The Letter Opener Read online

  “Well, then,” she said, after we had placed our orders. “Before I forget, I have something for you.” She dug around in her bag and brought out a package wrapped in tissue. “I met up with Dad during my layover at Heathrow. It’s from him. Burberry.”

  “Thanks,” I said, staring dumbly at the plaid scarf I had unwrapped. I was still taking in all the information I had just been given. “I didn’t realize you’ve been keeping in regular touch with him.”

  “Off and on. Lately more on,” she said, trying to sound indifferent. She stood up and draped the scarf around my neck. “Well?”

  “Very nice.” I took it off and laid it carefully across my lap. “It must have been expensive.”

  She shrugged. “He can afford it. Which reminds me,” she said, leaning forward, “we were talking and guess what? He wants to help pay for you to finish your degree.”

  I leaned back. “No way. Forget it.”

  “Think about it.”

  “No,” I said.

  I folded up the scarf and shoved it in my coat pocket. By now, I understood that my sister was on an errand. I had become a “cause” uniting my sister and my father. They were both devious.

  “How’s Paolo?” she asked, changing the subject.

  “Fine. Busy. He’s been doing a lot of weddings lately. You should see some of the arrangements they ask him to make. They’re hideous. And they all have these epic names like Love’s Jubilant Glory—”

  “He’s still at the flower shop?” She narrowed her eyes. “Isn’t it time you both had a fresh start?”

  “Don’t, Kana.”

  “Are you living together yet?” She inspected a fingernail.

  I shook my head.

  “At least he’s better than that last guy you dated.”

  “Eric.”

  “Paolo’s sweet. He just needs someone to work on his fashion sense. Those flannel shirts and ratty cords…” She shuddered.

  “I like the way he dresses.” I took a deep breath. “What about you? Are you still with Daniel?”

  “John. When we find the time. He’s been assigned to the Jerusalem bureau. But I think it’s starting to get to him. He keeps sending me cards signed ‘Flak Jack.’ Hey, “—she fished through her bag again—“did you bring any cigarettes?”

  “Uh-uh. I quit.”

  “Wish I could,” she said, tossing her bag onto the empty chair beside her and gesturing to the waiter. “You know, there are career counsellors.”

  I scowled at her. “I like my job.”

  “You’re a glorified clerk.”

  “I’m not a clerk. I’m a mail recovery employee.” No matter what anyone says, there is a hierarchy. People in mail recovery feel superior to window clerks, who, in turn, feel superior to letter carriers, who, in turn, feel superior to the machine operators in Primary Sort.

  “You’re almost thirty, Naiko, for chrissakes.”

  Kana is a journalist with The Independent. In any given week she’ll hop between England and France, or wherever, covering stories on soccer riots, immigration reform and government corruption.

  Kana has her suitcase. Her days zip by. My days come and go with an almost liturgical consistency.

  She’s the daughter my father wanted.

  Every morning, I ride to work on the bus, a twenty-minute journey past landscaped factories and new subdivisions rising from muddy plots. Every day, I scan the billboards from my window seat as we pass car dealerships with their plastic flags flying and Asian grocers with their crowded storefronts. I hold my takeout coffee, taking small sips until I feel the bitter sediment on my tongue. The doors wheeze open and shut. It is not until I experience the hiss of the brakes, so loud it sends a shiver up and down my spine, that I feel fully alert.

  I am at ease among the familiar crowd. The man leaning against the silver pole, the smell of wet smoke on his clothing and hair. The university student, about my age, very pale and thin, even in her puffy down jacket. (Lately she has been reading Ulysses, which I’ve started a couple of times and never finished.) The harried young woman, also about my age but eight months pregnant, with her singing toddler and “family-size” box of Tide.

  Of course, there are days when the journey is unpleasant, mornings when I witness school kids bullying one another or find myself sitting beside someone with a severe cough. I don’t mind the mutterers but I do my best to avoid those passengers who, without provocation, erupt into abusive rants or sexually explicit monologues. My boyfriend, Paolo, detests public transit. For the most part, I find that riding on the bus gives me a feeling of contentment. For a short, suspended time, I am in harmony with others.

