Veronica didn’t come to see her again. According to Vica, nobody had seen Mother Veronica for many years. Vica believed she had been dead, but the monastery never let anyone know so that it remained a place of pilgrimage and miracle. Other women in the village whispered that Veronica had another vision that told her to move away and build another monastery in a more remote place, to bring faith back to those people just as she did in Codresti. Others said that she had lost faith herself and went to wander the world in search of answers, never to be heard from again. A more hushed tale was saying that she had had disagreements with the fathers of the church, and went away to build a place of different worship.
.
Ana couldn’t believe how easy it had been to convince everybody to come to Codresti.
Ilinca and Laura met on the train, and they seemed to have become best friends. Laura consoled Ilinca who had tearfully shared her story about breaking her husband’s arm on a ski trip the previous weekend. George had tried to stop Ilinca’s fall on an unexpectedly steep slope, and ended up getting injured himself. Ilinca felt so guilty that she suffocated her husband with attention on the following days, so when Ana’s invitation came, he begged Ilinca to take that weekend away.
Ana’s mother and Marta drove down together and reached two girls with red cheeks, giggling at memories of times that hadn’t passed.
On their first evening in Codresti, the women made a campfire in the field beyond the vineyard, cooked corn, ate cheese and cold roasted chicken, and drank pink wine. Vica was master of ceremonies.
“Your grandmother would be so proud of you,” she told Ana. “If you ask me, I think she had been waiting for this for a long time.”
Ilinca and Ana’s mother took over the making of the pilaf in the morning, while Laura helped Vica and Marta with the stuffed grape leaves. Ana slept that day until ten o’clock.
“Nobody wake her up,” her mother ordered. “She never sleeps late. It’s rest that she needs. We can take care of everything. She’s in the clean room, so nobody go there to disturb her.”
Ana had always been amused by the idea of the clean room, or the back room as it is sometimes called. Each house in the village had one. All the houses there seem to have been planned by the same architect, with a train-like shape, rooms opening one at the end of the other. The last room, the clean room, had its own exit, and it was kept in perfect cleanliness, many times locked for protection against the muddy feet of children. This room was the keeper of all the family treasures: embroidered, never-used sheets and tablecloths, burial clothes, and holiday sweets that were not supposed to be touched before the celebration. This was the room where the priest was received when he came to bless the house and its inhabitants before Christmas and Easter. It was almost as if the priest had a room ready just for him in every house in the village. When guests came over, they were often offered the clean room.
“Absolutely. Everybody keep quiet,” Marta shouted. They all laughed. Marta had been effervescent since the night before, and she woke up in the same good mood. Her continuous jokes made the other women protest that their work was slowed down too much by laughter.
Laura was becoming very engaged in the food-making process. “I am learning a new skill. I never knew it would feel so fulfilling to make this traditional food.”
“It is easy when there are many hands helping and a glass of wine on the side,” replied the all-knowing Tanti Vica. She must have drunk two bottles by the end of the day, but she was more agile and helpful than anyone else.
“We have thirty people coming, so we need seven kilograms of rice. Take the long grain one, from the store, because it’s cleaner and it doesn’t stick. We don’t want to make fools of ourselves in front of the whole village. And the bread, keep it in plastic bags, so that it doesn’t become hard by tomorrow. You shouldn’t have bought the sliced one. What about plates and cups? Do we have enough? And towels? Yes, you have to give the priest, too.”
When Ana woke up, she came out and sat in the doorway, listening to the happy chatter and the clinking of pots and dishes. It was a beautiful, sunny November day that made Tanti Vica exclaim, “This is for your grandmother. She was a saint. She deserves a day like this.” Ana knew that Ella would have liked it, too.
Before the guests arrived, the tables, set in a row, one next to the other in the front yard, were waving their flowery mismatched linens in the wind. The tablecloths were kept in place only by the big clay jugs filled with yellow mums. It smelled of sautéed onion, flowers, and peace. In the summer kitchen, Ana’s mother, Marta, Ilinca, and Laura were chatting joyously and wiping dishes.
