The Madonna on the Moon (32 page)

“It wasn’t Dimitru,” Ilja countered. “He’s no traitor. Besides, there was nothing for him to betray. By the end of the evening he didn’t know what was going
on because he was dead drunk. He fell down the steps outside, and I think he broke a couple ribs. Pavel had to drag him home.”

“But who’s left as an informant? I’ll kill the bastard.” Koch was boiling mad.

I knocked my glass over. The
zuika
ran across the table. All eyes turned to me.

“There was somebody else.” I hesitated a moment, but it was too late to take it back. “There was somebody else here that evening besides Pater Johannes, Dimitru, Grandfather,
and me: Fritz Hofmann!”

For two or three heartbeats the men were frozen and speechless. Not because they lacked the words. I guessed there were too many thoughts pushing forward. A thousand images raced through their
heads. The enormous tension of the previous hours, days, even weeks congealed in a single name. Fritz Hofmann! A schoolkid!

Then they all started talking at once. Everyone had a stone to contribute to the mosaic of a family of traitors they were putting together. Was it an accident that only a week after Johannes
Baptiste’s murder a German truck turned up in the village and the Hofmanns left Baia Luna for good? Hadn’t the priest reprimanded the boy in front of all the men in Ilja Botev’s
tavern as the know-it-all Hofmanns’ Fritzy. Couldn’t you just see the cold fury in the kid’s face after that dressing-down? Of course, a schoolboy scarcely could have access to
the means of converting his thirst for revenge into a deed. But what about his father? Heinrich Hofmann, who had nothing but contempt for everything that happened in the village. The art
photographer. The divorced art photographer. Who wanted no truck with the Good Lord. And had money. Drove a big Italian motorcycle. And didn’t his wife have an electric stove? The fancy-dancy
Herr Hofmann! He never said hello, and Ilja’s tavern wasn’t good enough for him, and he preferred the high society in the city. He was on intimate terms with that Dr. Stephanescu, the
top collectivist in the whole Kronauburg District. Fritz and Heinrich Hofmann were obviously both traitors, two peas in a pod. Along with the party bigwigs. They sent the butchers to our village to
make an example of Johannes, the old priest who followed the word of God and not the laws of the temporal authorities.

I had scared myself. I sensed the hidden power I could exercise. With the mere naming of a name I had given the course of things a new direction. My direction. The reaction unleashed by the name
Fritz Hofmann had hurled me into adulthood. Now my voice carried weight. Now the men had accepted me into their circle. I wasn’t a boy anymore. Many years later I would understand it was
guilt that had put out the last spark of my childhood soul. When I said the name of my former schoolmate and friend, I became guilty. Consciously, intentionally, and calculatedly. If Fritz Hofmann
wouldn’t atone for the deed he had committed, then he would have to atone for a deed he certainly could not have committed.

Fritz had blown out the Eternal Flame. He had defiled the church, and I had been cursed by Johannes Baptiste for the deed. Go to hell, the priest had condemned me. When he was murdered, he died
in the mistaken belief that I, Pavel Botev, had sullied myself with the shame of a sacrilegious act, while the imbecilic fans of Kora Konstantin thought Angela Barbulescu was behind all of this
madness. Only Fritz could have and should have washed the teacher clean of this infamy, but instead of accepting responsibility for his deed he had scrammed, taken off for Germany. Fritz Hofmann
had abandoned me, left me alone with the extinguished lamp in the church, with all the madness in the village, and with the knowledge of his father’s swinish activities. Under my mattress was
the photo of a naked woman in a sunflower dress, a woman by the name of Alexa, between whose thighs Stefan Stephanescu was squirting a bottle of champagne. Photographed by Heinrich Hofmann.
Wasn’t it more than just compensation if the men in the taproom blamed Fritz and his overbearing father for a betrayal they certainly hadn’t committed?

