Mute, Jonathan automatically thought and returned to his recollections of the morning: Megi had snuggled up to him, encouraging him to enter her, but he’d pretended to be asleep. She’d curled up on the other side of the bed. From beneath half-closed eyelids he saw her hair and detected the neat snip of the hairdresser’s scissors. All of a sudden, he passionately longed for the sight of his own hands ruffling Andrea’s hair as they made love.
A stocky man in Hawaiian shorts, with a tattoo of a mermaid fighting for space among the tuft of hair on his back, peered out from the hut bearing the sign “Bikes for 5 zlotys.”
“Can I help you?” he asked.
“Megi, Megi…” The wheel in Jonathan’s head picked up speed, words merged as though on a roulette wheel.
“If you don’t want a bike why are you hanging around? Move away from the fence!”
The youngster, emboldened by his boss’s presence, took a step forward.
“Right!” he added from beneath his peak.
“What do you mean ‘right’?” Jonathan rebuked him before walking away.
If Megi had cried with disappointment or become really angry, it would have been easier for him. But she merely said, “If you’ve got to write, you’ve got to write.” He almost yelled, “I don’t have to, fight for me! Let’s leave like we’d planned.”
She helped him pack his laptop and clean clothes; she even asked whether she should drop some dinner off to him when she was in the neighborhood.
“No!” Jonathan blurted out.
She looked at him amazed; he leaned over to fasten his bag, saying, “I’ve got to tear myself away from reality.”
“I understand.” He heard the amusement in her voice.
The hardest thing was to say goodbye to the children. They gave him a quick kiss, wanting to hurry back to their granny, who was teaching them how to play poker, but Jonathan clung on to them, hugged them until Megi shouted and laughed, “Maybe you’ll stay with us after all?”
Jonathan stood Tomaszek on the floor and slung the bag holding his laptop over his shoulder.
“May the Force be with you!”
Jonathan gave Megi a kiss on the top of her head, waved to his mother-in-law from the door, and left without delay.
His father’s apartment was a collection of treasures from the former, socialist regime – a fake samovar with flaking patches of “silver,” curtain rods to which the clips would cling for good, a drying fern on the sill. The arrival of another woman in his father’s life – perhaps there’d been more after Jonathan’s mother disappeared from his life and his son had gone to school in England – had left no mark on the apartment. Perhaps because his father’s partner of several years, Helena, had two rooms on the same housing estate, thanks to which they could be together while retaining their independence.
On seeing the practically unchanged colors of the walls and fittings that had greeted him when he visited his father during the holidays, Jonathan suddenly missed home. He walked up to the window from which stretched an uninteresting view over the other blocks. His mother’s apartment in London, the different rooms of the boarding school, his father’s apartment, the rented studio in Warsaw where he and Megi had first lived, even the apartment they’d bought with their first earnings, didn’t seem close enough to him to call home. But now, unexpectedly, at the sound of the word “home” the façade of their Brussels apartment building appeared in front of his eyes.
He drew the curtain, from late in the Gierek era. The patter of a dog running downstairs, the scrape of the rubbish chute lid, the groan of the lift starting up – all resonated with the memories of childhood.
Andrea didn’t want him to pick her up at the airport so they arranged to meet on Krakowskie Przedmiescie, where he counted on not meeting anyone he knew. People from Warsaw didn’t venture along the Trakt Królewski, but left the attraction to visitors.
Before going out he phoned the children to ask them about their plans. He was afraid Megi’s mother might decide to remind the children of their national heritage and take them to the Old Town. He replaced the receiver, went to the bathroom, and scrutinized his reflection, fragmented by the edges of the mirrors on the cabinet doors: did his father experience similar moments here? Did he stand here tentatively studying his features, a little similar to Jonathan’s?
He glanced at his watch and picked up the shaving foam. Everything he did – daily, trivial activities – today seemed like a transgression of boundaries, an entry into a mystery or sacrilege. Covering his cheeks with foam, he clumsily knocked off his glasses, which fell on the bathroom surface. “Pan Hilary,” the poem his mother had read to him when he was little, leapt at him from somewhere. “Pan Hilary zgubil swoje okulary…” Mr Hilary lost his glasses…
A drop of blood appeared on the white froth. “And what if Andrea’s got HIV?” He swore out loud, held the shaver beneath running water, and sat on the edge of the bathtub. Enough! Enough worrying and guilt! He was going to screw the woman – that was all.
She walked into the café and he burned. The men stared at her as usual but she took Jonathan’s upturned face in her cool hands and kissed him where he’d once kissed her, that first time, almost on the lips.
A couple of hours later, he lay with his eyes open. Suddenly conscious of his own body, he listened to it, discovered it anew. Usually he fell asleep shortly after ejaculating; now he lay next to Andrea and contemplated the gulf of orgasms, stroked her body and his, and when she fell asleep, he stroked her harder, jealous of time lost in sleep, the looks not given him, angry at time wasted.
Then the alarm clock rang and Andrea had to leave. She hastily gathered her clothes and threw amused glances at him from over the mug of coffee he’d prepared in his father’s worn espresso pot. She pointed to the built-in room-divider shelf, saying, “Oh, it’s like those in the photo of my mother’s apartment in Prague!” and to the radiator with the words, “Dad said things were better in Poland but all this looks just like Czechoslovakia.”
Jonathan told her that things were better in Poland because he was only in primary school when the tanks had appeared on the streets. He hardly remembered them; it was not really his generation’s experience but that of people who were a few years older, students at the time. The first free elections, seven years later, had been more important for his generation. He hadn’t been in Poland at the time but he knew about the events from news in France where he’d been studying. He’d itched to return to Poland, especially when the Berlin Wall fell, but had been in love with Petra, a Swedish girl, and couldn’t imagine leaving her.
Andrea told him about how, after her father’s death, she’d visited Czech villages in search of distant family. Her father had been eighteen when he ended up in a camp for dissidents. He was not allowed to study, even though he painted beautifully. For the rest of his life he had to be treated for a lung disease he’d caught in prison. She hadn’t found any relatives; all she took with her from Czechoslovakia were handmade lace curtains.
“Your tanks, my tanks,” Jonathan whispered into her hair.
“…our tanks,” she concluded with a smile.
Jonathan loved her all the more for it. They resembled each other – they spoke other languages, easily found their place in other countries, their thinking was not determined by any national reading list. They never said, as did Megi, “because back home” or “look how they…” Jonathan and Andrea knew what it meant to think in two or three languages at the same time. They knew what parting meant, and how painful coming back could be.