The Madonna on the Moon (40 page)

Fourteen days later, a white ambulance drove into Baia Luna. It wasn’t the fact that Ilja Botev had been released from the hospital earlier than expected that raised a stir in the village,
but the splendid way the State Trade Organization apparently looked after its members and even provided them with transportation free of charge.

Grandfather got out smiling and waving. “I’m cured!” he called.

Kathalina, who seldom expressed her joy in a physical way, threw her arms around her father-in-law and began kissing him. Ilja was bursting with praise for the skill of the doctors in
Kronauburg, especially a neurologist whose name he couldn’t remember. Grandfather said he had felt completely healthy for the first three or four days after his arrival at the hospital, and
none of the doctors could find anything abnormal. He even overheard one of them use the word “malingerer” as they were talking out in the hallway. But then he had a strange attack he
had no memory of. The doctors later kept referring to it as “gran moll.” Granddad said that one morning after tea with white bread and marmalade, he’d had a kind of flash in his
head. Afterward he must have uttered a piercing scream, gone into spasms, and fallen to the floor. He’d turned blue and bitten his tongue without feeling any pain. When he woke up his tongue
had hurt terribly, but that wasn’t as bad as his embarrassment at not having controlled his bowels during the seizure. But that was normal with this illness, the doctors had told him after
they saved him from choking to death.

“I had to put on an oxygen mask and they gave me shots. When I could talk again, they told me I was lucky not to be living in the Middle Ages or even earlier.”

“Why?” I asked.

“Back then they thought epileptics were possessed by the devil, and they drilled holes in their heads to let the evil spirits escape. Today they have medicine for it. If I take my tablets
regularly—they have this stuff in ’em, something like ‘fennyteen’ and ‘mazypeen’—the attacks may not stop completely, but they’ll be under control.
That’s what the nerve doc with the glasses said. He was real educated and knew everything about my illness. They used to call it Saint John’s disease because people prayed to that
apostle to make the seizures stop. But today they know that something doesn’t flow right in the brain when you have epilepsy. People used to think it was caused by the moon. Lunacy. Even the
Romans talked about
morbus lunaticus.
It’s right there in the Bible, the doctor told me. Gospel of Matthew, chapter seventeen.”

Kathalina didn’t hesitate. She dug the Holy Bible out of the corner and handed it to Ilja. He leafed through it awhile, then he read without stumbling, “Lord, have mercy on my son:
for he is lunatic, and sore vexed: for ofttimes he falleth into the fire, and oft into the water. And I brought him to thy disciples, and they could not cure him. Then Jesus answered and said, O
faithless and perverse generation, how long shall I be with you? How long shall I suffer you? Bring him hither to me. And Jesus rebuked the devil; and he departed out of him: and the child was
cured from that very hour. Then came the disciples to Jesus apart, and said, Why could not we cast him out? And Jesus said unto them, Because of your unbelief: for verily I say unto you, If ye have
faith as a grain of mustard seed, ye shall say unto this mountain, Remove hence to yonder place; and it shall remove; and nothing shall be impossible unto you.”

In the following days it often happened that even I wanted to read the Bible, but Ilja always said, “Me first.” Reading the word of God became his new obsession. It burned almost as
strongly as his yearning to redeem his friend at last from his night of silence.

The key to that feat was provided by an event on April 12 of the year 1961, only ten days after the Feast of the Resurrection. My mother had turned on the TV early in the midday break prescribed
for family-run concessions. Just like every Wednesday, the state television network in the capital was broadcasting the half-hour show
The Homemaker: Simple Meals in a Jiffy!
In the studio
kitchen the head chef of the Athenee Palace Hotel would demonstrate how to conjure up delicious and economical meals from just a few ingredients with a modicum of culinary skill. Kathalina liked
the show less because she was trying to put some variety into her cuisine than because she liked the chef, who made her laugh. He had a strange brand of humor and way of expressing himself. Every
so often he would put his little finger into the pot, lick it off with closed eyes, and groan in pretended perplexity, “There’s still still still something missing.” Of course, he
would suddenly discover the missing ingredient on the kitchen table and exclaim with contrived astonishment, “It’s here here here after all!”

