The Letter Opener

by Kyo Maclear

  There is no question that my mother is un-divine. Her life is not one of renunciation. There is not the tiniest notion of God in her head. She is not waiting for a bolt of spiritual inspiration. She revels in her own corporeal existence. Often, too often, her acquisitiveness arouses deep discomfort about her total lack of discernment and propriety. Yet at other times, I am astounded by her almost pious attachment to objects, her numinous touching of what she loves, like the veneration of the rosary, only more ancient, more primal. More like a prehistoric cave dweller arranging and rearranging strange assortments of pebbles and flint.

  The other day I watched my mother replace the cap of her eau de toilette bottle and sort through a pile of socks until every sock had found its match, and it comforted me that her mind continues its active routine and will likely do so for as long as she lives. Her objects bear her along. They round out her emotions. They represent a life of pleasure (a ticket stub from a Placido Domingo concert, a box of matches from a favourite restaurant, trinkets from her pre-married life) or displeasure (or ambivalence: a lilac sundress purchased by her then husband/my father during their honeymoon). She holds these reminders of a mixed life in her lap without discriminating. She embraces them, thanks them. She locates virtue in repossessing the things we call garbage and junk. Her collection is a museum of her mind, and she comes by it honestly. At least no one was plundered.

  The problem with Kana is that she allows herself to see the craving but not the caring. That is why she judges our mother so harshly. She examines the sheer volume of the possessions our mother has managed to cram into her small room, and detects a character flaw. She sees evidence of “a vulgar and excessive materialism.” She tries to make light of the situation: “Hey, Mom. Leave it to others to save the world.” But in her eyes, our mother is a warning of what happens if you don’t try to escape the mind’s village, its cluster of narrow roads and ambitions.

  Lately, when I look at my mother I think maybe the trouble is not that she is too materialistic but that many of the rest of us in the First World are not materialistic enough. We are quick to discard one possession to chase something else more tempting. Our lives are, in essence, a cycle of acquiring and unloading. We cast off people and things to live more freely, to clear the deck for future acquisitions. Yet the objects we leave behind bear our touch, perpetuate us in different ways as we remember them, too, consciously or not. Whenever my mother says, “But I put it down right there,” or “It was here just a minute ago,” sculpting the air with her hands, without recalling with any precision the “it” that was “there” or “here,” I know she is conjuring the missing or mislaid object by the shape of its absence.

  Paolo is right. My mother is not an ascetic. An ascetic would say that truth reveals itself only when one is prepared to forget about oneself. An ascetic would say that it is difficult to let go. My mother, the anti-ascetic, would disagree. It is not hard to lose oneself. It is all too easy to fall apart and be swept away.

  Andrei swivelling on his chair.

  Gone.

  When I was a child, I believed that if something vanished from one place it would instantly crop up in another. Maybe I thought this because of something my father said when I left my favourite Tressy doll on the streetcar. I was inconsolable, and he hugged me and said, “Don’t worry, Nai-chan. Lost things travel to good places. Now another little girl somewhere in the world has your doll.”

  Every time the string of a balloon slipped through my fingers or a marble rolled away, I imagined a little girl named Carlyn living on a faraway island wearing my hat and mittens and a million pairs of mismatched socks, chiming, “Got it!” I could see her skipping across a heathery field in a light drizzle, clutching my doll by the arm with a huge grin on her face.

  Perhaps if I had listened more carefully, I would have heard something else in my father’s voice: Don’t be too possessive. Don’t depend on things, or others, unduly.

  We were three days into the new year, the dawn of a new decade, when Kana called to say she was home.

  “Oh no,” I said when I finally registered that she meant she was back in Toronto. “That’s awkward.”

  “Naiko!”

  “I’m sorry, Kana. That sounds terrible. I’m happy that you’re back. Honestly. It’s just your timing. You see, Paolo and I were planning to leave tomorrow.” A small white lie. The travel agent’s number was on the table in front of me. “Paolo wants to go to Buenos Aires and my manager thinks it would be a good time for me to have a break. You know, now that it’s not so busy.”

