The Letter Opener (7 page)

I
n my experience, if a person does not take note of an item’s disappearance within a few weeks, they are unlikely ever to do so. Some things simply go unmissed.

In the limbo of Canada Post, items that went unclaimed after seven months were either auctioned off by Head Office or destroyed. An overhaul of non-valuables happened twice a year. We called them “days of reckoning” and, with the exception of statutory holidays and staff birthdays, they were the days most anticipated by all of us. Dumpsters full of odds and ends were emptied. A great crunching ensued, a spinning of blades, a sizzle of cardboard, until everything was reduced to fibre and dust. The sound of hydraulically powered disintegration echoed in the warehouse, weaving like an avant-garde composition through the hum of daily work.

A day of reckoning was an opportunity to get out of your seat. I
spent most of the afternoon by an industrial shredding machine. Cardboard frames, sheets of loose paper, receipts, composition notebooks, photographs were reduced to ribbons and confetti. The order I had imposed on my collection was coming apart. Chaos was being reinstated. Yet as I stood there feeding handfuls into the machine, I found myself contemplating what it would be like to divest oneself of everything one owned.

I cheered myself by considering the long-term benefits of my work: I was dispensing with the world’s rummage so that future generations would not suffocate beneath the accumulated surplus. (Even museums de-acquisition their holdings from time to time. Without regular purges, the dead weight of everything in the mail recovery office would surely cause whole cities and countries to sink into the sea.) And yet—what was trash? So often I’d worry that an item casually chucked might be the protective charm of someone’s future.

Could someone’s entire life be derailed by an undelivered object?

I imagined mailboxes across the country filled with nothing but snow, household letter slots opening only to a shiver of wind.

The morning immediately following a day of reckoning always felt quiet in contrast. People kept to themselves. When I arrived at the office, Doreen was hunched over a mound of files, faxes and memos. Her coffee and Chelsea bun were untouched. She was executing her work with the gusto of someone involved in a vital project, not her usual attitude of secretarial indifference.

I said hello and she said hi in return. I hoped she might have some new information about Andrei to pass on, but she didn’t say anything. I felt silly just standing there, so I asked her if her skin was still bothering her. The last time we had spoken she had been complaining about her eczema, which she said should be improving because she was taking new vitamin supplements.

She touched her pen to her neck and replied, “Yes. But not as much.”

Beside her desk was a new poster and written in yellow were the words
HOW TO DETECT SUSPICIOUS ITEMS
. There was a picture of a dishevelled package and a list of things to look out for when sorting mail. I studied it for a moment, but the words began to blend together in a series of alarming haiku:

L
IVE
D
ANGEROUS
L
EAKS

S
HARP
L
OPSIDED
S
TRANGE
O
DOUR

N
O
R
ETURN
A
DDRESS

P
ROTRUDING
W
IRES

E
XCESSIVE
W
RAPPING
P
APER

O
IL
S
TAINS
R
IGID
B
ULK

It occurred to me as I walked across the floor toward my desk that I was the only one who still seemed to notice or care that Andrei was missing. An insular silence had crept over the hive. Ten days had passed since I last saw him—or was it eleven?—I was losing track of time. I had also not kept on top of my work. There were many things to sort through if I was to catch up.

By 9 a.m., I had chosen three objects, more for diversity than priority. One was small and round, an American Legion pin; another, hard and heavy, a box containing two Qigong balls; the third, pleasing and soft, a pair of leather gloves.

Over on the side, several plastic jars of medicine had burst through an envelope. Easy to trace. A name of a doctor and a number to call. A set of dentures sat like a museum piece in a box of light cast from the skylight.

By mid-morning, I was transfixed by a Polaroid photograph. A red sunset sky. Trails of violet cloud. Two backpackers walking down a sloped road. It was a fairly standard travel photograph but the surface was strangely beaded. The emulsion had partially peeled away, lifting away random details. The longer I peered into its tiny window, the more I felt as though I had entered a bubbling lava world where everything was liquid and alive.

Did the work ever take my mind off Andrei? Yes and no. Something new to identify could so totally preoccupy me, like the photograph that morning, that my mind emptied. But most days Andrei’s absence was a presence I felt from the moment I entered the building until the time I left.

That day during my lunch break, I dialled Andrei’s number five times and listened to it ring. The answering machine was either full or broken. I asked the manager to double-check Andrei’s personnel file, but there was no emergency contact information. There was nothing written under “Next of Kin.”

“Maybe it should be more precise?” the manager said, pointing at the blank spot beside “In case of emergency, call.”

