The Letter Opener (23 page)

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 Germans 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.

W
hen 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.

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.