A Neverending Affair (6 page)

They walked a few blocks and found a nice looking Lebane
se restaurant. She knew quite a lot about Lebanese food. Her father, the Armenian, had had a lot of business in Lebanon and had several Lebanese friends. She suggested that they would share
meze
, rather than buying main dishes. He looked questioning at her and said, “You know, I come from the country of meatballs, vodka and crisp bread. I know nothing about Lebanese food, nothing about meze, tabouleh, hummus and alike. For us, sophisticated foreign food is either French haute cuisine, Italian Pizza, four small dishes at the Chinese restaurant or a Big Mac.”

“Olaf
,” she said, “you shouldn’t be ashamed of your country. It has a lot to offer, as far as I can see. Wonderful nature, a good social security system, decent people that hardly ever fight, some wonderful pieces of culture and some really great personalities. Perhaps food is not your strength,” she said with a smile, “but I wouldn’t know as I never tried it.” 

“You know
, partly it is the kind of modesty we have, or promote. On the individual level, we should not try to be better than our peers, and we extrapolate that also to our whole nation. There is even a law for it, the Jante Law, which was formulated by a Norwegian author living in Denmark, but perhaps most vigorously applied in Sweden. We play down what we have accomplished; we speak about our ‘little duck pond’ all the time. We call our home and country the duck pond to show that we are insignificant and that even if the debate might be heated—you know what a load of noise ducks can make—it is trivial and nobody outside Sweden would give a damn, things like that. Of course, sometimes this is all false modesty, a bit like the Japanese. They also bow and are courteous and show extreme modesty, while in reality they despise us primitive Westerners. Swedes can also be like that, but we keep that for ourselves. Anyway, you choose the food. I am sure you’ll make a good choice. Just not too many things with yogurt, I don’t fancy that a lot.”

Ronia ordered
tabouleh, kafta, kibbeh, labneh bil zayit, falafel, and also a bottle of Cave Kouroum Syrah.

“This wine is excellent
,” said Olaf. “I don’t think I ever had Lebanese wine before.”

“Another time I will try to get you Armenian wine
,” said Ronia. “Although I must admit that the cognac is much better than the wine, even if my present motherland, in its nationalistic arrogance and protectionism, has managed to sway the world into depriving the Armenians to even call their brandy cognac.” 

They chatted a bit about the day, concluded that it could be fun to go to Ge
nt for the art fair. Olaf had been to Gent before and entertained Ronia with stories of the torture museum at the castle of Gent, Gravensteen
.
After a while, she told him that perhaps he could consider another topic for conversation and also he could think of something else she could see in Gent.

“Oh, sorry, I got carried away. It
’s been a long time since I was there and I don’t remember much. Apart from the ghastly castle, I remember a quite run-down neighborhood with charm. And I remember the tram.”

“Why”

“I was riding the tram and then there was a car blocking the tracks. The driver yelled and tried to get someone’s attention, but in the end the driver didn’t show up. After five minutes, he asked the passengers to assist him to move the car. So a whole load, perhaps twelve people, men and boys, moved the car bit by bit. Ultimately we put it in a position between a tree and a flowerbed, from which it would have to be lifted out in the street again, in order to be able to be driven away.”

“That must have been a sigh
t!”

“Y
es, it was. As a matter of fact, trams are haunting me. I was hit by a tram in Salzburg, and in Budapest, the engine of the tram caught fire when I was inside. In Gothenburg, the tram I was riding went amok and run into a row of cars in front of it. And at night I have tram nightmares.”

Ronia laughed. “I don’t have those issues with trams
,” she said, “but I have a lot of strange experiences with bicycles.”

“Let’s hear
.”

“To begin with, I didn’t learn how to bicycle until I was eighteen. My mother didn’t know h
ow to do it, and my father thought it was nothing for a girl. Silly, eh? And the first year of biking, I crashed into a mailbox and broke my collarbone, just to prove my father was right—how I hated that. Another time I was going speedily downhill and punctured a tire. Boom! And I just flipped over. I don’t remember anything. I woke up later in a hospital—a light concussion.

