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WHAT
DID YOU FEEL THEN? Barbed
wire. It was simply like barbed wire. Rusty barbed wire inside my vagina and
his tongue inside my mouth. Each letter engraved on that ring felt like a
sharp, cutting thorn. Joanna 30.01.1978. It began to hurt with the
“J”, first tears came with the first “a”; by “30” I felt cut through. I was
born on the 30th of January. His wedding day, but eight years earlier. When
he came to see me on my birthday, he always had two bouquets. One for me, the
birthday one. Beautiful. The kind that makes you stretch out both arms to
receive it. The other for the wife. He’d put it on the kitchen windowsill.
Out of sight. Like a briefcase. Irrelevant. Out of the way, not in the salon,
where we make love on the floor, and not in the bedroom, if we make it there.
When it was all over and he stopped kissing me and turned away, I would get
up from the floor in the salon, or out of bed in the bedroom, and walk naked
to the bathroom. He usually lay in bed and smoked a cigarette. On my way back
from the bathroom I’d notice the bouquet. I’d come to the wardrobe in the
hall and take out the biggest vase, the purple one, fill it with water, take
it to the kitchen and put the wife’s bouquet in. A bouquet one needs both
arms for. Also beautiful. For he never bought flowers in a hurry. Never. For
in truth he always bought flowers for himself, to enjoy the pleasure of
giving it. To me. And to his wife too. The
roses for her were always crimson red. Ribbons always beige. Inside the foil
always a white envelope. Unsealed. I had it in my hands, almost, once. He lay
in bed, smoking a cigarette, tired and calm after what he had done a moment
before, while I stood naked on the kitchen floor by the bouquet of crimson
roses for the wife, pressing to my breasts an envelope containing words that
could only hurt me. I remember
looking at the envelope and seeing the word “Joanna” written by his hand and
feeling that barbed wire for the second time. But this time inside the whole
of me, everywhere. I put the envelope back behind the foil. It slipped among
the crimson roses for the wife. I had to turn away from the vase; I could no
longer look at it. I stood with my back to the window, naked, shivering with
cold, hurt, humiliation, feeling sorry for myself and waiting for the shivers
to pass. So that he wouldn’t notice anything. Then
I’d return to bed, or on the floor, cuddle up to him and forget about
everything. He helped me do that. Sometimes I had an impression he knew what
was happening to me in the kitchen and wanted to make up for it. As if his
kisses were to plug holes left inside me by that barbed wire. And they did.
Because he loved women the same way he bought flowers for them. Mainly for
the pleasure of seeing them happy. And that was probably what made me so
addicted to him. The feeling that it was impossible to experience something
“as good” or even “better”. Simply impossible. Sometimes
it felt absurd. That it was possible because of my underdeveloped
imagination. Once, I plucked my courage and confessed it to my new therapist.
What I heard was a lecture, aimed to impress. He said it had nothing to do
with imagination and that it was “the Oedipal need to become wife of one’s
own father, to posses him and bear his children”. Can you imagine? What an
asshole! To tell me something like that. Me, who had no father since the age
of two, and before that having him only for six months and twenty three days
until the trawler where he served as officer, struck an iceberg and sank near
the Newfoundland. I walked out in the middle of the second session and didn’t
even bother to slam the door on that shrink. He might have felt too pleased
with himself that he managed to upset me. “Oedipal need” – what a pile of
crap. Nutcase with a stupid earring, in a black polo neck and a pair of trousers
that never came near a washing machine. Telling this crap to me, who
immediately after “Children from Bullerbyn” read “Female Psychology” by that
brilliant woman Horney! I
am sure it was no “Oedipal need”. It was his lips. Simply; and his hands. I
was cuddling up to him and he touched me and kissed me. Everywhere. My lips,
fingers, hair, knees, feet, back, wrists, ears, eyes and thighs. Then eyes,
fingernails, and again thighs. I even had to stop him. To stop him kissing
and entering me before it would be too late, before it was time to get up,
dress and get in a taxi that would take him back to his wife. Later,
when he was leaving, taking out the bouquet out of the vase in the kitchen, I
had that special feeling that it was impossible to experience something “as
good”. It simply wasn’t. And that I was incredibly lucky to be able to
experience it with him. That it was something no shrink could explain, not
even Horney herself, had she lived. And even if she could explain, I wouldn’t
give a damn. Sometimes
he would come back from the corridor, or even from the street, run up to my
fourth floor, burst into the flat, panting, to thank me for putting the
flowers into the vase. And then it hurt me the most, for I, just as much as
he, wanted to avoid the subject. To pretend that the bouquet was just a
briefcase. Irrelevant. It never worked. I always took out the purple vase; he
always ran back to thank me. He
ran back, because he never took anything for granted. And this is – always
has been – a part of that unattainable “as good”, which I’d never have with
any other man. He thinks about everything, attends to everything or at worst
sees everything. He treats gratitude as something that needs to be shown,
like respect. Ideally – here and now. And that is why, without even realising
how much he hurt me, he’d run up to the fourth floor, panting, kiss me and
thank me for putting the flowers in the vase. And as he ran downstairs to the
taxi, I would return to the bedroom, or to the salon where he had been kissing
me a moment ago, finish the rest of the wine from his and my glass, open the
