The Letter Opener Read online

  Andrei returned with two mugs and sat down. I turned my chair toward him. The steam curled slowly from the surface of the tea.

  “I keep thinking about what you said about bad connections,” I said. “Because really, when it comes down to it, I’m not what you’d call a virtuoso of personal interaction. It’s like I’m lacking some sort of social gene. I’m either half-communicating or half the time missing the point.”

  Andrei massaged the bridge of his nose, didn’t say anything. We sat in comfortable silence, drinking our tea. Finally, as if arranging space for a reply, Andrei pushed his mug a few centimetres away from him.

  “Do you have a husband or a boyfriend?” he asked.

  “Yes,” I said, surprised by his directness, “Kind of. Yes. A boyfriend. His name is Paolo. He’s from Argentina.”

  “Do you talk well together?”

  “You mean are we open with each other?”

  “Yes.”

  “Most of the time.”

  “So you trust him?”’

  “Yes.”

  “And he trusts you?”

  “I think so.”

  “And generally you understand each other?”

  “On good days.”

  “Well then, you should consider yourself fortunate. You have a good connection with someone. You can share your specificity.”

  “Specificity?”

  “I don’t know if I am saying it right,” he said. “What I mean is the opposite of generality—you know, your surface. Your public face.” He paused. “Most people need the comfort of generalities,” he continued. “They want to say only the correct things. They prefer conventions. They hide their specificity.”

  I thought, at that moment, of my late grandfather. He was a smart man, but he couldn’t bring himself to say anything that wasn’t brilliant. His words and finally his silences had to be profound, so that he couldn’t tell his children that he missed them, or his wife that he loved her.

  “But some conventions are important, don’t you think? They’re reassuring,” I argued.

  “You’re right. Some conventions are necessary. They are deeply felt.”

  “But you think most aren’t.”

  “No. Most are filling.”

  “You mean filler.”

  “Yes, filler. We avoid being precise or specific because we are lazy, or scared, or indifferent. Every day we say to someone, ‘How are you?’ but we really don’t want the details.”

  “Unless the details are exciting,” I said. And I held up a burlesque-dancer salt shaker. “Comme ça.“

  Andrei laughed. We sat there smiling at each other for a moment. As his mouth widened, I noticed a few missing molars, dark gaps at the back.

  “Now, if you will excuse me,” he said, stretching and rising from his chair, “I must go precisely and specifically to the loo.”

  I sifted through the bucket beside me. Picking up a small wooden music box, I lightly traced its border of seashells, thinking again of what he called the comfort of generalities. Of course, he was right. After all, intimacy would be diluted if expressed too readily. Even with Paolo, I often felt myself coasting on the surface, relying on physical instead of emotional closeness.

  Was it self-preservation, dishonesty, lack of courage? I tried to imagine a life in which every conversation was a revolt against triteness. All that unfettered frustration, euphoria, nostalgia, sullenness and anger suddenly loose in the room.

  Imagine the fatigue! It was a wonder, I thought, that anyone ever speaks from the heart. Most occasions call for a defiant shallowness. More impersonal, maybe, but more sensible, too.

  Three

  When I learned from Baba that Andrei was a refugee, I began to study him more intently.

  “No one would think you’re a refugee,” I said.

  “Well, I am. And what do you think a refugee should look like?”

  I called to mind images of refugees—images formed from what I assumed must be their suffering. Columns of muted people travelling on foot, inching westward. And where had these images come from?

  Honestly? The Concert for Bangladesh. George Harrison’s charity event for homeless Bengali refugees, which I had first seen on television in the early 1970s. (I was embarrassed to admit to Andrei that my first impressions had come from a rock concert.) What I remember most clearly about the event was the song “My Sweet Lord” accompanying a fundraising appeal during a concert intermission, the euphoric, pot-stoked chorus playing as a flow of soundless people passed across the screen. Exhausted women balancing precious possessions on their heads, clutching pots, pans, bedding and babies—always their babies; desperate people whose salvaged belongings seemed at times incongruous, like the woman bearing a rice-sack to which she had tied a small painting of gold flowers. I remember a boy walking beside her. The sun above them was bright and constant, a hot, indifferent sun. I remember fighting the impulse to look away. I could see that the boy was about my age and for this reason he was harder to watch.