“Precise?”

“You know, for different sorts of emergencies…in case of electrocution, call…in case of shooting, or heart attack or alien abduction, call…”

I stared at him. He pinched the knot in his necktie and gave a shrug.

“Sorry,” he said. “Dumb joke.”

How ironic that the combined tracking skills of all the employees at the office led us no closer to finding Andrei. (And indeed such were the skills at the UMO for locating people that there were occasions when we were recruited to help trace a loved one. For example,
one man who had been out of touch with his sister for nine years mailed a letter vaguely labelled,
To: Miss Emily Harwood, Registered Nurse, Regina, Canada.
We eventually discovered Miss Harwood’s whereabouts. She had traded in her nurse’s uniform for a nun’s habit and was now living with the Sisters of Charity in Saskatoon. Within a few weeks, Mr. Harwood wrote to express his thanks and to tell us that he was now corresponding with his sister on a regular basis.) We could sometimes solve the nation’s postal puzzles, but when it came to finding Andrei, our ingenuity and analytical talents seemed to get us nowhere.

I made the decision to visit his apartment. If he was not there, I would tape a message to his door. The landlord had told me that he could not give me permission to enter the room until Andrei’s rent expired. That left nineteen days until the end of the month.

A
ndrei lived in a top-floor apartment of a six-storey building, overlooking the street. It was a modest one-bedroom with a bathroom and kitchenette. The main room came furnished with a foldout couch in brown corduroy, two director chairs made of faded red canvas, a glass-topped coffee table and a heart-shaped ottoman. Every available surface was thick with yellowing newspapers and clippings, some in Romanian, others in English. The upholstery was dull and worn but the shapes felt modern—a feature he appreciated, coming from a world of patina and weathered wood. The walls were a freshly painted mint blue. The ceilings were high. It was a home relatively unsoiled by history.

In his second year in the building, Andrei had built a small wooden loft on the roof to house a family of pet pigeons. Like the birds he cared for, Andrei moved about his nest with immense nervous energy,
always garnishing and gathering, one minute adorning his walls with landscape photographs he cut out of travel magazines, the next minute filling his cupboards with used plastic and paper bags, which he expertly bundled and folded. Nothing was thrown out.

I visited his apartment only twice during the course of our friendship. On the first occasion, I had been invited over for tea. It was a Saturday afternoon in July (exactly one month after I had dragged Paolo through Parkdale in a vain effort to locate Andrei). I remember that it was a particularly muggy day, with the kind of suffocating humidity that usually precedes a summer storm. The air on the top floor was almost unbearable. I had brought strawberry tarts that had turned soggy around the edges, the custard on the verge of liquefying. Andrei welcomed me, gallantly placed the tarts on a small table and made his way across the uneven floor to the kitchen nook to fetch two plates. When he returned he was also carrying an electric fan. We placed the fan on the floor, then opened the window and door to create a cross breeze.

A pigeon swooped onto the wide ledge, a broken coo rising from its throat as it landed. Another followed. Then another. The birds were prim and polite, displaying avian precision in the way they spaced themselves on the perch.

Andrei picked up one of the birds and held it for me to touch, his hands cupped around its breast. The sensation was damp and cool. Then he put it back down and headed for the kitchen, returning moments later with a small bowl of water and a handful of raw popcorn, which he delicately dispersed on the sill, carefully avoiding a splatter of droppings. The pigeons pecked at the kernels, the sunlight transforming their slate-grey feathers into a silvery blue.

Despite the fan, sweat trickled down my chest, my clothes felt clammy. I could feel that my face was shiny.

“They prefer the kitchen ledge because it’s wider, but they’ll come wherever there’s food,” he said.

“They’re yours?” I asked, nudging my hair behind my ear.

“No, no. They’re not mine. I feed them occasionally and that’s why they return.”

Out of the open window, I noticed a large sign for a food mart in the distance, a bright band of orange with bold blue letters spanning an entire block. As we nibbled our tarts, Andrei followed my gaze and began to speak.

Andrei first entered a North American grocery store three weeks after he arrived in Toronto. He was still staying in the settlement house, wearing mismatched clothes and his baseball cap, dreaming of a job and an apartment of his own. He moved timidly about the city, quietly studying the transactions of people around him. Before long, he knew how to ride the streetcar, how to operate the coin laundry, where to buy coffee and cheese in Kensington Market. Just from observing and copying others, he was slowly gaining confidence and adapting to his new home.

