A Neverending Affair

by Kopen Hagen

  “Oh my, sometimes you are deep, Ronia. I have never, ever thought about that in such a way,” he said and looked at her as he was trying to figure out the riddle of the Sphinx. “I will go for a quick shower and pick up a book. Can you order a passion fruit juice for me?”

  When he returned, she was still there, watching the animals, an empty and one full glass of juice in front of her. He had brought a sweater for her and his own jacket, “As soon as the sun sets, it gets cold up here. We are quite high you know. They make fires in the room.”

  “Thanks.”

  They watched the sunlight slowly disappear from the crater; the Masaai herdsmen drove their cattle up the crater sides. Ronia was astounded when she realized they actually moved in and out every day, down those steep sides, and also that they could move around with all that wildlife. First, the bottom was shaded, and rapidly the sunlight moved up the side opposite them, finally disappearing altogether.

  Soon thereafter they were called down to the lounge by the calls of the Masaai, who performed the adumu, the traditional jumping dance. It was a simple chant, and they took turns individually, or two at a time, jumping high in a way that made it look effortless, like the bouncing of a superball. And they kept going for a long while, never letting their heels touch the ground. Ronia stood mesmerized, staring.

  “It really touched you, didn’t it?” Olaf said with a surprised smile.

  “Yes….It really did….I can’t really explain it. I mean, I know it’s all for us, just a tourist show. I’m sure the guys go to this like any other job, or even worse, perhaps they even think, Now we’re going to be presented like monkeys to these white ones who understand nothing of the world and still managed to conquer us, to conquer nature and dominate everything. Or perhaps I’m wrong. Perhaps I just judge them from what I would feel myself. Perhaps their feeling is real, that they are not bound by the place and the crazy situation, that they do this just for themselves and what’s wrong with doing it here and in addition get a nice meal and a bit of money for doing what you would do in the first place? Or perhaps they are very proud of their culture and show us with a view to touch us and really make us change. I don’t know. But what I do know is that this touched me. I already see a painting forming in my head, lots of color, smells and sounds.”

  “In addition, they really turned me on, these guys,” she said with a naughty smile. “If it weren’t for the smell, I could very well see myself between the sheets with them.”

  “All of them? My gosh, Ronia, isn’t fifteen at a time a bit too much?”

  “Silly, I didn’t mean it like that. What I meant was more that I was collectively turned on by them. It wasn’t like it was one of them that hit me particularly strong.”

  They were shown their seats and were served the soup. Then there was a rich buffet of main courses, salads and desserts. “The hardship of Safari,” Olaf said. “Did you know that ‘Safari’ just means trip in Swahili. It doesn’t mean a trip into the wild to look at animals as we mostly believe. They can also go safari to New York.”

  “No, I like that you tell me all these things. I am a bit shielded in my life and work, you know.”

  They had a lively conversation about the food. Ronia wondered—a bit embarrassed—about the smell of Masaai dancers. She found it very strong and repulsive. She wondered why they had such a strong smell. Olaf said he didn’t know.

  “Perhaps they don’t have such a strong smell. Perhaps we also smell strong for them. I guess it’s the food. I don’t think it’s about hygiene. Africans, especially the women, are very clean. You can compare the European backpackers and the local women. Even if they have been on the same trip for twelve hours, the backpackers look dirty and in rags while the African woman with full dignity shakes the dust of her shawl and looks as clean as before.” He was silent for a while and continued, “I guess I made one of those stupid generalizations. About Africans. I am not sure there is anything like ‘African,’ and most certainly Masaai are a very different people than the farming Bantu people, and they are much less alike than a Swede is to an Armenian. It is so easy to fall into that trap. Masaai perhaps smear themselves with cow manure or with lion shit to keep other predators away. I actually have no clue.”

  “Well, that was a very longwinded way of saying: I have no clue,” Ronia laughed, and Olaf got that look of a hurt cocker spaniel waiting for the master to tell him it is all right. A look that was irresistible for Ronia, and Olaf knew it.

