The Letter Opener (10 page)

“
Ohaiyo
, Ayumi-san, I’ve brought you your magic pills,” she said, and laughed warmly.

“They’re so tiny.” My mother stared into a small paper cup at two round, buff-coloured pills.

“
Dozo
, three more,” the nurse said gently, passing another cup with two vitamin E soft gels and a single ibuprofen tablet.

My mother stared into the second cup while I stared at the nurse’s fingernails, each one rounded and perfect. My mother rose to get some water from the bathroom. When she returned, I noticed that the tap was still running and went to turn it off.

There was nothing that could stop the wires from crossing in my mother’s head. Drawers full of mixed-up belongings: winter gloves
packed in with pyjamas, undergarments in the vitamin drawer. She continued to misplace her possessions and it continued to upset her—“But it was here just a second ago…” It affected me deeply, until one day I had another meeting with the social worker.

We were sitting in his small windowless office. He had eyes that crinkled at the corners behind round glasses, tufts of greying hair by his temples and a horrid habit of picking at the wax in his ears as he spoke. But he was kind—effortlessly kind. The important thing, he emphasized, was that my mother still cared. She hadn’t given up. She still remembered to put away her clothes every evening, folding then refolding the sleeves, arranging her shoes under the bed. Most important, he continued, she still remembered what belonged to her. (Underwire bras, Clinique moisturizer, digital travel clock…)

Whereas people with advanced Alzheimer’s forgot what was theirs until they had nothing of their own—their lives a mishmash of unfolded clothes, unrecognized children, mouldy refrigerators—my mother’s world was yet governed by orderliness.

“Naiko,” said the social worker, “you must keep in mind that the older we get, the more we have to remember. There’s not an aging person around that hasn’t at some point feared having the circuits of their brain blown out by dementia. If you’re thirty and you lose a second set of keys, it’s a joke: you’re in love, daydreaming. If you’re sixty, it’s a crisis. Everyone around you reaches for the panic button. Generally families can do more to help by remaining calm.”

I realized that the moment my mother showed indifference when everything she once owned was gone from her memory, I would know that the end was coming. The more sick she became, the less she would carry in her purse.

“Andrei, what am I going to do? She’s lost her wallet again.”

“There are worse things to lose,” he said.

“Of course there are, but…”

“We lose things all the time.”

He was carefully extracting a rolled-up diploma from a slender cardboard tube. He examined the silver seal and continued, “Most people can’t remember what happened last week, let alone a few months ago. Tell me. Do you remember what you ate for breakfast yesterday, or the face of the person who sat beside you on the bus to work?”

“No—but…”

“How about your first kiss? Do you remember that?”

“Yes, of course. But, Andrei, I don’t see how this relates to my mother losing her wallet.”

Andrei had a theory that the ability to adapt to losing things was one of the reasons very old people had such peaceful faces. They accepted it as part of aging, he said. But I could see nothing positive about my mother’s illness. There was no tranquility. The ease with which she used to open a door, talk on the phone, pick up a pen, search through her purse—all gone.

“She has been losing things for eight years. You might think it’s perfectly normal, but I still can’t get used to it.” I knew there was an edge to my voice.

Andrei nodded slowly, his guard dropped, and he said quietly: “I’m sorry. It’s just that…” He shrugged. “I think we worry a lot about our mothers. And maybe it doesn’t help…any of us.”

I changed the subject. “You know, she’s started taking watercolour classes. She’s actually very good. She knows how to capture trees, flowers, water, all that landscape stuff.”

“That’s wonderful. To have a grasp of nature.”

Andrei had experienced his own battles against forgetting, which made his seemingly casual attitude to my mother all the more puzzling.

