Spell of Blindness

by Lori Tiron-Pandit

  SPELL OF BLINDNESS

  …

  LORI TIRONPANDIT

  Copyright © 2012 by Lori TironPandit

  All rights reserved.

  No part of this book may be used or reproduced without written permission from the author, except by reviewers, who may quote brief passages in review articles.

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  This is a work of fiction. Characters, names, places and events are either fictional or used fictitiously. Any resemblance to real people or events is purely coincidental.

  1.

  AFTER WRITING THOSE LAST WORDS, Ana stood up from the blue wooden table of her grandmother’s kitchen and went out the door, carrying the heavy notebooks in her arms. In the middle of the pebbled yard surrounded by cherry trees, she put her load down.

  She bent to touch the old and long-loved covers one more time, then opened one of the notebooks, crumpled a few pages in one hand, and lit them on fire. When the flame started to warm her fingers, she put the burning notebook on top of the others. The flame rose high on the funeral pyre. The old soul was finally released. Happy birthday.

  For the first time in her memory, Ana sat there and watched a momentous event without a pen in her hand. Black butterflies started dancing in the air their very short-lived joy, while her written self charred beautifully under the tall flames. The sky joined in with a long flash of lightning.

  Ana retreated close to the whitewashed wall of the old house, under the shade of her favorite tree. The rain on the roof made sounds that penetrated and soothed her tired bones.

  She stood there until the curtain of water blurred the world beyond her cherry tree.

  .

  Coming to the village of her birth on her thirty-first birthday had been an impulse. She felt she had to run away from Bucharest, and this was the only place that came to her mind. The house felt much colder than she had remembered.

  At night, Ana found herself unable to close her eyes, staring in the blind darkness, hoping to see his shape gather into form in a corner, as usual. It was not something she wanted anymore, she told herself. She didn’t want to see him again. But waiting for him was a longtime habit, remains of her former life as a woman dreaming of a love bigger than the tangible world.

  . .

  The Year Before

  THE COFFEE DIVINER IS SITTING at a dark, lacquered table covered with a crocheted tablecloth. She looks regal—crimson lips, upswept hairdo, the ruffled collar of her velvet housecoat upright against her neck. She looks like hope; she will find my answers written clearly in coffee grounds. I believe.

  I sit at her left and sip from my cup, as she gestures me to do. The coffee is steamy and very bitter. I drink quickly. She tells me to swish the grounds around, cover the cup with the saucer, and turn it upside down. Then we wait. She sits looking silently out the window. No muscle on her face moves for minutes. I shiver.

  She must be in her forties, but here, in front of the fatidic cup of coffee, I know that I look much older than her, with the accursed lines between my eyebrows, the cheeks sinking in more every day, and the lips pursed with anxiety. Still, in the coffee diviner’s house, warmed by the generous October sun advancing through the room with ease this Sunday morning, I too feel a kind of serenity. The future is here, already set in these coffee grounds.

  She reads in the flowery cup of coffee truths so foreign to me that I mistake them for aberrations: “You are a believer.”

  What is she talking about, I think, this blue-housecoat lady who doesn’t have any clue that I haven’t stepped in a church for years? She is right, though, I realize in a moment. I am a believer, which is what brought me here today, and what keeps me listening and trying to pierce through the ceramic and the thick layers of coffee grounds for an inkling of truth.

  “I have seen this only once before, long time ago, in the cup of a young nun: heart and spirit intertwined. She was a gatherer of lost souls, and much pain and even more grace were coming her way. I’ve always wondered what happened to her.” She puts the coffee cup down on the table, and I stop breathing because I can’t believe that this is it. I went there with hope gathered thread by thread, daily, for weeks. It is loosely woven, this hope of mine, and I am afraid it will come apart any second.

  She places her palms flat on the table, with the cup in the space between them. I need more, I shout in my head. Take the cup in your hand again!

  And she does. Hope opens up my chest once more.

  “There is a church here on the handle. See the cross? I can also see an initial here … an A. Do you know somebody with a name starting in A?” But she does not wait for an answer. “You must know this man already. His face is big here. There are other men too, but this is the one that you sit with under the tall tree, near the church. See the candle? Your wish will be fulfilled.”

  A church?

  “But beware of the book,” she continues. “There is a long woman writing a book. She spans over past, present, and future. And she makes mistakes. She doesn’t write it as it is.” She takes a deep breath and turns her eyes to me. “You have been looking for him. That’s why you are here now, right? He is in there. See, the man in the book?”

  No, I cannot see anything. That’s why I came to her, the one with the vision. That’s why I went through so much pain to find her number and arrange this reading when I felt at the end of my rope, on the eve of my thirtieth birthday. She is not doing readings for a living anymore—just special circumstances, of which I must be one.

  “You can’t see him because it’s not this man whom you need to find. There is more behind him. There is something else. There is a place that holds your happiness. Keep your eyes wide open.”