next bottle, pour it into both glasses and cry. When the wine finished, I’d
fall asleep on the floor. Sometimes,
I would wake up just before dawn, still drunk, shivering with cold and
needing to go to the bathroom. On the way back, I saw my reflection in the
mirror. The face etched with dark lines of running makeup. The red blotches
of dried red wine spilt over my breasts when my hands shook from sobbing, or
when I was so drunk that it was spilling every time I put the glass to my
mouth. The hair stuck to the forehead and the neck. When I saw this
reflection in the mirror, I would be overcome by so much hatred and contempt,
for myself, for him, his wife, for all the bloody roses of the world. I would
burst into the salon, pick up the bouquet, yes, with both hands, and lash out
with it against the floor, against the furniture, the windowsill. Because I
would get roses from him too, except mine were white. I stopped trashing them
when the stalks had no flowers left on them. Only then I calmed down and was
able to sleep. I would wake up by midday and walk on the white petals
scattered all over the salon floor. Some of the petals were stained with
blood from my hands cut up by the thorns. The same stains were on the bed
linen. Now I remember not to turn bathroom lights just before dawn on the
31st of January. I
still like roses though. And when on the 31st of January I finally calm down
and in the evening sit down with a cup of camomile tea, listening to his
favourite Cohen, I think of him, that he is like a rose. And roses have
thorns. Sure, one can feel sad about it, but one can also enjoy the fact that
thorns have roses. This is more important. This is far more important. Few
people want to have roses for their thorns… But
with Cohen such thoughts are natural. He is so terribly sad. That British
music critique is right: with every Cohen record they should give a free
cutthroat razor. On the evening of 31 January I need a camomile tea and
Cohen. It’s with his music, his lyrics, despite that “special feature”
sadness of his, that I find it easier to deal with my own. And
that’s what it’s been like for these last six years. For six years running,
on the 30th of January he first drives me insane, touching, kissing and
caressing my hands, on which I then inflict bloody wounds with thorns from my
birthday bouquet. Although in truth it is the letters and the digits Joanna
30.01.1978 that hurt me the most, gently engraved on the inside of his
wedding ring. They hurt down there like barbed wire. WHY DO
YOU PUT UP WITH IT?
And
you are asking me that too?! My mother asks me that every time I go to stay
with her, crying as she does. And all my shrinks, apart from the one of the
“Oedipal need”, have been asking the same question. I understand perfectly
their intentions, but nevertheless the question is misconceived. For I do not
feel I have to put up with anything. One doesn’t have to “put up with” what
one needs or desires, does one? But
apart from the question and the intention behind it, I stay with him – I
think this is what the question is about – because I love him, so much it
sometimes takes my breath away. Sometimes I daydream that he leaves me,
without hurting me, naturally. I know it’s impossible. He will never leave
me. I simply know that. Because he is a true, the truest lover. He has only
me and his wife. And he is true to both of us. He will leave only when I will
tell him to, or when I find a new man. But I don’t want to tell him. And the
“other man” thing doesn’t work with me. I had a few “other” men. Mostly to
help me run away from him. It
happened two years ago. He went for a few weeks to Brussels, for a training
course. Since he started working for that Internet company he was travelling
a lot. I was to join him for the last week. We started planning it two months
earlier. Just planning it made me ecstatic. Once he got to Brussels he phoned
me everyday. I had everything ready. We were to spend together seven days and
eight nights. I was unbelievably happy. With pills I postponed my
menstruation to make sure it would not fall on that week in Brussels. My
flight was on Friday, on Wednesday I got a fever. Over 39°C. I was crying
with rage. If I could I’d strangle that girl who brought the virus to the
office. I gulped down spoonfuls of powdered vitamin C, handfuls of aspirin,
went around with my handbag stuffed with oranges and lemons, which I ate
without sugar, like apples. I was determined to be well for my seven days and
eight nights in Brussels. It was like a project at work: “Brussels, or get
well at any price”. When nothing worked, I started taking all the antibiotics
I could find in the bathroom cupboard. Most of them were out of date, for I’m
hardly ever ill. That Wednesday, when I finished the antibiotics and still
had the temperature over 39 degrees and a feeling as if someone stuck a knife
under my shoulder blades and kept twisting it every time I coughed – I
decided to see a doctor at a private clinic near my office. I
stood in the narrow corridor leading to the doctors’ surgeries. In the
armchair outside the gynaecologist’s sat his wife, reading a book. By the
window, at a low table with crayons and plasticine, played his daughter,
drawing something on a big sheet of paper. She raised her head when I came
in, and smiled at me. She smiled with the whole face, squinting her eyes,
exactly like he always did. I felt that my hands were shaking. At that moment
his wife got up, called out by a nurse. She put away the book, said something
to her daughter and, smiling at me, she pointed at the free chair. Passing me
by in the narrow corridor, she brushed against me with her huge belly. She
was in the last weeks of pregnancy. I
felt faint. I walked up to the window and, ignoring the protests, opened it
wide and breathed deeply. Someone run off to call a nurse. After a while,
chastened by the cold fresh air, I felt better. I shut the window and left.