It was then that she came. Ana saw her at the gate, looking inside from over the fence. She was again young and light, her feet above the ground. She seemed pleased.
“Come in,” Ana told her, without opening her mouth. But she didn’t enter. “Come in,” Ana insisted. “Look how happy everybody is. I think we’ll be fine. I will be fine. See? I think I can be happy again. I know Buna is happy, and I know Ella can see us and feel the love and forgiveness. I think I feel her presence. In my mind, she’s there in the kitchen, with everyone else, helping with the dishes.”
Veronica laughed. Or maybe it was the wind in the trees. Ana felt again, like sometime long before, that she was growing roots through the earth, expanding under the house, under the tables and the people, exploding into light through the chrysanthemums in earth jugs, through the dry vines from the hills, through the trunks of her beloved fruit trees. She embraced the land and the four hurt women who were laughing among large pots of food.
She had done well.
. .
The Year Before
I HAD TO SEE ELLA, talk to her, and make sure she was all right. Not that the revelation about her deception mattered to me, but the reality was slightly deformed now, and I was not sure that what I could see through this new lens made sense to me. I wanted better proximity and hoped to finally have a real look at her reality.
I went directly to the clinic from the train station. Ella was waiting for me in the garden, the receptionist said, so I walked outside, holding the golden box of caramel chocolates in my hands and a dark cloud in my heart. I saw Ella from a distance, under the round and low canopy of a walnut tree. Her hair was covered by a red turban twisted from a large silk scarf I had admired many times.
“Oh, Ana, I’ve been missing you so much!” Ella exclaimed when she turned her head to see me approaching. “Come, sit here next to me and tell me what’s been happening in your life. I am dying to hear some stories from the normal world.”
“The normal world? What possesses you to believe there is such a thing?” I replied with a large smile, opening my arms to respond to Ella’s embrace. I couldn’t stay upset with her.
We talked for a long time about wide-leg pants being back, about the TV star married to the celebrated actor who abused her, about the chance that the spirit remains intact after death to return and inhabit a different body later, or the possibility that it disintegrates and loses any sense of the former identity.
“There is no better therapy than talking with you, Ana.”
“You say so, but you don’t act like you believe it,” I finally said after a deep breath.
“You’re right. I’m sorry about all the deception. I don’t know why I always have to beautify the truth. I think I needed the fantasy, myself. It was more for my own benefit than yours. I wanted to believe that I was going to live in a beautiful mansion with my lover instead of a hospital in the company of my medication. Sometimes, it makes me happy. Imagining things, I mean. It’s almost real, isn’t it, when you choose to believe. Reality is so easy to manipulate. It feels like we are all millions of small gods going about recreating the world in our own image every seven days. Am I so bad, Ana? Please tell me you don’t hate me.” Ella took my hands in hers. “I’m sorry. Forgive me?”
There was nothing to forgive, I knew very well. The request was not for forgiveness but for hel
p.
“I love you, Ella. You know that, right? I just want to understand you, also, as much as you want to let me.” I didn’t say anything else. I wanted to ask more questions, about Calin, about the baby, about her mother, but it felt like I would be inflicting too much pain on the fragile creature sitting next to me. Sometimes, the unknown is more bearable.
“Oh, we are having a dance party tonight,” Ella said with enthusiasm, jumping off the bench. “One of the doctors is retiring, and it’s a surprise. I have a beige silk dress that will be fantastic for this occasion. I am sure I can find something for you, too. What do you say? Come. It will be fun. You look like you are in need of some fun. Don’t deny it.”
On the train ride back home the next morning, I thought about Ella’s wide smile and wild pirouettes on the tile floor of the sanatorium dining room, under twisted paper garlands. I thought about the charming doctor who had made her laugh so much at the party. “He’s brilliant and cute. I could easily fall for him,” Ella had whispered to me when she stopped at the table for a sip of sparkling water.
