The Letter Opener (8 page)

“…their addresses?”

“No.”

“Where did you encounter them?”

“Only once. At the park,” he answered.

The officer picked up a piece of bread and moved it to his mouth. He stood up and began pacing behind Nicolae.

“By the university,” Nicolae added.

“What were you doing?”

“Studying for my exams.”

“And Dinu and Pavel?”

“They approached me separately.”

“You knew they were homosexual?” The officer stopped and stood behind Nicolae, waiting for a response.

“I was propositioned,” Nicolae replied.

The officer appeared pleased, patted Nicolae’s shoulder and offered him a pen. “Sign the paper. Then you may go home.”

“Thank you.” Nicolae felt that his throat was coated with dirt.

He was summoned several more times by the officer, a chameleon of a man whose physical presence seemed to change—at times ominous, looming above Nicolae like a bully, at other times, big and warm, like a comforting friend. Nicolae was asked to submit further names. Enemies of peace and Communism. Anti-government conspirators. Each name was shuffled away. There was the ritual pretense at kindness, small gifts of food, a package of coffee, which he couldn’t easily decline but which made him nervous.

More tricky were the intermittent jokes. As the hours crawled along, every now and then the officer would fire off a new one. The humour was often irreverent.

“Why do the Securitate travel about in threes?” the officer asked.

Nicolae shook his head.

“So there’s one to read, one to write and one to keep an eye on the two intellectuals.”

Between jokes, the officer would toss out names to gauge Nicolae’s response; some he didn’t know at all, some he knew slightly and some intimately. Nicolae practised his reactions at home between interrogations. He did not flinch or allow his face to crumple. He learned to keep his expression relaxed but closed.

And then suddenly a new name popped up. A name that shattered his defences. After uttering it, the officer tilted his head ever so slightly to the side. He picked up a lemon cookie from the table and began to chew. Nicolae nodded and then looked away. “I must use
the bathroom,” he said. He could feel eyes on his back as he walked across the room.

Nicolae’s father, a professor emeritus who presided over his classrooms and his house with authority and who had once advised the dictator’s wife, Elena, on affairs of “science,” was powerless to stop the Securitate from harassing his son. When Nicolae returned home from the final session, his parents met him in the front room. He embraced his mother, then took one look at his father’s face, seeing an embedded sadness his father could not hide, and knew that they would not speak of anything that had passed.

In the days and weeks that followed, he tried to resume life as usual, but all his routines and certainties had been upended.

It wasn’t Ion after all, Andrei later discovered. The informant was a neighbour who had known Nicolae since he was a child.

It made sense. It could have been anyone.

Nicolae had been taught from an early age to believe in the promise of a utopian socialism, as a kind of twinkling light on the distant horizon. When he was eight, his father had introduced him to a reading syllabus beginning with the easy bits of
The Communist Manifesto.
By age eleven, he was reading the revolutionary writings of Che Guevara, Walter Rodney, Ho Chi Minh and Amilcar Cabral. He took his father’s assignments seriously and followed world events as closely as possible.

In September 1969, when Ho Chi Minh died, the state newspaper,
Scînteia
, ran a photo of him on the front page. Using a thin blue marker, Nicolae created a pointillist impression of Ho’s delicate bearded face, wisps of thin hair on his chin, which he mounted on cardboard and hung on his bedroom wall.

He dearly wanted to please his father, and in return be treated as a thinking young adult. But the more he read, and the more he compared what he read to the hardship and corruption he witnessed around him, the greater was his suspicion that something was not right. Of all the revolutions that had occurred in the Socialist World, Romania’s, he concluded, was a travesty. The missives that Marx, Lenin and Trotsky had posted many years before had clearly been lost in transit.

Nicolae maintained his faith for as long as he could. But his repeated visits to the Securitate became layers of depression, harder and harder to shake off. One night, unable to sleep, he hit rock bottom. He felt an emotion more harrowing than any he had ever experienced, a feeling that was intensified by the voice of a state radio announcer discussing the dictator’s visit to Buckingham Palace. The radio was in his father’s study. At half-past twelve, Nicolae contemplated killing himself.

