A Neverending Affair

by Kopen Hagen

  He continued to relate his work. How he had handed over the fair trade company to the employees in 2002, taken a half year time off with his daughter—a luxury the Swedish parental leave system supports.

  “It is really something very special to be able to spend all that time with your child. I wish all people could do that.”

  “Sure, but let's find them food to eat, shelter and freedom from violence first,” Ronia injected with a slightly ironic tone. “But forgive me, I didn't mean to make you look bad or diminish the value of that experience.”

  “Well, OK. Then in 2003 I got a job as the manager for the British Society for Fair Trade in the UK, a campaign organization. I saw it as a chance to try something new. We stayed in Gothenburg the first two years, but after that, I got quite tired of commuting, and I stayed in London. Also I found it a bit irresponsible—you know, for the environment—to fly twice a week between Gothenburg and London. Monika agreed to look for a job in the UK, and we were lucky. This was when things were really easy and she got a part-time job with a media house. Because of her writing and Rebecka and my travel, part time is just enough—even if she sometimes lets me know that we are falling in a typical gender role trap in our carrier development.

  “After a while, we bought a nice apartment in Dover. Five years ago, I felt I had done what I could do in the Fair Trade movement, and started to look for a new challenge. I like public campaigning, and they say I’m good at it, media darling and all that. Finally, I got head hunted by Human Rights International. Our office is in Brussels, so I am again commuting internationally, this time by train, though. It takes five hours from my home to the office. I normally stay three nights a week in Brussels, and work from home or am on the road somewhere else the rest of the time.”

  He paused.

  “And you?”

  “I will tell you, but tell me first how it is to have a child and a wife.”

  “You remember how much I wanted a child, don’t you?” She nodded. He continued. “And it’s really great. I sometimes wish I had more of them, a full soccer team. I told you I stayed at home for half a year with her. That was magic,” he said. “I mean, there are an awful lot of mundane things to do with a small baby, and there is sleep deprivation and there were anxiety attacks when she was ill, but overall, it is the magic of that little life and of the bond between that little life and yourself. I loved it. I bonded so well with my daughter that Monika got a bit jealous. Rebecka, my daughter, is twelve, starting to develop the attributes of a woman, but still a child in her thinking.

  “She had her first crush last month—a boy next door. He’s two years older, and I doubt he ever saw her, but she was sitting there, longing by the window. Then she overheard him saying something bad about immigrants and now she says he’s a jerk. She has very firm ideas about the world. Even more of an idealist than I am, and that says a lot, doesn’t it? She boycotts products from China because of the regime. She refuses to eat meat unless it’s from organic farms. She comes down on me hard for not sorting the garbage properly enough. She is sweet. Here!” he said, producing a photo of the daughter.

  “And that is your wife,” Ronia said pointing at the other photo.

  “Yes, Monika, that is. I already told you about her. What more do you want to know?”

  “Are you happy?” she asked.

  “Is that the right question to ask?” he said and fell silent, looking at her quizzically. “How do we really know if we are happy or not? Is it the number of times we laugh, that we don’t cry, that we are healthy, that we love our close ones? Is it the absence of fear, the absence of suffering, the satisfaction of our need for companionship, sex and care or the indulgences, the passion and enormous pleasures that makes up a good life?” he asked rhetorically. “I have a good life. I adore my daughter, and I love my wife.”

  “Very Buddhist,” she responded.

  Ngorongoro, February 1997

  After the meeting in Nairobi, when the dams had burst, the next time they were due to meet was in Arusha in February 1997. Olaf suggested that they take two extra days and go to the Ngorongoro crater. “You will simply love it,” he wrote in a message. “I was there two years ago, and it is a truly spectacular place.”

  They finished their three-day meeting in Arusha and then took a field trip to banana-leaf artists in the foothills of Kilimanjaro. There was a coffee growing area, although coffee was on decline as a result of low prices, which in turn was blamed on Vietnam’s transition to an export-oriented market economy. Through initiatives by World Bank and other donors, smallholders in the hills had turned to coffee, and in a short period Vietnam had become number two in the world after Brazil.

