Spell of Blindness

by Lori Tiron-Pandit

  The monastery, however, was a place of pure light and if it had a graveyard, Ana had never seen it. In the middle of large fields of corn, the whitewashed monastery walls housed a world of order, beauty, and quiet. The nuns worked incessantly to maintain the gardens where they grew all their food and still found time and space for lush beds of flowers all around. There were flowers surrounding their living quarters, flowers bordering all the stone alleys, and more flowers hanging in baskets from high building beams.

  In that early-fall parade of light and colors, the nuns themselves looked out of place. Where did they belong, Ana wondered, those serene creatures clad in black robes who ran away from the world, getting caught here, in between heaven and earth? She tried to imagine herself living the monastic life, sleeping and praying in a small white room decorated with an icon and a cross and furnished only with a hard bed and a side table. She tried to see herself waking up before dawn every day, putting on the same black clothes, saying the same prayers, be it dark winter or chirpy summer day. She tried to see herself working with her hands and her soul every moment of consciousness. Nuns do not have futures, dreams, or hopes. They also don’t know anxiety, worry, or heartache. Are they really alive, Ana thought, or are they the dead walking outside of the graveyard walls?

  What Ana was wondering, above all, was if these peaceful-looking creatures had actually found the answers she had been looking for all her life. Had they found the wisdom that had been eluding her for so long?

  . .

  The Year Before

  I AM IN SAINA. IT IS BEAUTIFUL here. I can’t believe I haven’t visited this place in decades. The trip from Bucharest was not that bad, either: about three hours that I spent reading. It was almost pleasant.

  Ella met me at the station, and then we came to this little hotel on the main street. Her place is being fumigated for pests this weekend, apparently. This is what Ella has been telling me, but I find it hard to believe, of course. I suspect that she doesn’t want me to meet Calin. It doesn’t really matter. She can tell me whatever stories she wants to tell. I will always pretend I believe her.

  We had a glorious day today, so I am exhausted in a good way. We walked for hours on pebbled high roads and had a picnic of hard-boiled eggs and cucumber slices in a wild chamomile meadow. I felt at peace with the world. It is hard to describe. I sat there in the sun, surrounded by the shadows of tall trees, and I felt like I had been chosen. I was alone, and the sun was touching my skin in what felt like a divine caress. The trees around me were beautiful, supernatural beings that guarded this garden of Eden and the souls in it.

  We must go back there tomorrow. I want to catch a whiff of that feeling again.

  I also bought myself a new pair of earrings made by an artisan from the town. Ella chose them for me: shimmering silver coins hanging on two chain strands down the neck. They are beautiful and will always remind me of the call of chamomile fields.

  .

  Today, we hiked for about one hour on a rocky little road up the mountain to the castle of the baroness. Ella told me the legend in her low and arresting voice.

  The Saina baroness is a noble woman from another land who marries the local landlord. The legend says that when she marries, she is a young girl of nineteen, obsessed with white lilies. As soon as she comes to Saina, the baroness asks to have a large lily garden planted right in front of her bedroom window. Every morning during spring and summer, her servants decorate her rooms with vases filled with fully blooming lilies. When her husband is gone to one of the many wars of that time, the baroness sits in her garden, trying to capture the beauty of her lilies on canvas. Away from her family and lonely in the cold castle, the baroness soon starts to wilt away, like her favorite flowers in fall. The only thing that seems to do her good is the smell of lilies.

  So the baron orders a famous French perfumer to arrest the essence of lilies in small, dark bottles for the baroness to be able to enjoy her beloved flowers during winter, when the gardens are long dead. The young woman is enchanted by the perfume so much that one night, she pours all the bottles on her clothes and the carpets and curtains of her room. The strong fragrance fills the small space so violently that it drives the baroness out of her mind: she opens the window and throws herself on the icy ground below. On the place where her body touches the ground, a most exquisite, never-seen-before species of lily grows the next spring: a large, pink flower with no fragrance at all.

  Ella told me the story on our way up. As soon as we reached the castle, however, she fell completely quiet. The lily garden was in bloom. As we walked through the large castles, the fragrance lifted through the windows and got trapped inside. The air was almost impossible to breathe. Ella felt weak and nauseous, so we stopped next to a windowsill, trying to catch the cool air from outside.

  “Thank you for coming here with me, Ana,” she said. “I wanted to visit this place before, but it frightened me. I was right to be frightened, wasn’t I? Don’t you feel like we are breathing in the tormented spirit of the young baroness?” Ella was wearing a long, gray dress, and, as she leaned on the window, her long hair fluttering free on her back, she looked like a phantasm herself. “My life is just as sad as hers, isn’t it? Much sadder, if you think about it, because I have no hope. There is no lily perfume that will heal me.”

  I hugged her but couldn’t find any soothing words to say. Because at that moment, I, too, was no one else but the sad, lonely baroness.

  .

