The Letter Opener (5 page)

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 they 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

M
y conversations with Andrei gradually became more intense. At times, words seemed to spurt from him. Sometimes he 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?

Paolo and I must have spent two hours walking through Parkdale, weaving along every street east of Ronscesvalles. The sun was baking the tar on the roads and the flowers drooped in the heat. Paolo had taken off his cotton jacket and there was a dark sweat patch between his shoulder blades. My feet were throbbing, so when Paolo pointed to a small Vietnamese noodle shop, I quickly agreed to stop for lunch and aborted my secret search.

Until Andrei came along, it was just Paolo and me. For nearly four years, Paolo was the centre of my life outside of work.

We met at a record store in a downtown mall. I noticed his T-shirt first. It had a picture of Thelonius Monk in profile. I asked him where he got it. His fingers were deftly flicking through rows of vinyl but he stopped, kept one finger on a record jacket to mark his place, peered at his watch and replied, “One thirty-five.” I laughed at the misunder-standing. His voice was strangely melodious.

Paolo’s eyes were steady and smiling. They peered out from behind a pair of rectangular glasses. He was wearing a belt that missed two loops on his black jeans. We ended up talking until his lunch break was over and he had to return to work.

Before he walked away, he told me the name of the flower store in the mall where he was employed. I followed him a half hour later, enjoying the continual flow of the shopping concourse, its expanding and contracting sense of space, the brightly lit signs for shops called Desire and Mecca, the din and drift of closely packed people.

Bloom, at the north end of the mall, had elaborate gift baskets hanging at the front. One wall was lined with a refrigeration system, the other with flower boxes. Misted roses glistened in a glass vase. Paolo was cutting up bright yellow organza ribbon to tie around bouquets. Clippers, a watering can, loose stems of baby’s breath were scattered on the counter. Tiny white flower heads were burred to his brown cardigan. His face opened when he saw me. He pushed his glasses back on his nose with a knuckle, reached into the refrigerator behind him and handed me a purple flower with a long, thin stalk. It smelled sweet and spicy.

“It’s pretty. Thank you,” I said as I rolled the stem between my middle finger and thumb. I wondered what it would be like to kiss his mouth. There was a fullness to his bottom lip that made me feel agreeably agitated.

“It’s a bit overripe.”

“Overripe?” (His lip? No, silly, not his lip.) I blushed.

“Withered, I mean. The petals should be crisp, not so limp.”

“It still smells good.” I smiled.

“I think so too.” He smiled back.

All sorts of people came into the flower shop from day to day, excited brides-to-be, nervous first-daters, corporate banquet planners. Paolo created hand-tied bouquets of the silkiest Ecuadorian roses, flamboyant arrangements of lilies and towering displays of birds of paradise. The rhythm of retail life, the comfort of familiar tools and props, allowed him to engage people in social exchanges he would otherwise have avoided. Like the shy intellectual who comes alive on the dance floor, Paolo had an extroverted shop persona. The flowers were an expression of some inner exuberance.

It was from Paolo that I learned to tell the difference between freesia and lisianthus, bearded irises and orchids. It wasn’t a simple or transparent relationship; there were times when the man sitting across from me was a stranger, one who revealed little about himself or Argentina, the country of his birth. Yet some force, some mutual want, held us tightly.

Paolo was twenty-nine when we met, four years my senior. I had assumed from his face that he was even older. Top and bottom relayed contrasting messages. His body was lank like a teenager’s, but the skin around his dark brown eyes was creased and shadowed and his dishevelled hair was already flecked with grey.

On our third anniversary, Paolo suggested we move in together. We were sitting at the kitchen table. My cat, Miko, was curled up on Paolo’s lap.

“It seems natural,” he said. “Why should we both be living alone and be paying double rent when we don’t have to?”

“I don’t—” I started.

“We could share this apartment or find a new one, something with three bedrooms, maybe a small garden.”

I felt my stomach tighten. “I like the way things are.”

“I’d cook and clean,” he said, ignoring me.

I know of people who adore the idea of having a live-in companion, couples who toss their laundry casually into the washing machine and delight in knowing that their clothes tumble dry together, couples who believe that cohabitation represents the pinnacle of love. As much as I love Paolo, as much as it reassures me to be in his company, I cannot imagine being part of such a couple. Ever since I was a child, I’ve needed space to myself. I’ve always enjoyed the melancholy world of single portions, solitary walks and undisturbed nights. I thought he shared this inclination. It was one of the qualities that made him attractive to me.

“I’m here half the time as it is. I just don’t have my stuff here.”

My silence was too long; it angered Paolo. “It’s only stuff, for God’s sake,” he shouted. Miko, startled, jumped off his lap onto the floor.

“It’s not the stuff,” I said. Even though it
was
the stuff. Having defined myself for so long by my solitude, I greeted the prospect of Paolo moving in with a vague sense of loss, followed by a wave of fear. No matter how hard I tried, I was unable to achieve the offhand attitude some people have toward cohabiting. It did not please me in the least to imagine my personal effects being joined with Paolo’s.

