Spell of Blindness

by Lori Tiron-Pandit

  But I was mute.

  He hit the table with his fist. Then he hit the wall with his head. “This is not happening. This is not happening,” he kept repeating.

  But I was made of stone. I felt nothing. I understood his pain—the pain of anther, in no way connected to me. I had left him a long time before this conversation took place.

  .

  This is a nightmare that I don’t seem to wake up from, and I badly want to wake up because it has turned weird, the way dreams tend to do.

  Last night, he left the apartment without a word. He spent the night somewhere else, but in the morning, he was back. Smiling, relaxed.

  “How was your day? Here, I brought coffee.” He left me standing in the hallway, stunned, and entered the house. He went to the bedroom, changed, and came out. “See you later.” Kiss on the cheek. Gone.

  What was that? I don’t know. I’m packing.

  .

  Last night, he came home. Brought chocolate. Cooked dinner. Said very few words. No eye contact. He didn’t even seem to notice my bags.

  He slept on the couch, but he leaned to kiss me good night before going to bed. I slept in the bedroom, door locked.

  I need to leave. My tenants are out by the end of the month. I cannot move into the house before that. Maybe Ilinca will take me in for two weeks, if George doesn’t mind.

  .

  Traian is away on a business trip for ten days. He offered to go and let me pack my things to move out in peace.

  He seemed shocked when I told him I was ready to move out. “But you didn’t give me a chance to prove to you that we can make it. You didn’t let me show you that you were wrong.”

  Even he knows that time cannot do anything for us. He sat in the kitchen and drank alone until nighttime, then he left again. In the morning, he left a message on my phone: I’m going away on business, goodbye and good luck to you.

  .

  He returned from the trip and called me yesterday. He asked to meet for drink, and I was unable to say no. I felt like I owed him. I think I also needed to meet him and see that he is not as devastated as I feared.

  We went to a newly opened bar just down the street. I wanted to stay close to home. He talked very calmly. He didn’t flirt. He didn’t curse. He didn’t let any emotion show. He said that he understood and thought it had been for the best. But this was only the beginning.

  When I was starting to feel comfortable, he broke into tears. He begged me to go back to him. I had never seen him cry before. He promised to make me happy, to give me everything that I needed.

  I cried, too. I said no. Sorry.

  And I left.

  Goodbye.

  6.

  “WHY DOESN’T GABI WANT to go to college, Tanti Vica?” Ana decided to finally ask the question that was on her mind. They were harvesting the grapes in large wicker baskets. The abundance of this year’s harvest had them sitting for as long as ten minutes under a vine to pick all the heavy, frosty clusters of explosively sweet fruit.

  “Gabi? Well, Gabi wouldn’t want anything more. But her life is down here, helping her parents, getting married, minding the animals and the fields.” Vica talked slowly while her hands expertly plucked the grapes and placed them carefully in the basket. “Why does she need college? You don’t need a degree to pick grapes from the vine or to raise a child. College is for city girls, who don’t have other responsibilities. Here in the country, we women are not short of work.” She stopped to wipe the sweat off her forehead with one corner of her cotton head scarf. “Thinking and learning too much only makes one unhappy. Life can be simpler than that.” Vica held onto the edge of the basket to lift her heavy body off the ground and move to the next vine.

  “But if she wants to go, shouldn’t she get a chance to try? Her parents are doing well, they are still young. Why hold her back? Maybe she wants something else.” Ana knew it was none of her business, but the words came out in spite of that. She felt surprised by her sudden aggressiveness, but not embarrassed or afraid. For a moment, she saw herself from the outside and marveled at the strength of the woman in front of her.

  “What do children know about what they want? What did I know when I was her age? Today she wants to go to school, tomorrow she wants to marry that Florea boy. She has been talking about the wedding all year, but they both have to finish high school first. They’re just children. When I was Gabi’s age, I just did what my parents told me to do. And I have had a long and good life, thank the Lord for that. All we wish for her is the same thing. At college, she would have to live in the city for a few years. Life is hard in the city when you are by yourself. You know that too well, don’t you, child?” Now, for the first time, Vica stopped her work and looked directly at Ana. It was not that she was waiting for an answer, but she wanted to cement the truth of what she was saying by seeing it reflected in Ana’s eyes.

