The Letter Opener (21 page)

Paolo was hunched forward, his elbows resting on the table. “But you said they were in love,” he said. “Besides, why would he have shared his story with you if he had something like that to hide?”

I nodded in agreement. It made no sense. Unless Andrei needed to atone.

In which case, why did I feel guilty? With Andrei’s story ringing in my head, why this nagging feeling that I was the one who had fallen short?

I pictured the night. The freighter pitching on the water as it moved through the Black Sea, east toward Istanbul. I saw Nicolae huddled on the deck, frozen with indecision. What lay ahead for him? What really happened in the water, in those hours between the ship and the shore?

I imagined that Andrei abandoned Nicolae in the water.

I imagined that Nicolae, numb with fear, decided not to join Andrei. He never made the jump.

I imagined that he decided he would rather die than face an unknown future.

I imagined that Nicolae slipped, hit his head as he entered the water.

He became tangled in a drifting net…

He suffered a leg cramp…

He encountered a forceful current that suctioned him straight down under the sea, water flooding his lungs…

As for Andrei, I imagined that he waited, paused for a minute before continuing, survival instinct the prevailing desire.

Then there was the darkest scenario.

Andrei, who longed after so many lost things, who was filled with fear and uncertainty, who had left behind the family he adored, who believed the disintegration of a relationship beset by misfortune was inevitable, who had once used the Romanian word
curaj
(“I lack courage”) when asked to describe his weakest quality, who didn’t trust what was on the other side of the water—I imagined that he had decided to desert the man he loved, simply because he could not contemplate starting again with Nicolae in another place.

I have known people to break away from those they claim to love simply because they distrust the idea of second chances. It is a kind of defection.

T
here were five trawlers lining the Turkish shore. Metin was busying himself with the nets, pulling them one by one from a pile to examine them for holes. The torn ones he folded up to take back to his wife for mending.

His dog was barking farther down the beach. He raised his head to look along the shoreline. His eyes fixed on a point in the distance: a figure huddled near a rock. He hesitated, briefly held back by the thought of so much work still to be done, then he dropped the nets and made his way across the beach, his stride slowed by sand.

The man he encountered appeared dead. The dog sniffed the man’s face and nudged his waist. Metin took his pulse: it was sluggish. The man’s skin was cool. Metin knew that it was important to get the body moving, to increase the blood flow to the man’s brain. He couldn’t be allowed to stay asleep. After a few unsuccessful efforts, Metin managed to wake him.

Andrei wanted to say something to reassure the man floating over him, but his words were slurred. His own voice sounded to him unearthly. He reached out his hand clumsily, missing the man’s shoulder, swatting the side of his head instead. As the man leaned in, Andrei tried to think of something to say in Turkish, but no words came. Finally he settled on a word from another language.

Andrei repeated the word several times before he was understood. On the fourth and slowest try, the man’s face softened and he began to laugh.

“
Ami.
“

The dog trotted around them in a circle.

“Where are you from?” Metin asked, once they were using passable French.

“Romania,” Andrei replied twice. The second time, he was understood.

Metin frowned. Life had taught him not to ask too many questions.

Andrei moved into Metin’s house for a week. His bed was made up in a yellow guest room. Bit by bit he regained his strength. The polluted water in which he had swum passed through him, and for several days he experienced stomach cramps followed by bouts of vomiting and diarrhea. Metin’s wife devoted herself to getting him back on his feet again.

“You are too skinny,” she chided. “I’ll make you meaty again.” She knew maybe a hundred words of French. She covered him in blankets. “Rest now. No talk. Just close your eyes.”

From his bed he could vaguely see a dark brown rocking chair, a grey plastic bucket beside him on the floor, a silver cigarette case. The curtains in the room were drawn. He passed in and out of sleep.

In his waking moments, he stared at the white ceiling. Once he heard music playing on the radio—a woman, her voice trilling like a bird’s, a man’s voice, an earthy bass, swooping down beside her. The man’s voice expanded until it pressed against his ears, filling them with a deep hum.

Metin’s wife came into the room. She held out a bowl of lentil soup, piping hot, the steam fragrant. He saw that she was relieved to find him sitting, relieved to know he was on his way to recovery; soon, on his way to leaving.

