Love and Other Ways of Dying

by Michael Paterniti

  “People think I’m crazy or a liar or both,” he said as we drank from our first pot of rose tea that morning at the Ritz. “They can’t believe that someone who speaks well can be in a position of fragility, which is a pity.”

  He claimed that he’d suffered a very real breakdown in Toronto, that he still didn’t know how he’d come to be in Canada in the first place, nor the hospital, but that he’d been terrified. He gave up his fingerprints to the detective and waited to be revealed as “a murderer or secret agent or felon.” He remembered the nurses saying, “He can’t be a street kid—look at his fingernails!”

  He said that his recent past had returned to him in shards, but the chapters of his early story seemed linear and detailed. “I came from Romania,” he told me, “a place I loathe. My family had nothing, but I was picked up for my musical talents in kindergarten. I played the violin, and I lived among the Communist elite in a special school that I attended, but I was poor. I had one dress shirt that I cleaned and ironed every night. I was never free among these people, though they had no culture whatsoever. I never felt poor or inferior or that I needed help, but people disliked me—perhaps because I spoke my mind.

  “I have a memory: this evil apparition, a teacher, and everyone is running, and the only one left is me. I remember this teacher approaching me at school. I was maybe ten. I remember him looking up and down the hallway to make sure no one was about, and then he hit me as hard as he could in the stomach, just because he could.

  “After seven or eight years, it came time for a big test to see who would move on. There was dictation and theory, on which I scored ten of ten; a part where we were graded for group singing, for which we all received the same score; and finally I had to play the violin. It was only me and the Communist nincompoops, my teachers, in a room. I was given a low score and wasn’t allowed to progress. And that’s how they ruined my life the first time.”

  He said his name had been Ciprian and that he’d grown up in the Romanian city of Timişoara (pronounced Timi-shwara)—under the repressive Communist regime of the dictator Nicolae Ceauşescu, himself the architect of grand delusions—where he lived until the age of nineteen. He was born to parents who worked as common laborers. He said his father was a drunk. “I have a memory of not existing,” he said, “of having no room to call my own. I remember waking with people lying around me. I remember windows shattering—and sleeping outdoors, counting stars.… My mother didn’t have the courage to leave the crazy man who ruined my life.” He said his father also beat him. He said he might have had a sister.

  According to him, the only affinities left to him in Romania were nature and music. He claimed the happiest day of his life was the moment he heard the strains of Richard Wagner, by mistake. “When I heard his music—it must have been on the soundtrack of a movie or something—I knew that this wasn’t me, the boy living this life, that there was someone else inside me and a place beyond this place, where I might belong.”

  His other recollection of joy, the only one conjured from the landscape of his home country, included no image of other people: It was a memory of standing by a rushing river in the mountain village of his grandmother, the peaks looming beyond. Just the boy and the river and the mountains, for that one moment: pure.

  Somewhere around the age of eighteen, Ciprian was conscripted into the army, and without being able to specify anything in particular about the experience, he said it was a year of hell that “broke” him. That’s how they ruined his life a second time. When he came out, he fled the country in the months before Ceauşescu’s fall, traveling to Germany to visit a friend there. He returned to Romania after a year, stayed for several months, and then left for good, never to be heard from again. “I had no one,” he said. “The easiest thing was to leave the country. There was no betrayal.”

  When I pressed him for a specific memory of leaving Romania—the country he now referred to only as “R.”—he was typically vague. I thought he might have felt relief, happiness, or perhaps a moment’s regret. But all he remembered was crossing in a car to Hungary, on the way to Germany. There were other people there. He claimed he felt nothing. I expressed disbelief. Finally, he looked at me calmly, from across the wreckage of empty teacups and skewed crockery adrift on the table between us, and said, “What do you want me to say: I had an orgasm and saw a rainbow?”

  Mr. Skeid came in dichotomies. He could be funny, controlling, fascinating, and monotonous. He could be principled, dubious, evasive, Zen, and exhausting—sometimes all within the same sixty seconds. I’m quite sure I’d never met anyone like him. Some nights I’d go back to my room with my head spinning from all the philosophizing, with a sense that he’d been patronizing or insulting. (“You remind me of Adriano Celentano,” he told me. “You have that same forced smirk, though you’re much, much less ugly than he is.”) And then some nights I went back wondering what must have happened to him as a boy, feeling half sorry for him—only half—before stopping myself with the thought that he would have hated even that much pity.

  Within the constellated mind of our Mr. Skeid, there may have been the underpinnings of a good old-fashioned narcissist, but he wasn’t without a conscience: He professed to wanting to be good, to trying to live in a pure way. He’d even retrofitted Mr. Ripley’s famous motto—“I’d rather be a fake somebody than a real nobody”—to suit his predicament. “I’d rather be a fake nobody than the real me,” he said.

  In order to transcend his station, he believed he needed to free himself of his Romanian past. He needed straight teeth and a better nose, which he’d submitted to two operations since it had been broken—what the press had called his “nose jobs.” (“It’s a decent nose, but it’s not Hollywood,” Mr. Skeid told me.) He wanted a piece of paper that declared him a citizen of some other nation, with a name other than Ciprian, a worthless coin chosen, he said, “by those who mistreated me.”

  “I lived twenty years in a repressive regime, and when I got away I was still trapped,” he said. “People would have liked me if I were that chap from R. trying to make good: ‘Oh, he speaks so well. See the monkey play the piano.’ But I’ve too much pride for that.”

  His pride was what made Mr. Skeid’s isolation seem insoluble. No one was better than he; very few were worth letting in. His most ardent friend was himself, and he spent days roaming the interior hallways of his person. He cited his greatest accomplishment as having eradicated the Romanian language—“an ugly thing”—from his mind and having made English the internal foundation of his linguistic-spiritual world. He could switch between six or so languages with varying fluency but simply couldn’t remember his mother tongue. When he heard it, he claimed to be struck by a pounding headache.

  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 Nath
alie, 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.