The Madonna on the Moon (8 page)

Grandfather was of the opinion that Dimitru had developed a serious streak while mourning the death of his father, while I thought his flightiness prevented it from being very well grounded.
Nevertheless, baptism must have activated a real passionate impulse to pursue life’s most basic questions.

And certainly the paternalistic friendship of Johannes Baptiste was also a contributing factor. The Benedictine made the books he had brought with him from Austria to Baia Luna available to all
in a kind of public library in the rectory, which was almost never used by the villagers. And if anyone ever did use it, they didn’t go to the priest to ask for permission but to Dimitru, who
in the course of two decades advanced to the post of Lord of the Library.

In summer you could see him lying on the green grass of the rectory garden with his nose in a book; in winter a light burned in the library even at night because Dimitru was pursuing his studies
by the shine of a kerosene lamp. To make it easier for him to read, Johannes Baptiste had had an old red divan and a warm featherbed moved to the library.

When the men of Baia Luna called him the Black philosopher, it might have sounded like an expression of respect but was closer to mockery. That didn’t bother Dimitru in the slightest. He
served himself generous portions from the pots of human knowledge, sampled here, snacked there, and in the end mixed it all together as he saw fit. He cared nothing for logical coherence.
“Either/or” didn’t count for much with him; he preferred “both/and.” Whenever he got hopelessly tangled up in logical inconsistencies, he would cut the Gordian knot of
his contradictions the very next day from some new vantage point. Something that was true today could be false tomorrow and vice versa. Dimitru learned by heart the most important sayings of the
great scholars without caring a fig about the correct sequence of thinkers and their thoughts. It was Liviu Brancusi who dubbed him “the blabbermouth” after Pater Johannes had taught
Dimitru a few scraps of Latin. Grandfather Ilja had advised his friend not to throw around such difficult terms so much but just slip one in from time to time to give people the impression they
were dealing with an educated man. Dimitru took the advice to heart but continued to confusticate (one of his favorite words) often.

When Grandfather wanted to chat with Dimitru undisturbed, he visited his friend in the library. When I was little, he would sometimes take me along, but then he stopped because the smell of
musty paper made me sick. In the fall of 1957, when I was fifteen, I often sought refuge in the library, not to read as my mother Kathalina thought but to escape chores at home. I took into account
that Dimitru would talk my ear off.

Since Johannes Baptiste gave the Gypsy a free hand in the library, Dimitru had arranged the books according to his own system. “There’s got to be order, Pavel, or it’ll start
to look like a Gypsy camp in Moldavia.” He was happy to tell me that his rise to head librarian had begun with unpacking the books from their crates and putting them on the shelves. “It
was a challenge, Pavel.” Even twenty years later he groaned at the thought. “A real challenge for any intelligent person. First I arranged the books by size, from thick folios to slim
pamphlets on self-improvement, then according to the color of their spines, from dark to light. Then by their year of publication. That number is up front on the first pages, you see. Now the books
are all standing as they should be: alphabetically from Augustine to Zola. Emilio Zola—you must have heard of him in school?”

“No.”

“What do you actually learn from Miss Barbulescu? Zola! That’s literature. Not that junk by party hacks that’s in your readers. That’s trash. How can I send my Buba to
school with a clear conscience? By the way, Zola wrote a book about Lourdes. Lourdes—at least you know what that is?”

“Never heard of it.”

“Never heard of it! Even though you
gaje
go on penitential pilgrimages to the Virgin of Eternal Consolation. You
gaje
are funny people, dumbskies. Why don’t you
have the Mother of God in your hearts? Then you could spare yourselves the hike. Like in Lourdes. They don’t pray to a wooden statue. Mary the Mother of God appeared there in the flesh. In
the flesh, Pavel! You know what that means? Think that over for a while instead of filling glasses with schnapps every night. Don’t misunderstand me: I’ve got nothing against
zuika
and nothing against the honest calling of tavern keeper, but you? You were meant for something higher. What am I saying—you have a calling!”

Dimitru got on my nerves. His flattery was embarrassing. I should have left. But I didn’t and asked instead, “Mary appeared in the flesh? How’s that possible?”