  What happened to that boy and his family? Did they ever return home? Did they reach across North America and establish new villages—such as the Somalians with their New Mogadishus or the Vietnamese with their Little Saigons? Were they transformed into parking lot attendants or night watchmen or pizza delivery “boys“?

  What made Andrei a refugee? Was it his bony chest? No, that was too obvious. His second-hand wardrobe? Perhaps, but that could also be attributed to general thriftiness. (I, for one, regularly shopped at Goodwill.) The reality was that there was no single outstanding characteristic—and why should there have been? Andrei frequently saved half his sandwich and kept the remaining Saran Wrap to use later, but to a different degree, I, too, was frugal. He appeared to own few personal belongings, but so did I. As to his deference to the manager, which seemed then the classic survivalism of the refugee, well now so much later I look more closely at myself, at my own often deferential demeanour. There were layers and layers to Andrei, I would discover, and refugee was but the latest, and thinnest.

  “Anyway,” Andrei was saying, “people don’t generally like to be called ‘refugees.’ That’s a file word. Like ‘asylum-seeker.’ Or ‘displaced person.’ People have their prejudices about refugees.”

  It was a clear message telling me how to be his friend, and so, in the coming months, I learned to listen as a diarist might, without presumption or pity. I was not to cast him among the earth’s indigent—the limbo dwellers, the invisible people.

  “Don’t forget,” he said, “Einstein was a refugee.”

  Despite Andrei’s previous friendship with Baba, I quickly became his closest companion at work. He did most of the talking. Every now and then I asked a question, and as the weeks passed I could sense the foundation of our friendship strengthening with every revealed detail, every shared idea. I never thought to ask, Why are you telling me? It just seemed natural and necessary.

  I recognized, early on, that Andrei was withdrawn—it’s what he preferred. Only gradually did I uncover his specificities: the sketches of his eccentric inventions, his collection of newspaper clippings, his passion for chess. When he spoke about anything he loved (his mother, the river near his house in Romania, the sound of a steel-string guitar), his eyes lit up, and his very skin seemed to glow.

  Early in May, two months after his arrival, he pushed his chair around his work table so that we sat back to back. I remember the wonderful feeling of sitting close to him, a softly humming body warmth. Such a warmth that I felt I must have wished for it—yet to what end I did not know.

  And I realized that just as I had been drawn to Andrei, something was drawing Andrei to me, and it eased my image of myself: the bumpy texture of my skin, the solid unmoving mass of hair. With Paolo, it sometimes felt as if there was nothing more to know. With Andrei it felt as if I was at the beginning of knowing. He pushed me into a dizzying world of defectors and stowaways. He was like one of the mystery packages that arrived at the office come alive.

/>   One afternoon while we were sharing a lunch break, he confessed to me that homesickness was interfering with his sleep.

  “Can I be personal for a moment?” he asked.

  “Of course. What is it?”

  “It’s a dream, you know, one of those night horrors. I’m worlds away from everyone, feeling very lost, trying to reach out to others and panicking that I’m forgotten, that I’m nothing, and the part of me that knows how much I have to be thankful for, well, it’s sliding away. When I wake up—I hope you don’t mind me telling you this—there’s you and Baba. And my job, and my birds, and all the bits and pieces I remember about my country, and I’m so grateful!”

  It was such an unexpected moment, so revealing of his emotions, and of my part in his new life, that I can no longer remember my exact response. I know I reassured him, but I can’t recall the words I used. Still, I know I was deeply touched. You see, Andrei took several months to tell me the story of his life. It was a long story with many offshoots and detours, so that what I am recounting here is a reassembled summary. Have I remembered it correctly? Have I imagined scenes he never actually described to me? He sometimes told me several versions of the same event and perhaps I have been selective. What is clear, however, are the key moments that shaped his life.

