Ana’s grandmother had lived a happy life there, in the house her husband had built with his own hands. It was a small house at first, with only two rooms and a kitchen, but over the years, they added two more rooms and an open summer kitchen area.
The yellow wood table around which Ana and Vica were sitting in the backyard had once been painted green. You could still see colorful chips in some of the cracks. This had been the dinner table of Ana’s childhood. She had eaten on it a good share of baked potato casseroles that her grandmother had deemed her specialty. Many years ago, the table had been demoted to the outside to keep the iron bench company under the crab apple tree.
“Well, child, just keep that jam pot open until it cools down, then fill the big jars with it, and cover with the wet foil, like I showed you. I’ll be going now.” Vica got up from her chair very slowly, wiped her hands on the black flowered apron, and started moving toward the gate.
Ana admired her determined walk, barely helped by the walking stick, and her self-assurance: she looked like one who was part of her surroundings, her world, and her time. She was not involved in any struggle, anxiety, or rush. She moved with the evening breeze.
As soon as Vica was out of sight, Ana took out the bread from the kitchen cupboard, sliced it on the ancient wood cutting board, and used the same knife to spread jam on a slice. She hadn’t had bread in more than a year. It tasted better than any other dinner she could remember.
With the sugar flooding her body with a state of awareness she didn’t recognize, she sat for a long time at the table outside, watching the stars and the night shadows and listening to the crickets.
. .
The Year Before
IT HAPPENED AGAIN. I BELIEVED. I trusted that I could find guidance, find a truly holy human, find, like so many others before me, solace in this religion into which I was born. It was all because of Mama. Because I wanted so badly to make her happy.
She had heard about this ancient monk in a monastery from a village near Vulturi. People say that the monk lifts spells and heals wounds of the body and of the soul, that he is as old as the monastery itself. Nobody knows when he was born. He eats once a week: bread and wine. The president came to ask for his advice once, they say. He never leaves the monastery. All his waking hours, he prays. He is said to have cured people suffering from leukemia and schizophrenia. A saint. If you sit in his aura, you can feel God, they say. If you kiss his hand, all your sins are forgiven.
So I go.
The monk looks old and wise, as advertised. Just as expected, he has a long white beard and a soft voice.
“Confess, my child.”
“I smoke,” I confess, beginning with the smallest of my sins, to build up courage.
His face changes with fury. “You have the devil inside you,” he shouts, his anger resonating in the empty church, bouncing back to me from all the tall, painted saints. He looks like a madman. He says that he would never give me forgiveness for my sins. As if he had that power. Yes, I know I gave it to him, in a moment of weakness. But now I take it back. You hear me? I take it back! No one has any power over me.
.
I met Zina today at the University Square. She is the only person I actually know from Laura’s other life. When I met her the first time, she was in a tiny apartment kitchen, cooking lentils, dressed in a red velvet gown with bell sleeves, her shoulder-length, honey-colored hair floating around her head like a mist. She was such an apparition that I couldn’t utter any word for a very long time. Laura wasn’t at home yet, and Zina invited me to wait with her in the kitchen. She offered me a glass of freshly-squeezed lemonade sweetened with honey, which I drank without a word.
She was not thin, I noticed very quickly, comparing her size with mine, as I often do, as soon as I entered the house. It must have been the intensive yoga practice that gave her movements a grace and precision that you would only expect from ballet dancers on stage, at the cost of great effort. It seemed to come naturally to her.
The apartment they lived in was a small place. Zina and her boyfriend had the large bedroom, and Laura had the small one with the tall, thin window, and they all shared a tiny kitchen that looked more like a pantry with a stove and sink in it. They had space only for a round café table and two chairs. The rooms were also very sparse and barely livable by my standards. All they had in the bedrooms were mattresses on the floor, framed photographs of Chandan, their guru, on the window sills, and books everywhere else.
Now, I have to wonder where they kept the clothes, because both Zina and Laura like to dress up, so they must have had some hidden closets somewhere. Of course, Laura wouldn’t need too much space for her clothes because she always kept just a handful of shirts, pants, and dresses at a time, always exceptional items, with intricate color, patterns, and embroidery. She has always had this enviable talent of finding a few perfect pieces of clothing and wearing them until they became one with her skin and you couldn’t identify her unless she was wearing those clothes, and then, suddenly, she would give them all away and put on the appearance of a strange someone else.
Only their kitchen was a busy, cluttered space in that small apartment because Zina liked cooking, and their vegetarian diet could use her imagination and the many bottles and boxes of spices scattered all around.
Zina left Chandan’s Transcendental Integration Movement almost a year ago. It has been very hard for her. “Chandan and the group had been all my life. Eleven years. They were all I knew. But you know, it had become unbearable ever since Vlas was banished.”
Vlas is Zina’s husband. They got married after they both left the group as a rebellion because Chandan doesn’t believe in marriage. I knew vaguely from Laura that Vlas had been involved in exposing some of the not-so-orthodox practices of the group to the media. He had filmed several Transcedental Integration Movement events that outraged the whole country when they became public knowledge. Vlas was removed from all the positions he held in the organization and was told that he no longer could enter any of the meditation houses because he had lost the trust of Chandan. Zina was allowed to stay, but she, too, felt marginalized and soon realized that she was not welcome anymore. The break for her was more painful.
