The Letter Opener

by Kyo Maclear

  I read the letter first.

  December 5, 1989

  My dear friend Naiko,

  Forgive me for not expressing myself earlier. Every time I thought of calling or writing, I do not know how to explain myself and when I try to find the word, I start to feel very bad about putting you in this place.

  I feel shamefaced. Was it wrong to get you involved?

  I am not proud of myself for running off without saying goodbye. It is becoming a poor habit.

  I have found out about Nicolae. Now I know I will never see him again. I feel terrible sadness. Yet for me, knowing what happened is also a releaf release. Perhaps I can put it all behind me—it is over.

  Thank you for your friendship. I always felt that you were

  The letter stopped there.

  I read it several times. Then I put it down. It revealed nothing of what he had discovered about Nicolae. I unfolded the fax. A newspaper clipping had been copied and transmitted to Andrei by a librarian at the Turkish Daily News; a single column of text no more than five centimetres in length accompanied by a blotchy police sketch. It was taken from the English edition of the newspaper.

  Man’s body pulled from Istanbul harbor. The man, mid-twenties, with light brown hair, was discovered by coast patrol on Monday night. No identifying possessions have been found. There were no signs of bodily injury. He is presumed drowned. The Bureau of Missing Persons in Turkey processes more than 20,000 cases a year.

  The article was dated June 16, 1984—just around the time that Andrei had moved from Metin’s house to the transit camp in Istanbul. The date had been circled in blue ink, but the rest of the column was unmarked. I read it over twice. Of all the clippings, all the other reports of drowning victims, did this one hold the clarity of truth? Was Nicolae dead? I pictured his body floating face down, white shorts glowing in the moonlight; imagined just how close he came to reaching the shore.

  I continued to stare at the crude police sketch. One side of the man’s face was blotted into a shadowy silhouette, his features further smudged by the dark toner. If I strained my eyes to focus it, I could make out an eerie, distorted likeness. But the reality was there was no clear resemblance. It could have been Nicolae or any one of the twenty thousand other unfortunates. I found myself fighting back tears, thinking of kinder images of Nicolae; trying to understand Andrei’s state of mind on reading the clipping, his desire for finality, however terrible or questionable.

  I was refolding the article when I happened to notice a line of text at the bottom right-hand corner of the fax: 18/07/1989. But there must have been some mistake; how could that date be correct? My hand began to shake and the paper slid from my fingers and drifted to the floor. July 18, 1989. The date was circling around and around in my head. If Andrei believed Nicolae was dead, why had he kept the information from me for so many months? I felt my heart thudding, my head reeling. Everything was becoming confused: my perception of the summer, my recollection of what we were talking about back then. Had it all been pretense?

  I tried to remember the days we had spent writing the second group of letters and the hours we had spent poring over newspapers and contacting archives. Did he receive the fax then? If so, who was served by the act of writing those letters?

  Grief swept through me.

  On the table across the room, I spotted a copy of The Waves that I had given Andrei for his birthday. I walked over and randomly flipped to a page. “‘For one moment only,’ said Louis. ‘Before the chain breaks, before disorder returns, see us fixed, see us displayed, see us held in a vice…’”

  My eyes began to blur. I felt exhausted. I set the book down and went to open the window again. I stood there, blinking back tears, inhaling the cold air, watching people with their strollers and dogs, joggers huffing along in sweatsuits and scarves. A couple sauntered by holding hands. I buttoned up my cardigan and went to lie on the bed, flopping down carelessly, mussing the covers and bunching the pillows against my chest.

  And then I began to cry, tears that came with great, heaving sobs, racking my whole body, stealing my breath. Uncontrollable tears. I cried until my eyes were swollen and my mouth was parched. I cried because my soul felt heavy. I cried for Nicolae. I cried for Andrei, for his loss and for whatever deeds or knowledge he had to carry in his heart. I cried for my mother. I cried for Paolo, for his endurance and patience, for all the times I had withheld my affection. And I cried for myself because Andrei had left without warning, without telling me the truth.

  When the spasms subsided, I rolled onto my back and closed my eyes. As my body settled into the mattress, my fatigue overtaking me, I suddenly had a flash of what Andrei must have felt after he was revived by Metin. To pass out of one world and into another, breaking away so absolutely, was almost unfathomable.

  I didn’t expect to doze off, but the shock of the afternoon had taken a toll. I must have slept for several hours, for when I awoke the sky was darkening. A faded green blanket lay twisted beside me. I glanced at my watch and realized that it was half past five, almost time for me to leave.

  Except for the letters, I had already decided to leave everything behind.

  Among the items I carried away with me that evening was the uncensored letter Andrei had received via England from his mother. One week later, thanks to a Romanian professor I located through the University of Toronto, I held a translated copy of it in my hands. It was typed on department letterhead, the university crest so at odds with the intimacy of the words that followed.