  ANDREI ARRIVED IN TORONTO in the summer of 1984. A room had been arranged for him at a settlement house in the west end of the city. He spent the mornings in a vocational placement program and in the afternoons made his way to the local library, where he read through recent newspapers and magazines. There were regulars at the library. A skinny woman with a faint moustache, and a clothing fetish for any shade of yellow, who surrounded herself with gardening books. An older white man in a sweatsuit who quietly read aloud from the Koran. Another man who was teaching himself German. He sat among these people and before long was greeted with familiarity by the library staff.

  Every day between the hours of 1 and 6 p.m., when the library closed, he gathered facts about his adopted home and copied them onto a pocket-sized writing pad. He looked for what was current, the catchphrases, the names of politicians and celebrities, recent films (although he rarely found the time or money to go to the movies), the names of local parks and city landmarks. He wanted to collect as many household terms as possible, out of curiosity, and also out of eagerness to occupy himself. He read and read. When people spoke of something he didn’t know, he listened attentively, leaping at unusual or unfamiliar bits of speech. He was cracking the social codes and behavioural patterns, the hierarchy of education and class.

  He copied people’s attire and habits, creating a safe character acceptable to his new world. He took to wearing a baseball cap, he dressed in blue jeans and a grey T-shirt with the words Dalhousie Men’s Diving emblazoned across the front in a distinguished, collegiate typeface. Every morning he put aside his dimes and nickels for the library’s photocopy machine, double-counting his change so that when he dropped the coins into the slot he could do so with the unthinking ease of a regular.

  It took some time to get used to the eccentricities of his new home. Exiting a streetcar. Operating a pay phone. Reading a map. Finding an address. Such simple everyday things, which at first held the fear of failure, became a test of belonging. Each misstep left him feeling alien and unprotected.

  When Andrei spoke with the other men at the settlement house, men who had travelled from all over the world fleeing wars and political oppression, they shared only details from the present, safe things, in scraps of English. They were not down-and-outs; they would be moving on. They were all just biding time until the day they could begin their real lives.

  Every few months one left and another arrived.

  The settlement house reflected their transience. There were pots and pans, clothes, milk crates, pillows, plates, towels, a TV set, mattresses, an electric stove, a fridge. But there were no pictures, no scented candles or ornaments, nothing personal that tied them to this place and time whose memories they would someday erase. By Andrei’s fourth month, a sense of kinship had developed among the men, but they were a momentary family who could disperse without regret or record.

  Of the residents, only Andrei and a South African spoke English prior to their arrival. The other men knew the words revolution, interrogation, embassy, displaced person, exile, death squad, but otherwise spoke like children, stringing together disjointed phrases—words that didn’t have much to do with the thoughts they were having, or the half world they lived in. Urged on by an exuberant ESL teacher, they mouthed the language of parrots: Hi, how are you? Nice day, isn’t it? Would you care for a coffee? Their accents slowed them down, but no more than if they had been taught to say, Do you know what’s happening in my country? Do you know what brought me here?

  As time passed and the expected days and weeks at the settlement house grew into months, the men increasingly began to share, if not their secrets, their daily routine. In the evenings, they did domestic chores, played cards on the bare floor surrounded by empty pizza boxes, smoked cigarettes or watched the international news on a springless couch, whispering, praying, cursing. There was footage of floods in Indonesia, famine in Ethiopia, drought in India and earthquakes in Peru. There were ads for cars, sugar cereal and floor cleaner. There was a story about the U.S. president’s favourite jelly beans.

  For Christmas, his first year in Canada, Andrei received from his roommates a bottle of wine, a digital watch and a clear plastic cube with Canadian coins embedded inside. In Andrei’s mind, there was a distinct line that divided Romania from Canada. On the Canadian side of the line were the gifts he received from those first roommates in Toronto. On the Romanian side was a pair of shoes.