  “But I just got in. Do you have to leave right away? I mean, you never go anywhere. Why start now?”

  That peeved me.

  She could tell by my silence that I wasn’t amused and began to laugh nervously. “I’m sorry. I can be such a bitch.”

  “Look, I’m going. I’ve already booked the ticket,” I lied again.

  “I’m sure they’d let you exchange it. People do it all the time. Please stay. There’s so much to catch up on. I’m bringing dinner over to Mum tonight. I want to surprise her.”

  “Kana—”

  “I need you to come. Please?”

  Always what she needed, not what I needed. She could not let me change. I also realized that she would never have any idea of the journey I had taken with Andrei. She would never know because I had no way of expressing it in words she would understand. Andrei’s life and mine had merged, then separated, without a physical trace—not so much as a photograph of the two of us.

  In Kana’s world, events were tangible, the facts concrete. To her anything that didn’t happen right before your eyes was irrelevant. It wasn’t news. It was hearsay or make-believe—at best, a good story. I thought of her profession’s remoteness, its pretense of neutrality; the ruthlessly compressed capsules of human life; the scrunching of tragedy into sidebars of text. What did I want her to know? Had she ever been subsumed by someone else’s story the way I had? The truth was that in her own way she had. We both liked second-hand stories.

  “Usually it’s you who leaves, right?” I said.

  “Yeah, but that’s how I survive—I mean, make a living. That’s my job.”

  “Then you understand.”

  “I suppose so.”

  But I could tell she didn’t. “I’ll send you a letter as soon as I get there.”

  “A letter?” She sounded genuinely puzzled.

  “A postcard.”

  There was a certain pleasure in putting the receiver down. I was taking control for once. How can I prevent people from slipping away? By going away myself.

  Twenty-nine

  More than a year has passed since I last saw Andrei. In the first months after I entered his apartment and discovered his unfinished letter to me, I was plagued by the recurring thought that I had failed both him and Nicolae. Wasn’t I obligated to Nicolae’s memory and Andrei’s well-being to discover the truth of what had really happened that night at sea? I mulled over the muddy, unfinished account of their escape again and again, each time remembering fresh things, but never finding fresh meaning. Some nights I felt furious with Andrei for having involved me in the first place. Why had he earmarked me? Was I someone people took advantage of? I ruminated over the circumstances that had brought us together.

  Yet as the months passed, I began to let Andrei go. I relinquished the house that overlooked the Carpathians. I relinquished Mihai, the baby born to Ileana; I relinquished the forest I would never visit, the freighter with its rusted hull and the settlement house in Toronto. I released it all.

  It was not to forget it that I released it all. It was not to bury it, because that was not possible: there is no unplugging the power of the mind, whether tomorrow or ten years later. I simply loosened the grip of my need to possess and comprehend it. More difficult to release was the feeling of purpose his need and despair had given me.

  After six months, the last of Andrei’s belongings, which Doreen had stored in a locked drawer on the
manager’s request, were given away or destroyed. There were still so many unanswered questions, but there was also an unmistakable air of conclusion as I watched those items be dispersed.

  There were times when Andrei’s entire existence seemed an invention of my imagination. But some things had moved out of the realm of the imaginary. Through weeks of watching television newscasts, I had come to know Bucharest as well as I did New York or London. I could call up an image of the city that felt unnervingly real: packs of mangy and scab-covered dogs roaming through concrete courtyards; streets choked with traffic; Romanian-made Dacia cars and brand-new imports swerving around an occasional horse-drawn cart from the countryside.

  Over the past year, the missionaries have marched in where the international press galloped off. The Christians have descended on Bucharest, bringing their zealous spirit and salvationist cameras to its ideological vacuum. They tour its neighbourhoods and visit its hospitals and schools. The orphans are the treasures they take home, as previous visitors would have returned with embroidered shirts and busts of Dracula. Every few weeks there are stories of solicitous Americans and Canadians who are preparing to hop on planes and take matters into their own hands. Television is filled with images of iron cribs and street orphans living in sewers.

