The Letter Opener

by Kyo Maclear

  “They’re yours?” I asked, nudging my hair behind my ear.

  “No, no. They’re not mine. I feed them occasionally and that’s why they return.”

  Out of the open window, I noticed a large sign for a food mart in the distance, a bright band of orange with bold blue letters spanning an entire block. As we nibbled our tarts, Andrei followed my gaze and began to speak.

  Andrei first entered a North American grocery store three weeks after he arrived in Toronto. He was still staying in the settlement house, wearing mismatched clothes and his baseball cap, dreaming of a job and an apartment of his own. He moved timidly about the city, quietly studying the transactions of people around him. Before long, he knew how to ride the streetcar, how to operate the coin laundry, where to buy coffee and cheese in Kensington Market. Just from observing and copying others, he was slowly gaining confidence and adapting to his new home.

  But entering a grocery store as large as a sports stadium was an entirely different matter. Andrei walked in on a whim, and found himself happily lost in a maze of aisles offering a variety of products beyond anything he could have imagined. Shrink-wrapped hams crowned with pineapple rings. Frozen meat pies with puffy gravy packets. Thigh-sized tubs of coffee-flavoured yogurt. Sausage rolls the size of a man’s fist.

  He stopped in a section devoted to pet food. There were small tins with special pull tabs, unidentifiable cow and sheep parts gussied up to sound like a gourmet French feast. His stomach tightened at the sight. A swell of nausea overcame him as he saw orange-coloured frozen pizza samples, pepperoni sticks dotted with fat. In sight of the exit, his mind numb, he hurried past mounds of oversize produce, deaf now to the ping-ping of cash registers and overhead speakers announcing the day’s specials. He stumbled through the automatic doors, feeling the cold from inside mixing with the heat outside. The air shimmered.

  He inhaled deeply and walked to the edge of the pavement, his back to a row of open car trunks. A woman dressed in a bright pink halter whipped grocery bags into her Jeep. Two girls picked through a book of stickers while the mother of one of the girls hunted for her car keys. A young clerk helped a well-dressed older man carry a crate of soft drinks to his hatchback. Andrei felt torn, part of him repelled by all the indulgence, part of him wanting to fit in, envious of the self-possessed shoppers rushing home to their families. Such purposeful people—had they ever felt at odds with the world? Had their own actions ever horrified them?

  As Andrei stood and watched, he felt more and more inconse-quential. He didn’t belong. Strangely, what struck him most was the awareness that there was no one watching him. Back home, he had experienced an intimate nearness to others, with all the accompanying strife and harmony. Here, it was as if he didn’t exist.

  Yet in the same instant Andrei knew he was everything he hadn’t been before. He was free to sleep with men and not marry, keep a pet or two, buy a colour television, practise religion, listen to Bach or AC/DC—any of which, back in Romania, would have marked him as a likely enemy of the state. In his newly adopted home, he could count on a certain degree of tolerance. Provided he was discreet, provided he did not overstep anyone’s idea of decorum and good taste, his personal preferences would remain his own affair.

  It was his dream. His big North American dream. The freedom to do what he pleased. Opportunities everywhere. So why did he feel so miserable?

  The fight had gone out of him, he realized, because there was no longer a monolithic force to fight against. He felt oddly diminished. He was a man standing on the periphery of human activity. He could be waiting for a friend. A child. A spouse. He could be Albanian. Or Italian.

  As he contemplated his situation, a young man swept past, accidentally brushing against him. Andrei’s heart raced at the sight of the man’s wavy dark hair, the sleek neck rising from a white T-shirt. A familiar smell. Andrei tried to concentrate on a billboard at the farthest edge of the parking lot, but a memory had been roused. Unsure, he remained still, but there was a stirring, and the blood filled him, a bolt of longing shot directly to his groin. He crouched, embarrassed by this sudden flicker of excitement.

  When the arousal faded it was replaced by a dull ache in his chest. He blinked back tears. All the tension that had been building inside of him needed to be released. How could he be heard? Throw himself on the ground? Pound the concrete? Blurt out some profanity that would trumpet his presence, like a brick shattering a pane of glass? But when the moment passed, he was still standing, appearing as nonchalant as everyone else who walked through the In and Out doors of the grocery store.

  A sweet yeasty aroma drifted from a nearby bakery. A dozen bagels for three dollars. Poppyseed or sesame. Andrei couldn’t remember the last time his cheeks had been stuffed with food. Meringue that melted decadently on the tongue. Diabolically rich eclairs. He made a mental note to buy a toaster the minute he could afford one. So many choices. Shirt pressed or crumpled? Shoes re-soled or replaced? Hair freshly cut, with or without a shave? Choices that would have been momentous back home were minor here.

  Andrei walked by a family-style restaurant and through the window saw a couple dining on giant steaks. He saw the woman pare away the gristle with a sharp knife before taking a bite.

  Nibbling diamonds and chewing hundred-dollar bills was the way he thought of it.

