The Letter Opener (19 page)

“I can help, Nai-chan,” she said.

“Thanks, Mum. I’ll bear that in mind. Now let’s finish drying your hair before you catch a cold.”

She sat in front of her dresser while I gently rubbed her head with a towel, my hands moving in small circles from the top to the sides. She smelled of apple shampoo. I glanced at her briefly in the mirror, and she smiled with an expression of sympathetic support. Then a thought seemed to occur to her. Her voice took on a musing quality.

“What about your office?”

“What about it?”

“Have you checked there?”

“Yes.”

“Your place?”

“Yes. Mum,” I said firmly, “we’re talking about a person. Not a set of keys.”

She turned away for a moment, perhaps stung by my words or perhaps waylaid in her thoughts by all the keys she had lost over the course of her life—those she’d left in bicycle locks or sitting on restaurant tables.

“You’re right. He’ll turn up. What’s important, Nai-chan—” She paused. “What’s important is that you have good, close friends. You should consider yourself fortunate.” She smiled.

“Thanks, Mum.”

I realized my fingers were still covered in bits of my mother’s hair. I rubbed them off on the towel and began paring her nails.

I was halfway down the hallway on my way out when I heard a scream coming from Gloria’s room. As I rushed toward the door, I could hear crying.

“G-g-o a-away,” Gloria was repeating between sobs.

Two attendants were huddled inside the entrance. Behind them, a nurse was trying to prevent Gloria from thrashing around in her wheelchair. Every time she touched her, Gloria started screaming again.

“What’s going on?” I demanded. I noticed a burning smell in the room.

One of the attendants turned around. “She just tried to set fire to her room,” he said, pointing at a singed curtain hem. “We’re moving her upstairs, where she’ll be more secure.”

I knew that “upstairs” meant the restricted ward—living under lock and key with full-time attendants.

Recognizing my voice, Gloria looked up, her skin blotchy from crying. The wide neck of her sweater had slid down her arm to reveal a bony shoulder. The nurse took advantage of my arrival to slip a sedative between Gloria’s parted lips.

“This will make you feel yourself again,” the nurse said, and handed a cup of water to Gloria, who, in her distraction, dutifully swallowed.

“May I come in and be with her for a moment?” I asked.

The nurse nodded and stepped back toward the window. The attendants moved aside, allowing me to pass.

I crouched by Gloria, lifted her sweater back on to her shoulder and held her shaking hands.

“They’re sending me away,” she whimpered.

“No, Gloria, not away, just upstairs.”

Her fingers curled around mine. Her breathing was becoming more even and regular. She glanced at the nurse and attendants, then lowered her head toward mine. “I’m going to take notes,” she whispered, looking down at the notepad I had given her, which was tucked beside her right thigh. “Just like you told me to do.”

I studied her face—the sedative was starting to work, her eyes were becoming soft and less focused. They said,
nothing matters.

“That’s right,” I whispered back. “Write it all down.”

I returned to my mother’s room feeling shaken, to see if she was all right. I was worried that she might have overheard the screaming down the hall. The door was slightly ajar, but when I peeked in, she seemed fine, obliviously wrapping a small mirror in a handkerchief. It was only after I sat down beside her on the bed that I noticed the clenching in her jaw.

She rested the mirror in her lap and turned to me.

“Naiko, suppose I wanted to leave here one day—could I?”

“Yes,” I replied without hesitation.

She tilted her head, lifted her shoulder to her cheek almost bashfully, then relaxed her shoulder and said, “Good.”

When I left Sakura that afternoon at five o’clock it was with relief that my mother was continuing her sorting. My visits interrupt her, but the minute I am out the door, her fingers begin roaming. She is in a state of constant bonding and rediscovery, experiencing her world of possessions as a bottomless source of curiosity. On any given
evening, some item begging her attention may distract her even from her dinner. Several times she will fail to hear her name being called to the dining room, her entire being focused on the burgundy lining of a wallet, the sleek curve of a shoehorn, the smooth-running drawer of a night table.

Wet snow was dumping down. I boarded the bus for home, glad for the warmth, and untied the soggy scarf around my neck. I sat toward the back, watching the slush slip down the oily windows, feeling a thread of cold air coming through a gap in the glass. A man with a grey beard was reflected in the window ahead of me. I removed my gloves and folded them into my pocket. The bus went up a hill and stopped. A teenage girl boarded, carrying several bags of takeout chicken. She shuffled down the aisle toward me, blue eyes peering, and stood over my knapsack until I moved it and let her plop her dinner onto the seat. My stomach growled at the smell of grease and spice.

