The Madonna on the Moon Read online

  “Right! Exactamente! What’d I tell you?” Dimitru interrupted him. “Joseph was a sly dog. But he had problems getting everyone proletarianized. Big problems. Because his policy of state control just couldn’t achieve the equality of all the Soviets. Sure, the Supreme Comrade really tried hard: bigger jails, higher prison walls, bread and water, half rations. He tried to rub out the last vestiges of inequality with more and more gallows and firing squads. But what did that achieve? Joseph had to keep expanding the labor camps for the unequal. The boundaries of the prisons grew incalculably vast. Today no one knows who’s in and who’s out. What a dilemma. The Supreme Soviet can’t keep track of it all anymore. That’s why they need Sputnik. The beeping eliminates the mind and the will. And where there’s no will, there’s no—”

  “Who needs this bullshit?” yelled Nico Brancusi. Purple with rage, he jumped up and glared around at the assembled company. “Who wants to hear this crap, goddamnit!” From way back in his throat he hocked up a loogie and spat it onto the floorboards with the words, “Gypsy lies! Black talk!”

  Dimitru drummed his fingers nervously on the table.

  “It’s the truth,” he said. “If my calculations are correct, Sputnik will be flying over the Transmontanian Carpathians between the forty-sixth degree of latitude and the twenty-fourth degree of longitude in the morning hours of my friend Ilja’s special day. It’ll be beeping right over our heads. I’m telling you, Sputnik is the beginning of the end. And you, Comrade Nico, you can offer your naked ass to whoever you want, that’s your business. But I’m a Gypsy, and you’ll never find a Gypsy in bed with the Bolsheviks.”

  Nico went for the Gypsy’s throat, but his brothers held him back. Dimitru emptied his glass, belched, and after whispering to grandfather, “Five on the dot. I’ll be waiting for you,” left the tavern without a backward glance.

  I didn’t know what to think about all the excitement. I went to bed but had a hard time falling asleep. The Gypsy had probably catapulted himself out of the track of logical thought again (as so often in the past) with his hair-raising speculations about the beeping Sputnik.

  But my bedtime prayer (which admittedly I usually forgot) suddenly gave me pause. “Our Father, who art in heaven, hallowed be thy name. Thy kingdom come . . .” Now, at fifteen, I was already clear that the kingdom of heaven was not about to arrive in the foreseeable future, at least not in Baia Luna. But it was different with the Sputnik. The kingdom of heaven might not be expanding on earth, but on the other hand, man was heading for the heavens. Or at least an earthly creature was: a dog. Surely the beast would soon be dead of starvation. But what was a dead mutt doing in the infinity of space anyway? Up where the Lord God and his hosts reigned, as our aged parish priest Johannes Baptiste thundered from his pulpit every Sunday.

  Night was already drawing to a close when the floorboards in the hall creaked. I heard cautious footsteps, as if someone didn’t want to be heard. Grandfather was taking great pains not to wake up my mother Kathalina, Aunt Antonia, and me. The footsteps descended the stairs and died out in the interior of the shop. I waited awhile, got dressed, and stole downstairs, full of curiosity. The outside door was open. It was pitch black.

  “Fucking shit,” hissed a voice. “Goddamn crappy weather!” It was Dimitru.

  “Be quiet or you’ll wake up the whole village.”

  “I prayed, Ilja, I mean I really beseeched the Creator to make short work of it and with one puff of his almighty breath sweep away these goddamn clouds. And what does he do when just once a Gypsy asks for something? He sends us this fog from hell. We can forget about hearing the Sputnik in this pea soup.”

  I hid behind the doorjamb and peered outside. Dimitru was right. It had been raining buckets for days, and now the fog had crept down from the mountains. You couldn’t even see the outline of the church steeple. Five muffled strokes of the clock penetrated the night. Ilja and Dimitru looked up at the sky. They cocked their heads, put their hands behind their ears, and listened again. Obviously in vain. Disappointed, the two shuffled back into the shop. They didn’t see me.

  “Ilja, I’m wondering if it wouldn’t make sense to go back to bed for a while,” said Dimitru.

  “It does make sense.”

  Then the Gypsy’s gaze fell on the tin funnel my grandfather always used to pour the sunflower oil delivered in canisters from Walachia into the bottles the village housewives brought.