His daughter looked at me, frightened, confused by what had happened. I
no longer needed the antibiotics. On the street, I dumped the oranges and
lemons into a dustbin; all my aspirins into the next. Suddenly I felt that I
desperately wanted to get ill. First, mortally ill, then bury myself in a
hole somewhere, so that no one could find me, to take my beloved plush elk
and bury myself in some God forsaken allotment in the suburbs. When
I got home I had no strength to climb on to my fourth floor. I had to stop on
every floor and rest. Fifteen minutes or more. Suddenly I was very ill. Just
as I wished. I fell asleep fully dressed on the sofa in the salon. I dreamed
that his daughter was hiding from me in the wardrobe, playing with my plush
elk, picking out his black button eyes with a fork. I
woke up after eighteen hours. I got up, found my ticket to Brussels and burnt
it over the sink. Next, I switched the phone off. Before that, I called for a
locksmith and changed the locks. So that he could never come inside here.
When the locksmith left, I locked the door with a new key and put it under my
pillow. That day I also decided that as soon as I got well again, I’d find
another man, and soon after get pregnant with him. And that it would be even
safer than changing locks. At
first I either cried or slept. Then the Brussels-bound plane left without me.
That same day, my coughing eased and the knife fell out of my back. When the
fever died down, I realised that he didn’t know why my telephone was not
working and why I was not on that plane. And why I was not in the office. I
was sure that the bell-ringing and door-knocking I heard and ignored over the
following days, was one of his friends, or even himself. My
days and my nights, all of those seven and eight Brussels days and nights,
passed one by one, while I was moving from the phase “how could he have done
it to me” to “what in fact has he done to me”? What did I expect? That he
returned to his wife’s bed and they played chess all night or looked at the
photos from their early years? Especially that it was not like she was a
twenty stone mama, hers indoors, while I was 90-60-90 lover ten doors down.
No, his wife was beautiful, and the model didn’t apply. I never thought about
her that, anyway. But that she was so beautiful, there in the waiting room,
shortly before giving birth – that hurt. And
that belly, as she made her way past me through the narrow corridor... When she touched my belly with hers, with
his baby inside it, I felt as if someone branded me with hot irons – Joanna
30.01.1978 – like a cow, or a sheep. Because
worked in a mode, probably found in a book and impregnated by my own will, in
which his wife was like his mother – asexual. A competitor, but in a way that
a mother-in-law is always seen as a competitor. I construed such a model
myself; Freud would be proud of me. I never asked him if he slept with his
wife. I never asked if he wanted to have more children with her, either. I
simply assumed, subconsciously, that if he leaves inside me his sperm it
would be unfair if he were leaving it in another woman. Especially one so
holy and asexual as his wife. For
me, she was surrounded with a halo of saintliness, I was to be the whore. She
had the right to his respect and everyday mass; I had the right to his body
and caresses. I confused what a
therapist would diagnose as neurosis with a mode of life. And this particular
mode had been smashed into smithereens in that waiting room, when her belly
brushed against mine. In truth, I
should have been angry with myself for construing some kind of utopian
models. But I was angry with him. That instead of saying prayers to her he
was going to bed with her. Which was so poignantly evidenced by her huge
belly. Besides,
I definitely overrated the role of sex in our relationship. It’ quite common.
