time because Andrea was only just emerging from a haze of unfamiliarity. Tall and slim, she turned to take a canapé. Her buttocks were small and so round that he wanted to knead them.

“And don’t worry about those people.” She smiled, pointing at the undulating human circle. “Look, those on the outer circle are trainees …”

Jonathan looked at the twentysomethings whose faces were turned toward the center of the circle.

“… those closer to the center are higher-ranking officials. See the bald one on the right?”

“The bullet head?”

“He’s sharpening his teeth for the position of minister’s adviser. While the fat one with a muff of hair is angling for the still warm place of a colleague who was promoted to another department.”

“And the man everyone’s looking at?” asked Jonathan, indicating the center where a tall, slim, gray-haired man was standing. The charisma emanating from him could be felt even at a distance.

“He’s the head of cabinet for the Justice Commissioner.” Andrea smiled.

“He’s boss of them all?” Jonathan was lost.

“He’s their god.”

The circle shuffled as the head of cabinet for the Commissioner retreated, shaking the outstretched hands as he went.

Andrea glanced at her watch.

“It was nice to meet you,” she said.

Jonathan felt an unexpected wrench within, a child’s voice screaming, “I want!” Perhaps it was the trace of a Swedish accent in her practically perfect English?

“What do you do?” he asked in desperation.

“I work for Swedish television. And you?”

“I write.”

“Articles?”

“Books.”

“Ohhh!”

Jonathan slipped his hands into his pockets. He loved this sort of reaction. He knew from experience that he ought to enjoy it to the full because it generally preceded another, less desirable one that began with the question: “And what do you write?”

“Fairy tales.”

He usually bore the phase of “losing face” manfully but this time he added equivocally, “I was recently offered a job to run a course in creative writing in Brussels.”

“Ohhh!”

“But for financial reasons I suppose I ought to try for a place in the Commission …”