  “Man, Ilja, that’s it! Your funnel. We’ll use it as a megaphone, only in reverse. You’ve heard of the principle of the concentration of sound waves—sonatus concentrates or something like that? We can use it to capture even the faintest hint of a noise.”

  The two went back outside and took turns sticking the tin funnel first into their left ear and then their right, hoping to amplify the sound. For a good quarter of an hour they swiveled their heads in all directions.

  When at last I cleared my throat and wished them good morning, they gave it up.

  “So, Dimitru, you’re going to let Sputnik steal your sanity?” I ribbed him.

  “Go ahead and laugh, Pavel. Blessed are those who neither see nor hear but still believe. Let me assure you, it’s beeping. Evidentamente. We just can’t hear it.”

  “No wonder,” I pretended to be sympathetic. “The November fog. It swallows everything up and you can’t hear a thing. Not the calves bleating, not even the cocks crowing. To say nothing of Sputnik, it’s so far away. Beyond the pull of gravity, if I’ve got it right.”

  “Good thinking, Pavel! You’re right, when it’s foggy the Sputnik’s not worth much. The Supreme Comrade didn’t think of that. Between you and me and in the cold light of day, Stalin was pretty much of an idiot. But don’t spread it around. That can get you into trouble nowadays. And now, forgive me, but my bed is calling.”

  Grandfather looked a little sheepish. It made him self-conscious to be caught holding a funnel to his ear out in front of the shop on his fifty-fifth birthday.

  “Pavel, go with Dimitru so he doesn’t break his neck on the way home. You can’t see your hand in front of your face.”

  Out of sorts, I groped my way with Dimitru to the lower end of the village where his people lived. At the doorstep of his cottage he put his hand to his ear again and listened.

  “Give it up, Dimitru. What’s the point?”

  “Sic est. You’re right,” he said, thanked me for my company, and disappeared inside.

  Was it mere coincidence? No idea. But just as I set off back through the village, the roosters began to crow, and across from the Gypsy settlement a weak light shimmered through the fog. For the second time on that early morning I let myself be driven by curiosity. The light was shining from the cottage of Angela Barbulescu, the village schoolteacher. This early in the morning! “Barbu,” as we called her, usually slept till all hours. She seldom showed up for class on time, and once in front of the class, she often stared at us from swollen eyes because the brandy from the previous evening was still having its effect. I left the street and peeked through her window. She was sitting at the kitchen table with a warm wool blanket thrown over her shoulders. Incredible! She was sitting there writing something. She lifted her head from time to time and looked at the ceiling as if seeking the right word. Much more than the fact that Barbu was apparently getting something important down on paper at this ungodly hour, it was her face I found astonishing. In the last few years of school, I had come to think she was disgusting. I never looked at her except with contempt, if not revulsion.

  Yet the Barbu I saw early on the morning of November 6, 1957, was different. She was bright and clear. Beautiful, even. Someday in the not-too-distant future I would understand what was happening in Angela Barbulescu’s cottage that morning, and it would plunge me into the abyss. But how could I have known it in that dreary November dawn?

  Pavel, you’re not going to tell Kathalina about that dumb idea with the funnel, are you? Your mother is not amused by that stuff.”r />
  “I didn’t see anything. Especially not on your birthday. Word of honor.”

  That took a load off Grandfather’s mind, whereupon I shook his hand, wished him happy fifty-fifth, and gave him a package wrapped in shiny red paper.

  As she did every year, my mother (and Granddad’s daughter-in-law) had asked Adamski the mailman to purchase a box of cigars in Kronauburg, the district capital. Ilja unwrapped his present, knowing full well he would soon be holding a wooden box with sixty Caballeros Finos, each thick as his thumb. Sixty cigars were the precise number Grandfather needed for his systematic smoking habits, plotted out for the year ahead. Sixty cigars were exactly enough for one every Sunday, one each for the parish fairs on the Feast of the Assumption, the Feast of the Virgin of Eternal Consolation (the patron saint of Baia Luna), and two or three other holidays. When he added in the birthdays of his closest friends and compensated for the doubling that sometimes occurred when a religious or secular holiday such as All Saints’, Christmas, or the Day of the Republic fell on a Sunday, then the inevitable result was that one final Caballero remained for his birthday, just before he opened the box for the following year.

  Ilja thanked me and, contrary to his customary procedure of smoking only in the evening, decided to allow himself then and there the pleasure of a Cuban, as he called his cigars. He pulled out his last Caballero and lit up. “America”—he sighed and blew a few smoke rings into the air—“America! What a country!”

