The Letter Opener by Kyo Maclear Page A

thought the roof might blow away, even then, not a word.
    At the time, Andrei thought he was going to lose his mind. He remembered she talked about crocus blades she had seen slicing through the soil and whether or not the carrots needed to be replanted in the shade and the importance of composting the soil and turning it over…and the entire time his heart was pounding. He wondered whether things would have turned out differently if they had talked about the letters, but they never had the chance.
    After Nicolae was interrogated he convinced Andrei that they had no choice but to leave. Andrei knew that if they stayed, things would get worse. For them. For their families. For his mother.
    Andrei and Nicolae fled Romania at the end of the school year. Their point of departure: the port of Cernavoda, just east of Bucharest. The journey southeast to the port took an entire day and night.
    During the long drive a silence grew between them. As they barrelled along the gravel roads, the engine’s vibrations ran up their legs. They rolled the windows down against the thickening heat and caught glimpses of the Danube as it slipped through the pale green countryside. The tracery of forest. Clusters of oak and beech. Orchardcovered hills. Once they were out of the mountains, the trees thinnedout abruptly. There were stumps burned to the colour of coal and broken fences. Vast areas with no grass or underbrush, just a blur of grey fields occasionally strewn with scraps of machinery—a rusting plough, mangled iron chains, an abandoned backhoe. Other cars rattled past them on the road, then a heavy transport vehicle throwing up black gusts of dust and diesel. They rolled up the windows. When it started to rain, Andrei focused on the road ahead of them through the flapping of the windshield wipers.
    They had taken this route once before. A month earlier, they had travelled with a group of graduating students from the University of Baia Mare to Cernavoda for the inauguration of a new canal. Flags were hiked to the skies. Children belonging to Pioneer organizations with red kerchiefs knotted around their necks and hair glued down with glycerine tugged at balloons shaped like giant ships. The lavish ceremonies, which continued for several days and nights, began with a state presentation and ended with a fireworks display. Overblown speeches by local Party leaders were delivered beneath a giant portrait of the dictator—emperor-like and brandishing an enormous hand-carved sceptre. A choir of peasants in ceremonial costume stood off to the side, holding sheaves of wheat and mechanically singing traditional hymns.
    Thousands of workers had toiled during the canal’s thirty-five-year construction. Not one mention was made of them. No one divulged that the canal, which linked the Danube at Cernavoda with the Black Sea to the south of Constanta, a sixty-kilometre stretch, had been dubbed the “Canal of Death.”
    All through the speeches, Andrei shifted restlessly from one foot to the other, aware of the bored audience around him, the ocean of numb faces. At the end there was obligatory applause and the acrid stench of gunpowder. Silk streamers in red, yellow and blue lapped at the wind.
    Once the canal was officially opened, the crowd scattered, then departed. Andrei and Nicolae headed for the pier, where they spent the next few days studying the ships. There were rickety fishing boats, Soviet tankers, Bulgarian coal freighters. They familiarized themselves with the funnels, masts, bridges and planks. “Naval architectural research,” they explained to anyone who asked. By the time they were ready to go home, a week later, the dockmen and loaders acknowledged and greeted them when they passed. Even the stray dogs scrounging by the garbage heaps barked and nudged at them in recognition. It was time to move on.
    The following month, after they had decided to flee, Andrei and Nicolae arrived at the pier just before sunset. The air was cooling,