Grażyna Plebanek - Illegal Liaisons

He walked ahead, moving away from the sea, following somebody’s slight silhouette. He thought he would bury the phone. The struggle with himself to resist the temptation of getting in touch with Andrea who, put off by his silence, had given no sign of life, was finishing him off. In the end, he made a wager with himself: if he managed to write a message to Andrea before the slim silhouette ahead of him disappeared in the dark gorge of the beach exit, he would send it.

He pulled the phone out and began typing. He cancelled and wrote anew. He groaned and wiped his eyes, which watered from staring at the blue screen. He began again.

Megi looks back, takes out her phone just in case, quickly searches for her husband’s number, and positions her finger on “call”. What had initially seemed a game of her own imagination, a controlled game of hide-and-seek – she and the archetypal pervert – has imperceptibly turned into painful anxiety .

The man walking behind her brightens the darkness with his phone. Megi quickens her stride. “Have your phone switched on, Jonathan, have your phone …” She shakes beneath her thin jacket and immediately reassures herself. “It must be switched on, he never parts with it.”

With that thought in mind Megi plunges into the darkness .

“Send.” Jonathan’s finger, damp with sweat, pressed the key on his phone while he raised his head. The message he sent was gliding just where he gazed – into the eyes of his lover, brown irises beneath dark lashes and hair so different from the delicate blonde hair of his wife, which their children had inherited.

So he was at Andrea’s mercy once again.

He forged ahead through the dark forest, the rustling leaves deadening the footsteps of the woman before him. He reached the road lit by street lamps and hesitantly pulled out his phone. His heart thumped to the beat of the disco which was blasting out the nearby bar. He looked at the screen. Andrea had written back!

THE PAVLOV DOGSfought for their territory. The city where they had been destined to live struggled with such poverty that nobody wanted to feed the four-legged animals any more. Thrown out into the street, they tried to eat scraps found in trash cans but the bins were already occupied by packs of the homeless – people or dogs. Poodles, Pekingese, and Terriers died, torn apart by the fangs of hungry Alsatians, Dobermans, and the fiercest of street brawlers – Caucasian Sheepdogs. Small dogs made poor food but large dogs used them for training a certain movement of their heads – a quick shake – followed by silence as warm blood dripped from their jaws.

Following the dogs as they dragged him through the stinking side streets of the city, Jonathan wrote with his knees pulled in under a small table that, instead of the usual four legs, had three annoying posts. He spun a different story in his messages to Andrea. Her replies acquired, in the heat of the badly ventilated room, the proportions of visions tempting Simon of the Desert. Racked by the impossibility of fulfilment, unable to believe she would agree, Jonathan finally suggested to his lover that she should come to Warsaw for a weekend.

She replied with a brief “yes.” He leapt from the table, bruising his shin, closed down The Pavlov Dogs on his laptop and left the room. He walked against a stream of children, bumped into windbreakers and rubber dinghies, rubbed against heated bodies in flip-flops. He scanned the family schedule in his mind: on their return from the seaside, they were going to leave the children with Megi’s mother and go to the Masurian Lakes for a few days instead of taking the diving course he’d so much wanted to attend.

He stopped outside a bicycle rental shop, leaned against a pole in the provisional fence, and started to mechanically peel away remnants of bark.

“Bike for you?” A youngster in a red baseball cap struck up the conversation.

Jonathan shook his head. He could tell his wife he wanted some peace to write, and move into his father’s apartment until the latter returned from Croatia. His mother-in-law could help Megi with the children and he’d spend the time with Andrea.

“If you don’t want a bike why’re you hanging around?” The boy’s voice rose strangely toward the end of the sentence.

Mute, Jonathan automatically thought and returned to his recollections of the morning: Megi had snuggled up to him, encouraging him to enter her, but he’d pretended to be asleep. She’d curled up on the other side of the bed. From beneath half-closed eyelids he saw her hair and detected the neat snip of the hairdresser’s scissors. All of a sudden, he passionately longed for the sight of his own hands ruffling Andrea’s hair as they made love.

A stocky man in Hawaiian shorts, with a tattoo of a mermaid fighting for space among the tuft of hair on his back, peered out from the hut bearing the sign “Bikes for 5 zlotys.”

“Can I help you?” he asked.

“Megi, Megi …” The wheel in Jonathan’s head picked up speed, words merged as though on a roulette wheel.

“If you don’t want a bike why are you hanging around? Move away from the fence!”

The youngster, emboldened by his boss’s presence, took a step forward.

“Right!” he added from beneath his peak.

“What do you mean ‘right’?” Jonathan rebuked him before walking away.

If Megi had cried with disappointment or become really angry, it would have been easier for him. But she merely said, “If you’ve got to write, you’ve got to write.” He almost yelled, “I don’t have to, fight for me! Let’s leave like we’d planned.”

She helped him pack his laptop and clean clothes; she even asked whether she should drop some dinner off to him when she was in the neighborhood.

“No!” Jonathan blurted out.

She looked at him amazed; he leaned over to fasten his bag, saying, “I’ve got to tear myself away from reality.”

“I understand.” He heard the amusement in her voice.

The hardest thing was to say goodbye to the children. They gave him a quick kiss, wanting to hurry back to their granny, who was teaching them how to play poker, but Jonathan clung on to them, hugged them until Megi shouted and laughed, “Maybe you’ll stay with us after all?”

Jonathan stood Tomaszek on the floor and slung the bag holding his laptop over his shoulder.

“May the Force be with you!”

Jonathan gave Megi a kiss on the top of her head, waved to his mother-in-law from the door, and left without delay.

His father’s apartment was a collection of treasures from the former, socialist regime – a fake samovar with flaking patches of “silver,” curtain rods to which the clips would cling for good, a drying fern on the sill. The arrival of another woman in his father’s life – perhaps there’d been more after Jonathan’s mother disappeared from his life and his son had gone to school in England – had left no mark on the apartment. Perhaps because his father’s partner of several years, Helena, had two rooms on the same housing estate, thanks to which they could be together while retaining their independence.

On seeing the practically unchanged colors of the walls and fittings that had greeted him when he visited his father during the holidays, Jonathan suddenly missed home. He walked up to the window from which stretched an uninteresting view over the other blocks. His mother’s apartment in London, the different rooms of the boarding school, his father’s apartment, the rented studio in Warsaw where he and Megi had first lived, even the apartment they’d bought with their first earnings, didn’t seem close enough to him to call home. But now, unexpectedly, at the sound of the word “home” the façade of their Brussels apartment building appeared in front of his eyes.