The Letter

The letter arrived forty-one years late, which even by the standards of the Greek postal service was unusual. It was addressed to Eleni Kazantzidou, 14 Odos Ithakis, Thessaloniki, in handwriting so careful it could only have been written by someone for whom Greek was not a first language. The stamp was from 1983. The postmark was smudged but appeared to say "Toulouse." It had been opened, resealed with tape, opened again, resealed with different tape, and at some point left in the rain. Eleni was eighty-six. She had lived at 14 Odos Ithakis for sixty-two years. She had outlived two husbands, one cat, and every appliance she had ever purchased except a radio that ran on spite. She took the letter from the postman, who was new and young and apologized for its condition as though he personally had been carrying it in his pocket since the Reagan administration. "These things happen," she told him, which was gracious and untrue. The letter was in French, which Eleni did not speak. She took it next door to Voula, who had once been to Paris for a weekend in 1997 and considered herself bilingual. Voula studied the letter for a long time. "It is a love letter," she announced. "From whom?" "A man named... I think... Gérard." Voula squinted. "Or possibly Bernard. The handwriting is terrible." "You said it was careful." "Carefully terrible." The letter, as Voula translated it over the course of an afternoon and three cups of coffee, was from a Frenchman who had visited Thessaloniki in the summer of 1982 and met a woman named Eleni at a café near the White Tower. They had spoken for an hour. His Greek was poor. Her French was nonexistent. They had communicated, he wrote, "in the language of eyes and cigarette smoke," which Voula read aloud with great feeling and which Eleni thought was perhaps overdoing it. The Frenchman had gone home to Toulouse and spent a year working up the courage to write. The letter asked if she remembered him. It asked if she might write back. It included his address, which was no longer his address and probably no longer existed. Eleni sat quietly for a while. "Do you remember him?" Voula asked. "No." "Not at all?" "I met a lot of people at that café. It was a café. That is what cafés are for." "But he remembered you. For a year, at least. Possibly more. He sat in Toulouse thinking about you." Eleni considered this. A man she did not remember had gone home to another country and written her a love letter in careful, terrible handwriting, and the letter had spent four decades moving through whatever limbo swallows undelivered mail, and now here it was on Voula's kitchen table, smelling faintly of mildew and old adhesive. "It's a nice letter," Eleni said. "It's romantic." "It's a nice letter." She took it home and put it on the mantelpiece, between a photograph of her second husband and a ceramic owl her granddaughter had made at school. It stayed there. She did not try to find Gérard or possibly Bernard. She did not write back to an address that no longer existed. She did not learn French. But some mornings, drinking her coffee by the window, she looked at the letter and thought about Toulouse, which she had never been to, and a man she didn't remember, who had remembered her. It was not a sad thought. It was the kind of thought you have with coffee, early, before the day starts and you have to be practical about things. She told Voula she threw it away. Voula did not believe her. Both of them were satisfied with this arrangement.