The Madonna on the Moon (59 page)

“Let me see that.” Fritz Hofmann took the Bible.

“It’s way in the back, chapter twelve,” said Antonia.

Fritz read it to us: “‘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 . . .’ And before, this John claimed that no woman, just Jesus, ascended into heaven?”

“That’s right,” said Dimitru. “But that’s when John was still right in the head.”

“I don’t see the problem,” Fritz said. “Assuming—purely hypothetically, of course—what’s in the Bible is right, then maybe John could have spoken the
truth both times.”

Dimitru jumped up. “What do you mean, Fritz?”

“It’s completely logical. Think dialectically! Thesis: Mary did not ascend to heaven. Period. Antithesis: On the moon John sees a woman with a crown of twelve stars.
Period.”

“And the synthesis?” The Gypsy was vibrating with excitement. “What’s the synthesis, Fritz?”

“The woman Johannes saw with the moon under her feet wasn’t Mary.”

Dimitru beamed. I saw that not only were his eyes flashing as they used to, but the size of his body had also increased again by a considerable amount.

“Fritz, my son, that’s the cleverest if-then
conclusio
I’ve ever heard from the mouth of a heathen. I have to tell you all that I saw her once, that woman on the moon.
When my friend Ilja and I were on the Mondberg in Baia Luna and looking through our telescope. What did the woman look like? I can’t remember. It was a long time ago. All I know is she was
beautiful. But maybe it wasn’t Mary, John wasn’t crazy, and I saw a different woman. But who? I don’t know. And my friend knows absolutely nothing about it either. Ilja!”
Dimitru cried out in desperation. “My beloved Ilja, there’s something I have to tell you. Ilja, it wasn’t Mary. Ilja, where are you? I can’t see you. Show yourself!
Won’t you tell me where you are?”

I took Buba’s hand. “Can you see my grandfather? Could you try to see him?”

Buba rose. “My second sight never worked in Italy.” Then she went over to the window, looked out, and closed her eyes. She folded her hands. There wasn’t a sound except for the
distant, thin wail of a siren.

Buba stood there motionless for an hour. Then she said, “In the background are tall buildings. They reach the sky and touch the clouds. The clouds are ashes and smoke. There’s a
woman, a gigantic woman. She holds a torch in her hand. Ilja sits at her feet, looking up at her, but she’s not looking at him. She’s staring toward the tall buildings. They’re
collapsing. The woman weeps. The sun is shining, but it’s cold. Ilja is freezing. He, he isn’t real. The sun is shining brightly, but Ilja casts no shadow.”

Buba opened her eyes and sank to the floor.

“In America?” I asked skeptically. “Is Grandfather supposed to be in New York with the Madonna of the Torch?”

“Then Buba would have seen a shadow,” Dimitru responded. “Where would Ilja not cast a shadow? The key to the door that will lead us to him is the answer to that
question.”

“What if the shadow is just an image,” conjectured Fritz, “a sort of symbol for darkness or for evil, for all I know?”

“Then the one without a shadow would be the one who carries nothing evil within him,” I replied. “Someone who’s innocent or cannot be guilty. Maybe a child.”

“Or all the people who are sick in the head,” Antonia piped up, “the poor lunatics all over this cou—”

“I know where Grandfather is!” Everyone’s eyes turned to me. Even Buba awoke from her trance. “‘You’re crazy! Psychotic!’ That’s what Stephanescu
told Fritz and me this morning. ‘You belong in Vadului,’ he said, ‘with the loonies.’”

“The demon couldn’t keep its mouth shut. I told you it was dumb as a doorknob!” Dimitru clapped his hands. “Riu Vadului. I know that name. That’s the village my
cousin Salman always made a big detour around when he was traveling on business. Vadului, that’s where Ilja is!”

“We have a German Volkswagen in the city,” I said. “Who wants to come along?”

