The Madonna on the Moon (47 page)

On the first of May, the Day of the International Proletariat, Karl Koch walked through the gate into his yard. His wife Klara and the children had been waiting for his return for three years.
Every few months the mailman had handed her a postcard with the identical message: “I’m well. The food is good.”

When Koch knocked on his own front door and Klara opened, she froze in shock for a second, then she threw her arms around him and wept for joy. She had feared he would return in an emaciated
state, but outwardly Karl was surprisingly unchanged since the day when Raducanu and Cartarescu had arrested him.

“You must be hungry,” said Klara, who put black beans on the kitchen table and sat down across from him. He pushed the plate away and looked at the linen sampler that hung above the
stove:
FROM NOTHING COMES NOTHING
.

“I’m getting a late start. I have to till my field. If you don’t sow, you won’t reap.” He sighed and went out into the barnyard. But then he turned around.
“Tomorrow,” he said, “tomorrow. I’m too tired today.”

But the next morning, although the Saxon had Klara pack him a lunch to eat out in the fields, he couldn’t pull himself together. And as this procedure kept repeating itself over the
following weeks, Klara realized that for the rest of their life together there would be nothing left for her except the painful memory of what Karl Koch used to be.

Working in our shop and tavern over the years, I had developed a fine feel for changes in the mood of our customers. I sensed that the country was undergoing a sea change. Every two months
Alexandru Kiselev would come back for a week of regular home leave from the tractor factory in Stalinstadt, bringing with him not just a nice pile of money but also the latest news, which the young
men of the village eagerly lapped up, especially Hermann Schuster Junior. Despite his father’s disappointment, he was quite frank about not seeing any future in agriculture and preferring a
job in industry. But Alexandru kept telling him that new hires were restricted to members of the party. Hermann knew that, beyond a doubt, a membership card in his pocket would mean his father
would never speak to him again. But he still asked Alexandru the same question every time: “How do things look in Stalinstadt?”

“Good. But Stalinstadt isn’t called Stalinstadt anymore. It’s called Brasov again, like it was before.”

While Hermann didn’t see much significance in the change, I concluded that the once-mighty pillars of our relationship with the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics were getting wobbly.

My suspicions were confirmed the evening I heard Liviu Brancusi saying openly that people in the agro-complex in Apoldasch were starting to grumble because, at Moscow’s urging, the
value-producing comrades were being compelled to constantly exceed their quotas. As an oft-decorated collectivist, of course, he was always ready to put his labor at the service of the proletarian
cause and exceed production targets when it was a question of improving the nation’s nutrition, but not just so the fattened hogs from AAC 2 could be exported to the Soviet Union. Liviu made
a point of saying he was representing the official party line by calling not for the severing of the bonds of friendship with our great Socialist brother, just a gradual relaxation. Before
advancing the cause of the international proletariat, a comrade’s first duty was to keep his own doorstep swept. “We need full independent sovereignty,” he said, “or the
Russians are going to bleed us dry.”

There was method behind the retro naming of Stalinstadt to Brasov. Street signs all over the country were being switched once again. In the case of all the Stalin Squares, Stalin Avenues, and
Stalin Boulevards, the name of the dictator was replaced by the name Gheorghiu-Dej, which would later fade in the radiance of his successor. Although the Central Committee continued to swear
allegiance to the inviolable bonds of solidarity with the Soviet Union, the troops of the Red Army were obliged, given the principle of national sovereignty, to depart from Transmontania. In the
capital, the Soviet monument to the unknown soldier was dismantled, and someone hung a sign on the Russian Museum saying
CLOSED FOR RENOVATIONS
. In the schools, Russian was
no longer required, and, little by little, anything that even vaguely alluded to the Slavic roots of the New Nation was removed from the history books. The reason was presumably that a great nation
needed a great history of independence, and moreover, they wanted to put a stick in the Hungarians’ eye. The Socialist neighbor kept raising territorial claims to its old ancestral homeland
in Transmontania, while the Transmontanians insisted they had been there first—since the pre-Christian era—that is, their ancestors the Dacians and the Romans had.

