Cityscape: Illegal, but tolerated, in a parallel existence
By Meg Bortin
International Herald Tribune
Published: August 20, 2006
PARIS Bearded, wry, Ioan Bojani sits on the steps of the Mtro beneath the sparkling tiled Opra Bastille. With him are a white bunny in a wire cage and a shopping cart – his life.
Not so long ago Bojani had 70 employees at a company in Romania. He and his family shared a three- bedroom house. They went places together by car.
Now he lives in an abandoned van near a forest outside Paris. He gets water from a well and cooks on a campfire. He earns his living, 10 to 15, or about $13 to $19, a day, as a beggar.
“The story of my life could be a novel,” he says, and it could.
At 48, in Paris for more than a year, Bojani has joined the underground, and not just because of where he earns his money, or how. In this most cosmopolitan of cities, he is part of an underground of foreign residents whose presence is tolerated by the authorities although they have no legal right to be here.
This is not the Paris of the angry young men of foreign descent who set the suburbs alight last autumn to protest discrimination. Nor is it the Paris of noisy students who marched this spring to demand lifetime guarantees for jobs.
This is a parallel Paris, based on a principle – the right of asylum – that has allowed hundreds of thousands of foreigners to arrive with nothing and survive, sometimes thrive. From Italy and Spain, Algeria and Poland, Vietnam and Senegal, they have come without visas over the decades. Despite periodic clampdowns, they persist. They people the streets and cafs, existing in a gray zone that is largely accepted by Parisians and acknowledged by the police – who will not, however, acknowledge the numbers or even discuss the matter on the record.
“We cannot arrest all the foreigners who reside here illegally,” said a police spokesman, declining to be identified. Bojani's situation, he said, “is typical of France because for decades we've had the principle that we take in everyone. It's a problem because the principle and the law are opposed to each other.”
France as a land of asylum derives from the French Revolution's lofty themes of liberty-equality-fraternity, so it is fitting that Bojani has chosen as his workplace the square where the Bastille prison stood until it was stormed and brought down in 1789.
On a typical day he is there on the Mtro steps at 9 a.m. and works for two to three hours, holding out a plastic cup for donations, tipping his cap when people drop in a coin. He wears the same clothes day after day, but is well groomed, with a ready smile, and the bunny as an attraction. “Her name is Juliet,” he confides. “Romeo is at home.”
Since January 2005, when he arrived in Paris on a bus after a period picking olives in Spain, home for Bojani has been his van, he said through an interpreter. He has no electricity, using a flashlight to see at night. He walks nearly a kilometer to pump water into plastic bottles he transports in his shopping cart. He gathers wood from the forest for cooking.
It is a shocking turn of events for a former executive. But he doesn't complain about the circumstances of his current life.
“I have lost everything,” he says quietly. “Nothing is difficult.”
With his chiseled features, graying beard and ironic crinkles around his eyes, Bojani resembles the figures who people the paintings of Chagall – Jews of Eastern Europe. But in fact he was born into a Christian Orthodox family in Salaj, a village in western Romania. “My father had horses and a cart,” he said. “My mother took care of the house. We had a small farm, with chickens, cows, ducks, geese and a vegetable garden.”
He left the village at 14 to learn machine-tool making in Brasov, north of Bucharest, then joined his brother in Arad, near the Hungarian border. He worked in construction, then went back to school, studying factory management and engineering. He married in 1980, aged 22, and got a job at a department store stockroom where he worked until the fall of Nicolae Ceausescu, the Romanian dictator, in 1989.
“After Ceausescu's fall, everything changed,” Bojani said. “Companies changed managers; there were more possibilities for finding work. Romania was very backward – it needed to rejoin Europe. We Romanians didn't know what freedom meant.”
Bojani, his wife and their three daughters moved to Vladimirescu, a village near Arad, where he found work at Distrigaz, a big gas distribution center; he worked his way up, he said, and eventually became the supervisor of 70 employees. In 2001 he left that job to create his own company, turning out wooden furniture in conjunction with a sawmill.
“Being a manager suited me,” Bojani said.
But then disaster struck. His youngest daughter, Nicoleta, broke her back in an accident and was paralyzed. Three months later, the second daughter, Paula, died of carbon monoxide poisoning from a defective water heater while taking a shower.
