HE: If one can rely on anyone in Germany it is only Croatian maids.

Of course no one woke him up ninety minutes before the departure of his Warsaw train. There even was no one there to tell what a scandalous neglect of duty it was in a hotel which charged 300 dollars per night. The receptionist from the previous night was no longer at the reception, while a blonde girl who had taken over looked she might have problem with finding Warsaw on a map.

He was woken up by a room maid who thought the room had been vacated. She entered the room while he was still asleep. He did not know what time was his train, but when he saw that it was five to eleven he knew he did not have much time.

Ignoring the woman who was still standing there, he leapt out of bed stark naked and cried: “Kurwa mać!” and started getting dressed in a mad rush. Because the room maid was from Croatia she knew very well what “kurwa mać” meant and as he proceeded to clear all his cosmetics from the bathroom shelf, she was packing all his stuff from the night table and by the TV set into his suitcase. After few minutes he ran of the room. Out of habit, he headed for the reception but luckily the receptionist from the previous night had already left. When he realised the blonde girl had no idea what he was on about, he ran out without paying. They had his credit card number. Besides, once on the train, he could get on the Internet and pay then. His business American Express had the facility.

Outside the hotel stood a line of taxis. The taxi driver obliged and ten minutes later they were at the station. He did not buy a ticket. He ran across the platform and leapt into the wagon directly outside the exit from the tunnel. He was lucky. The train was already moving. He opened the door to the first compartment.

She sat by the window. With a book on her lap. She had lips exactly like those he saw on that business card in the bar. Hair gathered at the back. High brow. She was lovely.

He sat in the only seat available. Of course he had no reservation. Never mind. He will solve this problem when the conductor comes. A piece of paper stuck to the compartment door read that the seat was reserved only from Frankfurt on the Odre.

He took out his papers. The hotel kiosk was also selling Polish titles. Apart from French, American, English and Italian. The Wyborcza available daily just like Paris Soir in a hotel kiosk in the middle of Berlin says more than all those declarations about “Poland’s readiness to join Europe”.

At some point he just could no longer resist it. He raised his head from his newspaper and started looking at her. Apart from the lipstick she had no other make up. She read, now and again touching her ear. She had fascinating hands. When she turned a page it looked as if she barely brushed it with her long fingers.

She raised her head and smiled at him. This time he did not get embarrassed. He smiled back.

He did not feel like reading any more. He connected his mobile to the computer and went into his mail. Slowly, he ploughed through the security procedures. The modem in a mobile is probably the slowest there is. He often wondered why. He promised himself to check it after his return home in Munich.

In his inbox there was only one email. The address contained a domain of an English bank.

“Another ad,” he thought.

He wanted to delete it but his attention was caught by the first part of the address: “Jennifer@” In his memory it sounded like music. He decided to read it.

Camberley, Surrey, England, 29 April

You are J.L. aren’t you?

That’s what you personal page seems to be saying. I’ve spent my entire afternoon reading it. Instead of going to the London Stock Exchange page and getting on with my work, for which I get handsomely paid by the way, I read every single word on yours. Then I took a taxi and drove to a bookshop in Camberely High Street to buy an English-Polish dictionary. I took the biggest they had. I also wanted to understand the passage you have published on the page in Polish. I didn’t understand everything but got the mood. The kind of mood only J.L. could create, so it must be you.

After work I went to my favourite bar “Club 54” by the station and got drunk. I have been fasting, which I go through twice a year, “cleansing” myself by not eating for a week. Do you know that when you survive the first three days you enter a kind of trance? Your organism doesn’t have to digest anything. Only then you realise what the digestion process robs you of. All of a sudden you have so much energy! You live as if on a permanent high. You are creative, excited, all your senses are super sharp. Your perception is like dry sponge, sucking in anything near it. You write beautiful poetry, invent revolutionary theories, you sculpt or paint provocative and very avant-garde works of art, and you buy and sell on the stock exchange with exceptional success. I can certainly confirm the last one. And finally, Bach on a hunger strike sounds like… well, sounds like he is played by Mozart.

You reach this state only after you have suffered through the first two, three days. Those first days are an unrelenting struggle with hunger. It wakes me up even in the middle of the night. But I suffered through those first days and this morning began to feel that high of “un-digestion”. And while on this high I came across your page. It could not be a better moment.

Everything else became less important.

But I did not break my fast. I did not eat in that bar. I only drank. Mostly to memories. Never drink – even if it’s the Bloody Mary as good as the one they serve at Club 54 and you have wonderful memories – never drink on the fourth day of your fast. Eat something before.

Then I returned home and wrote that email. It is like a page out the diary of a starving  (three days without eating), drunk (two Bloody Marys and four pints of Guinness) woman with a past (twelve years).

That is why I beg you – treat it with utmost seriousness.

P(re) Scriptum: The “Isle” in this text – in case you have forgotten – is my Isle of Wight. A tiny dot on the map between France and England, somewhere on the Channel. Where I was born.

Dear J.L.

Do you know, I have written this letter at least 1000 times?

