The Letter Opener Read Online Free PDF Page A

across North America and establish new villages—such as the Somalians with their New Mogadishus or the Vietnamese with their Little Saigons? Were they transformed into parking lot attendants or night watchmen or pizza delivery “boys“?
    What made Andrei a refugee? Was it his bony chest? No, that was too obvious. His second-hand wardrobe? Perhaps, but that could also be attributed to general thriftiness. (I, for one, regularly shopped at Goodwill.) The reality was that there was no single outstanding characteristic—and why should there have been? Andrei frequently saved half his sandwich and kept the remaining Saran Wrap to use later, but to a different degree, I, too, was frugal. He appeared to own few personal belongings, but so did I. As to his deference to the manager, which seemed then the classic survivalism of the refugee, well now so much later I look more closely at myself, at my own often deferential demeanour. There were layers and layers to Andrei, I would discover, and refugee was but the latest, and thinnest.
    “Anyway,” Andrei was saying, “people don’t generally like to be called ‘refugees.’ That’s a file word. Like ‘asylum-seeker.’ Or ‘displaced person.’ People have their prejudices about refugees.”
    It was a clear message telling me how to be his friend, and so, inthe coming months, I learned to listen as a diarist might, without presumption or pity. I was not to cast him among the earth’s indigent—the limbo dwellers, the invisible people.
    “Don’t forget,” he said, “Einstein was a refugee.”
    Despite Andrei’s previous friendship with Baba, I quickly became his closest companion at work. He did most of the talking. Every now and then I asked a question, and as the weeks passed I could sense the foundation of our friendship strengthening with every revealed detail, every shared idea. I never thought to ask, Why are you telling me? It just seemed natural and necessary.
    I recognized, early on, that Andrei was withdrawn—it’s what he preferred. Only gradually did I uncover his specificities: the sketches of his eccentric inventions, his collection of newspaper clippings, his passion for chess. When he spoke about anything he loved (his mother, the river near his house in Romania, the sound of a steel-string guitar), his eyes lit up, and his very skin seemed to glow.
    Early in May, two months after his arrival, he pushed his chair around his work table so that we sat back to back. I remember the wonderful feeling of sitting close to him, a softly humming body warmth. Such a warmth that I felt I must have wished for it—yet to what end I did not know.
    And I realized that just as I had been drawn to Andrei, something was drawing Andrei to me, and it eased my image of myself: the bumpy texture of my skin, the solid unmoving mass of hair. With Paolo, it sometimes felt as if there was nothing more to know. With Andrei it felt as if I was at the beginning of knowing. He pushed me into a dizzying world of defectors and stowaways. He was like one of the mystery packages that arrived at the office come alive.
    One afternoon while we were sharing a lunch break, he confessed to me that homesickness was interfering with his sleep.
    “Can I be personal for a moment?” he asked.
    “Of course. What is it?”
    “It’s a dream, you know, one of those night horrors. I’m worlds away from everyone, feeling very lost, trying to reach out to others and panicking that I’m forgotten, that I’m nothing, and the part of me that knows how much I have to be thankful for, well, it’s sliding away. When I wake up—I hope you don’t mind me telling you this—there’s you and Baba. And my job, and my birds, and all the bits and pieces I remember about my country, and I’m so grateful!”
    It was such an unexpected moment, so revealing of his emotions, and of my part in his new life, that I can no longer remember my exact response. I know I reassured him, but I can’t recall the