by Kopen Hagen
“Come join me in the bathroom,” Ronia whispered.
“OK, you go first,” he agreed.
They met in the restroom. It was small and not very clean or nice. She unbuttoned her shirt and pulled down her pants, stepping out of one of the legs and supporting herself on the sink. He tried to control his coming, but in the end there was not much he could do about it.
“Sorry,” he whispered.
“Don’t worry. What the heck can you expect from making love in a toilet anyway?” she said matter-of-factly while squatting over the toilet to let out his sperm.
“Are they called Vikinglings?” she asked.
“Who?”
“A small Viking. I see your sperm as small potential Vikings, so the question is if you can call them Vikinglings?”
Olaf smiled.
Out on the street again, she said, “Olaf, I want to break up.”
“What do you mean? Now that I’m finally making myself ready for you? We love each other. We said it again and again. Didn’t it mean anything to you?”
“Yes, but I want you to do it properly now, to focus on that process and be sure you make the right choice. It will be easier for you without having me to bother about. In addition, it will be good for me to reflect on if I’m serious enough about us.”
“Please don’t do this to me,” he said. “I need you to go through this process.”
“No, you need yourself for the process. Once you are done with it, contact me again and we’ll see—but I don’t promise.”
“Do you have someone else?”
“Now you’re being silly. This is first about you and Liv and then about you and me.”
“Do you?” he demanded.
“No, there is no fourth person, at least not on my side, but if you ask once more, I will say yes just to make you shut up. And I will tell you all the details of how we make love, how his touch makes me twinkle with delight, how he can make love three times every night and then again once or twice the morning after. I will tell you how much I love him and that he is rich and sends me roses, 33 new roses every week.”
“Ronia, I still don’t see the point in this. I’m in the process of breaking up my marriage—to be with you—and then you think we should break up as well,” Olaf said. “It simply doesn’t make sense to me.”
“I told you why already.”
“So what does this mean? No contact at all?”
“I envision that we can have a bit of contact but avoid the love-speak and that we don’t meet until you have broken up properly. I mean, that you have separated properly. Not just that she has moved out, but that you’ve sorted your affairs and all. Once that is all clear, I think I’ll be there for you again. But I make no promise. Don’t count on it. I’m not just hanging around waiting. You should separate from Liv because you aren’t happy in that relationship; go ahead, do that. I will admire and respect you for it. If you leave her for me, I’ll feel guilty. I’ll believe that you came to me because you’re afraid of being alone. There will be all sorts of stupid thoughts. And when you feel remorse or even regret, that you left her, you will blame me. Perhaps not openly, but in your heart.”
“Ronia, I hate this. I guess there isn’t much I can do, once you have made up your mind. You are one of the most stubborn people I know. But please let us make love once more. I hate to have that toilet business as the final memory of our love making. Let us plan for a serious session that we can both remember with pleasure.”
She gazed long into his eyes before saying, “Yes, I’d love that.”
“Let me organize a few things. Come to my room at seven.”
Olaf went shopping to get strawberries, chocolate sauce, bread, grapes, olives, ham, Gruyere and Appenzeller cheese and a bottle of good wine. Finally bath foam, massage oil and candles. He pulled the curtains, lit some of the candles, and called her to come.
“Bienvenue, mademoiselle. You are expected and craved for,” he let her with a bow. He took her by the arm. “The program is as follows. First, we have a light meal, followed by a bath. After the bath, I will rub your back and smear you with aromatic oils. This will be followed by a historic love-making session that will make the planet tremble. That session also includes some strawberries and chocolate sauce, to be applied as we wish. Will that suffice, M’selle?”
“I guess I would have preferred vanilla sauce, M’sieur,” Ronia said with a smile. “Joke aside: it sounds wonderful, Olaf. I feel sorry for Liv losing such a considerate husband.”
“Sssshhh, tonight we speak no work, no Liv, no future. We just enjoy us, here and now.”
