The Letter Opener Read Online Free PDF Page B

they mouthed the language of parrots: Hi, how are you? Nice day, isn’t it? Would you care for a coffee? Their accents slowed them down, but no more than if they had been taught to say, Do you know what’s happening in my country? Do you know what brought me here?
    As time passed and the expected days and weeks at the settlement house grew into months, the men increasingly began to share, if not their secrets, their daily routine. In the evenings, they did domestic chores, played cards on the bare floor surrounded by empty pizza boxes, smoked cigarettes or watched the international news on a springless couch, whispering, praying, cursing. There was footage of floods in Indonesia, famine in Ethiopia, drought in India and earthquakes in Peru. There were ads for cars, sugar cereal and floor cleaner. There was a story about the U.S. president’s favourite jelly beans.
    For Christmas, his first year in Canada, Andrei received from his roommates a bottle of wine, a digital watch and a clear plastic cube with Canadian coins embedded inside. In Andrei’s mind, there was a distinct line that divided Romania from Canada. On the Canadian side of the line were the gifts he received from those first roommates in Toronto. On the Romanian side was a pair of shoes.

Four
    A ndrei could never forget that on the morning he left his home for the last time, his favourite shoes were somewhere under his mother’s bed. They were leather shoes the colour of dark grapes. He hadn’t intended to leave them behind, but by the time he remembered them, his mother was asleep and he did not want to risk waking her. The previous evening he had left a letter for her with a woman named Ileana with instructions that she was not to deliver it until two days had passed. He knew that it would be impossible to depart with his mother’s blessing. He rummaged through his closet and found an old pair of running shoes that he laced shut with a piece of packing string. At 4 a.m., he hurried from the house. In his right hand he held a plastic bag containing his belongings. His boyfriend, Nicolae, awaited him as planned in a car parked just off the town’s main square.
    During the preparations for his departure, Andrei had convinced himself that he was reducing his mother’s burden by leaving. And although he was heartsick to part from his family, it was the only thing he could think to do. The state police would soon arrest him. Yet now, as he rushed toward the square, he was struck by another truth: he was a deserter. That sudden thought so stunned him that he halted in front of the pharmacy. He contemplated turning back. There was still time to change his mind, to go directly to Ileana and tear up the implicating letter.
    Had he misjudged the severity of his situation—the threat of the Securitate, his own helplessness?
    He stood there, cemented to the ground. The sky began to lighten, the first minutes of daybreak passed, and then, as abruptly as he had stopped, Andrei continued walking. Whatever motive had propelled him to this point had been right. Turning back was as precarious as going forward, and his heart and mind said forward. It was June 1984 and he was headed for the port of Cernavoda on the Danube–Black Sea Canal.
    Andrei had grown up in a small bordertown in northern Transylvania that had at various times belonged to Hungary and Romania. Once known as a smuggling centre, the town had long since lost allure. Gone were the days of gambling houses and brothels. All that was left were poorly stocked stores: a government ration shop for flour and sugar, and vegetable stalls reduced to selling wormy apples and withered cabbages.
    The food shortages were so severe that the government had announced a “scientific” diet for its citizens. Meat and excess starch and vegetables were unhealthy, declared the Health Minister. At the same time that truckloads of fresh crops were being transported to the capital for export, pamphlets began appearing that