The Letter Opener Read Online Free PDF

words I used. Still, I know I was deeply touched. You see, Andrei took several months to tell me the story of his life. It was a long story with many offshoots and detours, so that what I am recounting here is a reassembled summary. Have I remembered it correctly? Have I imagined scenes he never actually described to me? He sometimes told me several versions of the same event and perhaps I have been selective. What is clear, however, are the key moments that shaped his life.
    A NDREI ARRIVED IN T ORONTO in the summer of 1984. A room had been arranged for him at a settlement house in the west end of the city. He spent the mornings in a vocational placement program and in the afternoons made his way to the local library, where he read through recent newspapers and magazines. There were regulars at the library. A skinny woman with a faint moustache, and a clothing fetish for any shade of yellow, who surrounded herself with gardening books. An older whiteman in a sweatsuit who quietly read aloud from the Koran. Another man who was teaching himself German. He sat among these people and before long was greeted with familiarity by the library staff.
    Every day between the hours of 1 and 6 p.m., when the library closed, he gathered facts about his adopted home and copied them onto a pocket-sized writing pad. He looked for what was current, the catchphrases, the names of politicians and celebrities, recent films (although he rarely found the time or money to go to the movies), the names of local parks and city landmarks. He wanted to collect as many household terms as possible, out of curiosity, and also out of eagerness to occupy himself. He read and read. When people spoke of something he didn’t know, he listened attentively, leaping at unusual or unfamiliar bits of speech. He was cracking the social codes and behavioural patterns, the hierarchy of education and class.
    He copied people’s attire and habits, creating a safe character acceptable to his new world. He took to wearing a baseball cap, he dressed in blue jeans and a grey T-shirt with the words Dalhousie Men’s Diving emblazoned across the front in a distinguished, collegiate typeface. Every morning he put aside his dimes and nickels for the library’s photocopy machine, double-counting his change so that when he dropped the coins into the slot he could do so with the unthinking ease of a regular.
    It took some time to get used to the eccentricities of his new home. Exiting a streetcar. Operating a pay phone. Reading a map. Finding an address. Such simple everyday things, which at first held the fear of failure, became a test of belonging. Each misstep left him feeling alien and unprotected.
    When Andrei spoke with the other men at the settlement house, men who had travelled from all over the world fleeing wars and political oppression, they shared only details from the present, safe things,in scraps of English. They were not down-and-outs; they would be moving on. They were all just biding time until the day they could begin their real lives.
    Every few months one left and another arrived.
    The settlement house reflected their transience. There were pots and pans, clothes, milk crates, pillows, plates, towels, a TV set, mattresses, an electric stove, a fridge. But there were no pictures, no scented candles or ornaments, nothing personal that tied them to this place and time whose memories they would someday erase. By Andrei’s fourth month, a sense of kinship had developed among the men, but they were a momentary family who could disperse without regret or record.
    Of the residents, only Andrei and a South African spoke English prior to their arrival. The other men knew the words revolution, interrogation, embassy, displaced person, exile, death squad , but otherwise spoke like children, stringing together disjointed phrases—words that didn’t have much to do with the thoughts they were having, or the half world they lived in. Urged on by an exuberant ESL teacher,