The Letter Opener

by Kyo Maclear

  During the forced evacuation in the Second World War, when the Ishii family was relocated to Tashme, a former cattle ranch in the British Columbia interior, Roy’s weather predictions were treated as a welcome diversion. He taught the other children to read the clouds—widely scattered puffs, low twists and tatters, wisps with rust-coloured haloes—identifying each by name and thickness. A harmless hobby, everyone assumed, until October 1944, when Roy wrote a letter to an uncle in New Denver, describing as an aside the low-level nimbostratus obscuring the sky above Tashme. This edgeless dark mass would sit for days above their heads, producing a steady dump of snow.

  The letter was returned opened but undelivered: a first warning. It turned out that if you were Japanese Canadian, amateur weather forecasting was considered an offence. The post office was under government orders to scrutinize any letter being sent by or to any Japanese Canadian. Information concerning such things as meteorology or road conditions was blacked out as intelligence helpful to the enemy. The weather was no longer a staple of conversation—it was treachery.

  Despite a few inauspicious years, Roy continued to nurture his interest in weather after the war ended. And when he moved into Sakura, decades later, his worldly goods reflected a lifelong preoccupation. Posters from NASA’s image spacecraft covered his walls, offering a ghostly vision of Earth—a blue-and-white orb glowing in the blackness of outer space surrounded only by a thin membrane of air, which Roy referred to as Our Fragile Envelope. During a visit one afternoon, he showed me a storms-and-fronts index that went back to 1955. He surprised me by asking my birthdate. I told him it was April 14, 1960.

  He grinned. “Overcast. Showers in the afternoon,” he said.

  And when we looked it up, he was right. (He confessed later that my birthday coincided with Maurice “Rocket” Richard’s last game in the NHL, when the Montreal Canadiens swept the Toronto Maple Leafs 4–0 for the Stanley Cup. Roy remembered walking to Maple Leaf Gardens in a rain slicker.)

  Now, I watched him sauntering through light shafts in the church basement, wearing his down jacket as a cape. He raked his fingers through his thinning hair, unruffled by the day’s events.

  Noting my presence, he smiled and nodded. “Looks like she’s going to storm.”

  Cumulonimbus clouds, a cold front moving gradually across the early night sky.

  “Your mom. She sounds kind of tense.” Paolo’s hand was over the mouthpiece.

  He held the phone down toward the couch where I lay that same night, overcome with exhaustion. It was just past ten o’clock. My mother and the other residents of Sakura were staying at a local inn until their rooms were restored.

  “Naiko?” She had to be calling from the hotel front desk.

  “Mom, is everything okay?”

  “I’m not sure. It’s Gloria. She’s still missing.”

  Gloria Kimura lived on the same floor as my mother. I knew her as a fidgety woman who collected dolls and combed her grey bangs compulsively.

  “Get them to phone her family. Where else would she go?”

  As I said this, I imagined Gloria wandering alone through the cold streets.

  “They’re calling now. Oh dear, it has been such a crazy day. Only…”

  “Only what?”

  Silence.

  “Mom?”

  “This is awful, but I think she was the one who started the fire.”

  As soon as she said it, I knew she was right.

  On a recent visit, I had stopped by Gloria’s room to find her talking on the phone. I waved to her quickly from the doorway, but as soon as she saw me she tilted the phone onto her shoulder and gestured for me to join her, moving her free hand vigorously as if fanning herself. I stepped into her room, removed a stack of magazines from the only chair and heard the agitation in her voice as she spoke to her sister, who lives in Port Hope. The window was opened and the room was chilly, and as I flipped through an old copy of Vanity Fair, goosebumps spread across my skin. I noticed the sound of wind whistling through a tree just outside the open window. A few more minutes of heated conversation passed. Then, just as Gloria was saying goodbye to her sister, I was startled by a loud and sudden bang, something smashing against the rain gutter below. My head jerked back just as Gloria’s arm returned to her side. My heart jumped against my chest. I kept my eyes on her face, but she was staring at the window ledge, where a wooden Kokeshi doll had stood only seconds earlier. Her expression and the tension in her hand told me that the doll’s fall wasn’t an accident.

