The depressive Estonian and his prominent lover

An occasional series about people behind the scenes in Brussels.
I don't know whether it is appropriate to betray this memory of a friend. But then all writing is betrayal. I write this post today because well Christmas is often ia season of depressives, and when I think of depressives I think of Mart.
I lived with this Estonian cameraman, Mart, for a while. Actually he was no longer working as a cameraman – his onetime boss, M., Estonian television’s one-time only foreign correspondent, formerly based in Brussels, had returned home to be with her husband, who worked in the Estonian defence ministry in Tallinn. Her successor as correspondent Indrek, found no use for his services – after leaving
Indrek, he worked a little as a freelance for Czech television, then the European Union’s own broadcasting service, then…nothing.
He still had a few months of his Estonian press accreditation to run, though (the card has to be renewed every year), and before I got to know him I used to see him in the press centre, on the phone most of the day and into the evening long after most other correspondents had filed and gone – like me, he sometimes stayed until midnight. Judging by the fact that he was speaking Estonian, and the way he looked
furtively around him, I figured he was on the phone to Estonia quite a lot and that he was quite a lonely man. The parliament’s press centre offered free calls
around the world then – he was just of several journalists staying on late, using the facility every night, and not even the most assiduous. A number of
African journalists used to stay every night too, speaking tribal languages and/or French to people they knew clearly in Zaire or Rwanda or places like that.
One joker had a running gag with a friend or relative of his:
“Ici Osama Bin Laden,” he used to say, followed by a chesty, rollicking laugh. I hear it often; I sat opposite him.

I got to speak to Mart at a drinks party. He wasn’t an Estonian nationalist – a first – and seemed highly intelligent, sensitive and interesting. He was older than he looked: 38. He told me how he had almost lost a leg serving with the Soviet army
in Kamchatka. Like me, in those weeks when parliament were in session in Brussels, about half the time, he was a habitué of the various drinks parties held in
the lobbies of the EP. After a while, if returning from an interview at 630 or so to the press room, and seeing Mart on the phone, I’d tip him off if I had seen
preparations for a drinks party underway – tables wheeled out, penguin suits rubbing bottles of champagne, stagiaires gathering, ready to pounce on
the peanuts, the free wedges of parma cheese…
We’d usually stay drinking later than most other people, and we’d find ourselves going on to pubs and clubs as the receptions closed. I started crashing outin his flat, and, gradually, over a number of mornings drinking green tea and listening to his Jan Garbarek albums, I got to learn the story of Marianne – and his other women. Marianne had got pregnant, had an abortion, left him, and now he had no sexual energy left.I told him he was a very interesting guy but that he should avoid sentences in the first person pronoun because then he suddenly became boring. I worried about Mart: his father, a philosophy professor, had committed suicide. I stayed with him, in an informal arrangement that suited the uncertainties regarding how long I would be staying in Brussels. I felt I had a duty to get him a girlfriend: this, he said, would solve all his problems. He was in a bit of a Catch-22 though: no on wanted him in his current state.
I sometimes chatted up girls on his behalf. One such was the formidable Irish politician Avril Doyle’s beautiful assistant Kate, a real Irish beauty: pale, faintly
freckled skin, elfin eyes, full lips. Long dark hair.
He had seen her in the European parliament and
announced: “That is the most beautiful girl I have ever seen.”
Well, since last week anyway, I thought.
One evening, in the Wild Geese, I introduced Mart, who made awkward conversation with her. He came back and reported that they might meet up …nothing happened though over the next few days. It wasn’t clear if he had her phone number or if they had just agreed to have a further chat when they saw each other again…another evening in the Wild Geese, he went over, hand in pockets, hunched shoulders, (he was well over six feet tall) wearing a velour jumper which I knew smelt unwashed. (I wish I had been a good enough friend to tell him before we went out.) He returned, inevitably, a few minutes later.
“I think she likes me.”
Later in the evening I got talking to her – she said (diplomatically) that Mart seemed handsome, and nice, but alas he had a boyfriend.
I went to dance. An hour passed. Then I went looking for Mart with rising panic – out of self interest,I confess, since I had nowhere else to stay. I need not have worried. There was a roped off quiet area where people could sit at candle lit tables and chat – Katie was sitting with her girlfriend with whom she had danced somewhat tentatively earlier and had that slightly self conscious air of someone who is aware they are watched. Which of course they were. Not one metre away, on the other side tf the rope, Mart was standing, hands on picket, hunched, STARING. Standing,a figure of depression – his mouth in depressive downturn. He probably stood there in his tall stoop for a good ten minutes, transfixed. Like my grandfather after his wife had died.
“That is not the way to seduce a woman, Mart,” I said later.
“The security guards actually told me to move.
“Well, it was VERY obvious.“
He chuckled: a true surprise eruption. the first time I had heard him laugh for months.
“Keep it up Mart.” I qualified the comment, to avoid misunderstanding: “I mean, keep up laughing.”
Shortly afterwards I moved out – I had somewhere else to stay.
About a day or two later, he stopped turning up at the European parliament. He left a note that his press card had run out. I didn’t see him much – he had no
phone, he lived too out of the way to make a speculative spontaneous visit, and though I emailed him from time to time, telling him to come to parties
– I had him signed in by assistants I knew - he only came out once or twice that spring.
I only saw him a few times a year these days and we seldom have the intensity of relation to discover what his love life is like.
But recently I was at an European council summit – the highlight of the EU season, a biannual ceremony when all prime ministers of all member states gather and discuss iover two days the future direction of the union. Thousands of journalists turn up – there is a buzz in the air, the summits sometimes go on very late into the night. There is free food and drink from the bar, and loads of gossip and rumour. The EU set up work stations and free phones – sitting at one such work station I heard behind me.
“Ha, ha – ici Osama Bin Laden.”
Well – just as well the African found this. Because the parliament had by then stopped its free global phonecalls policy. (The grand summits, being so important and of such short duration, had no such restrictions)
The joke brought back thoughts of Mart – and I thought of Mart lying one February evening while the snowflakes were falling gently outside on cushions on the floor while I lay on his sofa, and Mart translating every single sentence of Tarkovsky’s Mirror in its unsubtitled Russian original version into English for my benefit. Two hours: quietly, doggedly – because he so wanted to give.

That is three years ago, but when I went back to his flat in November, it was empty, and a neighbour said she was wrorried he might commit suicide. He told me his family had considered putting him into a mental home. I am considering contacting M, who is now one of Estonia's most prominent politicians. Even they have baggage.