Free A Neverending Affair by Kopen Hagen Page A

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