  Andrei wrote his mother one letter after he had settled in Toronto. He tried postcards, but within a year he stopped sending those. By that time, he had heard a story about a Romanian family who were forced out of their home for having a defector son. The Securitate chose the middle of the night to evict them, boarding up every window and door of their house, then plastering the exterior walls with every letter and postcard the son had ever sent home. Years of intercepted correspondence neatly pasted up like wallpaper. Why the Securitate had waited so long wasn’t explained. The story sickened Andrei, and after that, he opted for the painful but less incriminating course of silence.

  “But you wrote to tell her that you had arrived in Canada safely.”

  “Yes. And out of homesickness.”

  A squeaky ceiling fan was whirling directly above me. My face now felt dry. A warm breeze passed through the window.

  Andrei was standing by the sink preparing iced tea. When the kettle reached a boil, he poured the gurgling water into a teapot. I watched him empty a tray of ice cubes into two wide glasses and thought about homesickness. I was trying to fathom what it would be like to leave everything and everyone I knew behind. How, after thirty years, could someone suddenly pack a bag and walk away? There had to be some single moment of decision.

  “Were there many people—?”

  “At the grocery store?” The ice cubes popped and crackled as he poured the warm tea over them.

  “No. In your country. Were there many trying to leave when you did?”

  “Yes. Then, before, after. There were always stories, from as early as I can remember—people hiding in the seats of cars, in wine barrels; people escaping by sea, through underground tunnels, even by hot-air balloon.”

  “But what happened to the ones who didn’t succeed? Did they end up in jail?”

  “Some did. But soon there weren’t enough jail cells for all those trying to run. And to improve his image with the West, the dictator released all but the most dangerous opponents. Anyway, it didn’t matter. We’d become our own jailers. We were so used to being watched, we began watching ourselves.”

  IN NICOLAE AND ANDREI’S class there was a student by the name of Ion who had succumbed wholeheartedly to the influence of the dictator and expressed his devotion by betraying others. Still in his early twenties, Ion already looked like the comedic image of a rising bureaucrat, in his imported clothes, always reeking of cologne.

  He was the one who had reported Nicolae for handing out samizdat leaflets a year earlier. So when Nicolae was summoned again in February, they assumed that Ion was the one responsible. Four months before Andrei and Nicolae’s defection, three men in he
avy coats approached Nicolae as he walked toward the university engineering building. A routine check, they said, and escorted him on foot to a small apartment near St. Stephen’s Tower, one of several rooms the Securitate leased around Baia Mare.

  Nicolae was directed toward a desk in the far corner and told to keep his coat on and remain standing. The room was horribly overheated. But he tried to appear calm, waiting for his eyes to adjust to the room’s dimness. Minutes passed and finally an officer emerged from the kitchen holding a plate of dumplings. The officer sat down at the desk, removed a pair of cufflinks, rolled up his shirt sleeves and began eating the food with his fingers.

  He ate with his eyes fixed on Nicolae. Apricot syrup dribbled onto the wood surface. The officer’s moustache became sloppy and wet. The room seemed to grow warmer. Why did the officer insist on eating so slowly? Nicolae wondered. At last, the officer wiped his fingers on a napkin, reached for his notebook and began to fan himself, revealing the silver roots of his dyed hair.

  The interrogation was quick. A round of questions, seemingly random, but precise. Nicolae was kept standing, and his mind took a zigzag course as he tried to follow and then anticipate the abrupt changes of subject. The officer’s tone was direct, his face inviting and amiable. Nicolae knew that they were trying to disarm him; replacing shouts and threats, his interrogator’s informality and false camaraderie was disconcerting in its own way.

  “…no more Solzhenitsyn?”

  “…copy of Saul Bellow?”

  “…brother-in-law, a backroom abortionist?”

  “…practise chemistry like your esteemed father?”

  “…anti-state activities?”

  “…contacts in the West?”

  To seem co-operative, Nicolae would nod or shake his head. When it was unavoidable, he gave brief answers.

  “…a fiancée?”

  “And children?”

  “…your duty to replenish the population?”

  Next, he was given a blank piece of paper and commanded to write down the name of every “dissident” he knew. Nicolae picked up the pen, pretended to think for a moment, then handed back the pen, shaking his head. The officer returned to his seat and stirred his coffee, clinking the spoon against the cup.

  The immunity Nicolae had experienced for being the son of a long-standing Party member was eroding.

  Two weeks later he was summoned again. This time, he was seated in front of a blank paper and ordered to write down the name of every homosexual he knew. He remembered the interrogator’s thick, diamond-centred wedding ring, as a heavy hand clapped his shoulder. Nicolae considered his options and picked up the pen. He wrote two names: Dinu and Pavel. And then he lowered his pen, his hand shaking. Dinu and Pavel were already notorious. Old men from the outskirts of Baia Mare, the thought of whom stirred up complicated feelings in Nicolae. They encapsulated all his fears of becoming vagrant and disparaged, yet they represented all his dreams of certainty; the selfacceptance he coveted, they wore as a shield.

  “…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 appr
oached 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.