The Madonna on the Moon (27 page)

The corpse hung from a black branch, swinging in the wind. Her hair fell in frozen strands, and on her head was a crown of snow. In that moment of terror, only I knew at once who the woman in
the summery dress with yellow-brown sunflowers was.

Karl Koch was the first to react. He took Hermann Schuster and Istvan Kallay aside. They nodded briefly in agreement. Karl went over to the old people and the women who immediately agreed to
take the children by the hand and turn back toward Baia Luna. When Karl took Kora Konstantin’s arm and gently but firmly tried to steer her back toward the village, she hissed at him and
quick as a wink scratched his face with her sharp nails, leaving three bloody welts on his cheek. “I’m not going back,” Kora sputtered. “I’m going to the
Virgin.” Hermann handed his friend Karl a handkerchief, and then we boys and men fought our way through the snow in among the beech trees, followed by the wheezing Konstantin. We stood
silently beneath the tree looking up at the corpse whose bare feet swung back and forth before our eyes.

“The dead keep well in the frost,” said Karl Koch. “I’m just wondering why Barbu came up here in a summer dress in the dead of winter to do this to herself.”

“I’ll bet her coat and shoes are under the snow somewhere,” said Petre before Schuster shut him up with a stern look. Then the Saxon folded his hands and said, “Our
Father, who art in heaven, hallowed be thy name . . .” Everybody chimed in with the murmured prayer and stared down abashedly at the glittering snow long after the amen.

I could not look away. I felt no sadness, only an unending, immense pain tearing at my heart. It was soundless, although it shrilled in my ears. I was too young to give it a name. Only years
later would I understand that what I had heard on that Christmas Eve was the death cry of love.

It began to get cold. The procession to the Virgin of Eternal Consolation was over without having reached its goal. But we had to act. Istvan Kallay felt he had enough strength left to continue
on to the chapel and fetch the statue of the Madonna. Petre, who just before was threatening to suffocate from shortness of breath, now got a second wind and said he would go with the
Hungarian.

“We need you for a trio.” Istvan turned to me, referring to our joint trip to Kronauburg and our visit to Captain Patrascu. “Come along!”

Grandfather Ilja backed up Istvan. “Go with them, Pavel. This here is nothing for a boy.”

“My place is here.”

“My legs still have it in them,” said Andreas Schuster, grabbing the wool blankets they planned to wrap the Madonna in. Then he, Istvan, and Petre climbed up toward the chapel, whose
pointed steeple rose in silhouette against the sky and the low-lying sun.

I closed my eyes the way I had with Buba and looked up behind closed lids. Second sight was easy. Without trying I saw the image. But I didn’t see the girl I missed so much; I saw her
uncle. Before my inner eye Dimitru stood in his library, took a running start, and swung up into a handstand, his skinny legs resting against a bookcase. Then I heard the sentence “Things
reveal themselves when you stand the world on its head.”

I opened my eyes, dropped down, and put my head into the snow. While the men were imagining I couldn’t take the sight of the dead woman, the pain I was feeling gave way to a cool clarity
of thought. I stood up and turned to the Scherban brothers.

“Can you help me? We have some digging to do.”

“You’re not going to look for her shoes and coat, are you?” asked Rasim. “That can wait until spring.”

I didn’t answer but started shoveling into the snow, cutting my hands on the sharp ice crust. Some of the men broke up branches thick as arms that the storm had brought down and used them
as digging tools. Soon everyone was helping to clear away the snow. The digging allowed the men to turn away from the half-naked woman in her thin dress. None of them knew what we were looking for
except me. When a woman wants to close the store for good, the old commissioner Patrascu had said, then you could bet you’d find the bottle of courage corked up. But what if we found a bottle
without a cork, as I feared? In that case, Angela Maria Barbulescu would not have been alone in her final hour. Then she would not have taken her own life. My anxiety proved groundless. We found no
uncorked schnapps bottle—and no corked one either.