And to substantiate these claims, the new first secretary of the Central Committee and Conducator-to-be dispatched squads of archaeologists into the countryside to dig for Roman potsherds. If
their discoveries were indeed Roman, they found their way into the vitrines of the countless local history museums being opened in every provincial town. But if the potsherds were of Slavic
origin—which in Kronauburg was almost always the case—the digs had to be filled in again at once. And people whispered to one another that to steer the historic facts in his direction,
the first secretary had had a secret pottery constructed near the Schweisch Valley where brick makers were sworn to secrecy and hired to produce pots in the antique style, smash them, and bury the
shards in formerly Hungarian settlements. How else to explain that even in Baia Luna they were coming upon traces of the Romans by chance, especially at construction sites.

Just when no one in the village expected change to happen anymore, a construction crew with heavy equipment appeared without any warning. The workmen distributed the party brochure
Children
Are the Future
to all households, then they proceeded to tear down the empty school building. Within weeks the portraits of the future Conducator and the Kronauburg regional secretary
Stephanescu were hanging in three brand-new classrooms.

Right on time for the new school year 1967–68, a truck with desks and textbooks drove into town, followed by a dilapidated Lada from which emerged Adrian Popescu, the new teacher, a man in
his midforties. He moved into the former house of the Hofmann family and proved to be an unsociable loner who avoided the male camaraderie of evenings in the taproom. But since he got along with
the children, was acceptably strict, and didn’t bother anyone in the village, people got used to his presence. A sort of friendship even developed between him and Istvan the Hungarian based
on their shared view that the faking of Roman potsherds deserved the adjective “clumsy,” if not worse.

When the successor of the Little Stalin proclaimed in the mid-sixties that—the Socialist phase having been completed—the New Nation was now proudly and with head held high setting
out on the path to Communism, people in the village at first judged it to be politicians’ twaddle. Socialism? Communism? What did they mean, anyway? Except for the new school, low prices for
groceries, and the propaganda harangues on the radio, no one in Baia Luna knew exactly what the newness of the New Nation actually consisted of. However, when the transmission assembler Alexandru
Kiselev brought home an electric sewing machine, an automatic spin dryer, a hood dryer, and a television with antenna right under the envious gaze of his neighbors, we had to admit that the
party’s promises of progress were more than just hot air.

It was thanks to the Conducator that the capitalist class enemy provided a generous source of credit for the construction of the New Nation. At the beginning of his rule he had portrayed himself
as a tireless worker and modest servant of the people. But then some poor poet had decided there was something to be gained by celebrating him as the guarantor of prosperity and proud scion of his
native earth. And since the verses pleased him and his spouse Elena even more, she had all the poets in the country called together and ordered even more poems. They praised the shining Evening
Star, celebrated the Guardian of Wisdom, and hailed the Universal Genius and the Titan of Titans. All this persuaded Elena to take a plane to Persia, where for practically a song she purchased a
golden scepter from the shah. Then Elena sewed with her own hands fantastic sashes of watered silk that her husband donned whenever he made a public appearance, brandishing his new scepter.

After assuming the post of general secretary in 1965, the Conducator laid the cornerstone for his meteoric rise with a decision not to follow in the footsteps of his deceased predecessor
Gheorghiu-Dej. Instead of constantly flying off to Moscow like the Little Stalin, he preferred to pay visits to China and America, thus muddling up the fronts in the Cold War. Although he was by
confession a Marxist, they rolled out the red carpet for him in the USA, calculating that in return he would drive a wedge into the Communist bloc. And indeed, when Soviet tanks rolled into Prague
in 1968, the Conducator turned a cold shoulder on Leonid Brezhnev and his other Socialist allies and kept his troops at home instead of sending them to war against the rebellious Czechs. In
Transmontania this refusal earned him the reputation of a national hero, to the delight of the poets. Other countries also paid him the highest diplomatic respect, not least because he was
constantly inviting high-level guests whom he wined and dined like princes and showered with presents. In return he accumulated medals for himself and gifts for his wife. The queen of England even
went so far as to knight him. But the crowning glory of the Conducator’s international connections was his close relationship with Richard Nixon. Even before becoming president, the American
had added a crimson Cadillac to the Conducator’s private fleet, which the latter never used, however, because it hadn’t been bulletproofed.

