The Letter Opener (6 page)

I asked Paolo one night following Andrei’s disappearance what they had discussed while I was gone. We were lying in bed.

“There is something…I was wondering…” I started tentatively. “Do you remember the last time you spoke with Andrei? We were at his apartment. I slipped out to the store and when I returned the two of you were deep in a conversation. When I walked in you were saying something about jet lag or flying. Something about the first time you travelled by plane, and how it was so fast there was no time to withdraw from the place you had left and adjust to the place you had arrived in.”

Through the bedroom window I could see clouds tracking slowly across the moon. I needed Paolo to share his thoughts, but I was cautious. I feared an argument.

In the darkness beside me, Paolo said, “He didn’t say anything about leaving, if that’s what you’re asking.”

His yawn told me there should be no further questioning. I took the cue—what good would pressing do? Andrei was gone. I had dissected every minute of our last moments in early December. I had tried to understand what had happened, but so far I could detect no motive or forewarning. Andrei had simply vanished.

I stayed up reading after Paolo fell asleep, not yet tired enough to close my eyes. When I did eventually sleep, the dream returned. This time, I was standing away from him. I could see the circular motion of the birds, hear the beating of wings. The movement was now smooth and regular. As the birds rose they appeared to melt into an orange sky. Once they had disappeared, Andrei lowered his head and saw me. Our eyes locked for a moment. When I awoke at 4 a.m., the warm colour of the dream stayed with me.

I got up for a glass of water, and when I returned to the bedroom, I slipped into bed as quietly as possible. Paolo’s sleeping body was radiating warmth. His mouth was slightly open, and as I peered into his deeply dreaming face, I could feel my heart quicken. Sleep had laid him open. All the muscles of his face had relaxed, rearranging his features. His nose drooped closer to his mouth. The distance between his eye and his cheek had diminished. I observed a fresh vulnerability. As I shifted toward him, he stirred for a moment, then gave a soft grunt. I curled my body against his. The steady rhythm of his breath was reassuring. I closed my eyes.

Paolo, I knew, wanted to make me happy, but for that he needed more from me. It was in his blood to take care of things—plants, flowers—just as it was in mine, despite the nature of my job, to mess them up.

I felt a light touch on my arm, and I looked to see Paolo staring at me. He kissed my forehead.

I gently rubbed his chest. “Do you think we’re good together?” I whispered.

“Most of the time,” he whispered back.

“What makes us good?”

“Balance. I don’t know. We’re a nice combination, I suppose.” His eyelids were heavy. He yawned. His tongue clucked for moisture.

“Like igloo and polar bear?” I said.

“Hmm?” he said faintly, drifting off again.

“Never mind,” I said to his sleeping face.

As I lay beside him, the sound of a streetcar wafted through the window. In the fluttering of near sleep, the distant clanging became abstract, spinning and shifting in my mind until it was the groan of an anchor being hoisted above the water. The pull of it was hypnotic. The sound splintered again and the flotsam of a world I could never have known came streaming in.

Before Andrei arrived, I had enjoyed the hush in my mind. But he brought with him the racket of the Cernavoda port, the clamour of the canal opening, the
clink
of a jib hitting a mast, the lapping of water against the hull of a boat, the
creak
of a wooden storage crate. Each sound brought an image, each image expanded, gathering in the eaves of my brain and overflowing, spilling into everything else. At times, the sounds obsessed me, pulsing with urgency, like a far-off distress signal.

How could this be? I had never been inside the depths of a ship or at sea. Could another person’s memories capture my mind, draw me unresistingly into someone else’s past?

B
aba kept a desk on the main floor but spent most of his time in the only separate room, a vault-like chamber, sorting valuables and precious items and depositing them in a row of security lockers. On slow days, I liked to take my break in there and watch him while he worked. I found it mesmerizing, the swiftness with which he arranged things into piles, the theatrical way he lowered his eyebrows and pushed out his lips when he encountered a clue, his Hercule Poirot manner when it was necessary to investigate further: a white-gloved hand slipped into the cool neck of a silver vase, a jeweller’s eyeglass placed on a locket.

My job as a mail recovery worker involved restoring more ordinary things. Lesser goods. The sort of things that fell into the cracks of people’s couches or cropped up at neighbourhood flea markets. Boy Scout badges, vacation photos, Magic Markers, teeth moulds.
A medical X-ray. A book of Sufi poetry. A Leonard Cohen audio cassette. Nothing was too small to matter to someone, somewhere.

Every day, inquiring letters arrived at my desk. Some had photos of the lost object enclosed; some attached a hastily sketched facsimile. Many letters contained exceptionally detailed accounts, proceeding on the assumption that an item was likely to be handled more carefully and/or returned more promptly if it was given a personal identity.

“Moo-moo” has been part of the family for generations. Over the years, he has travelled to Birmingham, Berlin, Montreal and the Hamptons. I sincerely hope he can be found and forwarded to my grandson at the enclosed address.

Others were written in handwriting distorted by grief.

All we have left of our son Stewart is a toothbrush, a digital wristwatch and a few other personal effects, which the hospital gave us in a clear plastic bag when we went to sign the death forms. We were sending a few of these keepsakes on to his brother in Yellowknife
…

A few people chose to write their letters from the object’s vantage point.

I am a silver heart-shaped locket. If you open my belly you will see a tiny picture of a man with wavy blond hair and a tan. That man sent me to the woman who he plans to marry but I must have got lost on the way. I am anxious to be united with her…

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.