A Neverending Affair (18 page)

“It is mainly behind the house, up that forested hill. You see the farm further up. That is
la Chevreau
, the farm of Monsieur Chamareau, the man whose goats are grazing my land. They are there now, but it is a bit to far to discern them.”

The sun was setting as they entered the compound.  

She had been thinking a lot. Was it possible to feel friend
ship after such an ending? And what had really ruined their relationship? Could one love too much, as she had told Olaf, or was that nonsense? Did they blow it? She had long ago told Zlatko and Snežana about her affair with Olaf. She felt it was easier for her to speak with Zlatko than with Snežana. Snežana was just such a hopeless romantic in her eyes, while Zlatko was much more down to earth. So while she told both of them, she had saved the details and her agony of the outcome for a time when she was alone with Zlatko. That must have been in the mid-2000s. Of course, he had sided with his mother, but he also pointed out to her that “Perhaps you are not so easy to live with, you know? You have very strong opinions about most things. You seem to believe you can command love and life in the same way as you control the people on your canvases.”

She responded
, “Zlatko, I wish I could,” and cried, cried openly for the first and last time in the presence of her son.

Zlatko was mortified
. What son isn’t, in the face of his mother crying? It was never the task of children to comfort their parents, as little as it is for parents to bury their children. 

She composed
herself. “I’m sorry, Zlatko. It’s not fair of me to burden you with this. You surely have enough with your own life choices and dramas.”

He had recently
ended a relationship with another boy, his first real love relationship ever. He had quite late realized that his interest was more with his own sex than with girls. Ronia had cursed herself for not realizing it earlier so that she could have helped him come to terms with it. It had taken a long time before he even told her. In that sense, she was happy that she had some experiences with other women, as she immediately could tell him that she had done it herself. Even if her final conclusion was that it was nothing for her, it was a signal that she fully could understand him, the signal he needed most of all in those difficult times. Now, years later, he was almost a missionary for homosexuality.

“You know, perhaps you never let that feeling for women you had bloom
. Perhaps you should try it again?”

“No
, Zlatko, it just doesn’t do it for me.”

“I
n any case, that guy must be a real idiot to dump you.”

“He didn’t dump me, and I didn’t du
mp him, we just marched together, side by side, towards the cliff, and we fell together. We fell long and hard. We were the biggest idiots in history.”

“But if you fe
el like that, why don’t you contact him again? Is it really too late?”

“I don’t think we
can undo such things, Zlatko. When you slaughter a goat, it is dead. You can regret it, but you can’t bring it back. When you pull a tooth, it is gone. You can put in an artificial one with a titan screw, but it is not the same tooth any longer. We both behaved badly, we lacked the right perspective, but the damage is done, and what we did would always be a thorn. Even if both of us apologized. Besides, I know he has married again.”

She thought about that last meeting in Rome. What had gone wrong? Wasn’t it she that made it happen? Yes, it was, but that she made it happen didn’t mean it was her fault. He had let it happen. He was as much cause of the disaster as she was.

After Olaf left her in the restaurant,
Ronia sat there crying. After a while, she composed herself, went to the bathroom, washed her face, looked long into the mirror. “What else could I do?” she asked herself? “Nothing,” she responded. She knew it wasn’t true. Of course, she could have done things a lot differently, but it wouldn’t be her. She could avoid her rationality, she could skip over things, but now when things between them had started to be serious, she found she had to be herself, that violating herself, her personality and her values, just to make Olaf happy would be the first step on a slippery slope.

Love certainly is great and a great feeling, but it can’t come with a sacrifice of myself
, she thought.

As
if in trance, she paid the bill and walked towards the hotel. She picked up the key, the receptionist giving her an inquiring look, but he didn’t ask anything. On closing the door, she burst out into heavy sobbing with no end to it. She cried and cried. She went into the shower, sat down embracing her knees with the hot water flowing, tears still falling. After a long time, she turned off the faucet, wrapped herself in a towel. She opened a bottle of wine, a bottle of Amarone that they bought earlier to share. She drank a glass, emptied another one, still crying. The wine mixed with her tears, which gave it a metallic taste. Still, she could neither stop crying nor drinking. 

“Ronia, you know, sometimes I feel that we are so close but still so far apart. Ninety percent of us are just so much in love. We are on the same wavelength, we have the same values and we like to do the same things. And the love making is fabulous. But then there is the other ten percent, the view of children, the view on religion. Reason, instinct and heart, emotions, seem to blend very differently in our bodies, and both of us are so stubborn that we never let go,” Olaf had said once after a fantastic session of love making. She had objected vaguely, even if she knew he was right. So even if they both knew where the problem was, they didn’t seem to be able to do anything about it.

And surely, now, almost
fifteen years later, was not the time to revisit this, to try to make sense out of what couldn’t make sense then. Or?

“
Dear Olaf,”
she wrote.

