Love and Other Ways of Dying (41 page)

He confessed that during this most recent year, when he and Nathalie had been separated, she’d found someone else. (“She couldn’t stand the test of living with me,” he said.) The irony was that the other man was from Romania—and while they weren’t formally divorced yet, they no longer spoke, which dashed all plans for Mr. Skeid to procure Portuguese citizenship through his wife. “I didn’t expect her to be monogamous, but she had done nothing to prepare for my arrival,” he said. “I had no apartment. It would have been fine for the three of us to live together until I’d had time to find a place.” In his mind, it went back to the teacher, the father, the military commander, and now even his wife—all those who were trying to strip him of his personhood, his birthright, his freedom, his destiny. He fancied himself someone who would have made a good lawyer, actor, musician, writer, politician—and there were probably other roles he might have played to seamless perfection besides that of masseur—but as a passenger in each country, he never bothered to try.

When I asked about the source of his money—especially after he revealed that he read twenty newspapers a day on his new Apple laptop, that his shoes cost $500, his braces $1,200, and that he still received the occasional manicure—he smiled and allowed that credit cards had helped him and Nathalie, until they declared bankruptcy. Not a great amount owed, something less than seven thousand dollars. Now he was living off a loan that he intended to pay back shortly, once he had the right papers.

“I’m arrogant but not illogical,” he said. And whom was he hurting? He hadn’t put a gun to Nathalie’s head to force her to spend on his behalf. They’d done it together, as husband and wife, like millions of other couples spending into debt. “Even being
bankrupt is a science. You can do it the right way or the wrong way,” he said. As for the loan, it had been given willingly.

As easily as Mr. Skeid had been able to discuss the setbacks in his life, as vividly as he seemed to recall them, the decade from 1989 to 1999 marked the lost years, the ones he was unwilling to discuss. Were these the years during which he’d shared that three-hundred-euro bottle of wine, then sunk so low as to have pilfered someone else’s passport? Were they the years of sexual awakening? The years during which he’d refined his existential philosophies? There was only one memory from that time that he would allow.

It occurred in France, perhaps in the early 1990s. He remembered stopping at a spot on the way from Cannes to Saint-Tropez. He’d come to see the sea, on this fabled, glitzy coastline, and stood at an inlet. Out over the water were lights on the other side, people’s houses, and he began to wonder about those people.

“I was by the Mediterranean,” he said. “I realized that people didn’t appreciate my gifts, and I was looking at the sea and wondering if I could cancel all that. I was wondering how, given my past, I could achieve a family, a good job besides washing dishes, a life of holidays. I very seriously contemplated the notion of suicide. This goes back to Japan, where suicide isn’t a negative thing but rather, if one wants to protect one’s karma, it’s better for them to leave. I’m a good swimmer, so it was hard to kill myself. I didn’t even try. But I had to kill myself either literally or figuratively. I had to break from my past even as the physical world demands papers and history, even as there is the continual demand for your name.”

As we made our rounds in Lisbon, we visited a Japanese restaurant that Mr. Skeid favored. He said it was run by a friend, and he phoned her one afternoon to see if the kitchen was still
open for a late lunch. When we arrived, he spoke with her, jokingly. He could be very disarming in this mode. He could be charismatic and generous with his good mood and had a funny, sarcastic sense of humor. His friend called him by his Romanian name, Ciprian, and when I asked him about it, rather than answering directly, he told me his past had recently come back to haunt him—he’d been speaking to a lawyer over the phone, someone in Bucharest, who ostensibly spoke English and was going to help him secure a passport. He now had a copy of his Romanian birth certificate. When it had arrived, he’d been rattled to discover that he was thirty-six years old, six years older than he’d thought himself to be.

The idea was that since Romania was entering the EU, Mr. Skeid would try to get a Romanian passport and move to Dublin, Oslo, or Geneva, somewhere he might be able to establish residency. In order to receive a Romanian passport, however, he needed to prove residency in Romania. For maybe a thousand euros total, he could get it done—someone would rent a flat for him and then appeal to the bureaucratic powers for the document in question. He was deeply ambivalent about this: It was much more than he was willing to pay.

