Grażyna Plebanek - Illegal Liaisons

Stefan ran his fingers across his upper lip.

“Aneta, no. Martyna.”

Jonathan burst out laughing. The beer made his head spin; the bubbles rose to tickle his throat. He laughed, happy for a while, and light-headed.

“You’re a body-snatcher. You sniff out weak relationships,” he choked out in the end.

“Not a body-snatcher but a beast of prey,” corrected Stefan. “I hunt out weaker specimens. Besides, married women are safe. Trainees might be appetizing but they have one fundamental failing: they’re usually free. I’ve had enough of worrying that I might come across some madwoman who will want me to get divorced, saying I’ve got her pregnant.”

“Don’t you know when you’re getting a woman pregnant?”

“In the majority of cases, yes,” Stefan agreed carelessly. “Besides, the young ones, often enough, don’t get aroused. They pretend they’re hot stuff in bed but they give you a blow job then think they have to run and get a yoghurt at the corner shop. On the other hand, fucking a youngster, you feel you’re a right lad! A propos, did I tell you about my rubber bursting?”

“During it?”

“In my car. Going at top speed. It crossed my mind because I changed the tire in a place called Zdrada [Betrayal] near Debki. Write it down, it might prove useful for your book.”

When Andrea wrote to him suggesting they see each other, he experienced a familiar physical reaction – churning in the stomach, dry mouth, tingling in the balls. Over the past two months, since she’d told him that they shouldn’t meet, he’d gone through just about everything there was to experience, at least that’s what he thought. Nevertheless, he agreed to see her.

He left his car near the park where she’d proposed they meet. He was early and couldn’t decide whether to go for a short walk before she appeared or stay in the car. Neither solution seemed right; if someone he knew were to see him it would have been equally hard for him to explain why he was taking a walk right there as to why he sat drumming his fingers on the steering wheel.

Ever since he’d begun to cut the umbilical cord that joined him to his lover, he’d seen his behavior in a much clearer light. Until then, the overwhelming desire to be with Andrea had obscured all risks; now he thought in universally accepted terms: he was betraying his wife, meeting another woman. The dead weight of guilt and punishment crushed his chest to such an extent that he found he was wearing a trench coat for the tryst, like a detective.

When he saw Andrea, admiration drove out self-ridicule. Her skirt emphasized the length of her legs, the blouse discreetly outlined her breasts, brown hair glistened bronze in the sun. She smiled at him through the window, then climbed in, settling in the passenger’s seat as if she’d just come home.

“The park, not the church, this time?” he joked.

She smelled of wind and fruit. He stole a gulp of air with her scent and rested his back against the seat.

“I’ve sinned too much.” She looked at him with a tenderness that slipped beneath his skin and turned into desire.

“But you’re fixing your ways,” he said light-heartedly.

She grew unexpectedly serious. She filled her lungs with air and let loose: “I want you to know before others find out. I’m pregnant.”

Jonathan stared at her, then to the side where a man, probably homeless, was lugging two bulging sacks on his back. He was swaying in a long, too warm coat – a white-bearded comma between balls of luggage. He stopped to rest; he was the color of the road.

“Congratulations,” Jonathan heard himself say.

Andrea opened the car door.

“Come on, let’s talk.”

They climbed the escarpment. The gray-beige man disappeared while they continued down the path, two people out for a stroll. Jonathan’s head was a morass, sentences were not coming together, question marks tottered, pushed aside by exclamations.

“You opened me up.” Andrea’s voice came on a wave. “It’s thanks to what happened between us.”

Andrea stood still, he walked on. Only when several joggers and cyclists had overtaken them did Andrea finish: “It’s my child. Think of it in that way.”

Jonathan made as if to turn back but she caught him by the sleeve. They now stood facing each other, Andrea gazing at him, he in the place where the man with the sacks had been. Suddenly Stefan crossed his mind. Whenever he’d been up to no good, he fawned on Monika, and that’s what she waited for. Jonathan looked at Andrea. She didn’t apologize – she demanded to be understood.

“I wanted a child.”

He nodded, his eyes fixed on the ground.

“I told you about it. Remember? Remember!”

He grabbed her in his arms and held her tight. He wiped her tears with the sleeve of his trench coat, the collar of his shirt. He must have forgotten his tissues.

“I told you.” He barely understood what she was saying. “I wanted one then. Remember? We were lying on top of each other and I said …”

He locked her in his arms and she pressed against him, so hard he stepped back.

“It was then,” he heard.

He looked over her head at the view stretching from the escarpment – at the water and the swan majestically taking possession of it. Closer, at the turn of the road, stood something that looked like a pen made of bare planks; inside, a heap of brown rags was huddled up.

“If you had said then that you wanted …”

“I do.”

She curled up; he felt her slight shoulder blades beneath his fingers. She was gasping for breath beneath his arm, shaking her head until hair stuck to her wet cheeks.

Brussels, autumn 2008

JONATHAN TOOKthe same route through the park as he usually did when jogging. There, on the other side of the fence, his thoughts merged with the smell of jasmine toward the end of May, waves of heat in July and August, the beating of his heart, and the sweat on his face. Now the park fence was on his left while on his right was a row of spectacular apartments. One of them, on sale, was lit violet from within so that a chewing-gum wrapper pressed in a niche in the pavement glistened unnaturally white in the light.

Jonathan began to walk faster. His “disciples,” as Megi called them, were waiting in the stuccoed room. He should have left the house earlier but at the last moment Tomaszek had spilled some “elixir,” which he’d secretly prepared, all over himself. The child had kept it beneath his bed for two weeks and when he’d proudly presented it, the stinking mixture had spilled on his shirt, trousers, and shoes. Jonathan had stood his son beneath the shower while Megi had cleaned the floor; the stench still filled the air when Jonathan rushed from the apartment with Tomaszek waving to him from the balcony, his hair wet and, on his face, an insincere expression of guilt.

Jonathan passed the legless organ-grinder who held out a mug to him, shaking his few coins. He had been there forever, longer, no doubt, than Jonathan, longer than most of the passers-by.

The door to the seminar room was ajar; a shaft of light fell diagonally across the floor. Other classes had already begun; the security man in his kiosk was dozing, his little television flickering. Jonathan stopped at the top of the stairs and leaned against the wall near a stand of leaflets. Nobody had noticed him yet; nobody knew he was there. Suspended in the space between home and work he was suddenly thrilled with an excitement not quite erotic yet equally deep. Light fell on him, plucking him out of the dark corridor.

A moment later, everything fell back into place – the security guard smacked his lips and adjusted his cap, individual footfalls resounded in the distance, somewhere a door slammed.