It was at that point that Nicolae realized he had nothing left to lose. A clarity came to his thoughts. A door opened. The idea of escape.

Andrei dismissed Nicolae the first time he approached him with his plans. But not long after, the circumstances of his own life changed considerably. The Securitate began visiting Andrei’s house and his mother’s dressmaking co-operative, questioning her while he was away at school. His mother tried to calm him. It’s just harassment, she insisted. But clearly she was upset, more so than Andrei had ever seen her. She paced the kitchen restlessly at night. Andrei noticed her body startle when the wind rattled the shutters or a visitor knocked on the door. He too alternated between panic and resolve, and he vowed to himself that he would protect her—even if it meant leaving Romania.

In the plastic bag that Andrei packed in haste while his mother was sleeping, there were two changes of underwear, an extra shirt, marine goggles that would replace his eyeglasses, some matches, food and water for two, and a slender waterproof packet containing a few photos and personal effects. He wore a bathing suit under his clothes. In contrast, Nicolae carried virtually nothing—a snorkelling mask and, pinned to his bathing suit, a tiny enamel portrait of Che Guevara given to him by his father.

Nicolae had spent weeks secretly dispensing his belongings. He did this partly out of concern for his family, for he truly believed it would be easier on everyone if there was nothing left to tidy up, but also because it provided him with an almost therapeutic sense of ceremony. To begin another life, Nicolae believed, the past life had to be given away.

On board the
Zenica
, however, Nicolae’s confidence quickly dissolved. The faint smell of laundry soap on his shirt filled him with longing. He was rid of possessions but not emotions: the unsaid goodbyes weighed heavily. He reached for Andrei, who moved closer and rested Nicolae’s head against his shoulder, softly counting down from one hundred as the Turkish freighter lifted anchor. When he reached fifty-seven, they heard the nasal sound of a ship’s horn.

The wooden crate in which they hid was hardly large enough for them both. After an hour, their flashlight began to flicker and fade. Andrei turned it off and immediately a damp blackness closed in. He shook the flashlight and turned it back on. The boat was tipping and sliding on the waves, water hitting the deck above them. He tried humming to subdue their fear, but quickly stopped, reaching instead for the jug of water they had been given earlier by the man who hid them. Nicolae’s eyes stayed on him as he lifted the jug, took a long gulp, then offered it.

“We’re going to be all right,” Andrei whispered, and Nicolae nodded.

The flashlight faded out one last time and then they were in darkness. Nicolae, who was pressed up against the side of the crate, felt the retching onset of seasickness. His stomach tossed each time the hull hit the water. He sagged into himself, his arms wrapped tightly around his legs, until he passed into sleep. Though they had been told to stay hidden away, Andrei felt his way up the ladder and wedged a small piece of scrap wood in the hatch to allow for fresh air.

At half past one, a puff of light and sulphur scratched the air. Andrei checked his watch, then extinguished the match. He reached for Nicolae’s hand, distressed at its clamminess, and gave it a gentle tug. Their plan was to enter the water at the mouth of the Bosporus. It was three hours before sunrise. Andrei groped carefully up the ladder and lifted the lid. On deck, he released a long sigh, relieved to be able to stretch his legs. He took pleasure in the moon, watching its reflection carve the black water in two, the sea now so quiet.

Then Nicolae arrived at his side, pale from fatigue and nausea, whispering, “Let’s hurry. I’m more than ready to throw myself overboard.”

Together they spread an insulating layer of petroleum jelly over their skin, along their arms, onto the backs of their legs, slipping against each other for a slick and final embrace. It was agreed that if they got separated, they would reunite on the shore.

Nicolae lowered himself by a rope and entered first. Andrei tripped on a winch, lost a few seconds righting himself, and entered a minute or so later. The freighter travelled slowly along its course, leaving a soft wake across the surface. It was still too early for the passenger ferry boats to begin brightening the water with their lights. The blue-black water and sky merged.

Andrei felt a strong wind quickening the current where the Black Sea filled the mouth of the Bosporus. The water was choppy and he
dipped under for longer stretches of time, sinking and spluttering, fighting to the surface as water swelled over him, coming up with a gasp and then sinking again. The pressure was almost more than he could bear. The force of the sea was crushing, and his lungs were heavy and sore. When the water calmed down, he rolled onto his back and floated for a few minutes to regain his strength. His chest was heaving. The Black Sea was behind him.

