It’s a mistake asking the taxi to drop her off at Ralph’s. Klara realizes it as soon as she pays and steps onto the cobblestones with her bag over her shoulder. She tries to keep her eyes on the door and her thoughts focused on the wine in order to avoid looking to the right, where the European Parliament stands with its blue glass and memories of her former life.
Ralph’s is remarkably empty on a Monday morning. It was always bursting to the limit when she was here in the past, full of lobbyists with an extra button unbuttoned on their pink dress shirts and gold cards at the ready, and red-cheeked interns from EU institutions with their badges dangling around their necks.
She orders herself a glass of white wine, sits down on one of the colourful plastic chairs at the far end of the long room and feels her anxiety grow. Maybe it’s the depressing, deserted bar with Adele’s soft voice streaming over the speakers above her, filling the bar with empty nostalgia, but her breath becomes more shallow and the pressure in her chest starts to spread to her left arm with acute and intense pain. For a moment, she’s afraid she might fall off her chair. She closes her eyes and grabs the table so hard her knuckles turn white.
‘Miss?’
Klara can barely hear, her ears are ringing so loudly it sounds as if she’s standing in a waterfall.
‘Are you okay, miss?’
She turns her head to the bar and sees, as if through a haze, a worried bartender leaning over the counter. She tries to nod and give him some kind of smile, but answering is beyond her capabilities. She manages to loosen her grip on the marble table and grab onto the stem of her wine glass. The noise just increases in her ears; she can barely hear Adele any more, and she can see the bartender’s lips move, but his mouth isn’t making any sound. He leaves the bar and starts to move towards her, but it’s as if he’s in another world, as if she’s in a bubble all by herself. The pit is wide open inside her now, and if she had the strength, any strength at all, she would scream or start to weep.
She feels the bartender’s hand on her shoulder – he’s shaking her gently, but she can’t do anything other than keep her eyes shut and try to hold it together as best she can.
‘Miss? Miss? Are you on something? Are you on any medication?’
The roar in her ears. The pain in her chest.
And then suddenly something else. A voice she recognizes. A voice that cuts through it all.
‘Klara?’ the voice says. ‘What the hell? What’s going on?’
She opens her eyes and the noise starts to diminish until it’s no longer deafening, more like the slight buzz of a bee or a wasp. The pain is just a strip across her chest, and she takes a breath, forcing herself to suck the oxygen as deep into her lungs as she can.
‘It’s fine,’ the man says to the bartender. ‘I’ll take care of it; she’s my friend.’
She recognizes the man leaning over her, despite the round, tortoiseshell glasses, even though the blonde hair isn’t slicked back with gel any more, but is product-free, tousled, and longer. Even though he has on a denim shirt instead of a neatly pressed, tailored pink one, even though he’s not wearing a pinstriped suit jacket, but a navy-blue bomber jacket.
‘Everything’s okay, Klara,’ George Lööw says. ‘Just breathe. We’re gonna take care of this, okay?’
She senses him sitting down on the chair next to her, putting his arm around her and pulling her close. Something releases inside her, and she lets it float away. She lets her head fall onto his shoulder.
‘George,’ she mumbles. ‘I meant to contact you, I was going to call, I was…’
‘Shh,’ he says, stroking her hair. ‘It’s fine, Klara. Just breathe now.’
He lets go of her for a moment, fumbling in his pocket for something, and then he lifts her weak arm with one hand and pushes something small and dry into her palm with the other.
‘Take this,’ he says. ‘Beta blockers. Nothing dangerous, but it’ll help you slow your pulse, okay?’
She looks at him. The buzzing in her ears has almost completely disappeared now. She’s almost out of the bubble. He looks so different. Not like the slick lobbyist she met a couple of years ago. This George is softer, his eyes not shifting and impatient, but warm and worried.
‘You got glasses,’ she whispers.
He smiles and pats her cheek. ‘Always had ’em. Just stopped using contacts. Take the pill now.’ He holds up the wine glass to her.
‘You’re giving me wine to wash down the medicine?’ she asks. ‘Haven’t changed that much, I see.’
He shrugs. ‘Just do what I say. Believe me, I know exactly how you feel right now.’
*
They walk slowly and quietly towards Matonge, the Congolese part of the Ixelles neighbourhood that borders on the EU district, and Klara remembers these contrasts were exactly what she loved about Brussels: privilege never more than a block away from poverty, the future never disconnected from the past.
She feels better, almost functional, after downing her wine and George’s pill. She can feel George glancing over at her as they cross Rue du Trône, continue past small, dusty shops full of wigs and phone cards, dried fish in wooden crates on the sidewalk.