“I worked for a while after the accidents, but then I stopped,” he said haltingly, taking photos of the daughters from his cart. “I spent all my time at the hospital. We had a house and two cars – we sold everything to survive.” Their elder daughter, Bianca, sent money from Italy, where she lived with her husband and baby.
Bojani, meanwhile, became the target of an investigation by Romania's economic police, who zeroed in on his company after it closed. “They thought I was mixed up with the mafia,” he said. “They confused me with somebody else whose handwriting was similar. They needed to find a guilty party – instead they found me.”
A former Romanian prime minister, Adrian Nastase, came to Arad to try to resolve the confusion, to no avail. Bojani went to court and was sentenced to 18 months in prison for falsification of documents and tax evasion. He appealed, but decided to leave the country. His lawyer, meanwhile, filed suit on behalf of Bojani with the European Court of Human Rights in Strasbourg; this was confirmed by a spokeswoman at the court, Beverley Jacobs, who said the case was pending.
With Nicoleta still in the hospital, Bojani's wife stayed behind when he boarded a bus for Spain. “I lived with the hope that my daughter would come back to good health,” Bojani said. But she caught an infection in the hospital and died in February this year. He was already in Paris. “I didn't even go to the funeral,” he said. “I cannot forgive the Romanian state for this. If I had gone back, I would have been arrested.”
Though his status here is precarious, Bojani says he does not fear arrest in France: “The truth has to come out one day or another.” In the meantime, he blends in rather well with the 2.15 million residents of Paris, and benefits from their largesse.
Thanks to a transport solidarity card, he can travel for free on the RER, the rapid-transit commuter trains from Paris to outlying areas. He lunches at a shelter for the homeless at the Gare de Lyon, not far from the Bastille, where he can get a hot meal for less than a euro. He can get treated free under France's universal medical aid.
How many foreigners are living like this is impossible to determine. As of 2001, there were 3.27 million foreigners residing legally in France, according to government statistics, 42 percent of them – about 1.3 million – in the Paris metropolitan area, which counts 11.5 million inhabitants.
The statistics do not include those living here illegally, nor do they include naturalized immigrants or Parisians of foreign descent. But one need only continue down the steps past Bojani and into the Mtro to get a picture of how many foreigners – some, of course, tourists – Paris accommodates.
When Bojani chose Paris, he said, it was both to be closer to Strasbourg, and because life was proving difficult in Spain. “Here things are easier,” he said. “There are plenty of opportunities, no problem eating or sleeping. Everyone is free.”
Although he now rarely ventures beyond the Bastille area, Bojani saw the sights when he first arrived, visiting the Arc de Triomphe, Notre-Dame and the Eiffel Tower. “Everything is beautiful,” he says. Yet what he prefers in Paris, he says, is “the population” – Parisians – and their respect for their fellow man: “People don't differentiate between a rich man and a poor man, a great man and a little man.”
He would try to get residency papers, he said, if he knew how to ask for them, although “it's virtually impossible for Romanians.” He would look for other work, but cannot. And, “no papers, no work.”
So he is in limbo, a free man in Paris awaiting his fate. He is concerned about his wife, who has remained in Romania with serious psychological problems after the death of two daughters. He is hopeful that justice will prevail, although the human rights court in Strasbourg moves slowly: The case was filed last year and there has been no action yet, Jacobs said.
He does not see his stay here as permanent; Paris is a resting post in the unfinished story of his life.
“Not having a house is very hard on me,” he admits. “When I find a solution to my problems, I will leave.”
PARIS Bearded, wry, Ioan Bojani sits on the steps of the Mtro beneath the sparkling tiled Opra Bastille. With him are a white bunny in a wire cage and a shopping cart – his life.
Not so long ago Bojani had 70 employees at a company in Romania. He and his family shared a three- bedroom house. They went places together by car.
Now he lives in an abandoned van near a forest outside Paris. He gets water from a well and cooks on a campfire. He earns his living, 10 to 15, or about $13 to $19, a day, as a beggar.
“The story of my life could be a novel,” he says, and it could.
At 48, in Paris for more than a year, Bojani has joined the underground, and not just because of where he earns his money, or how. In this most cosmopolitan of cities, he is part of an underground of foreign residents whose presence is tolerated by the authorities although they have no legal right to be here.
This is not the Paris of the angry young men of foreign descent who set the suburbs alight last autumn to protest discrimination. Nor is it the Paris of noisy students who marched this spring to demand lifetime guarantees for jobs.
