The Madonna on the Moon (4 page)

That’s why the good days in school were outweighed by the bad days when civics was on the agenda. The regime had also started requiring a pledge of allegiance to the fatherland combined
with an oath of loyalty to the Workers’ Party everyone was talking about back then. Every day the
Kronauburg Courier
reported the founding of new local chapters. In Baia Luna it was
especially the Brancusi brothers and the blacksmith Emil Simenov who grabbed the initiative in the effort to persuade the farmers to join the party and welcome collectivization as the wave of the
future, which met with little enthusiasm but no open resistance. What could you resist, after all? The puffed-up Brancusis who made propaganda speeches in the village but were otherwise big
nobodies? The party big shots way off in the capital who passed laws but didn’t check to see if they were being followed in Baia Luna? So people just waited things out in the conviction that
if the collectivizers ever showed up someday in the village, they’d show them what was what. And sometimes I got the impression from Barbu, too, that she only grudgingly taught us the
precepts of the party. Sometimes it seemed to me she was exaggerating the party blabber so much in order to provoke disgusted boredom in her pupils.

“Maybe she’s settling a score,” I’d suggested to Fritz. “For something that happened to her in the Paris of the East. A bitter disappointment, possibly, or a cruel
injustice.”

“Hard to imagine,” Fritz had answered. “So you think she forces party slogans down our throats just to make us barf? No, Barbu isn’t that crafty.”

So the only obvious explanation for Barbu’s Socialist blabber was the schnapps that had interfered with the rhythm of her brain waves. Anyway, only someone with brain damage would get the
idea of having defenseless schoolchildren copy out the poems of Alfred Margul-Sperber. We must have had to copy the poem “The Party” a dozen times:

That’s the first verse. Printed in black and white on page 5 of the state anthology, right after the portrait of President Gheorghiu-Dej.

Since copy work bored Fritz to tears, he’d gotten into the habit of modifying the text of the poem. One day in class, he slid his notebook over to me. I read:

“Are you crazy?” I whispered. “Put that away!” It wasn’t the rebellious words that frightened me but the cold-bloodedness with which Fritz had written
the rhymes in his good notebook. Any fear of discovery by Barbu, however, proved unfounded. Since she evinced no zeal in checking our copybooks, she seemed never to notice Fritz’s
insubordinate poetizing. Which only emboldened him. With growing enthusiasm, he inflated his parodies of the party to insane levels of grotesqueness. Until his father Heinrich discovered his
copybook, that is. After that, Fritz Hofmann didn’t appear in school for two weeks and then showed up with a letter his mother had written excusing him from physical education. Fritz
didn’t say a word about what had happened at home.

From my visits to the house of my school friend I gathered that despite his very Germanic name, Heinrich Hofmann held no stock in the traditions of his fellow Germans. Among the Saxons whose
ancestors had settled in Baia Luna generations ago, the Hofmann family was the only one that didn’t live from farming or raising livestock. There weren’t even any chickens clucking in
their yard. Hofmann avoided contact with the villagers, and people left him alone. I only saw or heard him once in a while, roaring off to Kronauburg in black leather on a big motorcycle of Italian
manufacture that no one else in Baia Luna could have afforded.

During the week Heinrich Hofmann was the proprietor of a photographic studio in the district capital. People used to go to Herr Hofmann when they needed a souvenir picture of their wedding or a
photo for their identity cards. But in the fifties he earned his money as an “artistic studio portraitist.” That’s what Fritz called the occupation that must have earned his
father a considerable income. At least to me, the Hofmann family seemed quite well-to-do. Fritz’s mother Birta was the only woman in the village who didn’t need to heat up a
wood-burning stove to cook. She put her pots on electric burners that glowed with heat at the turn of a Bakelite knob and set a teakettle whistling in a matter of seconds. Birta was a woman in her
midthirties with short blond locks and steel-blue eyes. When she laughed, white teeth shone between red lips. But I noticed that she was only relaxed and jovial when her husband was in Kronauburg.
On the weekends, when Heinrich Hofmann sat in his reading chair beneath the poster with the Virgin of the Torch from New York and next to a bookcase containing many volumes by a certain F. W.
Nietzsche, then Birta always made a nervous impression on me. She chewed her fingernails, and her laugh seemed forced. Fritz also fell instantly silent as soon as his father entered the room.
Unlike in school, he kept his cheeky remarks to himself and restricted his utterances to a curt yes or no.