  As coffee prices were dropping, banana production became more important. Coffee was seen as a cash crop and therefore men normally controlled it, while banana had been a household crop and therefore a woman’s crop. Now, as banana prices were up and coffee prices down, the men were not able to turn the story on its head, so the women kept the proceeds from the banana sales, went to bars and got drunk, while their men waited outside of the bar for their allowance. Or at least, that was the story they were told by the local host.

  Banana leaf art was one more income-generating activity. They bumped into some consultants who were there to start up an organic and fair trade coffee project together with the Kilimanjaro Native Cooperative Union, and discussed possible cooperation, for example by shipping the art in coffee containers or by making a joint movie about how fair trading opportunities could transform the region. The former sounded like a risky undertaking, realizing how coffee was handled. The latter sounded like a good idea.

  “We will have to wait two, three years until there are results on the ground to show though,” Ronia said.

  “Well, friends, in an ideal world, that would be right, but in the world we live in, we need to have that movie going within a year, because the donors have assigned money for only three years. We are already one year into the project, and we need to have something to show. In addition, the buyers are the same. They want us to be able to show the good results already at the first shipment and the consumer unfortunately also feels the same. So while we all know that development takes time—a lot of time—that is not the frame within which we are working. We are supposed to deliver unrealistic results in an unrealistic time. So we need that movie yesterday....” the leader of the consultants, a Dutchman called Piet, said.

  Olaf looked troubled, a combination of disliking what Piet told them and the knowledge that what he said was true.

  The days had generally speaking been uneventful, except there had been a severe accident in the Tanzanite minefields in the area. A heavy rain had flooded the mining area. The mining operations were all small scale, with a guy making a claim, digging a pit and hiring a few helpers. If he got rich, he would make more claims, contract out the pits to independent “miners.” There was no overall management of the minefields. Sometimes roads even collapsed because someone dug a pit too close to the road, and what was dug up from the soil was heaped on the sides with no particular plan or use. Some of it could be use for road works, but as the land was like a colony of prairie dogs, very few trucks dared to enter the area. At this particular time, a flood put all the pits under water, and in many cases the diggers hadn’t managed to get up in time. They were drowned like rats.

  When the team was winding down after the meeting, Ronia said, “I want to be an optimist, but every time I realize how we humans manage to screw things up, I get depressed. Now look at this Tanzanite stone,” she said and fingered her necklace. “I bought it last time we were here, the first time I was in Africa. It is so beautiful, and I have valued it a lot. Now it fills me with dread to see it. I get reminded of this accident. For the rest of my life, I will associate Tanzanite, not with the beauty of the stone, but with the disastrous conditions in the mines. And this is just one example. Sometimes I feel that all things beautiful have a dark side, and if people knew it, they would rej
ect them. It seems to me that we humans destroy anything and everything that comes our way. Only where humans have not interfered there is pure beauty. I don’t want to throw the necklace away. It won’t help anybody. But I will put it in a drawer and it will stay there,” she said and took off the necklace.

  “Well, I wouldn’t say that we humans are the ones destroying everything,” Olaf argued. “Nature itself can certainly be cruel and ugly. The kill of a wildebeest by a pack of hyenas is no beautiful sight. The power of a volcano eruption is perhaps admirable and beautiful from a distance, but if you look close enough, the boiling lava converts all life in its way to ashes in matters of seconds. Cyclones and floods are wreaking havoc, not only for humans but for all life forms.”

  “I read about this Gaia view, where the whole earth is like an organism, with self-correcting and curing mechanisms. It gave me some hope. But at the same time, it again made me think that the humans are the ones that destroy it all,” Ronia responded.

