.
I don’t know what is the deal with that job of his. He told me that he had some fight and a series of misunderstandings with the people from the office, and nobody there likes him. It seems that they wrongly accused him of something (he wouldn’t say exactly what it was), and he cannot forgive them for that. So, feeling that the atmosphere is not quite welcoming in the office, he has decided that he doesn’t want to go there anymore, choosing to do only fieldwork. As a result, he works mostly from home, from the computer that he brought along with his other possessions. If his manager calls, he goes out to meet clients. His manager sometimes calls him in the morning, sometimes in the afternoon, and sometimes doesn’t call all day long. He ends up spending entire days in his pajamas, in my house, in my bed, and in front of my TV.
.
I am feeling so angry with myself. There is something very wrong with him, and I shouldn’t have let him take over my life like this. All the lies and the weird, unexplainable behavior have reached grotesques heights.
His mother is not a doctor at all, but a medical assistant. He spilled out the truth in a fight I picked, during which he lost his temper and couldn’t control everything he was saying. He got lost in the labyrinth of his own lies. During our fight, he started telling me a story—unrelated to the whole conversation, as usual—about how his mother had to struggle after the divorce because she was only a medical assistant and she was not making much money. When I confronted him about the inconsistency in his stories, for a few moments, he was not able to utter any words. He sat on a chair, rested his head on the cross of his arms, bent over his knees. I tried to encourage him and explain that it didn’t make any difference to me, that I simply didn’t want these questions lurking in the back of my mind. He jumped at the opportunity and told me that indeed, it doesn’t make any difference, so let’s forget about it. That was the end of that conversation, and the start of the downfall. I tried to give him the benefit of the doubt before. Now I am only watching him, waiting for the big wrong move.
10.
“THEY NEED A NEW ENGLISH teacher at the school. Why don’t you go? They could use your help there. Mrs. Toma is having her baby next month, and there is no one who can fill in for her. All the teachers have double duties in our school. Nobody is available. You are a teacher. You should go.”
Gabi was helping Ana pick pears because Vica was coming in the afternoon to show Ana how to make compote. Ana could see Gabi’s innocence emanating from her skin like an aura.
“I don’t know, Gabi. It’s not that easy. I would love to help, but that is not why I came here. I am on a sabbatical. I don’t intend to teach this year. And I don’t know if I want to risk losing my tenure in Bucharest if I take a job in Codresti.”
The pears were large and ripe, requiring delicate handling. In the wood boxes, they looked like yellow-green gems. They were collecting a treasure.
“I just think that it would be amazing for this village to have a teacher like you. We have many very smart children, you know? There is this girl, Carla, she plays guitar and writes her own lyrics. She is very talented. And Geta, she has such a hold of grammar and is so smart that Mrs. Toma many times can’t even answer her questions. She has to check through her books for days to find answers for Geta. That’s how smart she is. She could use a teacher like you.”
They kept the juiciest pears aside, to place them on top of a full box. Ana planned to cut them up for compote as soon as she got home. Next to her, Gabi, tired of work, sat on the dry ground, eating a pear and reading from one of the books that Ana had bought for her. She was somewhere else. Ana marveled at her ability to withdraw from the world, completely absorbed in the pages of the book. The girl’s face was frozen in an expression of bliss. Maybe she could go to the school to ask how she could help, Ana thought. Maybe just a few hours a week. If she was going to spend all winter there, she needed some distraction. In the midst of snow and cold, there was not much to do in the village. Maybe some work at the school would be just what she needed. She would figure out the details later.
.
They made twenty-five jars of compote. Vica took ten home with her. Ana wanted to give her more, but she refused.
“We have been enjoying these pear trees for all these years since your grandparents passed away. It’s all right. I’m happy to see you eat some,” she said. “You need strength out here. I am afraid to look at you when you carry those water buckets. It seems like you will break. Life in the village is tough.”