“I felt I needed the meditation groups, the lectures, the large halls. I felt my life depended on them. Of course, there was the other problem, too: I had left school without graduating, I had no skills, no work experience except for whatever I had done for the group, like organizing events and keeping the meditation house visitation records, but that was, you know, volunteer work, useless in a résumé, right? Not to mention that they wouldn’t give me references anyway. Besides, if I told any potential employers that I had been a member of TIM, they would immediately label me as very unemployable, you know? Our saving grace was Vlas’s aunt, who has a farm and small dairy factory. She took us in, although Vlas hadn’t been in touch with his family for years. Isn’t that marvelous how family works?”
Marvelous, I suppose. If you have a family that works.
“Vlas hadn’t been the one who gave the tapes to the reporter, you know. But they suspected him first because they feared his honest nature. He had warned them many times that the group should keep the teacher-student relationship strictly professional so that it is beneficial to everyone. I am afraid there were other interests at play that he couldn’t understand. None of us could understand the implications while we were still inside. Chandan’s many adoring favorites were just that to us: disciples who idolized their guru. We never saw the age difference, the power imbalance. From inside, it looks like it is all for the spiritual advancement. From the outside, it is clearly all for money and sex. I am happy and lucky to be out.”
The woman I saw today at the University Square, however, did not seem as happy as the one I had met cooking in the small TIM apartment. This woman was mild-mannered and withdrawn, while the other one had been flamboyant and chatty, dancing around the kitchen to new age music and cooking like an exotic spice f
airy. The woman I see today is a sea, where the other one had been a river. She seems to have reached home. Zina of today is someone you look at and then entrust your life to, because it is clear that she will know what to do with it.
I asked her about Laura, but she told me that she couldn’t talk there. “Let’s meet tonight at our farm.” She gave me the address. “We’ll talk there. Public spaces are not always safe. Come after seven thirty.” She turned to leave, but stopped after taking only one step. She turned around and her eyes pinned me in place. “I think it’s serious. I think you might have good reason to worry about Laura. I hope there’s something we can do.”
Her eyes lost their grip on me and turned to looking inside. After she left, I came right home and poured myself a glass of wine that I drank like water, then I slept for twelve hours straight. Laura has to be all right. She has to.
.
The day started well. I woke up with the sun warming my face through the window sheers. I felt at peace. It didn’t last long.
It is now dark outside, and I need to talk to another human or I will scream. A few weeks ago, on a day like this, I had decided to fight against my premature surrender to depression, and I started to call everybody. I could not find anybody available to spend even ten minutes with me over the phone.
Who needs them anyway? I am observing with some kind of superior detachment that my heart is blackening, and I am not open to people anymore. I can’t stand all their happiness. I cannot stand to pretend anymore. I have this journal to talk to, and that’s all I need.
.
Her distressed voice over the phone in the middle of the night sent shivers through my spine. She had been drinking and watching dark French movies by herself all night. I tried to calm her down over the phone, but it was impossible. She wanted to come over, so she came, wearing just a long sweater over her pajamas and a red scarf with tropical flowers and birds of paradise, so big that she could probably wear it as a dress.
We had chamomile tea and listened to late night symphony radio. She told me that she tries to ignore that she is ill. She stopped treatment two years ago because it was not working for her. It didn’t make her feel any better, but it did make her unforgivably ugly, she thought, as he drugs caused her face to swell to twice its size. Ugliness is not something Ella is ready to handle.
“I like to forget all about it, that is why I never tell anyone. I don’t want to walk with a graveyard stone firmly planted on top of my head. Let it be invisible, you know?” She couldn’t stop crying for a long time.
Curled on the sofa, in her pajamas, she looked so fragile. “I’m hoping it will disappear if I ignore it long enough. And it often does, for weeks or even months. It works until one morning when I wake up and can’t feel the right side of my mouth. Or my hand. Or my entire face. I just don’t understand what I’ve done to deserve this. Some call it a karmic disease, you know? It could be something I’ve done in another life. How cruel is that?”
I didn’t know what to answer to that. “You can believe whatever makes you feel better. Whatever makes your days more bearable.”
“When you’re in my situation, you become a believer in everything,” she said. “There’s nothing else out there to promise help—only faith. I must believe that something’s going to cure me, right? I try to think that I’m not destined to just die. She was born, she got sick, and she died. How sad is that?”
She fell asleep on the living room sofa, although I had prepared the guestroom bed for her. I thought of calling the school to tell them that she’s not coming in today, but she woke up and got ready for work. “I cannot sit in bed all day. It would mean that I’m accepting defeat, and that’s not who I am. Never.”
She is now trying to find something in my closet that she can wear. Most things will be too short and tight for her, but she wears short and tight very well. At least she has her own sweater to layer up. It’s chilly this morning.
.
I felt an unnecessary sense of guilt today and called Marta at the home to make myself feel better. Horrible mistake. She was her normal self.