Just so – common and run of the mill. Sex is one of the most common, cheapest
and simplest means of securing affection for oneself. That is why it is so
easy to overrate it. And that is why so many men go to have their dinner at
home, but after the feast they go to a prostitute. I
too overrated sex. It happened to me too. Me, a regular shrink goer. Because
I so much needed affection. And that is why, when I recovered from my
Brussels flu, I went out to hunt it. An
intelligent single woman just past her thirty who is a little impatient to
find affection in that jungle out there is rarely lucky in her hunt. More
often than not she ends up as a hunting trophy. Won mostly by hunters who
either shoot blindly all over the place, or those who confuse hunting with a
fairground shooting gallery and mistake a woman for a plastic carnation they
had shot with an airgun. As
a rule, a woman just past her thirty, is far more interesting to a
fifty-year-old, or older, or still for an eighteen-year-old and younger. It’s
a fact; I read about it in the Cosmopolitan, then in the Psychology Today,
and experienced it on my own skin, and on different parts of it. For
most of those men were after my skin. Only one – or so I thought – was after
my soul. At least that was what he claimed, and at the beginning did not want
to undress me when I invited him over after our second dinner. I gave him
time. He could even stop his monologue about himself and let me tell him
something about my world. Two weeks passed and after a concert at the
Philharmonia we took a taxi to me place. At last we were to get intimate. At
the concert they played Brahms and I find Brahms very sexy and sensuous. But
nothing came of it. That evening I caught him pulling out of my dirty washing
my knickers and sniffing them. I realised that even if he was after a soul,
it was not mine. After
a while I came to terms with the fact that I had to look well, slim, freshly
bathed and smelling of good perfumes and allow early on at least for petting,
to “park” a man by my side for a while. A young Polish, very Warsaw style,
sexual capitalism with lots of supply and controlled demand. It’s interesting
that it was mostly married men who easily accepted the fact that for me,
intimacy was not something one could order through DHL as a Saturday evening
delivery. But married men have their home dinner Madonnas and I didn’t spend
so much on the locksmith to have the locks changed again. Those
older men, unmarried thanks to a court order, and those very young, unmarried
out of definition – not all of course but most, had one thing in common: if
they haven’t had problems with the erection, they had the erection with
problems. Those
young ones were Hormonites. That’s how I called them. High on testosterone
and adrenaline. They didn’t know exactly what they were doing but they were doing it all night. The
problem with their erection was that they had it again after fifteen minutes,
with little benefit for me, while they thought they should get a medal for
it. In the morning they would go back home as victorious gladiators leafing
me with my face scratched by a two-day stubble and my pussy numb from their
adrenaline. Those
my age, first spent the entire evening telling me what they have achieved or
would soon, and then had average, normal erections. But they were well read.
They read a lot about clitoris, the g-spot, they knew everything about
foreplay and oxitocine; they treated me as they own home movie: press here,
turn that knob, hold the two buttons down for five seconds and you will have
the best picture and sound quality. But it doesn’t work. Women are not IKEA
flat-packs you can put together following an instruction leaflet. Those
around fifty were convinced they were as beautiful and as important as their
titles or jobs on their business cards. They had more grey hair, and they had
more peace. They knew how to wait, they read more books, they had more to say
about their ex-wives and always paid all the bills. Then at night they were
so busy with bringing about and maintaining or augmenting their erections they
were forgetting what they wanted to bring them about, maintain or augment
for. They were forgetting about me, focused on their seven-inch or less ego.
On the morning after I’d find in my handbag their pitiful business cards, of
which they were so proud. Exactly
one hundred and eighty two days after changing locks in my flat, I was
leaving on a business trip to Toruń to prepare an interview for my paper.
When it came to paying, I took out from my wallet a two-hundred-zlotys note
but the girl in the ticket office had no change. I turned to the person
behind me to change the banknote. The person behind me was he. Without a
word, he took the money out of my hand, frozen still with surprise and fear,
came up to the ticket-office and said he was going to Toruń too and would
like a seat next to me. The girl gave him two tickets and the change. He took
my suitcase and we both walked in silence to the platform. When we were
coming down the escalator down to the platform from which the Toruń train was
due to depart, he stood behind me. He was breathing quickly and then started
kissing my neck and gently picking and pulling my hair with his mouth. And
you know what I felt then? I read an article about drug addicts once, where
among other things I found a description what such a junkie feels when he has
a long break from the habit, because he was in the prison for instance. When
he finally has his line, or a portion of heroine, and snorts it or shoots it
up, he experiences something like an orgasm, or after-Christmas dinner
satisfaction following weeks of fasting. On that escalator, when he touched
my neck with his lips – this must have been exactly what I felt. And then,
for a short while, I was petrified by a thought that I might confuse love
with addiction. With a kind of narcotic dependency, like LSD, morphine or
valium addiction. It did not seem absurd to me at the time. Following
that Toruń trip, he again had keys to my flat. The new keys. And again he
would drive to my office on a Friday evening and take me to Hel, Ustka or to
Bieszczady. His wife meanwhile gave birth to his second daughter, Natalia. WHAT IS
SO SPECIAL ABOUT HIM?
