Grażyna Plebanek - Illegal Liaisons

Jonathan peeled himself away from the wall. They were waiting for him.

AFTER HIS LAST CONVERSATIONwith Andrea, he could barely perform the rituals of daily life and, when the pain became unbearable, he got up and left. Beyond the apartment, the stream of unfamiliar faces and languages, those he understood and those that constituted a rapid torrent of sounds, cooled his inner fever; he caught his breath when he was among people, at last able to ask himself whether the world really did end with Andrea. “Yes,” he replied and felt something other than pain – fury.

This time he didn’t stop sending her messages. He knew from experience that the worst thing he could do to himself was to condemn himself to a detox, which was why he covered the screen on his cell with endless complaints, frightened that Andrea would be consistent and back out of their contact or, like a psychiatrist, would merely grunt. But she scrupulously replied – explained, apologized. There was only one thing she didn’t deny: that the child growing in her belly was not his.

“I’ve had enough of you. I don’t like you,” he wrote and asked one last question: why did she present him with a fait accompli; why, when she’d assured him that it was him, Jonathan, she loved did she get pregnant with Simon? “I told you I wanted one with you,” she wrote back. “Then why didn’t you wait?” he tapped out in despair. “For what?” she parried.

He recalled how she’d kneeled with her mouth filled with his hardness. She’d licked and blown, then let his penis out of her mouth only to take hold of it again with sadistic slowness. He’d turned her on to her back, moved her leg diagonally across his belly and entered her from above, slowly. He’d crushed her with his body until she’d stopped moving. The master of her orgasm, he’d been so aroused he’d had to slip out of her. She’d rolled on to her belly and kneeled in front of him on all fours; he’d screwed her from behind from all angles until she was wet, juices running down her groin. She’d lowered herself onto her elbows; he’d pressed his finger along the groove between her vagina and her anus until she’d squealed in rapture.

“I quite like you,” he muttered later, stroking her back.

“Quite?” She’d raised her head from his damp belly. Bubbles of happiness had burst in him with a quiet “puck!” He’d started to laugh, infecting her with his laughter, and together they tumbled across the blue sheets, the white clouds of linen.

As he neared the seminar room, Jonathan thanked fate for this course, for these people. They’d been faithful to him for over two years – unlike his lover. And yet he kept writing to her, wanted her, even pregnant. Andrea’s baby was growing in him, too – the fourth month, the fifth … He stroked her belly and made love delicately, didn’t let her straddle him.

“Could it harm the baby?” she asked, as though he were an expert, while he slipped into her gently and rocked forward, backward.

“Break up with me!” he wrote afterward but received only smiling faces. She didn’t take his words seriously. She told him she loved him and was going to have a baby, and that these were two different things. A baby meant a belly and waiting. He was her love, her difficult love.

Jonathan didn’t say much but diligently covered her body with kisses. He stopped at every hollow, at every swell, gentle and tender. He didn’t look her in the eyes; he didn’t want her to see how much he longed to screw her – so hard he’d go right through – and get rid of the intruder inside.

At times, it dawned on him how it must have looked from the outside – he was fucking someone else’s pregnant woman. But, practically at the same time, he also knew that they weren’t an ordinary couple. They created their own laws, discovered new paths, made love on the flipside of legality, at the limits of society’s good taste, in the maelstrom of their own scruples.

He nodded to the security guard and opened the door. Geert’s eyes were drifting across the stucco, Jean-Pierre was texting someone, Ariane was leaning over the table to hear what Kitty was saying.

“… I remember, the same thing happened to me.” Ariane nodded.

Kitty watched her with fascination. Jonathan couldn’t fathom whether she was really interested or whether it was a former journalist’s professional ability to listen. On the other hand, one couldn’t but help look at Ariane. Jonathan often thought there was a little windmill in her that turned at variable speeds.

Jonathan’s eyes returned to Geert, still sitting in the same position and paying no attention to the women. Neither their glances nor their outbursts of laughter disrupted his concentration.

“Sorry I’m late.” Jonathan closed the door. “I don’t even have a decent excuse because it won’t sound credible.”

“Anything could prove inspiring,” smiled Ariane.

“Maybe one of us will write a story about it?” added Kitty.

“Fairy tale more like,” muttered Jonathan, hanging up his jacket. “Imagine a little boy who creates an elixir out of Coca-Cola, egg shells, sunflower seeds, and dishwashing powder. Oh, and I forgot salt and pepper as ‘seasoning.’ ”

“Who is this magician?” asked Ariane.

“Tomaszek, my son.”

“He didn’t drink it, did he?” Kitty feared.

“No, but he kept the muck under his bed until it turned rancid. I’d rather not talk about the smell.”

“It’s the egg shells.” Jean-Pierre nodded like an expert. “Good thing the eggs weren’t raw. My daughter used them in an experiment once.”

Jonathan had already opened his mouth when he saw Geert was passing some pages over to him. His eyes skimmed over the first lines of English text.

“Mother was wearing a pair of white, open-toed slippers that glistened in the sun as it fell through the car window. Every now and again a black face obscured the yellow sphere. Mother’s shoes then grew dull, surrendering the glint to bloodshot eyes and teeth. Suddenly the window cracked, the glass scattered on her fair hair. The door sprang open and hung obliquely on its hinges. One white slipper touched the dust, the other flew idly after it.”

“Shall I read it out loud?” asked Jonathan quietly.

Geert nodded; Jonathan continued reading.

“The car stood inclined to the left, far from the town center, on the outskirts of Kinshasa. The boy crawled along the grass, further and further away from the rebels’ cries. His mother’s guttural sobs grew quieter. His father was still waiting for them there, where they had not arrived.

“The boy grazed his elbows and knees so they bled; chirping pounded in his ears; the stench of rubber reached him from afar. He had no strength left. He stopped moving in the damp grass then turned slowly; the burned-out car was growing black by the road, a cloud of smoke drifting from it.

“He rolled onto his back and stared at the sky shimmering in the heat. Somewhere over there the sun was caressing white patent slippers and the tin can of a car filled with the scent of his mother’s perfume, guarding the treasures of childhood. Although aflame, it was closed tight. Beneath the lava of strange faces, what was good set within her.”

The following day, Jonathan phoned Cecile. They had to publish a book of stories written by his students; the two years had matured his people’s talents.

“Your people?” Discreet laughter rang out in the receiver.

He couldn’t write that morning; excitement chased him out of the apartment. For the first time in a long while, he didn’t feel any pain. “It seems my nerve roots have stopped doing me in,” he noted on a piece of paper that he extracted from a side pocket of his rucksack. There was a drawing by Tomaszek on the back: a map of favorite places sketched in the sprawling hand of a seven-year-old. Jonathan orientated the piece of paper – and here he was, halfway down a road decorated with crooked houses, in front of him a roundabout coming into view. He knew there had to be a laundromat there, a shop selling olives and chocolates, and one of Brussels’s numerous pharmacies, but it was only thanks to the little map that he noticed that the roundabout lay in the shade of an enormous tree.