Grażyna Plebanek - Illegal Liaisons

The cliff bit into the water coupled with sky, the horizon was rough with clouds. The cow in the far distance shrank to the size of a pin and the vastness pressed Jonathan’s dilemmas into thin slivers. Maybe he’d even be able to cut them and throw them into hot water like the dumplings his grandmother – his father’s mother who disapproved of “bought” dumplings – used to make?

Megi strolled next to him, wind billowing her jacket. She stopped next to a rose bush.

“Hawthorn,” said Jonathan automatically. “A hedge like the one that grew around the castle where, pricked by a spindle, slept …”

“Look.” Megi squatted.

A flower was growing next to the bush, a bee buzzing among its open petals, stamping the stamen with its little legs.

“I’ve always wondered what that princess felt like after a hundred years.”

Megi embraced him unexpectedly, kissed him; he felt her tongue between his teeth.

They made love a few more times during their stay, but only that once, on the cliff, belonged to Megi. On the other occasions, Jonathan slipped into her body but his thoughts were so much with Andrea that it amazed him he came at all.

Despite the cold of Normandy, Megi didn’t wear underwear. When he cycled off somewhere leaving her with the children, she sent him messages he’d have liked to receive from Andrea. It was such a paradox. When, a few years ago, he’d dreamt of a little tenderness from Megi, she’d been silent. And now she was in love with him once more.

Megi gazes at the ocean. She had been happy a couple of years earlier – she’d loved two men. She’d blossomed so much she’d even wondered whether to tell Jonathan about her lover. But no! Others would have explained everything to him in no time – he wasn’t able to satisfy his woman so he wasn’t a man. And as for her, what a slut!

Only in a culture where machos are tolerated are men cuckolds, she thought. A crude culture, where there’s no place for wise women, no respect for them. And then it turns out that the macho men only shit their pants from fear of their moms .

Her mother had once said that the one feeling not worth cultivating was guilt .

Megi didn’t regret either the relationship with her lover or her decision to leave him. Her body had enthusiastically taken in another man, even searched for him. From then on she’d thought about herself, about her pussy, and the fact that he’d given it a name. Her lover hadn’t laughed at the word, took it the way it sounded. And for her the familiar word had begun to bring to mind something different, something bitter and juicy .

THE DOG HUNG ITS HEADover the small opening and barked from time to time. “Woof!” wrote Jonathan, and the hound in his imagination moved away from the hole, lowered itself on its front paws as if it were a puppy, and jumped away only to sniff at the ground again.

“What do you want?” muttered Jonathan with hostility as he got up from his laptop to stretch his arms.

Objectively, he could send his protagonist wherever he wanted. Subjectively, he could do fuck all. The dog kept watch over the hole, wagged its tail, curled its lips in a silly half-smile not in keeping with the dignity of the leader of a mongrel pack.

“Why the hell must you go down into that gutter?” Jonathan clicked his cigarette lighter and blew the smoke out on to the terrace.

He stood at the railings and gazed at the city. Brussels was built according to a medieval principle; façades faced streets set slightly at an angle to form triangles of green garden spaces at the back of the apartments. It reminded Jonathan of London, the area where his mother lived. When he got home from school, he used to take his bike and cycle around the area, root around the local haunts, find his way through the gardens and, in the evening, return to a house like so many others, in front of which stood a dustbin instead of a garden. It had smelled of washing indoors; his clothes hung on a wooden drying rack. He’d once caught his finger in it and his nail had fallen off.

Brussels was cozier. Some of the gardens, shaped like triangles of Brie, were like neglected forests where lilac boiled over; others, carpeted with lawns, were an oasis for local cats. They came here to bask in the heat; their howling reached as far as the apartment lofts. The cats bawled in early spring when the urge to rut hit them, and throughout the year when they chased each other away, fighting for their territory. They had the skill of squirrels in climbing trees and could drive their rivals to the very tip of the birch that rose above the gardens.

The other inhabitants of the gardens were birds. They overran the highest branches and the stone recesses lined with wild vines, which, in autumn, flamed a vivid red. The green parrots from the park rarely came here, frightened perhaps of the true rulers of the territory – pigeons beneath whom branches cracked now and again because they were so huge.

It was they who guided Jonathan to the mysterious door that became the breakthrough in the stories of The Pavlov Dogs . The walled-over entrance between one garden and another bothered Jonathan until one day he confided in Megi.

“There must have been a gate once,” she said after some thought.

“What do you say?” He wanted to laugh. Megi, the lawyer and realist. Her feet were firmly planted on the ground, true enough. But then somebody had to be in this house.

Jonathan brought the mysterious door, alias “there must have been a gate,” into his story and in this way enriched the space with a nebulous zone where the priniciples of firmly fenced-off pieces of land did not reign. The place, however, was not generally accessible – sometimes it was closed, not allowing entry to those who wanted to go in, however high-ranking.

That was why the huge dog, the leader of the pack, was now rooted with his nose to the hole, sniffing, trying to get through to where things were happening, tantalisingly packed away. Since “there must have been a gate here” didn’t want to open for him, he had to try to slip in a different way. The gutter, perhaps? He was shaggy and enormous, yet he tried to squeeze through.

After several days of writing, Jonathan began to study the apartment, as if looking for faults. The state was familiar to him – reality, resentful at being dethroned by fiction, was demanding attention. He let many things go when he was at home alone, and copped it when Megi tracked down the damage.

He went downstairs and threw away the stale bread. He was on the point of opening the washing machine – something was rotting inside – when the telephone rang. His father was passing through London and asked if they could meet.

Two days later, Jonathan settled into a seat on the Eurostar. He loved traveling by train. Ever since childhood, he had found that airplanes disrupted the healthy pace of life; two hours between London and Warsaw seemed a cheap trick, the mind found it hard to accept the change in reality. The gray barracks visible on landing at Okecie was superimposed over the colorful streets of London. The face of his mother seeing him off at Heathrow all too quickly turned into that of his father greeting him with a wave in Warsaw.

There had been years when he had practically not seen his father because it had been impossible to travel freely to Poland. His mother had been petrified that, although he’d have no problems going in, they wouldn’t let him out. He’d lived in England for years and still the same nightmare haunted her: she was back in a country whose borders had just been closed.

Jonathan didn’t have dreams like that. He was happy both in England, where he had his mother and his friends, and in Poland, in the tiny apartment of his father, whose bachelor existence was sometimes warmed by the presence of his grandmother who cooked pierogi and golabki for her grandson. He had resented his mother for not wanting him to visit his father. He just couldn’t imagine that a country could be closed. With the blitheness of a teenager, he shrugged off her fears.