This is a parallel Paris, based on a principle – the right of asylum – that has allowed hundreds of thousands of foreigners to arrive with nothing and survive, sometimes thrive. From Italy and Spain, Algeria and Poland, Vietnam and Senegal, they have come without visas over the decades. Despite periodic clampdowns, they persist. They people the streets and cafs, existing in a gray zone that is largely accepted by Parisians and acknowledged by the police – who will not, however, acknowledge the numbers or even discuss the matter on the record.
“We cannot arrest all the foreigners who reside here illegally,” said a police spokesman, declining to be identified. Bojani's situation, he said, “is typical of France because for decades we've had the principle that we take in everyone. It's a problem because the principle and the law are opposed to each other.”
France as a land of asylum derives from the French Revolution's lofty themes of liberty-equality-fraternity, so it is fitting that Bojani has chosen as his workplace the square where the Bastille prison stood until it was stormed and brought down in 1789.
On a typical day he is there on the Mtro steps at 9 a.m. and works for two to three hours, holding out a plastic cup for donations, tipping his cap when people drop in a coin. He wears the same clothes day after day, but is well groomed, with a ready smile, and the bunny as an attraction. “Her name is Juliet,” he confides. “Romeo is at home.”
Since January 2005, when he arrived in Paris on a bus after a period picking olives in Spain, home for Bojani has been his van, he said through an interpreter. He has no electricity, using a flashlight to see at night. He walks nearly a kilometer to pump water into plastic bottles he transports in his shopping cart. He gathers wood from the forest for cooking.
It is a shocking turn of events for a former executive. But he doesn't complain about the circumstances of his current life.
“I have lost everything,” he says quietly. “Nothing is difficult.”
With his chiseled features, graying beard and ironic crinkles around his eyes, Bojani resembles the figures who people the paintings of Chagall – Jews of Eastern Europe. But in fact he was born into a Christian Orthodox family in Salaj, a village in western Romania. “My father had horses and a cart,” he said. “My mother took care of the house. We had a small farm, with chickens, cows, ducks, geese and a vegetable garden.”
He left the village at 14 to learn machine-tool making in Brasov, north of Bucharest, then joined his brother in Arad, near the Hungarian border. He worked in construction, then went back to school, studying factory management and engineering. He married in 1980, aged 22, and got a job at a department store stockroom where he worked until the fall of Nicolae Ceausescu, the Romanian dictator, in 1989.
“After Ceausescu's fall, everything changed,” Bojani said. “Companies changed managers; there were more possibilities for finding work. Romania was very backward – it needed to rejoin Europe. We Romanians didn't know what freedom meant.”
Bojani, his wife and their three daughters moved to Vladimirescu, a village near Arad, where he found work at Distrigaz, a big gas distribution center; he worked his way up, he said, and eventually became the supervisor of 70 employees. In 2001 he left that job to create his own company, turning out wooden furniture in conjunction with a sawmill.
“Being a manager suited me,” Bojani said.
But then disaster struck. His youngest daughter, Nicoleta, broke her back in an accident and was paralyzed. Three months later, the second daughter, Paula, died of carbon monoxide poisoning from a defective water heater while taking a shower.
“I worked for a while after the accidents, but then I stopped,” he said haltingly, taking photos of the daughters from his cart. “I spent all my time at the hospital. We had a house and two cars – we sold everything to survive.” Their elder daughter, Bianca, sent money from Italy, where she lived with her husband and baby.
Bojani, meanwhile, became the target of an investigation by Romania's economic police, who zeroed in on his company after it closed. “They thought I was mixed up with the mafia,” he said. “They confused me with somebody else whose handwriting was similar. They needed to find a guilty party – instead they found me.”
A former Romanian prime minister, Adrian Nastase, came to Arad to try to resolve the confusion, to no avail. Bojani went to court and was sentenced to 18 months in prison for falsification of documents and tax evasion. He appealed, but decided to leave the country. His lawyer, meanwhile, filed suit on behalf of Bojani with the European Court of Human Rights in Strasbourg; this was confirmed by a spokeswoman at the court, Beverley Jacobs, who said the case was pending.
With Nicoleta still in the hospital, Bojani's wife stayed behind when he boarded a bus for Spain. “I lived with the hope that my daughter would come back to good health,” Bojani said. But she caught an infection in the hospital and died in February this year. He was already in Paris. “I didn't even go to the funeral,” he said. “I cannot forgive the Romanian state for this. If I had gone back, I would have been arrested.”