  That Friday morning I remember watching the toddler bouncing on his seat while his mother struggled to undo his scarf. As I smiled in sympathy, I instinctively raised my hand and felt for the scarf my father had sent me. Andrei had been gone for almost a week. I turned back toward the window and watched the freezing rain splash across the glass.

  “Some people would rather not be found.”

  That’s what the police officer said, explaining the protocol around missing persons. “A child’s disappearance is an immediate Amber Alert. But with capable adults, things can get muddy.”

  Of course, I was upset by his words. I thought I knew Andrei well. I couldn’t imagine that he wouldn’t want to be found. What I have learned since is that men, the ones who are not obviously endangered or victims of foul play, seldom disappear in any passive sense of the term. Men run. They escape, they bolt, they hide, they pursue. They start new lives, with new names, in new places. They feel no need to explain.

  Two

  Pens in a glass jar, flower-print calendar, ledger book, a pair of cotton dust gloves. Such small anchors are my bearings. Every morning when the mail trucks arrive and the doors clatter open, I pull out the drawer and fish out a pair of fleece socks. I layer them over my regular socks so that my feet do not get prickly from the cold. After that, I grope in the drawer for my vitamins. I take one from the bottle and lean back against the chair, chewing it slowly, watching as Marvin makes his way across the floor.

  If you repeat particular actions over and over, you can feel them creating a protective force field around you, dissolving your worries, making you feel safe. When something unexpected happens, you can feel that force field being broken. Andrei’s arrival in my life was like that. It broke me open.

  Andrei started working at the Undeliverable Mail Office just ten months ago. When he first sauntered in, a confused expression on his face, he seemed like someone who had taken a wrong turn. (I later learned that he had misplaced his only pair of glasses, which explained his exaggerated squint that first day.) Everyone focused on him: a compact and attractive young man, with a disorderly head of light brown hair and a prominent, almost Roman nose. Doreen, seated at her reception desk, seemed particularly enthralled, and I am quite sure I saw her glance at his hand to see if he wore a wedding band.

  It was Baba, however, who made the first move. He stood to welcome his old friend. (When Andrei first arrived in Canada, they had worked together as waiters at a hotel near the airport. Baba, in fact, had recommended him for this job.) Andrei squinted and smiled, perceptibly relieved to see Baba approaching from across the room: Baba’s outstretched arms of welcome, Baba’s mouth grinning in a wide hello. Andrei walked forward to meet him. Their mutual delight was obvious, yet once they stood face to face, a formality came over them. They shook hands, smiled, but did not embrace. I sensed an established boundary that could not be crossed, like the starched custom of some other era.

  The closer Andrei got, the more handsome he appeared. Broad forehead, defined cheekbones, angular jaw—strong, balanced, masculine. Just the sort of face that women are generally attracted to.

  As the manager walked him around, making introductions, I noticed the first signs of an endearing awkwardness. He gave everyone he met his rapt attention, but said odd things like: “I am extremely happy to be here. And you? Are you sati
sfied?” He scribbled quickly in his notebook while the manager explained various office matters to him, but every now and then I would catch him nodding repeatedly like a catatonic child. He seemed oblivious to the people eyeing him.

  Andrei was assigned to sort the “intact parcels.” On his first day following his training, I watched as he systematically organized his desk, lining his pens to his left in order of size and colour and stacking his notebooks to the right so that they aligned exactly with the corner of the desktop. Then he methodically positioned his chair to ensure that the sun, which was streaming through the windows, no longer troubled him.

  Though his desk was next to my own, we didn’t have our first true conversation for several weeks. The first time I ventured a hello, Andrei said hello back so punctually that I was left speechless. Had I been snubbed? Or was he simply asserting his right to privacy in an open space without walls or office cubes? When the manager walked by to pick up our time sheets, the interruption was a relief. I began running through my head two or three sentences that I could use to engage him at the next opportunity: friendly but not overeagerly so.