“But I am strong, Tanti Vica. Don’t worry. I am exercising every day.” Ana felt ridiculous saying that, but Vica didn’t seem to hear.
“Life is hard here. Since I was seven, I have been waking up at five in the morning to feed the animals. Never missed a day. See these hands? How cracked and beaten they are? How ugly? It’s hard work. But I would never trade it for the city in a million years. I want to feel this land under my feet until I die.” A tear made its way through one of the deep canals on her face.
“Your grandmother loved this place, too. She was heartbroken when both her daughters left. You know, your grandparents could have moved. Your grandfather was not from Codresti, and he was not happy to stay here.”
“I remember.”
“But there was great love between them. He had left for the war before they could have the wedding, and what kept him alive, he always used to say, was that he had to return and marry her. Your grandmother went to church every day for two years. She went to pray for his safe return. We all prayed for our men in those times. Many of us were left with only our prayers. But your grandfather did come back, and he didn’t leave her alone again.”
Tanti Vica told stories of the past and relived it in her mind. She was absent. But Ana felt more connected than ever. She saw the shadows of the trees and the house expand under the faint moonlight. She heard the song of the wrens in the distance and the playful barking of a neighbor’s dog. Ana propped her feet on the bench to make herself more comfortable.
“He was changed after the war, your grandfather. They all were, unable to put it all behind. They carried the war inside them a long time after it was over, until the end of their lives. When he looked into death’s face in the end, the last thing he remembered was the old woman he had killed. He had said goodbye to his children and wife, but the old woman was still haunting him.”
“What old woman?” Ana let her feet down to the ground and set her elbows straight on the table. “I don’t know that story.”
“You know that he was a tank commander. One day, they were moving to another front and had to go over a narrow bridge. Tank after tank, trucks filled with soldiers and supplies. They were ordered not to stop, no matter what. It was the war. An old lady turned up on the bridge in front of them, but they couldn’t stop. The entire convoy had to keep on moving; these were the orders. It was court martial if they didn’t obey. The first truck hit her, and the rest of them came on, over the woman’s crushed body and unable to figure out why they were doing it. Years later, at home, after a few glasses of wine, your grandfather always returned to that day and asked God over and over why he had to drive over somebody’s mother with his tank on that narrow bridge. He had seen many horrors for two years in battle, but that woman, he could not forget. It made him cry, after a few glasses of wine, and your grandmother had to come then and take him to bed. Maybe that is why he never took to drinking much.” Vica wiped her hands on the apron, as she does when work is over. “I’ll be going now. Good night.”
Ana stayed there on the bench for a while because she was unable to drag herself out from that bridge, where her grandfather’s tank had passed over the body of someone’s mother.
. .
The Year Before
I COULDN’T RESIST GOING with her. She accosted me at the subway exit. “I can read your future, beautiful. I can break black magic curses and take the living silver out of you. I can see that you need me. Maybe you’ve heard of me. I’ve been on TV. I am A
na the Witch.” So I went with her.
To my surprise, she didn’t sit me down in the chair that she had at her card table right there, next to the subway stairs. She folded and packed everything and put it all away in a locker behind, then she led me away, through a maze of stone-paved streets that I had never seen before. I would have followed her anywhere.
We reached a circle with once-beautiful houses, now fallen victim to weather, time, and neglect. Some of them had exquisite wrought iron balconies and gates. Some had the large windows of the beautiful cubist architecture from a prosperous past of this old city. The laundry hung out to dry on lines in every balcony and front yard. A group of women sat on chairs in front of the door of a corner-shaped building. I smiled and nodded at them.
Looking straight into my eyes, the older one shouted: “Hey, Damian, enough fooling around. Come inside right now; it’s time for dinner!” Damian, a little boy in a bright red tee shirt and dusty jeans, came running and, just like his mother or grandmother, didn’t take his eyes off me until he was inside the house. As soon as the boy was inside, I saw a man’s unshaven face peering out through the open door.
