by Kopen Hagen
“Have you eaten or do you feel like taking a bite?”
“Oh, I’m actually quite hungry. That airline food is not very edible. I hardly touched it. You have any idea where to go?”
“This hotel has some pretty nice restaurants, so we could eat here.”
“I wouldn’t mind taking a short walk and getting out a bit before eating.”
“Ok, let’s walk to the Ubuntu restaurant where we can get some African-style food. It is about a ten-minute walk.”
They met in the reception area twenty minutes later. They were both a bit awkward and didn’t know how best to interact. He wanted to take her by the arm, but he wasn’t sure that she would like it very much. Ronia, on her side, felt the same. So in the end, they walked with a slight distance between them, not touching. At the Ubuntu, Olaf ordered a beer and Ronia ordered pineapple juice, specifically inquiring if the juice was fresh. Olaf looked skeptical, Ronia thought, but she didn’t ask, and he didn't say anything. When the juice arrived, it was unmistakably made of canned concentrate. Ronia wanted to complain, but Olaf told her there was very little point in complaining to the waiters.
“Here the waiters have no authority. I am sure, to begin with, that the waiter didn’t understand when you asked if the juice was fresh. Probably she thought you meant ‘fresh’ as opposed to ‘rotten’ or ‘natural’ as opposed to ‘synthetic,’ something like that,” he said. “Also there’s no delegation of authority and very little communication between management and staff. So if you complain to the staff, first, I doubt they will understand you; second, there’s little chance that they will convey it to the management, and the manager is mostly not present in the first place. And there’s an even smaller chance that the management, which most likely is Indian, in any way will listen to a complaint from the staff. So if you really want to reach those who decide, you have to speak to the manager—which of course is reinforcing the lack of delegation.”
“Anyway, I’m talking too much. Let’s order,” he concluded.
They ordered, nyama choma (grilled goat meat), fried bananas and rice with peanut sauce. After that, there was silence.
Ronia looked at him and said, “I like to do things with you, Olaf.”
“Thanks, I appreciate your company very much too,” he said and waited silently for a continuation.
He looked her into her eyes. She met his gaze for a short while and then looked down.
“Ronia, I’m surprised that you’re alone. Not only are you a famous artist, you’re also good-looking, fun and have a great personality. I understand those paintings even fetch good prices, don’t they? There must be something wrong with those French guys. Perhaps they are afraid of a successful, independent woman.”
“You’re very kind to flatter me like that.”
“It’s not empty flattery. I do feel it. I enjoy being with you so much.”
“Olaf?”
“Yes?”
“I’m trying to tell you something.”
“Yes.”
“But it is so hard.”
There was a pause.
“It is always hard to express feelings,” she started again.
“Try.”
“In this case, it is also harder because you have a wife,” she blurted finally and blushed.
She felt stupid for saying this, instead of saying the right thing, that she was falling in love with him.
But that is how we humans are. The wrong thing often comes out of our mouths.
Olaf took her hand and looked at her. “I like you too…a lot.”
“Do you?”
“Yes, I do.”
“There is something special between us, Olaf.” She reached out and squeezed his left hand hard and put her other hand on top. She looked down at their joined hands, her lower lip trembling
Olaf looked at her, and finally bent over and stroked her hair with his right hand.
The magic was broken by the arrival of the food. They both looked a bit embarrassed, and they ate in silence.
Once they finished the meal, he looked at her and said, “There is a special connection between us. I can feel it strongly.”
“Yes, there is.”
“Let’s pay and get out of here.”
“Yes!”
After paying, Olaf took her by the hand and led her out of the restaurant. Just outside the entry, Ronia stopped him, “Come here,” pulling him towards a dark corner. She stood with her back against the wall and took his head between her hands and pulled him towards her. The first encounter, their lips met like butterflies lightly touching. Soon enough, the kiss deepened to reveal their real hunger and desire. They drank their love in big gulps. Ronia took the lead, with Olaf just reacting, but then the roles shifted. Finally, they both poked, licked, sucked and bit at the same time.
Lips and tongue were not enough. Their hands explored what they had longed to touch for so long, their bodies pressing against each other, their limbs entangled, their lust rising, rising up to levels soon unbearable without release.
A Masaai guardsman, passing closely in his red cloth and carrying a spear, brutally brought them back into the dirty alley, where under normal circumstances they hardly would even have dared to walk, in Nairobi, a city also called “Nairobbery”.
They walked towards the hotel, not letting their hands leave each other, their hips glued together. Every fifty meters or so, they stopped, kissed and embraced tightly. Finally Olaf said, “Come on, let’s run,” and they ran, laughing, hand in hand, jumping over the potholes in the pavement, the trash, the odd sleeping dog and the dog poo. A little dog followed them, barking and tail wagging. At the entrance of the hotel, Ronia knelt down and patted the puppy and told him to go home. In the end, the steward had to chase him off with a broom.
The next morning, Ronia woke up early. She thought about the night before, about how their bodies had met, how love had fired both of them. For her, it was the most amazing love making she ever experienced.