  September 1984

  My dearest Andrei,

  My son in Canada. Remember when we talked about whether there was anyone who knew the fate of my family during the war? I had told you that I lost track of them when I and the healthiest women of our village were separated and then sent to Ravensbrück. I must tell you now that was not entirely the truth. You see, I found out that there was a Russian girl who knew my mother at Birkenau. I met her in the Red Cross hospital after the war. Her name was Rachel, then nineteen years old. She had already been in the camp for one year when my mother arrived.

  They both belonged to a women’s kommando that was made to sort belongings taken from the arriving prisoners. The luggage these prisoners had so carefully packed was taken on arrival to a series of special barracks. The Nazis called these possessions “effects,” and among them Rachel and my mother found extra food to survive.

  It was my mother’s job to open the pocketbooks of the women who arrived. One time she came across a woman’s leather wallet with a photo of a student, a young man, and letters that his Austrian mother had sent in hopes of finding him—to the Gestapo, to the embassies—all returned with the stamp “Whereabouts Unknown.” Seeing all this, my mother began to cry.

  Rachel had been assigned to cut the lining out of coats to look for hidden valuables. When she noticed my mothercrying, she laid down her scissors and began to comfort her. My mother cried, she told Rachel, not just from pity but also envy: death for this woman would reunite mother and child.

  My mother began to work more slowly. It was as if she had made up her mind to preserve each pocketbook firmly in her memory. She would try to retain an image of each, and maybe one day she would recite these details should anyone ask. With these last belongings she would become a silent historian. She would protect their neshome. This was her tribute.

  In the end, Rachel attempted to assist my mother with her sorting, but it was too late. My mother complained of pains in her hands. She became dizzy with fever and was unable to continue. By the time they took my mother away, the piles were as high as the ceiling. The barracks had become too small for all the property brought to the camps. Trains full of disinfected possessions made their way to the Reich every week. Who knows what strangers inherited these things?

  Tonight, through a strange turning of memory, I was brought to remember something Rachel told me. The sorting barracks, she told me, were located in an area of Birkenau known as the personal effects camp. The Ge
rmans called them Effektenkammer. But the barracks had another nickname. They were together known as Canada. For many of the prisoners, the word earned a special meaning. It came to symbolize a place of wealth and plenty. For others, it was just a place of pillage.

  But let me share with you one final story. On the morning that I was leaving the Red Cross hospital, Rachel called me to her bedside to say goodbye. There was no knowing where we would end up or if we would see each other again, but she wanted me to know that however much time passed, she would always remember my mother and me. My mother had given her courage. My mother had been Rachel’s only friend. When my mother was taken away, Rachel buried her sorrows in her work. But now the precious items found in coat linings she threw rebelliously into the toilets—rings, cufflinks, watches, all of it. A sabotage against the greedy citizens of the Reich. “I made this my homage,” she said. “In memory of your mother.“

  So, yes, there was a girl who knew my mother. And now, I have told you the story of your grandmother.

  Your loving mother

  I sat on the couch in my living room holding the letter in my hand, feeling like a voyeur from another world. Everything in my life felt trite when set beside Sarah’s story. Her life had been torn apart, her family swept away in the torrents of war and persecution. How had she survived loss of that magnitude? How does anybody?

  I thought of Andrei’s flight from his country toward what he hoped would be the freedom to love, the plunge into the sea, the reaching shore. I thought of him realizing that his mother had suffered so much and never spoken of it. I thought of him resolving that Nicolae was dead and not having the courage to tell me that’s what he believed. No wonder he slipped quietly away.

  I walked over to the window and scanned the darkening rooftops. In the distance, a red trail of light blazed against the purple dusk sky.

  In the ten months Andrei spent working beside me at the Undeliverable Mail Office I had watched him approach his tasks with an unusual intensity. I had seen him study a package with a diligence that often exceeded necessity. I had seen him grin when a gift reached its destination, showing the delight of someone finding a lost friend.

  There was nothing straightforward about Andrei. He found his way to the UMO along an emotional path that spanned decades and continents. For a brief time I think he found happiness in the work.

  Perhaps it was his homage. Perhaps his penance.

  As I lay in bed that night, the image came back to me of a young girl trudging across a white plain, chin tucked against the cold. I saw how several girls fell back in the marching column, desperate for rest, while others swept them up before they could fall and be left behind. On the edge of sleep, I saw Andrei’s mother holding another girl as they marched, stamping through the snow, gripping each other as though their survival was being decided in that moment, as though they were the last of their people.

  Twenty-eight

  When I think of my mother’s room at Sakura I always see us in the bathroom. The yellow tiled walls, the white slip-proof floor and the narrow tub with its support railing. I stir the water with my hand to test the temperature, set aside tear-free shampoo, a fresh towel. She waits on the closed toilet seat in her bathrobe, slipping it off at the last minute. She seems slight without her clothes on, with her sunken chest, a mild scoliosis of the spine.

  A soapy washcloth moves along her limbs. She takes charge of the front, washing the accordion folds of her belly, lathering her empty breasts. Her skin has become loose and thin, too big for the body it contains. She lifts her arms to wash her armpits, then hands me the cloth so I can scrub her back. When I am finished I turn on the hot water to warm the cooling tub and begin to rinse her. We work in silence. She responds to my assistance like a child. She used to become rigid at my touch, but now her body is pliable. Her nakedness doesn’t embarrass us. It has become something separate from her—habitual, unerotic, chaste. Skin is the largest organ of the body. We tend to it unselfconsciously.

