The coffee diviner told Ana Dor that her prayers had already been answered: she had met the man of her destiny in the past. Ana called him “my Loved” and she believed that he was predestined to come and bring along a love so great that it would give her full understanding of existence and the universe. All she has to do now is go back through the pages of her life, dutifully recorded in journals, and search for him once more in all the men she once met. But before she finds him, Ana needs to discover why she couldn’t recognize him the first time.

        Ana’s quest for a love of mystical dimension is a tale about how the aggressive rush toward our goals can in fact take us away from the true path. Set in Romania, this is a universal story about love and its potential for transcendence, enlightenment and salvation, in which Ana believed, beyond all else.

EXCERPT

2007, May. The woman read in the flowery cup of coffee truths so profound that I first mistook them for aberrations.

"You are a believer."

What was she talking about, I thought, this blue housecoat lady, who didn’t have any clue that I hadn’t stepped in a church for years.

But she was right, I see now--I am a believer, which was what had brought me there on my thirtieth birthday and what made me keep listening and trying to pierce through the ceramic and the thick layers of coffee grounds.

“I have seen this only once before in the cup of a shy peasant girl. Love and spiritual calling intertwined. She was later to become a saint." She put the coffee cup down on the table and I shivered. I had gone there with hope gathered thread by thread, daily, for weeks. It was loosely woven, this hope of mine, and I was afraid of it coming apart any second.

Maria the coffee reader was sitting on my right, at her dark, lacquered dining room table, covered with a crocheted tablecloth. She had placed her palms flat on the table, with the cup in between. Was that it?

She looked almost regal with her crimson lips and up-style hairdo, with the collar of the velvety housecoat raised around her neck. She looked like hope. She could look into my past and my future. She could look for my answers. She had to take the cup in her hands again. And she did. Hope opened up my chest.

"There is a church here on the handle. You see the cross? I can also see an initial here ... an L. Do you know somebody with an L name?" But she was not waiting for an answer. “You must know this man already. His face is big here. There are other men too, but this is the one that you meet under the tall tree, near the church. See the candle? Your wish will be fulfilled."

A church. It still doesn't make sense to me.

"But beware of the book," she continued. "There is a tall woman writing a book. She spans over your past, present and future. And she makes mistakes. The book has secrets."

She must have been in her forties but there, in front of the fatidic cup of coffee, I knew I looked much older, with those accursed lines between my eyebrows and the cheeks that sink in more every day.

I am always disheveled with too much worry but there, in the coffee diviner’s house, warmed by the generous May sun that was advancing through the room with ease that Sunday morning, I too felt a kind of serenity. The future was there, already set in the coffee grounds, so why the need to struggle?

"You have been looking for him. That’s why you are here now, right? You don’t need to look farther than the book. He is in there. See, the man is like a prisoner inside the book.”

I couldn’t see anything. That’s why I had come to her, the one with the vision. That's why I went through so much pain to find her number and arrange the reading. She was not doing this anymore. Just special circumstances. I guess I had become one of those.

She told me that the book was a curse and a gateway, that I needed to go through it, find my answers and then destroy it, just the way she smashed the symbols on the bottom of the cup because they brought misfortune. ”He is waiting for you. You are going to meet if you go deeper into the book.”

In that second, the lightening of understanding hit through me. The new hope started to pulse wildly through my veins, growing in diameter, taking over my mind, my body, the world.

1989, December. He descended on Earth in a body that she didn’t know. He was beautiful, though. Maybe a little too thin.

"I’ll go for a short visit," he said. "I have one love to finish." And he was happy to fall. "Just to be able to rise a little higher, my Lord. Afterward, I shall forever remain at your feet."

"Go," the Lord answered, "and find your perfect little love, my beloved. I cannot stop you from knowing the only truth there is down there."

And so he left.

He only had a slight hesitation at birth, when he remembered the worried smile on the Lord’s face again. He did not return though. He had to look for her, make one more step-- the final, big step--the length of a wing feather.

1989, December. The snow is one foot high around the house. When I woke up this morning, the light reflected through the windows blinded me. I haven’t got out of bed yet.

Buna has started the fire in the stove, and I want nothing more but to sit here under the wool comforter and read all day. Bunu gave me this notebook as a Christmas gift. He had seen me writing on every piece of paper that came my way and thought I would like this heavy bound book. I love it. It’s the best present ever and it comes at a perfect time, because this book that I’m reading makes me think a lot and I need a place to sort those thoughts out.

I have in my hands the greatest book that’s ever been written and because I’m on vacation, and I am in Codresti with the best grandparents the world has ever seen, I can read all day, undisturbed. Isn’t that the definition of happiness?

It’s called “Adam and Eve” and the author is Liviu Rebreanu. “God lives inside people in the form of Love.” It is the story of two people who meet through several lifetimes, but are never allowed to be together. She is an Indian princess and he is a lower caste yogi, he is an Egyptian landlord while she is one of the Pharaoh’s wives, or both are Sumerian war prisoners. In other lifetimes he is a Roman nobleman while she is a slave in his house, he a German monk and she the portrait of the Virgin, he an ordinary French citizen, she a woman of the revolution being guillotined. Their final encounter, the last life, is in Romania where they are finally allowed to be together and have a child, who is also destined to meet his soul mate in this life.

The theory is that love, the divine spark in each of us, is the spiritual state of being. When we descend from the spiritual spheres, we break into two elements, the masculine and the feminine, and we fall into the material world, where time and space become a reality. But the essence of us is still spiritual and through lifetimes we keep struggling for the reunion that will take us back into the planes of eternal happiness. 

It is all so true and simple. I feel like I wrote this book myself.

 

1989, December. It’s been two days since I have written anything in the diary. Two days since I’ve done anything. I scared everybody, but I didn’t mean to, I swear. Bunu called Mom and she is here now with me. They are all happy because after two days I was finally able to eat.

I don’t know what happened to me. The doctor cannot explain it either. I couldn’t move for two days. I felt like I was only a guest in my body. A guest who didn’t have the controls. I tried really hard to at least move a finger, my head, my lips. I know I was blinking. I know I slept. But while awake, I was only half there.

I felt dead. Like there was no spark of life to ignite my physical engines. How do I explain this? I couldn’t move for two days. That’s all. It felt like quite a paranormal experience. Maybe I have a gift. Maybe I’ll start talking to the dead. Well, yeah, I don’t think I want that.

I also saw that man. I don't know who he is. He was there when they brought me outside, in the front yard. They sat me on a chair, to look at my friends who were playing in the street. He was leaning against the fence across the road, under the walnut tree. He looked beautiful and he had a smile that I could feel in my chest. I don't know who he was, but I know that he was not real.

I think it was the sight of him that made me come back. He made me feel safe. It was like the sun was brighter and my friends were happier. Like there were no shadows and no fear.

Like everybody loved me and I loved them back so much that I had to move again and be with them.

Am I too weird? I kind of like it. He vanished before I could make any gesture. But it was fine with me, because I have the feeling that he would come again. He won’t leave me alone.

Life is beautiful, isn’t it?

End of EXCERPT