  “How do you paint sounds, and how do you paint smells?” Olaf asked a bit later. “You said you could envision the smell of a painting of the Masaai.” Ronia hardly ever spoke about her painting, but Olaf was curious.

  “That’s nothing I can explain easily. Have you never felt a sensation of smell from a painting?”

  “Apart from the smell of oil, no, frankly speaking no,” Olaf said after thinking. “I think I sometimes have been able to experience a feeling of noise, of sound, and of movement, of course, of love, of fear—but smell and taste? No, not really.”

  “I guess it’s partly how we relate to our senses that determines it, but I also assume it might be a bit acquired. I mean, if we train ourselves to see and discuss art from a perspective of smell, we will discern smells in paintings. We will feel the smoke smell of the fireplace. We can smell the algae and the fish in the harbor painting, the fumes in a view of a busy city, perhaps the perfume of a fashionable lady and the musty smell of manure from the heap.”

  Olaf looked at her with awe. He loved her so much. He took her hand, squeezed it, stroked it with the other hand, took her fingers one by one in his mouth, sucking and biting them. “Let’s have our first dessert, and then proceed to the second,” he said.

  Back in the room, there was a nice fire in the fireplace. They undressed rapidly. Ronia took a quick shower. Olaf sat in a bathrobe by the fireplace and uncorked a bottle of wine. Ronia bent over him from behind and let her hands slip under the robe, bit him in the ear and whispered that they could drink the wine afterwards.

  “After what?” Olaf said.

  “You silly boy, I will show you,” she said, her hands stroking his nipples teasingly.

  “The Masaai indeed made you wild,” he said when pouring the wine.

  “Olaf, this is a wonderful place,” she hesitated. “I just wished that you had not brought Liv to this place before. It makes it feel desecrated sort of. I know I’m being silly, and I don’t blame you per se, but it’s hard for me. You know I’m all there for you and you are not there for me.”

  “Are you sure that you would be there for me?”

  “What do you mean? Of course I am. I have nobody else.”

  “I didn’t mean like that. I meant, would you really be there for me if I wanted to live with you?”

  “Do you have to live with the person you love?”

  “So you don’t?”

  “I didn’t say that. I just asked a general question. I didn’t say I didn’t want to. I just asked, what is it that makes us want—or believe that we have to—live with the person we love? Perhaps we would be better off by not doing that, by not having to share all those mundane things of life, avoid being irritated over the bread crumbs on the kitchen table, dirty underwear left on the bathroom floor or the fact that the toilet has shit stuck on the inside. Sorry for my language.”

  “I never thought about it like that. I don’t think it’s true love unless you share everything, ‘in sickness and in health, for better and for worse,’ you know.”

  Ronia drank her wine, silently, thinking. She thought Olaf was a romantic. Of course, his romantic side attracted her. But she was afraid of her own rationality, her own lack of romanticism, leaning towards cynicism.

  Can we really relax fully with another person, just feel their love, trust it, not question it, just be with it? she wondered silently. “Sooner or later, we all sleep alone,” Cher sings. It’s a depressing thought. On the other hand, she was not immune to romanticism—why else would she be
bothered that Olaf had been here before with Liv? In a rational world, that could hardly matter. Of course, being a painter, it was absurd to pretend that rational thought was most important. It would negate everything she did.

  Rome, April 2013

  “You’re next,” he concluded.

  “After you left me—sorry, I mean after we left each other—I was very low for a long time. I felt that I lost part of my life, that there was nothing more for me. I hated you, and I hated myself. I can’t say I was suicidal, but I started to drink too much for a period. Then I sobered up and tried men, many men, sometimes many at a time. I mean, I didn’t sleep with many at the same time, even if that also happened once. I meant that I was seeing several in parallel, but I always told them. It was strange. Some were really put off and said good bye, while others seemed to get more interested, thrilled, almost like a competition. Anyway, liquor didn’t work and men didn’t work at all.” She asked the waiter for some water, which he brought.

