The Madonna on the Moon (20 page)

“Unbelievable!” I exclaimed. All the enmity between Fritz and me melted away. Instead I felt a bond of intimacy I never would have thought possible. “And now I’m going to
tell you something. Do you know who that woman is?”

“How would I know? You can’t see her face. Maybe a streetwalker or something. You know what? My old man took more like this. They were in one of the crates, well hidden among piles
of old wedding portraits. Only young women in the pictures. All pretty and all blond. I’m telling you, you can see everything. Really hard core. All the men are older. What do you think would
happen if this stuff got out? I looked through all the photos, but this is the only one you can recognize Stephanescu on.”

“That’s Barbu lying there.”

Fritz caught his breath. “You’re crazy! How do you know? You can’t see anything . . . I mean, her face.”

“I just know it is. A hundred percent guaranteed, believe me. But I don’t have time to explain.”

“Holy shit,” groaned Fritz. “I never understood what Father meant a couple months ago. One weekend he asked me how school was going, and I told him how Barbu was always
blabbering about the Paris of the East and how civilized it was and all. Father just said the teacher should teach us something useful instead of digging up the past or he would make her life a
hell. Pavel, I’m sure there’s something really nasty going on here, but I don’t know what. And I’m leaving for Germany soon.”

“You always said you were going to move to Kronauburg. Is it because of the dirty pictures you don’t want to live with your father?”

“I decided long ago I didn’t want anything to do with my father.”

“But why? I always thought you two got along well. You both swear by that Nietzsche guy.”

Fritz stood up and unbuckled his belt. When he dropped his pants I bit my lip so as not to cry out in anger. His thighs were covered with welts, some blue-violet, some black. He showed me his
scarred backside.

“The last beating I owe to those party verses. The old man didn’t like me improving on that stupid poem.”

Instantly I grasped why Fritz had stopped participating in gym class. While my classmates and I were still being sent off to school in short pants, I had secretly envied Fritz as the only
student in Baia Luna who wore long pants even in the summer. His father Heinrich had bought them at a haberdasher’s in Kronauburg. What made Fritz so grown up in my eyes did nothing more than
conceal the evidence of his father’s abuse. I thought of what my teacher Angela Barbulescu had called after me as I stormed out of her cottage: “Pavel, things are different than they
seem.”

“Fritz! Your mother’s waiting for you!” Kathalina called up the stairs.

“I have to go, Pavel. Keep the photo and do something with it. Put some stones in the road of those scumbags.”

I hid the picture under my mattress. Birta was waiting in the tavern. I went outside with Grandfather and my mother to say good-bye to Fritz and Frau Hofmann. The Mercedes stood there with its
motor running. Parked beside it was Herr Hofmann’s motorcycle with two crates strapped to the rear seat. Herr Hofmann walked over to his son and put out his hand. Fritz put his hands in his
pockets.

“See that you make something of yourself in Germany.” Hofmann put on his helmet and mounted his bike without a second glance at his wife and Fritz. Birta was so embarrassed she
didn’t say a word. She just shook our hands.

“Good luck,” said Fritz. “Too bad I have to go. And about that thing with the light in the church: I’m really sorry if you got into trouble for that. But what difference
does it make if there’s a little lamp burning in this Podunk or not?”

As I went back inside, it started snowing again. The flakes drifted to earth, heavy and slow. The calendar showed Friday, November 15, 1957. Winter had definitely arrived. Baia Luna was facing
long months when the village would drowse away in deepest isolation. With so much snow no one could get out of Baia Luna and no one could get in. But there was also something soothing about the
loneliness. The security officer Raducanu still hadn’t come to pick up the list of names. Until spring Karl Koch would be spared the sight of the pretty boy.

N
ovember 6, A. Barbu, library key. Return!!!”

I put the note in my pants pocket. I told my mother I was bored and I was going to the rectory library to see if Dimitru could recommend a book to me.

“You want to borrow a book?” asked my mother in astonishment.

Even Grandfather, dozing behind the counter in the absence of customers, woke up. “Don’t let Dimitru pawn off any trash on you.” He handed me a bottle of
zuika.
“Books won’t warm you up. Tell Dimitru not to drink the bottle all at once, and he should show his face sometime.”

I pressed the bell at the rectory, but it didn’t ring. However, since Simenov the blacksmith had done such a thorough job of breaking the lock, it was easy to push the door open. I could
hear wild ranting and raving from the library. At first I thought Dimitru was arguing with someone from his tribe, but then I realized he was alone and quarreling with himself. The noisy Gypsy
didn’t hear me knocking. I pushed down the latch. As I crossed the threshold I instantly had to duck to avoid being hit by a folio.

I was shocked. Dimitru’s forehead was wrapped in cloth rags, since he’d beaten it bloody against the door when he saw the murdered Papa Baptiste. With his pathetic bandage he was the
timeless image of a defeated soldier after a lost battle. Then he saw me.

“Oh my goodness! What an honor, what joy, what happiness! Is it really you, Pavel? Come to the place of intellect?”

I couldn’t fend off Dimitru’s hugs and noisy kisses. I freed myself from his embrace, and he picked up the tome he had just hurled across the room. He rapped his knuckles on the
leather binding. “This here is the handbook of the universe. I tell you, Pavel, the cryptological language of these researchers of the heavens will be the death of me yet. Formulas as long as
your arm, gravitational laws, centrifugal rotations, parabolic accelerations. Everything multiplied by pi. Nothing but uneven numbers and mathematical horrors.”

