Love and Other Ways of Dying

by Michael Paterniti

  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.”

  His dad died two years after his mother. Later in life, Daniela said, he’d tried to limit his drinking, realizing the pain it had caused his family, and yet still could not be trusted: For her son Razvan’s birthday parties growing up, he was never invited. But then, she remembered him in the family wagon house, an old man with a destroyed liver, standing at the window, wondering about his son. Filled with self-recrimination, he felt that his family was keeping Ciprian’s whereabouts secret, and he pleaded for some word about him. “Have you heard anything?” he said over and over again.

  I listened to all of these revelations feeling that uncomfortable combination of voyeurism and vampirism, its own form of greed. Here I was, walking through someone else’s life to steal it for a moment, to assume it, reshape it, and resolve it somehow, all things that I knew I would never accomplish in the end. It wasn’t just that the patterns of abuse here were so ingrained, so historical and repetitive, and that Mr. Nobody’s own personal tale was trapped in this larger irrevocable pattern. But it was that I, having been sucked into the vortex of his person, having given him every benefit of the doubt, still couldn’t balance how he might have killed off his entire family. How was it that he claimed not to remember their faces?

  Had he ever felt anything? Perhaps the truth—the only real truth about Mr. Nobody—was the eerie depth of his emptiness.

  I would have believed this if it hadn’t been for that last evening with Daniela in Timişoara. We’d gone shopping together to buy food for a special dinner, then returned to their three-room apartment with its kitchen, a living/dining room where Daniela slept on the foldout couch, and a bedroom where father and son slept together. They’d saved this visit for last and seemed almost nervous to have me here, but why? Daniela held up a finger to signal that I should wait; then she descended some metal stairs to a dank basement and returned with a cardboard box.

  She placed the box on the coffee table and reached in. Now that I myself seemed to be family, she told me that the final split had come as a result of “a small argument.” Ciprian had been working as a chef in Germany, at an Italian restaurant, and was making more money in a month than Daniela and Stefan together earned in a year. When he returned home briefly, his mother mentioned that perhaps he should think about buying a house in Timişoara, and for some reason that set him off. He packed his bag and left. Later, he sent his sister all of her letters back. And they never heard from him again.

  “When you see him,” said Daniela, “tell him we love him—and that our lives are too short not to know each other.” Though I’d warned her of his recalcitrance when it came to being in direct communication with them, she couldn’t help herself. She imagined a scenario in which she might have a chance just to lay eyes on him once more, maybe from across a store. “What if we were to bump into each other on the street?” she wondered aloud. “Would we recognize each other?”

  But the reality of her world was so stark—and she seemed so wrung out by it—that her expectations always made their correction. “Even if he wrote us one e-mail a year, one line,” she said. “Just something telling us he’s fine and where he is.”

  She reached for the box, from which came photographs, poems, and letters, all of them belonging to Ciprian, the boy who’d been left behind. Could this have been what he meant by “the elsewhere”?

  There were pictures of Cipi as a baby, lying naked on a table. Here was Cipi on his father’s lap, a modest Christmas tree hung with ornaments behind them, his handsome father gazing easily at the camera. Here was Cipi on vacation at the shore, year after year with his mother and sister, dressed as a cowboy, a sailor, an Indian. Here he was, standing stock-straight, dressed in his fine clothes, playing his violin in a school recital. There were pictures of Cipi growing older, sprouting up. At the end of high school, according to Daniela, he took an entrance exam to study languages at college. There were hundreds who took the exam in hopes of getting one of four spots. Ciprian hadn’t made the cut. Nonetheless, in all the pictures of his graduation, he appeared singing and smiling, arms slung around friends, of which he seemed to have many.

  It was his letters, especially those from the military, that seemed to capture the depths of his despair, the culmination of his disillusion. “He was someone who was used to showering once a day,” said his sister, “and the military ruined him.” Remembering his own military service, Stefan said, “They tried every way they could to degrade you. That’s how I lost all my hair.”

  Ciprian’s letters often began with the salutation “Dear ones.” He sent happy birthdays to his parents and sisters, pleaded for his father to come visit. He was conscripted for a year and a half, and during that time he was forced to harvest crops and do field work. He underwent the psychological torments of a new recruit, being broken and made into a cog. “I’ve only been here a week,” he wrote, “and I’ve already had all my fingers destroyed.… After two months of this, I won’t be able to play the violin ever again.”