But entering a grocery store as large as a sports stadium was an entirely different matter. Andrei walked in on a whim, and found himself happily lost in a maze of aisles offering a variety of products beyond anything he could have imagined. Shrink-wrapped hams crowned with pineapple rings. Frozen meat pies with puffy gravy packets. Thigh-sized tubs of coffee-flavoured yogurt. Sausage rolls the size of a man’s fist.

He stopped in a section devoted to pet food. There were small tins with special pull tabs, unidentifiable cow and sheep parts gussied up to sound like a gourmet French feast. His stomach tightened at
the sight. A swell of nausea overcame him as he saw orange-coloured frozen pizza samples, pepperoni sticks dotted with fat. In sight of the exit, his mind numb, he hurried past mounds of oversize produce, deaf now to the
ping-ping
of cash registers and overhead speakers announcing the day’s specials. He stumbled through the automatic doors, feeling the cold from inside mixing with the heat outside. The air shimmered.

He inhaled deeply and walked to the edge of the pavement, his back to a row of open car trunks. A woman dressed in a bright pink halter whipped grocery bags into her Jeep. Two girls picked through a book of stickers while the mother of one of the girls hunted for her car keys. A young clerk helped a well-dressed older man carry a crate of soft drinks to his hatchback. Andrei felt torn, part of him repelled by all the indulgence, part of him wanting to fit in, envious of the self-possessed shoppers rushing home to their families. Such purposeful people—had they ever felt at odds with the world? Had their own actions ever horrified them?

As Andrei stood and watched, he felt more and more inconse-quential. He didn’t belong. Strangely, what struck him most was the awareness that there was no one watching
him.
Back home, he had experienced an intimate nearness to others, with all the accompanying strife and harmony. Here, it was as if he didn’t exist.

Yet in the same instant Andrei knew he was everything he hadn’t been before. He was free to sleep with men and not marry, keep a pet or two, buy a colour television, practise religion, listen to Bach or AC/DC—any of which, back in Romania, would have marked him as a likely enemy of the state. In his newly adopted home, he could count on a certain degree of tolerance. Provided he was discreet, provided he did not overstep anyone’s idea of decorum and good taste, his personal preferences would remain his own affair.

It was his dream. His big North American dream. The freedom to do what he pleased. Opportunities everywhere. So why did he feel so miserable?

The fight had gone out of him, he realized, because there was no longer a monolithic force to fight against. He felt oddly diminished. He was a man standing on the periphery of human activity. He could be waiting for a friend. A child. A spouse. He could be Albanian. Or Italian.

As he contemplated his situation, a young man swept past, accidentally brushing against him. Andrei’s heart raced at the sight of the man’s wavy dark hair, the sleek neck rising from a white T-shirt. A familiar smell. Andrei tried to concentrate on a billboard at the farthest edge of the parking lot, but a memory had been roused. Unsure, he remained still, but there was a stirring, and the blood filled him, a bolt of longing shot directly to his groin. He crouched, embarrassed by this sudden flicker of excitement.

When the arousal faded it was replaced by a dull ache in his chest. He blinked back tears. All the tension that had been building inside of him needed to be released. How could he be heard? Throw himself on the ground? Pound the concrete? Blurt out some profanity that would trumpet his presence, like a brick shattering a pane of glass? But when the moment passed, he was still standing, appearing as nonchalant as everyone else who walked through the In and Out doors of the grocery store.

A sweet yeasty aroma drifted from a nearby bakery. A dozen bagels for three dollars. Poppyseed or sesame. Andrei couldn’t remember the last time his cheeks had been stuffed with food. Meringue that melted decadently on the tongue. Diabolically rich eclairs. He made a mental note to buy a toaster the minute he could afford one. So many choices. Shirt pressed or crumpled? Shoes re-soled or replaced? Hair
freshly cut, with or without a shave? Choices that would have been momentous back home were minor here.

Andrei walked by a family-style restaurant and through the window saw a couple dining on giant steaks. He saw the woman pare away the gristle with a sharp knife before taking a bite.

Nibbling diamonds and chewing hundred-dollar bills was the way he thought of it.

Andrei wrote his mother one letter after he had settled in Toronto. He tried postcards, but within a year he stopped sending those. By that time, he had heard a story about a Romanian family who were forced out of their home for having a defector son. The Securitate chose the middle of the night to evict them, boarding up every window and door of their house, then plastering the exterior walls with every letter and postcard the son had ever sent home. Years of intercepted correspondence neatly pasted up like wallpaper. Why the Securitate had waited so long wasn’t explained. The story sickened Andrei, and after that, he opted for the painful but less incriminating course of silence.