  My preparations proved to be unnecessary. A few days later Andrei initiated a conversation by asking me how long I had worked at the office. He was starting to note my existence and I could feel him studying me as if judging whether I could be trusted. He spoke English comfortably, though his speech was deliberate and strongly inflected, the words strung together with a Romanian rhythm. Even when he mixed up words, such as “undecorating” or “earwitness,” it was clear what he meant. When he couldn’t think of a word, he moved his hands in the air like whisks.

  The third time we spoke, Andrei was sorting the plain brown packages from the ones that came gift-wrapped for birthdays and holidays. He was wearing a navy blue sweater, one of the few he seemed to own. His face was scrunched in concentration. I followed his hands, his gestures of gently raising each package, inspecting it, setting it down again and then writing on his clipboard. He stopped at a small yellow package. He tested its weight, squeezed its contents curiously. It was taped down at the lip and edged with animal stickers and flowery doodles.

  “Look at this,” he said. “A child’s handwriting. It’s addressed to her ‘Daddy.’”

  “What does it say there?” I pointed to a tiny square of writing in the bottom corner.

  He held it closer and read, “‘Fragile. Keep flat.’ Or, more precisely, ‘Frygil. Keep Fat.’”

  We both laughed. Then I examined the package. “It’s sad. The kid probably doesn’t know the package was lost and her father may not know it was ever sent.”

  “Hmm,” he said, then took off his new glasses and held them up to the light. “But life is full of bad connections. We all know it; we just trust in luck.” He exhaled on the lenses and then wiped them with the arm of his coarsely knit sweater.

  I looked at his face, at his pale lips and his boyishly smooth skin.

  “Let me see what’s inside,” he said, slicing open the end with an exacto knife. Out slid a folded note, a packet of powdered cake mix and a box of candles. He picked up the paper and looked it over on both sides. After a moment he shook his head. “No luck.” He made a note of the contents, closed the package back up with adhesive tape, then printed the word Abandon across the front.

  Beside him was a stack of parcels with blurred writing. Black ink ran like spider legs across the face of the top parcel. The signature of a cloudburst.

  The manager passed by our desks, scrutinizing, frowning. I glanced up and he nodded slightly. I got back to work. Andrei had moved on to the other bundles, devoting sleuth-like attention to those that still had a chance of being repatriated. Careful fingers worked at each sealed seam until the contents spilled out.

  When the packages and bins contained money or other valuables, we laid them carefully on a side table. These items were later collected and delivered to Baba’s workstation. It was Baba’s job to attend to “major” valuables, but he had a love–hate relationship with his work. In the abstract, he accepted the delineation between items of “major” and “minor” value as a necessary part of postal organization, but anyone who spent a week in his company was bound to hear him soliloquize about the West’s tendency to separate “matter” from “spirit.” Under Islam it was important to show respect for the humbler things in life.

  “Why differentiate? Why put money before sentiment? This pen is the means of poems. And even the silliest poem says more than that monstrosity!” he said, pointing disdainfully at a gold bracelet. “Why are people addicted to junk?”

  Despite his philosophical reservations, which were always stated with good humour, Baba continued to preside over the subdivision of items deemed by Canada Post to be of “market worth.” He was chosen because he was conscientious and fast. (In the early days of mail recovery this branch of the office tended to be run by retired clergy, whom it was felt could be trusted with items of value. Baba was our man-of-the-cloth equivalent.) He was a first-rate decipherer who had a genuine flair for working out the scrawled addresses on international mail. He also had expert penmanship—small, perfectly sloped script, which he had learned at boarding school in Beirut. If an envelope addressed to Benji Williams containing a hundred-dollar bill and a note that read For your wee pocket. xxo Grandma went astray, Baba could be trusted to record it. Turning to W in his ledger, Baba would find the number 12796 and, beside it, enter the name “Williams,” the postmark date and the amount “$100” in careful block letters. In the column marked Addressee, he would enter “24 Dover Crescent, Oakville,” and a note “No Known Party,” followed by “Illegible Return Address.” If the gift was claimed, the word “Returned” would be added to another column along with a date.