  In a letter to his sister, he concluded with the words: “From the first day here, something in me, like a fla
me, was put out.

  “Happy Birthday. Love, Ciprian.”

  One imagines the boy as he was then: nineteen years old, presenting a hard countenance but broken inside—and if he stayed, his life was over. In Romania, every person became the exact stamp of his neighbor. If you had an inclination to experiment—with your ideas, sex, religion, or dress—you ran the risk of prison and torture. Devoid of professional prospects, Ciprian would have been forced to take a job—one of the unglamorous sort—perhaps like his father, in meat processing. Or whatever the state decided. He would have fallen under the weight of one identity, and would have died with it. Trapped, he might have easily fallen into the tar pit of too much drink, passing along what had been passed to him: an age-old rage. Sooner or later, he’d find his resting spot by the pile of dead flowers in the cemetery, another victim of ideological consumption.

  And so he came up with a plan. If a Romanian citizen living abroad were to issue an invitation to another national living back in the home country—an invite for that person to come and visit—the state could issue temporary travel documents. For some, it became a means to escape: The invited party might arrive in Germany and, once settled, send an invitation back for a friend, who would come and then send for a friend, and so on. Soon you were all living illegally abroad on flimsy, often expired Romanian travel documents, which entailed its own very real risks. But at least you were free of Romania—and at least you could eat meat again instead of fishburgers. So Marius, who’d moved to Germany, sent for Ciprian, who later sent for Adrian. When Ciprian had arrived, he’d found a job cooking in an Italian restaurant. He read the Bible under the covers at night with a flashlight, so as not to bother anyone. Was he still a believer or merely grasping for the last of his faith?

  So began the lost decade. After another year—after returning to Romania one last time and leaving angrily, with that exhale of finality—he moved to Paris. Now twenty-two, he joined Adrian, who had moved to France straightaway. Fourteen years later, Adrian was still there when I reached him by phone. I told him I was trying to recover the memory of his friend, and when I mentioned him by name, he said, “Ciprian? You’re calling about Ciprian!” He could barely contain himself. “You saw him? How is he? Where is he? Will he see me?” Adrian remembered their shared fear at not having papers beyond the temporary travel permits they’d been issued, the fear that they’d be found out and either sent back home or imprisoned. Adrian recalled how Ciprian—whom he said would “always have a special place in my heart”—became someone different in Paris.

  “In a way, he was one side of everyone,” Adrian said, “the rebel that most don’t have the courage to be. He didn’t have any limits. He just said what he said. I really respected that in him.” According to Adrian, during this time Ciprian read the Romanian philosopher Emil Cioran, who wrote obsessively about suicide. He renounced his family—and shortly, too, his country. “Work is prostitution,” Ciprian declared to Adrian. One day he appeared at the bar where Adrian worked. “He came in with a guy,” said Adrian, “and the way they were talking, the way they were together, it was different. In Timişoara, he only went with women.” So now that had changed, too.

  After a year of their living together, Adrian finally had had enough. He bristled at the criticism, especially when his friend felt no qualms about living in the apartment for free while Adrian worked so hard to pay for it. “I was part of his story; I was his friend,” said Adrian. “He didn’t have any reason to fight with me except to find a reason to go away, to claim that I was just like the others who had let him down.”

  And then Ciprian left, never to be seen again. Adrian thought about him often while carrying on: He married, divorced, studied photography in Prague, and returned to Paris as a professional photographer. “Ciprian was there when I needed someone the most,” Adrian remembered. “But he was against everything all the time. His desire was to be different. He didn’t care about money. I would never say he wanted to be ‘famous.’ That’s a word I would never use. He just didn’t want to waste his life doing stupid things.”

  The last Adrian heard, he’d gone to Italy—but where? Mr. Skeid couldn’t, or wouldn’t, recall. So he’d moved like a wisp over the Continent, hoarding his papers and whatever documents enabled him to cross this or that border, filling his brain with books and Wagner, formulating his opinions on everything—his slightly disconnected unified theories—while, as he had put it, making himself into a Pygmalion to others of lower intellect.

  Where, and with whom, had he consumed that expensive bottle of wine?

  “I won’t answer any question that may jeopardize my freedom,” he said.