“Here! There’s something here!” Hermann Schuster pulled something out of the snow that had been leaning against the trunk of the beech. Hermann held up his find. A picture in a
dull gold wooden frame with a shattered sheet of glass. “Who’s this? Anybody know him?”

“Could be one of those party bigwigs from the capital,” said Karl Koch, “the way he looks.” Koch looked up. “I bet she called it quits because of him. I’m
telling you, she was crazy. Somebody hangs herself in a dress like that is nuts. No wonder such a fancy-pants wanted nothing to do with Barbu.”

Karl Koch had hold of a corner of the truth, but he was wrong.

If only I had grabbed her hand and held it back then, in her parlor. That’s what kept going through my head again and again. When she turned away Stephanescu. But she was just Barbu. From
the branch hung Angela Maria, and all her pain and suffering lay behind her. And all her hate.

Andreas, Istvan, and Petre returned sooner than expected. Upset, Andreas threw the wool blankets down on the snow and panted, “The Madonna is gone.”

“What? Gone?”

“Sh-she’s not in the chapel.” Petre was gasping for breath. “Just the empty pedestal.”

That unleashed a barrage of questions. “Why? How come? What happened?”

“Just gone! Stolen!” Istvan cried. “Get it through your heads: the Madonna is gone.”

In his consternation Hermann Schuster couldn’t think of anything better to do than start intoning, “Hail Mary, full of grace, the Lord is with thee . . . ,” but few of the men
joined in. When Schuster got to “Blessed art thou amongst women, and blessed is the fruit of thy womb,” all eyes turned to Kora Konstantin.

The whole time she had been sitting over on the side in the snow and giving the impression she was recovering from the strenuous hike. Now everyone could see in her face an enormous tension
behind which a slavering spitefulness lay in wait. And it appeared that Kora had only endured this tension in order to let it loose at this moment. Before we had time to realize it, her enormous
hate exploded.

“Blessed is the fruit of thy womb! No! No! No! This womb was cursed. Barbu’s to blame! The demon! The witch!”

Kora’s piercing scream sliced through the silence of the mountains and made the blood freeze in my veins. Like a madwoman she stormed toward the hanging body. “You murderous whore,
you damned Satan’s bride! To hell with you!” she screeched and leaped at the dangling dead woman. She grabbed a corner of her dress, pulled and tore at the thin material until the
sunflower dress ripped into tatters, completely exposing Angela Barbulescu’s naked corpse.

This furor had broken over the men like a sudden storm, so that no one made a move to restrain Kora’s frenzy. I went up to her calmly and punched her in the face as hard as I could. A
fountain of blood erupted from her nose and sprayed the snow. Kora Konstantin fell instantly silent.

In another half hour the sun would disappear completely behind the Mondberg.

“Even if she ended up like this, she was a human being, too,” said the sacristan Julius Knaup.

“That’s why we can’t leave her to the wolves and bears,” said Hans Schneider while Karl Koch grabbed a limb and hoisted himself into the beech to cut the dead
woman’s rope.

“The least you can do is catch her!” he called down angrily. The two Scherbans sprang into action and helped me take the weight of the stiffened corpse. We wrapped her naked body in
the blankets meant for the Virgin of Eternal Consolation. Then Karl Koch tied up the bundle with the rope and heaved the dead woman onto his shoulder. We began the descent into the valley. Each one
of us walked alone, not looking to see if his neighbor was keeping up or not.

I knew in that hour that the bonds of the village community were severed, and I wasn’t the only one. Grandfather knew it, too. It didn’t matter that the women of Baia Luna had
decorated the parish church in the meantime. In previous years the prayer that concluded the penitential pilgrimage had always been short and simple because after arriving back in the village in
the evening the shivering and exhausted pilgrims longed for nothing more than their warm parlors. Now, however, the women had decked out the church with yuletide fir sprigs, white candles, and red
ribbons to prepare a proper welcome for the Madonna. But when they discovered it was Barbu being brought down into the valley on Karl Koch’s shoulders, they extinguished the candles.