  “My God, Gloria,” I said, one hand still on my chest. “What happened?”

  She looked up. “It slipped,” she said quietly.

  I walked over to the window and looked below. “Someone could have been down there. You could have really hurt someone.”

  She didn’t answer. Drooping with tiredness, she slumped onto the bed so suddenly it startled me. It took me a moment to take in her difficulty and to help her lie down.

  “Bless your heart.” She blinked and changed the subject. “You like yokan?” She aimed an arm in the direction of her mini-fridge. “Take some with you. I shouldn’t eat it. Diabetes. Go on, take it all.”

  “Gloria, please rest.” I began to pull up the folded quilt at the foot of her bed, but her hand blocked me.

  “Please, no. The quilt’s not quite finished yet.” She sighed. “But almost.”

  And with that she rolled over and closed her eyes.

  I ran my fingers over the fabric, then carefully folded it up and put it back at the foot of the bed before leaving the room.

  The quilt had taken on epic dimensions since finding its way to Gloria the previous winter. Though she told slightly different versions of the story, the basics stayed the same:

  In the spring of 1987, an elderly widow by the name of Mrs. Millie Kingston collided with a cyclist while taking a morning walk and died hours later of a cerebral hemorrhage. When her children were disposing of her things, they found folded away among the more obvious valuables a quilt embroidered with the words For our dear friends, John and Margaret Kimura, Ucluelet 1944. The quilt, which was now sun-faded and unstitched in sections, had been purchased at a small antiques market near Cobourg, Ontario.

  How it ended up there is open to speculation. When Japanese Canadians were rounded up and sent to internment camps, the remnants of their lives cropped up in various locations. Among the myriad disruptions of daily life faced by a people suddenly branded “enemy aliens” was uncertain mail delivery. Piles of undeliverable packages sat in Canadian post offices waiting to be rerouted. Most of these packages had been returned or retrieved from houses where families were not present to receive them, and were marked with the impassive administrative memo Forwarding Address Required. Some found their proper destination, but many were left unclaimed.

  The names on letter boxes throughout the coastal towns of British Columbia spoke of Japanese Canadians who hoped one day to return to their homes. The name Tanaka painted on a box imparted the impression that Kenta and Hatsuko Tanaka had not been evacuated by the RCMP, that if one opened the door to 526 Cordova Street, they might be right inside, preoccupied with mending the water damage to their bedroom ceiling following the heavy spring rains or busy unpacking a recent shipment of Japanese silk to display in their modest but successful import shop. A block away on Powell Street, a letter box bearing the name Maikawa awaited mail addressed to the owners of the community’s only department store. One after another, the names on the letter boxes were replaced, but for a time it was possible to stroll through the streets of Vancouver’s Japantown and believe that the community had simply stepped out for a moment, that everyone would shortly return.

  The quilt was one of many postal orphans. After the war it was put up for auction, and it eventually found its way to Cobourg, where it was purchased by Millie Kingston, a retired primary-school principal. Decades of travel and use took their toll, so that by the time Millie died, the quilt was tattered and ready for the trashbin; onl
y the intervention of Millie’s perceptive daughter, Jenny Kingston, prevented such an end. Jenny, with intuition reinforced through a decade of work as a city archivist, recognized the quilt’s sentimental and historical value and immediately packed it off to The Kimuras of Ucluelet c/o Canada Post.

  From friendship token to stray artifact to craft souvenir to raggedy castaway to personal effect of the deceased to repatriated relic to cherished heirloom. The transmutation of matter.

  The quilt arrived at the Undeliverable Mail Office toward the end of 1988. As I recall, I was poring over an elastic-bound set of Enid Blyton books, looking for a card or a dedication, remembering my childhood, when I was called over by one of the storage-room sorters. His name was Finn, short for Finnegan—though Andrei used to tease him by calling him “Fin, the End,” because it was his job to declare the worth of items that were left unclaimed after six months. He was the gravekeeper; the storage room, his necropolis. For days at a time, its phantoms were his only company. Covered in dust, in actual danger of being crushed, Finn burrowed his way through bulging walls of packages and documents, his great mop of reddish brown hair floating through this contemporary catacomb along an increasingly narrow trench. Valuables were sent to auction. Non-valuables were destroyed. It was like sorting wheat from chaff: tedious but straightforward. Only on occasion did he call on anyone else for input. And when he did he spoke concisely.