“But you wrote to tell her that you had arrived in Canada safely.”

“Yes. And out of homesickness.”

A squeaky ceiling fan was whirling directly above me. My face now felt dry. A warm breeze passed through the window.

Andrei was standing by the sink preparing iced tea. When the kettle reached a boil, he poured the gurgling water into a teapot. I watched him empty a tray of ice cubes into two wide glasses and thought about homesickness. I was trying to fathom what it would be like to leave everything and everyone I knew behind. How, after thirty years, could someone suddenly pack a bag and walk away? There had to be some single moment of decision.

“Were there many people—?”

“At the grocery store?” The ice cubes popped and crackled as he poured the warm tea over them.

“No. In your country. Were there many trying to leave when you did?”

“Yes. Then, before, after. There were always stories, from as early as I can remember—people hiding in the seats of cars, in wine barrels; people escaping by sea, through underground tunnels, even by hot-air balloon.”

“But what happened to the ones who didn’t succeed? Did they end up in jail?”

“Some did. But soon there weren’t enough jail cells for all those trying to run. And to improve his image with the West, the dictator released all but the most dangerous opponents. Anyway, it didn’t matter. We’d become our own jailers. We were so used to being watched, we began watching ourselves.”

I
N
N
ICOLAE AND
A
NDREI
’
S
class there was a student by the name of Ion who had succumbed wholeheartedly to the influence of the dictator and expressed his devotion by betraying others. Still in his early twenties, Ion already looked like the comedic image of a rising bureaucrat, in his imported clothes, always reeking of cologne.

He was the one who had reported Nicolae for handing out
samizdat
leaflets a year earlier. So when Nicolae was summoned again in February, they assumed that Ion was the one responsible. Four months before Andrei and Nicolae’s defection, three men in heavy coats approached Nicolae as he walked toward the university engineering building. A routine check, they said, and escorted him on foot to a small apartment near St. Stephen’s Tower, one of several rooms the Securitate leased around Baia Mare.

Nicolae was directed toward a desk in the far corner and told to keep his coat on and remain standing. The room was horribly overheated. But he tried to appear calm, waiting for his eyes to adjust to the room’s dimness. Minutes passed and finally an officer emerged from the kitchen holding a plate of dumplings. The officer sat down at the desk, removed a pair of cufflinks, rolled up his shirt sleeves and began eating the food with his fingers.

He ate with his eyes fixed on Nicolae. Apricot syrup dribbled onto the wood surface. The officer’s moustache became sloppy and wet. The room seemed to grow warmer. Why did the officer insist on eating so slowly? Nicolae wondered. At last, the officer wiped his fingers on a napkin, reached for his notebook and began to fan himself, revealing the silver roots of his dyed hair.

The interrogation was quick. A round of questions, seemingly random, but precise. Nicolae was kept standing, and his mind took a zigzag course as he tried to follow and then anticipate the abrupt changes of subject. The officer’s tone was direct, his face inviting and amiable. Nicolae knew that they were trying to disarm him; replacing shouts and threats, his interrogator’s informality and false camaraderie was disconcerting in its own way.

“…no more Solzhenitsyn?”

“…copy of Saul Bellow?”

“…brother-in-law, a backroom abortionist?”

“…practise chemistry like your esteemed father?”

“…anti-state activities?”

“…contacts in the West?”

To seem co-operative, Nicolae would nod or shake his head. When it was unavoidable, he gave brief answers.

“…a fiancée?”

“And children?”

“…your duty to replenish the population?”

Next, he was given a blank piece of paper and commanded to write down the name of every “dissident” he knew. Nicolae picked up the pen, pretended to think for a moment, then handed back the pen, shaking his head. The officer returned to his seat and stirred his coffee, clinking the spoon against the cup.

The immunity Nicolae had experienced for being the son of a long-standing Party member was eroding.

Two weeks later he was summoned again. This time, he was seated in front of a blank paper and ordered to write down the name of every homosexual he knew. He remembered the interrogator’s thick, diamond-centred wedding ring, as a heavy hand clapped his shoulder. Nicolae considered his options and picked up the pen. He wrote two names:
Dinu
and
Pavel.
And then he lowered his pen, his hand shaking. Dinu and Pavel were already notorious. Old men from the outskirts of Baia Mare, the thought of whom stirred up complicated feelings in Nicolae. They encapsulated all his fears of becoming vagrant and disparaged, yet they represented all his dreams of certainty; the selfacceptance he coveted, they wore as a shield.