  .

  Ana pulled the small kitchen bed outside, on the back porch. The fresh paint vapors were too strong in the house. From the porch, she could smell the flowers that her grandmother had planted. It was an exquisitely diverse garden from seeds her buna had collected from friends and strangers whose gardens she admired.

  From where Ana sat, she could see above the fence, into Vica’s backyard. The neighbor family seemed to be having dinner. The flower fragrances mixed with a breeze of fried chicken, garlic, and grilled cornmeal porridge. Ana closed her eyes and tried to imagine the tastes of the food.

  This village was the place of her birth, and this peace that she felt now, Ana thought, must have been the peace of being in the right place, the peace of being in a world that is meant to hold you in.

  The grey kitten was making herself comfortable at Ana’s feet. Ana thought she needed to give her a name since she didn’t seem to be going anywhere. She had appeared the other day in the front yard. Ana noticed her from the kitchen, walking with grace and confidence, tail up, looking her directly in the eye. Fearless. Brava would be a good name for her, Ana decided.

  . .

  The Year Before

  I AM GOING TO SEE THE BOOK reader tomorrow. He is a sort of witch. Or is the right word wizard, if it’s a man? Mama believes that I am the victim of black magic, the only explanation she can fathom for my inability to find a man and my depression. I’m going. I cannot deny her the pleasure of believing that she is helping me.

  This man is supposed to be able to read anybody’s future from a book that he has, and he can tell you if there is any dark energy surrounding you. Let’s believe.

  .

  The whole day yesterday seems like a surrealist dream. I can’t believe I let Mama talk me into going to that place. Sometimes she can be so childish, this mother of mine. But let me tell the whole story from the beginning.

  We left very early in the morning, when it was still dark outside. It seemed like all the people in the world were safely asleep in their warm beds while we were walking the cold streets, sharp wind blowing in our faces. I was feeling depressed and cranky at that hour, but I tried not to show it—for Mama, who was so hopeful and excited about the trip.

  The town of the famous book reader is difficult to reach. We traveled by train for one hour and took a bus for one more. The bus was old and dirty, smelling of damp wool and cheese. By the time we reached the small town, I was very tired and feeling sick. We were lucky, though, because the weather was mild and sunny. We went to a park and sat on a bench there, so that I could breathe some fresh air and eat an apple. I couldn’t even bear the thought of the ham sandwich Mama had packed from home. I hate to eat in the park like homeless people, anyway.

  The town looked like any other small mountain locality: a central street with apartment buildings of up to ten floors, a few shops, a school, a small clinic, some factories, and small white houses surrounded by gardens and trees. Although the houses don’t have all the amenities of big apartment buildings, people dislodged from their villages to work in factories prefer to heat their water on the stove an
d go to the outside toilet rather than live in cement cubes where you have to whisper if you don’t want all the neighbors to know your business. Mama has been dreaming forever of moving into a small house in the town, but we never had enough money. And we never will. I know she misses her parents’ big house in her home village. She goes there very rarely now. Nothing for her there anymore, she says.

  We managed to find the reader’s house after asking the people on the street. Many of them seemed to know about him, and Mama deduced that he is a really important man.

  He lives in a house on a small, muddy street. The house has a ten-foot concrete fence, so we were not able to see anything inside the courtyard when we rang the big brass bell at the gate. A dog started to bark from another courtyard. It was the only sound that we could hear. The street was dead. Even the wind seemed frozen, which left me with a feeling of emptiness, and I almost grabbed Mama’s arm and told her to run away from there. But it was too late. We heard a horrible metallic, screechy noise and the gate opened, letting us see the small frame of an old woman in black, her hair completely covered with a scarf. We could barely see her small eyes piercing us with distrust.

  “You want something? What are you here for?” she asked.