While Mother laughed at the chef, Grandfather sat on the bench next to the potbellied stove, groaning. He’d begun reading the Old Testament, had finished the books of Moses, and moved on
through Joshua, Samuel, and the books of Kings to First Chronicles. When at last in the sixth chapter, after endless genealogies listing when who begat whom with whom, he got hung up at the sons of
Manasseh and became so furious he hurled the sacred book across the room.

“Who in God’s name came up with all this boring shit? Who can keep it all straight?”

Kathalina turned away from her TV chef only long enough to remark casually, “When Pater Johannes preached, he always made the Bible interesting. Why not read what his patron saint put down
on paper back then?”

Grandfather followed her advice, retrieved the Bible, and turned to the last book of the New Testament, the Revelation of Saint John the Divine. For some unfathomable reason that Dimitru would
later call intuition, he didn’t begin to read the Apocalypse at the first chapter but at chapter 12. At the precise moment that Grandfather realized what was written there in the first two
verses, the midday break ended.

As I was turning the sign on the door to
OPEN
, Ilja jumped up as if stung by a thousand wasps and staggered around in euphoric intoxication. He rejoiced and raised his
fists in triumph as if he had won a hard-fought battle. At first I thought the lunatic madness had seized Grandfather again. Just as when he’d been fascinated by the black bar on the
television screen, Granddad shouted again and again, “That’s it. That’s it,” his index finger playing a staccato rhythm on Revelation, chapter 12. “The proof!
That’s the proof!”

“Shush! Quiet, dammit!” Kathalina turned up the TV.

“We interrupt our popular program
Simple Meals in a Jiffy!
for an important announcement. Following the successful flight of the Sputnik in 1957, the Union of Soviet Socialist
Republics has reached another milestone in the history of mankind. Air Force Major Yury Alekseyevich Gagarin has today become the first human being to fly into outer space. Today, April twelfth,
1961, the cosmonaut spent one hundred eight minutes in weightlessness aboard the spaceship Vostok 1. In the meantime, Gagarin has returned safely to earth. We congratulate our Soviet friends on
this epoch-making accomplishment and announce the broadcast of a special program at eight fifteen this evening:
Yury Gagarin—Man Conquers Space.
”

Grandfather’s high spirits at his discovery in the Revelation of Saint John suddenly changed to pure horror. “Come with me,” he said, took his Bible, and ran to the rectory.
Without knocking he stormed into the library where Dimitru was staring at an impenetrable pile of books with disheveled hair and bloodshot eyes. He’d lived in hermitlike silence for three
years and five months without saying a word.

“Here! Read this! Revelation of Saint John. Chapter twelve, verse one!”

Dimitru obeyed like someone without the strength to contradict.

“‘And there appeared a great wonder in heaven, a woman clothed with the sun, and the moon under her feet, and upon her head a crown of twelve stars: And she being with child cried .
. .’”

Dimitru wept. He wept in the arms of his friend Ilja.

“Papa Johannes knew it,” said Dimitru softly. “And now we know it, too. The woman clothed with the sun. If she has the moon under her feet, that means . . .”

“. . . that she must be standing on the moon,” Ilja finished the sentence.

“That’s it. That’s the proof. Now my heart is light. That’s why the Virgin of Eternal Consolation had to disappear.”

“What do you mean?”

“My dear friend Ilja, I rememorate the Madonna’s face exactly. The puny Baby Jesus! Oh, and those great big breasts of hers, but her delicate feet, too. Those feet! That’s it!
The Madonna is standing on a crescent, a crescent moon! The tale about how Baia Luna came to be is a mistake. An
error fatal
everybody fell for. The crescent moon doesn’t stand for
the victory of the Christians over the Mussulmen. It’s a symbol of Mary’s Assumption! That old sculptor knew that. You see? That’s why the Bolsheviks swiped the Virgin from the
Mondberg. So their propaganda for converting mankind to atheism could run smoothly. There should be nothing left to remind us that the Mother of God is on the moon. Mary is the sovereign of the
moon.”

“Incredible,” said Ilja. “Why didn’t we think of this before?”

“Because we hadn’t studied the Holy Scripture. It’s the source of all knowledge, the source Papa Baptiste always drank from. What more proof do we need than the word of God in
person?”