  I keep telling myself that Ella will be fine. On the way back home, I prayed for her for hours. I looked out the window and prayed for her to the trees on the side of the railway and to the melted light seeping through their foliage. For most of our time together, Ella seemed energetic and happy about my presence, but I didn’t feel any real connection with her. She was cold and impenetrable. I felt like she was trying very hard to come out of her own mind, but she was stuck there, in some tight knot of negativity and pain. Whenever she thought I was not looking, her face would relax into a horrible mask of sadness. She managed to break off from it quickly and for extended periods of time, but the return of the mask was always sudden and terrifying.

  I don’t know what she’s going through, and I couldn’t force her to share it with me. She seemed healthy, and that’s what matters the most. I suspect that Calin is the source of her unhappiness, but I don’t really know anything.

  So I am back home now, carrying with me a sense of dread and helplessness and dreams of trees that come to life and flowers that kill.

  .

  Zina’s contacts found Laura yesterday. She is fine. She doesn’t want to return yet. It hurts to admit that I don’t know who Laura is anymore. A long time ago, in school, we were twins. She used to wear dark, dramatic clothes, loose hair, and heavy mascara, while I was more of a ponytailed, grey-sweater-and-jean type, but we were identical when we checked the mirror. But we changed. Today, I am unlike anyone else, and it’s very disorienting and very lonely to be this unique.

  One day—it was our last year in high school—I went to the studio that her father had rented for her, and all her beautiful, hardwood, ornate furniture was gone. The canopy bed that I envied was no longer occupying the center of the room, and the gothic posters were gone from the walls.

  “What have you done? This is not you.” I felt devastated for reasons I couldn’t understand just then.

  “Oh. I gave everything away to that orphanage that we visited last week with the class,” she answered as if it was the most mundane and unimportant fact, and she was bothered to have to waste time speaking about it. “I don’t think they need a canopy bed, but that furniture is worth something for sure. They seemed very happy.” She was very content with the empty apartment.

  “But where will you sleep? Where will you eat? You have nothing here.” I was almost crying. I felt an overwhelming dread emanating from the empty, white walls.

  “Come on, Ana,” she said. “Stop freaking out about this. Let’s go out to ea
t. I’m feeling very hungry.”

  She was always hungry, and she always welcomed her hunger as if food was not a monster but an angel from the heavens of pleasure and delight.

  “I feel like the darkness has lifted,” she told me over chicken shawarmas and lemonade that day. “I think I am ready for some light in my life now. I want to try being content and embracing the world for what it is. I feel that there is an escape now. There is a way.”

  She had started reading about Buddhism and, although all she knew was from books, Laura felt very strongly about it from the beginning.

  .

  Dearest Ana,

  There is no need for so much concern and distress about me. I am perfectly all right, as always. I’m making discoveries here in Japan and I intend to explore them. I think I might be staying for a while, longer than I thought, because I feel this new place might be good for Laura’s spiritual quest.

  Sorry for not telling you that I was going to Japan. I expected to return sooner.

  Keep writing to me. I promise to check my e-mail more often.

  Please tell my mother that I’m fine, and I’ll call her when I can. She will worry about me anyway. Don’t allow her negativity to affect you.

  Write to me when you can. I’ll reply.

  Much love,

  Laura

  .

  For a while, for a very short time, loneliness had felt like freedom. It felt like a new, open path through an orchard on a fresh spring morning. Pink peach flowers were falling on my head and shoulders.

  .

  I spent a few hours at Zina’s house today, helping her husband write a response to a newspaper article that was defending and justifying the Transcedental Integration Movement as a spiritual organization that threatens the church and the status-quo, and is persecuted only for that reason.

  We also watched Zina being eloquent and very convincing on TV about the wrongdoings of Griolaru’s organization. She was on two different television channels, talking about the group sending girls to Japan to work in clubs. The story is big now because of the alleged murder of a poor woman. It’s getting gruesome and scary. This woman was on her fourth or fifth Japan trip, apparently. She was one of the oldest members of the group, one of the “advanced instructors” who had a larger view of the inside workings of the organization. She was not a standard beauty, but it seems that she was fascinating and irresistible to men, and she had the trust and love of many people inside. She was also very tough, with many years of martial-art training, which is why she was the perfect guide for the women who went to Japan. She used to accompany each group and teach them the ropes over there. It was a dispute over money with a club owner that she lost her life over. Monday morning, she was found by cleaning crews, dead on the street. According to some reports, she was decapitated. There haven’t been any official reports of the incident and everything is being discussed mostly in the tabloids and late-night entertainment talk shows, so I wouldn’t be very surprised if tomorrow I see the woman herself on TV, alive and very well. But she could very well be dead, and so could Laura. And that is an unbearable thought.

  Zina’s husband, Vlas, is a very quiet man. He seems very gentle, too, and a very genuine seeker of truth. We talked a lot last night about God, life, love, and beauty.

  .

  Dear Ana,

  I miss you. The truth is that it’s lonely here and I miss seeing a familiar face, a person who looks like me or talks like me.

  I can only imagine how much trouble you went through to find me, and I honestly think that I don’t deserve a friend like you.

  I feel that the light of the day is too harsh here, and the grass is too green, and I am living in a badly made movie about life in another world in the galaxy. People around here are at times very friendly, and at times they don’t even look me in the eyes because I don’t matter to them. I am an inferior form of existence in this world. Laura is an invertebrate here: a prized curiosity and, at the same time, a creature that belongs under the sole of their shoes.