In a flash, four times “I do” became “We all do.” Dimitru wanted to set off immediately, but since it was evening already, Fritz and I decided to spend the night in the
Interconti. Fritz volunteered to organize gasoline with the help of some connections and his cache of dollars, while I tried to find Petre Petrov.

As Fritz and I entered the hotel, there was only one topic of conversation among the gaggles of foreign correspondents, namely, that the Conducator was certainly not going to return. The
videotapes of the couple’s execution were genuine. The fact that the most promising candidate for the office of the new prime minister was also among the latest victims of the continuing
revolutionary skirmishes was more of a footnote for the representatives of the international media. We learned that the Kronauburg regional secretary Stefan Stephanescu had been murdered by masked
gunmen during the storming of the Athenee Palace. An American photographer who had been at the scene related in revulsion that the Presidential Suite had obviously been the murderers’
explicit target and that they had not just shot their victim but mutilated his body savagely and beyond recognition.

I set out in search of Petre but couldn’t find him in the darkness. To my relief he showed up at the Interconti in the middle of the night, at first castigating me for always disappearing
somewhere while he was risking his ass for the revolution. But Petre calmed down and was ecstatic at the news that there was a good chance the Virgin of Eternal Consolation would be found among the
stolen church treasures in the cellars of the Securitate in Kronauburg. Petre said he would make his way to Kronauburg the next day and if necessary carry the Madonna to Baia Luna on his own
back.

Before I retrieved the priest Antonius Wachenwerther’s Volkswagen the next morning from where Petre and I had left it days ago, Fritz purchased the latest edition of the
Voice of
Truth.
We were relieved to discover that the editor in chief had foregone publishing the photo of the naked Stephanescu. Instead, there was an earlier portrait of Dr. Stephanescu with a
smiling face. The editor had let the dead rest in peace, done without an obituary, but had speculated at length about the nebulous identity of the perpetrators. Nor did the following days and weeks
clear up whether a faction of the splintered Salvation Front or clandestine counterrevolutionary forces from the Securitate had been behind the murder. Despite Stephanescu’s death, the
ministerial council of the provisional government had appointed a prime minister that afternoon. It was a name I had never heard before. The new head of state promised to appoint an investigative
commission to look into the murder of Stephanescu, but the country never learned if that commission ever met.

Chapter Fifteen

On Wednesday, December 27, 1989, I steered the Volkswagen through the lonely Carpathians. Aunt Antonia sat next to me, and Fritz Hofmann, the Gypsy Dimitru, and Buba were in
the backseat. Fritz’s luggage was in the trunk along with his photo equipment, Petre’s carbine, and Dimitru’s white box with the bones of his father Laszlo. No one said a word
during the drive. At first an occasional truck or a Dacia would pass us going the other direction and now and then a horse-drawn cart, but for the last half hour before we reached the village of
Riu Vadului we encountered nothing and no one.

The barracks stood at the far edge of town. I stopped in front of a closed gate. A rusty tin sign informed us that beyond the gate was a neurologic and psychiatric hospital.

“Wait here a second!” I got out, pushed open the gate, and entered. I couldn’t see a soul, only the yellow stone barracks and a large, vacant field to the left. A half-dozen
mongrel dogs started growling when they saw me. Despite that, I went nearer. Then I saw the wooden crosses. There were many crosses, some overgrown with weeds, some new. The longer I looked, the
more I discovered, all without names. I was standing in a cemetery. The Place Without Shadows. I beseeched heaven that my grandfather not be among those buried here. The dogs were tugging something
out of the ground. They were fighting over an arm from a child’s corpse.

I returned to the car. Fritz and Buba had gotten out.

“Can we go in?” asked Buba.

“Yes, but just Fritz and me. Not you, Buba.”

She started to protest, then she looked into my face. “Is it that bad?”

“Yes.”

“No entrance without an appointment,” barked a guard at the gate. Fritz and I couldn’t tell from his appearance if he was an inmate or one of the staff.

Fritz handed him ten dollars.

