The plane, overbooked, was crawling with irritable travelers. After some seat reshuffling, I squeezed by a burly, hostile-looking man and settled in. I figured on an unpleasant flight. The man and I wrestled over our shared armrest for about five minutes, until I gave up.
When the drinks cart came around, I heard him say, “Gin and tonic,” in an accent I couldn’t place. Curious, I decided to attempt conversation: “Kind of cold in here, isn’t it?” I said. “Indeed,” he answered, and there ensued seven of the most interesting hours I have ever spent.
He had come from Bucharest, and that led to topics Romanian. I would start safe, cultural: Dinu Lipatti (a pianist, who died young in 1950)? Yes, he knew of him, cherished him, and had at that moment a set of recordings by Lipatti in his duffel bag.
I mentioned Clinton’s recent trip to Bucharest. My, how the crowds had cheered, even though the United States had refused to admit Romania to NATO. ” Yes,” the man said, “but we know we’ll get in, and we were overjoyed to see the American president — not the individual, understand, but the idea.”
In time, the dark name of Ceausescu came up, and he began — slowly at first, then with gusto — to speak of life under communism: its brutality, its abnormality, its terrors large and small. I had forgotten, sort of, how bad it was. The Iron Curtain crumbled not 10 years ago, yet the Soviet bloc can seem as distant as the Ottoman Empire. My seatmate brought back to me the horror of it all, how the dictator and his miserable, murderous wife had suffocated Romanian citizens day and night, in quest of a perfect totalitarianism.
And where had he been, when news came of the regime’s collapse? “In the strangest of all places: the middle of the ocean.” He had served — and still served — as an electrical engineer aboard ships. His big plan, years ago, was to join the merchant marine and escape to America. But two days before he set sail, he met a woman — Monica, an English teacher — and “suddenly, the prison house was bearable. With her, I could live anywhere.”
So he was in his bunk, fiddling with a shortwave radio, when he heard that the Ceausescus had fled. He could not believe his ears — thought it was a hoax, or a mistake, or his own hallucination. He was afraid to speak to anyone about it, because “even at sea, they watched you, through their agents. ” Eventually, he informed his captain, who informed the rest of the men. They murmured and grinned, then laughed and shouted, then wept and sank to their knees. “It was,” the man told me, “the happiest day of my life.”
After an hour or so, an astounding fact came clear: He knew everything. That is, he had read everything, thought about everything, seen (through his voyages) everything. He had devoted his life to teaching himself languages and traversing the world’s great literature. At sea, he was permitted to have 40 kilograms of personal material, and 30 of those he reserved for books. He worked “for my bread” until 5 o’clock, after which he fed himself fiction, history, and art until he could stay awake no longer.
He was a particularly keen student of Latin American literature and had translated four or five of the more important novels into Romanian. “How about that buddy of Castro,” I asked, “the Hundred Years of Solitude guy?” “A bad character, but an enormous literary talent.” “Isabel Allende? Don’t people read her because of her political associations?” “Perhaps, but they ought to anyway.” He went on at engrossing length about Julio Cortazar, scribbling the names of his books for me on a napkin.
I began to pepper him with questions — about Bosnia, Homer, Catholicism and Orthodoxy, American letters (Cheever he admired), the quirks of Communist rule (“You will be disappointed,” he confided, sorrowfully, “that Lipatti’s brother was for 20 years ambassador to France, a pet of the regime”). He made me think of certain qualities that I had let slip away: a love of discovery, a reverence for the masters, an unprofessionalized dedication to knowledge.
As the plane descended — my friend was, amusingly, a nervous flyer, though he had traveled to the far corners of the globe by ship — I thought of the chestnut “Travel is broadening.” And so it is — for the British Museum, the Acropolis, and Victoria Falls, sure, but also for encounters with strangers, like Radu Niciporuc, who, for my money, is one of the most extraordinary people alive.
JAY NORDLINGER