‘You’ve changed,’ she says. She runs a hand over his jacket. ‘What happened to the Wall Street look?’
George was really the quintessential lobbyist when Klara first met him. Flashy job at a big American PR firm. The suits, a glass of champagne in his hand at Ralph’s, big talk, high stress and shady customers.
‘Laid off after last summer,’ he says. He takes her arm gently and pulls her close to keep her from being run over by a teenager on a Vespa tearing around the corner.
Klara nods. Her pulse isn’t racing any more. She glances up at him. The panic attack has started to give way to something else, something warmer, something bigger. It feels so good to be walking side by side with George. Too good.
‘What are you up to now?’ she asks.
‘You won’t believe it,’ he says.
‘You started working for the Social Democrats in the European Parliament?’ she says with a smile.
‘Worse,’ George says. ‘I’m moving home.’
‘What? Moving back to Stockholm?’
Klara thinks she must have heard wrong. George is so much a part of Brussels for her that she never imagined him leaving, it feels like the city itself wouldn’t be the same.
‘But what will you do there?’
He looks so uncomfortable that Klara almost starts to laugh, despite her condition. ‘I got a job as an official at the Ministry of Enterprise,’ he says.
Now she does start to laugh. ‘You’re becoming a bureaucrat?’ she says. ‘Well, I don’t know what to say.’
He shrugs. ‘It’s a good job,’ he says quietly. ‘And I haven’t felt so great lately either. Been through a lot.’
She turns to him and looks into his eyes. ‘Seriously, it is a good job. A dream job for a lot of people. Just odd to think of you…’
‘I know,’ he says. ‘Seriously, I don’t want to talk about it, okay?’
She hesitantly puts her arm around him and can feel herself getting goosebumps. He looks so different in his grown-up glasses and tousled hair.
‘Damn it, George,’ she says. ‘I’m proud of you.’
They end up at L’Ultime Atome on Rue Saint-Boniface, at a table in a large, bright room. George orders some kind of complicated and potent amber beer for them. This is apparently also part of his new persona; Klara never pegged him as a beer drinker. Champagne and cocaine were more his style.
She looks around at the other tables in the room, which are slowly filling up as darkness falls. L’Ultime Atome is a modern grande café, a classic place where she used to go for a beer on Sunday or a drink before dinner along with all the other newcomers in Brussels. She’d almost forgotten it, but it feels homey and safe to be back. With every gulp of beer, every minute spent with George, she feels better.
‘But you haven’t told me why you’re here,’ George says.
Klara takes another gulp, and realizes she’s almost drunk it all. George is barely halfway through his. After Ralph’s and the intense anxiety she felt there, she almost managed to suppress her reason for being here, but now she hears that slight buzz in her ears again. She downs the rest of the beer and stands up.
‘Do you have a smoke?’ she asks.
*
They’re standing outside the bar in the dark, cold drizzle, and George lights her cigarette with a silver lighter. The facade of the church on the short side of the square is illuminated, and above it hang the Christmas lights the city puts up every year.
‘Gabriella was arrested yesterday,’ she says.
‘Excuse me?’ he says. ‘But she’s a…’
‘Lawyer, yes,’ Klara says. ‘But that doesn’t seem to matter to a national SWAT team.’
It takes her a whole cigarette to tell him what happened yesterday, and George listens without interrupting. They stand in the grey twilight while Klara tells him everything she knows. About the letter Gabriella wrote to her, and the men who were following her, and who now seem to be following Klara.
‘We need another beer,’ is the only thing he says when she’s done. ‘At least one more.’
They have two more beers, then three and Klara can feel herself almost floating out of her chair, her head finally empty and manageable, her breathing easy.
‘Shall we have one more?’ she says.
But George just stretches a hand over the table and carefully, unexpectedly, takes her hand.
‘You’re gonna meet this guy Karl tomorrow,’ he says gently. ‘Tomorrow is the twenty-fourth. You have to be sharp for that. No more beer for you now.’
She pulls her hand away and leans back in her chair. ‘Who the hell do you think you are?’ she says, barely slurring. ‘I drink as much beer as I want.’
His eyes seem worried now, and it makes her furious. Where did she put her bag? She looks around. There, on the floor. She bends down and gets her wallet, heads over to the bar. George can do whatever the hell he wants; she’s having another drink.
‘Where are you staying?’ he asks before she’s made it to the bar. ‘What hotel?’
She stops. Staying? The pleasant, blurry feeling in her head scatters and gives way to something else lurking beneath, something sharp and stinging. She hasn’t even thought about where she’s going to stay tonight.
‘I…’ she begins.
‘Come on,’ he says. ‘You’re staying with me. We’ll have another drink when we get there. I promise.’