A few weeks after he started working at the Undeliverable Mail Office, he developed a sudden spell of insomnia. He came to the office dishevelled and exhausted. His face suddenly seemed to be composed of sharp planes and dramatic shadows. His eyes became dark and grieffilled. As he later explained it: “One morning I woke up from a bad sleep and I couldn’t remember any of the shop names or streets signs of my childhood. I tried to remember the name of my favourite gradeschool teacher but that was gone too. Was it Mr. Giurescu? Georgescu? I tried to picture the animal that appeared on our school badge. That little slice of moon, the tree. Was the tree an elm? Was the animal an owl? For nights I lay awake, fearing sleep, fearing that my dreams would swallow up other things.”

He called it his “memory flu.” In bed, he stared for hours at the stuccoed ceiling, making connect-the-dot shapes in his mind. Tree. Hammer. Cloud. By daybreak, with the sky lightening, he found himself drifting in a state of half sleep, rehearsing the Romanian words for willow, carpenter, thunderstorm. A kind of pre-emptive rescue mission. Was it his way of not forgetting the world of Nicolae?

Images of the Carpathians sat on one shelf of his mind, the words to “Awaken, Thee, Romanian!” sat on another, waiting to be retrieved whenever someone mentioned Romanian mountains or anthems.

But no one did.

Toward the end of the second week, Andrei was on the verge of collapse. He would awaken to the morning sun piercing the bedroom window, then, sleep-deprived, drowse during the day. He dropped and spilled things at work. He developed a pulsing tic in his right eye. His pride took a plunge along with his blood sugar. Eroding his sanity,
heightening his sense of fragility, was the feeling he was utterly alone. That’s when he reached out to me.

The Undeliverable Mail Office is where all the lonely hearts end up. It was destiny, I believe, that he started working here when he did. Maybe I had a sympathetic face, high eyebrows that made me look perpetually interested. Maybe he had a nose for a good listener.

Together, we resurrected his past, and eventually Andrei began to sleep again. He laid claim to his memories as doggedly as he recovered misdirected mail.

For my part, I was grateful to be able to help him. Most of my mother’s memories were already unreachable.

The other night I was lying in bed wondering about the mischievous nature of recollection. Why our minds stop at some things and skip over others. It started with a stray childhood image of me standing at the end of a tall diving board in a red bathing suit, the board sloping slightly under my weight, my hands folded between my legs, hot pee trickling through my fingers. Why did that forgotten image flash into my head when it did? Where had it been kept all that time?

One cannot predict what portions of the past will be carried into the future. I work in a place where there are no guarantees of delivery. Letters or parcels sent to easy destinations arrive damaged or in tatters, while other mail, perhaps subjected to wars or hurricanes, arrives in near-perfect condition.

A few days ago something special happened at the Undeliverable Mail Office. A birthday card turned up that had been sent from Brighton, England, in 1896. It had arrived in Canada, in an official postmaster’s envelope, having spent nearly a century lost in the
British Royal Mail. A long-ago, offhand greeting had become a symbol of imperishability. I looked at the handwritten script, the curlicue accents, the quaint image on the card of a Victorian child holding a butterfly net and playing in a summery meadow.

Maybe in the torrent of the new, old memories get swept away to some corner of the mind that is custodian of the future, until years later they mysteriously reappear, pristine in their innocence.

T
here are seventeen days until Andrei’s rent expires. And Christmas is coming.

Kana has called to tell me that she won’t be coming home for a while. The general strike in Prague has led to the resignation of the president and a demand for democratic elections. They are calling it the Velvet Revolution and it is being led by Václav Havel, a dissident playwright who was still in jail only three months ago. They adoringly refer to him as the Lennon-loving—as opposed to Lenin-loving—champion of Prague.

At the end of November I had received an excited letter from her.

Dear Nai-chan,

The past week’s events have been incredible. Students have taken over the streets calling for democratic reform.
Families march through the city and jangle their keys—a symbol that means it is time for a change in leadership. The other night there was a standoff near Wenceslas Square in which the students offered flowers to the riot police. The police began beating the young demonstrators with night sticks, bringing out dogs and water hoses. It has angered everyone I speak with. They are expecting an even bigger demonstration next week at Letna Park. There are even rumours of a general strike.