The sacristan Knaup and the organist Konstantin had already discussed the destination of Angela Barbulescu’s corpse on the way back from the Mondberg, although Hermann Schuster was not
happy about the solution they hit upon. For in the entire history of Baia Luna, not a single inhabitant had ever taken his own life. It was true that in the case of Laszlo Carolea Gabor, an
unbaptized person had for the first time been buried in the cemetery on the orders of Johannes Baptiste. But in the end it exceeded even Hermann Schuster’s capacity for sympathy—and he
was by no means a hard-hearted Catholic—to think that a woman who had been destroyed by alcohol and then killed herself should find a final resting place in sacred ground.

With shovels, pickaxes, and torches, some of the men set off in the direction of Cemetery Hill. Before they reached the entrance gate, they turned off to the left and looked for an appropriate
place. At first they thought of under the old oak, but when Julius Knaup objected that from there you could look down on the children playing in the school yard, they chose a spot behind the upper
wall of the cemetery. The gravediggers shoveled the place free of snow, hacked a hole in the frozen ground, and placed the dead woman in it. Then they filled in the hole again and stamped the earth
down with their boots.

There was nothing for me to do. I was adrift in a sea that knew no shore.

Chapter Eight

Despite his fifty-five years, Grandfather Ilja had never set foot outside the district of Kronauburg. Even if he sometimes dreamed of setting off to see the Virgin of the Torch
in faraway America, his intellectual expeditions were never flights of completely unbridled imagination. They never called into question the world of the village, the homeland to which he was
attached down to the last fiber of his being. Baia Luna gave roots to his feet and purchase to his life. It was a place where his dreams could return safely back to earth. To be evenhanded to
everyone was his sacred rule, and that required a benevolent eye, free from mistrust and suspicion. It allowed my grandfather to put up with sanctimonious Christians like sacristan Knaup as well as
party faithful like the Brancusis, both the shrew Kora Konstantin and the snob Vera Raducanu, without ever being consumed by resentment.

Until that ill-fated Christmas of 1957, that is.

While my mother Kathalina slept, Grandfather sat at the kitchen table. His downcast—even bitter—face betrayed that the insidious and corrosive poison of doubt was eating at him.

“Pavel,” he said after what seemed an interminable silence, “Baia Luna isn’t my Baia Luna anymore. And I’m to blame.”

“What are you talking about, Granddad? It’s not you. None of this is your fault.”

“Yes, it is, Pavel. What that crazy Konstantin woman did to Miss Barbulescu was my fault, although it pains me deeply to say so. If Dimitru ever finds out how stupid I was, he’ll
stop being my friend.”

“But what happened?”

Grandfather poured himself a glass of
zuika
and took a swallow as if to free his tongue from its fetters.

“Forgive me, Pavel, for burdening your heart with tales you’re still too young to hear.”

“I’m old enough.”

“You’re right, my boy, you are. As long as I can remember, Pavel, there’s been an agreement in Baia Luna not to make one another’s lives miserable. And if I do say so
myself, I was always a reliable guarantor that we didn’t. Honesty is inbred in us Botevs. People always said of my father Borislav that he didn’t have an enemy in the world, only
friends, and I myself always tried to instill that virtue in your father Nicolai, who died in the war, and in you, his son. But now something has invaded the village that not only sets aside the
rules of respectability but throws us all off course. Even though Dimitru and I never heard the Sputnik beeping, looking back it still seems to have been a harbinger of the catastrophe that’s
now upon us. Too many things have happened, Pavel. The Eternal Flame no longer shines in the church. Johannes Baptiste was murdered, and his Fernanda literally scared to death. The body of our
beloved priest has found no rest, his grave is empty, and now even the patron saint of our village, the Virgin of Eternal Consolation, has disappeared. Even in the darkest times, she always kept
alive the hope that good would win out in the end. I could always make out the gentleness and affection in her tortured face. Hundreds—no, thousands—of times I’ve knelt before the
Madonna and looked at her. But now she’s dissolved into thin air. Since I saw poor Miss Barbulescu swinging from that branch, the Madonna has disappeared. I can’t see her anymore,
Pavel. She’s gone. I can’t call her up anymore.”