by Kopen Hagen
A Neverending
Affair
Kopen Hagen
First edition, rev 1 ( 16 August 2013)
Copyright © 2013 Kopen Hagen
All rights reserved.
This novel is also published with the title Love Atlas under the author name Monika Rubel.
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters and places are either a product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.
Global events of the 1990s are more or less correctly narrated, while events in 2008 and ahead are brainchilds of the author. For example, Tony Blair has not (yet) become the President of the European Union. As a matter of fact there is no President of the EU. The separatist movement of Northern Italy exists but has not taken the forms as depicted in the novel.
Fracking and global warming take place in reality 2013, but play no role in the novel. Peak Oil does.
Love is, however, as blind 2013 as it were in the 1990s.
It makes no difference, night or day
The shadow never seems to fade away
(Robbie Robertson, It Makes No Difference)
Table of Contents
Rome, April 2013
Paris, February 1998
Rome, April 2013
Arusha, April 1996
Rome, April 2013
Geneva, June 1996
Rome, April 2013
Geneva, June 1996
Rome, April 2013
June to September 1996
Rome, April 2013
Gent, September 1996
Rome, April 2013
Nairobi, November 1996
Rome, April 2013
Ngorongoro, February 1997
Rome, April 2013
Arusha, February 1997
Rome, April 2013
Geneva, May 1997
Rome, April 2013
Dar es Salaam, October 1997
Rome, 2013
Geneva, May 1998
Rome, April 2013
Chindrieux, October 1998
Rome, April 2013
Chindrieux, October 1998
Chindrieux, May 2013
Rome, June 1999
Dover, May 2013
Epilogue: Omsk, September 2013
Rome, April 2013
That mouth is hers. He was drinking his third cup of coffee when his eyes rested on the painting over the buffet table; a painting of a woman and her dog. The dog was some kind of sheep dog, but he never paid much attention to dog breeds. She was dressed like a native of Savoy, a mountainous area of the French Alps. But the figures walked in a worrying urban landscape. In some covert way, the scene alluded to the total meltdown of civilization, the total destruction of the environment. It was hard to explain what gave him that feeling, but as soon as he put his eyes on the painting, it made him uneasy.
The dog didn’t concern him much, as he studied the face of the woman. The mouth seemed very familiar. He was almost certain. It must be her. There is no other mouth like that in the universe, and even if there were, there is no other mouth like that on the face of a woman who is also a painter who happens to transplant at least something from herself into her paintings. And who else could create such unsettling paintings?
It was quite incomprehensible that the hotel management would hang a painting like that in a breakfast room, though. The contrast between that and the soothing tunes of the “Power of Love” or “Listen to Your Heart”—the typical hotel Muzak—was just too much.
There had been two more paintings, one on each side of the entry to the dining room, and there was something familiar about them as well. He went back and took a look: yes, indeed, she must have painted them. On the left side, there was a coastal landscape, with sand dunes. The Flemish coast, he guessed. The most remarkable thing about that painting was that there was nothing there. Even in landscapes, is there not normally something in them? An animal, a flower, distant figures of people or at least a threatening cloud? But this was just the plain landscape. It was well done, but the fact that there was nothing in it to speak of made it worrying.
The canvas on the right side was almost the opposite, a completely crowded city picture, Manhattan perhaps. The signs read “walk-don’t walk,” “Billy’s Diner,” and KFC, suggesting the USA. The painting was full of people, walking, talking, arguing, begging, reading and driving. But in some mysterious way, they were frozen. They were clearly in action, but in the end, despite the maze of details, the final impression was more or less the same as the opposite painting; there was nothing special happening. He assumed that that was exactly the desired effect, that the viewer should realize that our civilization is just an ecosystem like the others, no more, no less. Or the other side of it: the coastal landscape has as many variations and actions as our cities: it’s just that we don’t see them.
Where is the signature? he wondered. She always hid her signature somewhere, integrated in the motives themselves, a bent branch or grass, a lock of hair, the shape of a wave. An R and a D. And while most artists would put their signature in the lower right corner, she mostly put hers on the left side somewhere. And now he saw it. The shape of the waves in the landscape formed first an R and then just a little below on the side a D. And he also found the R and the D in the other painting, integrated into a sign saying RD’s Entertainment Inc. He went back to the first one, and of course, it was also there. The shape of the woman’s ear and a lock of her hair made a visible RD.
He felt the void, down in his bowels, spreading to his loin; the feeling of loss, of regret and remorse. He had not actively thought of her many times the last few years. He knew she was there all the time, there inside of him. He could never be free of her, but he had learned to cope with it, to keep her at bay, to look for other things. But he could also, at any time, call her to life if he wanted to, and she paid her visits to him at night now and then, sometimes in sweet, and wet, dreams, sometimes as terrifying nightmares. He was always afraid that he would call out her name with desire or agony. Considering that he had been married twelve years, that would not be a very good idea.