“Then once
, my bicycle got stolen in Paris. I saw it happen and I followed the guy and confronted him at a corner. ‘Give back my bicycle!’ I said. He was a student like myself, but dead poor. We ended up being lovers. When we broke up, he took the bike with him and said it was just as well to continue on the path that brought us together and now apart. I was moving anyway, so I thought he could have it. My final odd experience with bicycles was when I rode from Lyon to where I live some years ago. I had bought a new bicycle in Lyon. It was a good one. I had planned four days of riding to reach my place.  But somehow I got lost. Stubbornly, I refused to look at the map or ask for directions. I ended up in Jura, and needed two extra days to reach home.”

Then there was silence.

What more to say? Ronia thought.

I must
figure out something to say,
Olaf thought. They were saved by the food, which arrived just when the silence started to be embarrassing. They both engaged fully in eating. Ronia explained what some of the dishes were and how people normally ate them. Olaf found them delicious.

“You know, just before the f
ood came in, there was silence. It’s funny how afraid we are of silence,” Ronia said. “It’s like we’re afraid of the emptiness, as if silence means that we have nothing to say or nothing in our mind. I felt like that. Did you as well?”

‘”Uh, yes, I gues
s I did,” Olaf said, not used to discussing silence with anybody else. “I thought hard for something to tell you, but each thing was either too bombastic, too trivial, too personal or not sufficiently personal. It’s strange how rapidly we think, how many thoughts one manages to have just in a minute.”

“To be silent together with another person can be a very intimate situation. We can’t shield ourselves behind conversations or appearances. For every minute we feel the other person
’s presence stronger and stronger,” she paused for a while. “I remember that I could be silent together with my father but never with my mother. With Mother, there was always something. She was nagging, I was begging, we discussed clothes or personal behavior, movies or food or we were arguing. With Father, I could go for half an hour’s walk, and we sometimes exchanged just a few words, mostly a little comment about something in nature, like: ‘The swallows just arrived. Wonder where they came from?’ Still, I felt that we were so close after those walks.”     

“I never could be silent with either of my parents, but I could with my grandmother. She was a great person
.”

They talked for a long time about various things from their upbringing. Ronia's mother was born by a French mother who married
a Dutch Jew in publishing. On her father's side, they were Armenians, driven out of Turkey in 1916. Her mother had passed away, from cancer, some six years earlier.

“I
’m sorry,” said Olaf, “but the moment I say it, I find that it is insufficient. I haven’t experienced the death of anyone close to me, and can't really understand how we are affected by such a death. It must be very hard.”

“It is at first
,” Ronia swallowed, “but even if it is a dreadful cliche, time does heal. At least I was grown up.”

“
I do prefer to think about her as she was before she got cancer. She was certainly a very typical Parisian, despite her hybrid background. But I find that those who are outsiders try harder to live up to the norms and therefore are more Parisian than the Parisians themselves. Of course, the real ones will always find some new markers so that we know who is authentic, in the same way as the upper classes will.

“Anyway, she was very chic, and rather traditional in her views on gende
r. She thought it was all well and fine that I painted, that it was not as good as playing the piano or the violin, but it was still a decent thing. But when she saw my work and realized that I wanted to live from my work, she changed her opinion. Fortunately, my father was less strict. But his moral standards were always a bit lax,” she added, thinking of how he had cheated on her mother.

“I didn't like her a lot before she was ill, but the cancer made her mellow. Not at first
. At first she did everything to keep up pretense. Toward the end, she found that all that surface stuff had little meaning. In the end, she didn't even bother to wear a wig when her hair fell out from the treatments,” Ronia suppressed tears and Olaf sat quietly.

The waiter came and took the
ir plates. They finished the wine, ordered an espresso each and Ronia ordered two Arak to go with it. They took off at ten, walking slowly back to the hotel. Olaf felt very close to Ronia and she felt close to Olaf. At the hotel entrance, she asked him to join her for a smoke outside.

“I had
no idea you smoked.”

