The Letter Opener

by Kyo Maclear

  Andrei was happy in a way, in many ways. Their engagement had not put an end to the stares or the gossip—but the tenor had changed. It was no longer the spiteful attention they had endured earlier. The peering eyes behind painted shutters seemed less hostile now. Mothers pinning their laundry in the sunlight stopped to say hello. Bony fingers wagged greetings from balconies. Children on creaking tricycles rang their bells in greeting as they passed. Of course, there were skeptics who muttered under their breath, Condolences to the children born to such a strange couple… But for the most part, believing they had influenced events, people in the village were self-congratulatory—wasn’t it miracle the two had been cured!—a glimmer of victory in their eyes.

  Eli was triply pleased by the engagement. Pleased that his older brother was spared the spattering of his reputation. Pleased that the family name had been redeemed. Pleased that he had been the one to help spare him. Andrei’s mother was initially suspicious but she soon lost herself in the preliminaries of wedding planning. The cake design was her coup de maître: three tiers, topped by two ceramic figurines, feet embedded in rich butter icing. A white satin dress for the woman. A tuxedo and hat for the man. Cake sides decorated with crushed almonds and raisins. A sprinkle of cocoa.

  Only Nicolae was distraught.

  Nicolae considered Andrei’s engagement an act of cowardice. It devastated him. He didn’t accept Andrei’s assurance that the relationship was a sham, that it had helped stifle the scandal. Perhaps he feared deep down that Andrei would grow to love his fiancée. With its layers of deceit, the coming wedding was too painful a subject to mention. So between them Ileana was never discussed—until one afternoon Ileana and Nicolae met. A brief encounter near the market. Andrei and Ileana had been out walking when Nicolae pulled up beside them on his bicycle. They shook hands and exchanged pleasantries for a few minutes. Chitchat about the improving weather, the cycling group that had passed through town that morning, the meagre loaves of bread at the bakery…

  Andrei was under the false impression that the encounter had appeased Nicolae and washed away any doubts he entertained about the nature of Andrei’s relationship with Ileana.

  But a week later Nicolae announced that he had checked the Cernavoda ship schedules and that he was intent on leaving Romania—with or without Andrei.

  With the summer wedding only a few months away, Andrei tried to convince him to reconsider. “Wait a while. Things will settle down.”

  They were sitting in the forest. Nicolae was petulant.

  “How long do you plan to continue with her?” Nicolae asked.

  “Until it’s safe,” said Andrei.

  “Aren’t you sick of it? Haven’t you grown weary of your little performance?”

  As Andrei looked down at his feet, something clicked. “I don’t believe it.” He glanced up, incredulous. “You think I’ve fallen in love with her.”

  Nicolae brushed off Andrei’s words with a smirk. “Do you think people have really forgotten about you? Do you think it’s that simple? That you can just choose to erase who you are?”

  Andrei shook his head slowly. “But what do you want me to do?”

  Nicolae was silent.

  Andrei continued. “I thought you’d understand. This is for us.”

  At this Nicolae released a cynical laugh and, still without a word, began to pack his bag. Andrei tried to reach for him, but Nicolae turned away in a manner that said there was nothing left to discuss.

  When Andrei returned home that evening, he closed his bedroom door with more force than he had intended. It shook his bedside table, causing a small lamp to wobble, and he caught it just before it fell. Having restored it, he sank down onto the floor and began to cry. Nicolae was right. He had acted out of weakness. Was he really intending to go through with this marriage?

  All that mattered to him at that moment was that he wanted to be with Nicolae again. It was not too late. The courtship could be called off. There was still time.

  That evening, Andrei brought out a map of Romania and spread it on his bed. He stared at the winding lines that represented rivers and roads, finding comfort in the map’s simple abstractions. He looked at every notation, ran his hand from corner to corner, from the mountains to the coastline. His finger settled on a southeast point, a thumbnail distance from Constanta. He began to trace the route.