Though his status here is precarious, Bojani says he does not fear arrest in France: “The truth has to come out one day or another.” In the meantime, he blends in rather well with the 2.15 million residents of Paris, and benefits from their largesse.
Thanks to a transport solidarity card, he can travel for free on the RER, the rapid-transit commuter trains from Paris to outlying areas. He lunches at a shelter for the homeless at the Gare de Lyon, not far from the Bastille, where he can get a hot meal for less than a euro. He can get treated free under France's universal medical aid.
How many foreigners are living like this is impossible to determine. As of 2001, there were 3.27 million foreigners residing legally in France, according to government statistics, 42 percent of them – about 1.3 million – in the Paris metropolitan area, which counts 11.5 million inhabitants.
The statistics do not include those living here illegally, nor do they include naturalized immigrants or Parisians of foreign descent. But one need only continue down the steps past Bojani and into the Mtro to get a picture of how many foreigners – some, of course, tourists – Paris accommodates.
When Bojani chose Paris, he said, it was both to be closer to Strasbourg, and because life was proving difficult in Spain. “Here things are easier,” he said. “There are plenty of opportunities, no problem eating or sleeping. Everyone is free.”
Although he now rarely ventures beyond the Bastille area, Bojani saw the sights when he first arrived, visiting the Arc de Triomphe, Notre-Dame and the Eiffel Tower. “Everything is beautiful,” he says. Yet what he prefers in Paris, he says, is “the population” – Parisians – and their respect for their fellow man: “People don't differentiate between a rich man and a poor man, a great man and a little man.”
He would try to get residency papers, he said, if he knew how to ask for them, although “it's virtually impossible for Romanians.” He would look for other work, but cannot. And, “no papers, no work.”
So he is in limbo, a free man in Paris awaiting his fate. He is concerned about his wife, who has remained in Romania with serious psychological problems after the death of two daughters. He is hopeful that justice will prevail, although the human rights court in Strasbourg moves slowly: The case was filed last year and there has been no action yet, Jacobs said.
He does not see his stay here as permanent; Paris is a resting post in the unfinished story of his life.
“Not having a house is very hard on me,” he admits. “When I find a solution to my problems, I will leave.”
PARIS Bearded, wry, Ioan Bojani sits on the steps of the Mtro beneath the sparkling tiled Opra Bastille. With him are a white bunny in a wire cage and a shopping cart – his life.
Not so long ago Bojani had 70 employees at a company in Romania. He and his family shared a three- bedroom house. They went places together by car.
Now he lives in an abandoned van near a forest outside Paris. He gets water from a well and cooks on a campfire. He earns his living, 10 to 15, or about $13 to $19, a day, as a beggar.
“The story of my life could be a novel,” he says, and it could.
At 48, in Paris for more than a year, Bojani has joined the underground, and not just because of where he earns his money, or how. In this most cosmopolitan of cities, he is part of an underground of foreign residents whose presence is tolerated by the authorities although they have no legal right to be here.
This is not the Paris of the angry young men of foreign descent who set the suburbs alight last autumn to protest discrimination. Nor is it the Paris of noisy students who marched this spring to demand lifetime guarantees for jobs.
This is a parallel Paris, based on a principle – the right of asylum – that has allowed hundreds of thousands of foreigners to arrive with nothing and survive, sometimes thrive. From Italy and Spain, Algeria and Poland, Vietnam and Senegal, they have come without visas over the decades. Despite periodic clampdowns, they persist. They people the streets and cafs, existing in a gray zone that is largely accepted by Parisians and acknowledged by the police – who will not, however, acknowledge the numbers or even discuss the matter on the record.
“We cannot arrest all the foreigners who reside here illegally,” said a police spokesman, declining to be identified. Bojani's situation, he said, “is typical of France because for decades we've had the principle that we take in everyone. It's a problem because the principle and the law are opposed to each other.”
France as a land of asylum derives from the French Revolution's lofty themes of liberty-equality-fraternity, so it is fitting that Bojani has chosen as his workplace the square where the Bastille prison stood until it was stormed and brought down in 1789.
On a typical day he is there on the Mtro steps at 9 a.m. and works for two to three hours, holding out a plastic cup for donations, tipping his cap when people drop in a coin. He wears the same clothes day after day, but is well groomed, with a ready smile, and the bunny as an attraction. “Her name is Juliet,” he confides. “Romeo is at home.”