“See, I knew you were a smart boy. How can Mary, who has shuffled off this mortal coil, still appear in the flesh? That’s the question! You just have to turn it around with
dialectical logic, understand? Then the question becomes: Where does someone have to rise up to in order to return to earth after death and show themselves to people?”

I felt sorry for the Gypsy. How could anyone think such screwy thoughts? “I don’t understand what you’re getting at, Dimitru. Where’s the problem?”

“You’re still young, Pavel. But I’m tortured by this question. And I’ll tell you why and since when. I miss my father Laszlo of blessed memory. Since the moment I closed
the lid of his coffin, there’s only one thing I want to know: how can a person get to heaven? I mean, not just your soul but your body, too. The resurrection of the flesh. I mean the whole
person.”

“It’s not possible, Dimitru. If I understand Christian teaching, up to now only Jesus has succeeded in the resurrection of the flesh.”

“But it also worked with Jesus’s Mother. Mary was also taken up into heaven body and soul. Pope Pius himself made the announcement. How did the Assumption work, exactly? Body and
soul? What happened to them? When I know that, Pavel, I’ll know everything.”

“Why don’t you ask Johannes Baptiste? He’ll be able to solve your problem for sure.”

“I asked Papa Baptiste already. ‘Dimitru, my son,’ he said, ‘to find that out would take an entire lifetime. Maybe even longer.’ But I don’t know if I have
that much time, Pavel.”

What was time? Except for the wish that my dreary school years would end, time played no special role in my life. In Baia Luna, today was like what yesterday was and tomorrow would be. Even
Margul-Sperber’s propaganda verses could not change that. “Now look about, where’er you bend your gaze appears a new world struggling to be born.” Nothing struggled to be
born in Baia Luna. At least not for me.

Until my grandfather’s fifty-fifth birthday.

Ilja had smoked the last Cuban of the previous year and was waiting for customers in the shop while my mother Kathalina was getting lunch ready in the kitchen. Aunt Antonia was still dozing in
bed. From time to time, as always, she would stretch out her arm for a nougat praline from the nightstand, then let the chocolate melt in her mouth as she fell back asleep.

I sat in school, where no one else guessed that the woman in the blue dress would never again make us copy out Hans Bohn’s patriotic poem about the beautiful land in the Carpathian forests
on its way to a grandiose future in which “each new day is better than the last.” Up to now, the poems in our schoolbooks had struck me as just empty blather, but no more. Today was no
longer like yesterday since Angela Barbulescu had whispered the incomprehensible assignment into my ear,
Send this man straight to hell! Destroy him!

What did she mean? Was Barbu’s plea a demand to kill the Kronauburg party secretary? She couldn’t possibly have meant that. She would never have made such a request given the fact
that she’d always praised the sacredness of the Ten Commandments in religion class. “Thou shalt not kill.” That was the sin of sins. Any halfway-intelligent person knew that even
without Moses. The teacher surely was not asking me to commit murder. It was out of the question! Of course, there were ways and means to send an enemy to the other side without getting one’s
own hands dirty. If you believed in witchcraft.

The Gypsies were said to understand something about black magic. I considered mixing potions of pulverized pubic hair, menstrual blood, and cat shit to be nothing but humbug. And Buba Gabor gave
me to understand with a wink that I was right. Rumor had it that her mother Susanna had access to occult powers. “We listen to people, understand their worries, make a little hocus-pocus, and
cash in. Sometimes it works, usually not, but we have enough to eat for a few days.” I believed Buba because she had such a wonderful laugh, because she was beautiful, and because a witch
couldn’t possibly smell so good.

