The Letter Opener (4 page)

A few months after she started work, the co-operative ordered a second-hand mannequin from Bucharest. Delivered to much acclaim on the back of a truck that also carried blackboards for the local school, it had red hair, a large upturned nose, eyebrows arched like arrows and wide red lips. The bust was large and placed very low; the hips were marked by jutting pelvic bones. Wearing a fitted wool suit, demurely arranged in the store window, “Shirley,” named after Shirley MacLaine, one of several American actors who had visited Romania
during Andrei’s childhood, became a symbol of Western glamour and sophistication.

On the day Andrei turned thirteen, his mother presented him with his father’s old belt. The buckle was a hand-hammered brass square. The strap was enormous on Andrei’s small frame, so she used an awl to punch extra holes in the brown leather, spacing the holes evenly until, on the eighth hole, it no longer slipped off his waist. The newly tailored belt became Andrei’s pride and joy. He wore it everywhere, fitting it through his belt loops, tucking and winding the extra foot of leather so that it was artfully distributed around his middle. Even with the extra holes, it looked ungainly, a belt designed for another body, but Andrei refused his mother’s offer to trim its length. And she never insisted, perhaps because secretly it gave her pleasure to see it left intact, a kind of continuance. The final, awkward embrace of the father.

D
oes the sender have any obligation to the receiver? Andrei was not always reliable when it came to recounting the events of his departure from Romania. He had a tendency to bounce around in time, so that I was often left to piece his story together morsel by morsel. This was especially true in the early months, when our encounters were confined to breaks during the workday.

On one such occasion, Andrei was reminiscing about wading in the Tisza River as a child. It was a humid summer morning, and we had been sitting outside on a concrete planter having a coffee. A group of pigeons was waddling around us, pecking at bread crumbs Andrei had tossed a few seconds earlier. A car approached and the flock took flight in a sudden updraft of wings. I turned toward Andrei, saw the way the sunlight passed through his fair hair. As he spoke, the sweat gathered on his upper lip. I blushed and turned away when he noticed
me staring at him. Passersby would have seen us as a somewhat odd couple: a slender, boyish man leaning toward a full-bodied woman. I often felt that no matter what adjective I applied to Andrei, the opposite could be said of me. Thin/Wide. Bony/Voluptuous (if I flattered myself). Light/Dark. Male/Female. Gay/Straight. Our differences piled up. His proletarian provincial childhood. My two-car suburban upbringing…

“You know,” Andrei said, gently knocking my shoulder, “I think we make a wonderful pair.”

“Do you?” I said, with feigned casualness.

“Yes. Like—” He paused. “Like Ginger and Fred…Like igloo and polar bear…Like peanuts and chocolate.”

A smile glowed in his eyes.

I laughed. “You’re crazy.”

I could feel a hum of activity between the two poles, an electric exercise of imagination, an unwritten correspondence.

This platonic attraction of ours grew into a need, an urgency I had never before experienced. It was not a matter of Andrei being more attractive than Paolo. Paolo was handsome in exactly the brooding, tossed-together way I liked. Dressed in jeans, a plaid flannel shirt, work boots and glasses, he looked like a skinny, intellectual lumber-jack. We had our rough patches, but no more than any other couple. In essence, we were well-suited. Right? That’s what I began to wonder. The more I got to know Andrei, the more I found myself silently comparing. Paolo was my boyfriend, but it was Andrei who made me feel vital—important and alive.

Paolo had grown up in Argentina with rigid ideas about social etiquette. He was not the type to stop on the street, for example, and greet the corner-store owner and ask about his children’s piano recital or his recent trip to Vietnam. Paolo was the product of the prolonged
dictatorship that had set neighbour against neighbour. He avoided situations that might call on him to intervene. This was the crux of our difference (as I understood it then). A part of Paolo still lived in a country his family had left almost ten years before, a world of grated iron shutters, where people closed themselves off from one another and learned to ignore the comings and goings of strangers. In this world, it was entirely possible for someone in the same apartment building to disappear, his fate never to be questioned or mentioned.

Then again, perhaps Paolo’s temperament had nothing whatsoever to do with his history. Perhaps his aversion to crowds, his bystander apathy tempered by his fierce loyalty would have all been present even if he had grown up among auto dealers in Windsor or dairy farmers in Vermont.

T
HE
T
ISZA WAS ONE
of the longest rivers in Europe. As it rambled along the edge of town, within walking distance of Andrei’s home, its current slowed. A few months before Andrei was to leave his village with Nicolae, a terrible accident occurred in a neighbouring town when the dam surrounding a mining reservoir containing cyanide burst. The contaminated water seeped into an adjoining river, and eventually into the Tisza, which drained from the Carpathian Mountains into the Danube.