Since January 2005, when he arrived in Paris on a bus after a period picking olives in Spain, home for Bojani has been his van, he said through an interpreter. He has no electricity, using a flashlight to see at night. He walks nearly a kilometer to pump water into plastic bottles he transports in his shopping cart. He gathers wood from the forest for cooking.
It is a shocking turn of events for a former executive. But he doesn't complain about the circumstances of his current life.
“I have lost everything,” he says quietly. “Nothing is difficult.”
With his chiseled features, graying beard and ironic crinkles around his eyes, Bojani resembles the figures who people the paintings of Chagall – Jews of Eastern Europe. But in fact he was born into a Christian Orthodox family in Salaj, a village in western Romania. “My father had horses and a cart,” he said. “My mother took care of the house. We had a small farm, with chickens, cows, ducks, geese and a vegetable garden.”
He left the village at 14 to learn machine-tool making in Brasov, north of Bucharest, then joined his brother in Arad, near the Hungarian border. He worked in construction, then went back to school, studying factory management and engineering. He married in 1980, aged 22, and got a job at a department store stockroom where he worked until the fall of Nicolae Ceausescu, the Romanian dictator, in 1989.
“After Ceausescu's fall, everything changed,” Bojani said. “Companies changed managers; there were more possibilities for finding work. Romania was very backward – it needed to rejoin Europe. We Romanians didn't know what freedom meant.”
Bojani, his wife and their three daughters moved to Vladimirescu, a village near Arad, where he found work at Distrigaz, a big gas distribution center; he worked his way up, he said, and eventually became the supervisor of 70 employees. In 2001 he left that job to create his own company, turning out wooden furniture in conjunction with a sawmill.
“Being a manager suited me,” Bojani said.
But then disaster struck. His youngest daughter, Nicoleta, broke her back in an accident and was paralyzed. Three months later, the second daughter, Paula, died of carbon monoxide poisoning from a defective water heater while taking a shower.
“I worked for a while after the accidents, but then I stopped,” he said haltingly, taking photos of the daughters from his cart. “I spent all my time at the hospital. We had a house and two cars – we sold everything to survive.” Their elder daughter, Bianca, sent money from Italy, where she lived with her husband and baby.
Bojani, meanwhile, became the target of an investigation by Romania's economic police, who zeroed in on his company after it closed. “They thought I was mixed up with the mafia,” he said. “They confused me with somebody else whose handwriting was similar. They needed to find a guilty party – instead they found me.”
A former Romanian prime minister, Adrian Nastase, came to Arad to try to resolve the confusion, to no avail. Bojani went to court and was sentenced to 18 months in prison for falsification of documents and tax evasion. He appealed, but decided to leave the country. His lawyer, meanwhile, filed suit on behalf of Bojani with the European Court of Human Rights in Strasbourg; this was confirmed by a spokeswoman at the court, Beverley Jacobs, who said the case was pending.
With Nicoleta still in the hospital, Bojani's wife stayed behind when he boarded a bus for Spain. “I lived with the hope that my daughter would come back to good health,” Bojani said. But she caught an infection in the hospital and died in February this year. He was already in Paris. “I didn't even go to the funeral,” he said. “I cannot forgive the Romanian state for this. If I had gone back, I would have been arrested.”
Though his status here is precarious, Bojani says he does not fear arrest in France: “The truth has to come out one day or another.” In the meantime, he blends in rather well with the 2.15 million residents of Paris, and benefits from their largesse.
Thanks to a transport solidarity card, he can travel for free on the RER, the rapid-transit commuter trains from Paris to outlying areas. He lunches at a shelter for the homeless at the Gare de Lyon, not far from the Bastille, where he can get a hot meal for less than a euro. He can get treated free under France's universal medical aid.
How many foreigners are living like this is impossible to determine. As of 2001, there were 3.27 million foreigners residing legally in France, according to government statistics, 42 percent of them – about 1.3 million – in the Paris metropolitan area, which counts 11.5 million inhabitants.
The statistics do not include those living here illegally, nor do they include naturalized immigrants or Parisians of foreign descent. But one need only continue down the steps past Bojani and into the Mtro to get a picture of how many foreigners – some, of course, tourists – Paris accommodates.