  I can’t tell you how much I miss home. This turn in my life might not be in the right direction. I have lost any sense of direction, as a matter of fact, and I am letting myself be carried by the wind wherever it cares to take me. I need to explore this new perspective, though, as I feel there is something that Laura can learn from this experience. She will be changed by it.

  Laura

  .

  Ella was shaving off her beautiful hair in my dream, saying that she had no use for it anymore, that she needed to return it. I woke up choking on tears. She is not well. I need to call her.

  I know I should just pick up the phone and make that call, but instead I am sitting here at the table, unable to move even my head to the side. The air is heavy today, and my shoulders are so weak.

  The principal approached me because she knows I am close to Ella and wanted to just ask if I knew anything about her. She told me that the children missed her. Her students love her, and the principal adores her too. The results of the school testing show what a wizard she is with math: her students have better scores than anyone else in school history. She is an asset and all her eccentricities are “understandable.”

  “She is quite unique,” said the principal. “When I first saw the student math notebooks filled with sketches of vases and fruit, I thought I would flip. ‘I’m teaching them perspective and size estimation,’ Ella said when I questioned her. It was just part of her method, and it worked. Of course, later she started with watercolors, and that I couldn’t tolerate. Having the children come out of math class all covered in paint. We have an art lab for that. We have aprons.”

  The principal’s hair seemed to take on a life of its own. She has a spellbinding hairstyle. It’s teased to perfection and shaped with small combs into a wondrous confectionery that inspires awe in the hallways. I am thinking that much of the respect she gets from the kids is owed to her hair: they are scared of it.

  What she said next was a shock to me. “Her mother came to school to talk to me today. She is a respected professor of literature at the university. You might have heard of her. Professor Adiele Cameri? She wrote that book on comparative literature that was big a few years ago?”

  Adiele Cameri was my idol in college. I studied only one year with her after she had returned from Paris-Sorbonne University, where she had been invited as a guest professor due to the great success of her book. She used to be a rock star in our circle, and any sight of her dark glasses and red lips was cherished like a vision from heavens by all of us. I actually had a magazine photo of hers framed on my desk. Adiele Cameri is Ella’s mother. I still cannot fathom it.

  “Well, she came to tell me that Ella is not returning to school this year. She needs rest, more than anything, her mother said, and she is getting it, listen to this, in a residential clinic, somewhere in Saina, I believe. I told her how everyone loves her over here, and I promised to have the children write get-well cards for her. I told you all this because I need you to take charge of this project. Have the children write the cards and make sure the cards reach her. Professor Cameri is a very influential woman, and we should stay on her good side, even if it means more work for us.”

  I am very afraid to call Ella. A clinic? Is she so bad? Why would she lie to me? Do I want to know?

  .

  Laura is sleeping in the study right now. The prodigal friend, the lost child is back. Her hair is cut very short, her voice is softer, and her laugh is changed, but she’s back, and I’m grateful.

  She flew back yesterday and called me from the airport. I went to pick her up. We didn’t talk at all on the ride back home. I cannot force anything. She needs to feel comfortable and speak when she’s ready. I can see it in her eyes: this is the kind of story that changes people deeply, in both big and small ways. It’s the kind of story that needs to be pushed farther away in time to make sense; it’s the kind of story that cannot be shared at night, but only in the sparkling morning light that sends
the monsters trembling back to their lairs.

  . .

  It is a small notebook with brown leather covers and thin, smooth pages edged with gold. It is written in black fountain pen, each date underlined with a delicate calligraphic swirl. The last five pages contain a list of book titles.

  PETRU IS TOO GOOD, I FEEL. He is too kind, too considerate, too well-read, too much. I am learning a lot from him, and he has enormous patience to listen to every silly thing I say. I don’t know what he sees in me.

  Ilinca thinks he doesn’t have any faults, and I would be the stupidest woman on Earth if I don’t at least give him a fair chance.

  I cannot get over his hair. He has beautiful, honey-colored, long hair that he wears in a ponytail. Besides being jealous that he has better hair than I have, I also feel that long hair doesn’t suit him. There is a very unsettling discordance between his hair and his personality. His hair seems to scream that there is something wild or rebellious about this man, but everything else about him says he is a polite and well-adjusted man of the world, with a very calm and gentle demeanor. He is an enigma, in a way.

  .

  Petru’s house is a spacious apartment, with painted adobe walls. The living room has wall-length, dark-wood shelves filled with books, and an ornate, antique gramophone is placed on the coffee table as a centerpiece. No TV in sight.

  It looks too clean to be a single man’s home. I have to ask.

  “Did anybody help you decorate this place?”

  “No. It’s all my ugly taste I’m afraid, and my consuming obsession with dusty, old books.”

  Yes, indeed. There are books on the coffee table (stacked according to size), books on the bar counter, and books on the bar stools. I feel a strong impulse to go and touch them. They were all loved books, their essence flowing through the veins of the place.

  “I spend most of my money on books. I possibly make too much,” he said plainly, without hinting that he is making a joke.