Free Novel Read

The Letter Opener Page 5


  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.”

  ONE AFTERNOON, ANDREI 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.

  After Nicolae was interrogated he convinced Andrei that they had no choice but to leave. Andrei knew that if they stayed, things would get worse. For them. For their families. For his mother.

  Andrei and Nicolae fled Romania at the end of the school year. Their point of departure: the port of Cernavoda, just east of Bucharest. The journey southeast to the port took an entire day and night.

  During the long drive a silence grew between them. As t
hey barrelled along the gravel roads, the engine’s vibrations ran up their legs. They rolled the windows down against the thickening heat and caught glimpses of the Danube as it slipped through the pale green countryside. The tracery of forest. Clusters of oak and beech. Orchardcovered hills. Once they were out of the mountains, the trees thinned out abruptly. There were stumps burned to the colour of coal and broken fences. Vast areas with no grass or underbrush, just a blur of grey fields occasionally strewn with scraps of machinery—a rusting plough, mangled iron chains, an abandoned backhoe. Other cars rattled past them on the road, then a heavy transport vehicle throwing up black gusts of dust and diesel. They rolled up the windows. When it started to rain, Andrei focused on the road ahead of them through the flapping of the windshield wipers.

  They had taken this route once before. A month earlier, they had travelled with a group of graduating students from the University of Baia Mare to Cernavoda for the inauguration of a new canal. Flags were hiked to the skies. Children belonging to Pioneer organizations with red kerchiefs knotted around their necks and hair glued down with glycerine tugged at balloons shaped like giant ships. The lavish ceremonies, which continued for several days and nights, began with a state presentation and ended with a fireworks display. Overblown speeches by local Party leaders were delivered beneath a giant portrait of the dictator—emperor-like and brandishing an enormous hand-carved sceptre. A choir of peasants in ceremonial costume stood off to the side, holding sheaves of wheat and mechanically singing traditional hymns.

  Thousands of workers had toiled during the canal’s thirty-five-year construction. Not one mention was made of them. No one divulged that the canal, which linked the Danube at Cernavoda with the Black Sea to the south of Constanta, a sixty-kilometre stretch, had been dubbed the “Canal of Death.”

  All through the speeches, Andrei shifted restlessly from one foot to the other, aware of the bored audience around him, the ocean of numb faces. At the end there was obligatory applause and the acrid stench of gunpowder. Silk streamers in red, yellow and blue lapped at the wind.

  Once the canal was officially opened, the crowd scattered, then departed. Andrei and Nicolae headed for the pier, where they spent the next few days studying the ships. There were rickety fishing boats, Soviet tankers, Bulgarian coal freighters. They familiarized themselves with the funnels, masts, bridges and planks. “Naval architectural research,” they explained to anyone who asked. By the time they were ready to go home, a week later, the dockmen and loaders acknowledged and greeted them when they passed. Even the stray dogs scrounging by the garbage heaps barked and nudged at them in recognition. It was time to move on.

  The following month, after they had decided to flee, Andrei and Nicolae arrived at the pier just before sunset. The air was cooling, and with the garbage cleared, the friendly dogs were gone. They sat in the car watching the fishing boats growing darker on the water, watching the warm light reflected from their sides until night arrived and their silhouettes melted away. They waited until they were approached, as planned, by a man who conducted an underground business of smuggling refugees across the water. For a fee, he would carry them across the Black Sea to the Bosporus.

  Soon after, they found themselves on the Zenica, a rundown Turkish freighter. The dark blue paint was chipped and cracked; rust was thickening on the hull; a red flag flapped in the breeze, stained and ragged at the edges. The man disappeared below deck. After a few minutes, he returned and gestured for them to follow. Andrei and Nicolae accompanied him down the ladder into the belly of the freighter. They were thirsty. They were scared. They had heard stories of stowaways betrayed by the very people they had paid.

  When they reached the bottom, the man smiled and reached for Nicolae’s wrist, silently removing his watch. He slipped it into his back pocket, then reached again for Nicolae’s wrist. He circled it with his hand, touching his middle finger to his thumb, bounced it lightly, then dropped it like a twig.

  “Are you strong swimmers?” the man asked. “I hope so. The shore will not be easy to reach.”

  “We’ll make it,” Andrei replied. Then added, “We’ve practised.”

  Before the man turned to leave, he gave them a blanket, a flashlight and a jug of water.

  He climbed the ladder and lowered the wooden hatch.

  The fisherman who found Andrei later on dry land noticed him from a distance, an ill-defined shape curled beside a rock.