  “I’ve found something.”

  On a table lay the badly preserved quilt, star-shaped patches of red floral fabric hanging in flaps against an uneven blue background. Along one edge in pale pink thread was the embroidered inscription. He underlined the names John and Margaret Kimura with his index finger.

  Did I know of them? Well. No. Not them. But I could make a few calls.

  It turned out that the quilt, which had been on its way to the incinerator, had been made for Gloria’s aunt and uncle, who, when given the choice of going to an internment camp or “repatriating” to Japan, a country as foreign to them as Norway, had chosen the latter. The quilt had been in the hands of strangers for four decades. After a bit of inquiring, it was given to Gloria as John and Margaret’s closest traceable relative.

  It was a “reunion” I regarded as a landmark in my mail recovery carreer. Gloria was an odd but good-hearted woman who tended to place everyone else’s needs before her own. I’d long admired her cheerful disposition, the genuine, sometimes heroic smile that spared whoever she was with any sense of the distress she might be feeling at that moment. It gratified me to be able to give her something.

  For Gloria, the quilt became a source of pride and purpose—like Penelope’s robe, a perpetual doing. She worked on it every day, mending the broken stitches, repairing the stars. In retrospect, the labour probably staved off a depression that would have consumed her sooner. It was impossible to imagine Gloria without the quilt.

  And when it was completed, a few days after I visited her, she got out of bed and wrapped herself in it, and then a woman whose days and nights had no centre walked down the hall and set fire to a wastepaper bin in the women’s washroom.

  Twelve

  The morning after the sprinklers went off at Sakura, I woke up early with razors in the back of my throat. I went to the kitchen to fetch a glass of orange juice but it hurt too much to swallow. My ears were clogged and when I spoke my voice sounded faraway. I padded off to the bathroom and inspected my tonsils, gargled and padded back to bed, groaning as I lay down. A shaft of light passed through the window. It had snowed lightly during the night.

  “It’s probably the flu,” said Paolo when I called him. “Stay in bed.”

  After I telephoned the UMO, I slept and slept, waking occasionally to take teaspoons of liquid, including chicken broth that Paolo brought over later in a big pot. After the virus travelled from my throat to my chest, a cough racked my entire body. During the three days it took me to recover, I hardly thought of Gloria or Andrei or my mother at all. I rested and watched television with filmy eyes, buried in a beige duvet that I had had since I was seven years old and surrounded by ribbons of toilet tissue to blow my nose. Paolo nursed me between his shifts at the flower shop, but for the most part I was alone, blinds drawn against the daylight, lozenge wrappers hidden in the damp folds of my overslept bed.

  Day mixed with night, snacks replaced meals. A feeling of slackness gradually overcame me, as if my body had been filleted of its bones and was now melting into the mattress. The television was on but I looked through it. After some patting around, I found the converter and turned it off. There was a bulk at my feet where I had left the morning newspaper. I reached down and pulled it toward me, unfolded it on the bed as best I could, barely able to take in the day’s reporting.

  USA THREATENS TO INVADE PANAMA. OPERATION JUST CAUSE

  90 HOMELESS EARTHQUAKE VICTIMS IN SAN FRANCISCO SLEEPING IN AN AUTOMOBILE SHOWROOM

  ELEVEN PEOPLE KILLED IN A CAR PILE-UP ON THE 401

  MASS PROTESTS IN TIMISOARA, ROMANIA, TURN VIOLENT

  I refolded the paper and my mind started to roam, picking up thoughts then discarding them. The telephone rang. After four rings, I managed to reach it. My mother was calling with news that Gloria had been tracked down through her sister in Port Hope. Her breathing quickened with excitement as she spoke. Apparently, Gloria’s sister had received a call earlier that morning from a nurse at a Toronto hospital. Some good Samaritan out walking his dog had witnessed Gloria fall on a pathway overlooking the Scarborough Bluffs and had brought her to emergency the night before with a hip fracture. They had set the fracture, but she would be in hospital for several more days. As she told me this, I could hear the note of disappointment in my mother’s voice, the pout of a child who couldn’t wait. I swallowed in an effort to unblock my stuffed ears and mustered a few words of encouragement. Something about time passing quickly enough, no need to be impatient.

