by Kopen Hagen
“The trick is to make it warm and cozy inside and go out as little as possible, and when you go out, you do it with friends.”
“Is this how you entertain your wife at breakfast?” she said and then blushed as it might be understood as a pass, comparing their sitting there with his matrimonial situation.
“Uh,” he said, “our breakfast ritual is quite different. It goes like this. I wake up, I put on the coffee and set the table with the most popular items. Then I try to find my wife. She is normally either out on a quick walk or if the weather is really, and I mean really, bad she works out with a torture machine in the basement. I tell her the coffee is ready, and she looks at me like I am her servant and says, ‘I hope it is good.’ ‘Of course it is good, milady,’ I respond. Then we sit and have breakfast together. It’s actually the only time of the day when we are almost always together. Lunches we take at work, dinners we often skip or eat out, each one of us alone or with some colleagues. We both work a lot, I must say. Too much, frankly. During weekends we spend more serious time together. That means that we take the fifteen minutes of breakfast together as a time to discuss things like managing our life, who will fix that, buy food, clean up, do the laundry, etc., etc. It is basically a business meeting, sometimes including stiff negotiations, but mostly just plain organization. Not a lot of entertainment there, not a lot of fun,” his voiced trailed off and he looked down with a bothered expression.
She sat quiet.
“And you, how is your breakfast?”
“Oh, breakfast is quite serious for me. Once I get going with my work, I easily forget to eat, so I force myself to take heavy breakfast, inspired by the traditions where I live, in total opposition to my upbringing, which didn’t really include breakfast. I make an omelet, with something seasonal such as mushrooms, tomatoes, parsley or carrots, fry some potatoes, eat sausages and goat’s cheese. I drink milk, goat’s milk, and I drink herbal tea. Rarely coffee in the morning. I save the coffee for the day, where it keeps me going all through to supper.”
“One would not believe that a thin person like you could have such a heavy breakfast,” he said. It was not really true that she was thin, but Olaf thought most women wanted to hear that they are thin even if it is not true.
She froze. “Olaf, please don’t do that. I know who I am. I know how I look. I know I’m not thin. I also know that I’m not really fat. I’m quite close to what would have been ideal seventy years ago, which means I am fifteen kilos too heavy for today’s standard. But I tell you what, I don’t care at all about that. And I don’t want you saying things to keep me happy when they are not true.”
She sat silent for a while and then corrected herself. “I don’t care too much about it is perhaps more correct. The truth is that the constant flow of impressions from billboards, news and media in general is so forceful that even stubborn feminist revolutionaries like me are affected by the views of how a woman should look.”
“Sorry, Ronia. You know we Nordic people are always said to be a bit rude, not sophisticated enough, and our gender equality obsession means that we treat everybody the same. We don’t open doors for women, we don’t pull out their chairs, and we don’t flatter them. I guess I just tried to be a bit chivalric. Knowing your French heritage, I assumed you would expect that. But you come out as a real Norse Amazon.”
“By the way, I certainly know where Chechnya is,” Ronia told him, changing the subject. “Mind you, it is not far from Armenia as things are. And I do live in France, but I am half Armenian, a quarter French and a quarter Dutch Jew.” She added some detail about her mother and father’s descent.
They discussed the day. He suggested that they would walk to the Centre, and she agreed. During the walk, he recounted a story about his recent sales to a Swedish hotel and she told him about her latest painting. He asked if she would mind sharing dinner with him that night. She agreed.
“What time?” he asked. “Is six fine?”
“Can we say six thirty?”
“OK, deal. See you in reception then.”
The day passed with the normal deliberations of a serious meeting. They developed an action plan for the project for the coming two years. It was agreed that both Ronia and Olaf would participate in the next major event, which was the FairArtFair at the Gent art and handicraft fair in September.
Ronia was at the reception desk at six-thirty. Olaf was not there. He arrived fifteen minutes late. Ronia looked cross and said, “I thought you Swedes were punctual?”
“Hm, mostly we are, but I might not be an average Swede. I had to speak with my wife about an upcoming event.” He immediately wondered why he had chosen that language, “had to speak…” as if he hadn’t chosen it. He was the one calling her. He didn’t admit it to himself, but the reason he called now was that he could truthfully say that he was in the hotel, that he was alone and that he planned to go out for a bite. He wouldn’t like Liv to call him after returning from dinner with Ronia and ask what he had eaten and with whom. It was not like Liv was jealous. It was more that she wanted to know everything, part of her need to be in control, he guessed.
He himself could be fiercely jealous sometimes. But it happened mostly when they were together and he saw the looks of other men. Strangely, he trusted her more when she was on her own. Partly it had to do with her very composed and controlled self. Remembering how rationally she had approached him and their relationship, as well as her super rational attitude towards children, he could not imagine her running off with another guy out of passion.
For Olaf, the real threat would be if she found another man that could match her professionally and be attractive and secure enough. Ultimately, Olaf was quite confident that Liv needed his more emotional and spontaneous way as a counterweight to her own sober and somber self. She might not fully realize that herself. When they were together with others, for some reason she sometimes played out her sexuality, her appeal, in a way she hardly ever did with him. It did make him jealous, but it also turned him on. More than once, after a party, he would ask her why she had spoken so much with Mr. Y, or why she had let her shoulder band slip when she was sitting next to Mr. M.
She would look at him and say, “Because I know it turns you on. Come on, tiger, make my day, or rather, make my night.”
And they would make love. Never had his jealousy led to any real conflict, as Liv cleverly knew how to turn it into something positive.
They walked a few blocks and found a nice looking Lebanese 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 t
his 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 Gent 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 sight!”
“Yes, 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 how 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 food 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 guess 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 gender. 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 their 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 pe
rson, 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.”
Rome, April 2013
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.