  Drained by the day’s emotions, he felt his mind shutting down. The weight of his eyelids pressing. Sleep finally overtook him. He woke up several hours later to the sound of Eli coming home, the noise of a screen door squealing on a rusty hinge. His eyes sprang open. The map was crumpled beside his head. He felt paper creases on his cheek. He rolled over in bed but couldn’t fall back to sleep. As the house became quiet, he began to consider Ileana. The more he thought about leaving her, the more ashamed he felt. For the rest of the night, he slept poorly, turning from side to side, from Nicolae to Ileana and back again.

  The next day, Andrei waited for Ileana by a fountain in the main square. He sat on a stone bench facing the dry basin. On the side of the fountain someone had painted For whom do we suffer? The faint grey words peered through a cloud of whitewash. The fountain had been out of commission for five years, turned off as a symbol of the new austerity; now it was just an ornament to bureaucracy. Where once water had cascaded down, there was cracked ceramic and bits of trash.

  When Ileana arrived, she shouted out in a friendly voice. Her hammock bag, slung on one shoulder, bumped against her thigh with her quick steps. It was only as she drew nearer that she hesitated. Seeing Andrei’s solemn look, she sat down warily, still short of breath.

  Over the course of the next hour Andrei confessed everything to her. There was a look of surprise on her face, then dismay. For a time, after he finished, she kept her head lowered, nodding ever so slightly as if pondering each part of a confusing puzzle. When she raised her head again her eyes were red. A vein flared at her temple. She seemed about to cry.

  “Andrei. Please forgive me,” she said, reaching for his hand. The compassion on her face at that moment was overwhelming.

  He looked at her suspiciously. “I don’t understand.”

  “It’s all my fault. What a mess.” She shook her head. “Eli said it was over between you and Nicolae. He said you were just friends. Oh no! Nicolae must just despise me.”

  Andrei was totally confounded by her reaction and it took him a moment to respond. “He doesn’t despise you. Anyway, you’re the one who should despise us—or at least me. How can I marry you now that I have plans to leave?”

  “Yes—now all the old problems are back.” Then, as the meaning of what Andrei had said finally sunk in, she groaned. “Now I’m back where I started.” She raised her hand to her temple. “Please, Andrei,” she pleaded. “You have to help me.”

  All afternoon, they sat on the stone bench and plotted. Ileana folded her arms into the body of her jacket for warmth. Andrei gave her his scarf to wear. They considered their situation from every conceivable angle. They resolved that as wrenching as their predicament was, it could be turned in their favour. By the time Andrei left the square, kissing Ileana on the cheek, they had agreed on a course of action. They had a compact. Another conspiracy.

  Nineteen

  The quota change was announced on state radio. It was squeezed between a story about the construction of a massive new government building in Bucharest, to be called the Palace of the People, and news about the Olympic team tryouts. Before the broadcast came to an end, the news reader recapped: The former quota of four children for every woman had been raised to five.

  “This is unbelievable,” Ileana said, pointing at the radio in Andrei’s kitchen.

  “Idiot counters,” Andrei muttered. “They’re turning us into a nation of numbers. Lightbulbs in the house. Loaves of bread on the table. Potatoes in the pantry. Litres in the gas tank.”

  “Five babies.” She shook her head incredulously.

  “It’s the babies who should
be rationed. The last thing this country needs is another child to—”

  “Andrei!” Ileana flinched.

  Andrei had not meant to sound hard-hearted. To his mind, the callousness lay with the authorities, and the unconscionable outcome of its campaign for population growth. Row upon row of metal cribs. There were more children than there was love to go around. Concrete warehouses throughout the country were teeming with jittery orphans who rocked like mechanical toys; children who cried for mothers until they were hoarse, and then stopped crying; children who lay on urinesoaked cots; bright beautiful children tethered by limb to furniture; silent, staring children hiding under a jumble of blankets.

  The orphanages threatened to erase all the ingredients that made one human. Such was the legacy of the long aisles of babies treated as undesired goods.