They ate the bread and accompanying food, drank two glasses of wine each, small-talking about everything and nothing. Olaf cleared the table and then drew a bath, adding foam. They both sank into the water with a sigh. Olaf took some rose petals and dropped them into the water, and threw some at Ronia. They discussed how it had been when they first met, what they had thought about each other and other fond joint memories.
Up from the bath, they dried each other with the towels. Olaf asked her to lie down and smeared her with rose and calendula oil and started to rub her legs, slowly moving upwards. When he reached her back, he straddled her. Ronia felt him pressing in the split of her buttocks, but she failed to get excited. Normally a treatment like this would bring her to the brink of hysteric desire. Instead, she just felt more and more relaxed and finally she dosed off.
She woke up much later. The clock showed that it was past midnight. Olaf had tucked her into the sheets and put her to bed. There was a small note on the bedstand. “Gone out for a while, love, Olaf.” Ronia suddenly was clear awake. What did I do? she thought. He must be awfully disappointed now. He went to great lengths to make this a wonderful evening, and this is how I thank him. She wished that she had a mobile phone so that she could call him. But then she realized that it was enough that he had one. She looked around and couldn’t see it, so she assumed that he had brought it with him. She called from the hotel phone, but in the end, it was his answering machine speaking.
She tried to stay awake, but ultimately she fell asleep again. Before doing so, she had written in big letters, “Forgive me, my love,” and pinned it to the pillow.
He came in at around two, saw the note and crept under the duvet, his back towards her.
She woke and felt his back. “Olaf, I’m so sorry for falling asleep. It was so nice, and I was so relaxed.”
“Sure” he said, bitterly. “I can’t even turn you on any longer. That’s why you want to split.”
“Don’t be silly,” she said. “I don’t want to split. I just want you to sort out your relationship with Liv. It was truly wonderful what you did to me. I was so relaxed and fell asleep, to fall asleep in that way almost beats an orgasm. It was wonderful. For me, but I feel so sad that I didn’t do anything for you.”
“Are you sure? You aren’t just saying it just to make me feel good? Did you like it?”
“Yes, I told you so.”
He turned towards her, looked deep into her eyes, “Is it true?”
“Yes, silly little boy, I told you so. It was absolutely wonderful, and you know I love you so much.”
They kissed, slowly becoming more and more energetic and deep.
“We didn’t even get to the dessert,” he said.
“Ah, the famed strawberries and the chocolate sauce. We can have them now.”
“I had planned something a bit special. Wait and see.”
He collected a towel in the bathroom, and put it under her. They both enjoyed the unusual way of serving strawberries and chocolate sauce and found inspired ways of application and ingestion, blending with bodily fluids and secrets and secretions of their bodies.
“I hope this will do as a memory,” he finally said, exhausted, falling down on his back, panting. “Will it not?”
“Don’t ask, silly boy. Don’t ask.
“I’m afraid the cleaning lady will never forget this morning either. We have
to give her an enormous tip. It looks like a pigsty here.” She took a 100 franc bill and put in an envelope and wrote a short note and tucked it under the pillow.
“Oh my, that’s a hefty tip. What did you write?”
“Something that will make her understand.”
He opened the envelope and read, in French: “Never in my life will I forget this night, and I am grateful not only to the man that rendered all this pleasure, but also to you that made it possible and have to clean up after us. I wish you too will experience such a night at least once in your life.”
“I wonder if she will understand that this brown stuff is chocolate and not…” Olaf said.
“Yuck!”
“Ronia, don’t leave me.”
“I’m not leaving you. You need time to sort out your life.”
Olaf couldn’t see her logic. He was filled with dread when he flew home.
Rome, April 2013
Olaf thought back on the conversation. What did it mean? What did it mean to him? What did it mean to her? He took the train to Fumiccino Airport and pondered over this. Ronia had said that she thought the ending was inevitable, that their all-consuming love just wasn’t sustainable. Olaf still didn’t want to accept the idea that there could be too much love, that we can love too much. Perhaps we can love in the wrong way, like with jealousy? he thought.