Though I always did a botch job trying to explain it to Paolo, I saw two major drawbacks to living together. The first was the likelihood of physical and mental disruption. There are certain assurances that come with living by yourself. No matter how many times you may come and go, you know that your furniture and belongings will remain a beacon of reliability. If you decide to place your sandals on top of the stereo speaker, for instance, you know they will stay there until you decide to
move them. If you have to go to the washroom in the middle of the night, you know you won’t do so at your own peril, tripping over someone else’s misplaced gym bag or guitar case. When you live with someone, such guarantees of equilibrium go out the window. Suddenly the person may decide to put down a zigzag column of orange traffic pylons.

The second and more significant drawback is that if and when the relationship ends there is more to sift through and separate. In my experience, what gets blended eventually gets divided. Then you’re left with bare hangers, blank shelves and jutting nails where framed pictures hung just the day before.

“Things are good,” I said.

“Okay, okay, I’ll drop it,” he said, in a tone that indicated he intended to do no such thing.

He paused, then added, grinning, “I could section my things off from yours. Get some of that yellow police tape.”

“Very funny.” I punched him lightly on the arm. “Listen. I’ll promise you Tuesday, Thursday and Friday nights from now until eternity.”

“That’s just it. Wouldn’t it be nice to have a relationship that was a little less programmed?”

While Paolo had revealed himself to be a coupler, a nester, I took it for granted that Andrei was a loner, that he was predisposed to keeping his own company most of the time, and that we shared this tendency. I once tried to determine what he did when he was not at work or with me. (Did he have lovers in Canada? Would he tell me if he did?) When I asked what he did to amuse himself on his days off, he shrugged and said:

“I read. I exercise. But mostly, I practise.”

“What do you practise?”

“I must learn to speak better, so I practise English. I am only a mediocre draughtsman, so I practise drawing. In the evenings sometimes I
go to a café near my house and I practise chess because my playing is only so-so. It allows me to meet my fellow expatriates.”

When he said this his eyes brightened. “There is an older Pole I know who is a grand master. He used to play with Khalifman in St. Petersburg, and one of my true desires is to beat him just once. Last time he won he teased me. He reached over the board and pulled my bangs to one side and said: ‘Draw the curtains next time or I might think you’re sleeping.’”

Andrei touched his newly cut hair as an epilogue to the story. Then something seemed to catch his attention and he traced a finger along the base of his skull. “I am turning into my father, how do you say it, spitting image? These dents at the back. I’m like a bowling ball!” Then he smiled in a way that seemed forced.

I struggled to convince Paolo that our current arrangement was the best way of ensuring our relationship would last. As a consolation, I made an extra set of keys and invited him to keep a few of his things at my place. Despite the offer, he didn’t end up storing much—a toiletries bag, some extra clothes, a few CDs, a bottle of chimichurri sauce, some Maalox.

I made one other concession. I let him do my laundry when he needed to fill out a load. I know “let him” is an odd way of putting it, but everyone has chores they like to take care of by themselves and it took a while for me to get used to seeing Paolo stuffing my sheets and clothes into the washer, measuring soap and setting dials, waiting for the
whoosh
of the water into the machine.

My friendship with Andrei was something that Paolo took a long time to accept. In Paolo’s mind, Andrei’s arrival coincided with my rejection of his proposal that we live together. As he saw it, the closer I got
to Andrei, the more my attention toward him seemed to fade. There was no doubt that it shaped his attitude toward Andrei.

On the rare occasions they saw each other, usually when Paolo came to meet me after work, Paolo acted distant, almost conde-scending toward Andrei. The tension in the room was palpable, but I refused to be on edge as I often was when I tried to hinge people together. I did not want to be a connector or a message carrier, something I had announced long ago to my parents. So I left it to them to sort out their differences, and over the summer their relationship seemed to improve. Paolo behaved more sociably toward Andrei and Andrei eventually returned the gesture by inviting us to join him at his apartment for a meal.

The dinner took place in October, right around Thanksgiving. We got off to a strained start, but by midnight we had settled in. The dirty plates were soaking in the sink. We were lounging on the floor around a glass-topped coffee table. The pie that Paolo and I had brought was warming in the oven. I was feeling happily wine-drunk. Paolo and Andrei were immersed in a discussion of the music they liked. Delta blues. Charlie Patton. Robert Johnson. A cassette played. Scratch and hiss. Sliding steel strings. Johnson’s rasp rising into a flickering falsetto howl. I was so relieved that they had found something to talk about, I left them alone and floated around the apartment, tidying, nudging newspapers back into stacks, stopping at Andrei’s desk to note a copy of
Time
magazine beside an open Oxford dictionary, peering at a familiar mother-and-child Klimt picture pinned to the wall beside a postcard of two men seated on a camel. The smell of baking apples sweetened the air. I offered to run to the all-night store and get some ice cream, and was gone for about fifteen minutes. We ate our dessert and Andrei opened a bottle of port he had been given by a Portuguese neighbour.

When we left that evening, Andrei gave us each a hug, and then kissed me on the cheek. For a second I thought he wanted to say something, but the second passed and he raised his hand and gave me a goodbye salute. Paolo and I walked slowly down the stairs, both lost in our own thoughts. As we wove our way down the street, the night was filled with the smell of raked leaves and wood smoke.

I have often wondered what happened after we left. Did Andrei begin washing up? Did he switch on his television or turn on the radio? Did he contentedly fix himself a cup of tea? Or did he have a troubled, sleepless night knowing that he would soon be leaving us all behind?