  One day Andrei took Ileana to the hidden clearing in the forest. The ground still smelled of spring. There were droplets of moisture on the leaves. “Right here. Shall we lie down?” Andrei placed a bed of clothes over the ground, a faded canvas jacket beside a grubby pullover beside a flannel shirt. This makeshift arrangement cloaked Andrei’s secret: the imprint of other bodies pressed into moss.

  The moisture seeped through the clothes into their skin. The hairs on Andrei’s neck rose when a deer bounded across the forest floor only a few metres from where they were lying.

  Their mutual desperation brought a tenderness. They lay side by side. He explored her with his fingers, Tell me if you mind. She moved slightly and pulled down her pants. His hand moved to her hip. May I? She had the body of a soft boy. Flat planes, opulent moments. Is this okay?

  Her arms around him. Fingers tracing his spine. Andrei knew he was the first man to brush himself against her breasts. He touched his lips to the cleft near her mouth. Ileana rolled on top. He held her shoulders. She rocked on top of him, her hips pushing slowly, back and forth. She leaned forward. A string of tiny red beads hanging from her neck rested on his chest.

  They moved, awkwardly, their every gesture strange in the fumble of first lovemaking. Neither had a claim on the other. But they released each other, and their feelings lifted, cleansed like a fresh wind.

  The silence afterwards was not an embarrassed one. They relaxed into the earth. The blue sky darkened around them. Ileana’s breathing was so deep and regular, Andrei thought she might be sleeping. But then he saw her open eyes gazing upwards. The wind was warm. She sat up, lifted her hair and retied it gently.

  What startled Andrei was the strength of his emotions after the fact. A raw affection toward Ileana, a genuine sense of excitement at the prospect of becoming a father or, at least, a father figure. He thought it was cut and dried—that his feelings would conform to his intentions. He assumed he was in control of his own fate. What he discovered was that there were the mechanics of the matter and then there was something more.

  “Come here,” he murmured.

  As he reached to embrace her, their hands bumped and their arms moved at different angles. Flustered, Andrei shook his arms in playful frustration and pretended to hug the air. She laughed. They both blushed.

  On the walk home, she threaded her arm through his.

  Agreeing to get Ileana pregnant was the last sentimental thing Andrei did before leaving his country. Otherwise, his days were spent going over logistics, studying maps, deciding what to take.

  “Listen,” he told Ileana one evening after they had been walking. “I want you to take my room. I’ll tidy up everything, make it beautiful for you and the baby. There’s a closet, some shelves, a big window with a tree just outside so it’s nice and cool in the summer. I want you to say yes. Say you’ll move into my house.”

  Ileana agreed.

  The first thing Ileana did when she found out that she was pregnant was crop her hair. It was an impulsive gesture. People stared at her bristly head with disapproval. But once it was known that she was a woman with child she was granted immunity.

  When Ileana was eleven weeks pregnant, she moved into his room. Those last nights before Andrei left, he busied himself making her comfortable. He built a bassinet and he altered his old trousers so they would fit her in the coming months. He cleared a shelf and prepared it with strips of fabric, a bottle of olive oil and a jar of talcum powder.

  The last thing he did was slip a note inside Ileana’s coat pocket while she was sleeping. The note was for his mother.

  It took Andrei’s mother many weeks to accept the fact that her son was not coming home. Despite the goodbye note, she behaved as though she expected him to walk through the door at any moment. At least that’s what Andrei gathered from Ileana’s first letter, every bland, censor-evading word subject to his scrutiny, his emotional telepathy. (“Your mother has been extremely busy with housework for two months. She wakes up in the morning and throws herself into her chores.”) She spent hours restitching the seams of Ileana’s wedding dress as if to reorder events. She ironed napkins and polished cutlery for a reception that would never happen. She trimmed the threads of her curtains. She mended a cushion cover that had been in storage for years. She oiled the hinge of the screen door. She noticed that the door to the hallway closet was creaking, so she oiled that, too.

  Quickly the days sped by—one day, another day, a week, a month—until gradually, through a process of sewing up all the ragged things, shining all the tarnished things and repairing all the broken things, she seemed at peace with herself. (“This afternoon, I came home as your mother was bundling up to leave the house. It’s Sunday. The shop is closed. I asked her where she was going and she shrugged. ‘For a walk,’ she said. ‘There’s nothing more I can do.’”)