  After I replaced the receiver, I flopped back against the pillows with a mixed sense of relief (that the mystery of Gloria’s whereabouts had been cleared up) and irritation (that my mother hadn’t asked a single question about me, not a word about how I was feeling). My spine hurt. Sitting upright, I sipped my tea and shifted against the headboard, feeling sulky. The small of my back needed a good stretch. I flexed my feet, crossed my legs, tucked them under, straightened them, unable to get comfortable. At what point had she stopped asking?

  Was it possible for a mother to forget to be a mother?

  Don’t, I thought.

  But it was too late.

  When they come, childhood memories are much like a wind in the trees, everything stirring at once.

  ONE SPRING, WHEN I was ten and Kana was thirteen, my father and mother made the announcement that they were separating, a mutual and amicable decision.

  “We’ve grown apart,” they said.

  To which we responded: “Can’t you work it out? Can’t you grow back together?”

  But they insisted: “Don’t make this harder. Someday you’ll understand. And we’ll still be friends, still be here for you.”

  We pleaded and bargained but it didn’t get us anywhere. There were no miracles. We felt cheated. The way they had padded their announcement with niceties had broken our hearts.

  It was almost summer but the world was grey, the shadows in our house multiplied. I became a faucet of sorrow, flooding the house with my tears. Kana cried in private, often in the shower under camouflage of cascading water, but her eyes bulged publicly with grief.

  Everything happened so quickly. Within a few days, my father had rented an apartment near the college where he taught applied geography, and on my mother’s insistence they began dividing the contents of the house bit by bit. Books, records, scissors, linen, unmatched chairs, mugs, photos, even condiments. I walked around the depleted house in a state of shock, while Kana spent hours in her room working on a jigsaw puzzle of Antarctica she could never complete.

  When the first heartbreak passed, we imagined we were
luckier than many kids in similar situations. We practised handstands and back walkovers in a space once occupied by two worn leather armchairs, and imagined our father’s empty study as a time-travel machine, a device that could transform stillness into velocity, the present into the past.

  Of course, in the end, the separation wasn’t as tidy as they had led us to believe it would be. Old grudges began to reveal themselves. My parents became more aloof with each other, and stopped talking like old friends when they were on the telephone. Shared meals became less common. As the drifting apart gained momentum, we felt it acutely: the loss of their once combined energy and ideas. My father, an introvert by nature, sank further into his books, and into a monastic solitude that became harder and harder to interrupt.

  But the most significant change was in my mother.

  Through the initial stages of their separation, my mother fluctuated between matter-of-factness and giddiness. Strangely, her approach to keeping her composure was to keep moving. A figure of perpetual motion, she restained furniture, discovered the art of stencilling borders and reorganized the house from top to bottom.

  Then one day, out of nowhere, following a conversation with my father during which he told her he had made the decision to spend half his sabbatical in England the following year, she came to an abrupt halt. When she got off the phone, the look on her face was that of someone who had lost her way. For a few minutes she moved about the room, repositioning chairs, picking things up and putting them down someplace else. She swept the vitamin bottles to the back of the kitchen counter, then sat on a stool. It seemed she didn’t know what to do next.

  As I finished eating the onigiri she had prepared for lunch, she stumbled past us to her bedroom, quietly but firmly closing the door. I followed her, with bits of rice sticking to my fingers, and rapped lightly on her door with the heel of my hand. There was no response. I licked the rice off my fingers, placed my hand on the knob and put my ear to the wood. Inside I could hear the rustle of bedsheets growing more insistent, like a mole was burrowing. I tried again. Still no response.