Through a surface skimmed with iridescence, swirls of pink and blue petrol, he swam out of one world and into another. On the Bosporus, he was surrounded by tankers anchored in the night, a spew of industrial waste. His mouth clamped shut. Three hours after they had entered the water, he experienced the first grey light of morning. Ahead he saw a dark, shifting stripe of land.

When his feet finally touched solid ground, he looked up and noticed the sky spinning above him. For a moment, his eyes pulsed with spots of darkness, then his body gave way, like ink spilled on the shore. He crawled toward, then collapsed against a large rock. For hours, he slipped in and out of awareness.

He dreamt he saw Nicolae’s head bobbing above the water’s surface. He called out, but there was only his voice and its echo, receding upward to the sky, then caught, gone on the wind.

Andrei Dinescu, age 27, from Northern Romania, was found alive on a shore near Yenikoy by local fisherman Metin Saygin. He is in stable condition after many hours in the water.

Metin Saygin, the man who discovered Andrei, was interviewed by the local paper. Wasn’t he afraid the man he rescued might be dangerous?

“No. I trusted my first impression completely,” Andrei’s rescuer replied.

And what impression was that?

“It’s very simple. I saw someone’s son.”

Metin saw in Andrei a child who was near death. He took a flask of water and held it to Andrei’s lips. When Andrei failed to respond, he dipped his fingers in the clear liquid and swabbed his parched lips until the child suckled in appreciation. He wiped his shirt across Andrei’s forehead to draw off the sweat.

D
ESPITE THE PASSAGE OF
several years, Metin had remained undiminished in Andrei’s mind. So much so that the moment he finished describing his rescuer to me, he began to cry. We had moved from the living room to Andrei’s small kitchen table. The electric fan, set at medium, was now perched on a stack of newspapers. Its vibrating tone blended with drifts of city noise. Strands of hair fluttered across Andrei’s forehead as he wiped his eyes. There was a vase of daisies in front of us with a penny sitting at the bottom of the stale water. Bubbles clung to the stems. I pushed it aside and reached for his arm.

We stayed sitting in adjacent chairs. I remember being struck by Andrei’s nearness, the closeness of his warm body smelling of soap and sweat. I remember looking at him and having a funny feeling in my chest.

He moved his chair closer, put his palm on my shoulder, tilted his face close to mine and kissed me. It started with a delicate touching of lips, then his mouth opened on mine and the kiss became loose, moist. I didn’t stop him—suspended by surprise. He kissed me tentatively, and then more urgently. It was pleasant and then exciting
and then…strange. When it was over (maybe a minute had passed, maybe two), he looked at me and shifted in his seat.

“That’s my first kiss in a long time,” he said, and began to blush.

I nodded and smiled, equally embarrassed, knowing what he was going to say.

He continued, “I have to tell you that—” He paused and looked into the vase.

“It’s okay. I know.”

“That I—I care very much about you, but—”

“It’s okay, Andrei. I care about you, too,” I said, trying not to feel rejected.

He looked away. “Forgive me?”

“Yes,” I said, feeling guilty now as I thought of Paolo. “I forgive you.”

When it was time for me to leave, we stood in the hall and hugged each other for a long time. Then we said goodbye.

We never discussed that kiss again. After a few days of awkwardness we slipped back into the roles we had established. Though it was unspoken, we both seemed to agree that friendship was the best thing for us, the easiest intimacy. I took the kiss to be merely a symptom of his increasing loneliness.

When I returned home that evening, still flustered by the afternoon’s events, the entrance to my apartment was festooned with streamers. A scratchy fibre door mat—HOME SWEET HOME—had been placed across the threshold. On it was a letter from Paolo with an amusing poem he had composed about a dog named Hindrance that insists on squatting at a woman’s doorstep until she adopts him. Paolo ended the letter by saying that he knew I was following my instincts, but soon he hoped my instincts would convince me to invite the dog in. “We can all learn new tricks,” as he put it.