I just spoke with Mummy on the telephone. It was very discouraging. She seems to be getting worse—more absent-minded every time I call. Have you noticed? She keeps repeating the same stories. Tonight she told me (twice!) that you have been bringing someone other than Paolo to see her. She didn’t mention his name but she says he speaks English well, but with a heavy accent. What’s going on? Is she making all this up? If things settle down here I am determined to come home for Christmas, but I’ll call as soon as my plans are confirmed. Let’s talk then.

XOXO

K-chan

p.s. Is everything okay between you and Paolo?! Have you come to any decision about living together?

This evening when I arrived at Sakura after speaking with Kana on the phone, there was a handwritten sign taped to the main door: Because of a small fire all residents had been temporarily relocated to Grace Church. The sprinkler system had been set off in the morning.
Water had spouted out in circles, drenching the corridors and the bedrooms of several residents. Fumes of melted plastic permeated the air. There was so much smoke that the white tiles of the mainfloor washroom had turned grey. Shortly before I arrived, the residents had been escorted to the simple red-brick United Church building one street over. A firefighter pointed me in the direction of its squat, cross-topped steeple and I walked there against a lashing early winter wind. Grace Church, a strange building that butted up against a real estate office on one side and a video store on the other, boasted a giant stained-glass window of the Resurrection. It would have been no surprise to find a singing choir or a minister reading a sermon, but when I opened the door and peered inside, there was only a balding middle-aged man holding two fold-up chairs. He gestured for me to follow him.

Inside the church, the evacuated residents were resting in a large basement room. There was a peaceful after-supper feel to the place. Roasted chicken legs, dinner rolls and the remains of a shredded-carrot-and-raisin salad sat on a rectangular banquet table next to a stack of unused paper plates. An aroma of greasy meat lurked in the air. Roy Nakano sat on a chair eating a piece of Black Forest cake, a tissue stuffed up one of his nostrils. The darkening spots from an earlier nosebleed matched the dark red cake filling. I stopped to say hello.

The woman to his right, Grace Shimura, was wearing a red cowboy bandana as a head scarf. She had a wonderful, happy face, and seemed, along with a few of the others, genuinely thrilled by the day’s events.

“You poor thing, you look absolutely frozen,” she said.

I pulled the collar of my jacket closed and nodded. “The wind just picked up. I didn’t realize it would be so cold when I left for work this morning.”

She smiled. The bandana gave her a scatty appearance. By way of apology she adjusted it.

“I know this is a peculiar thing, but Roy, now, he tells me when he doesn’t like the way I fix my hair. And today, with all the commotion, I didn’t have a chance to pretty myself.”

Grace rested her hand on Roy’s leg, patted it lightly. Roy scraped the icing on his plate and piped in: “They’re still trying to figure out what started the sprinklers. The goddamn system went haywire. I had to throw plastic bags over my trees so they wouldn’t get flooded. What a mess!”

His gaunt face puffed up in excitement, an emphatic plastic fork poked the air.

Across from Grace, a woman bleated, “
Hidoi yo…
it’s just terrible…”

My mother was sitting in a corner holding an orange drink box, drawing short sips through the straw, a lonesome plastic chair beside her. She was wearing most of her costume jewellery, strings of coloured glass beads and silver pendants around her neck. Her hair was held in a bun by handfuls of black bobby pins. She looked more uncertain than usual, and even after I arrived she kept nervously watching the door. When I sat down, she leaned close and took my hand, holding it tightly.

She whispered, “They can’t find Gloria.”

She let go of my hand and twisted a garnet ring around her baby finger.

I sat silently with my mother for an hour, and watched Roy Ishii (another Roy) pacing back and forth with a down jacket around his shoulders. Whenever he passed a window, he would stop for a moment to peer up at the sky. A layer of curdled cloud spread as far as the eye could see.

