Grażyna Plebanek - Illegal Liaisons

Jonathan stared at him in silence.

“You think we enjoy all this?” Stefan said, riled. “That life’s easy when colleagues laugh about Poland being ruled by the clergy and a couple of twins, and lunch in Poland means vodka and sausages? If anyone’s got the strength they challenge it, if not they watch Polish television and keep inviting their family and friends to visit. And why? So that they can see for themselves what a civilized country looks like. And bring poppy-seed cake.”

Stefan leaned back, wiped the sweat from his forehead with his wrist.

“That’s what life’s like among strangers. Understand?” He reached for his beer.

Jonathan said he did but a moment later asked, “What strangers?”

Jonathan walked home, pushing his bicycle. Although blue with cold, the city had miraculously retained its coziness. Cinquantenaire Park seemed vaster than in summer; the sky broke through the leafless branches on which green parrots swung. Usurpers in a world of satiated starlings and sparrows, forbidden goods which had given a smuggler the slip, they had multiplied and adapted to their new environment. Now they flew in green flocks, squawking, and sweeping their long tails. Only the emerald of their feathers linked them to the “lost little parrots.” With hooked beaks they hammered the local birds on the head, not afraid of even the magpies.

“You live in a world of fairy tales!” Stefan had thrown at him before they parted ways. They had quarrelled, not for the first time, but so fiercely that Jonathan was deeply stung.

“So what?” he’d fumed.

“So,” Stefan had yelled heatedly, “they’re not Polish fairy tales!”

“Are you mad?” Jonathan was stunned. “And Andersen’s tales are Danish, are they?”

But Stefan had only waved it aside. The splash of nationalism he’d spilled on the table of the Belgian eatery was an unknown aspect of Stefan. Jonathan had suddenly seen the hard face of a football fanatic before him.

The deeper he went into the park, the more vengefully he thought about his friend. Was Stefan jealous of his love for Andrea? He lived from fuck to fuck, just like his father had and his grandfather.

Jonathan stood still and studied the criss-crossing alleys of the park, their geometrical forkings, their evenly trimmed hedges. Did Andrea also think of him as a Pole? And what kind of a Pole: one proud of his history or one who represents a nation of collaborators, like some people from “the West” considered Poles to be? He’d been made aware of this variant by a certain American woman who, when he’d taken offence, had patted him on the shoulder and said, “Don’t worry, the French also collaborated with the Germans.”

As he strolled down the alley, he thought anxiously that, after all, Stefan and Andrea were similar in a way. He reset his mind with a grind, trying to see Andrea from a different perspective. If he closed his eyes to her beauty, education, the fact that she knew several languages fluently and coped perfectly well with working abroad, who was she? The daughter of Czech immigrants, one who associated churches with empty shells of the past. A child with a key around its neck, running around between blocks where an apartment had been allocated to refugees. The poorest girl in class who never felt at home in sated Sweden and was fed stories about a distant revolution by her parents. An ambitious scholarship holder, curious about the world, aesthetically in love with the apartments of Brussels, a snob collecting English tea sets and cutlery, the partner of a financially and professionally well-placed Briton, head of cabinet for the Commissioner, the trophy wife of a charismatic fifty-year-old.

He stood still. Holding on to that perspective, who in that case was he? A writer untainted by official connections, an artist and outsider, “a warrior’s respite.” an idealist thanks to whom she returned to the dreams of her past? No, no, that’s how he liked to think of himself when looking at himself through the eyes of his Andrea. But now he wanted to look at himself through the eyes of Stefan’s Andrea. Was he for her (whoever she was) a handsome, trouble-free lover, but also – and here in a rather secondary guise – a Pole?

A couple of hours later, the children already washed, he came downstairs. Megi was still reading to them and, while waiting for their evening together – two hours blissfully vegetating with an unambitious film and pistachios at hand – he opened his computer. Stefan had emailed, explaining that he’d lost his temper and shouldn’t have yelled like that. He attached “something as an apology.”

Full of foreboding, Jonathan moved the mouse to “attachment.” Enormous breasts filled the screen, gaudy advertisements floated across the nipples. Half-blinded, Jonathan searched for where to click to turn them off but the mouse froze, fixing the arrow at the groove between the breasts.

“Right!” He heard his wife’s voice behind him.

“Ay, ay!” Jonathan nervously rubbed the mouse over the table surface.

“I knew it.” Megi put her hands on his chair.

“And you still stand there,” groaned Jonathan. “As if I wasn’t humiliated enough! A moment later and you’d have caught me with my hand down my trousers.”

“I wonder,” Megi kneaded her chin and bent over, squinting, “what it’s really advertising.”

“That’s what you’re wondering?”

“Some sort of liquid no doubt. Yes!” She pointed to the writing. “There it is. Liquid for washing car windows.”

Jonathan clicked on the cross, the breasts vanished and Megi straightened herself, giggling.

“You caught me out,” Jonathan said without guilt.

“Good thing it was only that,” she muttered, moving off to the kitchen.

Jonathan unwittingly froze, then reluctantly made after her.

“Good thing it wasn’t the same as Stefan …”

Jonathan slipped his hands into the pockets of his jeans.

“Okay, we’ve got the background, we’ve got the suspense, now let’s have the climax,” he said.

Megi rested her elbows on the work surface, which extended into the living room. Jonathan was tickled by the thought that she must have known how good she looked in that position. The breasts on the screen were nothing compared to her tits, as shapely as apples, and her butt – a little flatter than Andrea’s – took on womanly shapes when she bent forward.

“I caught him red-handed with Aneta,” she whispered secretively.

“No!” exclaimed Jonathan.

Megi scrutinized him; finally she poked an accusatory finger at him.

“You knew! You knew and you didn’t say anything! I always tell you!”

“Why do you tell me now, years later?” countered Jonathan. “Stefan’s already managed to tell me himself.”

“I couldn’t any earlier!”

“Why not? Bound by oath, were you?”

Megi lowered her eyes.

“I couldn’t because I was worried.”

Jonathan gave her a searching look; a moment later, he burst out laughing.

“I almost believed you!”

“No, really,” Megi defended herself but his smile was infectious. “I really was upset. And on top of that, Monika came up and I had to deflect her.”

Jonathan walked up to the fridge and extracted two bottles. Later, they sat on the floor drinking beer, chatting a little, laughing a little. Jonathan stroked Megi’s hair, thinking she was dear to him even though he couldn’t watch porn with her or visit the red light district of Amsterdam.

Before putting on a film, he told her about his argument with Stefan, how his friend had suddenly brought up the subject of being Polish. Megi listened and stroked his hand; the threads of understanding tickled pleasantly. Then, of her own accord, she started telling him how much she liked Brussels where even Masses were celebrated in five languages, and subtitles in three languages were projected in theaters so that everybody could understand.