“I don’t really
. I’m a party smoker, just one or two a couple of times a month.”

“I guess there
’s not much harm in that if you can keep it at that,” he responded, immediately cursing himself for being judgmental. It was none of his business to vet or approve her smoking

She lit the cigarette, inhaled deeply and let the smoke out slowly. “Olaf
,” she said, “it has been really nice to get to know you. I don’t meet a lot of people out where I live. I guess I don’t take a lot of initiative to meet the local people. Perhaps we don’t have a lot in common. You make me feel alive, appreciated. I mean as a person, not only as a painter, as a person of flesh and blood.”

“You surely
are a very nice and real person of flesh and blood.” He was about to add “a real woman,” but swallowed it just before it burst out. 

“Olaf, I
’m sure you say that out of courtesy,” she said. Clouds passed over her face. “Never mind, it has been a pleasant evening” and progressed towards the hotel entrance.

“Ronia
,” he said to her back, “see you for breakfast?”

She turned around and looked at him and said
, “Guess so…around seven-thirty?”

“Sure, I
’ll be there.”

That night his dreams were mixed up
. He dreamed about Ronia, Diana and Monika all mixed up. He went to bed with one and woke up with the other. He invited Ronia for dinner, and when he came to the restaurant, Monika was there to meet him. He woke up several times.

He rose early, far too early for the breakfast meeting with the manager, so he took a long walk in the crisp morning air. He
saw produce being delivered to the shops, the garbage collectors, the newspaper delivery guys and the early morning wanderers, most of them with a dog, and some of them with the mandatory bag for collecting droppings. He noted that the traffic situation in Rome was improving with every visit. At least, there were fewer cars on the road. He guessed that it was more a result of the ever-increasing oil prices and the recession than of any conscious policy of the Italian government or the mayor of Rome.

When oil had been above
a hundred dollars per barrel for a long time, it didn’t only affect the petrol price, but everything else that is needed to operate a car increased in direct proportion, everything from asphalt or concrete for the roads to the mechanic’s salary. The effects of a higher energy price had not been well understood at first, but now there was general agreement that much of the entrenched recession had its root cause, or at least one of its main causes, in the increased cost of energy.

“We all thought it was because we were so smart or because of our wonderful democratic political system
that we could develop and maintain our wealth,” Bo said when they met a week ago in Brussels, “but we didn’t want to see to what extent it was based on the exploitation of oil. And of other people.”

Olaf
thought about Monika, “Miss Monika” as he used to address her, or sometimes just “MM.” Without a doubt, he loved her. He had never felt the same overwhelming passion for her that he had felt for Ronia, but then again, he had met her when he was still ailing from the failure with Ronia. They say men can’t be alone very long, and at least for Olaf, that was true. After the breakdown with Ronia, he was first desperately sad for several months. He even went to a therapist, the same one that he had seen with Liv. The therapist was sympathetic, but in the end, what could she do? What could he do?

The pain over the lost passion was like a physical condition that needed time
to heal. Olaf wasn’t sure that this was the right time to discuss his upbringing or whether his parents had shown him enough love, or if he wanted to kill his father in order to marry his mother. In all honesty, the therapist never suggested that, but still she wanted him to find clues, keys, and understanding from things from his childhood. Even if he realized that there were issues there, and that despite his seemingly nice childhood, he was messed up like everybody else, in the end he came back to the fact that he had just lost the love of his lifetime, and that was equal to losing a body part, and that it was just natural to feel pain.

He s
aw the therapist as much to have someone to talk to. He found it difficult to speak about the separation from Liv with Susanne and Bo. He had met Liv at their place and they had remained their closest friends. In some way, he felt that they accused him for the mess. He slept a lot. Then gradually, he started seeing other women. He had many brief acquaintances. Ronia’s painting, with its masks, hyenas, jumping Masaai warriors and supernatural creatures, was still on his wall. A few friends who knew the story, and knew that the painting was hers, had suggested that he take it down, at least for a while. He stubbornly said, “I keep it there as proof of that I can live without her,” like an alcoholic in recovery keeping a bottle just to prove his point. He didn’t even convince himself with that.