When I proposed that he accompany me back to Romania in order to straighten out the passport business, his response was curt:
never.
What, then, I wondered, if I were to go, to find the family he’d lost seventeen years ago when he left? Would he object? “It doesn’t bother me if you want to see my parents,” he said at his most Zen.

I had him write their names in my notebook. So was he sending me as his proxy? Or did he doubt I’d ever go?

The connection in Milan was a short, brisk walk to a small plane—and then, with the hum of propellers, I felt myself lifted
up over the Alps, which were snowcapped and hovering eerily like a bloom of behemoth jellyfish in the morning sun. The plane skimmed the countries of Slovenia, Croatia, and Hungary. The land flattened and emptied; a tiny horse and cart appeared below. I could almost smell manure wafting from the earth to that height. “I never had a home,” he’d said. “I never had a name. I never had the peace of having a place for me. I was born in the wrong place, to the wrong people, and never lived free.”

So he’d made himself into a German, a Frenchman, an Englishman. He tried to become Canadian and Portuguese. And finally, aground in Lisbon, he’d reached another dead end. He could have been anybody—and had been—and now he was nobody. “I don’t exist,” he kept repeating to me. “I can’t be betrayed.”

The airport at Timişoara was nothing but a cracked tarmac and a low-slung gray block building—the remnants of another time—toward which we walked after deplaning. Inside floated a crowd, albeit a small one, that familiar beam of expectant faces one sees upon exiting customs almost anywhere in the world. I spied a man and a woman, huddled close together—and they looked back at me without looking past. The man was thin, slightly stooped, with tufts of hair on either side of his head and smooth skin on top. The woman was about forty, with dishwater hair and a kind if tired face. I’d later find she hadn’t been able to sleep for the week leading up to my arrival, but what I noticed first was that one of her eyes trailed slightly to the right.

Like her brother’s.

They pushed toward me and we embraced. As if I were the brother himself. His sister’s name was Daniela, and for seventeen years she’d assumed the worst about Ciprian. Seventeen years without a word from him—and then, ten days ago, came a call from America. The voice at the other end had belonged to my friend’s grandfather, a man born in Romania, who spoke fluently,
calling on my behalf. He’d been kind enough to find a listing that had led to Daniela.

They would tell me later that they’d been confused and overwhelmed, happy and shocked. They attributed that call to God. It was a warm, hazy Tuesday in November, and they were taking the afternoon off from their work at the radio communications firm where Daniela’s husband, Stefan, was a technician and Daniela was a secretary. Their only son, Razvan, who was nineteen years old and spoke perfect English, was in class at the language college and would join us later.

Daniela was tentative, polite. Her dress was simple, of the anonymous Eastern European variety. She wore no perfume, put on no airs or affectation. We walked the parking lot in a bit of a daze, trying to think of what to say first. It was seven miles or so to the city, and we rode in their small car. Both could speak English well enough for us to communicate the basics. Daniela had so many questions, and after waiting a polite modicum of time, they came flooding: Where was Ciprian? What did he look like? Was he okay? Was he healthy? What was his job? Was he married? Did he have the correct papers? Had he any trouble with the law? Would he be coming home soon?

She regarded me as a dear friend of Ciprian’s—as well as a friend of hers. But more, I think she saw me as a deus ex machina come to rectify years of grief. She had already called me “a good man,” whereas her brother, quoting Wagner’s
Das Rheingold
, had said, “I only trust your greed.” Over the course of our days together, she listened carefully to everything I could think to tell her: He was fine despite the head injury, worked out often, was married (or at least not divorced yet). She had an open, curious expression, one of trying to understand. And at the same time, no matter what odd twist the story took, she seemed to recognize the strength of her brother in all of it. Sometimes her eyes
would well with tears, and then she would fight to hold herself together, to put everything back inside that placid, resigned body of hers. When she finally couldn’t hold her emotion, she cried so politely that it seemed she wasn’t crying at all.

“
Why
does he keep changing his name?” she asked. “Can we write his wife, our sister? Will they have children?”