At face value, there was perhaps nothing special. They hadn’t exactly done things she had never done before. But the feeling of total union was entirely new. What had amazed her was how many parts of her body seemed to be erogenous zones in a way she had never experienced before. The thought of being licked in the ear had been a turn off for Ronia since a boy tried that at school. It made her think about dogs. When Olaf started to bite her ear lobe, she had first tried to steer him away, until she relaxed and was shocked to feel a sensation from her ear all the way down to her vagina with a flick of his tongue. Her whole skin was like a sexual organ, and his hands were the most amazing tools of love she had ever experienced. It was like the orgasm wasn’t that important. The rest of the love making was so good that it made little difference for her.
Ronia wanted to feel his body against her and crept close to him, pushing her back towards his body, lifting his arm to embrace her. He was still asleep. She took his hand, one of his amazing hands, the right one, and pressed its palm towards her breast. A shock went through her body, and now his fingers woke up, first sleepily moving around her areola, and teasing her nipples languidly to start with. She felt them harden and his movements and breathing shifted from morning drowsiness to alertness. She let him in and asked him to be still, she wanted to stay like that forever.
“You are a force of nature,” she said afterwards. There was some truth in that statement. Ronia also knew that praise for sexual capacity has a direct line into the heart of most males and that it certainly was self-reinforcing. Olaf didn’t seem to be an exception.
“It’s thanks to you,” he responded. “You bring it out of me.”
Most people believe there is a difference between sex and love. And there is, but there is also a union of sex and love, a union of loving, being in love and making love, all of them at once. And then, a look, a word, even a scent can become acts of making love, all adding to the feeling of fullness. We often mistakenly mix this feeling up with sexual satisfaction. But it is perhaps like drinking
water to still your hunger. It does fill your stomach, but it doesn’t still your hunger for more than a short moment. And it is the loss of this union that leaves us wounded forever when it is broken. That loss can never be undone. It can never be compensated for. True, in a few cases, luckily few, it can be turned into a passionate all-consuming anger, hatred, but more often it fades away slowly, slowly, like a galaxy in the expanding universe. It is the same as last year, but it is a bit further away than last year, which means that you don’t see it as well, that its gravity doesn’t affect you in the same way. But it is still there, as much as it ever was.
They ordered room service. After a rich breakfast, Ronia wanted to make love again, but Olaf clearly was at his limit, and they were going to be late for their meetings. The day was spent on three different meetings. They pushed through, made a good show, and all the goals for the day were attained. But frankly, neither of them really remembered what their goals were, and neither of them would afterward be able to account for what had passed during the day.
At three, the last meeting was over, and they took a taxi to the hotel. In the taxi, they could not keep their hands off each other. Ronia let her head rest in his lap. When she felt him harden, she unzipped his fly. Quite soon, he pulled her away, and his rolling eyes made her understand that he was on the brink. She smiled naughtily, licked her lips and zipped him up.
Rome, April 2013
He waited for her all that evening. He tried to do some work, but he couldn’t concentrate. He watched the news, which for the hundredth time in the last years was about the gradual dissolution of the European Union. The Commission chairperson, Carl Bildt, had just resigned after only ten months in office.
It all started with the financial crisis in 2008. Initially, the political leaders took actions to curb the crisis, but increasing austerity as well as deteriorating state finances among some of the EU members lead things into a vicious cycle of crisis. In 2012, Italy, Spain, Ireland, Greece, and France left the Euro. Most of the others accepted a situation where the Euro was basically a German currency, but Poland left the EU officially in a rage. The three Baltic states, Sweden, Finland and Denmark, were developing a parallel institution, some said as a direct competition to the EU; others said it is more like a back-up. The EU President, Tony Blair, finally elected after a big delay, spoke a lot about values and common ground, but moved few new proposals to the table, and even the table itself was less interesting. The two last meetings of the head of states, France and the UK, sent their foreign ministers instead of their heads of state. The EU was still there, with twenty-six members, but it was de facto falling apart.
Also in the USA there was an increased regionalism. First there was nationalism as a response to the global crisis. When that, combined with three sets of giant stimulus packages, didn’t work—and brought the USA to the brink of bankruptcy—or most would say far beyond bankruptcy, it was just that nobody dared to say it out loud—some of the states thought they could do it better than the federal government, most notably Texas and California.
Ten minutes after switching it off, he would not be able to tell what it was all about. At ten, he realized that she would not come and then he took a beer from the minibar, and then another one. After that, he went to the hotel bar and had two more. He rarely drank much. He went to bed at midnight. The flight was at nine, so he had to leave the hotel by seven at the latest.
She called at six the following morning. “Hi, it’s me,” she said and waited for him to confirm that he knew who was on the other end of the line, but that didn’t happen. “Did I wake you up? Can we meet now?”
“Ronia, I waited for you all night yesterday!” he exclaimed, immediately regretting that the first thing he said was a critical remark.
“I’m sorry, but I had something else planned,” she lied.
“Now I have to leave in forty minutes.”
“I’m down at reception if you want to meet.”
“Sure, give me five minutes. I’m not dressed. No, give me ten.”