  She also tells me that the book is both a curse and a gateway. She says that I need to find my answers and then destroy it, just the way she smashes the symbols from the bottom of the cup with her thumb, so they don’t bring misfortune.

  That is when the lightning of understanding hits me: I am the writer. New hope starts to pulse wildly through my veins, growing in diameter, taking over my small universe.

  “Do not give up searching,” she shouts at me, still sitting on her chair, as I am leaving her house. “What you’re looking for is only yours to find. Make good use of the old wisdom.”

  .

  I wrote my first journal entry when I was twelve years old. It was then when I decided that I was going to believe. It was summer vacation, and I was spending it at my grandparents’ house, the happiest place in the world for me. Bunu had just given me this beautiful notebook that he had bought from the village store. That is the last memory I have of my grandfather: he handed me the blue notebook like a treasure. It looked so unnatural in his crackled old hands that could hold a garden spade with much more precision and grace than a pen. That whole day I sat there in bed, under the wool comforter, reading and writing. I felt happy. That is my last memory of happiness. The book I was reading was Liviu Rebreanu’s Adam and Eve. It taught me that God lives inside people in the form of love, and we all carry that divine spark with us always.

  It was during that summer vacation that I saw Amon for the first time. It started as a sickness. For two days I couldn’t move. I felt too weak. I was only a guest in my body, a guest who didn’t have all the keys or access to all the rooms. I tried really
hard to move a finger, my head, my lips, but nothing responded. I know I was blinking. I know I slept. But while awake, I was only half there.

  Nobody could tell what was happening. The doctor couldn’t explain it. I just couldn’t move for two days. There is a very strange thing about it, though. I couldn’t move for two days, but it felt good. It felt to me like there was no need to move. It felt like a paranormal experience, maybe. I remember thinking that maybe I had a gift, and I would soon start talking to the dead. That thought scared me out of it probably.

  I saw him when Buna made me sit on the bench in front of the house to look at my friends who were playing in the street. He was leaning against the fence across the road. He looked beautiful, and he had a very sad smile. The sight of him filled me with a sense of confidence that the world was a good and beautiful place. The sun looked suddenly brighter, the air seemed to have thickened again, enough that I could breathe it in. Everybody loved me, and I loved them back so much that I had to move again with them. So I moved. Then he was gone.

  But he left me with faith. It was supposed to be simple: the world made sense because he would come to save me, in some form or another. All he asked for was unfaltering faith. You know, the kind that moves mountains. He needed a name, and I called him Amon: the hidden one. All I had to do was look for him, for the real one, who could be anywhere, hiding behind any man I met.

  Amon doesn’t really live in my world, and yet he has been to me more real than my own body, and he was coming to show me all the reasons that kept the world spinning. He would help me see the engines of the universe and understand their meaning. He would end the suffering and the ignorance. He would render all the pain insignificant. He would be godlike, because he would bring me love.

  I was only going to record in the journals my life before him. I intended to write for his eyes only, until we met, which I believed wouldn’t be too long—maybe three or four years, or a couple of notebooks. I have nine of them piled up now in my desk. He has never come.

  .

  Another empty weekend. All alone. Well, true, I do have the cat. They say that cats absorb the negative energy in a house. Without Miaw, this house would be an empty soul, a horrible place of fears.

  I feel deserted by all human beings right now. Everybody seems to have forgotten me, as if I am already dead and buried. I am blaming my mother for this too. She has led a lonely life, never with a real friend to share her problems, never with a partner who could understand. She couldn’t teach me differently.

  When Mama got pregnant with me, it was a tragedy for her. A single mother was unacceptable in the small village where she grew up, and she could never look into her parents’ eyes again after that. She was twenty-one years old, in her third year of college, away from home, when it happened. She fell in love with a handsome graduate student who seemed to be everything that she ever wanted: sophisticated, charming, a man of the world. She fell in love with him over a large cup of hot chocolate, on a long and extremely cold January day. The next January, I was born.

  I don’t know the whole story. He disappeared as soon as he found out about the pregnancy. My father—the coward.

  Mama was never able to forgive herself for having a child out of wedlock. Her church told her that she had committed the unforgivable sin. She paid by never marrying, by never seeing a man again. She paid by letting me become the sole purpose of her life. And then she administered to herself the ultimate punishment by letting me go when I was still only a child. I went to live with Marta in Bucharest when I turned fifteen, while Mama stayed back in Vulturi because she couldn’t afford to lose her job. It was hell for her. She came to see me every weekend, bringing food, shoes and clothes, books and school supplies. It didn’t matter if it was the most excruciatingly hot summer or the worst of winter storms—she took the bus and came to Bucharest, with luggage heavier than you would ever expect her of being able to lift from the ground. She seemed happy to do all of it. She worked in the factory from five in the morning till five in the evening, every day, even on the weekends when she didn’t come to see me. She ate only bread and bagels, saving for me all the good food that she could afford to buy. I had to force her to eat something with me at the table. She said she was not hungry. My mother was never hungry. She said all the food she needed was the sight of me being happy.

