The Letter Opener Read online

  Once in a while there was a cranky, blaming letter about bureaucratic incompetence. (These tended to be in uppercase and full of demonstrative punctuation.)

  I AM UNFAILINGLY AMAZED AT YOUR GROSS INEPTITUDE. TWICE THIS YEAR, I HAVE SENT A PACKAGE THAT HAS NOT ARRIVED AT ITS INTENDED DESTINATION. ARE YOUR POSTMEN PILFERING FROM THEIR CUSTOMERS?! THIS IS A PUBLICLY FUNDED INSTITUTION: ARE YOU SLEEPING ON THE JOB!?!!?!

  I tried not to let the complaints get to me.

  I liked the act of salvaging, and the feeling of goodness and purpose it gave me. Then again, maybe I was just nosy, a little too fascinated by other people’s property.

  In Andrei’s absence, I felt increasingly indebted to my work. I found myself sorting cutlery with the exacting patience of a 1950s housewife. I folded clothing with a newfound tenderness, in the way an expecting mother folds a freshly laundered layette.

  I plunged my arm zealously into the bucket and brought up one item after another. A canvas museum tote bag suggested an older woman; Hong Kong movie magazines suggested a teenage boy; a silver tie pin suggested a businessman; a pink Free Tibet T-shirt suggested a young, possibly style-conscious activist. Each item, no matter what it was, comforted me. I could lose myself in the lives piled up on my table.

  I lost track of whole days, in fact—until an entire week had disappeared. The repetition of matching things up, sorting them into boxes, allowed my mind to soften and blur. I knew from practice the perils of too little concentration: overlooked clues, incorrectly attributed belongings. But I’d also learned it was a mistake to concentrate too much. Part of the mind always has to remain open.

  The first thing that caught my eye the day after Andrei disappeared was a brown plastic rosary nested inside a white vinyl pouch. Taped to the back of the pouch was a small photo of a woman wearing a flimsy paisley dress that adhered to her hips, emphasizing her thinness. I brought the rosary to my lips, as I had seen Catholics do in prayer, and discreetly kissed several beads before placing it back down on the table, struck suddenly by the eroticism of the gesture. I hoped none of my co-workers had seen me.

  By mid-morning, the rosary had been usurped by: a small tin of Scottish toffee, a set of newborn baby photos, a package of old Penthouse magazines, a plastic crocodile. I set each object on the steel table. At the centre was a cracked porcelain pillbox, oval shaped, loosely wrapped in brown craft paper, fragile in my hand. But the metal clasp flicked open with a pleasing snap to reveal a misty pond scene.

  There was a time when the Undeliverable Mail Office was called the Dead Letter Office. The name was used from 1875, when the practice of opening undelivered letters was first authorized by the Canadian government, until 1954, when Canada Post opted for a less depressing name. Perhaps it was a sudden burst of optimism that encouraged them to change it. In 1954, for a brief interval—after two world wars and the Korean War and before the start of the Vietnam War—people were dying less prolifically. The world was almost at peace. Before that, the office must have felt like a tomb, a record of numerous sons and lovers forsaken to various battles. The staff then must have despaired at the futility of their jobs: so many of life’s senders and receivers riven by death, never to be connected.

  The facility is still sometimes referred to as “the postal morgue,” “the letter cemetery,” “the limbo of missent mail.” As a child, I remember asking my mother to explain the idea of limbo to me. I had in my mind a picture of bodies melting in an oven-hot anteroom to hell, an image drawn from some Warner Brothers cartoon. She surprised me by saying that limbo was not a place of anguish or fury but a place of suspension.

  “You mean people just float there in mid-air?” I asked.

  To which my sister, who was always explaining things, responded, “Yeah. And they swing around, trying hard not to puke. That’s their punishment for being bad people.”

  My mother, in her placid, comforting voice, responded, “No, Kana. Not that kind of suspension. I meant waiting. Imagine a very long hallway…”

  When I pass through the heavy metal doors of the Undeliverable Mail Office it’s as if I am suspended in time.

  “Are you ready for lunch?” Baba asked a few days after Andrei disappeared. “It’s ten past twelve.”