Angela Barbulescu, on the other hand, was superstitious. Clearly. Burning the image of her former lover out of a photo, however, seemed not an effective piece of magic but a pointless gesture of
helpless misfortune that didn’t testify to Barbu’s secret power but merely to her helplessness There was no doubt this Dr. Stephanescu had done her wrong. Rejected love, probably. Maybe
that’s why she had drunk herself into a ruin. She wished this man dead, not alive. But she was too weak herself. Now I was supposed to deliver a man to hell for her, and all I knew about him
was that he used to smoke unfiltered cigarettes and drank
konjaki,
and was now a big-shot party functionary. Anyway, only people like the dumb Konstantin still believed in hell. Why should
I go do battle for Barbu? Declare her enemy to be mine? Stir up bygone filth and get my own hands dirty? Clearly this Stephanescu was a heartbreaker, a creep. But you didn’t just wipe out a
Ph.D., a big shot in the state and the party. Especially if you had no plan and no idea as to why and wherefore.

“Send this man straight to hell”—after school, while I poked listlessly at my lunch, something had changed. I had changed. Not because of the crazy assignment, but the picture!
That photo that I had hung up in school! Something was wrong with it. Why had Barbu taken it down again and carried it away? While my mother admonished me, “Eat something! Put some meat on
your bones! You’re getting a chill,” I could still see Stephanescu smiling.

Chapter Three

The dreary weather continued the entire day and hardly a housewife in Baia Luna found her way to our shop on November 6, 1957. Grandfather dozed behind the counter while I
huddled shivering by the stove. Around three, the widow Vera Raducanu entered, a flaxen-haired woman in her midforties. It was said in the village that she had cornered the market on being insulted
and outraged.

Instead of wishing Grandfather happy birthday, Vera pointed to her spattered shoes and complained about what a morass the village street was. As always, she examined our stock suspiciously and
asked for Luxor in gold foil, a snow-white soap scented with essence of roses, although she knew very well we didn’t carry such luxury items. Granddad kindly offered her a bar of chamomile
soap instead, whereupon Vera called him a vulgar huckster, turned on her heel, and flounced out the door.

Shortly thereafter, Elena Kiselev came in with her four-year-old twins Drina and Diana, who curtsied prettily and wished Grandfather many happy returns.

“Your order is here,” said Ilja while I fetched the brand-new suitcase of brown leatherette from the storeroom.

“It’s a present for my husband.” Elena inspected the suitcase with shy pride. “For his new job when he takes the train to Stalinstadt on Sunday.”

The news had already circulated through Baia Luna that Alexandru Kiselev had found a job assembling transmissions in the new state tractor factory. But the fact that from now on her husband
would bring home three times as much money in his pay envelope as he earned on their farm couldn’t diminish Elena’s heartache at soon having to live apart.

While she paid for the suitcase, her daughters eyed the glass candy jar on the counter with eager expectation. Grandfather unscrewed the lid and pressed into each extended palm a piece of
genuine chewing gum in silver foil, thereby displaying not only his understanding of the little raptures of childhood but also his passion for America. It was his hope that, someday before he died,
a ship would carry him across the Atlantic to the homeland of the Virgin of the Shining Crown.

I
t’s going to be a birthday like any other, I thought on that November 6. The men would talk themselves into a state. First about harmless,
uncontroversial topics. They would probably start off with rabies. At some point Avram Scherban the shepherd would curse the wolves and bears that grabbed his sheep at night because he
couldn’t defend himself against those hungry thieves without a rifle and he didn’t have a rifle because only party officials were allowed to go hunting. Avram would bitch and moan. And
drink. First the new Sylvaner: one carafe and then another and then another after that. Then the men would ask for
zuika.
Goes down nice, that brandy, that’s what they’d say.
I’d have to rush back and forth, and they’d start getting louder. Work up some Dutch courage. Ready for anything. They’d thunder about the sinking price for milk and meat and the
steady devaluation of the currency. They’d have nothing more to laugh about then, those comrades, those collectivists. “Down with the Reds!” the Scherban boys would holler while
their drunken father shook his hands in front of him:
ratta-tat-tat, ratta-tat-tat.
But Avram Scherban wasn’t about to bump anybody off. He couldn’t, because he had to turn in
his gun. They’d confiscated all our firearms, those fat-assed pencil pushers. They’d stolen the men’s pride, and that fanned their anger, but they had to swallow it. Until they
were falling down drunk. Then they’d sleep it off the next morning. The only one who wouldn’t have a serious hangover would be the host and birthday boy, my grandfather Ilja. He
didn’t drink.