First they looked around in the house. He noted that her bed was rather
narrow and not so fitting for them both to sleep in. She showed him the other bedroom with two guest beds, which could easily be moved together. “I thought we could sleep here,” she explained. “It has a better view than my bedroom, but not the morning sun.” In the studio, he for the first time saw her paintings in the making. There was one big painting on the easel.

There were two more sketches on other easels. One of them had a child in the cent
er. A girl of perhaps six, looking out over a garden where a woman, the mother? was tending her roses and a man, the father? was sitting in an armchair reading. The expression of the girl was one of terror, even if there was nothing in the picture giving cause for that terror. Olaf found himself thinking that perhaps the man was beating the woman, that this was the “lull before the storm.” But there was nothing he could point to in the painting supporting that.

He realized that it was
these kinds of thoughts that made Ronia’s art alive, that it raised more questions than it answered. The paintings didn't leave you alone. He told her so.

She said that he probably had a point, but that she herself never engaged in discussions about her paintings and their inner true meaning. S
he didn’t have a particular such meaning formed in her head when she drew the sketches, and she thought that people saw too many different things in them. She also recognized the value that people got all these associations from her art. But she would not be the referee to say what was right or wrong. She herself often interpreted her own paintings in many different ways, and rarely did they mean the same four years after production than at the time of painting.  In any case, she was glad that Olaf tried to see something in her art and that what he saw was not too outlandish.

Ronia pointed to two paintings standing against the wall: “
Those are made on order for a client. Mostly I don’t do that. I paint, I expose and I sell, but now and then somebody comes with a special request that I fancy. These two are for the Armenian association of North America, or they are for a private person, but he intends to donate them to the association. The motifs are therefore quite uniquely Armenian.

“He wanted them even m
ore nationally romantic, but I managed to convince him that the overly nationalistic was dead, a thing of the past. I’m not at all sure that that is the case, but I just can’t do social realism or national romanticism. They are as much cause of the Armenian genocide as any other atrocity. Even if they, we,” she corrected herself, “were the victims, the perpetrator was nationalism, and Armenians have had their fair share of nationalism. Perhaps more as is often the case of people who are oppressed, it seems.”

“Ro
nia, I realize we never spoke of this before,” Olaf said. “You know that I am politically interested and interested in human rights, and of course I know about the genocide of Armenians by the Turks—or perhaps we should say the Ottomans, which actually is something a bit different. Anyway, I must admit that my knowledge of Armenia in general and the genocide in particular is quite small.” 

“No problem
,” Ronia said. “Just wait until you meet my cousins. They will give you a crash course, and they will never let you forget that you married an Armenian, or rather that you married an Armenian family. You see, she comes with the whole lot,” she smiled.

“Ronia, we never talked marriage before. Do you want to marry?”

“Olaf, you are setting new records in being non-charming. Is that a proper way to propose?” she scolded him. But he heard from the tone of her voice and from her special smile that she wasn’t really angry.

“Sorry, but it was entered as a topic of rational discus
sion and not emotion,” he said, “and I know you approach them quite differently.”

“Forget it.”

Ronia had pre-prepared some food for their first dinner in
La Fournier
. It was full of local and seasonal food; a salad of goat’s cheese, walnuts, rocket, honey and vinaigrette, followed by wild boar cutlet with potato puree. For dessert there was apple pie with vanilla sauce. She was aware that vanilla wasn’t very local, but she wasn’t a fanatic. She would also serve a delicate Jamaica blue coffee, even if it wasn’t either organic or fair trade, both obsessions of Olaf. It was simply the best coffee and for Ronia, product quality was very high on her list of priorities. For the meal there was a white wine,
Mondeuse blanche,
which indeed was organic for a few years.

Towards the end of the meal, Olaf set out:
“How do you see children, Ronia? We discussed it once and then you were evasive. But when I saw that painting of the child, I thought perhaps you were more interested than I thought. You know how much children mean to me, and I have told you that I made a terrible mistake by accepting Liv’s ‘no.’ I am not going to repeat that. As you haven’t dismissed it, I assume you are not entirely cold to the idea of having children.”

“No
, I’m not entirely cold to the idea, Olaf, but I’m also not dreaming of children. And in particular, I am not dreaming of giving birth myself. I believe there are so many unloved children in this world and that we should perhaps take care of them first, before producing more ourselves. Not that I am ready to take care of any of those children at this very moment. But do you remember that orphanage in Arusha we visited? How can one want a child and
not
want to take care of one of those?”

“I never thought about it like that. There are plenty of people who can’t
have a child of their own, and for them, I think it makes a lot of sense to adopt. Personally I would choose that over spending years on fertility treatments. But for those that can have a child of their own, it seems like the most natural choice.”

“That is a bit simplistic thinking
, I believe,” Ronia said and fell silent.

“For me, our child, a child of our flesh and blood
, would be a manifestation of our love, a continuation after we are gone. But it is also something more. We have, we have been given, this ability to multiply. There must be a reason for it. It is our right, yes not only a right but somewhat of an obligation, to use it. A bit like you have been given this remarkable talent for painting, and it would be a shame that you didn’t use it, wouldn’t it?”