  We still worked in an archaic world of longhand, carbon paper, rubber stamps and filing cabinets. Computers were slow to arrive at the mail office. Despite their renovation of other public institutions, their benefits for our work were still unclear. The job of sorting through mangled mail and defunct correspondence relied so much on the analog process of touch, on logic, or, failing that, on hit-and-miss.

  Many of us secretly adapted our record books so the entries would tell us more at a glance. Baba added his own final column, a sliver-thin space in which he marked an S if he felt an item was particularly special and a U if he thought it was useless. I developed a star system, with four pencilled stars designating the objects I cared about the most, the ones I would spend the most time and effort attempting to repatriate. Some things resisted automation.

  “Three minutes per package,” Andrei said.

  “Is that what they told you it took?” I asked.

  “Yes. If you go by The Manual. The mail recovery book says that three minutes is the average time needed to trace a package back to its owner.”

  “Ah, of course. The Manual.”

  “Three minutes is just enough time to take in the essential things,” he said.

  “Meaning that there’s no time to snoop.”

  “Exactly.”

  Even so, I felt a dash of shame when I came across anything that was unmistakably private. Riffling through a woman’s diary, handling her most personal keepsakes, the sentimental poems she had written on scented paper, the pornographic pictures someone had taken in a bathroom stall. At such times it helped to work swiftly, with the composure and efficiency of a doctor carrying out a pelvic exam. Voyeurism was the tendency to linger.

  I have to admit that Andrei was a consummate letter opener. By this I mean he was ethical in the extreme. He treated his access to other people’s lives as a privilege not to be mistreated. If Andrei’s lost mail contained secrets, so they remained.

  Three minutes per package. Andrei was studying the contents of a small green tin. Snuggled in a nest of shredded newspaper was a bag of homemade cookies to be disposed of immediately, as were all perishable things. He placed a red pencil mark on the accompanying greeting card, a chocolate-brown stamp on the envelope, the
Latin phrase Post Obitum—and the gift was dead.

  The truth is that fewer than half of the thousands of packages that pass through the building reach their intended destination. The rest lie stacked on shelves and stuffed into storage bins: annals of doomed friendship, misdirected love, lost relations. The backroom is always crammed with canvas bags, their mouths cinched closed, their sides tattooed with the word Undeliverable. A thick cover of dust coats everything. Particles float in the light. Spiders twirl their threads and the husks of dead insects lie in corners.

  An archive of misery. Or so I had always thought.

  I can see now that only after Andrei’s arrival did the daily dead mail offer new life. The piles of misfortune didn’t dampen Andrei’s morale; rather, they revealed his optimism, as if misadventures were part of him and all his life he’d been sorting them out. Wasn’t it remarkable, he’d say, that anything ever reached its destination at all? Wasn’t it wonderful that things sometimes turned out as you’d hoped?

  Did some lost token of love ever touch him deeply? I never asked and he never said. Occasionally, I would notice him create a careful line drawing in his beloved notebook of an item on his desk—a bicycle pump, a model ship (the latter rendered in cutaway perspective)—but these drawings seemed less an expression of sentimentality and more a study in technical design: a reminder of the engineering student he had once been, and the inventor he hoped to one day become. I assume that for every pile he waded through, only a handful of objects stood out. The remainder would have been perfunctory messages sent on the occasion of a birthday or to someone travelling: John getting over a cold, Sylvie having a new baby, father’s upcoming surgery, the weather, the food. Flat, formulaic words sent without much thought; words that feigned interest but escaped involvement, words that maintained a distance.

  The morning he showed me the “Frygil, Keep Fat” package, Andrei offered to make us some tea. As he drifted off to the kitchen, I found myself staring blankly at my bin. All the objects from the morning delivery beckoned to me eagerly. Crocheted baby clothes, a satin scarf, a bottle of body lubricant, pencils with fuzzy pompoms…I sifted the satin through my fingers, enjoying the slippery smoothness. I tucked two fingers into a tiny cashmere mitten.