  “I actually read that Gaia book by Lovelock,” Selma said. “What is waste for one organism is food for another one. What one composes, the other decomposes. If there is too much of something, an organism will soon appear that can live in that environment. Nature abhors vacuum; nature abhors emptiness. But still I think the Gaia theory overdoes it. These are not designed functions. They are just the result of evolution, of that organism’s attempt to adapt itself to any available ecological niches. I believe there are natural events that by themselves can wipe out all populations. Just look at the dinosaurs. No Gaia helped them. I don’t think Gaia will help us either.”

  “Of course, there is design. I haven’t read that book,” Gladys countered, “but God made this world and the creatures in it. That is design. What you call Gaia seems to me to be the hand of God.”

  Olaf was not in the mood to enter into a discussion about religion. Ronia was the clear atheist. It sounded that Selma was in that camp as well. Gladys, as almost all Africans, was very religious in a nice naïve way that Olaf admired, but couldn’t make his. He didn’t turn to God for all the answers, and even if he did believe in God, he didn’t believe in creative design or other ideas that God in any hands-on way had made all the creatures and features of the planet.

  “I also think humans create beauty. Look at many of the most beautiful landscapes in the world. They are human creations. From the Lunebürger heide to the pastoral mountains of Ronia’s Savoy,” Olaf offered. “Yes, even this landscape has to a large extent been shaped by humans. I don’t know the exact details, but the hunting and the burning of grass and cutting forests are certainly shaping the landscape as much as the elephants are doing. The savannah is certainly no wilderness. This is the cradle of humanity, our home.

  “Thinking of it, I believe that’s probably the reason why almost all people can love this landscape, while they can be very intimidated by real wilderness, deserts and forests. It is probably because it was made by humans. It is like our own garden or a park.”

  “Olaf, that was a very interesting thought,” Selma concluded.

  The thought of the savannah as a man-made landscape first seemed outlandish to Ronia, but reflecting upon it, she saw that it was somewhat plausible.

  When they were with the team, Olaf and Ronia showed none of their affection, or at least they thought so. They made vague statements about their plans when Selma asked if they would also fly out in the coming days. Ronia said, as they had agreed, that she planned to go to Ngorogoro, while Olaf said he wanted to visit some potential clay artists west of Arusha, close to the Lake Manyara Natural Park. They had agreed to meet at the car rental company in downtown Arusha. They were not willing to let their love to be seen and exposed. Olaf because of Liv, and Ronia because she felt it compromised her professional role in the project, and that people would think she was just selected because she was Olaf's lover.

  Lover, she thought. This is the first time I’ve thought about us in those terms.

  They went by a rickety car to the Ngorogoro crater. Olaf had told Liv that he had more meetings. The mobile phone didn’t work in Arusha, so he didn’t have to be in contact with home. The landlines hardly ever worked, and Liv knew this. She had experienced it firsthand the one time she had followed him on a trip two years earlier. They had visited Ngorogoro together. Coming closer, Olaf regretted that he had booked himself and Ronia in the same hotel where he stayed last time. Not that he expected anyone to remember him there, but he was afraid that he would associate the place with Liv. He had not told Ronia about it. In some way, it felt like a double betrayal, both towards Liv and towards Ronia. But it was too late to change it now.

  They arrived at the Crater View Lodge in the early afternoon. The Toyota Corolla had kept together and the driver, Patrick, had negotiated all the potholes with great skill and patience. After check-in they went up to the Simba den, the bar overlooking the vast crater. The view was breathtaking. The sides of the crater fell hundreds of meters down to the floor. They could discern individual elephants in a large herd just below the lodge. Further afield there were huge herds, zebras and wildebeest, but the individual animals could barely be seen without binoculars.

  “Olaf, this is amazing!” Ronia exclaimed.

  “Wait till we go down in the crater tomorrow morning. We have to go early, you know, around seven at the latest. If we are lucky, the migration will be on.”

  “The migration?”

