I could have called Tadek. Asked, “Hey, Tadek, has Bogdan arrived yet?” And I would have heard the silence, and I would have known for certain. But I did not want to know for certain. Not yet. Because as long as I did not know for certain, I could convince myself that it might have been a mistake. Maybe he was looking something up for someone else. Maybe the guesthouse booking was for a colleague from work.
A double room with a sea view. For a colleague from work.
I called my sister. I did not tell her why – I just asked if she wanted to come over for coffee. Krysia arrived an hour later, with a cheesecake from Biedronka and a question about what was wrong, because she had heard something strange in my voice. I said, “Nothing, it is just quiet here without Bogdan.” Krysia looked at me carefully but did not push. We have known each other for forty years. She knows when to push and when to stay silent.
The Name on the Booking
In the afternoon, I did what I had been dreading. I opened Bogdan’s laptop – the password was our dog’s name, Reksio, with a capital letter and a two at the end. In his email, I found the booking confirmation. Pensjonat Albatros, room number 12, two people, surname: Kowalczyk. Bogdan Kowalczyk and Elżbieta Maciejewska.
Elżbieta Maciejewska. I did not recognise the name. I typed it into a search engine, but nothing meaningful came up – just ordinary results, nothing from Częstochowa. Then I moved to his phone messages – and that is where I found her.
In a messenger app that Bogdan had set to not show notifications on the screen. Three months of conversations. Not hundreds of messages – maybe two or three a day. Short, calm ones. “Goodnight, Ela.” “I have the afternoon off tomorrow.” “I bought that tea you liked.” That tea stopped me. Bogdan never bought tea. I bought the tea.
I sat down on the floor in the hallway, my back against the shoe cabinet, and cried as quietly as I could. Not because Bogdan had someone else. But because he bought her tea. Because he wrote “goodnight.” Because this was not some incident, a drunken night on a business trip, a foolish mistake that could be erased. This was everyday life. A parallel everyday life, with tea and goodnight messages, running alongside ours.
The Confrontation
Bogdan returned on Sunday at half past seven. He smelled of the sea. Not pine-scented shower gel – the sea. Salt, wind, something that does not exist near Łódź in my brother-in-law’s garage.
“How was Tadek?” I asked from the kitchen.
“Good. The garage is almost done.” He set his bag down by the door. “I am tired.”
“Bogdan,” I said. “Do they have garages in Kołobrzeg too?”
Silence. The kind of silence where you hear the refrigerator, the clock on the wall, the neighbour’s dog through the wall. Bogdan stood in the hallway with his jacket in his hands, looking at me. There was no fear in his eyes – rather, something that looked like relief. As if he had been waiting for someone to say it out loud.
“How long?” I asked.
“Since the sanatorium. In February.” He sat down on a chair in the kitchen. “Jolka, I did not want to…”
“Do not tell me what you did not want.”
We were silent. He looked at his hands, I looked at the teacup that had been sitting on the table since morning. Outside, someone was parking – I could hear the beeping of the reversing sensors, a dog barking, music from a radio somewhere further away.
“Tell me one thing,” I finally said. “That tea you bought for her. What kind was it?”
Bogdan looked up. There was astonishment in his eyes – of all the questions he had been expecting, that one was not on the list.
“Earl Grey,” he said quietly. “With bergamot.”
I nodded. We drank ordinary black tea, with lemon. Thirty years of ordinary black tea with lemon. But for her, he bought Earl Grey with bergamot. As if with her, he was someone else. Someone who drank different tea.
What Comes Next
Bogdan slept that night in our daughter’s room. In the morning, he left for work earlier than usual. He left a note on the table: “We need to talk. I am sorry.” I looked at that note for a long time. At the word “sorry,” which looked like it had been written in a hurry, slightly crooked, the letter “p” leaning to the left.
I do not yet know what I will do. I do not know if I want to hear what he has to say. I do not know if I want to know who he is with her, if with me for thirty years he was just Bogdan of the pine-scented shower gel and yesterday’s broth.
All I know is that that evening, I made myself a cup of tea. Not black with lemon. Earl Grey, with bergamot. I bought it on my way home from work, at the little shop on Jasnogórska Street – I am not sure why. Maybe to taste what that other life was like.
It tasted bitter. But perhaps I have not yet had time to get used to it.