He last heard from her five years ago, and it wasn’t much. He got an email from [email protected], saying, “I saw you at the BBC last night—keep up the great job! Hugs, Arendee.” At first, he didn’t understand. Arendee? He never met anybody with that name. Also, the message was sent to his private email address, the one he only gave out to those close to him. There were only seven or so people who had that address: his wife, his daughter, his sister, his chairperson, his personal assistant and a few friends.
Suddenly he realized: “Arendee” was just how R and D were pronounced. A typical game of hers. And she certainly had his private mail address; he initially registered it to communicate with her. He had realized that the technical staff at his company had access, and should have access, to his email account, and didn’t want to risk having some of his loving, delirious communication with Ronia read by any outsider, not to mention what would happen if it reached his wife.
He wrote back, in fairly neutral words: “Hi, Ronia. It took a while before I got it. You are still full of smart tricks. I am happy to see that. Thanks for your encouragement; I need it, as there are so many depressing things in my job. What are you doing? I checked the net, but found nothing. I saw that some of your old paintings are sold for good prices, but none of them are newer than nine years? Are you not painting anymore? Where do you live?”
She never responded. This was in stark contrast to the dozens of emails per day that they had exchanged when their affair was at its height, fifteen years earlier. Both of them needed to start and end each day with a message of love or a phone call, and to repeat it four or five times over the day. He sighed at the memory. How m
uch he had enjoyed their love, and how much he loathed their ultimate failure. Even more, he resented himself for not arresting the journey to the final disaster. He had seen what was happening. Why didn’t he do anything? But then, she also saw it, so why didn’t she do anything? Could anything have been done?
“Are you solving the problems of the world again, Olaf?” his assistant Sandra asked. “You look like you’re concentrating.”
“Well, I was far away, or at least I was very long time away,” he said without any further explanation. “What’s on our agenda today?”
Paris, February 1998
They had agreed to meet at a café in Saint Germaine. Ronia was in Paris for work and to visit her father, and Olaf was stopping over for two days. She visited her father before Olaf arrived. She contemplated suggesting that her father and Valerie, the woman in his life since Ronia’s mother died a few years ago, should invite them for dinner, as they lived in Paris. She wanted Olaf and her father to meet. But then, the fact that Olaf was married was a good reason against it. Not that her father was very traditional, but he would pity Ronia for having found a married man, and he would most certainly be cross at Olaf for courting his daughter without being serious enough to leave his wife. She had told her father about Olaf without giving those details.
Olaf would meet one business contact, but for the rest of the time, he had cleared his schedule. He had planned to tell Liv about the affair, that he wanted to leave her, but ultimately he decided not to do it. Like so many before and after him, he justified not telling her by saying that it wasn't the right time, it was to protect her, it made no difference, etc.
He got to the bar fifteen minutes after the agreed-upon time of two in the afternoon. His flight was on time, and things had been smooth. When he left the Saint Germaine metro station, he realized that he should buy her something, but what? he asked himself. He wandered aimlessly and then settled for a florist. There, he was again lost, trying to remember what kinds of flowers she liked, and what all those different flowers meant. His eye was drawn to some orange blossoms that had a darker splotch of red in the center, reminding him of sunset.
“What do they mean?” he asked. The girl in the shop didn’t understand his question, or she didn’t understand his French, or she was just rude. She just told him the price, and repeated it when he asked again.
How many should I get? he thought. Why do they have to make flowers so complicated? The kind of flower means something and the number of flowers also means something. I’m sure the color of the ribbon and the wrapping paper also has some hidden meaning. Fortunately, Ronia doesn’t seem to know these things either, or at least I hope so. Finally, he asked for seventeen of “those orange flowers,” which turned out to be Chrysanthemums. He thought seventeen was safe. It was a high enough number not to have any particular meaning, and flowers should always be given in odd number, or was that only when you plant a garden? He thought that they had spent seventeen nights together since they first met. At least, that was what he would tell her. That would mean that they had made love some thirty-five or forty times, he calculated roughly, with a smile on his lips.
As soon as he saw her, his heart flooded. How beautiful she is, he thought, but why is she crying? He saw her wiping her eyes. She stood up and opened her arms, and they shared a long embrace.
“I missed you so,” he whispered in her ear. “Do you love me?”
“Silly, you know how much I love you. You just want to hear it again and again.”
“C’est vrai, mon amour,” he agreed. They normally spoke English with each other, but they often threw in a word of French here and there. He enjoyed love speak in French in particular. He thought French sounded a lot more romantic than English. Sometimes when they made love, he would say something in Swedish, mostly sweet things like “Jag älskar dig" (I love you) or “hur kan någon vara så underbar som du är" (How can anybody be as wonderful as you are?). He explained those phrases to her sometimes.