Her dark eyebrows met at the bridge of her nose. Every time Andrei tried to tell her what happened, she pleated her forehead and quieted him. (“Shh. I told you I do not want details or names. Certainly no names,” she repeated.) On the third day, he overheard her speaking to Metin in Turkish. They thought he was still sleeping. He tried to decipher what they were saying from the rise and fall of their voices.

As he was drifting toward sleep, he had a vision of Metin’s wife standing over him, asking: “What is your name?”

Andrei dreamt of his mother as a young woman. She was lying in a hospital in faded brown pyjamas. The cots were covered with snow. Everything was spotlessly clean. He dreamt the smell of bleach and oranges on her pillowcase, the cool feel of the metal bed rail against her cheek.

“What is your name?” the Red Cross doctor asked his mother.

In his dream, the American doctor was handsome, rugged, healthy, unlike the others in the room. He was aware of his mother watching the doctor with a mixture of desire and guilt, ashamed at her quite normal thoughts when so many were still suffering, so many were dead…

When he was awake Andrei would hallucinate. Everywhere he looked, he saw Nicolae. Framed by a window. Coming up the stairs. Opening, then closing the bathroom door. Reading a book at the foot of the bed, then lying beside him, sharing a pillow.

Four days into his recovery, Andrei confided to Metin that he had not been alone when he left Romania. The next morning at daybreak, Metin assembled his friends and they began to search the far shoreline—but they found nothing.

At the end of Andrei’s convalescence, they had a farewell dinner, and that evening he and Metin stayed up talking into the late hours.

“He must be dead. He must have drowned,” Andrei said.

“How can you be so certain?” Metin replied. “You made it, didn’t you? Don’t you owe it to him not to give up so easily?”

“Yes. I do.” Andrei instinctively lowered his head. He rested a drinking glass against his thigh and concentrated on pulling a teabag by its string, up and down through the darkening liquid.

“There are men that are found. Long after their families have given up looking. You read about these cases sometimes,” Metin said.

“Then you think I should keep searching.” He did not raise his head.

“It’s important to keep hoping, my son. One never knows. Go,” Metin said softly before taking himself to bed, “but don’t give up.”

Andrei spent his last two weeks in Turkey in a massive transit camp. It was crowded with other asylum-seekers waiting for their status to be determined by an adjudicator, waiting for third-country resettlement. The camp was situated at the edge of Istanbul, on a stretch of wasteland. Just a vast expanse of dirt and sky.

They slept in dormitories at night and during the day they lined up for their resettlement interviews. The officials sitting behind the desks waded through stacks of files. They were assisted by harried interpreters who rushed around as each claimant came forward with a new story and request. You could hear Romani, Arabic, Polish and Croat.

The officer who organized the queue was very friendly. He shared his cigarettes and handed out canvas hats to shield people from the sun. He spoke a bit of French. He told Andrei that his family lived in the Meandros Valley, near the river made famous for its meandering course.

“It doesn’t seem to know exactly where it wants to go,” he said. He didn’t add
like you
, but that’s what Andrei heard.

When it was Andrei’s turn, he was interviewed, photographed and told to sign a form. The man at the desk placed the tip of his finger by a line marked with a pencilled cross. “Right here.”

Andrei reached for the pen.

Under the question “Where would you like to be sent?” he carefully printed the word Canada.

In his mind, Canada was a country of pristine snow mounds, perfectly paved highways and quiet cities where people paid little attention to the past; a country beckoning with promise—big enough for anonymity, wide enough for goodwill. A country that didn’t close ranks.

Andrei arrived in Canada virtually empty-handed, an engineering graduate whose Northern Romanian degree was untranslatable in his new homeland. Four years later, by dint of luck, good contacts and dogged perseverance, he was working at a decent job, putting aside money every month in the hopes of one day sending it to his mother. The extent of that accomplishment was something he downplayed. “I do what I have to do,” he would say, adding, “There are taxi drivers in this city who could remove brain tumours.”

I
N ALL THE TIME
that we talked, Andrei never once indicated that his stay in Canada would be temporary. It did not occur to me that he might one day want to leave for good. But looking back I wonder if there were signs I should have deciphered.

One afternoon in June we were taking a break in the staff kitchen. I was pouring two cups of coffee, talking idly about a Spanish movie I had seen the night before, asking if there were any Romanian films he might recommend, when Andrei interrupted.

“You know, it’s been so long, so unbearably long, since I spoke my language, or even heard it,” he said.

His tone was so despairing, it alarmed me. The longing he expressed at that moment had claws. I put the glass coffee pot back on the burner and sat down.