  Beside the sink there is a wall-mounted soap dispenser (made in Cornwall, Ontario). It is placed beside a roll-towel device (made in Livonia, Michigan). Am I wrong or do these institutional accessories keep small towns in business? The soap has a medicinal smell. There is usually a gummy trail of pink liquid running down the wall, even though we almost always use our own soap. The soap I buy for my mother smells of magnolia or almond blossom or tea rose—perfumed vanity as opposed to antibacterial hygiene. Pucks of Roger & Gallet wrapped in pleated paper. It’s a small, pampering difference.

  After the tub has drained I mop up the remaining suds, claim my mother’s stray hairs. She moves into the bedroom and dries herself with a large towel. When she’s finished, she wraps the towel around herself, twisting and tucking the top corner in over her right breast, and sits down. I pull a pair of nail clippers from her bedside drawer and begin to pare and clean her toenails. The skin on the tops of her feet feels like mulberry paper. I daub them with moisturizer. I’m in charge of the unreachable parts.

  As I work on her feet, she lathers cream on her face. My mother’s skin is darker than mine. To the left of her nose is a large, raised beauty mark. My own face has a dimmer version of the mole, as if the stamp that created hers had run out of fresh ink. This is our correspondence. A man hitting on my mother once pointed to the symmetry of our moles and said, “I swear you could be twins.” Several years ago my mole fell off. Actually, I tried to pluck a stubborn hair from it (which I now know you’re not supposed to do) and accidentally scraped off the pigment. It reappeared eventually, but the whole experience was deeply unsettling.

  I know one can place too much weight on the minute details of family resemblance: the fact that I have my father’s ears, my mother’s mole. But I also know that the signs of difference can be even more revealing. Not that these signs—my untraceable hazel eyes, for instance—are proof of independence, idiosyncratic as they may seem. I am convinced, for example, that I am “soft-spoken” not for some innate or genetic reason, but because when we were children my sister was often a screamer.

  We are never wholly of our own making, or even our parents’ making. We are DNA and destiny blended together. The blueprint of who we will become versus what was meant to be, redrafted by circumstance at a moment’s notice.

  In my mother’s case, I find it difficult to distinguish nature from nurture. Like her own mother’s, her face has grown angular with age. She has lost much of the facial fat that once made her look soft but sturdy. Now her cheeks are sinking and her always prominent nose seems to protrude even more, like a beak. Is it nature that pares her down, makes her look like a bird? Is it nurture that has turned her into a magpie?

  On New Year’s Day, as I was brushing my mother’s hair, I noticed a Swiss Army knife resting on top of her wardrobe.

  “Where did you get this?” I asked, examining the jelly red casing.

  “That is from your father,” she said, and turned away. She was plinking the teeth of a long-handled comb.

  “Do you use it?”

  She shook her head.

  “Let me look.”

  The knife contained a generous assortment of tools, which I pulled, one by one, out of the casing.

  Large blade

  Small blade

  Can opener

  Small screwdriver

  Bottle opener

  Large screwdriver

  Wire stripper

  Awl with sewing eye

  Toothpick

  Tweezers

  Key ring

  Corkscrew

  Mini screwdriver

  Scissors

  When I had finished and all the tools were protruding, I placed the knife on the table. It looked like a porcupine. I picked it up again, retracted the jagged spine. I could tell that the gift displeased my mother. A survivalist accessory. Further indication of her ex-husband’s detachment—an instruction to fend for herself in the wilderness.

  “I wonder how he is?” I said aloud, returning the
knife to its place. A year had passed since my father’s last visit to Toronto.

  “So da ne,” she said, musing over the hairpins in her hand. “I was just reminiscing.”

  “Really, Mummy? What were you reminiscing?”

  She reached forward and picked up a rectangle of painted silk—another present from my father? She fluttered it for me slowly, as if demonstrating its allure. “Look,” she said, playfully draping it on her head, then over her shoulders, then across her chest, around her waist…

  I have grown accustomed to my mother’s habit of veering off in the middle of a conversation. But I see patterns in her behaviour. Her digressions, so regular, by now are more comforting than alarming. For those who don’t know her well, however, for those who see her only occasionally, I know the suddenness with which she tilts in and out of the present can be disturbing. I know it shakes Kana. These are a few things I’ve heard her say to our mother over the years:

  Please, Mom. Get a grip.

  Can you try to hold it together?

  Listen, if you can’t handle it, then we won’t go/stay/leave, et cetera.

  I find these statements to be funny and sad, but mostly paradoxical, because if nothing else, my mother is a gripper, a holder and a handler.

  Paolo calls her the “anti-ascetic,” and I think the term appropriate on a number of levels. Ascetics shed themselves of all worldly goods in order to experience divinity. Ascetics seek out truth by retreating to otherworldly places like caves, cloisters, temples or deserts.