He met Monika at a friend’s party. She lived alone; she
hadn’t had a serious relationship before and was of the age where she seriously wanted to settle down. He knew that she was a social worker at the municipality. She was rather short, a bit round without being fat, blue eyes with big lashes, brown straight hair cut short and with a very friendly, pleasant face, the type that makes you happy, or at least, it made Olaf happy. She was a motherly type and pitied him. He asked her out.

After that first dinner, it was quite obvious for both of them that they were a match. They went for a long walk and spoke about thei
r lives. They met three times that same week and the last evening, after a dinner and a movie, he followed her home. Even if they didn't talk about it, it was clear for them both that he would stay overnight. Olaf noticed that Monica was shy and didn't take a lot of initiative when they made love. He was gentle and so comforted by the love making that he cried. Monika held him tightly but chose, wisely, not to ask him to talk about it.

Another day though,
Monika took the bull by the horns. Her professional background made it easy to speak about personal things, or at least to make others speak about their personal things.  “Olaf, I see clearly that you have been in pain. Marianne told me about your divorce and your affair with that other woman. Do you want to tell me about it?”

“OK, but I
’m afraid it was a lot more than an 'affair,'” he said and told her selected parts of the story. Finishing, he concluded, “She was the love of my life, and I’m not sure I’ll ever get over it fully. I have gotten over it in the sense that I don’t seek her out or hope that she will come back to me, but I am not sure how 'ready' I am for a new relationship.”

“Olaf, I don’t know if we
’re meant to be,” Monika assured him. “It’s too early to say. I’ve heard your story. I understand that I might be a pale copy to that Ronia, but I do like you a lot and want to continue seeing you. There’s no rush to determine anything. Perhaps it will work out, perhaps it won’t. Perhaps I’ll fall in love with you and you won’t fall in love with me or vice versa. Neither of us knows, and we don’t have to know. We can just let it flow.”

In the end
, their relation developed as if there was an urgency. Olaf appreciated Monika’s consolation. She made him feel good. For the first time in her life she felt real closeness to a male, and Olaf also showered her with affection and attention. Olaf was also vulnerable, which made her relax. Previously, she had often felt intimidated by men. They had a good sex life, shared most of the same interests and had common friends. After five months, she raised the issue of children.

“Olaf, I
’m thirty-two, I’ve finished my education, I have a good job—well, a job at least and it’s secure. It’s time for me to have a child.”

“Monika, I
’m not sure I’m ready for this….”

“
Sssshhh. Don’t say more. Let me continue. I know you aren’t fully ready, even if I find that we come closer and closer by the day. I believe that we are meant to be, Olaf, and I’m sure you’ll get there too, quite soon. But even if you didn’t, I would still like to have your child. I won’t have any expectations on you as a father. If you don’t want the child, I can register it as ‘father unknown,’ but of course, what I wish more than anything else is that you would also want it, that you want me. I have no pride. I don’t have to play games. I love you from the bottom of my heart. I know you still don’t love me in the same unreserved way, but I think and hope it will come.”

Olaf was completely defenseless to this
. He thought Monika was a brave woman, braver than any he’d met, and he fully admired her for that. And in that moment, he felt all his reservations or second thoughts just blow away. He felt that he loved her, not as he had loved Ronia, but he surely could envision a life with Monika. It would work.

“Monik
a, I do love you. You’re a great person, you’re smart, you’re sexy, and we share the same values.”

“Olaf I don’t want to hear the ‘but.
’”

“There
isn’t really a ‘but.’ But—now I still said it—but how could you trust me, when I don’t trust myself?”

“Olaf, nothing is forever
. We will all die. I could be run over by a car tomorrow; you can die from prostate cancer. I don’t ask you to promise me anything. I just ask you to make your heart fully open without reservations, without fear that you will let me down.”

“Monika, you are simply irresistible
—emotionally, sexually and logically. When I hear you and your confidence in me, in us, I am more than willing to live with you. I also want a child, and I can’t see anybody better than you as the mother of my child,
our child
. I don’t want to hear a word about that child not having a father.”