When Bojani chose Paris, he said, it was both to be closer to Strasbourg, and because life was proving difficult in Spain. “Here things are easier,” he said. “There are plenty of opportunities, no problem eating or sleeping. Everyone is free.”
Although he now rarely ventures beyond the Bastille area, Bojani saw the sights when he first arrived, visiting the Arc de Triomphe, Notre-Dame and the Eiffel Tower. “Everything is beautiful,” he says. Yet what he prefers in Paris, he says, is “the population” – Parisians – and their respect for their fellow man: “People don't differentiate between a rich man and a poor man, a great man and a little man.”
He would try to get residency papers, he said, if he knew how to ask for them, although “it's virtually impossible for Romanians.” He would look for other work, but cannot. And, “no papers, no work.”
So he is in limbo, a free man in Paris awaiting his fate. He is concerned about his wife, who has remained in Romania with serious psychological problems after the death of two daughters. He is hopeful that justice will prevail, although the human rights court in Strasbourg moves slowly: The case was filed last year and there has been no action yet, Jacobs said.
He does not see his stay here as permanent; Paris is a resting post in the unfinished story of his life.
“Not having a house is very hard on me,” he admits. “When I find a solution to my problems, I will leave.”
PARIS Bearded, wry, Ioan Bojani sits on the steps of the Mtro beneath the sparkling tiled Opra Bastille. With him are a white bunny in a wire cage and a shopping cart – his life.
Not so long ago Bojani had 70 employees at a company in Romania. He and his family shared a three- bedroom house. They went places together by car.
Now he lives in an abandoned van near a forest outside Paris. He gets water from a well and cooks on a campfire. He earns his living, 10 to 15, or about $13 to $19, a day, as a beggar.
“The story of my life could be a novel,” he says, and it could.
At 48, in Paris for more than a year, Bojani has joined the underground, and not just because of where he earns his money, or how. In this most cosmopolitan of cities, he is part of an underground of foreign residents whose presence is tolerated by the authorities although they have no legal right to be here.
This is not the Paris of the angry young men of foreign descent who set the suburbs alight last autumn to protest discrimination. Nor is it the Paris of noisy students who marched this spring to demand lifetime guarantees for jobs.
This is a parallel Paris, based on a principle – the right of asylum – that has allowed hundreds of thousands of foreigners to arrive with nothing and survive, sometimes thrive. From Italy and Spain, Algeria and Poland, Vietnam and Senegal, they have come without visas over the decades. Despite periodic clampdowns, they persist. They people the streets and cafs, existing in a gray zone that is largely accepted by Parisians and acknowledged by the police – who will not, however, acknowledge the numbers or even discuss the matter on the record.
“We cannot arrest all the foreigners who reside here illegally,” said a police spokesman, declining to be identified. Bojani's situation, he said, “is typical of France because for decades we've had the principle that we take in everyone. It's a problem because the principle and the law are opposed to each other.”
France as a land of asylum derives from the French Revolution's lofty themes of liberty-equality-fraternity, so it is fitting that Bojani has chosen as his workplace the square where the Bastille prison stood until it was stormed and brought down in 1789.
On a typical day he is there on the Mtro steps at 9 a.m. and works for two to three hours, holding out a plastic cup for donations, tipping his cap when people drop in a coin. He wears the same clothes day after day, but is well groomed, with a ready smile, and the bunny as an attraction. “Her name is Juliet,” he confides. “Romeo is at home.”
Since January 2005, when he arrived in Paris on a bus after a period picking olives in Spain, home for Bojani has been his van, he said through an interpreter. He has no electricity, using a flashlight to see at night. He walks nearly a kilometer to pump water into plastic bottles he transports in his shopping cart. He gathers wood from the forest for cooking.
It is a shocking turn of events for a former executive. But he doesn't complain about the circumstances of his current life.
“I have lost everything,” he says quietly. “Nothing is difficult.”
With his chiseled features, graying beard and ironic crinkles around his eyes, Bojani resembles the figures who people the paintings of Chagall – Jews of Eastern Europe. But in fact he was born into a Christian Orthodox family in Salaj, a village in western Romania. “My father had horses and a cart,” he said. “My mother took care of the house. We had a small farm, with chickens, cows, ducks, geese and a vegetable garden.”
He left the village at 14 to learn machine-tool making in Brasov, north of Bucharest, then joined his brother in Arad, near the Hungarian border. He worked in construction, then went back to school, studying factory management and engineering. He married in 1980, aged 22, and got a job at a department store stockroom where he worked until the fall of Nicolae Ceausescu, the Romanian dictator, in 1989.