The man snatched the bill and held it up to the light. “What’s this? Swindler! It’s old money!” He tore up the bill and demanded, “Real money!” Fritz gave him
some local currency and in a flash the man put it in his pocket.

“You can go in, but not him!” He pointed to me.

I ignored the prohibition and started to push past the guard when suddenly a few figures in rags appeared from nowhere. I froze. Before me stood wretchedness incarnate.

“Food?” asked one.

At our harsh no, the man began to howl like a wolf. The sound pierced me to the quick.

“I’m from Germany,” Fritz said quietly. The howling ceased immediately. “I’ll see that you get something to eat soon. You’ll have enough, you’ll always
have enough from now on. Not today, but soon. I promise.”

“He’s a German!” someone yelled, and they all started screaming. “The Germans are here. They haven’t forgotten us. They’re bringing food. The Germans
don’t forget!”

“But that one’s not a German!” The orderly was putting in his two cents again, and when the howling started up anew, I withdrew.

“Fritz, I can’t go into this place.”

“Okay, Pavel. I’ll give it my best try.”

I returned to the car while Fritz asked after a certain Ilja Botev from Baia Luna. The orderly said no, as did the men, who apparently knew nothing of first names or family names.

“Are you really a German?”

Fritz turned around and found himself face-to-face with a young man who introduced himself as Dr. Adrian Bacanu, the director of the hospital, and beseeched Fritz, “Please help
us.”

Bacanu explained that he had taken over the place only two weeks ago. His predecessor Dr. Pauker had gotten himself transferred to the army. For his part, Bacanu never imagined in his worst
nightmares what horrors would await him in Vadului.

“I wanted to be a doctor, not a gravedigger,” he said, and Fritz could see he was telling the truth. When Fritz introduced himself as a photojournalist, Bacanu almost hugged him.
“Please photograph the wretched people here! Show the Germans what miserable conditions they live in.”

“No! I’m not here to take pictures now. But I give you my word I’ll send my colleagues from the capital up here in three days at the most.”

“Three days? Okay, we can wait that long.”

When Fritz Hofmann saw Adrian Bacanu’s quiet satisfaction, he knew that he would never again in his life press the shutter release of a camera. Then he explained that the man he was
looking for, Ilja Botev, would be very old by now if he was still alive at all—well over eighty and possibly living here for more than twenty years.

But Bacanu also denied knowing the name Ilja Botev. There were certainly some very elderly men among the three hundred patients, but he couldn’t imagine that anyone would have been able to
survive two decades in Vadului.

“There was hardly anything to eat, thin soup at the most. No medications. No heat in the winter. Even if patients survived their illnesses, they died from the lack of kindness. They dried
up like flowers without water. No one wanted them. They have no home, no sense to their lives, no goal, not even to arouse our sympathy. Some have left the world entirely and spun themselves into a
cocoon of their own invention as if protecting themselves against a doctor pulling them back into this reality.”

“Like the blind guy in the bunker,” the orderly interjected, “the crazy New Yorker.”

It had been only a few days since Fritz Hofmann had said in the Interconti, “When I see the pain of others, I feel alive.” As he descended the steps to the cellar hole in Vadului, he
felt ashamed to have said it.

“Don’t be shocked,” Dr. Bacanu said and pushed open the door to an empty coal bunker. Fritz stepped inside. “I’ve been with him a few times already,”
whispered Bacanu, “but he won’t talk. I’ll leave you alone with the gentleman. Maybe you’ll find the magic word to release him from silence.”

“Okay!”

And with that, Fritz Hofmann had uttered the magic word.

The bundle of rags turned its head toward him. “Are you from America?”

The man sat in the shadows. From behind him, a ray of light fell from the narrow slit of a shaft onto the blackness of the opposite wall. Long ago something had been scratched onto the naked
stone: the outline of the Statue of Liberty. When Fritz’s eyes had adjusted to the semidarkness, he saw that the silhouettes of skyscrapers had also been scratched on the walls to
Ilja’s right and left.