In the sixties, there were only two inhabitants of Baia Luna besides the Saxon Karl Koch who didn’t care whether the country was flourishing or not—namely the two friends Ilja and
Dimitru.

At eight every morning, Grandfather rose, ate breakfast, and took his epilepsy pills. When he was having a good day he helped me in the shop or swept out the storeroom. On bad days he moped
around, argued with his daughter, my heavyweight aunt Antonia, and made a general nuisance of himself. On very good days he would take a long walk beside the Tirnava. Sometimes Dimitru went with
him. They didn’t talk much because there was hardly anything to talk about.

Kathalina thought their gradual loss of vitality might have something to do with the pair’s pledge to act reasonably from now on. Mother was secretly plagued by a bad conscience because
she sensed that the promise she had extracted from her father-in-law and the Gypsy had clipped the wings of the two friends’ spirits. But her nerves simply couldn’t take having to
playact for Lupu Raducanu again. Grandfather and Dimitru did feel constrained to keep their promise, but the reason they were downcast was something else.

The calamity began on August 5 of the year 1962. Dimitru was listening to Radio London.

“Quiet! No! Oh no! It can’t be true. She’s dead!”

“Who’s dead?” I asked.

“Marilyn! Little Marilein. John Eff’s mistress! Suicide! They say it was pills, too many pills and whiskey. That’s supposedly what killed her. She was only in her
midthirties!”

“But why would she commit suicide?” Kathalina chimed in. “They say she was beautiful and famous. She had money and could have any man she wanted. Why on earth would she go and
kill herself with pills!”

“I ask myself the same question,” Dimitru agreed. “It isn’t reasonable. There’s something behind it! A Black like me can smell it a mile away.”

Mother’s sour look and the sentence “Don’t start in again!” were enough to shut Dimitru up.

Although Dimitru and Grandfather avoided any speculation about the death of the blond actress, their suspicion received new nourishment the following year. In both America and the Soviet Union
dark forces were at work. Their vague fear turned into depressing certainty on the day when even the Transmontanian Broadcasting System was full of nothing but the news that the American president
John Fitzgerald Kennedy had been assassinated. A respectful eulogy spoke not only of his visionary leadership but also his ambitious plans for space exploration. There was no mention of his love
affairs. Instead we learned that as one of his last official acts, he had received the director of the National Space Flight Center in Huntsville at the White House. Wernher von Braun had filled in
the president on the details of the Saturn rocket and the Apollo program to land a man on the moon.

When Dimitru and Grandfather learned that the assassin, a certain Lee Harvey Oswald, had lived in the Soviet Union, the two friends were sure they knew who was behind the murder plot. I’m
certain the only reason they didn’t mention the name Korolev was their fear of getting Kathalina all riled up.

All Dimitru said was, “Oswald won’t talk. The CIA can torture him all they want. If Oswald’s working for the Russians, he’d sooner bite off his tongue.”

Two days later any lingering doubts Dimitru might have had about the plot to kill the American president were dispelled. On his way to prison, Oswald was silenced forever—gunned down by a
shady nightclub owner. In retrospect, for Grandfather and the Gypsy it was the initial spark for a fateful chain reaction.

The Soviets would stop at nothing, and neither would the Americans. The two dominant world powers might be engaged in only a Cold War, but they were obviously rubbing out each other’s
leading minds. At least, that’s the conclusion Dimitru and Grandfather drew from the radio news, and years later they would believe they had confirmation of it.

“Moscow, January 5, 1966. The Soviet rocket scientist Korolev is to be hospitalized for a few days to have a growth removed. After his recovery, the date for the first Soviet lunar flight
will be announced. The cosmonaut Yury Gagarin has let it be known that he is ready for the mission even if they never bring him back.”