  Andrei had collapsed on the shore of a small Turkish village. The man who discovered him had come to fix his cast nets. When Andrei was revived, he was on the edge of delirium, sweltering in the midday sun. Only the breeze masked the scorching heat. His face and body were burnt on one side, almost raw at the shoulder blades and neck. His hair was still plastered to his face from the oily water.

  The fisherman brought Andrei home, wrapped him in blankets and put him to bed, where he spent the next few days resting and waiting. Andrei was convinced it was just a matter of time before Nicolae would appear, staggering from exhaustion but grinning with relief.

  Several days after he washed ashore in Turkey, Andrei had satisfied his hunger and thirst and felt strong enough to ask his hosts for permission to call his mother. The fisherman’s teenage daughter led Andrei to a telephone in the dining room, brought him a wooden stool and politely excused herself as he began to dial the number of the dressmaking shop. He sat, cradling the phone against his ear, and focused on the ringing. He felt as nervous as if ringing the Securitate directly.

  After four rings there was a hum and a hard click, followed by a sound like air rushing through a shaft. Then her voice, so clear he caught his breath.

  “Hello?”

  He exhaled and began to speak quickly. His eyes were already wet.

  “Mama, it’s Andrei. Please don’t say anything. Just listen. I want you to know that I’m safe and not to worry. I love you.” His words were followed by a forbidding echo.

  He heard his mother sigh and then the sound of something heavy being set down on a solid surface. He pictured his mother’s fabric shears, the plywood shop counters. He pictured the white walls speckled with starching spray, the window propped open with a stack of old textile catalogues.

  “Please hug Eli for me.”

  He thought he could hear his mother’s steady breathing and in the distance the call of children on the streets. Emotion swept over him. Romania was still there, people coping as they always had. The world hadn’t shattered just because he left.

  “Mama. I love and miss you so much, but we have to be careful. I have to hang up now. I want you to lock up, go for a walk right away. Right away. Walk where people can see you. Don’t say anything, just do it. Now, Mama.”

  Then, above the buzz of static, he heard the jingle of a bell and the closing of a door.

  The next time he phoned his mother, the call was intercepted. After several loud clicks, the line went dead. That was his last call. After that, his only contact with her was through his letters, which he knew were vetted, and through the letters she dropped into a blue mailbox every few months. On rare occasions, obliging tourists smuggled out missives filled with small talk and the most innocent details of her life. But for the most part, her envelopes arrived covered in censor markings and resealed with brown tape, their contents black-pencilled by the letter opener of the Central Post Office. But it made no difference. Sarah could have sent squiggles and ink blots. Her love was uncensorable.

  Dear Andrei,

  The walls are bright again. I thought you’d want to know. Eli has painted them with a fresh coat of canary yellow, which will take a day and a night to dry. He wanted to finish the whole room in time for my birthday, but he ran out of paint before he reached the ceiling. I could see he was frustrated, but he laughed as soon as he saw how surprised I was. The living room walls are still glistening as I write

  Six

  My conversations with Andrei gradually became more intense. At times, words seemed to spurt from him. Sometimes h
e moved wildly off course, speaking in surges, sometimes remembering things partially, sometimes stopping abruptly as though overcome. If something excited him, he would gesture in the air until, embarrassed by his own exuberance, he would lock his hands between his knees as if to subdue them.

  Yet, as I listened, I sensed that some part of his story remained unreachable, like a dark, cold stone that sat at the depths of a distant ocean floor. While everything else around it drifted and swayed, shifted and resettled, this core remained impervious.

  In June, Andrei was sick for a week, and I tried not to think about him. But through the sprawling hours of the day, stories and scenes he had recounted came tumbling back. I thought of calling him, but that wasn’t the kind of relationship we had. I didn’t even know if he had a phone. Then I recalled Baba telling me once that Andrei lived downtown in an apartment in Parkdale. That weekend I called Paolo and convinced him to take a stroll with me through the west end to look at used furniture stores.

  When we got off the streetcar, the streets were filled with the sound of summer construction, a bulldozer beeping in reverse, a pneumatic drill pounding up the pavement. Sturdy-legged women chitchatted past with armloads of groceries.

  Paolo was in a cheerful mood, happy to face the world on his own intermittently engaged terms. He smiled at a baby in a stroller and played hide-and-seek with his face behind his hands but withdrew impatiently when the child’s father addressed him. He stopped to pet an affectionate terrier while barely casting a glance at the owner.

  We passed by apartment buildings, and now and then a door would open and someone would emerge. I imagined that, wherever he was, Andrei probably lived on the bottom floor—maybe it was a remark he once made about a fear of heights—so I casually searched the first-floor windows. I didn’t tell Paolo what I was up to. I began to feel ridiculous. The prospect of running into Andrei suddenly seemed embarrassing. How would I account for my presence on his street?