George manoeuvres his car into the traffic on Avenue Louise. Down into tunnels and up again. Just before the major transit route heads into Bois de la Cambre, he turns left towards Place Flagey, and the two small grey ponds known as the Ixelles Ponds. Klara looks at the grey buildings with flaking shutters and small Portuguese bistros.
‘You’re going to miss all this,’ she says.
George glances at her. ‘Brussels?’ he says with a shrug. ‘Why do you think that?’
‘You don’t notice it until you leave,’ she says. ‘And maybe not even then. But you notice it when you come back. Everything that makes you so furious when you live here: the strikes and roadwork and the traffic and all the fucking hassle. Then you move and come back, and you see all the people sitting around drinking their Leffes at some outdoor cafe in November, and you forget about all the bullshit. We’ve been here too long. No other city will be like this one for us.’
George nods and parks the car by the sidewalk next to one of the small ponds. The trees are bare and straggly; a cold drizzle hangs in the air.
‘I won’t miss being hunted by the goddamn Russians, that’s for sure,’ he mutters and jumps out of the car.
*
They order a coffee and sit down at Café Belga’s outdoor seating area, despite the cold. Klara wraps one of the cafe’s beige blankets around her shoulders and stares out over the small square and the tram tracks in front of them. She lights a cigarette and sips her cappuccino.
‘At least we have a good vantage point here,’ she says, ‘if they track us down again.’
George takes a Marlboro from Klara’s pack and looks back over his shoulder towards the big, bright bar room where young students and freelancers are bent over laptops, phones and croissants. He turns back to Klara again. His eyes are so different than she remembers them, so much less insecure and arrogant. There’s a depth there now, something almost like caring. And something more, something bigger that makes her body tremble, and it’s so strong and surprising that she doesn’t know what to do with it, so she looks away.
‘Are we gonna figure this out?’ George says. ‘It could be just about anything. And the Russians? I don’t like it.’
She feels him hesitantly putting his hand over hers. It’s as if he doesn’t really know if it’s appropriate, if he has permission, despite what happened yesterday and this morning.
She turns her palm upwards so she can lace her fingers with his. She feels his cold thumb stroking her wrist. It feels so strange and confusing to touch him, to hold his hand. More intimate than lying naked beside him in his bed. And when she turns to him and meets his eyes again, it is as though a door opens inside her. For so long it’s felt like she was stumbling around in a big gloomy room, a cave or a tomb, trapped inside memories, and she didn’t know what to do. Memories and guilt. She got lost in that room, didn’t know how to find a way out, didn’t know where the door was, or if there even was one.
But now, here in the grey chill of Brussels, just days after Gabi’s arrest and her grandfather’s funeral, with George’s hand in hers, it’s as though she found it. As if she fumbled onto the door handle in the dark, as if she turned it and discovered the door was never locked.
She looks at George. Sees his blonde hair, his slightly worried eyes, feels his fingers playing with her own. He’s not the door, not the one who opened it. But maybe he’s the one standing there when she cracks it open.
‘Yes,’ she says. ‘We’ll figure this out.’