  “We came to see the father. My name is Dor. A friend of mine called you on Tuesday to tell you that we are coming to see the father today. I came with my daughter.” The reader fancied himself a monk, and liked to be addressed as father.

  “Come inside, then. You can wait here on the bench.” She pointed to a small wooden plaque suspended on two legs against the fence, on the inside of the courtyard. The bench looked wet, and I didn’t want to sit. I was feeling very agitated, as if I was going to see a doctor. Only hospitals give me the same restless state, the same stab of fear. I felt as if the reader was going to decide my fate. It was all real now.

  I felt my body drained of strength and blood, controlled by some outside force, while I became small inside, trying to hide, to stay protected from the pain that was going to come.

  Behind the gate, it took me a while before I noticed, in the middle of the wild growth of shrubs and tall grasses, a small, blackened house, rained and snowed upon through many springs and winters, ready to crumble at any moment. Everything looked unkempt and dirty. My mother and I didn’t speak for the whole half hour that we had to wait there. We didn’t feel brave enough to disturb the silence while the reader was probably taking an afternoon nap.

  After a while, the small woman came out again and let us pass through another gate, into the backyard. On that side, the house looked even smaller, like a home for ugly, dirty dwarfs. We had to wait there for another fifteen minutes, in front of an unfinished wood door. When the door opened, as if by itself, with nobody coming out, I gave Mama a frightened look, and she went inside alone.

  I remained outside, feeling increasingly more upset about the mistake of going there. All I wanted was to go back home, climb in my bed, cover myself in wool blankets, and feel warm and safe again, on familiar ground. I didn’t need anybody to tell me the future. I didn’t want to find out that I was cursed, never to be happy, never to find love, never to make a home and a family of my own.

  We are not supposed to know the future. We don’t know because we cannot bear all that knowledge. The burden would be too much for us to handle. The order of things has very good reasons. Let things happen to us when they happen. Let us deal with one disaster at a time, a small happiness and then another hardship, one at a time. This is how we have been made to function in this world. I thought all this while waiting outside a shabby house for the reader to come and read my story in his book.

  After a couple of minutes, Mama showed up in the doorway and asked me to go inside. It was dark in the low room I entered, and I could almost touch the ceiling. A narrow window on the side of the door allowed some dusty, stale light to come inside. When my eyes got used to the darkness, I was able to see a wooden table in one corner, covered with a white, embroidered cloth. There was an enormous old book on the table, and a man was sitting in a chair, watching me. He was wearing a dark cloak, a thick, long beard, and untidy, long hair. He was younger than I had expected, maybe in his forties.

  “Hello, miss. Please, come inside. I am happy you came to see me. Your mother says that you have been a little skeptical about the reading. It is all right. I am just glad you came. It proves that you are ready. There are many sides of our world as God made it, and we don’t see all of them. For that reason, we have to resort to using another type of vision. That’s what my reading is.”

  Then he asked me to sit on a chair in front of him. Mama stood in a corner of the room, near the door.

  “So, why are you here? What do you want to know? What do you want to see with the use of my eyes?” He smiled in a way that gave me chills.

  “I am not sure. Nothing much. Life. My mother is worried because I am not married yet, I guess. You know how mothers are. I’m sorry for wasting your time.” In my mind, I was screaming at myself for getting into this situation.

  “All right,” he said. “All right. I understand. But you are a young and beautiful woman. There shouldn’t be anything to worry about. Come closer.”

  I sat on the chair in front of him, as he indicated. He placed his palms on my temples and closed his eyes, as if he was concentrating very hard to read my mind. I was too close to him, and I could smell the heavy odor emanating from his garments. It was like the smell of sulfur and rot. I instantly felt lightheaded, and I thought I would just fall from the chair, as I was sitting with my head bent toward him. But he didn’t keep my head long in his hands.

  He let go and opened his eyes very wide. He then moved the book on the table closer to him, placed his palms on the cover for a few moments, and then opened it somewhere in the middle. He read something from there and then turned toward me.

  “You will soon meet a redheaded man. I can also see a mole on his face. He is your destiny. Just go home and don’t worry about anything anymore.”

