“Ana? Hi! Hey! Ana?”
I raised my eyes to look at him up close, feeling a cutting pain in my stomach.
“Hi, Ra! What a surprise. I can’t believe we meet like this,” I managed to say.
He looked like the ghost of the one who was once Ra: much taller and bonier, older and more tired. Only when he took off the sunglasses, I could recognize a quick sparkle of the one I knew.
His jawline was very visible and very lovely. He looked happy. I kept looking at him without saying anything, waiting to see it in his eyes. The adoration was not there. Had it ever been? His eyes were opened toward me, empty, like reflective mirrors.
He was in a hurry. “But I do want to talk to you. Let’s meet this evening.”
No. I don’t want to.
We went for a drink on the lakeside terrace, in Cismigiu. I hadn’t been to the park for years, and today, it made me feel old. High school kids were roaming around the alley, kisses, roller skates, tight tops, laughter, so much laughter.
I ordered an Irish coffee. I was shaking so badly that my thoughts were getting dizzy.
He only had sparkling water. He was not tense. He looked handsome and serene.
I told him about my boring life, my struggles with waking up in the morning, my unfulfilled dreams. I expressed my frustrations about things not going my way. I confessed about my jealousy and anger, about not believing anymore, about possibly giving up all hope. I complained about the evenings spent in front of the TV, about the books never read, and about my lost friends and hopes. I admitted living dreamless nights and days. It was a lot, I know, but a long time had passed since my last confession.
“I wish I found you happier,” he said, looking in his glass of water. “You haven’t changed. You still have the greatest expectations of people and suffer when they don’t live up to your dreams, and you still refuse to settle for today, thinking that tomorrow might be perfect.”
He kept talking as if he was giving a lecture, and I kept swallowing the words coming from his mouth. They went throughout my cells, shuffling and rearranging them, without meeting any resistance.
“You are stuck. We all change. People change, they grow. You don’t. You need to move on, Ana. Once upon a time, I admired your beautiful soul. You were like a new orchid bud, and I used to watch in amazement how your petals slowly unfurled and glowed. I wanted to protect you so badly. But of course, you didn’t need my protection.” He reached over the table for my hand, but I refused the comforting touch.
“That is completely untrue,” I almost shouted. “You didn’t want to protect me from anything. I loved you and cherished our friendship. You were the brother of my soul, and I was brokenhearted that you didn’t want to be close to me anymore. I needed you, but you left. You left me with all the agony of guilt.” What did he want from me after all?
“Oh, how can you be so childish? My love for you has been nothing else but an event of my being, and it never had anything to do with you. I needed to live that moment and maybe suffer in it for a while. There is no need for guilt. As a matter of fact, I need to thank you for being there with all your beauty and for offering me that moment.”
Blinding hate. Violent urges. I wanted to hurt him until I hurt myself. I could only cry. “I don’t know what you’re saying. I’ve never understood you.”
“I’m sorry. I don’t want to upset you.” He paused. His eyes wandered around the room and settled on a distant corner. “I love you, Ana. Don’t think that will ever change. That is why I feel entitled to tell you all these things. It hurts me to see you wasting your life like this.”
I know he’s right. I don’t need him to tell me all that.
I got up to leave without finishing my coffee. “I’m feeling tired. See you soon.”
“Can I have a hug?” He got up from this seat and opened his arms. I put my arms around him, and he held me for too long. “Take care of yourself, Ana. I’m sorry I upset you. Don’t mind me, Okay? Forget all about me. I don’t know what I’m saying, Okay?”
As if I could ever forget him.
He gave me a gift before leaving. A large, wool shawl, made by hand by the nuns at a northern monastery where he worked last year. It’s amazing: gray, with embroidered red poppies along the border. How does he know that I am always cold?
.
I’m suddenly feeling very cold. Where is this draft coming from? I thought I had closed all the windows. I haven’t felt warm enough since childhood. Only my grandparent’s house in Codresti ever managed to warm me up to the bones, to the whole depth of my soul.
This is my last entry in this notebook. Next time I’ll be writing in the new one that I found in the bookstore near my school. It looks very plain, with its unbleached cardboard covers and thick paper, but it is made by a women’s cooperative from India, so it has a very big soul.
The coffee diviner has agreed to see me tomorrow. She is my last hope, the one who will finally break the curse. She will have an answer for me. I have to believe.
