MISTRESS

 

© Janusz Leon Wiśniewski

 

(Tranlsated from the Polish by Wiesiek Powaga)

 

 

He’d come in, sometimes throw his jacket on the floor, sometime hang it on the coat hanger in the hall, come up to me without a word, lift my skirt or forcefully pull my trousers down, stick his tongue into my mouth then push my legs apart and thrust his two fingers inside me. Sometimes I wasn’t even wet, and if he chose the wrong finger, I’d feel his wedding ring inside me.

 

 

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.