  Of course, my mother Kathalina and I knew that Ilja’s Cubans had never seen the hold of a transatlantic freighter. The Cyrillic letters on the cigar bands betrayed the fact that the tobacco had been rolled in a Bulgarian factory near Blagoevgrad and probably transported across the Danube on the new Bridge of Friendship between Ruse and Giurgiu in a diesel rig. But Mother’s lips were sealed, leaving her father-in-law with the conviction that Cuba was the most marvelous among the United States of America.

  By the age of five or six, I had already guessed that Granddad could barely read. Up to then I had hung devotedly on his lips when he told me stories or pretended to be reading one from a book. But I began to notice that sometimes he got the plot hopelessly tangled up, mixing up persons, places, and times and very seldom turning the page. Once I started first grade, my suspicions were confirmed. So as not to embarrass Grandfather I didn’t tell anyone about my discovery. And since Ilja could juggle numbers with great facility and my unmarried aunt Antonia, who had set up her digs in the garret upstairs, took care of the bookkeeping for our family’s shop, Ilja’s defect remained for many years hidden from the rest of the village and even from the Gypsy Dimitru.

  My father Nicolai, on the other hand, certainly had no problem reading and writing when still alive. I gathered that from the underlinings and marginal notes he had made, as a young man, in a volume of poetical works by Mihail Eminescu. The only other things of any value he left me were Das Kapital by Karl Marx and a beat-up chess set with the stub of a candle replacing the missing white queen.

  I had no memories of my father. For me, Nicolai Botev was a stranger who existed only in a framed photograph standing in the glass-fronted cabinet in the living room. It showed him as a soldier on leave and a note on the back dated it to December 1942. With his thin cheeks, Nicolai sits next to my mother in a sleigh in front of the snow-covered slope of Cemetery Hill in Baia Luna. I am about one year old and stand between his knees, wrapped in a scarf and with a Kazak cap pulled down over my ears. There was something unsettling about this family photo that always caught my eye. It was Father’s hands. They lay on my shoulders limp and lifeless, incapable of providing support.

  On winter evenings, my mother would take the photo out of the cabinet and sit silently in her chair holding it on her lap. She could sit that way hour after hour until sleep wrote an ethereal smile on her face. She never talked about my father. I think she wanted to hide the fact that she thought about him constantly so I wouldn’t be reminded that he was gone. But his absence seemed quite natural to me. Besides, Grandfather made sure that nobody in the village could complain that I didn’t have enough paternal oversight.

  In the 1950s two hundred and fifty people lived in Baia Luna, distributed among thirty houses. To the southeast rose the Mondberg with the pilgrimage Chapel of the Virgin of Eternal Consolation, to the west the village was bordered by the mighty cliffs of the Carpathians, while the village fields and pastures extended in a northerly direction until one’s gaze was lost in the landscape of the distant Transmontanian hills. Below the Mondberg flowed the Tirnava. After the spring thaw the river became a raging torrent, but in the hot, dry summers the Tirnava shriveled to a thin, foul-smelling trickle, and the fish jumped onto the bank so as not to suffocate. Following the river downstream, one came to a wooden wayside cross in memory of the tragedy that occurred during the blizzard of 1935, and continuing on foot, one could reach the neighboring village of Apoldasch in an hour and a half.

  The ascent of the Mondberg took three hours. Once my legs were strong enough to survive the climb without whining and whimpering, Granddad regularly took me along to the Virgin of Eternal Consolation. As we entered the chapel, we crossed ourselves and presented our compliments to the Mother of God. As a child I always found the Madonna a bit creepy. Her face, carved from red beech centuries ago by a sculptor of manifestly modest talent, was anything but beautiful. The Queen of Heaven stood on a pedestal, and when I looked up at her, I found her expression more tortured than majestic. With files and chisels, the artist had set about his work quite coarsely, so that Mary’s gentleness only touched me on second or third glance. The right foot of the Mother of God peeked out from under her enveloping cloak and trod on a crescent moon. Obviously the sculptor had no sense of proportion. He made Baby Jesus, who sat on the globe with Mary’s protective hand above his head, too small. By contrast, the Madonna’s imposing breasts were too big, as was the crescent moon. Generations of believers interpreted the foot on the crescent as a symbol of the Virgin’s victory over the Turks, who under the sign of the crescent moon had tried by force to turn Europeans into Mussulmen. But which—thanks to the heavenly intervention of the Virgin of Eternal Consolation—they failed to do in Baia Luna.