  Four

  Andrei could never forget that on the morning he left his home for the last time, his favourite shoes were somewhere under his mother’s bed. They were leather shoes the colour of dark grapes. He hadn’t intended to leave them behind, but by the time he remembered them, his mother was asleep and he did not want to risk waking her. The previous evening he had left a letter for her with a woman named Ileana with instructions that she was not to deliver it until two days had passed. He knew that it would be impossible to depart with his mother’s blessing. He rummaged through his closet and found an old pair of running shoes that he laced shut with a piece of packing string. At 4 a.m., he hurried from the house. In his right hand he held a plastic bag containing his belongings. His boyfriend, Nicolae, awaited him as planned in a car parked just off the town’s main square.

  During the preparations for his departure, Andrei had convinced himself that he was reducing his mother’s burden by leaving. And although he was heartsick to part from his family, it was the only thing he could think to do. The state police would soon arrest him. Yet now, as he rushed toward the square, he was struck by another truth: he was a deserter. That sudden thought so stunned him that he halted in front of the pharmacy. He contemplated turning back. There was still time to change his mind, to go directly to Ileana and tear up the implicating letter.

  Had he misjudged the severity of his situation—the threat of the Securitate, his own helplessness?

  He stood there, cemented to the ground. The sky began to lighten, the first minutes of daybreak passed, and then, as abruptly as he had stopped, Andrei continued walking. Whatever motive had propelled him to this point had been right. Turning back was as precarious as going forward, and his heart and mind said forward. It was June 1984 and he was headed for the port of Cernavoda on the Danube–Black Sea Canal.

  Andrei had grown up in a small bordertown in northern Transylvania that had at various times belonged to Hungary and Romania. Once known as a smuggling centre, the town had long since lost allure. Gone were the days of gambling houses and brothels. All that was left were poorly stocked stores: a government ration shop for flour and sugar, and vegetable stalls reduced to selling wormy apples and withered cabbages.

  The food shortages were so severe that the government had ann
ounced a “scientific” diet for its citizens. Meat and excess starch and vegetables were unhealthy, declared the Health Minister. At the same time that truckloads of fresh crops were being transported to the capital for export, pamphlets began appearing that showed thin but happy families sitting down for dinner together. The pamphlets, which made a virtue out of eating less, were not warmly received. Within a week, they could be found littered around public spaces, defaced with drawings of corpulent politicians, overinflated balloon faces with Dracula-like fangs.

  Thinking of food was excruciating; Andrei fantasized about bright red tomatoes, buttered bread, spiced meat, honey loaves with centres as soft as cotton. At night the craving was overpowering, and he would chew on his leather watchband, twisting the straps between his teeth to extract some imagined meal.

  Andrei and his mother and brother fished from the river and grew their own food when they could. They relied on a small garden plot of hardy root crops, tucked discreetly behind the house. Sturdy beet leaves, feathery carrot tops, and pale-green onion stalks; a sweet earthy fragrance filled the air when the muddy harvest was pulled from the ground. Each morning Andrei would kneel to pat down the soil, delighting in its wet heaviness on his hands. Before she left for work at the dressmaking shop, his mother, Sarah, prepared an evening meal for the family, creating soups and stews from the meagre supplies. Pearls of barley sinking into vigorously boiling pots of liquid, adding a bit of thickness and bulk.

  They had the mountains to thank, Andrei once said.

  The Carpathians. Their snow-capped peaks were visible from the kitchen window. The mountains were their blessing, their shield. Foothills were strewn with tough bushes and wildflowers. Mechanized farming was impossible on this kind of land. In other parts of the country, bulldozers were razing villages to pave the way for agroindustrial complexes. Throughout the early 1980s, high-rise housing projects shot up everywhere, an endless horizon of concrete conformity. The dictator Ceausescu crushed homes and carted families off as if he were forklifting boxes in a warehouse. Anyone who asked questions or resisted found themselves summoned by the Securitate.