“I don’t think I am going to be here much longer,” she said when the dining room had turned into a tragic ruin of crumpled decorations and dirty paper plates. “Maybe another month. I’ll see you very soon. We’ll go out for shopping and a night at the opera, when I return. I miss the opera so much. Although, you know, let me see how it works out with the cute doctor. I might be staying longer and I might come back married.”
.
What happened? Was it you, Amon?
I was on the subway, coming from school, and, although it was not that late, my carriage had become empty two stations before my stop. I was alone, watching the lights run along the windows in the tunnels. Then I saw you, at the other end. You were sitting with you head tucked in between your shoulders. I knew it was you. How, you ask? Well, because of the daggers piercing my stomach that I always feel in your presence. Oh no, there is no pain. It’s happiness. It’s wonderful, believe me.
I wanted to get up from my chair and run to you, but I couldn’t move. Something held me in place with iron arms. Even when you lifted your head and smiled at me, I couldn’t shake my immobility. But I was happy. To sit there, fifteen seats away from you, to breathe the same air.
You were a black hole, on the peeling red of the metal seats. The tunnel with its throbbing lights, was reflected in you, but still, I could distinguish clearly your lips and your eyebrows coming together in distress. What are you always so anguished about?
I wanted to shout at you, ask how you’ve been, how’s life, where the hell you really are. But as usual, my good sense prevailed—what if it wasn’t you, after all?
You got down before the doors opened.
.
I cannot form words. I am unable to put the pieces of this reality together. It’s the end.
Ella threw herself from the roof of the sanatorium and died on the pebbled driveway, her blood and pieces of her flesh scattered around like drops of a red artesian fountain, hiding in the thick layer of stones, absorbed in the dark loam that has never been given a chance at fertility. She fell on her back, they say, and her beautiful face remained intact, in full makeup, eyes wide open. She fell looking at the sky. She had always been of creature of air, more than of earth. I … will never let her go. I am going to refuse her this inconceivable death.
.
I lost it. During the end of year show that the kids put on in school, I couldn’t hold it inside anymore. I started to cry uncontrollably. I felt lifted out of my body, which in turn started to choke and be unable to breathe, so somebody had to carry me out of there and call an ambulance. I was shaking and my vision was blurry, and I just wanted to lie down and never wake up again. I knew it was possible right then because my body never felt so easy to unzip and shed like an old dress. It was a poem recited by one of the children. Eminescu’s “Why Don’t You Come.”
It is because you are the light
That turns my soul all bright,
More precious than the stars above,
My love, my love!
Now it is late into the fall,
The dead leaves cover my paths all,
The life of gardens is long gone … .
Why don’t you come to me, why don’t you come?
.
Reading the pages of these old notebooks has been painful. These are not just words neatly strung on straight lines, but emotions encapsulated, preserved, giving off forgotten aromas of times I thought were past but are still alive inside of me. Time is of no consequence.
Analyzing every single thought and event can be enlightening, but it gets to a point where nothing can be explained anymore, where all the human logic becomes useless. My thoughts run like a roller coaster: fast, over the same bumps, over and over again, in the same circle. I am not getting anywhere.
At some point, one has to stop thinking and simply start to believe. And live. Right? We see the world; we taste it and touch it. Beyond that, it’s all a game of our minds.
.
I reached Codresti two hours ago. Ever since then, I have been sitting here, unable to move, to make a decision. I sit in front of the stove, melting in the heat of the fire, and I don’t dare make a move that I might regret. I would rather put my hand in there, to be turned into ashes. Or should I cut my heart out and incinerate that? Letting go of the journals wouldn’t be less painful or less deadly.