“Olaf, I
’m not so sure about that talent. I have worked hard to be where I am today, to be who I am today. I had no talent. I had a dream. It is that dream, my hard work and inspiration from other artists that made me into a painter, not my talent,” she argued. “You are an incurable romantic, Olaf. How many children walk around with the feeling that they are a manifestation of love, of their parents’ love? I certainly don’t. I mean, I know they loved each other, sort of at least, and I was produced by them. Hopefully that happened in one of their better love-making sessions, but perhaps it was just a quickie in the elevator. Perhaps it was after one of their terrible arguments when they had a make-up session. With their child, with me, something new starts. I don’t carry their love. I carry a mix of their love for me and a little of their love for each other—but that is more like an environmental factor—and then my own self, my own feelings.”  

She continued
, “I don’t think we should breed children for that kind of selfish reasons. There are enough people on this planet already, more than enough.”

“I get hurt when you call me selfish
, Ronia. I don’t think love for a child can be selfish.”

“Nothing is more selfish than love, Olaf. All love is selfish, not only the love for children also the love for another per
son, perhaps even more so thinking about it. Also, my love is selfish. And that is all fine. We need to accept that love is selfish and balance it with some reason and some morals. Love leads us astray; love is blind. It is the same with our egoism. Children are egoists. Nature is egoistic. Genes only want to multiply themselves. It is through upbringing and education we socialize children, make them altruistic and empathetic.”

Olaf didn’t agree. He felt that Ronia devalued their love, his love and her love
; that she made it dirty and into an expression of self-interest. Still he didn’t say more. Ronia’s mind and arguments were sharp as knives, and Olaf found it hard to stand up against her with argumentation, and if he were to refer to feelings in a discussion like this it made her upset. He chose to take up another thread of discussion.

“I al
ways thought that that ‘love is blind’ saying related to how few errors we see in the one we love, how we tend to overlook even apparent weaknesses, etc.”

“Perhaps it was, I guess that was the meaning Shake
speare gave it in
The
Merchant of Venice,
but I never thought about it like that. For me, it was always that you can’t trust love for guidance. Love is a dubious advisor and sometimes love is simply not possible in the real world,” Ronia said. “In relation to the other meaning, I have always had a critical eye to you, Olaf, even in the midst of the worst periods of obsession, I mean the most intensive periods. Even then I could see small and big things that I didn’t like.”

“Such as
?”

“No,
let’s not go there, Olaf. I will only hurt you to no avail. The things, the behaviors that I believe I, you, can do something about, I already raised. The others are just part of the deal. I don’t expect you to change. They are part of you. If you are honest towards yourself and towards me, you know there are things with me that you also don’t like. We already touched religion a couple of times. I also know that you think that I should not let the goats graze the forest; that I put pepper on my food without tasting it; that I am a bit sloppy; that I drink too much; that I look at other males with an anatomic interest, etc. But let’s not make the list longer. It makes me feel bad. The bottom line is that I believe you experience all these things
more
with me just because you love me, than if we were not lovers.”

“Ronia, we are not lovers anymore
.”

“If not lovers
, what are we then?

“I left Liv to live with you
. We are true-loved, we are engaged, we are life companions, anything but lovers.”

“Kiss me
, Olaf.”

They kissed, long. They made love, there in th
e kitchen, observed by two of Ronia’s paintings. The paintings looked at them, sighing. “What will they become?”

“I do want to live with you Ronia, you know that. It looks nice here and I could envision living here.”

“But…?”

“No, there is no ‘but’ from my side, but I do feel a ‘but’ from your side. Do your really want to
live with me
? Do you really want to live
here
with me?” Olaf said. 

His questions remained unanswered
, all three days he stayed with her.

Ronia wasn't able to deliver what he expected
: unequivocal, unconditional love. She certainly loved him, and liked him being around. She just didn't know if she could bear him being around all the time. When she was high with desire, she could think of nothing else but him, making love with him, being with him—but then when the worst hunger was sated, she felt she needed to be alone, to be by herself. She didn't see how it would be possible to work, to paint, if he were around.

But she also couldn't bear the thought of him being far away
. She would be jealous. With Liv, she could not be jealous. After all, she was there before her, and it was because he was not happy with Liv that Olaf had reached out for Ronia in the first place. But now he was single, an attractive single male, with no kids and a decent job that brought him interesting places. He was almost like a jackpot in the dating market, she thought, even if she immediately scolded herself to think like that.   

Olaf was disappointed with her lack of response and
commitment, but he didn't press for answers.

When
Ronia dropped him in Aix, she gave him a roll of canvas. “This is the African picture I started after my first trip to Africa, the trip we met. After Ngorogoro, I added some Masaai warriors and a few hyenas. It’s not really finished, but it’s as good as it gets, and it is us. I couldn’t put it in the market. Please take it.”

“But don’t you want to keep it for yourself?”

She didn’t respond. She pressed a kiss on his cheek and drove off.