I have written it in my mind, I have written it on sand, I have written it on the best paper in the United Kingdom, I have written it with a biro on my thigh. I have written it on the covers of records with Chopin’s music.

I have written it so many times…

I have never sent it. Over the last twelve years – for it happened almost exactly twelve years ago – I have not sent at least a thousand letters to HIM.

Because this is not a letter to YOU. This is a letter to L.J. – or Elyot. For I swapped the initials and spelled them the Polish way – el-yot. Sheer poetry.

You are J.L. but you know him. You probably know him like no one else. Promise me you will tell him what I have written. Will you?

For Elyot was to be like an interval between the first and the second act of an opera. I always drink the best champagne in the bar. If I can’t afford it, I stay at home and listen to records. He was to be like that champagne. Only for the interval. He was to go to my head. He was to taste delicious, make me tipsy in readiness for the second act. To make the music sound even more beautiful.

Elyot was like that. Like the best and the most expensive champagne in the bar. He went to my head. There was to be another interval. And then the concert was to end. Champagne too. But it was not to be. For the first time in my life out of the whole opera I remembered best the interval between the first and the second act. In truth, it was the interval that never ended. I realised that this morning in that club. Mostly thanks to the senses sharpened by the fast and the fourth pint of Guinness.

I spent with him 88 days and 16 hours of my life. No other man had so little time and gave me so much. One guy was with me for six months and could not give me what I had with Elyot after six hours. I was with that guy because I thought that his “six hours” were yet to come. I waited. But they never came. One day during one of those pointless quarrels he started shouting:

“What did you get from that bloody Pole who hasn’t left you anything? Even a single photo?!” And when he added triumphantly: “Anyway, did he know what a camera was?” – I put his half packed suitcase, with which he moved in, out through the door.

So what did that “bloody Pole” give me? Well?

For instance - my optimism. He never spoke about sorrow, though I knew he lived through the ultimate sorrow. His optimism was contagious. With him, rain was only a passing phase before the return of sunshine.  Anyone who lived in Dublin knows it’s an example of total optimism. It was with him that I noticed that I could wear clothes which were not black. It was with him that I believed that my father loved my mother but simply did not know how to show it. Even my mother did not believe that. And neither did her psychotherapist.

For instance, he gave me that feeling when you think you are about go mad with desire. And you know it is going to be satisfied. He could tell me a fairy tale about every little bit of my body. And there was none that he didn’t touch or tasted. If he had the time he would have kissed every single hair on my head, one by one. With him, I always wanted to undress even more. I had the feeling that I would be truly naked only if my gynaecologist took out my coil.

He never searched for erogenic spots on my body. He assumed that a woman’s body is erogenic as a whole, and the most erogenic place of al is the brain. Elyot heard of the famous G-spot in the vagina, but he was looking for it in my brain. And almost always found it.

With him, I reached the end of every road. He led to such wonderfully sinful places. Since then, some of them have become holy for me. Sometimes, when we made love listening to operas or Beethoven, I felt no one could be more tender. As if he had two hearts instead of two lungs. Perhaps he did…

For instance, he gave me a little red heart-shaped hot water bottle. Not much bigger than the palm of my hand. Sweet. Only he could have found something like that in Dublin. Because only he paid any attention to things like that. He knew I had terrible PMTs, before even worse periods, which turned me into an unfair, cruel, egoistical, mean ***** from hell who finds fault with everything in the world. Even the fact that east is in the east and west in the west. One day he went to the other end of Dublin and bought it. That night, when it hurt so much, he got out of bed, filled it with hot water and put it on my stomach. But first he kissed me – there. Every millimetre. Slowly, softly and so incredibly tenderly. Then he put that on my stomach and when I, totally delighted, was looking at that sweet little heart, he proceeded to kiss and suck my toes. One after the other. One foot after the other. Even if you do not have PMTs you can imagine how wonderful it felt. Alas, I survived with him only three PMTs and three periods.

For instance, he gave me that childish curiosity about the world. He always asked about everything. Really, just like a child who has the natural right to ask. He wanted to know. He taught me that “not to know” is to “live in fear”. Everything interested him. He challenged everything, doubted everything and was ready to believe in anything, as soon as he was persuaded by the facts. I remember as one day he shocked me.

“Do you think Einstein masturbated?”

He taught me, for example, that one should succumb to one’s desires as they arise, and never put anything off for later. Just like then, during a party in a huge house, which belonged to a very important professor of genetics, in the middle of a very important discussion about “genetically conditioned sexuality of mammals”. He got up, walked up to me, bent forward – everyone fell silent looking at us – and whispered:

“On the first floor there is a bathroom like you haven’t seen before. I can’t concentrate on this discussion about sexuality, looking at you. Come see that bathroom with me.”

And added:

“Do you think it’s conditioned genetically?”

I got up obediently and followed him upstairs. Without a word, he put me up against the crystal mirror in the wardrobe’s door, unbuttoned his trousers, spread my legs apart and… And the “genetically conditioned sexuality of mammals” acquired altogether a new, wonderful meaning. When after a few minutes we returned downstairs and took our seats, there was a moment of silence. Women looked at me intently. Men lit up their cigars.