  Paolo and I did take our trip, though in the end, Paolo had a change of heart and we went to Cuba instead of Argentina. It was a repairing vacation. The sun made us mild and generous with each other. I shared a few more pieces about Andrei, but mostly we tried to find our way back to being together, just two. I had told him about Sarah’s letter, but I never showed it to him. I stored the original, along with the translation, in my desk on top of a pile of my own papers. It stayed there for three months, its stiff heavy paper weighing down on the pile just as the words had weighed down on my heart. I knew the letter wasn’t mine, but it also didn’t feel right to keep it a secret. In the end I investigated the options and, after some consideration, sent it to a Holocaust memorial museum in Paris, the first of its kind in Europe.

  Paolo and I stayed in Havana but took day trips to the Varadero Peninsula, where we lazed on the beach and did a lot of walking along the water’s edge. On our last night, after strolling through Havana’s Barrio Chino, we came across a restaurant coincidentally called Sakura, a small sushi bar run by an older Japanese Cuban named Eduardo Miyasaki. Over a dinner of miso and salmon maki we found out that the spry man in front of us was actually five years older than my mother, and that he had been interned along with his sons (and eleven hundred other Japanese Cubans) during the Second World War. He clearly took a shine to us, maybe seeing in our relationship some moments of his own past. I told him about my mother, an ocean away, living in the other Sakura. Just as we were about to leave, he hurried into the kitchen and presented us with a small bag of green tea from a nearby farming collective. We were so overwhelmed by his kindness that we asked if there was anything we could send him from Canada. No, no, he insisted, nothing to send. Just something to bring next time we visited: “Dried shiitake. And aspirin.”

  Paolo and I returned to Toronto on a blizzardy Sunday night in mid-January and I resumed work the next day. Kana, unexpectedly, was still in town. (In my absence, she had spent more time with our mother than she had since we were kids.) Back at work, to my surprise, I sank into old rhythms as though nothing had happened. And as the routine took over, I eventually began to believe nothing vital had changed at all.

  In February, Baba and his wife had their twins a month early. Yasmine Belle Maloof was born first, at 5 1/4 pounds. Asaad Michel Maloof came ten minutes later, weighing just over 6 pounds and, according to Baba, announced himself with an ear-splitting squawk. They were both born with a thick mat of curly hair, which made them look uncannily like their father.

  In March my father paid his yearly visit. We met up at his favourite restaurant, a French bistro in the east end of the city. I had been standing outside in my coat waiting. He showed up in a wool suit and tie, his hair noticeably whiter than the last time we had met. He looked distressingly elderly. As we made our way into the restaurant, he touched me lightly on my shoulder.

  We had a quick lunch of soup and sandwiches before heading off to visit my mother. My father had rented a car, and as we caught up on recent events—my trip, his retirement—my eyes locked on his hands. I watched them as he flicked the indicator and rotated the steering wheel to the right, letting the wheel slide lightly through his fingers when the turn was complete.

  I had always loved my father’s hands. His body was slight but his hands were large, strong and square. They were hands that could play a piano or work a rotary saw. As a child I always wanted to hold them; longing to feel their rough texture and warmth clasping mine. But after my parents separated, this longing felt disloyal and I learned to tuck it away.

  When we got to Sakura, my father pulled into a parking spot and turned off the engine. We arrived slightly ahead of schedule, so we sat there and started to talk. I rolled down my window to get some air. He told me he had been meeting up regularly with Kana, whom he referred to, in an aggravating fashion, as “our journalist du jour.”

  “We connect at airports. Heathrow and sometimes Gatwick,” he said. “Our journalist du jour is doing great things out there in the world.”

  I said nothing, just sat there, glowering at the dashboard.

  “Hey, why the frown?” he said.

  I turned to face him. “Am I really such a failure?”

