A Neverending Affair

by Kopen Hagen

  After a slow morning and a nice breakfast, they took the cable car to the top of the Salève. They revered the view of Geneva, Lake Leman and the Jura mountains. Walking across to the southern side rewarded them with a stunning view of the Mont Blanc. Paragliders used the peak for their glides.

  “Did you know it was so beautiful up here?” Olaf asked, as it had been Ronia’s idea to go there.

  “No, I had no idea, but I am very happy we made it. Days like this and with a view like this, I can feel hope in humanity,” Ronia said and asked him to kiss her and hold her.

  He did. He hugged her tightly, told her that he loved her, that he wanted to live with her.

  Ronia asked him, “Do you think we would be happy together?”

  “Silly question. Of course we would. We are so happy with each other all the time. We have fun, we make great love, we admire each other.”

  “Yes, but there is a day when you have to empty the trash, go shopping, fix the leaking faucet, earn your bread, take care of wilting parents.”

  “And a time for changing diapers and sleepless nights,” Olaf filled in. “I also know all that. That’s part of life, or real life. I know we have been playing. We have been lucky, just doing the fun part with each other, even getting paid to go to lovely places together. I thank God for that blessing.”

  “Why do you thank God for it?” Ronia asked briskly with an irritated undertone.

  “Oh, I think I owe my luck to God. I should thank him for the blessings he bestows upon me. Do you think that’s strange?”

  “Yes I do,” Ronia said. She contemplated briefly if she would continue. She knew they were heading for an argument if she did, but she simply could not let it pass. Even less now when she was serious about their engagement. “When you say that you should thank God for your luck, you basically say that people unlucky because God has chosen them to be the unlucky ones. In that way, they are to blame for their own misery.”

  “I don’t follow you at all. I just think God stands for that great love and grace, and for some reason I was the lucky one, and I should thank him.”

  “I see, but that’s exactly my problem, the ‘for some reason,’ as you said. You speak about luck, but if your luck is owed to God, it means his priorities or his decisions gave you this luck. So God is the judge, and he gives some guys luck and others bad luck. What could the reasons be for that? Basically it comes down to faith and belief, doesn’t it? So if you are a good Christian, perhaps doing the right things, like saying the prayers, you will be the chosen one, you will be lucky? But the others are just fucked. You start to look into who deserves to be lucky and who deserves to be unlucky, which is what the whole discussion about heaven and hell is about in the first place, isn’t it?” Ronia said, her voice rising to a high pitch.

  “I really don’t get you, Ronia. You’re twisting my words. I don’t for a second believe that those who are poor and hungry are that way because God wants them to be. And why do you say that when you don’t believe in him at all?!”

  “Olaf, you aren’t listening. I’m saying that if you—you, not me—think that God has given you the luck to have a good life, I maintain that the logical consequence of that is that those that are less fortunate have also been chosen by God not to be fortunate. When he chose you, he did not choose the others. He chose not to choose them, so to say.”

  Olaf felt very intimidated by this. He had never thought about it in this way, and he was convinced that there was something wrong with Ronia’s argument, but he was not able to point to what that was. So he diverted and attacked, “What is your take on it then? Why are you entitled to a comfortable middle class life while the women in Congo are raped and the children in Bosnia are traumatized?”

  “I believe it is partly because of coincidences and partly injustices built into the system. I mean, the reality is that if you are born wealthy, the chances are high that you will get a good education; that your parents will take good care of you; that you will have influential friends, etc. Just look at the Enarques, referring to the alumni of the École Nationale d'Administration. Or look at the US. I read the other day that if you are born poor in the US, your life expectancy will be 15 years shorter than if you are born rich! Can you imagine? And then you come with God here. For me, any reference to God in relation to anybody’s luck or position or happiness implicitly also says that it is by God’s choice some other people are poor and miserable.”

  “I hate when you turn my beliefs into something that defends injustice,” Olaf cried out. “Why do you hate religion so? What did God or Christians ever do to you to justify that rage of yours?”

  “You are the one raging, Olaf. You just don’t listen to my argument, do you?”

  “I hear you tell me that I’m saying that the wretched people are themselves to blame for their conditions. But I’m not saying that. I just thanked God for the luck I have in standing here today on this mountain with a spectacular view of a truly magic landscape. I also thanked God that such a wonderful woman was standing next to me, but just as I did that, she disappeared altogether and was replaced with somebody trying to make me look bad and feel bad. Can we drop this discussion, please, please?”

  “It is always the same when we come to touchy topics. First, you say something that makes me object or that I find provoking, then next moment you don’t want to discuss it. How will we ever be able to discuss the hard things in life, the important things in life, if we do that?”

  “Ronia, for me, the important thing is the unity we can feel, the love that flows, not the arguments for being right.”

  “Olaf, that sounds nice, but a view for which you can’t argue is not well thought through, and even if we don’t come to an agreement, I need to understand your opinion or position in order to respect it.”

  “I don’t need that to respect you, Ronia. I always respect you, and I respect your opinions. I might not always agree, but I don’t have to understand the basis for your opinion in order to respect it. If you think so, I’m sure you have valid reasons for it, and there’s no need for you to justify it to me.”