  “Not quite. You go ahead. I think I’ll stay and finish this last bin.”

  He nodded and left, and I was alone.

  As I had drifted through my work, occasionally taking breaks with Baba and going off with him for lunch, I had been waiting for a moment like this. The office was empty.

  I stood up and walked toward Andrei’s work area, which the manager, after some coaxing on Baba’s part and mine, had agreed to leave untouched for a few more days. Andrei’s blue sweater hung over the back of the chair. Magazines fanned across his shelf.

  I sat down at his vacant desk, pulled out the drawer and swept around with my hand. I discovered an old roll of mints and some paperclips. I pushed my fingers up into all the corners, but the picture I was searching for was gone.

  If I made an effort I could call an impression of it to mind. I could see a figure in a woollen hat and a dark pea jacket sitting on the steps of a building, a cheerful face, thick brown hair drifting across his forehead.

  “So who’s behind the camera?” I once asked Andrei. “Who’s put that big grin on your face?”

  When I looked across the table at him, he was staring down, blushing. He glanced up again and his face seemed soft and sad—like that of a different Andrei.

  Another picture existed. A picture of Nicolae sitting on the same steps. But that was gone, too. I remembered remarking that Nicolae looked too timid to be a revolutionary firebrand, but according to Andrei he was active for a brief period in an underground student movement. His activist career ended abruptly when he was detained for hand-copying a quote from Solzhenitsyn’s Nobel lecture: “The simple step of a simple courageous man is not to partake in falsehood, not to support false actions! One word of truth shall outweigh the whole world!” Nicolae had written and distributed a hundred copies of the slogan, almost all of which had landed on the desk of a Securitate officer. The officer had said, setting the handwritten leaflet beside Nicolae’s matching handwritten statement, that Nicolae was fortunate it was a first offence. Even so, his father, a longtime Party member and a distinguished professor of chemistry, had to bribe the police for his son’s release.

  I ran my hand along the shelf, touching each object. A silver ball, about palm-size, made of the foil that came in cigarette packages. A small plant that Baba had watered recently, and beside it, Andrei’s notebook of inventions. I flipped through the pages, filled with sketches and roughly hatched plans that he had never brought himself to patent. I followed the contours of curves and the collision of lines, appreciating the satisfying crispness of graph paper filled with 2B pencil. Each idea was rendered meticulously:

  A self-cleaning device for window blinds.

  A chess timer with coffee-warming attachment.

  A prosthetic limb with a hidden compartment for storing house keys and money.

  A hand-operated brake for Rollerblades. (He showed me the sketch during one of our first conversations. “I will revolutionize this activity, channel the force in motion,” said Andrei, with a seriousness that placed him somewhere between physicist laureate and Obi Wan Kenobi.)

  Everything that was left of Andrei rested on his shelf. And I stood there, crestfallen, because all of a sudden I realized that I had no pictures of him.

  But there was a photo. Not the one I was searching for, but a photo nonetheless. I found it a few minutes later, tucked into a pocket at the back of his notebook. A picture of Andrei and his settlement class taken during the first year he lived in Canada—a studio portrait set against a sunset orange curtain. Two dozen people stared out from the photo. Andrei was in the front row, dressed in blue jeans and a black long-sleeved shirt that made his torso look even lankier than it was. He was seated at a three-quarter angle to the camera, his hands folded in
his lap in a touching, overly posed way. His face was newly shaven, his hair combed, his eyes…Was that a piece of paper in his shirt pocket?

  I shuddered slightly, frightened now at this attachment to someone who had inexplicably vanished. All I wanted was to have things return to what they were, to live my life in a familiar world. I needed Andrei at his desk: a solid, warm, unfailing presence.

  I couldn’t accept the ambiguity that surrounded Andrei’s absence or trust Baba’s assurance that it was only a matter of time. Instead, I felt adrift, somewhere between sinking and surfacing.

  Eight

  In 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:

  LIVE DANGEROUS LEAKS

  SHARP LOPSIDED STRANGE ODOUR

  NO RETURN ADDRESS

  PROTRUDING WIRES

  EXCESSIVE WRAPPING PAPER

  OIL STAINS RIGID BULK

  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.

  Nine

  Andrei 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.