  And that was all. He stood up and showed us to the door. I went out running and couldn’t suppress my relieved, nervous laughter. Mama dragged her feet slowly behind me.

  .

  The stories that Zina told me are frightening. Maybe because they seem unreal. Or maybe because they make sense. I understand many things now: Laura’s reluctance to tell me what was going on in the group, her never-explained disappearing acts, the nudity compulsion.

  Laura has always been “a liberated sexual being,” as she likes to call herself. She often told me stories of her amorous escapades in great detail, just to see the shock and discomfort on my face. But in the past few years, something had changed. She started wearing low-cut tops as dresses and talking less about sex.

  “I am feeling free, Ana. I am feeling like I am bursting out of my skin. I want to show myself to the world whole, just as I am. I want to walk on the street naked and unashamed.” She seemed in a trance when saying that, as if she had reached a place that I could not access.

  “Just try to feel free with your clothes on.” I would try to take it lightly. “I don’t think the world is ready for your complete freedom right now.”

  “But if we could all go back to walking naked in front one another without shame, accepting ourselves for what we really are, undisguised, if we accepted our true nature, wouldn’t the world be a better place?”

  “Well, it would be a much sadder place, that’s for sure, with fewer malls.”

  But it was no laughing matter to her, and I knew that very well.

  One day, when I went to the apartment where she was living at that time, I was inspecting her books when I noticed several photo albums that I hadn’t seen before.

  “Oh, yes, I wanted to show you those photos,” she said. “I just got them, and they are amazing.”

  The first images depicted a wispy creek finding its way through beautiful rocky formations and greenery in eerie, misty light. Next, there was a group of three people,
two men and a woman, posing in front of a small waterfall. Laura told me some names, which I promptly forgot. Next there was an image of a naked woman, legs spread out, on a large river rock. Her eyes were closed. It took me a while to recognize Laura.

  “Do you like it? Isn’t it amazing?”

  I nodded and tried to utter a faint yes, then I closed the album and put it back on the shelf, although it will always remain wide open in my mind. Neither of us mentioned it again.

  “It has been happening for years,” started Zina. “Everything the newspapers say is true. I don’t know how deep it goes. Nobody can tell if Chandan is aware of everything that’s going on, or if it’s all the doing of his ‘executives’ who are out of control. I like to think that he is not involved, because it makes it easier to accept all the years I lost with TIM.”

  Zina was wearing a long, full skirt and an embroidered white tank, and for a moment, the sight of her took me back to the time when we first met. She invited me into a roomy kitchen with large windows and cushiony benches around a solid pine table, and she stood at the stove mixing a pot of spiced wine. The kitchen was lost in mists of sweet alcohol and cinnamon flavors. She had remained the same fairy after all.

  “The girls are very happy to be selected for the trip to Japan. It’s a great honor to be given the tools to help the organization grow by raising money for it. They actually work hard for the money, as hostesses in bars in Tokyo.” She stopped hovering over her stove when she said the last sentence, and she looked straight into my eyes, as if to make me understand the gravity of the situation. “I am afraid Laura went to Japan two months ago. She was probably told, like all the others, that they like foreign women over there, but the job doesn’t involve having sex with the customers, and all she would be doing would be for TIM. It’s not only for the group either. They say that it’s for your own spiritual growth: letting go of all inhibitions, of the false sense of morality that society has you imbued with. You just need to smile and make conversation. Just make customers order drinks and come back to spend time with you. Easy as that, or so they make you believe. And it seems easy as that at first. But after a few weeks, you realize that the job is too demanding even for the most hardened soul. Customers always ask for more, and employers encourage you go for it. Keeping sex out of it becomes impossible. You have to go with it. You are alone there, without papers, because the visa is usually expired by that time, and without money because you had to send everything you made to the group. You can, of course, keep some tips and gifts, but that is not enough to get you home. If you play by the rules, they get you out of there in six months. These are innocent girls with big aspirations and minds so muddled that they think they are saving the world by going out on dates with Japanese men.”