Through the Eyes of An African

A strange romance

I was to spend the New Year with Marianne at Thisted. She was expecting me. I left Espergaerde on the 27th of December; but not before mischievously stealing a snapshot of Erik while he dozed on his arm-chair with mouth agape. I waved to Erik as my train headed towards Copenhagen. He was so much of a father to me during my stay in Denmark. We never saw each other again but we kept in touch by phone and by correspondence.

There was the usual silence in the train as people kept to themselves, either reading, staring out of the windows or taking a nap. In the course of the journey, I witnessed a scene that sent me thinking.

There was this old woman seated about three rows away on the other side of the aisle. She looked quite aged, and was thickly attired as the winter warranted. Her countenance was dull and bored. She had draped her winter coat on the vacant seat beside her. Also on the seat was a bag. It was as big as the common shopping bags but was made of perforated cloth. As we travelled on towards Copenhagen, the bag suddenly began to move. Her hands reached into it and emerged holding a small lap dog. I was pleasantly surprised. The dog looked so cute and beautiful with its fluffy fur. I thought it looked somewhat like a Pekinese. The old lady placed the dog on her laps, staring at it with now twinkling eyes and smiles. She began to stroke and fondle it. Bending over the dog, she kissed it repeatedly, whispering to it all the while.

I have witnessed people give affectionate pecks to their dogs without feeling that anything was amiss. But certainly not in my homeland where such a show of affection is considered absurd. I remember that once in my childhood my brothers and I had decided to start kissing our dog after having seen it done so many times in different movies. The first step we took in that regard was to give our dog a thorough mouth scrub using an old toothbrush and a profusion of toothpaste. But we could not keep up such a "show of affection" for long. It was not just in our character.

Now what was different in the case of this old lady was in the nature of her kisses. Her lip- contacts with her dog were often prolonged and seemed more like passionate kisses. I stared on as if mesmerised while she "molested" the poor dog with a profusion of such kisses. After a while she began stroking the dog to sleep on her laps. I watched the whole scene with revulsion. This very quickly gave way to some understanding. I now saw it as one of the unpleasant fruits of the Danish individualistic way of life.

Here was an old lady most likely living all alone, abandoned, in some flat, and still having a lot of affection to give. Having no one at hand to give her affection, she picks on the innocent dog and showers it with all that she has to give. This thought led to other reflections on the Danish family.

From impressions I had gathered, the children in a Danish home are the ones served by their parents; served by parents who they sometimes abandon at old age. They even send their parents on errands:
"Mom go and buy Arne and I some chocolates."
"Dad remove that bag from there."

Mum get me this. Dad do this or that. Such things are simply unheard of where I come from. There, it is the children, the youths, that serve their parents. They serve them until they are no more, even if they were to become vegetables in their old age. The children will in turn be treated similarly by their own children, or in the case of a childless person, by some other young relative.

The reaction of some of the Danes who had visited us in Nigeria to this custom was always instructive. One of them, an elderly man, had been visibly shocked to find that my dad could still send me on trivial errands, even though I was over twenty years of age. "You're over twenty, and your father can still send you around?" He had asked quite astonished.

One young Danish lady had not been so tempered in expressing her shock at such a custom. She had been outraged to find my younger brother washing my father's car, having been asked to do so.
"He has no right to ask him to wash his car," she had shouted, mad at such an "injustice".
"He drives the car so he should wash it himself!"

During one of the winter mornings I spent in Denmark, my hostess and I had walked down to her car. We were on our way out for some appointment. We found the car covered all over with crusted ice flakes. The ice seemed even more concentrated on the windscreen such as would impair visibility. We had set to work cleaning up the car. While we busied ourselves scraping and cleaning, I mentioned that had it been in my homeland, she would have come down to meet the car already cleaned up and prepared for her use by her children. Having spent some time in Nigeria, she was well aware of this fact. She told me that on her return from my country she had tried to inculcate such manners in her child but to no avail. In many ways, I found the Danish family quite unfamiliar.

I once asked a Danish lady friend of mine, "Have you ever been beaten by your parents?" Her answer had been, "Yes, just once, when I was twelve years old. My mother slapped me and I slapped her back, and she never tried it again".

Such is virtually unheard of in my homeland. However with increasing westernisation such is now occasionally heard of. But such rare cases often send shock waves through those in the community who learn of it.

The old lady spent the rest of the journey with the dog on her laps. It was uneventful. I spent it thinking of one thing or the other, and staring out of the train's window. I left the train at Copenhagen and boarded another heading towards Jutland.