The Letter Opener by Kyo Maclear Read Free Book Online Page A

were well-suited. Right? That’s what I began to wonder. The more I got to know Andrei, the more I found myself silently comparing. Paolo was my boyfriend, but it was Andrei who made me feel vital—important and alive.
    Paolo had grown up in Argentina with rigid ideas about social etiquette. He was not the type to stop on the street, for example, and greet the corner-store owner and ask about his children’s piano recital or his recent trip to Vietnam. Paolo was the product of the prolongeddictatorship that had set neighbour against neighbour. He avoided situations that might call on him to intervene. This was the crux of our difference (as I understood it then). A part of Paolo still lived in a country his family had left almost ten years before, a world of grated iron shutters, where people closed themselves off from one another and learned to ignore the comings and goings of strangers. In this world, it was entirely possible for someone in the same apartment building to disappear, his fate never to be questioned or mentioned.
    Then again, perhaps Paolo’s temperament had nothing whatsoever to do with his history. Perhaps his aversion to crowds, his bystander apathy tempered by his fierce loyalty would have all been present even if he had grown up among auto dealers in Windsor or dairy farmers in Vermont.
    T HE T ISZA WAS ONE of the longest rivers in Europe. As it rambled along the edge of town, within walking distance of Andrei’s home, its current slowed. A few months before Andrei was to leave his village with Nicolae, a terrible accident occurred in a neighbouring town when the dam surrounding a mining reservoir containing cyanide burst. The contaminated water seeped into an adjoining river, and eventually into the Tisza, which drained from the Carpathian Mountains into the Danube.
    Andrei was twenty-seven at the time and cramming all night for his final exams at the regional university. At 3 a.m., seeing that it was a full moon, he decided to take a break from studying and go for a walk in the woods by the river. There was no one else around. Other than the occasional rustle of an animal, the hoot of an owl, the night was silent.
    As he approached the river, he noticed an acrid smell in the cold air, a strange taste of bitter almonds on his tongue. He shone a flashlight on the water. Clusters of fish twisted on the surface, mouths openand gills heaving. A few metres away a carp bumped violently against a rock then began swimming in circles. He moved the beam slowly along the river’s edge and saw that several larger fish had veered into lather by the bank, trying to escape the poison.
    It seemed inconceivable that a great river like the Tisza should suddenly die. So the following day, when men wearing protective suits and thick rubber gloves came from Baia Mare to pull the dull-eyed fish from the river, the town went into deep mourning. People came to throw flowers into the current and silently cursed the dictator for the accident. No one expected the river to recover.
    The mine spill deeply affected Andrei. That evening by the banks of the poisoned Tisza, a feeling of doom spread through him. It frightened him to watch the fish drift by. Their dying reminded him of everything he had lost before—his father, his grandparents—and he couldn’t bear the thought of another death.
    It was dawn by the time he returned home from the river. Careful not to wake anyone, he crept past Eli’s room and quietly ducked into his mother’s curtained bedroom. He stood several paces from her bed. As his eyes adjusted to the blackness, he studied her sleeping form. Her greying hair tied in a long pale braid and drawn across the pillow. Her sunken eyes, the loose skin around her neck, her chiselled chin.
    He willed his mind to journey back to childhood, to recover a younger, more consoling image, something that would be less distressful to carry away with him.
    He stood there for a moment, and then he left the room without