And yet, as I look at all of them piled up around me, I contemplate only a lifeless cocoon of what once was the house of my soul. I don’t need them to drag me down anymore. I’ll turn them into ashes, into soil, into mud. The rain will wash everything away, and I will be free. Right there, in ink on paper, I lived my whole life, or at least the real part of it. But now I think I am ready to switch to living in flesh and blood. Goodbye, my darlings. I am letting you go.
I have been waiting for Amon to show me the way, but I know now he will never come. All I wanted was to see his face and his devilish soul. I wanted to see him walking into my life as if nothing was happening. I wanted to see him look through me in silence, smiling for nobody, thinking of nothing. I wanted him to ask me how I was and not care for an answer. I wanted to clearly see all his faults, his hands too big, his bones too thin. I wanted to find millions of imperfections, to make him seem human, easy to hate, easy to despise, easy to forget. I just wanted him to be close, to be like everybody, to be like me, like you, easy to love, for a moment, or more. I wanted to feel him alive, in the same world with me, not just as a creature of my imagination. How I would have loved the world, then, the world in which both he and I were made of the same matter.
I thought light would have shone on everything through him, and I would have clearly seen the meaning of all things there, at the meeting place of the sacred and the profane.
Of this dream, I am now free. Of this illusion I am now letting go.
. .
This is a thin pocket journal with black leather covers barely able to hold the abundance of oak, linden, poplar, and chestnut leaves collected from the city sidewalks and pressed between the pages. All the entries are written neatly, in blue ballpoint pen.
THE POWERFUL SMELL of coffee was permeating the air and the pink satin cloud of my dress. It had entered my blood, just as it happens every morning. Why is the smell of coffee synonymous with waking?
I was born into a world obsessed with coffee. I waited to grow up only to be able to drink it and complain of headaches. How much I longed for migraines when I was a child! Now I can’t even remember the first headache. Or the first cup of coffee. They must have come together, in an amnesic time of my life, a time when I was already too grown up to think of such small things, a time when the fairy tales had already done their damage and seemed forgotten.
Why is it that the fairy tales princesses are so desirable? In the real world, where I later discovered I was living, the princes do not want us. We bow in front of them, we twist and turn, and we perform all kin
ds of tricks, but they are unmoved. We change and play different roles for them, but they don’t notice. I was an ingénue and a femme fatale, child and prostitute, nun and sexy broad. I have been everything I thought they wanted from me. They didn’t even have to ask for anything because I guessed their secret wishes and I embraced the transformations. I embraced not being myself, only to be loved, only to attain some of the perfection of fairy tales. But all of them left me, one after the other. They left my heart and my thoughts because I wasn’t the one who loved them, but the other women who lived inside me in different proportions did, women who were not me.
Tears are falling on the kitchen table. I feel his warm palms on my face and I close my eyes. I don’t want to wake up.
“What are you doing, love?” he asks. “For how long have you been here? Why didn’t you wake me up?”
His arms have found their way around my waist, and I can feel his cheek resting on the top of my head.
“This feels so good,” I admit.
Tears are falling in a tempest on the table and in the coffee mug.
Sometimes God exists, even it’s just for a dream moment. It is real: these tired arms around me, this sleepy head, in the center of my being, this man who can love the whole of me, with all that I am. He thinks I am worth any fight with the terrible monsters, with the sun and the moon, and this deadly life.
“Come, let’s go. Let’s sleep a little more. Hold me. I don’t want to wake up yet.”
Amon smiles that sweet calling smile, and his arms melt all my defenses because they make their way around my soul. And I feel like crying more, and like taking another long step, to the beginning of another day.
.
I met Ra today. We met on the street while I was walking back from school. I had no idea that he was back in Bucharest.
When I spotted him from a distance, my first impulse was to cross the street and avoid him. Dark fear. He hadn’t seen me yet, but I wasn’t able to move fast enough. I felt the space emptying around me, and I kept walking, at a slower pace, toward him but not looking up. I was waiting to hear him calling my name.
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