  “I tried women as well. They did give me more comfort and made me feel good. There can be great comfort in the arms of a woman, and her touch is normally superior to the touch of a male, but a woman never really turned me on. You’re not included in this judgment, Olaf. Your touch was always sensational.

  “My painting filled me with dread. So I turned to the children. I believe you remember Carlota and Esma, the ones with the orphanage for Bosnian children in Bari? We met them in Geneva at the Wilson building.”

  He nodded.

  “Most of the kids were badly traumatized by the war, and several of them saw their mothers being raped and other ghastly things. Part of the therapy for them was to speak about it. But for some, drawing came much more easily than talking, so I started to work with them on a voluntary basis. Once a month I went there for two days.

  “One day, little Darko drew a Halloween pumpkin with a big hole in it. ‘What is that hole?’ I asked. ‘It is a hole from an iron rod,’ he said. ‘The fat man drove it through her head,’ he said. I am happy that Esma was close by, as I didn’t know how to handle it. Esma took him aside and they started to whisper. It was clear that Darko’s pumpkin was the head of his mother, who had been killed.”

  She looked down, her lower lip trembled and a small tear rolled down her left cheek. He took his finger and wiped the tear away. She startled from the touch.

  “Don’t put those fingers to my skin ever again, Olaf! You can kiss me, you can hug me, but the touch of those fingers is still too painful to me, and will be for the rest of my life.”

  “Sorry.”

  “I know you meant no harm.” She collected herself and returned to the story.

  “Anyway…I liked that the orphanage mixed children of different ethnicity. No one ever spoke about the Serbs, the Croats or the Bosnians, or at least the staff never did. Also, in the discussions with the children, people were referred to as ‘the soldiers,’ ‘the other people’ or sometimes ‘the evil men.’ Esma preferred not to use the expression ‘the evil men,’ as she thought there are no evil people—that there are just broken people. Carlota was less forgiving and believed that it was easier for the children to recover if the bad guys were allowed to be called the bad guys. I was a bit in between them in this.

  “It’s funny though. Shouldn't we know how to heal children traumatized by genocide by now? I mean, it has been going on for centuries,” she hesitated.

  “Gradually, I started to work more and more with the children. The drawings started as therapy, but for some of the children, it became art. It was therapy for me as well, mind you. We mostly worked, several children and I, on the same canvas. There were in particular two boys, Zlatko and Darko, and one girl, Snežana, who were really gifted. And they got along really well, despite being from different ethnicities. We signed our masterpieces with RZDS. Some RZDS paintings have fetched good prices, up to ten thousand dollars. Anyway, it was after a few years that we started to think about selling art.

  “I worked for ten years in that orphanage. In the end, of course, orphans grow up, and the whole place closed down. I adopted Zlatko and Snežana and have helped them to grow up. Darko was the hardest case. He killed himself with drugs. That is also why I cried when speaking about the pumpkin. He was just so harmed and hurt. His soul was in tatters. And how can we criticize someone that takes his life after seeing what he saw?” She drew a deep breath and shivered.

  They sat silent for a while.

  “I didn’t think you believed in the soul, Ronia?”

  “I don’t believe in the existence of the soul, but I believe in the loss of soul. But if you refer to my view of religion, one can easily say that it has certainly not become more positive now than it was before. I mean, all those three ethnic groups were fighting in the name of religion and ethnicity. Both of them are utterly primitive reasons for conflicts. I don’t mean that all religious people will behave like that, but ultimately it is faith that makes it possible to justify such horrendous acts—faith, fanaticism and misery in equal blends. That the conflict in Bosnia, like most other conflicts, was orchestrated by people, men mainly, that didn't really care about religion or even about ethnicity, but mainly about money and power doesn’t take away the blame from religion, for its role in Bosnia and elsewhere.”