What
is special? What do you mean? Everything is special. Even his first hours in
my life were special. For the first time I saw him through tears in an
Italian morgue. It
was the last year of my degree course. I was writing my theses about an
Italian Nobel Prize winner from the 70s, the poet Eugenio Montale. This was
my choice. I, a student of French, enchanted by Montale’s poetry, decided to
write a dissertation about Italian poetry in French. It was Monika who talked
me into a trip to Liguria, in Italy. I postponed the submission date till
September and off we went to Genoa with a plan to discover Liguria. Monika,
seeing I had a guilty conscience about postponing my diploma, tried to
console me: “No work about Montale is going to be credible if one does not
get drunk with wine, at least once, in Montale’s birth place, Genoa. Think of
it as a field research,” she said smiling at me, ”and the wine is on
me.” First,
we were to earn some money working as waitresses and then spend two weeks of
research by crossing Liguria from Cinque Terre in the east to Monaco in the
west, and as Monika put it – “never stray away from the beaches for more than
five kilometres, or for longer than five hours”. But
we failed to stick to the plan. As we wandered from restaurant to restaurant,
we had the impression they employed only Polish girls or Russian bouncers. We
could not afford a hotel in Genoa so we retreated inland. There, everything
was five times cheaper. After a week, with no money or hope, we ended up in
Avegno, a little settlement just off the motorway running along the Genoa
Bay. It was already afternoon when we found ourselves in a little square with
a fountain in the middle of it. After some time, a procession passed through.
Women in black dresses, black hats, with faces behind black veils. Some were
hiding from the heat under black umbrellas. We sensed the procession was
something unusual. We followed them. Not far from the square was a cemetery
with an alley of orange trees and a little morgue in a white house with a
wooden cross on the roof. In the morgue, in a little white coffin padded with
white velvet, laid a baby in a white silk dress. At some point one of the
women began to pray. I knelt next to her and prayed with her. In Italian. For
I can prey and swear in twelve languages. Even in Flemish. And it has nothing
to do with my interest in languages. It’s simply practical. The
little coffin was moved on the hidden conveyer belt to the wall, where a
metal partition was raised and the coffin was virtually sucked in behind the
wall dividing the morgue and crematorium.
All present groaned with terror. After a while, in the silence that
fell, from behind the metal wall came a clearly audible hiss of flames. In an
attempt to cover it up, I started praying aloud. In Italian. Monika seconded
me louder, in Polish: “Father thou art in Heaven…” Suddenly,
everyone joined us in Italian. Few
minutes later, the hiss behind the wall died down. The sobbing woman from the
second row lifted her veil, walked up to me and kissed my hand. Then they all
left. Monika
was kneeling. I sat with my hands still joined in a gesture of supplication,
terrified, staring at the cross on the metal wall. It all happened so
quickly. Too quickly. A little baby was burnt, prayers were said, and
everyone went home. A
short, very fat man came into the morgue and started talking in Italian to
Monika, who pointed at me. After fifteen minutes we were employees of the
morgue and the adjoining cemetery.
Our job was to prepare the coffins, start and lead the prayers before
cremation. The fat Italian offered three times as what we could have got in
any restaurant in Genoa. “People
like it, and will pay more, if a complete stranger starts to cry for their
close ones…” he said. And
so for two weeks we were professional weepers for Best Funerals Ltd, with HQ
in Avegno. Of course, too few people died in Avegno to earn a decent wage, so
we wept and prayed in all the surrounding towns and villages: Cicagan, Nervi,
Rapallo, Carasco, Camogli, sometimes as far as Moneglia. In two weeks we
prepared the coffins and wept for twenty two men, fourteen women and two
children; all in all thirty eight times. That
day when the baby was cremated, he came into the morgue and knelt opposite
me. He was looking into my eyes when I cried. Later, when we came out and
returned to the square, we saw him sitting at the fountain. The following
day, there was a funeral of an old woman. At 9 am. She was the mother of the
Mayer of Avegno; the proprietor asked us to weep particularly well. He came
to the morgue fifteen minutes into the funeral. He must have been a little
surprised to see me there again, and what’s more, just like the previous day,
kneeling at the coffin and crying. After the funeral, he was again waiting by
the fountain. He plucked up his courage and asked something in English. That
was how we met. He
was on holidays in Liguria, with the wife, who that day decided to stay on a
beach in Savona. He hated wasting whole days on the beach. He hired a car and
drove around. That’s how he found Avegno. And that’s how he walked into the
morgue just before the cremation of the baby. “You
cried so much I thought it was your baby, and I felt so sorry for you I
wanted to cuddle you up,” he said a few days later when we were having our
first dinner in a port restaurant in Genoa. With that ‘cuddle” he moved me
for the first time. He moves me to this day. Two
months later in Warsaw he kissed me for the first time. Although we were in
touch, that day we bumped into each other by chance in a bookstore in Nowy
Świat. I was buying a birthday present for Monika, the latest book of my
favourite Gretkowska. He bought the same, for himself. He asked shyly if I
had time to join him for a glass of wine. I did. We drank a bottle. I had not
eaten since the morning, and it was the morning of the previous day, as I had
just started on a new diet. But I didn’t get drunk. He was charming. When he
raised his glass I did see the ring, but it meant nothing to me. He walked me
home, said his good bye kissing me on the hand. A minute later he was back.