Andrei was twenty-seven at the time and cramming all night for his final exams at the regional university. At 3 a.m., seeing that it was a full moon, he decided to take a break from studying and go for a walk in the woods by the river. There was no one else around. Other than the occasional rustle of an animal, the hoot of an owl, the night was silent.

As he approached the river, he noticed an acrid smell in the cold air, a strange taste of bitter almonds on his tongue. He shone a flashlight on the water. Clusters of fish twisted on the surface, mouths open
and gills heaving. A few metres away a carp bumped violently against a rock then began swimming in circles. He moved the beam slowly along the river’s edge and saw that several larger fish had veered into lather by the bank, trying to escape the poison.

It seemed inconceivable that a great river like the Tisza should suddenly die. So the following day, when men wearing protective suits and thick rubber gloves came from Baia Mare to pull the dull-eyed fish from the river, the town went into deep mourning. People came to throw flowers into the current and silently cursed the dictator for the accident. No one expected the river to recover.

The mine spill deeply affected Andrei. That evening by the banks of the poisoned Tisza, a feeling of doom spread through him. It frightened him to watch the fish drift by. Their dying reminded him of everything he had lost before—his father, his grandparents—and he couldn’t bear the thought of another death.

It was dawn by the time he returned home from the river. Careful not to wake anyone, he crept past Eli’s room and quietly ducked into his mother’s curtained bedroom. He stood several paces from her bed. As his eyes adjusted to the blackness, he studied her sleeping form. Her greying hair tied in a long pale braid and drawn across the pillow. Her sunken eyes, the loose skin around her neck, her chiselled chin.

He willed his mind to journey back to childhood, to recover a younger, more consoling image, something that would be less distressful to carry away with him.

He stood there for a moment, and then he left the room without looking back.

I
N
A
NDREI
’
S STORIES
I had pictured his mother as invincible. She was always making, arranging, mending, planting, polishing and carrying
things. To hear Andrei speak of his mother in other terms was disquieting. And I was disturbed by all this talk of death. I remember it made me think of my own mother, now living close to the mail office at Sakura, a seniors’ home for Japanese Canadians. My mother was sixty-nine and by all accounts less active than Andrei’s.

My mother’s was a body gradually subsiding. Hands in need of regular massage to relieve crippling arthritis. Soaring blood pressure in need of pills. It wasn’t just her body. It was her mind. She was more forgetful every day. And because I had a tendency to mistake forgetfulness for fretfulness, I had to remind myself continually that she was not especially miserable. (I once received a gentle reprimand from another resident at Sakura, Gloria Kimura, who said:
When you are old, Naiko, it becomes almost impossible to persuade other people that you are still sharp, current or—hardest of all—happy!
)

I was determined that my mother shouldn’t feel abandoned, particularly by me, so I visited her at every opportunity. My sister Kana wasn’t immune to our mother’s decline just because she was far away. I could tell from her letters and phone calls that she was upset by my reports, and sometimes incredulous. To protect herself she insisted that our mother was exaggerating her memory loss. Strangely, I think she felt cheated. I was managing to sustain a relationship with our mother, who even in her declining state was a more active parent than our father.

As Andrei spoke, I pictured my mother’s dark head nested on the bed, covers bunched in her hands, a spare pillow cushioning her body.

“Did you think about your mother a lot?” I asked him.

“Of course. She was at the front of my mind.”

“But something pushed you to leave anyway.”

Andrei glanced up, then down again. We were having lunch by the loading docks. The picnic table was covered with takeout wrappers
from the falafel shop down the street, dribbles of tahini across the surface, but Andrei seemed not to notice or care. His attention was fixed on his notebook and a drawing of a suspension bridge he had started as soon as we finished lunch. His long rake-like fingers gripped a thick mechanical pencil. I studied the graphite dust on his shirt cuffs, then peeled back the lid of my coffee cup and took a sip.

Andrei’s hands were seldom idle. He was always sketching or picking at his fingernails or tearing off pieces of paper napkin and twisting them until they resembled tiny maggots.

“The hardest part was leaving my mother, but I don’t feel that I abandoned her,” he said, and rested the pencil in the gutter of his book.

“I’m sorry, Andrei. I didn’t mean it to sound that way.”

“I wasn’t a runaway like you see in the movies. There was no thrill to it. I didn’t
want
to leave; there just came a point where I had to. There was a rumour that our names were on a list of people suspected of anti-government activity.”