He was due to be back in Rome at the end of May for a conference, Human Rights over 100 Years. It was mainly something for scholars, and he wasn’t any scholar. Still it made sense for him to be there, to be visible, to be relevant, to interact with Academia and the press covering the event. After all, HRI was one of five main players in the Human Rights scene, and there was competition between the actors, even if they hade the same ultimate goals. Sometimes, he resented all the stuff he had to do for show. He wanted to focus on his job, and if he were to socialize, he’d prefer to socialize with his target group, people who had something to say, who had done something, rather than the cheerful crowd that stood aside and spoke about human rights, and worst of all, the politicians. He remembered a cocktail party at Downing Street 10 as a situation where he felt held ransom by Blair’s and Bush’s agenda. Admittedly, those two were rather different, and their agenda also was different, but when it came to hypocrisy about human rights, the difference was one of shade and not of direction.
On parting, he had asked Ronia if they could meet again. She had been evasive and noncommittal. He asked for her email address, and she had given it to him somewhat reluctantly, her new email address, adding that she didn’t check it very often.
“Ronia, don’t fool me. You have two children living in other parts of the world. I’m sure you are in contact with them regularly.”
“True, but it is mostly via the telephone, and I read their postings on Dashboard.”
He couldn’t say for sure why he wanted to meet Ronia. Part of him just longed for her, in the same way he longed for her a long time ago. Other parts of him just wanted to figure out what went wrong. He still didn’t really understand why their relationship had to break down. Yet another part just wanted her as a friend. Finally, he also wanted to get rid of her, once and for all, feel that she meant little to him, that he could do well without her. But he felt that he needed to meet her again to close the chapter.
On take off, he thought about the words of Stig Dagerman: “Our need for consolation is insatiable.” That author certainly knew all about distress and loneliness.
He thought about how, fifteen years earlier, he had left her in the restaurant and walked away in anger. He had drifted, he had cried a bit, but then composed himself and went into a bar. He sat down at the bar, asking for a whiskey, emptied it rapidly and asked for another one—a rare behavior for Olaf. A girl appeared next to him, and asked him if he was lonely. He assumed she was a prostitute and said, “Yes, I am desperately lonely. I have just left the woman I love more than anything else, so how can I be anything but lonely. But it suits me well to be lonely. I am a bloody idiot. She too is a bloody idiot. We’re just too proud and stubborn, but I don’t know how to get out of it.”
“Oops, that was a whole load,” she said and sat silent. “I can make you feel good,” she continued after a while.
“I doubt that.”
“You can try me out.”
“No, seriously, don’t waste your time on me. I’m bad business. I should drink myself senseless,” he said, “and then I should find somewhere to sleep. Or perhaps the other way round. Get yourself another client tonight.”
“Hey, mister, do you think I’m a bloody whore?” she called out, startling the other patrons who had perhaps already been eavesdropping. She realized that she had been loud, looking around, embarrassed. She continued in a lower voice, “I just thought you looked lonely and miserable, and I wanted to be kind, and this is how you reward me,” she said.
“I’m sorry if I jumped to conclusions. I’m just not used to being picked up by women like that.”
“I never approached a man like that either,” she admitted. “Lorena, Lorena is my name, by the way. You looked so sad, so vulnerable, your emotions so much on the surface that I just wanted to reach out to you. My boyfriend left me half a year ago, and this is the first time I’ve gone out alone since he left me. The first man I see is you. There must be a meaning in that. You can come with me, tell me your story. I’ll hug you. I can stroke your hair. You will kiss my forehead and my neck. I have something to drink, and you can stay overnight, but no sex, mister. I have an extra bed.”
Lorena was in her late twenties. Long, dark curly hair. One of her parents was clearly of African decent; her skin was beautifully brown and her lips fuller and the nose wider than the typical Italian.