He caught up with me on the first floor and simply took me in his arms and
kissed me. Not just pecking me on the cheek. Properly, pushing my teeth apart
with his tongue. Next
day he rang me at the office, apologised for what had happened “on the stairs
yesterday”. In the evening he sent in flowers to my home. And in a cardboard
box, wrapped in shiny paper, all books by Gretkowska. Sometimes on other
evenings he would drive to my block of flats and through the entry- phone
invite me for a walk. I would come downstairs and we walked. After some time
I noticed I no longer saw anyone in the evenings and arranged my plans to
make sure I was home in case he got an idea to drive over, press the button
at the door and invite me for a walk. I missed him if he didn’t. Even then,
though it was still impossible to name what was going on between us, even
then I began to adjust my life to his plans. Even then I was waiting for a
ring of the phone, the buzz of the entry-phone or a doorbell. Even then I
began to hate weekends and started looking forward to Mondays, constantly
checking my mobile. So, I became his mistress quite early on. He didn’t even
know about it. A
month later I began to expect that after a walk he would come upstairs with
me. But he only occasionally ran up the stairs, just like the first time, and
kissed me. Two months later, on my name’s day, he came to see me and brought
photos from Liguria, without a warning. He simply rang the doorbell, I opened
the door with a towel on my head and he stood there with a bunch of roses. We
looked at the photos, reminiscing. I stopped answering phones with name’s day
wishes; didn’t want to waste time. When we went to the kitchen to make tea,
he stopped behind me, lifted my jumper, pulled down the bra straps and
started kissing those hollows in the back. I turned around, raised my hands
and he pulled the jumper over my head. Then I closed my eyes and gave him my
lips. Of
course he is special! He is. It’s impossible to pass him on the street and
having met his eyes not to feel he is someone exceptional, someone you would
like to spend time with. And that’s what I envy his wife. That she has so
much of his time for herself. During
that time she can listen to him. And of all the things I receive from him I
like listening to him best. From our nights – I think he would not be pleased
to hear that – I remember stories he told me better than what we were doing
before. He
would ring me in the morning, in the middle of the day, even of the night,
excited and impatient: “Listen, I
have to tell you this.” I
knew that with this one sentence he was putting me before everyone else. Even
before his wife. For it was me – and no one else – who was to listen to his
story of success, failure, a special moment, a plan or an idea. I was the
first. Absolutely the first. And that for me was the true proof of love. For
six years he never said he loved me but instead I always heard everything
first. Till the end of my life, no “I love you” will ever replace “Listen, I
have to tell you this.” I understood
how important it was for him when once, in a pub, I accidentally heard him
argue fiercely with a friend about the point at which a man becomes
unfaithful. I listened to him with amazement, as he argued that an act of
martial betrayal has taken place when “instead of your wife you feel you need
to tell something another woman first” and that “to be unfaithful you don’t
even have to leave home; it’s enough to have a phone or access to Internet”. For
six years he was telling me all the most important things first. Sometimes he
waited with them till the morning. Sometimes, when he was abroad, he waited
even a few days, but in most cases he drove over immediately. For I was the
one who was to know all the most important things first. For six years he has
not been unfaithful to me even once. Even with his wife. All
the things he was telling me were always so… so significant. Yes,
significant. Either stuff that was happening to him was so unusual, or he was
so unusually sensitive that he noticed those things and let them terrify him,
touch him, excite him, or make him mad. Some people want to give the world a
cuddle, others a punch on the nose. He belonged to the former. And that was
what he was mostly telling me about – his world cuddles. Just
like then, when he returned from Frankfurt-an-Mein and told me the story from
his first day there, how on his way from the hotel to an exhibition centre a
man with a white stick sat next to him on the metro. They were travelling in
silence for a while and then the man started telling him how beautiful Canary
Islands are. What the Lanzarote Bay looks like after a spring rain and what
colour are cacti in bloom growing in the crater on Palma; how velvety are the
flowers, and that the bluest horizon is in May. Then the train stopped and
the man got up, looked at him with a smile and got out. And how, walking
around the exhibition centre for the rest of the day, he could not forget the
look of the man with a white stick. Or
then, when on the eleventh of September he drove over to my apartment and we
sat on the floor, speechless, staring at the TV screen, unable to comprehend
the world. He was afraid. He sat behind my back, hugged me and rested his
head on my neck. He was trembling. And he spoke with such a strange, stifled
voice. You know, I love him also for the way he was afraid and not ashamed to
show it. He, who with such ruthless but pedantic fairness manages a hundred
people in his company, who is feared by practically all of them. He who never
stays in the passenger’s seat when he sees something wrong. He immediately
asks the bus to be stopped and takes the steering wheel in his own hands. No
man I know showed fear more beautifully than he did. I’ll never forget as on that fateful day
he got up suddenly and for the first time rang his wife from my apartment.