  “That sounds a bit too loving, non-demanding, Buddhist or new ageist for me, and in the end I don’t think those are your true feelings.”

  That night, they didn’t make love. They ate together and then watched a rather silly movie on TV. Before turning off the lights, Olaf looked at Ronia and said, “We shouldn’t fight. We are the best in the world. We are meant for each other. We can’t let silly arguments divide us, please?”

  Ronia responded, “Let’s just sleep. There is a new day tomorrow. Let’s start that one fresh.”

  That morning, they visited an exhibition of photos from Bosnia in the Palais Wilson. Most of the photos, but not all, were laden with terror. There was a lot of suffering depicted and that impression was exacerbated by the photos of houses with blown out roofs and windows. There were no humans in those photos, but they still conveyed such strong feelings. A little toy downtrodden in the mud in a massive boot print. The kitchen table where the plates and cutlery and food remained, but the chairs have fallen. The window is broken, there is a big track of blood, ostensibly from a body, dragged from one of the fallen chairs out through the door that stands open. Contrasting to this were a few, perhaps a tenth of the photos, with light and loving motives. Some of them were clearly influenced by the war, but still showing some normality, candle light dinners behind the blackout curtains, a walk in the forest to collect firewood, and some motifs from churches and mosques.

  Ronia was very interested in the photos and looked for contacts, and finally met Carlota and Esma, who worked with an orphanage for Bosnian children in Bari, which was in some way related to the exhibition. They ate lunch together with them, followed by coffee. Esma had tea. She said that she wasn’t used to Italian coffee.

  “How do you take your coffee?” Olaf asked.

  “We drink it the Turkish way,” she answered.

  Ronia told that her family also had
coffee in that way. “After all, I am Armenian, and we were ruled by the Turks for centuries in the same way as the people of the Balkans,” she explained. Ronia asked a lot of questions about the orphanage, the age of the children and how the photos had come about. She told them that she was a painter, and they said that they would love to work with a professional painter. Ronia said that she would think about it but that she wouldn’t promise anything.

  They swapped addresses and kissed good bye.

  “Is it two or three in Bosnia?” Ronia asked, “I mean, the number of kisses?”

  “Serbs normally do three,” Esma said, “but Croats and Muslims only twice. You see, we can’t even agree on such a simple thing.”

  “Oh well, in France they also can’t agree,” Ronia said. “It is one, two, three or even four in some places. Of course, the Parisians think that their number, four, is the only right one.”

  Olaf shook hands instead, saying, “It is a lot simpler to shake hands, I believe.”

  They walked back to the hotel, Ronia mentioning that she wanted to visit the orphanage. In the evening, they planned their next meeting, which would be in conjunction with a work mission to Dar es Salaam. That evening and night they were on loving terms again.

  Rome, April 2013

  Olaf said, “Ronia, I have remarried, and I guess my life is happy. I have a wonderful daughter and I love my wife. Still, after all these years, I see the collapse of our relationship—I think that is the right word to use—as the worst failure in my life. Not that I think I am mainly to blame. We both screwed it up. It was such a failure, and it has haunted me. But it has also kept me in fidelity in my relationship. In my previous marriage and relationship until I met you, I was not faithful out of morals or conviction. I was mainly faithful out of comfort and practicality. After you, things were different.”

  “Guess we are a bit different here,” Ronia said. “I mean, I also think that the collapse of our relationship was a real failure—our failure—but for me it also meant that I gave up the idea of a lifetime love. And in the end, that was the only kind of love that I was interested in. But I must admit that lately I have more and more started to think that perhaps I should seek a friendship and comfort-based love, that this passion-driven love is just too much, that it is too demanding, too consuming, that it is not sustainable as it is. Perhaps the traditional view in India of marriage like a stove is the right one: you put cold water in the kettle on the stove and it will get hot over time.

  “Passion-driven love will slowly—or sometimes rapidly, perhaps more rapidly the hotter it is—burn out like any other fire. The higher you fly, the harder you fall, so to say. So this last year, I have been looking around for nice males that could be life-companions. Attractive enough so that we can make love—at least they should be able to beat my vibrator—or if they can’t beat it, they should be able to run it properly. They, I mean he, should be friendly and a bit service minded, catering for my well-being, healthy, good in administration so that he can take care of my tax forms and all the other nonsense, and fun to cheer me up, etc. In the end, most candidates only fulfill half of the list,” she concluded with an air of disappointment.

  “Life is hard, isn’t it?” Olaf sympathized.

  “Sure is.”

  “Do you think we ever could revisit what went wrong between us?” Olaf asked.

  “Why? I already know what went wrong. We were both too proud and stubborn, not willing to admit our wrongdoing, too demanding in our love. Some people think that the more you love, the more you are willing to accept from your mate, your spouse or your lover. I think the reality is the opposite. The more consuming the love, the less we trust, the more we look for crazy signs of infidelity, the more we feel dependent, which also makes us revolt, and so on. With a calmer, gentler love, more of a friendship love, we are a lot more willing to forgive. We were like strong electrical poles with enormous attraction, a supervoltage. Unfortunately, we also had the same charge and voltage to hurt and repel each other when we clashed.”