I reached for my pack of cigarettes and offered the men Carpatis. Petre, old Brancusi, and the shepherd took one. Grandfather neglected to give me a disapproving look. I was grown up. The men
had accepted me as one of their own. But I didn’t really belong. There was no place left for me in Baia Luna, in this disrupted, divided village. Kora Konstantin’s crowd disgusted me;
the men in the taproom were as honest as they were clueless. Their anger at the betrayal of Johannes Baptiste was genuine, but it had no outlet. Fritz Hofmann was gone, his father unreachable and
protected by his political connections. No one could get at them. Sure, in a burst of fury Karl Koch had sworn to take revenge on the high-class Hofmann, and the impulsive Petre Petrov talked big
about going to Kronauburg when the snow melted to throw a couple Molotov cocktails into a certain well-known photography studio. But in the foreseeable future, their anger would dissipate and give
way first to bitter resentment and finally to an oppressive feeling of helplessness.

And the real guilty party?

I was lonely and alone and had no other choice but to hang on and wait things out until I could avenge Angela Barbulescu. She was dead and had not taken the party secretary with her to hell.
What would happen with that vicious man I was supposed to destroy? The teacher had made me into her instrument, and I was ready for my crusade, ready for a battle, though I didn’t know when,
where, or with what weapons it would be fought. The only indisputable thing was that I had to go to Kronauburg as soon as the snow had melted.

Chapter Nine

Spring kept us waiting. Not until mid-May of ’58 did nature concede that its habitual rhythms were reliable. Maple, ash, and beech finally started bursting with buds,
crocus and narcissus broke from the soil, swifts flitted through the sky, and on the village pastures the first lambs were bleating, like every year. The farmers went into the fields with their
horses, harrows, and plows to prepare them for sowing while the Gypsies stood on the banks of the Tirnava for hours on end, staring at the roaring flood and praying the rising water would spare
their dwellings again this year. Dimitru had barricaded himself in the library. I thought he was probably still groping in the fog of his speculations, uncertain about the corporeal Assumption of
Mary the Mother of God into heaven.

It pained Grandfather Ilja deeply that in his naïveté he had turned Dimitru into a witness for the frightful Kora Konstantin, and he made all sorts of attempts to revive their former
friendship. Sometimes he paid penitential visits to the library with a bottle of schnapps; sometimes he brought the Gypsy a Cuban from Bulgaria (thereby completely disrupting the rhythm of his own
smoking habits). My aunt Antonia had understood how much her father was tortured by the loss of his friend and even agreed without complaint when Granddad wanted to take her last box of nougats to
Dimitru. The latter accepted the gifts but uttered not a word and immediately bent over his books again, which misled Grandfather into assuming the Gypsy had broken with him forever.

There was one exception to all the character flaws attributed to the Blacks in our country. Not even the most prejudiced contemporaries could accuse the Gypsies of holding a grudge or being
vengeful. Even if Grandfather had disqualified himself from being Dimitru’s ally in his historic mission, the Gypsy had long since silently forgiven Ilja, as he told me in confidence years
afterward.

So I’m going to spring forward to April 12, 1961. I remember the date exactly because on that day, Yury Alekseyevich Gagarin became the first man to float weightlessly in space. On that
day, Dimitru Carolea Gabor broke the silence that had lasted for years and confided his thoughts to me in a quiet hour. At the time I was sure his audacious, even foolhardy theories were hopelessly
off course. Today, in my old age, I no longer presume to judge them.

“Pavel,” he said, “there was no one left and I had to shoulder the cross of loneliness by myself. No one else in the village was or is even close to being in a position to
grasp
in principio
the world historical threat posed by the Soviet rockets. It was too much even for your good grandfather Ilja. He is incapable of calculating the danger. And it was my
own
error fatal
to include my friend on my mission to rescue Mary the Mother of God. Ilja doesn’t have the strategies of deceit at his disposal. With all due respect for his
honesty—it wasn’t what was called for against that idiot Konstantin and her sanctimonious crew. And Ilja talked too much. But it’s
mea culpa maxima
. He talked too much
because I told him too much. And so I catapitulated. I decided to keep still. And I made a vow. Not one word would pass my lips until the day my search for knowledge was crowned with success,
namely, with the answer to the question: What happened to Mary after the Assumption?