  I haven’t succeeded at happiness, I’m afraid. How will I ever repay my mother?

  .

  I wish I could believe in God, the same way I did when I was a child. This has become such a delicate subject with Mama. She cannot understand. I do not try to explain to her. She tells me to go to church at least on Sundays, to light a candle at least, but I cannot make myself do anything anymore.

  Buna was the one who used to take me to the Codresti church where the white-bearded priest would take me on his lap and ask me if I can say “Our Father Who Art in Heaven.” I was very proud to recite it to him. But those times are long gone.

  I miss being a child. I miss Buna’s house. I miss the quiet dreams I’ve always had in my room there and the smells of her kitchen waking me up

  .

  Marta. I dreamed about her. Even without being here, she will always haunt me for as long as I live in this house.

  I was barely able to sleep last night. I am now in the kitchen, in my blanket, eyes half-closed. It’s four thirty a.m. I turned on the cooking stove for heat. I like to sit here like this, before the world awakes, to let my soul slowly warm up to the day. I can sit here with my notebook and write the nightmares down to exorcize them. I can drink the strong black coffee to feel alive. And I can witness how the universe gives birth to another day, and how people take it for granted again and start going on their way as if nothing died at night.

  “You should call her Auntie,” Mama told me when she brought me here the first time. “You should tell her everything that you need when I’m not here. She will take care of you. She will be your second mother.”

  But she has only been Marta to me, and in my book, there aren’t many things more vicious than a Marta.

  When I came to live with her, it had been ten years since Uncle Leo’s death. The man with dark hair and a combed-over bald spot, with bushy eyebrows and invisible lips. He was smiling in the photo of him and Marta on their wedding day. He was smiling like a man who had never smiled before that photo, and who couldn’t really understand the photographer’s instructions.

  He was a drunk. He used to make Marta drink with him, and then he’d beat her up. She often hit him back. After his death, Marta never stopped complaining about the injuries she had suffered—the broken bones that would always hurt when needed and the headaches that could make a child obey out of guilt.

  He was inhuman, I will give her that. He used to lock her out of the house at night. In winter. Go back to your stupid mother, you barren bitch. But she was a married woman—there was no place for her to go.

  Uncle Leo died of a heart attack twenty years ago, and that was Marta’s happiest day. She went and bought the most expensive black dress she could find, her first dress in years, and she wore it at the funeral with a gigantic pink lily pinned to her lapel. She went to a beauty salon to dye her hair black and she had it cut short, with bangs, in a style that she would never change after that. “I was the most elegant widow the neighborhood had ever seen. Now that the devil was dead, I could finally be myself.” It was her favorite story to tell.

  But something went wrong when Uncle Leo died. I think his soul has never left. He has stayed with her, torturing her—and torturing me.

  “Forgive her. She’s had a hard life. Try to understand,” Mama used to tell ten-year-old Ana, who was always expected to be the wise one. The child never could live up to all the unfair expectations.

  . .

  The thick, two-hundred-page notebook is covered in navy-blue vinyl. It has smooth, lined pages and is filled with tiny writing. Each entry is written in a different ink: blue, red, green, purple, or black. Tiny stars, d
rawn in the same ink colors, create frames around each page.

  I WANT TO ASK MAMA to take me back home with her, but I cannot make myself say the words. I was the one who wanted to come to school here, in Bucharest. I was the one who begged for months until she agreed. She let me come here to live with her sister, while she stayed in Vulturi to work twelve-hour days and return to an empty home, all alone. I know what horrible sacrifice I asked her to make. How can I admit that I made a mistake, that schools here are not that much better than in Vulturi, and all I want is to be with my mother? I only live for the weekends when she comes here, but I cannot ask her to take me home.

  Marta is not the only reason for my unhappiness, though. I would probably carry my misery with me wherever I go. Marta is just a poor, sick woman who has never known a good life, and I am becoming immune to her cruelty. I still can’t help but wonder how such a disturbed creature can be Mama’s sibling. I know she has had a hard life, but Mama’s wasn’t easier, either. How did suffering push each of them on to such different paths?

  .

  I am up in my room. Marta allowed me to make the attic storage my own bedroom. I am happy we moved out of the apartment and I no longer have to sleep in the living room under her constant scrutiny. I don’t have to do everything under those eyes that judge me, measure me, and always tell me of her disdain. This room is small, but it keeps me away from the evil witch. I feel safe.

  It is already dark outside. I just came back from school an hour ago. Marta is probably at church. I ate some boiled potatoes that she had left for me. They were cold and mushy. It was food, though. Who cares?

  After school, I took a long walk with Laura. We defied the cold until we couldn’t breathe the frozen air anymore. My ears are still aching, and I haven’t recovered my sense of balance completely.

  We talked about parents. Hers are pushing her too hard to study. Her father makes her memorize five definitions from the dictionary every day. I told her that I had called my father last weekend, but he sounded drunk and didn’t even try to pretend that he cared how I was. Mama cares. Probably too much. But she’s never here with me.