I looked around with a certain degree of sudden fear then. The possibility of being attacked and robbed in this neighborhood, I realized, was very high, and I started to blame myself for being so stupid and credulous. I never stopped walking behind my witch, though, because I felt on another level that my lessons were of a different nature.
Ana the Witch opened the heavy wooden door of a house with the paint peeling in big crusts from the exterior walls. We entered a large living room overstuffed with dark wood furniture: tables, chairs, and armoires. Beautiful twisted stairs, covered in a thick oriental carpet, led somewhere upstairs. Right at the bottom, a child’s bicycle was waiting to be taken outside for a ride.
She invited to me to sit at a Biedermeier-style table with a thick leg in the middle. On the cabinet in front of me, I could spot a green glass vase with rolled papers inside, and a carved wooden cross.
As she sat at the table, I couldn’t help thinking that we looked very much alike. I was playing a double role in this scene: the Gypsy witch, dressed in a long black skirt and black blouse with gold inlays, wearing her long dark hair in a single back braid, and the common teacher type, in black pants and boutique-bought peasant blouse, with a stylish new haircut worth half her paycheck.
“Show me your palm,” she said, and she took my hand in hers with a sudden gesture. “You are Ana, aren’t you? Just like me.” I am fairly sure that one cannot see a name in the palm, but at that moment, I couldn’t care less how she saw the things she saw.
“You are a lucky one. There is big love in your life.”
I suddenly woke up and saw the ridiculousness of my being there. I started to worry about how much she would charge me for her palmistry expertise.
And then she spoke again. “You know, I cannot read palms as well as I can tell the future with the cowries. You want me to do that?” She was not letting go of my hand. The air felt sweet and dense. It was getting dark, and I was very tired and unable to stay focused. The whole scene started to glow at the edges. Ana the Witch was surrounded by a thin halo.
She took out a tray and threw on it a handful of shells. The cowries rolled around and then stopped, deciding my fate. The line between her eyebrows deepened.
“There is a curse put on you. It’s an old, powerful curse that follows the women in your family. You are never to be happy in love, never to settle, or to know when you’ve found the truth.”
She doesn’t look at me to check for confirmation. Black strands of her hair were sweeping the tray.
“You are strong,” she continued. “You will break the curse, and your rewards will be better than silver and gold. But to break the curse, you have to leave. You have to search for the antidote in a remote place next to a water source, surrounded by fruit trees. It’s a place you know. It’s where your heart resides.”
Slap! Slap! It happened fast. She had picked up a bunch of what looked like twigs and dried herbs, and had slapped my arms with it. I jumped off my chair, but her face calmed me down.
“There it is, beautiful,” her voice had become overly joyous and high-pitched again. “The evil has been averted for you. It will be 50 lei.”
All this time, I had harbored a faint hope that she would do the reading for free because of a supernatural connection between the two of us. I thought I had been special because she took me to her house instead of doing my reading on the street and because I had followed her. Not that I didn’t want to pay her, but the money soiled the truth, I thought.
But she took the money, and before I went out the door, she grabbed my hand again. “The world is a mysterious realm. There is life and death, and there is magic. They can’t be without one another. Remember that.”
I can’t stop thinking of her. I know she didn’t give me any solid revelation, but she did burn her image into my head. Right now, I feel like she is here with me. I feel her constantly whipping my arms, cracking and blasting dirty glass walls all around me. Something has changed.
.
I am happy to help. They need space for an office, and I have this big old house that I really don’t need all to myself. Why not? Laura is ecstatic about the prospect of moving the business out of the cramped apartment where they are now. The guest room and adjacent study make a perfect space for them because of the separate entrance and lobby with bathroom. I use the kitchen entrance most of the time, anyway. It also helps that the guest room entrance is on the street side, and my quarters are in the back and through the garden, so I can have my privacy. I am imagining that this house must have been used, in a previous life, as a private doctor’s office, or maybe a seamstress’ studio. It is perfect for a small business.