“You are beautiful. You are smart. You have a good job. There is nothing wrong with you. There is no curse, like that silly mother of yours seems to believe. I know there have been some men interested in you. It can be only your fault. What are you doing to chase them all away?” Her high-pitched yet rough voice made my teeth hurt.
“Yes, Marta, I want to be unhappy. It’s all my fault. It’s Okay. I am not asking for anyone’s pity. Now, tell me how you are. Are they treating you well over there?”
“No need for you to worry about that. You take care of yourself first, so you don’t end up here, too. Stop being a brat! Listen to me. I know what I’m saying. You don’t need to find the perfect man. He doesn’t need to be too handsome or too smart. Find one who’s good enough. That’s all you need. You won’t worry that he might cheat on you with a prettier woman. He only needs to be a good man, with a steady job. If you ask my opinion, you need a small-town boy who is hard working and with good family values. This is what you should be looking for, if you ask me.”
I would never ask.
“There are enough men out there. You just need to be more aggressive. Don’t just stay at home. You have to go out and meet somebody. Don’t waste your evenings by phoning your old, crazy aunt. Go out there and have fun. Put on a dress that looks flattering on you. Hide those legs, but show some of those curves. There are all those bars out there where young people spend their time. They are all drunk there. Maybe you have a chance. Why don’t you go to a bar?”
I indeed needed a drink by the time the conversation was over.
I have made many mistakes. Traian was maybe the biggest one. Traian came into my life at the perfect moment, didn’t he? I was not thinking of Dan every day anymore and I thought, “Why not? Let’s try again.” One more time. Fingers crossed.
I was still wounded and in pain, though, curled inside myself in fetal position. He came close, put his arms around me, and never asked for much. I was sleepwalking, moving around in the fog, eyes closed. I knew I was not living, but for a very long time, I could not shake myself back into feeling. Traian accepted it.
Traian was tall and gentle. He had an unequivocal smile and eyes that didn’t sparkle.
. .
The notebook is a small three-ring binder with paper inserts of different colors. The binder is red but otherwise plain, and there are no other decorations on this notebook. The writing, small and leaning to the left a little as usual, looks crammed onto the page, covering every inch of the paper. There isn’t even one line of empty space left between entries, but the dates are heavily underlined.
TRAIAN HAS BEEN CALLING ME four times a day. He doesn’t even have anything to say, and I certainly am tired of coming up with topics for discussion. Why does a person call when they have nothing to talk about? I have muted the phone ringer. I have a headache.
He also brings me gifts every time we see each other: stuffed animals, chocolate (a lot of chocolate that I will never eat), flowers, or perfume. It’s embarrassing, but I don’t know how to make it stop.
“I want to make you happy,” he says. I suppose it’s nice.
.
Traian left. He waived at me from the bus. A last glimpse through dirty curtains. A last forced-optimistic smile. I am back home now, alone, and I cannot believe that it finally happened. We have been talking about this job in Switzerland for months, and now he’s gone. He might come back for Christmas. Or not.
There is darkness wherever I look, and I know this must be my fate that I cannot escape. I’ve known it since I was only a child. I saw it in Marta’s eyes: the doom of the unloved. Maybe she is the one who put the curse on me.
The bad witch comes at night and tells you how you’re good for nothing. The bad witch reminds you that you are alone. The bad witch chases your friends far away, beyond the forest, from where they cannot find their way to you again. The bad witch co
mes out of the darkness to show you that you’re fat and ugly and you don’t deserve any fragment of love.
.
I miss Traian. The pain is unexpected. He left me, too. The only man who really loved me.
I miss his strength. I miss the feeling he brought with him. The safety. I miss his hourly phone calls.
.
He’s coming back home, for good. I’m so relieved.
I am waiting for him now to ring the doorbell any minute. He should be here soon. I prepared a nice dinner for the two of us, with candles and champagne.
.
Traian is sleeping now. It is only seven in the morning. I couldn’t sleep anymore although we stayed up very late last night.
I’m in the kitchen. My head feels big and heavy. I must have had too much to drink.
It feels good to know that Traian is in the bedroom sleeping and not away from me anymore. He seems changed, though. In these three months, he has become a different man. Or is it just me seeing him with different eyes now?
I don’t care about anything as long as he is back here with me. We are going to Vulturi tomorrow. We’ll spend Christmas there with Mama, and everything will be perfect again.
I am not able to enjoy this moment to the fullest, though. This moment I have been dreaming of for months. Maybe I am somehow afraid that he is going to leave me alone again, that I cannot count on him anymore, at least not as I did before. But that’s just stupid.
I am happy. I am.
.
I don’t have any friends anymore. What has happened to me? Week after week, we meet only Traian’s friends. We go to parties with them, to barbeques, camping, and movies with them. We have them over for board games. We spend all the holidays and birthdays with them. Always Traian’s friends. They are a tight, fun group to which I will never belong.
Ilinca told me that she doesn’t recognize me anymore. Apparently my sense of style has “changed dramatically” in the past few years, and my voice has “borrowed an affected tone, suitable for a midday news reporter.” What does that even mean?
Spell of Blindness Page 7