The Letter Opener (3 page)

“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.

W
hen 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.

A
NDREI ARRIVED IN
T
ORONTO
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.

A
ndrei 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 announced 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.

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.

H
OW 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.
“

S
HORTLY 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.