They called the organization Ex-TIM Refuge. Laura plans to use the guestroom as temporary housing for members of the Transcendental Integration Movement who walk out and don’t know where to start putting their lives together again. They are funded by several international organizations, and they offered to pay rent for the space, but I cannot accept that. It will be my contribution to the cause. I am happy if they can pay the utility bills, though, because I wouldn’t be able to cover all those costs.
Laura has also decided to move in indefinitely. She is settling in upstairs, in my old bedroom. She says it works for her. I’m never going to be alone again.
. .
The cream faux-leather notebook has a complicated key-locking mechanism. Many of the entries are written in pencil and surrounded by unintelligible doodles, creations of a mind preoccupied with thoughts that are afraid to form into words.
I WENT TO BOGDAN’S APARTMENT and met his mother. It was an experience that I need to revive here on paper, to make sure that I can believe it.
I don’t know what is going on in this family, and I have to wonder if it wouldn’t be better for my mental health to just remain oblivious forever. But let’s not get ahead of the story.
So this morning, Bogdan finally said that he would like to go home to take some things from there. The surprise came when he asked me to go along “if I wanted.” Of course I did. I was too intrigued. I wanted to figure out why he had been trying so hard to keep me away from his mother. His first excuse had been that she would definitely ask us to stay for dinner, and she would feel offended if I didn’t eat a lot, which he knew I wouldn’t. Another time when we were in the area, he went inside to take some papers and left me waiting in the cab, saying that his mother would have been very embarrassed if she didn’t have time to clean and prepare the house for guests. “The doctor is very particular about these things. She would want the house to be perfect for you. Not that she doesn’t usually keep the place very clean,” he felt he had to mention, “but she likes it all to be perfect for guests.”
This time, I made it to the door. His mother welcomed us in, dressed in a nightgown, with messy hair, looking as if she had been sleeping. She didn’t m
ake the effort of a smile.
“Hello. I am so happy to meet you,” I said, trying to sound cheerful.
“Hello,” she whispered, sneaking a peak at me without lifting her chin. Then she disappeared into one of the rooms.
Bogdan invited me in the living room, where he had to take an armful of messy sheets, pillows, and some papers from the sofa so that I could sit. He was unusually silent and not trying to make things look better.
“Do you want something to drink?” He was shaking and avoiding my eyes.
“Maybe some water. Thank you.” I was not thirsty, but wanted to keep myself busy with something, just in case other embarrassing moments came up.
He went into what looked like a long and dark corridor. I was almost holding my breath. I moved a bit on the sofa, to stretch my leg, and the motion produced a squeaky, creaking noise. I lifted the pillow under my arm and there was a small pile made up of a sock, some big plastic earrings, two pens, a crossword puzzle book, and a small bag of crumbs that looked like they might have been crackers in another life.
I got up to look around the room. The shades were closed. It smelled stale and sweaty. The rug on top of the wood floors was faded and worn. A big glass-door armoire covered the entire wall opposite the sofa, and it was filled with crystal and porcelain figurines: dogs and ballerinas. A lot of dust.
“Here’s your water.” I was startled by Bogdan’s voice right behind me. He seemed to have calmed down, forcing himself to smile and look composed. “That’s the doctor’s collection. I hate it. Wait here just a minute.” Back into the corridor he went.
I sat very carefully on an armchair. There was a small space between the chair and the sofa, and I could see a tall pile of things on the floor: clothes, newspapers, kitchen towels, something that looked like string, bottles, a dirty cup of coffee. The bookshelves had more dirty ashtrays and coffee mugs than books, and the carpet had an unidentified pattern, looking either too old or not vacuumed for at least half a year. What was I doing there? The water glass suddenly looked suspicious. It was not even cold. I put it down on the stained but suspiciously uncluttered coffee table.
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