I couldn’t stand Fritz’s father. When I entered the Hofmanns’ living room and went to shake his hand politely, as I had been taught to do, he lowered whatever Nietzsche volume
he was reading for a moment and gave me a sharp look over the top of his reading glasses. Then he gave a brief twitch of his head like someone shooing off an annoying fly and applied himself to his
book again. At some point, I promised myself to ignore Herr Hofmann, and I kept that pledge until just before the fall recess in October 1957.

In the last hour of school Barbu instructed us older students to calculate the increased quotas for the export of fattened hogs to the Soviet Union. As so often before, Fritz and I made a bet on
how abstruse we could make our results and still have Barbu nod and check them off. I put down a seven and then fourteen places after the decimal point on my paper. When Fritz upped the stakes to
twenty-three, Barbu patted his shoulder. “Accurate, very accurate. Your precision will be a great advantage to you, Fritz. An incalculable advantage.”

Fritz looked up at her, nodded in feigned zeal, and said, “Thank you, beautiful Miss Barbulescu.”

I was surprised that Fritz didn’t even grin. Personally, I couldn’t control myself and had to laugh out loud. Everyone in the class knew what the consequences of a laugh like that
were. Barbu stared at me and picked up her hazel pointer. She raised her arm and I cringed.

At that moment, something unexpected happened. I only hoped the pointer would miss me, but Fritz jumped to his feet. He grabbed Barbu’s arm and held it fast. With a cold stare, he spoke
calmly, almost whispering: “Go ahead! Hit my friend if you want my father to make your life a hell.”

I didn’t understand this brazen threat against the teacher. Although it protected me from her blows, it seemed outrageous to me. Shocked, Barbu turned from me, and her face went white as
cheese. Fritz let go of her arm, and for a moment it looked as if she was lowering the pointer. But then she struck. Again and again she rained blows on Fritz, more in desperation than in fury was
my impression. Fritz just stood there without uttering a sound. He grinned while she turned red as a turkey. Then the stick broke and, exhausted, she stopped thrashing him.

As I grabbed my satchel and was heading for the door at the end of the hour, she called, “Botev! I’m giving you an hour’s detention! Copy work!” She pronounced this
harmless punishment not like an order but a request.

I lounged insolently on a bench in the empty classroom and registered the fact that Barbu was more upset than I was. She was pacing up and down by the blackboard while her hands fiddled with a
piece of chalk. Finally she said with feigned strictness that it hadn’t escaped her I was bored by class and found schoolwork very undemanding of my talents.

“Just tell me what I’m supposed to copy out,” I grumbled.

“You don’t have to copy out anything.”

“So why am I here?”

The teacher swallowed hard, looked at the ceiling, and chewed her lips as though trying to keep an unconsidered word from slipping out.

“Pavel, I thought . . . you and Fritz, you’re friends . . . and maybe, I mean, Fritz’s father is . . .” She put her hand over her mouth and fell silent.

“You’re just afraid of Herr Hofmann!” I said cheekily.

The chalk between her fingers snapped, and white dust trickled onto her blue dress.

“Yes,” she replied. “Yes, Botev, your Barbu is afraid.”

I bit my tongue. It took me awhile to stammer out in consternation, “But why? ‘My father will make your life a hell.’ What did Fritz mean by that? I thought he was just trying
to be a big shot like always. He’s always got such a big mouth, that’s just the way he is.”

Angela Barbulescu looked out the window. “Fritz will be like his father.” She said nothing more, but it was enough to let me know I was just a boy of fifteen, not a man. What
separated me from the grown-ups was their knowledge of secrets I didn’t have the slightest inkling of.

“Your detention is over,” she said suddenly.

I made no move to get up. “Herr Hofmann won’t hurt you,” I said spontaneously.

She gave a pained laugh. “And you’re going to protect me. You mean well, young man. Better go home now.”

“No! I won’t go until you tell me why you’re afraid of Herr Hofmann!” I was surprised by the resolution in my own voice.

