Grażyna Plebanek - Illegal Liaisons

He went home to put up some shelves but the thought of the strange job did not leave him. Every now and again, he grabbed a notebook and, using one of Tomaszek’s crayons, jotted down ideas that came into his head. Unable to bear it any longer, he phoned Megi. He bounced off her answering machine and pressed the next number on his list – Stefan’s.

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!”

JONATHAN’S THOUGHTSrarely 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.