  “Yes, annually these wildebeests, gnu as we call them in Swedish, move in a cycle from down here, through the Serengeti, crossing the Mara River on their way to Kenya and then back again. Perhaps you have seen footage from the Mara River where crocodiles are waiting for them?” Ronia nodded confirming. “The crocs get some, but the sheer number of the beasts means that they are like a flood crossing that river, and most of them, of course, survive. It is a bit too early to see them here from what I gather. Anyway, this migration follows certain patterns, obviously controlled by the growth of the grass and perhaps some other factors. The previous time I was here, it was in February. Then there were many of them here with their calves. And we saw a lot of them.”

  “We?”

  He sat silent, gazing out on the animals, pretending not to have heard. Of course, it just made it worse. Ronia asked again.

  “You said ‘we.’ With whom were you here?”

  “I was here with Liv,” he said matter-of-factly. He knew there would be trouble, but he really couldn’t lie about it.

  “You didn’t tell me.”

  “I didn’t tell you that I was here alone. I didn’t tell you I was here with her,” he said, irritated. “In the end, what does it matter? She’s my wife. I live with her. I fuck her and I go to nice places with her. That’s what a man is supposed to do with his woman, isn’t it?” He knew it was not fair of him to be upset and angry, but he felt attacked and for Olaf, like for most of us, fighting was the natural response, even if he was the one that had erred.

  “Yes, but….Did you stay here? I mean in this very hotel?”

  “Yes, we did.”

  She looked down for a while and then she picked up her binoculars. She was disturbed by the fact, but she also realized that she hardly could blame him for having been to the crater with Liv before. But she did think it was insensitive of him to book them in the same place. Like all women—yes, like all lovers, whether male or female—she wanted to be unique and special, and she thought that he at least could have booked them in another place.

  “Let me look,” she said and gazed at the animals, through the binoculars. “It is truly beautiful here, Olaf.”

  “Yes, it is.” He felt there was something left standing between them, that Liv was there, but he chose to ignore it as much as possible and adopt a cheerful attitude. The damage was already done. “I must say I’m hungry. The food isn’t until seven-thirty, and normally there is some Masaai jumping before dinner, I think. Don’t ask me to explain that as well. You will see why I call it Masaai jumping, and I can te
ll you what little I know afterwards. I wouldn’t mind going to the room and taking a shower. Perhaps we could also cuddle. We could get out of practice, you know,” he said with a wicked twinkle.

  “Olaf, I’m not in the mood. It was a long trip, and I’m enjoying the scenery so much. Let’s just sit here, order another juice, perhaps some biscuits and wait for the twilight…. Do you know that song of the Band: Don't leave me alone in the twilight, 'cause twilight is the loneliest time of day?’” she sang in a soft and somewhat hesitant voice. It was the first time he had heard her sing, and he thought she had a lovely voice, deep and slow, but fragile in some way.

  “Do you know it? Do you also feel like that? What is twilight in Swedish? In French it is crepuscule, but that can be either dusk or dawn, and I don’t think it is such a beautiful word.”

  “The words for dusk and dawn are some of the most beautiful words we have in Swedish. Dusk or twilight is skymning and dawn is gryning.”

  “Skumning and grunig,” she tried.

  He corrected her and she tried a few more times, not really getting the pronunciation straight.

  “They are indeed beautiful words,” she said. “What is je t’aime in Swedish?”

  “We don’t have any word for that,” he said.

  “I think you are pulling my leg now.”

  “OK, Jag älskar dig.”

  She repeated it a few times, and he repeated it and said, “Jag älskar dig med. I love you too.”

  “You know, I really never liked that expression in the English language. ‘I love you too.’ I feel it is ambiguous. It can mean that I love you in addition to someone else. You know, it is like you say, I love Liv, and I love you too. And the other way it is used is passive. It’s just bouncing back what the other person said. If I say “I love you” and then you respond “I love you too,” I feel it is a bit like kissing on the cheek or shaking hands. It is just responding with the same thing. There is no original expression of feeling from you, just a kind of polite response.”