“Believe me, Pavel, you’re too young to understand.”

I bent down and picked up a piece of the broken chalk. “It’s true, I’m young. Just like Fritz. But he’s old enough to make his teacher go white with fear. Your face was
as white as this chalk.”

She looked at me. “Not here. Not in the school. Come see me tonight after dark. And don’t tell anyone where you’re going.”

W
ith the excuse that I had to go over to Fritz Hofmann’s for something, I left my mother, Aunt Antonia, and Grandfather sitting at the dinner
table. In the shadows of twilight I dawdled up the main street of the village. Just before I reached the Hofmanns’ front gate I turned around, saw that no one was watching, and quickly ducked
down along the massive wall of the church. Behind the church, I hurried off in the opposite direction past Cemetery Hill to the lower part of the village where Barbu lived in a wooden cottage
across from the Gypsies.

She opened the door before I even had a chance to knock. I went in and took off my shoes as one does when entering someone else’s house. She took my jacket, led me into her overheated
parlor, and offered me a seat on her sofa. To my surprise, she wasn’t wearing the grubby dark blue dress she’d had on that morning in school. Instead, she’d put on a fresh, airy
summer dress with yellow sunflowers on it. The dress smelled like a field of roses, and her parlor made an unexpectedly neat and clean impression. Yet I felt uncomfortable. On the coffee table, a
candle was burning on a round brocade doily. Next to it stood a bottle of the plum schnapps we call
zuika
with a cork in it. There was no glass in sight. Next to the bottle, a well-worn
book lay open and facedown. To have something to do, I picked it up. It was a book of poems by Mihail Eminescu.

“Mind if I have a look?” I asked to hide my embarrassment.

“You’re too young for those poems.”

I ignored the remark. Someone had underlined verses in pencil: “And one more thing I ask you, / please grant that I may die / upon that distant shoreline, / red evening in the sky.”
I caught sight of a few other phrases: “cool evening wind,” “trees bare of leaves,” “moonlight on gravestones.” I quickly clapped Eminescu shut.

Something had slipped out of the book and landed on the table. It was a square photo with a scalloped white border.

“Go ahead and have a look, my boy,” said the teacher and she handed me the picture.

“I’m not a boy anymore,” I protested. “You were going to tell me about Herr Hofmann now that I’m here.”

She picked up the bottle, pulled out the cork, and drank.

“Not a boy anymore! We’ll see about that.”

I said nothing and stared intently at the photo.

“You can see that I wasn’t such a bad catch.”

I had to admit to myself that Barbu was right. The photograph showed her with a man who had pomaded and combed back his dark hair in the style of a university student. He wore his sport coat
open and his tie was loosened. He had a cigarette in the corner of his mouth and displayed what I thought was a roguish grin for the camera. Maybe even rakish. Between the middle and ring fingers
of his left hand he casually swirled a big-bellied glass such as I had never seen in my grandfather’s taproom. Mr. Pomade’s right arm firmly encircled Miss Barbulescu’s shoulder,
while only one side of her face was turned toward the camera. Unlike this evening, in the photo she had long blond hair that she had gathered into a ponytail and tied with a scarf. Although her
eyes were closed, she was beaming, and her puckered lips were a fraction of a second away from kissing the cheek of the man at her side. If I wasn’t mistaken, in this black-and-white photo
she was wearing the same sunflower dress in which she now sat next to me on the sofa.

“Taken in the capital?” I asked, studiedly casual.

“Yes, and guess who pressed the shutter release.”

“Heinrich Hofmann?”

“Correct, boy. Exactly right. It was Hofmann.”

“And the man in the photo? Your fiancé?”

“He had many fiancées.” Barbu laughed. It was a laugh that scared me. As the tavern gofer I was familiar with various kinds of laughter. Mischievous chuckles, malicious grins,
idiotic guffaws. I knew the shy smile of the embarrassed, the laugh salvos of the jokesters, and the caterwauling of the drunks. I could gauge by their laughter the level of intoxication my
grandfather’s customers had reached. But I had never heard a laugh like Barbu’s before. It alienated and confused me. I longed to get far away from it, back to Grandfather Ilja, back to
my mother and to Aunt Antonia. I had just left their supper table, and I’d lied to them.