Though pleased with his response, Monika logically requested,
“In order not to rush things, especially not a child, can we let this sink for a few weeks and then decide? I think we have the responsibility to our child that it is welcome not only at conception, but also after it is born and for life.”

Back in the hotel after his walk, Olaf did some exercise, took a shower and spent quite some time examining his tummy. It was clearly more marked now than a year ago, wasn’t it? Would this continue? Like most physical inspections of ones own body, it led nowhere in particular, and he eventually dressed and went down to the breakfast room.

Sandra was alre
ady there. He told her that he had something to speak with the manager about, something of a rather private nature. Sandra lifted her eyebrows in surprise but didn’t say anything. He found a table and then called the waiter and asked for coffee. When the coffee was brought, he said he wanted to speak with the manager,
Signor Andretto
. The waiter disappeared, and after a while Signor Andretto appeared. Olaf asked him take a seat. They exchanged the normal pleasantries about whether Olaf was enjoying his stay, how nice the hotel was, etc. 

“I wonder about those paintings you have here, the three of them, the one above the buffet and the two at the entry. Don’t you fin
d them a bit daring for a hotel breakfast room?”

The manager appeared a bit baffled.
“Oh, those. Yes, I guess you’re right. I did buy them, or rather my wife bought them, at a bazaar for a center taking care of war-children from Bosnia here in Italy, in Bari, I believe. My wife thought they were very good. I don’t consider myself a connoisseur when it comes to art. They all three had certificates saying that they were sold in support of that center, which meant we could buy them as a fully deductible expense for the company. Of course, that also assumes that they are hung here in the hotel and not at home. To make a long story short, they are now here. Every now and then, some guest inquires about them, but nobody has complained so far. Do you object to them?”

“No, not at all
. I honestly think they’re good, very good. They’re a bit outside of what you normally see in a breakfast room. I mean, the music you play is soft and standardized, the same as in a hundred other hotels. The paintings are a bit unsettling, but they are great pieces of art, in my opinion.”

“You
’re the first one to realize that they’re all from the same place, from the same painter, which is amazing considering they’re quite different and that they lack signatures.”

“There are signatures
there; they’re just very hard to spot,” he said. “Did you meet the artist? When was this? Do you know her name?”

“Her name was Marie something, the papers said. I did meet her at a later occasion.
My wife spotted her, at a gallery. She appeared to be French. This was around 2004, I think.”

“And it was here in Rome?”

“Yes.”

“
Was she a rather tall, voluptuous woman with high cheeks, green eyes and good looks? Curly hair?” Olaf asked.

“I couldn’t say much about the hair
. She had a scarf tied around her head so that no hair was visible, but for the rest, yes. I remember that my wife remarked gruffly afterwards that I had stared at her, so I guess she was attractive, or at least interesting.”

“Have you seen her after that?”

“No.” He looked a bit bored now, “and now that you’ve asked me so many questions, perhaps you could tell me what this is all about.”

“Sorry
,” Olaf rose, made a sign of wanting the manager to join him and went to the three paintings, where he showed him the R and the D in one after the other.

S
tanding in front of the one with the coastal landscape, he explained that he had known that woman, that de Grove was her mother’s name and Marie was her second name, but that her real name was Ronia Davla, that she was an old friend of his. Olaf told him to take out insurance on the paintings. He could look her up on the internet and he would see how much her paintings were traded for. She had released no new paintings for more than a decade, and it had increased the interest in those few that were in the market. 

Surprised, t
he manager said he had paid 1,500 Euro per piece and that he had thought that was on the high side.

On the way to the conference, Olaf found himself thinking of Ronia again and again. He made a possible link between the painter and the woman organizing the bazaar of the local chapter of HRI. He would ask Diana more about it when they met. Sandra, who normally never inquired about private matters, asked if he had tried to buy those paintings from the hotel, as she had observed him with the manager. He said that they were painted by a friend of his that he lost contact with, and he had asked the manager about where he bought them. But that it was long time ago.