  Dar es Salaam, October 1997

  The last day of their work mission, they had visited two women’s groups in Dar es Salaam. One was working with paintings and the other one with batik. Many of the paintings were not paintings in the normal sense: they were compositions of small stripes of banana leaf glued onto a background canvas. There were only shades of brown, from very light, almost yellow, to almost black. Despite the limitation in palette, the works were great, and Olaf thought they could be sold. He and Ronia discussed the motifs. Ronia fancied the work of one younger woman in particular, Fatima, the one that had been in Gent with them. She didn’t focus on the traditional African motifs, but rather very sensual studies of bodies. It was a bit Picassoan in style.

  “This is really great art,” Ronia said, “don’t you think?”

  “Yes, but it’s not mass market. It’s more for the connoisseurs. The other stuff is what I can sell to my clients. My clients aren’t galleries. They’re solidarity shops where people buy stuff to help poor Africans. And they want their stuff to look like traditional African; to fit their own view of what is traditional African, even if they never set foot here. They can point to the painting and say, ‘I bought this in a World Shop,’ and people will know they are of the good stock, the good guys.” Olaf resented himself when he took on this cynical attitude, but he adopted it many times to preempt criticism. If he already admitted some weaker points in what he was doing, others couldn’t challenge him in the same way. Olaf didn’t think that those weaknesses negated the many positive things in the fair trade concept, however. “This girl, Fatima, her works belong somewhere else, or should belong somewhere else. She should be in a real gallery. ”

  “I agree, but she could perhaps also teach the others a bit of hers. I think that the others could improve with say ten percent by her artistic style—move it from pure Africana to African art. I should bring a couple of her things to Elise, my art agent in Lyon.”

  They discussed this with the leader of the group, Adah, and Fatima. On their way to the batik group, Ronia commented that she never expected a Muslim at all to do body pictures, much less a Muslim woman, and certainly not these kind of sensual pieces.

  “I agree with you. I guess it just shows our prejudice,” Olaf said.

  “Yes, that was my point. Even we, enlightened globetrotters assigned by the United Nations to work for the benefit of poor female artists in Africa are awash with bigotry and hypocrisy.”

  “Those are strong words. Perhaps we just don’t know enough.”

  In the batik group, there was a bit of the same. It was mostly the normal Africana. On the way to the group, they had stopped in a tourist market, where they concluded that most of the batik and the kanga were imported from Bangladesh, and these also were typical African motifs.

  “Som jävla dalahästar,” Olaf muttered.

  “What was that?”

  “I said that this is like the Swedish dalahäst. They’re wooden horses from the county of Dalarna, painted orange and decorated with kurbits patterns.”

  “Kurbits?”

  “It’s a special style of painting where you use a lot of flowers and leaves in winding arrangements, like the vine of kurbits plants. Gourds, I believe they are called in English.

  “At any rate, today a lot of those sold are ’made in China,’ and here it is the same. The Kanga is a traditional Tanzanian cloth, and they can’t even compete making this simple thing here. That makes me despair a bit. Despite their low income and thus cheap labor, Africa, or Tanzania at least, can’t even compete in such a simple business, the production of the most common piece of clothing that every woman wears. And it is just a square piece of textile with colorful printing.”

  As soon as they were done with the second meeting, they took a taxi to the South Beach of Dar es Salaam. They had made a reservation in the Kamahi Lodge, a two-hour drive south. They had to take the rickety ferry boat across the sound. Ronia was afraid to leave the
car, having to rub skin with the crowd and their luggage, some of it alive. But Olaf said that she was safer to get out of the car in the not-so-unlikely event that the ferry were to sink. In the end, it didn’t sink, and they continued their trip south. Immediately past the ferry harbor, the atmosphere changed from the bustle of a million-person city to a calm of a Swahili village, and that meant very calm because the coastal population of Tanzania more than anyone has mastered the art of “taking it easy.”

  Another half an hour, and there were no people and no buildings—only the occasional signpost pointing to a beach or a lodge near the sea. It was hot, around 35 Centigrade, and they drove with the windows open. Ronia’s long hair was swirling in the wind. Olaf let the hair slide between his fingers. He looked at her with so much love, and she looked back and smiled.

  “You know,” she said, “I am so happy. I’m on my way to yet another adventure with the most fantastic lover in the world in a pristine landscape at the fabulous coast of Tanzania. It’s so pretty here. You’re so handsome; you make me feel good, make me feel loved. I think we even do a good job together, so we can feel that we are useful, that we deserve all this delight.”

  “We do Ronia, we do.” He leaned closer and whispered, “You know you are always sexy, but that red top you have with the black bra showing from certain angles and that lovely skirt you have just makes me wild. I have been looking at you the whole day, and already at lunch I was desperate, and now we have another hour to drive, I just can’t make it any longer. Perhaps we should stop, and you can fuck me silly behind some trees.”