They wanted to start by giving me a tour of Timişoara. Once past the rings of Communist construction, the blight of soulless apartment blocks, it was a beautiful downtown, full of Hapsburg-era buildings and a number of remarkable squares and churches, including an Orthodox cathedral that served as a central landmark. Timişoara had always been Romania’s most Western city, the first in Europe to have introduced horse-drawn trams and then electric streetlights. And it was the place where the bloody revolution that led to the downfall of Ceauşescu had begun in December 1989.

One of the first stops was Colegiul Naţional de Artǎ Ion Vidu—the music school. We walked the narrow, slightly dilapidated toothpaste-colored halls. Children of all ages were afoot everywhere. “He was quiet,” remembered his sister. “He liked to read and listen to music. He didn’t get into trouble, at least not here.” The plangent strains of violins could be heard emanating from behind closed doors, the tinkle of a piano, a trumpet blast. There was only this outward evidence of joyful, noisy learning. One had to go back in time, passing through decades, to retrieve the days of the Ceauşescu regime: the rationing and curfews, the abolition of religion and private property, the renaming of cities and streets, and fishburgers—only fishburgers—for sale at what passed as restaurants. The rigidity and daily persecutions of Communism had stripped the people of their dignity and identity. Holidays were erased, street names changed. People were forced to live double and triple lives. Was it this hallway here
where Ciprian had received the punch from his teacher? Or this one here? Or was it, rather, all in his mind?

Daniela could remember that, after school, she and her brother were rarely permitted to play with friends but practiced the violin two to three hours at home each day. She allowed that her mother, who had worked in a bread factory, always had a special affection for Ciprian. “She did everything she could for him,” Daniela said. “And he was such a smart, sensitive child. Even when he was fifteen or sixteen—when he was very sad, he would cry.” It was the violin that his mother hoped would propel her son beyond their consigned life. Ciprian: He’d been named for a Moldavian composer.

About her father, Daniela said he was a decent man, too—one who also loved his son—except when he drank. He began his career as a shoemaker but then worked in the meat-processing business. We drove into an older section of the downtown, along a street of brick row houses, and ended up in front of the family’s old domicile, or the door that led back to an inner courtyard and a long stablelike building with three or four apartments, what she called “a wagon house.” They’d had three cramped rooms in their apartment—which, taken as a whole, was the size of what my room had been at the Ritz—and Daniela admitted that “things did not go well when my father was drunk.” She said alcohol was his illness, not every night but often. And he was doomed by a lack of tolerance: When he did drink, he got drunk fast. And then things flew, windows broke, no one was safe. Their mother was beaten, and Ciprian, who objected to his father’s behavior, was beaten, too—with a belt.

I believed her, of course. I walked the perimeter of the courtyard, trying to place myself in the shoes of that sensitive boy, the dead one now, the one buried beneath all those names and identities. There would have been four families jammed into
these apartments, with everyone living on top of each other, all living tightly circumscribed lives, always under the weight of Communist suspicion.

So when the objects flew, had Ciprian slept the cold night over here by the stone wall, under the stars? Or was it over there in the corner, under the porch roof?

The next day, Daniela wanted to take me to visit her—and Ciprian’s—parents. While still exuding calm, she appeared that morning more ragged, with deeper rings beneath her eyes and her hair a little more limp. Perhaps this was the effect of having stayed behind in Romania—having lived a hard life here—or perhaps it was the price she’d paid for having lost a brother to the world beyond and being revisited by him now, through me.

We drove to the edge of town and parked the car, then walked two blocks along a high wall with the traffic racing past at breakneck speed. Sharp horns sounded; the loud trucks bore extra-heavy loads. We came through the gate to the cemetery and ambled to the back, to a small mountain of dead flowers. Daniela tidied and decorated the sarcophagus that held both her parents. She lit candles, placing them fastidiously in bottle caps, and fussed with the flowers. Ciprian’s mother had passed away in 2000, to the end believing that she would see her son again. Daniela told me that there was a very popular television show in Romania, one that reunited lost family members, called
Surprise, Surprise
, and her mother thought many times about calling with his name, but then thought better of it, wondering if her Ciprian might be in prison somewhere—or worse, she might find that he’d died. Sometime later, when I reached an old friend of Ciprian’s from his high school years in Romania, one who himself had emigrated, he said, “Every time I went back to Romania, I went to
see her. She could not understand his anger. She lost her mind, really. She died of suffering.”