  Six months after Andrei’s departure, the baby was born. Andrei never saw the baby nurse at Ileana’s breast. He never saw him roll or crawl, toddle or walk. Ileana got her independence. She was spared the harassments. Because she was bound to a man who had left, because she lived in the home of her fiancé, she was not pressured to marry. It was only a partial freedom, but it was enough. (“I can walk through town with a sense of peace—I’m happy.”) It was not the rosy euphoria of maternity, just a feeling that she had found a pocket of air.

  Ileana carried the baby in a sling fashioned from a folded bedsheet. When people called Andrei a deserter, she never uttered a word against him. She worked in the tailor shop during the day and she played her guitar at night. Between these activities, Ileana dedicated herself to making her son, Mihai, feel wanted. And he was. For Andrei’s mother, the baby was an unanticipated gift. She bathed him, wrapped him in pieces of clean old cloth and treasured his newness, believing that some ancient dimension of the family she had lost might endure through him.

  According to Ileana, the baby had black hair, twiggy legs and skinny fingers that looked exactly like Andrei’s.

  I REMEMBER WHEN ANDREI relayed this information to me in the fall. There was a mixture of pride and something else, yearning perhaps, in his voice. It took me by surprise because I had never seen him in a paternal light. It is only now that I wonder if the baby’s birth—the result of a pragmatic sperm donorship—and Ileana’s reports on their son’s progress had a more significant effect on Andrei than he let on. Did he want something more than a commitment-free fatherhood? Did he long to meet his son enough to be pulled back to Romania?

  The other night I watched a man and his son as I was riding the bus home from Sakura. The bus was almost empty and they were sitting in a row near the front, sharing earphones, listening to music on a Walkman. I watched, studying the shape of the man’s head, observing how his hair curled over his jacket collar just like Andrei’s. A few minutes passed and I noticed the young child remove his earphones and lift his face, then ask a question. Still gazing ahead, the man nodded. The child asked another question, and at this point the man leaned toward him and began slowly and tenderly stroking his hair. I could not keep my eyes off them.

  After a few more blocks the man reached up and pulled the yellow cord, signalling a stop
request to the driver. When the bus stopped, they stood up, shuffled into the aisle and made their way toward the front exit. I pressed my forehead to the window and continued watching them get off, my warm breath fogging the glass.

  Long after they had disappeared from view, the idea that the man and the child were somehow linked to Andrei and his son stayed with me: a notion that I had been given a message about Andrei’s existence and fate. As the bus continued its course toward the station, images began to form in my mind. A young boy having his hair combed by his mother. An older woman chopping vegetables from the garden at the table. A cooking pot full of soup steaming on the stove.

  And then another image: an early winter afternoon, the clouds advancing unhurriedly in the sky, a man’s shadow moving at long last up a winding dirt road between two fields. As he passes a small dairy farm, he recalls the unevenly tilted shoulders of the woman who sells milk; the ducklike waddle of the woman’s brother, the town’s postman. In the distance he sees a house with light yellow trim and large arched windows. A small face above a flower box.

  THE SUMMER OF 1984, when Andrei arrived in Toronto, everyone was watching the Summer Olympics in Los Angeles on TV. The Soviets had boycotted the games, ordering all of their satellite states to do the same. Romania openly defied Moscow, becoming the only Warsaw Pact country to send their athletes to the games. In the absence of the Soviet competitors, an eighteen-year-old Romanian gymnast by the name of Kati Szabó rose to the top, winning four gold medals.

  On the day of the final competition, Andrei ventured a few blocks from the settlement house to a Portuguese coffee bar called Milky Rose. He had noticed the television mounted above the bar and walked in. The gymnasts on the screen wore white leotards with red, gold and blue stripes running down the sides. They had matching ribbons in their hair and delicate-boned limbs. From the back of the bar came the harsh clacking of dominoes hitting a table.