Grandfather shook his head. Dimitru looked toward the ceiling, illuminated to the furthest corner of his soul by the light of understanding. Then he threw his arms around Ilja, who returned his
friend’s joyous, noisy kisses with equal delight.

“I talked! I said something!” cried the Gypsy suddenly, realizing that his spell of silence was finally broken. In graceful, almost weightless hops he danced across the books that
lay scattered on the floor. I interrupted.

“Soon there will be more to say, Dimitru. The situation’s critical. Korolev’s project is entering its final phase. He’s not sending up dogs anymore. Gagarin was in space.
They’re going to show the proof on TV soon.”

“Well, what are we waiting for, then?
Tempus fugus!
We’re just wasting time here.” Dimitru locked the library and marched over to our house, arm in arm with Ilja.
Kathalina was overjoyed when she heard “Greetings, my dear” coming from the Gypsy’s mouth, and I squeezed in a “You’re finally back among the living again!” amid
the general rejoicing

“Right”—Kathalina laughed, wrinkling her nose—“but before the living accept you there’s some urgent hygiene that needs attending to, Dimitru. You smell
awful.” Mother turned on the boiler to heat water for the tub. Then she sent me to Hermann Schuster to announce Dimitru’s rebirth and ask if he could lend us some hand-me-down pants, a
shirt, and a jacket from the wardrobe of their oldest son Andreas. After his bath, she jockeyed Dimitru onto a chair on the porch, grabbed her scissors, and gave him a haircut amid howls of
laughter from the village children.

“But the beard stays!”

When Kathalina joked that without a beard he’d be even more irresistible to the ladies, Dimitru replied, “Do you think the Children of Israel would have followed Moses through the
Red Sea if he hadn’t had such a magnificent beard? Never! It was on account of his beard, not despite his beard, that the old guy never went to bed alone.”

Grandfather chimed in with “Read your Bible, Kathalina, and you’ll see what a clan Moses begat.” It was obvious that Dimitru Carolea Gabor was his old self again and his
friendship with Grandfather Ilja was as strong as ever.

B
y seven o’clock, the best seats were taken in front of the television. By seven thirty the taproom was full to bursting. The sensational
announcement promised for eight fifteen was preceded by a lengthy introduction. Even people who could see through its propagandistic purpose had to admit that it had been put together in a
fiendishly clever way.

A slow, leaden funeral march introduced the report. By the end of three measures it gave you the foreboding sense that something truly important was about to be buried forever. On the darkened
screen there suddenly appeared an oversize image of an American dollar bill. A solemn voice intoned, “This money wants to rule the world,” followed by a dramatically beating kettledrum
and then a drumroll. “But who is behind the money?” At that question, the sorrowful music became even more sorrowful, and short film clips followed one another in seemingly random
order: dark-skinned chauffeurs held limousine doors open for cigar-puffing capitalists, unemployed workers with hangdog expressions waited in line at locked factory gates. One was even barefoot. We
gaped in amazement as a stout movie producer in knickers pinched a starlet with swelling breasts in the behind, followed by dozens of police nightsticks raining blows onto an unarmed black man. The
high point of tastelessness was when a peroxided blond positioned herself on purpose over a ventilation grate and it blew her skirt up above her bottom so everyone could see her panties. Then came
a smooth operator who beamed while being kissed by a pack of half-naked women wearing silly rabbit ears. All of a sudden the music got so loud and shrill that some people in the tavern held their
ears. To wild guitar chords some crazy screamer jerked his hips back and forth. Then he yowled something unintelligible into the microphone while young girls screamed ecstatically and stretched out
their arms, straining to get to the animalistic guy. Dimitru sat with one leg over the other, swinging his foot to the rhythm, but then the music stopped abruptly. We saw American students lounging
on a university campus and chewing gum.

“Are these young people supposed to inspire the human spirit and advance progress?” asked the voice of the announcer as whispering and then exclamations broke out in the tavern. A
rocket stood on a launchpad, and someone began to count in English—five, four, three, two, one—and then some more words we didn’t understand. A gigantic ball of smoke and flames
shrouded everything. A title appeared on the screen: “Launch of the Vanguard TV3 satellite, USA, December 6, 1957.” The rocket slowly lifted off, then it fell sideways and exploded.
“America’s dream is a nightmare,” said the voice. Cut.