“Remember, Pavel, even Papa Baptiste had warned that ascensions are reserved for the risen Christ and his Mother. And now the Soviets have the presumption to imitate them. President
Khrushchev has promised a moon landing, and his best rocket builder is supposed to make it happen. That hubristical Korolev is the only one who can do it. He’s a cunning master engineer, well
read and crafty. A Marxist! That’s why I’ve been combing through the collected works of Karl Marx in the library. I was hoping to find firsthand a clandestine reference to resurrection
and ascension. But forget it, Pavel, you won’t find anything useful. I intended to interrogate the works of Lenin with the same
intentio,
but then I made a discovery. I stumbled upon
a book I urged you to read years ago, but you didn’t listen to me. It was lying open at the bottom of one of my many piles. When it looked up at me, I remembered Papa Baptiste once telling
me, ‘Forget the Marxists, Dimitru! If you want to fight your way through the storms of religious doubt, read Nietzsches’ Friedrich.’

“So I reread the story I’d studied a dozen times before. In the middle of the day a madman runs around with a lamp in his hand seeking God. But he doesn’t find him. And then he
goes and claims we’ve killed God. The guy rightly remarks that the deed of killing God was too great for mankind, who ever since (as I can verificize myself) has been stumbling through
eternal nothingness in the cold of night. But can we even conceive of nothingness? Who would be able to stand it? Doesn’t it have to be overcome? ‘Must we not ourselves become
gods?’ That’s the question, Pavel Botev! Keep it in mind. Nietzsche’s crazy guy asked the question, but now it’s going to be answered. And in the affirmative. By Korolev.
Become gods ourselves! Be God! Engineer Number One only has the works of Marx in his bookcase to keep the comrades happy. But believe me, Pavel, Korolev’s read Nietzsche. That’s why he
knew that the madman with the lamp was ahead of his time. His message came too soon. People were not ready for the news of God’s death, but now they are. The Russkies’ Sputnik
verificizes that gravity can be overcome.

“To become gods ourselves! Fly to the stars! Find a home in the sky! Weightlessly! Relieved of the banalities of this vale of tears! That’s it, Pavel! Korolev is the heir apparent of
Daedalus and Icarus, only much craftier. Those two Greeks were trapped in the labyrinth of the tyrant Minos, a labyrinth Daedalus himself had so cleverly constructed. Unfortunately, in old age the
architect had forgotten where the exit was, but he hadn’t yet lost his ingenuity. Don’t forget, Pavel, when you’re stuck and can’t move right or left, forward or back, the
only direction is up. Daedalus loses no time building wings for himself and his son. So far so good. His only mistake is using wax to hold them together, the idiot. And Icarus is so impetuous
he’s not satisfied to escape from the labyrinth, he wants to fly up to heaven. Flies higher and higher, too close to the sun. As you can easily imagine the wax melts and wham! The guy falls
into the sea like a stone.

“Korolev’s not that dense. His flying machines are solid work. The test Sputniks worked. The goal of the Project is evidentical. To become gods ourselves! Korolev is the new Icarus.
You understand, Pavel? That big-mustache Nietzsche is the challenge. Papa Baptiste was right as always. But look around the village. People listen to the widow Konstantin, and their memories of
Papa Baptiste are fading. No gravestone, no remembrance. And I’ll bet you, Pavel, the same causalities are behind the disappearance of his corpse and the disappearance of the Virgin of
Eternal Consolation.”

W
ith the late spring of ’58, life also returned to Baia Luna. The farmers brought out their seeds, the women gossiped by the laundry troughs, and
parents hoped the district administration would send a new teacher to Baia Luna soon.

Meanwhile, our family was in poor spirits. Grandfather Ilja was as miserable as a drowned cat. He could hardly get up in the morning, was grouchy all day, and at night tossed restlessly in his
bed. In the evening, patrons in the taproom encountered a touchy and grumpy host who slammed the bottles onto the tables and aside from a few mumbled sentence fragments didn’t utter a single
friendly word. The dispute with Dimitru was harder on him than he liked to admit. Since Kora’s big moment in the church, the Gypsy hadn’t spoken a word to Ilja. Grandfather consoled
himself for the painful loss of his friend by drinking a glass in the morning to meet the day with a certain measure of indifference. Since the effect of the
zuika
wore off in ever-shorter
intervals and his foul mood increased conversely, he found it necessary to maintain his false equanimity with further glasses.