When we arrived at the subway station, I joined a crush of people waiting on the concrete platform for the southbound bus. A man crouched against a pillar was selling individual roses from a white plastic bucket. The illuminated poster above his head advertised a romantic beach vacation to Mexico with a company called Carousel. The woman in front of me was reading Matthew 25:40 in her leather-bound Bible.

Soon people were rushing past me. I studied their faces, looking for Andrei among the younger men walking toward me. A tall man with a wool coat and fur earmuffs, a shorter man with owlish eyes peeking out from a down hooded jacket…I was momentarily distracted by a boy waving his arms excitedly at a woman stepping off the escalator behind me. The ear flaps of his hat bounced up and down as he ran to her. I turned to watch them, and when I turned back, the platform was densely packed. I tucked my chin into the cowl of my black sweater to
ward off the wind. Just then the bus pulled up, the windshield wipers swooshing across the window.

At home, a small stack of mail was waiting. I had been hoping for several months for a thin grey envelope addressed to me—the kind my father used—but no envelope had arrived. When I turned sixteen, my father had sent me the first of his grey envelopes. Inside was a birthday cheque and a letter telling me to
find something you love doing so much that it becomes your bedrock.
(Naturally, a geography metaphor. The subtext: You can’t count on human relationships.) It was close to a year since I had last seen my father, so I counted on these letters to stay connected. Instead, I found a heating bill, Christmas cards and another postcard from Kana. This one was a shot of Wenceslas Square in the centre of Prague. An imposing equestrian statue stood in front of a bulky dome-capped building. The message was short.

N: Election in less that two weeks! I will file my story as soon as the results are in. Hope to be home soon! Kana. P.S. The rest of the team is off to Romania to cover the unrest there. The harassment of a dissident Hungarian priest in Timisoara has touched off mass protests. The whole region is on fire!!!

The windows were all closed, but my limbs felt as though an icy draft had suddenly entered the room. I thought about what Kana had once said to me about keeping on top of world events. A postscript she had sent from Libya…or was it Lebanon?
P.S. We are witnesses to the march of history!
or some such grandiose declaration. I had never felt so cut off as when I read those words. World affairs always seemed inflated when communicated by my self-important sister.

This was not her world. Nor her history.

I called Paolo just as he was leaving work and asked him to pick up an evening edition on his way over. He arrived with three newspapers, by which time I was already planted in front of the television watching the news.

The report on Romania was both vivid and unreal to me. I tried to concentrate on the reporter’s words.

The Central Post Office has been occupied.

The television and radio stations are in the hands of the rebels.

There has been a coup.

But it was the images that stunned me. I realized that I had never before seen a picture of Andrei’s country. I had never heard the sounds of Romania. Everything looked so distinctly un-Canadian. The bloated square buildings and oversized streets, the faces of the people, the grey forests of construction equipment, everything so drab.

The footage was perhaps a day old, and what it showed was undeniable: the breakdown of command, the collapse of tyranny.

A
massive crowd is gathered beneath the low balcony of the Central Committee Building in Bucharest. The dictator in a fur hat is reading from a prepared speech when suddenly, a few minutes into his address, a single shout of “Ti-mi-soara! Murderer!” rises from the back of the crowd, followed by several boos.

The dictator falters, surprise and uncertainty passing across his face. Urged on by his wife, he attempts to continue his speech. Again there are shouts and more boos. Realizing his hold on the crowd is lost, he stops again and begins to wave. Confusion spreads on the balcony while the dictator and his wife, who are still being filmed, consult with their attendants and several members of the Political Executive Council about what to do next. Finally, they are ushered inside the palace. The camera is switched off.

Three minutes later, the broadcast resumes to prerecorded cheers
and applause. Visibly shaken, the dictator has returned to the balcony to finish his speech. This time the crowd bursts into jeers and whistles. No longer cowed, it chants:
Down with Ceausescu!
As the shouting rises, the image shakes and distorts. The screen becomes a field of red.