And although I nearly cried when I heard him say to the phone “Jo…” I felt it
was beautiful too, and if he had not done it, I would not respect him as much
as I do. That
day, looking at those surreal images from New York, we spoke for the first
time about God and religion. He was an un-baptized Catholic, church going
only in afternoon or evening, only when he was sure he would not meet any
priests – that’s after they refused to bury his father who was left by his
first wife and he, having no choice, agreed to divorce. He sat with me,
telling me of his dream, to put on the same train to Assisi or Mecca all the
popes and wizards of all religions. So that there would be a voodoo woman who
believes that all the dead wander among the living on their eternal journey,
and that by way of a rag doll and a needle she can make someone pregnant or
cause famine in a whole country. That next to her would be sitting a
Buddhist, who believes that God is an ant or a stone. By the window there
would sit a Taoist who tells the millions of Chinese that Yin and Yang are
Truth and False, Man and Woman, Good and Evil merged in Dao, or Tao, and that
in the end it’s all the same Wu Wei, or literally – “meaningless”. And by the
door, a Polish rabbi from New York; and vis-à-vis – a bearded sheik,
the most important sheik from the most important mosque Al-Azhar. And that
they all would get off that train in Assisi or Mecca and say it, each in his
own language, that no religion can justify the killing of a pregnant
Pakistani secretary from the 104th floor at the WTC. And that no one can be
killed in the name of God, in the name of a rag-doll or an ant. So he was whispering
into my ear, while I, tears in my eyes, was falling in love with him, deeper
and deeper. In
such moments I wanted to be everything to him. From a rosary to a whore. And
never let him down or disappoint him. But not like I wanted it for my mother.
For my mother I wanted to be perfect for her sake, not for my own
satisfaction. I’ll never forget when she bought me a pair of skates for
Christmas and she took me to the ice-rink. I was twelve. I could not skate. I
didn’t like skating, anyway. But my mother treated ice-skating as part of
“good upbringing”. I felt that I wasn’t just skating. When I was falling down
on the ice, I was pulling down my mother’s ego with me. The ego of a proud
officer’s widow who “on her own brought up her daughter to be somebody”. And
so I was falling, too embarrassed to say anything about the pain in my arm.
In the evening, when my arm looked like an oversized artificial limb and I
had a fever, I told her. My arm was broken in two places. When I told him
that story – I will never forget his hands folding like into a prayer, horror
in his eyes, and the silence that fell.
What
is so special about him? What’s so special about him is that he desires me
continuously. Despite his age, he is like a boy, one thing on his mind, has an
erection during the national anthem. When the anthem is over, he takes his
patriotic left hand from his breast and puts his lusty right one on mine. It
is very heartening for a thirty-something woman to feel she is desired in
such an almost animal way, and almost all the time. It’s a source of
unforgettable out-breath moments, and of that sweet pulsating ache down
there. In
such moments he left everything and everyone, leant over to my ear and
whispered that he wanted me. On the bus, when “it so happened” we were going
to my apartment for a lunch break, to return an hour later to our offices
only to start ringing each other and plotting to meet in the afternoon back
in my apartment. In the theatre, when he waited till everyone returned to
their seat only to drag me over to the ladies where we made love in one of
the cubicles. Or in a taxi, when he told the driver to stop by the park,
handed him a small wad of money with a wink and asked him to leave us for a
while, and “to lock the door from the outside”. No driver ever refused. Yes!
With him, I knew immediately that he wanted me. You
probably think that he was like that because he had no time to cool down,
being with me from morning to morning, from Monday to Monday. I thought that
too, especially when I was listening to the stories told by my girlfriends
about their newly wedded husbands or newly shacked up boyfriends who four
months later began showing signs of “lowered coefficient of desire”, as Mrs
X-nska, our office tea-lady used to say; a wise, quiet, childless, twice
divorced, three times married woman. He had no problems with that
coefficient. I know that for sure. In the course of those six years, there
were four months when he came to see me at my apartment every day. And every
time we started or ended up in bed. Come to think of it now, most of those
times we never left the bed. I
often thought whether there had ever been time – it never crossed my mind
then to use present tense – that he desired his wife in such a way too. Only
once, ever, did I ask him about it. Once, at sunrise on a beach in Hel. He
drove over to my office on a Friday afternoon and rang me from the
reception. I came downstairs to the
parking lot, got into his car and from that parking in the centre of Warsaw
we drove straight to Hel. “I
knew you had no plans for the weekend,” he said squinting his eyes. “Please,
come with me…” And
that hurt. That he knew I had no plans for the weekend. And that he certainly
knew that my plans were he. And that I waited for him. That my phone waited,
my lock in the door, my bed. And that I waited for him, hurrying back on
Saturday morning from the bakery, worried he might have rung while I was out.