O
NE AFTERNOON
, A
NDREI HAD
returned home from school to find his mother sitting at the dining-room table. She had placed her hands flat on the table surface with an intensity that suggested an effort to remember or to communicate. Her gaze was toward the living room, focused on one corner, though there was nothing there.

What she was staring at was the apparition of an old armoire, which once stood behind a dark velvet sofa. She was staring at it in the same way that she would sometimes gaze at an empty bookshelf, stacking it in her mind with leather-bound editions of Eminescu, Dostoyevsky and Shakespeare, dictionaries and the Talmud, the hundred different titles that had formed her father’s collection. Andrei knew his mother
would enter this trance-state occasionally, revisiting her childhood home, taking inventory of even the smallest objects: a crystal bowl full of lemon drops, a favourite fringed pillow, a silver wedding platter. In this restoration, the vacant areas were bright colourful spaces, not the hazy, white light of memory.

Andrei greeted her with a kiss and lifted her red cardigan back onto her shoulders. He gave her neck a quick and gentle rub. She smiled and an eyelash slipped off her cheek onto the table. He felt that, inside, she was flinching in his presence.

The next morning, the street was bustling with people engaged in early spring chores. A woman several doors away from Andrei was beating a knotted rug she had draped over a washing line. Every time she gave a hard whack with the cane pole, a cloud of brown dust exploded in the air. Neighbours on the other side were mending their fence with a ball of wire. Someone fixed a roof leak. Another person cracked a piece of wood in half with a hatchet. A child skipped on the pavement. Yet at the moment Andrei appeared on the front stoop of his house, everyone froze. The entire street seemed to refrain from breathing until he had passed from view.

There was never a direct accusation, but everyone gossiped, and the gossip that surrounded Andrei and Nicolae grew savage; neighbours and classmates were like pack dogs sniffing the prey. Perhaps Andrei and Nicolae were stepping out of class, or walking toward the forest, or sharing a quick embrace—suddenly the torchlight was on them. People said they were in league with the Magyars, the Jews, the foreigners, the orgiasts, the anarchists. They stared and whispered about obscene excesses and sexual perversions. At first, Andrei stared back, but the merciless faces troubled him. They glowed with smugness. His treachery not only reinforced their loyalty, but also purged them, made them feel holy. For if he was guilty, then they were pure.

Why did he risk so much?

He didn’t know. He was swept away. Maybe it was his need for something more, his desire to live a life of his own choosing even if it meant paying a price. Maybe he just needed to believe in something. Or maybe it was simply the way Nicolae put his mouth to Andrei’s ear and murmured,
Because I love you.

The effect was narcotic. Suddenly he experienced a swell of sureness telling him that everything would be all right.

Nicolae and Andrei met always in secret, always at different times of the day and night. When it became difficult to meet, they confided their thoughts in letters slipped discreetly between the pages of textbooks and passed between classes. Intoxicated poems, burning declarations and carnal prose, scrawled on envelopes, opened matchboxes, napkins. The naughtiest had a cartoon sketch of two humping cats, and, below it, a heart inscribed with the flowing words
Te Ador.
They took the precaution of leaving their letters unsigned, but Andrei could not bring himself to part with them. Instead, he wrapped his stack carefully in an old tea towel and tucked it between his bed and night table.

One day he came home and found his mother smoothing out a small mound of earth in the garden by the kitchen. A small shovel lay at her feet. As soon as she spotted Andrei, her cheeks reddened and she reached with a shaking hand for a cluster of dandelions.

“So many weeds,” she said, and feigned an exasperated sigh. The digging had left her short of breath.

Andrei watched while she finished.

“You work too hard, Mama,” he said, and managed a smile of encouragement.

When he went inside to change his clothes, he found that the bundle of letters by his bedside was gone, the tea towel along with it.

He waited, but she never mentioned the letters. That evening, he spent longer in the kitchen, stacking the dishes away, wiping the counters. When it began to rain and the earth turned to mud, he thought of them, buried in haste, absorbing the moisture, ink sliding off the pages, everything melting into grey mush. But still she said nothing. Even when the storm winds were so strong he thought the roof might blow away, even then, not a word.

At the time, Andrei thought he was going to lose his mind. He remembered she talked about crocus blades she had seen slicing through the soil and whether or not the carrots needed to be replanted in the shade and the importance of composting the soil and turning it over…and the entire time his heart was pounding. He wondered whether things would have turned out differently if they had talked about the letters, but they never had the chance.