Sometimes when he was bursting with desire, he would cry out less romantic things in his native tongue, rude expressions of how he wanted her, how he wanted to take her, or how she should take him and how she made him horny like a buck. By saying them in Swedish, he thought he shielded her and still could let the words flow from his heart. No, not from the heart—these things don’t come from the heart, and they surely don’t come from the brain—they come from the groin, from the balls, from the animal within. Which was what he appreciated so much in his relationship with Ronia, its primal force.
“It is true that I know it , but it is equally true that I want to—no, that I need to—hear it again and again. You know, even if we Christians believe in Jesus, we still need a book of thousand of pages telling us that he existed and that he still exists,” he mused.
Ronia was a convinced atheist, and it disturbed him. It disturbed her probably even more that he believed in something that she thought was irrational, immature, and in the end, negative for society. “And I love you too, sooooooo much,” he added, trying to get away from any religious debate.
He always felt inferior discussing religion. Her logic and arguments were so sharp, but they didn’t appeal to his heart, and therefore had little impact on him. When he told her so, she got upset, saying that that kind of defense was pathetic. This time, there was no such debate, though. He looked into her face and saw a streak of sadness.
“Were you crying?” he asked.
“Just a bit.”
“Why?”
Silence.
“Please tell me, cherie. I can’t see you sad without knowing why.”
“I know I’m silly. It’s just that you were late, and I started to think that you wouldn’t come or that you were late on purpose, demonstrating your independence or God knows what. It’s incredible how many thoughts one can have in just a few minutes time, and you know,” she looked at her wristwatch and said with an accomplished stern look, “you are almost twenty minutes late.” Despite her look, he felt that she was not so serious about it.
“Oh sweetie, I’ve traveled two thousand kilometers and I’m sixteen minutes late and you start to think badly about me. What kind of confidence is that?” he said. “Besides, the reason I’m late is that I bought you flowers.” He gave them to her.
“Thank you for the flowers. I fancy Chrysanthemums, if they are not of the smelliest sort at least,” she said, inhaling the scent of them and smiling approvingly. She paused. “Sorry. Please forget it. I was silly. I have been looking forward to seeing you. I was nervous that you would let me down in the end. And I’m still nervous that you will tell me you want to break up.”
He felt pain that she could even think about their romantic rendezvous in that way, but he decided not to go into it.
“Ok, let’s forget it and think about the pleasures ahead of us. Do we have something here or can we proceed to more important business?”
“And what could such important business be?” she asked.
“Mmmm.”
“Mmmm,” she echoed. “ Let’s have a coffee and a one of their fantastic pastries. That will be a good starter for a marathon love-in.” she suggested with a coy look.
“Oh, were you thinking about that?” he asked. “I was only thinking about drawing up the contract.”
“The contract?”
“Our cohabitation contract,” he said with a mischievous look. “I have a draft with me. It has twenty-four paragraphs and covers everything from who should make coffee in the morning to the status of our children, as well as detailed regulations for how ill one shall be before the daily obligations are transferred to the other. So if you have a fever above 38.5 centigrade, you don’t have to cook anymore.”
A cloud swept over her face.
“Olaf, I know it’s a joke, but at this moment, it’s not amusing,” she said.
“Did you like the flowers?” he asked after a short while. “One for each night we spent together.”
“They’re sweet�
�you’re sweet. Let’s order.”
"You know, I couldn't afford to buy flowers for each time we made love or for each time we kissed." They looked at each other and smiled.
They ordered coffee and pastries, catching up. Ronia told him about the contact she’d had with the people they’d met in Geneva the year before. They ran a Bosnian orphanage in Italy. They had made such an impression on her, taking care of traumatized children. She had called them a few times and would go and visit them the coming month. He told her about the lovely papyrus mats he had sourced in North East Uganda, and that he found a—hopefully—reliable lady who could run the local business. He showed her the roll he had brought along. She said they were pretty.
As they were in contact several times per day, there was little about each other’s lives they didn’t know. But they didn’t mind repeating what had been written. In the same way, they rarely grew tired of telling each other how much they loved each other or how they fancied this or that special treat in their relationship.
“I love when you touch me like that,” Ronia said when he touched her upper arm.
“I love the smell of your sweat after we have made love,” Olaf replied.
She had booked the hotel. One of those small Parisian places with narrow, creaking stairs and a smoking receptionist who acted more like a patronizing landlady for a student dorm than somebody there to serve the guests. He was a bit fearful seeing the entry, as he envisioned something really cramped. He remembered staying at a Parisian hotel years ago, where the temperature was unbearable, the smell intrusive, and the air at a total standstill. He remembered long, sweating nights accompanied by the banging, the creaking beds and the cries of couples—of all sorts—making love.
“I know it looks shitty from the outside and in the entry, but you’ll like it, I know you will,” she assured him and squeezed his arm. “Let me help you with your luggage,” she offered and took the papyrus roll, and she leaped ahead of him the five floors.