He hung up and then called the 24-hour travel agent service and asked them to find him a later flight and call back. He dressed and started to pack his stuff. They called and confirmed a flight for 14:30. Down in the lobby, he saw her from the back. I’m sure she placed herself with the back to the stairs purposely, he thought. Why, he didn’t know.
“Ronia, long time no see,” he said.
“Olaf, strange that we would meet in Rome again of all places. Or perhaps it is not strange at all, especially not considering that I live here.”
They hugged the Swedish way and kissed the French way.
Olaf just looked at her, dumbfounded. He had looked forward to meeting her and now he didn’t know what to do. He just wanted to see her. He had not thought further ahead than that. He had also concluded that she would not come and was therefore thrown off guard, which was surely the reason she came now and not yesterday evening.
“You look great,” she said, “and I mean it. I’ve seen you now and then in the news, and I see that you’re aging with dignity.”
“Oh, please don’t use the ‘a-word,’” he responded. “I’m one of those vain males that thinks he can be forever young. You also look great,” he said. “That silver in your hair suits you well, and your skin is almost as smooth as ever.” (The first was clearly true, but the second was more doubtful. Ronia’s hands were rough from paint and cleaning agents, and the rest of her skin showed signs of aging, wrinkles and cracks.) “I rescheduled my flight so I have one at 14:30 instead. Do you have time to spend an hour or two with me? We have a lot of catching up to do.”
“And do we want to catch up?”
“Of course we want to, or at least I want to, and as you came, I think you are also a bit curious.”
“Sure, Olaf,” she relented. “I can spend the whole morning with you. I have a thing scheduled at ten-thirty, but I will call it off if we haven’t started to argue before ten.”
“Why would we argue?” he asked. She just looked at him with a surprised look. “I guess you think we’ll just pick up where we left off?”
“Olaf, I don’t think I really remember.” This was partly true and partly false. Of course, she remembered the feelings she had in their final days of splitting up, what kind of feelings, how she felt about him, etc. But she had quite faint memories of the details. She surely would not be able to pick up that discussion as if it had just been waiting for them to come back to it. “I did not come here to revive old arguments, but I must be frank enough to say that I kind of expect it to happen. You were never able to let go.”
He wanted to respond “neither were you,” but just before that popped out of his mouth, he realized that they were about to wreck their first encounter in so many years. Instead he said, “Ronia, I still have very warm feelings about you, and I treasure the memories of our relationship, even if it was stormy. For the few hour we have now, I want us to meet as good, old friends and not as a humiliated ex-lovers seeking vengeance.”
She sat silent for a while, looking at him. “You’re right. So you start. Tell me all about your life.”
He related the main points of his life. He started off where they parted. He said that it had taken him some time to get over her, over the failure, that he had taken time for some soul-searching to see where he could improve. He even contacted Liv to see if they could pick up their relationship again. She declined, not very politely, and Olaf realized that she was right.
After half a year, he met Monika at a friend’s party. At that time, she was working as a social worker, although after having the baby she had gone into publishing. Her desired vocation was writing. She had had a few short stories published, and at the moment she was working on a romance novel. She had not let him see it. Monika was younger than Olaf—a few years. It was almost love at first sight when they met. They moved in together at the end of 2000, and in 2001, their daughter Rebecka was borne. They had a normal family life, with an apartment i
n Dover since he started working in Brussels.
“Sometimes we spend time in my parents’ cottage. Well, you certainly know the place, where we spent the secret, and sacred, canoe weekend,” he said.
This was the first time he referred to something they done together. When he said it, he looked intensely at her to seek her reaction.
Ronia smiled and said, “That was a kayak and not a canoe. I tried to teach you the difference, but I failed…But I do remember that cute little cottage, the sommarstuga, as you call it. And it’s hard not to remember what we did there,” she said with a faint blush.
It was between the adorable meeting in Paris, the meeting when she said it could never get better, and that weekend that Olaf left Liv. They had stolen a day and a half at Olaf’s parents’ cottage. He told Liv and his parents that he needed a retreat to work on an important paper. She had flown into Copenhagen, and he picked her up in a rental car. They stopped and made love two times on the drive up to Sommen, a drive that could take four hours, but took them seven as they also worked up a good appetite from the love making. They stopped in Gränna at a nice inn and had a heavy meal. The view over Lake Vättern was stunning. “Olaf, you told me about the islands of Sweden, but not all the lakes.”
“Well, they’re part of the same game. The giants were angry and grabbed the dirt here and there and threw it, and where they made a hole, a lake appeared, and where the dirt landed, an island was formed.”
“So in addition to your belief in God and Jesus, the Holy Spirit and Virgin Mary, you also believe in giants and trolls.”
“Whatever pleases you, my dearest of dears, but for the sake of clarity, Lutherans don’t worship the Virgin Mary.”
“Perhaps not, but they believe she was the mother of Jesus.”
The temperature didn’t allow swimming. The ice had just broken in the lake and it was absolutely freezing. The cottage was cold and Olaf made a fire from birch and oak wood. Soon it was nice and toasty and they made love slowly and tenderly in front of the fire. The next day, they went out kayaking, Olaf in a red one and Ronia in a blue one. Ronia smiled at the memory.