  After Italy, how had he made it to London?

  “I can tell the truth, but I can’t be made to answer,” he said.

  So which was he, the one they said was a grifter and a fraud or the one who’d been a victim?

  “Remember, I don’t exist,” he said.

  It was fascinating to think so. If one were to believe the facts and allegations that constituted the only known record of our man—the polish of his accent, the testimony given by alleged friends and acquaintances, as well as the version presented by the Canadian authorities—he arrived in England with the passport of Georges Lecuit, taken by theft or cash, moved to London, engaged in various versions of selling his body, grew tired of the scene there after some years, and left with a plan to get to America, where, he’d allegedly claimed, he planned to make more pornographic movies.

  Then he was found in Toronto. Beaten and traumatized. From that point forward, his memories were vivid again. The nurses hovering over him in the hospital, the time spent living in the rough Downtown Eastside section of Vancouver, his wedded life with Nathalie, the alleged injustices visited upon him by the politicians of Canada, the bureaucracy, the guards at the jail—he could recall specific conversations, the number of days in his hunger strike, the people who had taken him into their homes out of pity.

  “My time in Canada proved one thing,” he said. “It’s a hypocritical dictatorship with a genocidal past.”

  And here he stood now, in the lobby of the Ritz, on our last night together. What incarnation was this? His eighth or ninth? How many times had he committed some figurative suicide to be here now, to purify himself, standing there with his air of superiority and vulnerability, with his new teeth and his new nose, living in this world of his own ideas that defended the boy who had once come so easily to tears? In what cul-de-sac would he soon find himself stuck again?

  He was being funny—and, as he admitted, a bit snobby. He thought the tapestries on the wall, the ones of supposed “museum quality” depicting centaurs, were “absolutely shabby.” Speaking of Nathalie, he said that she was probably happier now, with a man who might be more sensitive to her insecurities, even if he was from Romania. “I’m so full of myself,” he said. “I consider it compliment enough if I decide to be with someone. I don’t need to say anything.” He spoke of Wagner, of the difficult circumstances of his great hero’s life, the last of nine offspring, his father’s low station. “He had all the odds against him, lived most of his life with little money. He once said, and this isn’t verbatim: ‘At first, I tried not to be anyone at all. Then I tried to become someone. And then someone better.’ ”

  It was maybe ten or eleven o’clock, and I was beginning to feel nauseous there in the lobby at the Ritz, amid the onslaught of all those fashionable suits, all those fine, hollow men residing in their various vacuums of power. Certainly no one was as he seemed, everyone had his secret, but I was beginning to feel exhausted by trying to figure out his. Tomorrow I’d be on a plane, heading home to resume my life, and he’d be in his apartment, still shipwrecked here in Lisbon, lashed to the rigging.

  We shook hands, our Mr. Skeid and I. “In a funny way,” he said, “you know me better now than anyone.” And again that feeling of pity, that exact thing he didn’t want, registered inside me. I wanted to say something to him then—something abo
ut how a smart and able person such as himself could still make something of his life if only he’d try. I wanted to reiterate what he’d just said—that a stranger such as myself knew him better after these four days in Lisbon than his mother, father, sister, or wife ever had, and how could that be?—but thought better of it. It merely would have angered him, for he must have felt he had made something of his life. Or found something, something approximating freedom. His image reflected again in the gilded elevator doors, statuesque and absolutely generic. I stepped aboard, and he courteously wished me safe travels; then the door closed between us.

  I rose to my room with a sense of relief, while I imagined his leave-taking, how he may have lingered for a moment, in his cargo pants and collared shirt and $500 shoes. He could have been anyone, except that he had no reason to be here any longer, a spell dematerialized. I imagined him stalking the marble floor past the concierge desk to the sliding door that would have heralded the entrance of those returning to their finely appointed rooms: the diplomat squiring his new lady friend, the businessmen back in a congratulatory pack from a gluttonous dinner and the gracious flow of money from some client’s pocket to theirs.

  He would have glanced once at the knot of their ties, the fabric of their suits. He would have noticed the leather of their shoes and the size of their cuff links, registered everything he considered their birthright and destiny—and all that hadn’t been his.

  And then, once and for all, he would have disappeared from the lobby of the Ritz—as he did then—lost once more in his spin of lights, the welter of night.

  NEVER FORGET