I liked Roy. He was probably the most solid, unwavering person I had ever met. When he was a kid in Vancouver, he decided he wanted to be a weatherman. He dreamt of being a master of the elements. While forecasting the weather didn’t mean you could transform it, and while there would always be days that you’d get it wrong, he said that learning how to interpret the skies and gauge the winds gave him a feeling of confidence he had never had before.

During the forced evacuation in the Second World War, when the Ishii family was relocated to Tashme, a former cattle ranch in the British Columbia interior, Roy’s weather predictions were treated as a welcome diversion. He taught the other children to read the clouds—widely scattered puffs, low twists and tatters, wisps with rust-coloured haloes—identifying each by name and thickness. A harmless hobby, everyone assumed, until October 1944, when Roy wrote a letter to an uncle in New Denver, describing as an aside the low-level nimbostratus obscuring the sky above Tashme. This edgeless dark mass would sit for days above their heads, producing a steady dump of snow.

The letter was returned opened but undelivered: a first warning. It turned out that if you were Japanese Canadian, amateur weather forecasting was considered an offence. The post office was under government orders to scrutinize any letter being sent by or to any Japanese Canadian. Information concerning such things as meteorology or road conditions was blacked out as intelligence helpful to the enemy. The weather was no longer a staple of conversation—it was treachery.

Despite a few inauspicious years, Roy continued to nurture his interest in weather after the war ended. And when he moved into Sakura, decades later, his worldly goods reflected a lifelong preoccupation. Posters from NASA’s image spacecraft covered his walls,
offering a ghostly vision of Earth—a blue-and-white orb glowing in the blackness of outer space surrounded only by a thin membrane of air, which Roy referred to as Our Fragile Envelope. During a visit one afternoon, he showed me a storms-and-fronts index that went back to 1955. He surprised me by asking my birthdate. I told him it was April 14, 1960.

He grinned. “Overcast. Showers in the afternoon,” he said.

And when we looked it up, he was right. (He confessed later that my birthday coincided with Maurice “Rocket” Richard’s last game in the NHL, when the Montreal Canadiens swept the Toronto Maple Leafs 4–0 for the Stanley Cup. Roy remembered walking to Maple Leaf Gardens in a rain slicker.)

Now, I watched him sauntering through light shafts in the church basement, wearing his down jacket as a cape. He raked his fingers through his thinning hair, unruffled by the day’s events.

Noting my presence, he smiled and nodded. “Looks like she’s going to storm.”

Cumulonimbus clouds, a cold front moving gradually across the early night sky.

“Your mom. She sounds kind of tense.” Paolo’s hand was over the mouthpiece.

He held the phone down toward the couch where I lay that same night, overcome with exhaustion. It was just past ten o’clock. My mother and the other residents of Sakura were staying at a local inn until their rooms were restored.

“Naiko?” She had to be calling from the hotel front desk.

“Mom, is everything okay?”

“I’m not sure. It’s Gloria. She’s still missing.”

Gloria Kimura lived on the same floor as my mother. I knew her as a fidgety woman who collected dolls and combed her grey bangs compulsively.

“Get them to phone her family. Where else would she go?”

As I said this, I imagined Gloria wandering alone through the cold streets.

“They’re calling now. Oh dear, it has been such a crazy day. Only…”

“Only what?”

Silence.

“Mom?”

“This is awful, but I think she was the one who started the fire.”

As soon as she said it, I knew she was right.