  After paying our respects to the Mother of God, Grandfather and I sat on the rocks among the juniper bushes. With the stock phrase “Then let’s take a look and see what Kathalina has packed up for us,” Granddad would open his rucksack and take out a thermos of sweet black tea, hard-boiled eggs, tomatoes, bacon, and ham sandwiches. After lunch Ilja stretched out on the warm grass, napped for a half hour, and awoke refreshed. Then we sat awhile longer, gazing out over the countryside.

  If, like the Mother of God (who is known to have ascended bodily into heaven), one could take off from the Mondberg, Grandfather explained, one would at some point settle to earth in America. And he stretched out his arm and pointed in the direction where he thought the skyscrapers of a city he called “Noueeyorka” were located. According to Grandfather, that splendid city would obviously be the only logical goal of such a flight. Dimitru had also assured him it was so and declared that the geographic space between the towns of Baia Luna and Noueeyorka was like an electromagnetic field between positive and negative poles in which one pole without the other would be reduced to a void of nothingness. Seen in this light, the American Noueeyorka owed its very greatness to the existence of Baia Luna. From Grandfather I learned that, thanks to an independent disposition, an American never concerns himself with petty details and on principle always thinks on a gigantic scale. The Americans build the tallest buildings in the world, roll the best cigars, and in honor of the Mother of God erected the most colossal of all statues of the Virgin at the gates of Noueeyorka, surrounded by water on all sides. Mary guarantees the inhabitants of the skyscrapers peace, prosperity, and protection from enemy attack. The burning torch in her hand not only shows the way for ships from all over the world, but the broken chains at her feet also promise new arrivals
freedom from all forms of servitude. That’s why seven beams of light emerge from the crown on her head, each beam bigger than the church steeple of Baia Luna. Dimitru had interpreted the number 7 as Mary’s seven closest confidants, of whom the Lord God, the Son of God, and the Holy Spirit represented the Fields of Heaven, while the four Evangelists were in charge of earthly affairs.

  I couldn’t find a city with the name Noueeyorka on the globe at school, but the story about the giant Madonna and her blazing torch seemed to be true, for at my school-friend Fritz Hofmann’s house I had seen an impressive poster of Mary hanging on the living room wall. I stared at it openmouthed. There she was. I was surprised to find a picture of the Madonna here in the house of the photographer Hofmann, since Fritz and his parents Heinrich and Birta were ethnic Germans with no interest in the Catholic religion and were the only people in the village not to attend Mass. It was also strange that the statue stood not in Noueeyorka but clearly in New York, as one could read on the poster in black and white. Since Herr Hofmann had a photographic studio in the district capital of Kronauburg, it seemed logical to ask if he had taken this impressive picture with his own camera. The only response I got was a gruff “No!”

  Fritz Hofmann and I were the same age, and in the mornings we attended the village school, crammed together in one classroom with sixty boys and girls between the ages of seven and fifteen. There were enough seats for everyone, however, because the Gypsies seldom or never sent their children to school. Angela Barbulescu was the teacher for everyone. At the beginning of the fifties, the Ministry of Education had sent her to Baia Luna from the capital—under compulsion, it was rumored, although the reasons for this measure remained obscure. I had overheard the men in Grandfather’s tavern say that she used to be quite good-looking and took care to conceal her tendency to drink too much. But at some point, she’d lost all sense of shame. The village women, however, maintained that Barbu could never have lost her feel for when the bounds of decency had been overstepped, since she’d never had a woman’s natural instinct for propriety in the first place. After all, when she went up to the altar to receive the Body of the Lord on her first Sunday in the village, everybody at Mass had seen her hands. Her fingernails were painted a garish blood red. Kora Konstantin even reported that the obscene trollop had prevented her from listening to the priest’s words in the proper spirit of devotion. Kora put into circulation that Barbu had something called a “nimmfomaniac” character defect and had been banished to the mountains to cure this inclination. I hadn’t heard any gossip about her for a long time, however. Angela Barbulescu’s nail polish had cracked and peeled. And besides, the wives and mothers behind their curtains gave her no chance to go more than three steps unobserved.