“Andrei,” I said tentatively, “maybe you can go back and visit one day.”

“Never…maybe.” He halted, then laughed at his reaction. “I think about it all the time. But you know how things are.”

“But things could change. Look at what’s happened in Poland. You must have seen it on TV.”

“I’ve been watching the TV every chance I get. What’s happening in Poland is extraordinary. But I’ll tell you right now, it would never go like this in Romania.”

“But if it did?”

“If it did? If it did, what a revolution that would be!”

I
t occurs to me in hindsight that doubt was always present. Doubt is a part of everything I think and do, at the root of who I am. Doubt is the eighteen-month-old baby toddling around a coffee table, worried about letting go. Doubt is the child screeching to be taken off the skyride at Coney Island, the adolescent flatly refusing to set foot in a canoe on Lake Simcoe. (My father eventually took to calling me St. Thomas after the doubting apostle who refused to believe in the Resurrection until he could be persuaded by pressing his hand into Christ’s wounded side.)

For a while, my doubt was centred on my merit as a listener and as a friend. Then, rightly or not, there came a time when it shifted to Andrei. I began to question the accuracy of his story. A tangled web, it now seemed, with so little tangible to hold on to. Those closest to him—Nicolae, his mother and brother—remained unknown to me.

Yet what I took from the story of St. Thomas was that you didn’t need to plunge your hands into something to make it real. All you needed was faith and trust. So I continued to listen, hands by my sides, trying not to judge his version of events, even when it felt as if I was being led over very shaky ground. (Was the Ileana chapter of his story true—that they were engaged, that she was pregnant? If Nicolae was a slow swimmer, why didn’t Andrei swim alongside him instead of heading independently for the shore?) Questions arose but I learned to deflect them. If I were to forfeit his account of what happened, what would replace it? And what would be left of our relationship?

Not once did I feel that Andrei was consciously deceiving me. I knew he wasn’t a liar. He didn’t even have a lively imagination. What seems more plausible is that he recounted different versions of certain events because he honestly couldn’t commit to one.

Life is unpredictable. There are moments when everything seems to break down around us. And there are moments when everything snaps into place so perfectly that it seems like a miracle. Yet when we look back, much of what we have experienced seems unclear. Even the most important moments—the incomparable lows, the unsurpassed highs—blend together inexplicably.

I resurrect the past by relying on the physical world-documents in my possession, photos in my album, my old high-school yearbook, my teenage journals. Prompted by these objects, I can tell you, for example, that I travelled to England when I was seven and stayed for over a month, breaking my foot the last week; that I spent two summers working as an assistant carnie at the Canadian National Exhibition (the ring toss one year, the wheel of fortune the next); that I wore a strapless midnight blue dress to my high-school prom; that my best friend in grade eleven had the same name as Andrei’s mother, Sarah. Left to my own devices, I remember very little. My mind is lax. I need these memory magnets.

Andrei was driven from his country and, aside from a few photographs, his stories were the only possessions left to him. No wonder he handled them so often, eventually reshaping them. There were the solid, unchanging things: the river, the moon, the freighter, the tips of the waves. And there were the indefinite things: the things weighed by his conscience and by his heart.

I believe now that wherever Andrei is, there are events he will reexamine for as long as he lives, there are choices for which he may seek forgiveness, there are thoughts that will awaken him in the middle of the night. I cannot change that, not now. If I retain a share of guilt it is over “what if”—what if I had been a better friend…what if he had found a more open, perceptive audience in me…what if I had been willing to face the burden of complete disclosure…

I know that, in some people’s eyes, a story cannot be true and false at the same time. For some, the distinction between the probable and the possible, the contrast between what Andrei knew and what he hoped, is of no account. In a culture of absolute verdicts, all that matters is the final outcome.

A fresh supply of stationery sits on my desk. It includes a new book of adhesive labels. Postal instructions in Day-Glo colours.

D
O NOT OPEN
. R
EAD CAREFULLY BEFORE USING
.

P
LACE STAMP HERE
. R
EPRODUCTION STRICTLY PROHIBITED
.

D
O NOT BEND
. F
RAGILE
. N
OT TRANSFERABLE
. D
O NOT WRITE

BELOW THIS LINE
. R
ETURN TO SENDER
.

I stare at the bright instruction labels.

Every personal story should be stickered with words of notice, a thousand red flags and caveats.