And that I was buying twice as many rolls and eggs in case he didn’t ring but
simply turned up for breakfast. And that I was buying tomatoes, for scrambled
eggs with tomatoes, his favourite, naturally. Ha
planned his time and mine, without asking me. He would drive over to office
parking on Friday after work. I’d get in, he’d kiss my hands and wrists; I’d
lie that “I had my plans for the weekend”. Then he would pretend he was
disappointed and drive me home in silence. I would get out. He’d wait. Then I
would pretend that I changed my plans, walk back to the car and get in. “I
changed my plans. For you. It’s the last time. The very last time,” I’d say,
pretending to be annoyed. Every
time he would smile like a child happy with a present, and then we would
drive from under my apartment to Hel, Kazimierz or Bieszczady. Once even we
drove straight to Prague. And every time I changed my plans for “the very
last time”, every time I had the impression I was making his dreams come true
– by changing plans I didn’t have. I
held his hand and he was telling me all that happened in his life since the last
time he saw me. On every trip we behaved like teenagers whose parents let
them go camping. We laughed till our bellies ached or drove in silence for
miles, touching our hands, so much in love. Do you know you can have an
orgasm just by brushing gently the inside of a hand? And that it may happen on that stretch of
the road just past Łódź, or as you drive onto the Gdansk circular? Sometimes
we listened to my favourite music, sometimes he stopped on a picnic parking
lot in a forest and kissed me. Sometimes he asked me to read to him books,
which he wanted to read, but never had the time. Do you know that reading
aloud to each other binds people more than paying off the mortgage together? Sometimes
he was telling me about something that sounded like pure fantasy but in truth
was a proper lecture in physics or cosmology? As he used to say – “it was not
his fault that he was working in IT”. In fact when people asked him he always
said he was a physicist. So when physics took him over he would stop the car
on the roadside, pull out pieces of paper or business cards and draw for me
the theory of the universe. Just like when he remembered about baby worlds.
The very name made me want to know everything about them. Baby worlds! Whole
worlds like soap bubbles except that made not of soap but timespace created
after the Big Bang or the collapse of a black hole into a point. Babies born
of the cosmic froth or evaporating black holes that fill parent worlds,
independent of them in a sense of the laws of physics that govern them but
being their continuation. He would stop the car and start explaining to me
excitedly all about those worlds. And
when the journey was coming to an end and we were nearing Hel, Kazimierz or
Bieszczady, I was sure that the next time I will “change my plans for him”
again, and that, again, it would be “the very last time”. That’s how
imperceptibly a woman becomes a mistress. The
journey was coming to an end but that was only a beginning. We still had to
pitch the tent and slip inside the sleeping bag. Just
like then, on Hel. It was the end of August. We lived in a little hut
smelling of pinewood and resin by the beach. We didn’t sleep all night. He
got up and brought a white towel from the bathroom and wrapped me in it. We
came out onto a small wooden veranda covered with peeling paint and fenced
off the beach by a low sand barrier of rotten boards. The sun was rising.
Only over Hel and Key West in Florida the sun rises in a way that makes you
believe in God, if you haven’t yet. We
sat on the veranda, looking at the sunrise, completely enthralled by the
view. He slipped his hand under my towel and touched me. He passed me an open
bottle of champagne. To this day I don’t know if it was the alcohol or God
pushing the sun so beautifully over the horizon that morning which made me
feel suddenly so incredibly close to him.
Have you ever felt something like that for a man? Have you had a
feeling that he belongs to you so completely? A sudden feeling that there is
a mystical, solemn, evangelical bond between you? A tantra at sunrise. I felt
al those things, one after the other on that pathetic veranda in Hel. That’s
probably the reason I plucked up my courage and said: “I
would like so much to be the only woman in your life. The only one! Do you
understand?! And to know I will have you tomorrow and the next Monday and on
Christams Eve. Do you understand?!” I
was crying. “I
would like to be your only woman. That’s all.” He
dropped his head. He shrank, as if what I had said was like a blow and now he
was awaiting another. He pulled out his finger from the bottle neck and froze
still. He was silent. After a while he got up and started walking towards the
sea. I sat, unable to move. When he got back, he touched my head and said in
a low voice: “Forgive
me.” Then
he went to the kitchen and started preparing a breakfast for us. We didn’t
make love that day. Nor the next night. Then we drove in silence all the way
to Warsaw. It was then, on
our way back from Hel, that I understood he would never belong to me and to
me only. That he can only be had completely – temporarily. And that I should accept it. If one can’t have the
whole cake, one can always have the joy of picking out and eating the
raisins. Besides, it’s worth living for the moment, even though you want to
leave your own heart away in a fridge. When on the way back we reached the
outskirts of Warsaw, I had resigned myself to it. I touched his hand. The
place where his veins are most protruding. When we arrived at my apartment,
he followed me up to the fourth floor, helping to carry the suitcase, and
stayed the night. I have never withheld that acceptance to this day. Tomorrow
is my birthday. And his wedding anniversary. I haven’t had my period for nine
months. I am with a child. His child. I’m no longer afraid of that wedding
ring. I will tell him tomorrow. That one cannot buy two bouquets of roses and
think that one can offer them to women from two different, separate worlds. He
will certainly understand and will leave us. But he will leave with me his
whole world. The baby one. |