He gave me for instance a sense that for him I was the most important woman ever, and that everything I do means something to him. He opened his eyes, took out my hand from under the duvet, kissed it and said: “good morning”. Always in Polish just as he did the day we were introduced to each other.

Sometimes, when he woke up “hit by an idea” – that’s how he called it – he slipped out of bed quietly and went to work on those genes of his. At dawn he came back and slipped back into bed to kiss my hand and say “dzień dobry”. He thought naively that I did not notice. I noticed every nanosecond without him.

He could run to see me at the institute, where I had my lectures, just to tell me he was going to be late for supper. So that I would not worry. You understand, the whole incredibly long ten minutes.

In those 88 days and 16 hours, he gave me, for instance, more than 50 crimson roses. Because crimson roses are my favourite. The last one he gave me in that last, sixteenth hour. Just before the departure, at the Dublin airport. You know, on the way back from the airport, it seemed to me it was the most precious thing anyone had ever given to me?

He was my lover and my best female friend. Something like that happens only in films, and only in those made in California. To me it happened in Dublin. He was giving me all that and asked for nothing in return. Nothing at all. No promises, no vows, no oaths that “only you and no one else ever”. Simply nothing. It was his only, terrible fault. There can’t be a greater misery for a woman than a man who is so good, so faithful, so loving and so unique and who does not expect any declarations. He simply is and gives her the assurance it is going to be forever. You only worry that the eternity – without all those standard promises – will be short.

My eternity was 88 days and 16 hours long.

On the 17th hour of the 89th day, I began to wait for him. I was still at the airport. He left the terminal gate on a bus.  He climbed slowly the stairs leading to the aeroplane and when he got to the top, just before the door, he turned around to look towards the viewing gallery where I was – he knew I would be there – and placed his right hand on his left breast. He stood like that for a while, looking in my direction. Then he disappeared inside the plane.

I haven’t seen him since.

The first three days of fast is nothing in comparison with what I had been through during the first three months after he left.  He didn’t write. He didn’t phone. I knew the plane got to Warsaw, for a week later I rang the LOT office in London to make sure.

He just put his hand on his heart and disappeared from my life.

I suffered like a child who was sent to an orphanage for a week and then forgotten about. I missed him. Incredibly. I loved him and could not wish him anything bad, and so suffered even more. After a while, I stopped listening to Chopin, out of revenge. And then, out of revenge, I threw away the recordings of all the operas we used to listen to together. Then, out of revenge, I began to hate all Poles. Except one. Him. Because, believe it or not, I am not vindictive.

Then my father left my mother. I had to stop my studies for six months, leave Dublin and go back home on the Isle to help her. It helped me more than anyone else. Life on the Isle is simple. The Isle puts the right perspective on everything. When you stand on the cliff which has been there for 8 thousands years, a lot of things that people strive for because they are important to them – lose their significance.

Six months after he left, just before Christmas, I received a packet of letters sent to my Dublin address. Among them was a card from Elyot. The only one in 12 years. On a kitsch letterhead from a San Diego hotel.   

The only thing I could do to survive this was to disappear from you life for good. You would not be happy with me here. I would not be happy there.

We live in a divided world.

I’m not even asking for your forgiveness. What I have done cannot be forgiven. It can only be forgotten.

Forget.

Jakub

PS: Whenever I’m in Warsaw and have some spare time, I always go to Zelazowa Wola. I sit on a garden bench near the house and listen to music. Sometimes I cry.

I did not forget. But the card helped. Even if I disagree with all that he wrote, at least I learnt how he decided to deal with what happened between us. It would have been the most egotistical way but at least I learnt he had decided something. At least I had that “sometimes I cry”. Women live on memories. Men on what they have forgotten.

I returned to Dublin, finsihed my diploma. Then my father decided I should run our family business on the Isle. I lasted a year. Long enough to find out that my father’s emotional intelligence factor was zero. His high IQ had nothing to do with it.  I decided to leave the Isle before I would start hating him.

I came to London. I did a PhD in economics at Queens Mary College, learned to play the piano, started going to ballet classes, found a job on the Stock Exchange, listened to operas. No more intervals that would be more important than the opera. And no more champagne to match.

Then came pointless men. The more I met, the less I wanted to get close to any of them. It came to this that when I was in bed with one, even when he kissed me down there, I still felt – up here – lonely. Because they only touched me with their skin on their lips or tongues, mechanically. While Elyot… Elyot simple ate me. Greedily, like the first strawberry in a season. Sometimes he dipped it in champagne…

I could not fall in love with any of those men, who only had skin on their lips.

After two years of living in London I realised I had no female friends and most of my friends were gay. Apart from having weird desires they can be men for life. I was lucky to meet the best of them. Sensitive, gentle, knowing how to listen. They don’t have to pretend. If they pay for your dinner it’s not to get into your knickers. And that they wear earrings?

It’s fantastic – as one of my girlfriends at work says – at least you know the guy knows about pain, and a thing or two about jewellery.