“It sounds like a tempting proposition,” Olaf said. “Let me pay for your drink and let’s go. Olaf is my name.”
“OK, Olaf, but no sex, capice?”
“Capice!”
Lorena’s apartment was not far away. It was rather small. She was an assistant professor in psychology. She poured them a red drink, Campari perhaps, with ice, and slices of lemon. She sat down on the sofa, patting the cushions next to her and asked him to sit. He did, or rather he stretched out with his head in her lap. And he told his story. It took an hour or so. She asked a few questions, stroked his hair, made him feel good. He gradually became aware of her body, her scent, the musty smell from her groin, her hands now wandering from his head inside his collar, touching his chest and the fingers reaching his nipples. He turned around, buried his face in her belly, grabbing around her thigh with one hand and the other one around her waist.
Ronia had called him on his mobile phone the next afternoon. He was alone in Lorena’s apartment as she had gone to her university.
“Hi.”
“Hi.”
“Where are you?”
“Hanging around in Rome.”
“I’m leaving tomorrow morning early. I rebooked my flight.”
“OK, the room is paid for already, so if you can please pay for any calls and the minibar, that would be great. If not, I guess they’ll charge my card for it anyway. “
“Does it end like this, Olaf?”
“Does it have to end like this, Ronia?”
Silence.
“Good-bye then.”
“Bye.”
He hung up.
Chindrieux, October 1998
Ronia drove to Aix-les-Bains to pick him up. He had flown to Paris and taken the TGV and was due to arrive at two. She was looking forward to seeing him, but she was also nervous about it. The last month before his visit, she had felt a new seriousness in their communications and an urgency.
Olaf called three months after Geneva.
“Ronia, I left Liv, or rather she left me.”
“So she moved out?”
“Yes, she did, or she is in the process of doing it. She doesn’t sleep here anymore, but most of her stuff is here. We’ve filed for a divorce. In Sweden, that’s a simple forma
lity.”
“And?”
“And what?” Olaf said. “It means I’m free. I’m here for you, or there for you, wherever you want me.”
“Where does it leave us? Olaf, do you still want me?”
“Silly question, of course I want you.”
“I’m sorry that I hurt you in Geneva. I just needed to be alone with my thoughts. And I thought you needed to sort out your relationship.”
“You said so. I still think it would have been a lot better if you would have stood by my side in this process.”
“I see. I understand your feelings. I’m not sure I agree though. Nevertheless, can you forgive me?”
“Ronia, I can forgive you a lot of things.”
“Also this.”
“Also this,” he responded, though she felt that it was reluctantly. He added, “I forgive, but I will not forget that easily.”
They talked several times the following days and each day they came closer, converging in that they wanted to be together, to form a life together.
“When can we meet?”
“I can come to you in a month. I am busy with work, and also I want Liv to leave the house properly before I come.”
“You want to come to me?” Ronia asked hesitantly.
“Yes, I want to see your place. You know, perhaps I can even move there sometime not too far ahead. I think I could manage my business from there as well. I would need to go to Sweden once a month perhaps. But I could rent a small overnight apartment in Linköping, Gothenburg or Stockholm.”
Ronia felt a certain resistance to the idea that he would come to Chindrieux, but in the end, she had no good argument against it. Also, she did love her place, and she surely would much rather him move in there than her move somewhere else. She thought that they perhaps didn’t have to live together, but she also knew that for Olaf that didn’t seem to be an option. Sometimes she was afraid of him being too needy and too demanding on her attention. She also recognized that she was a bit afraid of the closeness of the relationship. “Is that because I don’t love him enough or just because of my personality? And is my personality as such a hindrance for unconditional love?” On the one hand, she wanted to be engulfed and submerged in love, in his love for her and her own love for him. But then she distrusted love as a separate force. “It is just something we make up in our head.” The thoughts passed rapidly through her mind.