The recorded picture again returns, revealing the sky toward which the cameraman has aimed his camera, as he has been told to do should anything disturb the demonstration. There are intermittent images of the dictator calling for calm. At one point the camera moves away from the balcony and sweeps across the crowd to locate the source of the disruption. Then, training remembered, the cameraman swings back to the balcony. By this point, the dictator and his wife are gone.

Books and papers are spilling out of buildings. Students are fighting with riot police in armoured vests. Cars are overturned. Images of the dictator are burning in the streets. Tear gas has been fired into the Piata Universitatii, where more demonstrators increasingly gather, ignoring the presence of guns and tanks.

Throughout the night, police, Securitate and the army sporadically fire on the crowds, but the people return in even greater numbers the next morning. But the most stunning image comes from outside the University of Bucharest, where students, sitting on each other’s shoulders, are hanging paper cut-outs of pears on the poplar trees. For the dictator this is a symbol of impossibility.

The image expresses to the world that reform is coming.

Everyone with a television watched the news that night but noticed different details.

I noticed the way Elena Ceausescu held her hands: first resting them confidently on the balcony, then pulling them back, holding them against her diaphragm in a tight clasp. The more the crowd jeered, the more ordinary she appeared. Like a woman waiting for a bus.

Roy Ishii noticed the light jackets and open coats worn by the crowd. He deduced from their apparel that it was an unseasonably mild day, with a springlike temperature unusual for December. And he was right.

My mother noticed a man in the crowd with long silvery hair who reminded her of someone she once knew—a painter she had dated many years before.

Kana noticed acutely that her coverage of the presidential elections in Czechoslovakia had been supplanted.

Paolo noticed a trampled evergreen medallion off to the side on the square, a low-growing topiary portrait of Ceausescu above the words The Epoch of Light.

But all of us noticed them flee—the dictator in a black hat, his wife trailing after, running along the roof of the Central Committee Building toward a helicopter.

He and She. Each carried a bag.

The minute I spotted them I wondered what these bags contained. Were they laden with booty from the palace? Did they contain their most cherished items? Or simply the most expensive? It was hard to fathom. What would have meant most to them, when they had held—seized—whatever they had wished?

Paolo and I watched the television screen that weekend until our eyes hurt. At about eleven o’clock on Christmas Eve, long after the news reports had ended, we pulled out the couch and smoked a bit of pot. Neither of us had the energy to do anything after that, so Paolo flipped between
The Sound of Music
and
Miracle on 34th Street.
I didn’t really pay attention to either one. We had strung up coloured Christmas lights, and they flickered by the window, breaking the dark with a flashing rhythm. I watched them for a while, feeling a brief dope-induced swell of empathy for the weakest light, but mostly my mind just floated.

I kept seeing the wince on Ceausescu’s face when the crowd started booing, when he experienced exactly what so many of his subjects had—the flinching of the victim waiting to be hit.

I heard Maria, the cheerful governess, singing about raindrops on roses. When I looked at the TV screen, she was flitting around her bedroom, praising the virtues of those simple delights that helped make her life so gallingly effervescent. What were my favourite things?

It occurred to me at that moment that I owned seven black turtlenecks.

The last thing I remember before drifting off around two (Paolo already asleep beside me) was the nuns alerting the von Trapp family to flee the abbey, as the Nazis were approaching.

On Christmas Day I woke up at half past six to hear the thump of a tree branch hitting the living-room window. It was still dark and the Christmas lights were flashing ominously. I had a premonition at that instant that something had happened. Maybe a vase had broken in my mother’s room, triangles of phthalo green crockery littering the floor. Maybe Gloria had escaped again. There was a perceptible change in the air, the sort of fluctuation in pressure that precedes a thunderstorm. My skin was tingling.

I held my breath and waited. Nothing happened. I looked over and saw that Paolo was still sleeping, curled up on his side. His bare torso was exposed, and I saw the undulation of ribs under his skin, dark oblong nipples at either side of a small patch of hair. He looked beautiful. It brought me a moment’s sadness to see him so far away in sleep.

The television was on, though Paolo had risen at some point and turned down the volume. I stayed on the bed for a while longer. The
refrigerator buzzed. The clock ticked. I lay there and waited, but the sense of foreboding wouldn’t go away. Finally, stretching out my hands, I leaned over and groped along the floor for the television converter, changed the channel and turned up the volume. The headline news told me Ceausescu had been executed.

All my possessions for a moment in time.

Queen Elizabeth I on her deathbed in 1603