The Letter Opener Read online

  Unlike villages to the south, Andrei’s village had been preserved for centuries. Some of the houses still had their original wooden mouldings and fixtures. Andrei’s house had belonged to his mother’s family since before the deportations in 1944. Nearly four decades later, it was still identified by locals as an Evreica, or “Jew,” house on the basis of its design. Blue walls the colour of robins’ eggs and pale yellow trim. Filigreed borders. Large arched windows. “The house that still stood” was what his mother called it.

  Not that their house had always been so intact. Not that the villagers had watched out for it. Quite the reverse. Andrei’s mother, Sarah, was Jewish. The only member of her family to survive the war.

  Back in 1945, piles of overturned earth surrounding former Jewish homes and gardens were pitted with deep holes where neighbours had dug, searching for any valuables hidden by Jewish families in their final hours. Many deportees had committed their cherished possessions to the earth—wrapping jewellery, photos, silver, paintings, everything they hoped one day to rescue.

  So when Andrei’s mother returned alone at the end of the war at the age of fifteen, a survivor of Ravensbrück and a twelve-day march out of the camp, her family house was empty but filled with traces of uninvited company. The delicate film of dust that should have accrued in the family’s absence had been disturbed. The sheer range of footprints and fingerprints suggested that the house had been searched exhaustively on several occasions: scratches and dents on the remaining vandalized furniture, dark yellow rectangles on the pale yellow walls indicating absent pictures, water stains weeping across the dining-room table. Where once there had been light fixtures, there were now only naked bulbs with broken insides, hanging from wires. Holes where windows used to be. Chairs repositioned. Bare bookshelves. Cabinets with sagging doors.

  The remaining contents of drawers were strewn on the floor, items nobody wanted: a single glove, a dried inkpot, a box of clarinet reeds, a tub of skin lotion, a ball of twine, candle stubs. And yet to Sarah this valueless debris seemed as precious as heirlooms.

  She spent the first day of her return in tears, moving from room to room. Toward early evening, she tried to tidy up. She returned the objects to their places, hanging the glove on a hook in the hallway, sliding the inkpot against the wall where her father’s desk had been. She scraped wax drippings from the floor with her fingernails, and used her head scarf to wipe all the doorknobs and faucet heads. She scrubbed the door frame where a brass mezuzah had been pried away, reciting the Sh’ma as she touched her fingers to the bare wood.

  Near midnight, she sealed up the windows as best she could and set up a bed and lantern in the kitchen near the wood stove. She ignored the scuttling sounds coming from the closet and rested her head on a folded towel. When she dimmed the lantern, the discoloured patches on the walls stood out like holes made by a giant fist. She filled them with her memory, creating ghost portraits of her parents and grandparents. She stared at each one of them until she could not imagine the walls without them.

  Sarah’s return to her village elicited total astonishment. She had vanished from the streets and shops of the town and now she had reappeared. She was a spectre, Lazarus returned from the dead, a phantom of the wind. The man at the dairy turned down his radio and stared when she walked in. His mouth gaped. He extended his hand as if reaching to touch, to prove she was solid, then stopped himself. A former schoolmate looked at her and then, without breaking her pace, crossed the street to avoid passing her. Many of them remembered the morning the town ghetto was emptied and the Jews were told to meet at the village school, where they were taken to the trains. Sarah’s existence forced them to recall what they had seen and not seen, how they had watched and how they had looked away. Her survival had the double effect of both allaying their guilt (she was alive) and intensifying it (she was alive in spite of their inaction).

  Sarah knew that she was an unwanted reminder of shameful times, fated to become the conspicuous Jew, to be either pilloried or patronized, treated with too little or too much kindness. Yet she had to remain in the village, a survivor praying for the return of other survivors. The looks of curiosity, of pity, of disdain were the price one paid for waiting in a world that preferred to forget.

  Waiting was Sarah’s way of warding off a conclusion, of delaying the pain of final knowledge. A state of permanent suspension that might have driven others to madness kept Sarah from falling apart. The shock of the war never lessened, but as time passed, Sarah learned that it was possible to form a kinship with even the most shattering of absences. Her shoes resounded across the open floor as she went about keeping house.

  A month after her return, Sarah removed an old door bolt from the basement and brought it upstairs, to protect herself in her new, old home.