  Arusha, February 1997

  They spent one whole day and the following morning in the crater. They saw so many animals that they lost count. A pack of hyenas killing a zebra was the most vivid memory, and a cheetah’s failed chase for a dick-dick. It had amazed both of them how much immediate power the cheetah has, but how briefly it endures. Olaf had more than once stated how admirable the creation was, that he saw God in all this. Ronia had responded that she didn’t need God to appreciate the scenery and that it “added no value” to mix in God in the experience. Every time they broached the subject, there was a hint of conflict, but they both dropped it.

  Now they sat in the car on their way back to Arusha, where they were to take off in the evening, Olaf on the KLM flight via Dar es Salaam and Ronia to Nairobi for a connection with Swiss Air. They spoke about when to meet next. There was no natural opportunity until the next meeting in Geneva in May, half a year ahead. Olaf wanted to meet before that.

  Ronia was evasive. “Let’s talk about it when we reach Arusha. I don’t feel so comfortable discussing these things when the driver overhears all of it,” she whispered in his ear.

  In Arusha, they wanted to have a late lunch, as they were very hungry. They asked the driver to come back in an hour and a half, in time to get to the Kilimanjaro airport before Ronia’s flight departed at five. The driver recommended the Flamboyant, named after the flame tree just outside. Unfortunately, it wasn’t flowering. They offered a limited range of English dishes, and Ronia and Olaf had already agreed that the only cuisine worse than the English was the English cuisine domesticated in East Africa.

  “Olaf, I don’t think we should meet anymore. It has been wonderful, and I do love you, but when you told me that you and Liv had been in that lodge before, I felt she was suddenly between us in bed, at the table, almost all the time. I know I said that I’m not even sure I have to live with the person that I love, but I still need his full commitment. It was stupid of me to even engage in this relationship. But…but,” she hesitated, “I can’t say I regret it...It has been wonderful, but it has to come to an end.”

  “Ronia, don’t do this. I love you so much. You have woken up a side of me I hardly knew existed. You are smart and nice to talk to, but so is Liv. You are beautiful, but there are many beautiful women in the world, and you are in no way unique.”

  “Olaf,” Ronia interjected, “I may not be a woman that is soft for flattery, but there are also limits for how frank a man should be. Regardless of everything else, a woman wants to be unique.”

  “Sorry, Ronia, I didn’t mean it like that, but I hadn’t finished. The unique thing I feel with you is that I am alive—I am fully alive. My heart sings, my hands have to touch, my tongu
e needs to feel, and Rod really is all mad about you. I have to see you, feel you all the time. Even five minutes without you is torture.”

  “That is called infatuation,” Ronia dismissed his words. “It is a mental condition. It passes with time; it wears off. It is actually about you, and not about me. I am not unique in your view. Your feelings for me are unique. Sooner or later, reality bites, and you will see that the body is just not as perfect as you thought, that there are cracks in the façade, that the wittiness has run out of steam, that the charming idiosyncrasies are signs of annoying eccentricity.”

  “Is that how you see me?”

  “Not at all. I am still at the infatuated stage, the falling in love stage, so I am absolutely naïve and uncritical.”

  “How do you know?”

  “I have had other men, before you.”

  “Of course you have, but it didn’t sound as if any of them really meant anything.”

  “Oh, there was one. Raymond was his name. We were sweethearts at art school in Montpelier in the mid-eighties. We were so in love,” Ronia said nothing more but was apparently touched.

  “What happened?” Olaf asked after a long silence.

  “I got pregnant….I had an abortion….Neither he, nor I, were ready for that child. However, even if I am in favor of the right to abortion in principle, I mourned the child. I blamed myself for ending that life. I blamed myself for not letting it cry, laugh, burp, shit and grow up like any other child. Ultimately, my guilt poisoned the relationship with Raymond. Reality kicked in—in a very brutal way. Ironically, it was mourning the unborn child that gave meaning to my art.”

  “I’m sorry,” Olaf said. “I mean, I’m sorry for the abortion, not for the meaning of your art.”