“Of course not,” Przemek joined in placatingly.
“Facts are facts,” interrupted Jonathan. “They can be blown up or ignored.”
“Isn’t that a bit of a conspiratorial way of thinking?” Simon tipped his glass.
“Typical of those from the old Soviet bloc?” Jonathan’s voice sounded surprisingly sharp.
Przemek opened his mouth and immediately closed it; Andrea raised her hand as if wanting to speak. Simon was still looking at Jonathan with the same smile. Perhaps he was waiting for Jonathan to turn everything into a big joke, as they had both been taught to do by the English education system.
But it was too late. Something had opened in Jonathan, something that deformed his words and drew the muscles around his lips, which refused to respond to Simon’s smile. They were kinsmen, brought up in the same country; and yet Jonathan was seeing himself as others viewed him – coldly, from the outside – and what he saw was the perpetrator of a social gaffe, a serious Pole who had lost his temper.
“My son’s informed me that you’re talking about queers,” Stefan’s jovial voice resounded behind them. “At last something I know a bit about!”
Rafal quickly started chatting to the British journalist; Przemek drew the bureaucrat with a French accent aside; Andrea whispered something in Simon’s ear. Jonathan turned to Stefan and rolled his eyes, at which the latter, as if conspiring, pressed a packet of cigarettes into his hand.
The terrace was deserted, the rain having chased the smokers inside. Jonathan rested against the railings and clicked the cigarette lighter.
“Gave him a piece of your mind?” Stefan stood next to him.
Jonathan took a drag and without a word blew out a cloud of smoke.
“Don’t worry, it’s just the usual hiccup after ditching a girl. It doesn’t normally happen to me,” Stefan explained, seeing that Jonathan wanted to say something, “but I’ve seen it happen to others.”
He leaned against the railings then after a while added: “Anyway Simon had it coming. He didn’t invite you to that party. He thinks that since you’re a nobody in the Commission… You’ve shown him that’s not the case.”
“What’s not?” asked Jonathan in a drab voice.
“Well, that if you’re not in the Commission it doesn’t mean you’re not important.”
Jonathan stared at the garden stretching out in front of him.
“Stefan,” he said clearly. “I’m fucking his wife.”
“Still!” Stefan tore his hands away from the railings. “Even though she didn’t invite you to their party, ignored you, and after everything else you said?”
Jonathan stamped out the cigarette butt.
“Right, that’s not the point,” Stefan said, more to himself.
When the terrace door closed behind him, Jonathan rested his back against the rough wall. In the light seeping from the apartment, he could see the rain cutting through the air. He turned his face to the sky. How far he’d gone! He loved Andrea even for her faults. He was hurt, yet happy. Is this the essence of love, he thought. Pain?
All at once, he longed for his calm love of Megi.
“What are they talking about?” wonders Megi, looking at Jonathan on the balcony. “Exchanging rude jokes, what else?”
She turns her eyes to Andrea. She’s like a stone chafing in her shoe. Megi tries to shake it out of her mind – in vain. If it was a man who’d so irked Megi, she would confront him. But Andrea is a woman.
She remembers the dream she had that night: she was standing at a party like this one and talking about something unimportant. There were fewer people than here which was why she was surprised nobody had noticed a bear slip in through the door.
It was beautiful! Its coat, almost black, glistened like a pitch-black stream, fur swaying in rhythm with its gait. As it passed Megi, it didn’t slow down but walked between her legs at the same steady pace. She shuddered, clenched her glass tighter and, with an apologetic smile, looked around at the faces of the guests. But they seemed not to notice it, perhaps they had not even noticed the bear’s presence at the party.
She’d woken up, flooded with an irrational feeling of happiness: the bear had chosen her, passed between her legs! She burned with shame, exciting shame.
Megi runs her fingers through her hair and her eyes return to the circle of men swaying around Andrea; she watches Andrea make room for them, invite them to be the center of her interest. With her attention, her eyes, she extracts from those she is talking to whatever they believe is the best in them; she is their mirror; the canvas for their self-portraits. She merely retouches a little and immediately they appear better – are “the real thing!”
Megi shrugs. She doesn’t believe in Native American male friendship. Brought up by women, she knows that nothing can equal their power. Which is why, when women turn against her, Megi feels lost.
7
AS HE WALKED next to Stefan, Jonathan remembered that, according to Megi, the more time he spent with his friend, the more Jonathan became part of Stefan’s dog team and, like a good Husky, took on some of his friend’s personality for a time: the way he spoke, some of his gestures. “It’s easy to guess who you’ve just seen,” she laughed. “Do I also pick up other people’s traits?” Jonathan worried; he didn’t want to be a chameleon. “No, no,” Megi reassured him. “Only Stefan’s.”
Stefan was less susceptible to Jonathan’s influence and Jonathan consoled himself that even though his friend’s personality may have been more dominating, he, Jonathan, had more empathy. Does that mean I’m more feminine? The thought flitted through his mind, but he quickly rid himself of it. “Masculine” and “feminine” were so flexible and kept on changing; he himself was the best example of this. He didn’t bother to put a name to it. He had already been an outsider in life; he might as well be avant-garde.
This time, as he walked down the street with his friend, Jonathan felt, for the first time, that he was observing him. He studied Stefan’s body language, the glances he threw at passing women, his half-smiles, the way he turned to look – at that woman for example, older than them, classy.
Once she’d passed by, Stefan didn’t even interrupt what he was saying, as though separate cells in his brain registered aesthetic and sexual events without disturbing those responsible for the coherent spinning of a story. Yet the woman walking away must have thought Stefan was still eyeing her because when Jonathan glanced back, he saw that she was trying to step lightly in her stilettos over the uneven pavement.
The street traced a gentle arch. Brussels, he thought, a sexy city where people look at each other and this mutual attention warms them as if they were lying in a beach shelter. A city where Megi had one morning dared to say, “Why clitoris? It should be tickloris.”
They passed another girl at whom Stefan cast his approving eye.
“Not bad,” he muttered.
“Young.”
“What do you expect? Thirty-year-olds are desperate. Marriage and babies – that’s what they have in mind. Forty-year-olds are great but they scare me.”
“Twenty-year-olds in bed are like broth from a stock cube.”
“But you can screw them,” sighed Stefan.
Jonathan stopped short. Stefan walked on a while before realizing he was talking to himself. He turned and looked questioningly at Jonathan.
“She wasn’t even twenty,” Jonathan indicated behind him.
“What’s up with you? I haven’t raped her!”
“You’re forty and dribbling over a girl half your age. Are you retarded or something?”