  HOW CAN I TRUTHFULLY know the lives of people I have never met? I reassure myself I am as good a detective as any. After all, it has become a life work reconstructing other people’s stories. I spend each day before my mountain of scraps, and imagine.

  When Andrei first told me about his mother what I imagined was this: one girl among hundreds of thousands of silhouettes set against a vast plain of packed snow. I saw the crunch of feet, the march of death. The recesses of the mind are full of the grim images of history waiting to be summoned, and this image possessed me—the figure of a girl trudging along an icy path, slowly fading into the swirling snow.

  “I’m remembering those newsreels we were shown in school about the liberation of the camps, but we were never told what happened to the Jews who survived,” I said.

  “Many people died from disease. But others spent years in other camps, waiting to be resettled, like my mother.”

  “Do you ever wish she had gone west rather than returning to Romania?”

  Andrei was quiet before he answered. “I can’t think that way. If she hadn’t gone back, she wouldn’t have met my father…my brother and I wouldn’t exist…I wouldn’t be sitting here now.” Then he paused and smiled, pointed to the stack of work on his desk. “Just imagine the backlog.”

  And we laughed.

  Once, when I asked Andrei to tell me more about his father, this is what he said:

  “There’s not much to tell.”

  We were walking to the bus stop together after work.

  “When did your mother marry him?” I prodded.

  “When she was eighteen. He was double her age and already a widower. I don’t know if they were ever happy,” he continued. “My father was away so much of the time, working as a miner in the mountains, I don’t know…”

  I nodded.

  “He had one long holiday every year, around New Year’s, which probably explains why both of us, my younger brother and me, were born in September.”

  As we walked, a smile spread across Andrei’s face. “My favourite memory of my father is of lying with him on the couch, singing songs by the Mamas and the Papas that we had memorized, by phonetics, off an illegally copied album.

  “We were lying close together, which is probably why I remember it. My father wasn’t a very touchy kind of person. He didn’t kiss or hug us. My mother was affectionate, but never my father—although he could be sweet with my mother. He had strong ideas about what it meant to be a man.”

  I saw a bus approaching in the distance.

  “When did he die?” I asked.

  “In 1968, when I was eleven. He had emphysema. There was nothing the doctors could do. He wasn’t even sixty. For the last month of his life, he just lay on his bed, taking short breaths from an oxygen tube he held in his hand. Then one morning I woke up and he was curled up on his side, trying to get air. When he stopped breathing, the whole house turned quiet.

  “After he died, I stayed in my room. I had a short-wave radio my father had built years before and I lay on the bed and listened to the music shows on Radio Free Europe. Phil Ochs. Bob Dylan. That sad sandpaper folk music. Every night I listened until the radio transmission stopped. One morning I woke
up and found an extra blanket on the bed and my brother, Eli, sleeping close beside me.

  “Seeing him there made me pull myself together. I remember thinking, If Papa is dead, then it is up to me to protect everyone.“

  SHORTLY AFTER SHE BURIED her husband, Andrei’s mother was presented with an opportunity to emigrate to Israel. News had spread that the dictator was selling Jews to Israel for hard currency, ten thousand dollars for each exit visa. Sarah declined: she refused to be treated as a commodity. Instead she went to work. She joined a local co-operative, and eventually became chief tailor of a small dressmaking and dry goods shop in the middle of town.

  She sat at the sewing machine from morning until evening, making clothes, bedcovers and curtains; unfurling metres and metres of stiff buckram, a coarse blend of linen and cotton that could refurbish a chesterfield or “shield an army from bullets,” as she put it. Though she worked with fabric of various colours, she herself never wore anything but black. Not just any black but the deep charcoal black of mourning. Even ten years after her husband’s funeral, she wanted the villagers to know that his was not the only death she remembered.

  Andrei helped his mother at the co-operative as often as he could. The rumbling of the roll-up metal doors was a signature sound—we’re open—heard from blocks away. Sarah taught her sons to wind a bobbin, chalk the pattern marks onto fabric and use the foot-pedalled Singer (and, later on, the electric Singer) so that they could assist her when she was especially busy. The women of the town came to the shop for their dressmaking needs, and Sarah gained a reputation for her ability to make new outfits from old garments. She could cut down a sack and turn it into something stylish.

  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.

  Five

  Does 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.

  THE TISZA 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 Andr
ei. 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.

  IN ANDREI’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.