On a recent visit, I had stopped by Gloria’s room to find her talking on the phone. I waved to her quickly from the doorway, but as soon as she saw me she tilted the phone onto her shoulder and gestured for me to join her, moving her free hand vigorously as if fanning herself. I stepped into her room, removed a stack of magazines from the only chair and heard the agitation in her voice as she spoke to her sister, who lives in Port Hope. The window was opened and the room was chilly, and as I flipped through an old copy of
Vanity Fair
, goosebumps spread across my skin. I noticed the sound of wind whistling through a tree just outside the open window. A few more minutes of heated conversation passed. Then, just as Gloria was saying goodbye to her sister, I was startled by a loud and sudden
bang
, something smashing against the rain gutter below. My head jerked back just as Gloria’s arm returned to her side. My heart jumped against my chest. I kept my eyes on her face, but she was staring at the window ledge, where a wooden
Kokeshi
doll had stood only seconds earlier. Her expression and the tension in her hand told me that the doll’s fall wasn’t an accident.

“My God, Gloria,” I said, one hand still on my chest. “What happened?”

She looked up. “It slipped,” she said quietly.

I walked over to the window and looked below. “Someone could have been down there. You could have really hurt someone.”

She didn’t answer. Drooping with tiredness, she slumped onto the bed so suddenly it startled me. It took me a moment to take in her difficulty and to help her lie down.

“Bless your heart.” She blinked and changed the subject. “You like
yokan
?” She aimed an arm in the direction of her mini-fridge. “Take some with you. I shouldn’t eat it. Diabetes. Go on, take it all.”

“Gloria, please rest.” I began to pull up the folded quilt at the foot of her bed, but her hand blocked me.

“Please, no. The quilt’s not quite finished yet.” She sighed. “But almost.”

And with that she rolled over and closed her eyes.

I ran my fingers over the fabric, then carefully folded it up and put it back at the foot of the bed before leaving the room.

The quilt had taken on epic dimensions since finding its way to Gloria the previous winter. Though she told slightly different versions of the story, the basics stayed the same:

In the spring of 1987, an elderly widow by the name of Mrs. Millie Kingston collided with a cyclist while taking a morning walk and died hours later of a cerebral hemorrhage. When her children were disposing of her things, they found folded away among the more obvious valuables a quilt embroidered with the words
For our dear friends, John and Margaret Kimura, Ucluelet 1944.
The quilt, which was now sun-faded and unstitched in sections, had been purchased at a small antiques market near Cobourg, Ontario.

How it ended up there is open to speculation. When Japanese
Canadians were rounded up and sent to internment camps, the remnants of their lives cropped up in various locations. Among the myriad disruptions of daily life faced by a people suddenly branded “enemy aliens” was uncertain mail delivery. Piles of undeliverable packages sat in Canadian post offices waiting to be rerouted. Most of these packages had been returned or retrieved from houses where families were not present to receive them, and were marked with the impassive administrative memo Forwarding Address Required. Some found their proper destination, but many were left unclaimed.

The names on letter boxes throughout the coastal towns of British Columbia spoke of Japanese Canadians who hoped one day to return to their homes. The name Tanaka painted on a box imparted the impression that Kenta and Hatsuko Tanaka had not been evacuated by the RCMP, that if one opened the door to 526 Cordova Street, they might be right inside, preoccupied with mending the water damage to their bedroom ceiling following the heavy spring rains or busy unpacking a recent shipment of Japanese silk to display in their modest but successful import shop. A block away on Powell Street, a letter box bearing the name Maikawa awaited mail addressed to the owners of the community’s only department store. One after another, the names on the letter boxes were replaced, but for a time it was possible to stroll through the streets of Vancouver’s Japantown and believe that the community had simply stepped out for a moment, that everyone would shortly return.

The quilt was one of many postal orphans. After the war it was put up for auction, and it eventually found its way to Cobourg, where it was purchased by Millie Kingston, a retired primary-school principal. Decades of travel and use took their toll, so that by the time Millie died, the quilt was tattered and ready for the trashbin; only
the intervention of Millie’s perceptive daughter, Jenny Kingston, prevented such an end. Jenny, with intuition reinforced through a decade of work as a city archivist, recognized the quilt’s sentimental and historical value and immediately packed it off to
The Kimuras of Ucluelet c/o Canada Post.