The last spark of the setting sun disappears into the sea. The people disperse; the sky turns the purple color of end-credits.
“Where’s Jonathan?” Another stab. “Running? No, he runs in the morning. At the café with the children? No, Mom’s there… So where is he?”
Darkness and coolness draw over the sea; the beach around her grows deserted. Megi doesn’t follow the others; she remains sitting in the blackened boat.
Jonathan followed the edge of the sea, going against the crowd, which, having seen the performance of the setting sun, made its way to the exit.
Cold crept up on him, chilling his fingertips and raising the hair on his arms, but didn’t force him to retire with the others. He strolled and thought about his cell phone. He would willingly throw it away. Now, with a broad swing like when skimming pebbles over water.
To his surprise, he recalled the way Megi skipped stones – and almost laughed out loud. It was a sight for the entire family; even the children proved better at the skill which, for some reason, she couldn’t master. Megi would pick up a stone and take a swing but the stone wouldn’t glide; in a strange flight resembling the trajectory of a sickle, it returned to the starting point, sometimes hitting Megi herself.
He’d taught her so many times how to skim pebbles, but she couldn’t get the knack.
He kicked a piece of wood from which all life had been washed away by the salty water. He could teach her so many things! Be it only to make love like Andrea – unrestrained, indecently, sometimes even unaesthetically. To leave him breathless with desire.
He picked up a pebble and took a mighty swing. It was not a question of skill; Jonathan didn’t believe in anything like objective sexual competence. What was most important in making love was intelligence, Imagination, and “chemistry,” not necessarily in that order. There was also lack of inhibition, but this was a double-edged sword. He’d once had a girlfriend who admitted blatantly that animal copulation aroused her, and he was aroused by the fact that she’d told him. Yet when he was granting her request he’d felt a shadow of repulsion, which had appeared from he knew not where, and which had spoiled his enjoyment.
Jonathan hurled another pebble and when he heard the splash, far away in the dark water, he reached into his pocket and checked his cell again. The phone shimmered in his hand like a dead fish. He took a swing.
Megi stands in the fishing boat and thinks about perverts. What if one is lurking in the forest by the path leading to the beach? A childhood terror brought up to date in the form of a goblin – a stocky monster with wide-set legs and narrow horizons?
Megi scrambles out of the boat and makes toward the dark funnel of the exit. There are two or three people on the beach; if something were to happen, they wouldn’t hear her scream. She reaches the wooden walkway. Ahead of her is the dark forest and dunes, behind her a single, tall figure. “Shall I let him pass? Shall I run on ahead?”
Jonathan made his way to the beach exit, which was barely visible against the dunes. Wading through the loose sand along the beaten track where the beach met the sea seemed too tiring. He glanced, yet again, at his phone which he hadn’t in the end thrown into the water but hidden in his pocket with a groan of disappointment.
He walked ahead, moving away from the sea, following somebody’s slight silhouette. He thought he would bury the phone. The struggle with himself to resist the temptation of getting in touch with Andrea who, put off by his silence, had given no sign of life, was finishing him off. In the end, he made a wager with himself: if he managed to write a message to Andrea before the slim silhouette ahead of him disappeared in the dark gorge of the beach exit, he would send it.
He pulled the phone out and began typing. He cancelled and wrote anew. He groaned and wiped his eyes, which watered from staring at the blue screen. He began again.
Megi looks back, takes out her phone just in case, quickly searches for her husband’s number, and positions her finger on “call”. What had initially seemed a game of her own imagination, a controlled game of hide-and-seek – she and the archetypal pervert – has imperceptibly turned into painful anxiety.
The man walking behind her brightens the darkness with his phone. Megi quickens her stride. “Have your phone switched on, Jonathan, have your phone…” She shakes beneath her thin jacket and immediately reassures herself. “It must be switched on, he never parts with it.”
With that thought in mind Megi plunges into the darkness.
“Send.” Jonathan’s finger, damp with sweat, pressed the key on his phone while he raised his head. The message he sent was gliding just where he gazed – into the eyes of his lover, brown irises beneath dark lashes and hair so different from the delicate blonde hair of his wife, which their children had inherited.
So he was at Andrea’s mercy once again.
He forged ahead through the dark forest, the rustling leaves deadening the footsteps of the woman before him. He reached the road lit by street lamps and hesitantly pulled out his phone. His heart thumped to the beat of the disco which was blasting out the nearby bar. He looked at the screen. Andrea had written back!
5
THE PAVLOV DOGS fought for their territory. The city where they had been destined to live struggled with such poverty that nobody wanted to feed the four-legged animals any more. Thrown out into the street, they tried to eat scraps found in trash cans but the bins were already occupied by packs of the homeless – people or dogs. Poodles, Pekingese, and Terriers died, torn apart by the fangs of hungry Alsatians, Dobermans, and the fiercest of street brawlers – Caucasian Sheepdogs. Small dogs made poor food but large dogs used them for training a certain movement of their heads – a quick shake – followed by silence as warm blood dripped from their jaws.
Following the dogs as they dragged him through the stinking side streets of the city, Jonathan wrote with his knees pulled in under a small table that, instead of the usual four legs, had three annoying posts. He spun a different story in his messages to Andrea. Her replies acquired, in the heat of the badly ventilated room, the proportions of visions tempting Simon of the Desert. Racked by the impossibility of fulfilment, unable to believe she would agree, Jonathan finally suggested to his lover that she should come to Warsaw for a weekend.
She replied with a brief “yes.” He leapt from the table, bruising his shin, closed down The Pavlov Dogs on his laptop and left the room. He walked against a stream of children, bumped into windbreakers and rubber dinghies, rubbed against heated bodies in flip-flops. He scanned the family schedule in his mind: on their return from the seaside, they were going to leave the children with Megi’s mother and go to the Masurian Lakes for a few days instead of taking the diving course he’d so much wanted to attend.
He stopped outside a bicycle rental shop, leaned against a pole in the provisional fence, and started to mechanically peel away remnants of bark.
“Bike for you?” A youngster in a red baseball cap struck up the conversation.
Jonathan shook his head. He could tell his wife he wanted some peace to write, and move into his father’s apartment until the latter returned from Croatia. His mother-in-law could help Megi with the children and he’d spend the time with Andrea.
“If you don’t want a bike why’re you hanging around?” The boy’s voice rose strangely toward the end of the sentence.