“After Ceausescu's fall, everything changed,” Bojani said. “Companies changed managers; there were more possibilities for finding work. Romania was very backward – it needed to rejoin Europe. We Romanians didn't know what freedom meant.”
Bojani, his wife and their three daughters moved to Vladimirescu, a village near Arad, where he found work at Distrigaz, a big gas distribution center; he worked his way up, he said, and eventually became the supervisor of 70 employees. In 2001 he left that job to create his own company, turning out wooden furniture in conjunction with a sawmill.
“Being a manager suited me,” Bojani said.
But then disaster struck. His youngest daughter, Nicoleta, broke her back in an accident and was paralyzed. Three months later, the second daughter, Paula, died of carbon monoxide poisoning from a defective water heater while taking a shower.
“I worked for a while after the accidents, but then I stopped,” he said haltingly, taking photos of the daughters from his cart. “I spent all my time at the hospital. We had a house and two cars – we sold everything to survive.” Their elder daughter, Bianca, sent money from Italy, where she lived with her husband and baby.
Bojani, meanwhile, became the target of an investigation by Romania's economic police, who zeroed in on his company after it closed. “They thought I was mixed up with the mafia,” he said. “They confused me with somebody else whose handwriting was similar. They needed to find a guilty party – instead they found me.”
A former Romanian prime minister, Adrian Nastase, came to Arad to try to resolve the confusion, to no avail. Bojani went to court and was sentenced to 18 months in prison for falsification of documents and tax evasion. He appealed, but decided to leave the country. His lawyer, meanwhile, filed suit on behalf of Bojani with the European Court of Human Rights in Strasbourg; this was confirmed by a spokeswoman at the court, Beverley Jacobs, who said the case was pending.
With Nicoleta still in the hospital, Bojani's wife stayed behind when he boarded a bus for Spain. “I lived with the hope that my daughter would come back to good health,” Bojani said. But she caught an infection in the hospital and died in February this year. He was already in Paris. “I didn't even go to the funeral,” he said. “I cannot forgive the Romanian state for this. If I had gone back, I would have been arrested.”
Though his status here is precarious, Bojani says he does not fear arrest in France: “The truth has to come out one day or another.” In the meantime, he blends in rather well with the 2.15 million residents of Paris, and benefits from their largesse.
Thanks to a transport solidarity card, he can travel for free on the RER, the rapid-transit commuter trains from Paris to outlying areas. He lunches at a shelter for the homeless at the Gare de Lyon, not far from the Bastille, where he can get a hot meal for less than a euro. He can get treated free under France's universal medical aid.
How many foreigners are living like this is impossible to determine. As of 2001, there were 3.27 million foreigners residing legally in France, according to government statistics, 42 percent of them – about 1.3 million – in the Paris metropolitan area, which counts 11.5 million inhabitants.
The statistics do not include those living here illegally, nor do they include naturalized immigrants or Parisians of foreign descent. But one need only continue down the steps past Bojani and into the Mtro to get a picture of how many foreigners – some, of course, tourists – Paris accommodates.
When Bojani chose Paris, he said, it was both to be closer to Strasbourg, and because life was proving difficult in Spain. “Here things are easier,” he said. “There are plenty of opportunities, no problem eating or sleeping. Everyone is free.”
Although he now rarely ventures beyond the Bastille area, Bojani saw the sights when he first arrived, visiting the Arc de Triomphe, Notre-Dame and the Eiffel Tower. “Everything is beautiful,” he says. Yet what he prefers in Paris, he says, is “the population” – Parisians – and their respect for their fellow man: “People don't differentiate between a rich man and a poor man, a great man and a little man.”
He would try to get residency papers, he said, if he knew how to ask for them, although “it's virtually impossible for Romanians.” He would look for other work, but cannot. And, “no papers, no work.”
So he is in limbo, a free man in Paris awaiting his fate. He is concerned about his wife, who has remained in Romania with serious psychological problems after the death of two daughters. He is hopeful that justice will prevail, although the human rights court in Strasbourg moves slowly: The case was filed last year and there has been no action yet, Jacobs said.
He does not see his stay here as permanent; Paris is a resting post in the unfinished story of his life.
“Not having a house is very hard on me,” he admits. “When I find a solution to my problems, I will leave.”