. .
Epilogue
THAT DECEMBER, IN CODRESTI, Ana meets the man who is restoring the murals in the old monastery church. He has been in the village since the end of summer, just like Ana, but their paths never crossed before. It was probably because she wouldn’t step inside the church while he worked only there. Or maybe the timing had other reasons behind it.
All we know is that during the Christmas Mass that year, the two of them are once again brought together, on the same bench where Ana spent so many evenings.
The snow seems to create light and warmth. Ana watches a group of children who are running around the church, shouting and giggling. The man has put in place a complicated system of electric wires and tiny bulbs around the monastery’s front yard, and now he turns it on. The children stop and lift their heads, turning from unleashed wild little beasts into marveled winter spirits. For only a moment.
Ana breathes in the sudden euphoria that pours like a mist from the trees covered in the shards of a shattered heaven. He stands on the other side of the yard, looking up, admiring his creation, and the spirit that enlivened it. Ana tries not to look directly at him until he starts moving toward her.
He presses his palms on his stomach. “Ana? You’re the last person I would have expected to see here.”
Ana looks at him in disbelief.
“Do you mind if I sit next to you?” he asks. “I’m not feeling too well. A happily-ignored case of almost-ulcer,” he says, smiling. “My witch doctor tells me that I feel too much.”
Ana smiles back. It has been him all along, but only now, on the night of the mystical lights and laughter bells, she can see his true face. She is laughing. It all seems funny to her now, when she knows that she had been looking everywhere for what had been right in front of her eyes the whole time. She is free.
.
The following summer, with a suitcase much lighter than the one she came with, Ana starts the eight-hour journey back to her Bucharest house. She leaves her village and the school where she has been teaching for the past year to accept the job that Professor Adiele Cameri offered her: director of a newly created non-profit association that helps raise funds to sponsor university studies for brilliant girls from remote villages who have minimal resources for pursuing higher education.
One late winter night, after work, Adiele Cameri tells Ana her life story. She was born in a Gypsy village where she never felt she belonged. It was small mountain village that was connected to the nearest town by a three-hour, weekly bus route. From a young age, all she dreamed of was becoming a bride of Christ and spending all her days behind thick brick walls, away from the real world, in permanent prayer. After a few years as a novice, however, strong doubts about her calling started to enter her thoughts. It suddenly seemed to her that her life, although happy and comfortable, was being wasted, and all her gifts were not of help to anyone.
One day, when she was out of the monastery to buy provisions for that month, a st
range woman stopped her in the market, grabbed her hand, and told her that she had the answers Adiele was looking for. The woman practiced a type of divination based on coffee grounds, and she told young Adiele that the world was calling her outside. There were many who needed her, the woman said, and there was one in particular soul who would be too lost without her.
Adiele left the nunnery and went to school. The impoverished monastery miraculously found a way to fund her university studies when Adiele figured out that becoming a teacher was what she had been destined for. During college, she met her future husband, and for a while, she stopped doubting the universe and its ways: the love they shared was larger than any paradise she had ever imagined. He was the lost soul who couldn’t survive without her, she thought. Then their daughter was born, and Adiele discovered that she had been wrong. This new love, of a mother for her child, was even greater, even more unearthly.
When she reached this part of the story, Adiele Cameri’s voice becomes barely audible. Her pain, unsaid, booms in her chest and is as real as a new presence in the room. “When I lost my daughter, I thought that there was no reason for me to be anymore. The world had done what it needed with my life, and I was no longer required. I was preparing to resign from all my positions at the university and lock myself in the monastery cell for the rest of my days. But then I received this letter from you, asking about financial aid for Gabi, and my heart once again released blood through my arteries, my lungs pumped strongly enough for breathing, and my eyes cleared up enough for me to see that I hadn’t been able to help my daughter, but there are other daughters out there who need me. This big world of ours, in all its humanity, is the only place where by being of help and comfort to others, we can live a worthy life of real devotion.”
For the first time, all her phantasms gone, Ana has a clear view of what looks like a world rotating on its true axis: all is godly and all is human in the same place, at the same time.
…
Lori TironPandit is a writer, editor, and translator of Romanian origin. She lives in a small town in Massachusetts. Her work of fiction explores the lives and universes of women, with the legends, beliefs, dreams, and labors that shape them. You can visit her website at www.loritironpandit.com.
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