  He looked shocked. “Not at all.” He hesitated. “Naiko, you have to understand that sometimes I feel responsible. I imagine that things might have turned out differently if I hadn’t…”

  “No,” I snapped. “No, they wouldn’t have.”

  He rolled down his own window.

  “Look. I like my job. I’m pretty good at it, too,” I said. “Everything else, well, that’s a different matter.”

  When he didn’t say anything, I continued, feeling suddenly bold. “You know. Now that we’re on the subject, I’ve always wondered why? Why all of a sudden? What happened? Did you lose ‘the spark’?”

  “It’s complicated. We had a lot of ups and downs.”

  “That’s it? Ups and downs? That was enough for you to just give up?”

  “You were too little to understand.”

  “You left us alone.”

  “I never shut you out, Naiko. I left but I didn’t reject you.”

  “Then why England? I mean, another town maybe I can understand. But a whole other continent?”

  He rubbed his temples slowly. “At the time I thought it would be easier, I would save everyone the pain of seeing one another too often.”

  “It hurt anyway,” I said. “It hurt more.”

  “Yes,” he said. “I know.” His tone was resigned but conclusive, as though those two words were the reparation of all his transgressions, all his failures as a father.

  I felt the first stabs of a headache and put the heels of my hands over my eyes. When I removed them, everything looked blotchy and unfocused but the pain had receded. I glanced over and saw that my father was now slumped in his seat, a deflated version of himself.

  I rolled up the window and took a deep, shaky breath. “Well, here we are.” I smiled at him. “I realize it might not show, but I’m still glad you came.”

  “Me too,” he said, and gave me a sad smile back.

  I pointed at the clock on the dashboard: 3:03.

  He patted his side pocket. “I brought your mother a charm for her bracelet. A silver lily of the valley with a pearl inside. Maybe we should go and give it to her.”

  I nodded.

  As we walked through the front entrance, he slipped a grey envelope out of his suit pocket. I knew it contained the charm and it touched me. He didn’t like extravagance, but at that moment there was something lavish about how hard he tried, when he tried.

  That afternoon, as we sat in the common room at Sakura fumbling through the first moments of our reunion, my
father complimenting the stack of tea biscuits my mother had prepared with Mary Yamada, my mother’s stockinged feet, as she sat, brushing the floor with delight, I noticed that my hands were very similar to his. I had inherited large, strong hands—uncommon on a woman. The discovery filled me with pleasure.

  While my father poured his third cup of tea, I excused myself to call Paolo and to give them time alone. On my way to the phone, I had a sudden desire to say hello to Gloria on the third floor, so I made a detour. I took the elevator up and walked down a short hallway to the ward entrance, where a nurse buzzed me in to the common area. I spotted Gloria reading a book in a secluded area by the window. An orderly was seated a metre away. Gloria was holding the book up by her chest like a plate of canapés, resting it flatly on one palm, turning the pages carefully with the other hand. I watched her in profile for a moment, then walked over.

  “I filled up the notepad,” she said once I had sat down.

  “Shall I bring you another one?” I noticed a strange bracelet on her left arm. It looked like a white wristwatch but the face was blank.

  She said, “I’d like that,” then lowered the book to her lap.

  I made out tiny black letters on the side of the bracelet: Wanderproof™.

  “They won’t let me have matches now.”

  I returned to the first floor, made my phone call and then walked back to the common room. When I entered, I saw my mother passing her purse to my father, who ran his fingertips lightly over the leather in a show of appreciation. When he noticed the damaged strap, he stopped and looked up.

  My mother gave a little shrug and grinned at him.

  He smiled and looked back down.

  I glanced out the window and saw that it was growing cloudy outside.

  We concluded our visit to Sakura on a friendly note. My father presented my mother with the gift he had brought. She was instantly entranced and kept shaking her wrist so that we could hear the tiny pearl tinkle inside the silver flower. Just as we were set to leave, Roy Ishii walked over and shook my hand. I was happy to see him. He had become a fixture of my visits.