“Is that why you’re so angry? You’re letting this shopworn old doorstop about the universe get you all steamed up?”

Dimitru put his hand on the bandage. “A hothead can always find a reason to get hot. As if a yummy apple in Eden can help it if that idiot Eve takes a bite. No, Pavel, those astronomical
bureaucrats aren’t driving me crazy with their calculations. It’s just, it’s just . . .” Dimitru rubbed his eyes so he wouldn’t cry. “It’s just that I miss
Papa Baptiste so much. He’s gone. I’ll never be able to ask his advice again. Never, you understand?”

Dimitru finally calmed down. I got up the courage to ask him if his problem had anything to do with the beeping Sputnik and the Assumption of Mary the Mother of God.

“Absolutely!” Dimitru’s eyes shone like a child’s who feels himself understood. Then he sang the praises of Papa Baptiste, extolled the wisdom and foresight snatched from
humanity in general and the Baia Lunians in particular by those cowardly killers. He complained that the burden of knowledge now rested solely on the weak shoulders of a single poor Gypsy.

“But what is the problem?” I asked earnestly. “How would Pater Johannes help you out of your dead end?”

“That’s the exact word, my boy. Even better: a double dead end. There’s no going forward, and the way back is blocked, too. And you know where the dead end ends?”

“No idea.”

“I’ll tell you: the dead end of my research ends far away. More precisely, I’m stuck somewhere between heaven and earth.”

“In outer space? Up in the sky?” I didn’t understand. “Where did you get such an idea?”

“Listen: let’s assume that the corporeal Assumption of Mary the Mother of God is a fact. Vatican dogma, infallibly proclaimed by Pope Pius, and, despite that, completely correct.
With me so far?”

“Yes.”

“Good. Rising bodily from the dead isn’t a matter of just hopping on the
spiritus sanctus
and zooming into the firmament. Rising bodily from the dead—for a person,
especially a woman (and after all, that’s what our Mother of Jesus was)—means the whole of you goes up to heaven, thighs, buttocks, breasts, and all.”

“Sounds logical,” I agreed. “So where are they? I mean, where’s the entire Mary?”

“That’s the sixty-four-thousand-dollar question I’ve been working on, and I may be on the brink of a decisive breakthrough.”

“What do you mean? Haven’t you had a clue up to now? Didn’t you know where the Mother of God was?”

“Do you think I’m an idiot? Of course I had a clue. But a clue doesn’t count. What counts is proof. I’ve been collecting evidence, making hypotheses, and counting on the
power of logic. ‘Stick to facticities!’ That’s what Papa Baptiste always advised, not once, but a thousand times. And that’s what I stick to. Fact is, the Russians want to
go to the moon. Determined to. But that’s suspicious. More than suspicious, I’d say. The Russian president promised his people not vodka and pork chops but a moon flight. Preferably on
the anniversary of the Revolution. The Bolsheviks aren’t about to mount such a gigantic operation with their rockets just to look at some old rocks on the moon and put up a pathetic flag that
can’t even flutter. Not a fart’s worth of wind up there, you know.” And Dimitru rapped on the handbook for the far reaches of the universe again. “It’s all in here.
You just have to replace the word ‘atmosphere’ with ‘intestinal wind’ to more or less understand it all.”

“You mean to say that the Russkies are such idiots they’d fly to the moon just to look for Mary? You believe that nonsense that Johannes Baptiste said? He thought the Russkies were
looking for the Lord God in outer space, too.”

“But what if it’s not nonsense, Pavel? What then?”

“Assuming the pope is right and Mary literally rose up to heaven, why would she land on the moon? She could just as well be God knows where—on Mars or Venus. Or sometimes in one
place, sometimes in another, floating weightlessly among the stars.”

Dimitru acted insulted. “You didn’t have enough schooling, Pavel. You don’t understand the essence of dialectical deduction. But I’ll explain it to you. Thesis: Mary is
on the moon. Antithesis: Mary is not on the moon. And now for the
conclusio
. . . but that’s the problem. There isn’t one, at least not as long as the truth of the thesis has
not been proven by the verification method.”

I nodded. “I sort of get it.”

“Assuming—and that’s exactly what I mean:
assuming
—the thesis is true and Mary is literally on the moon or anywhere else in space, what do you think would
happen, Pavel, if Korolev’s cosmonauts discover where the Madonna is and get their sights on her? It doesn’t take much imagination to know. Pavel, do you seriously believe those
atheists would say, ‘Oh, what a surprise, dear Mother of God! Very sorry we made a mistake. Please forgive us that we didn’t believe in you. Just a misunderstanding.’”

“Don’t get mad, Dimitru, but I’m afraid you’ve made a pretty big error somewhere in your brain.”

Dimitru crumbled like a dry leaf. “Why do you say that, Pavel? That’s exactly what makes me so desperate. An erroneous deduction, one tiny fohpaw, and whoops! Your logic is down the
drain. A locomotive’s racing through my brain. Will it reach its goal? Has it gone off the tracks? But where? A thinker has to see with a thousand eyes, look at all sides of the coin, solicit
contradictory opinions, test, weigh, test again, up to the bitter end of the
conclusio correcto
. Wrong turns are lurking everywhere. And there’s only one person on earth who could
keep me from taking those false turns. Just one, and he’s dead! And I don’t even know where his earthly remains are. Why wasn’t I in the rectory when the murderers came? Why was
Papa Baptiste alone with Fernanda? Why didn’t he call for me? They could gladly have assassinated me. I’m just a Gypsy. But not the good Papa Baptiste. Oh, how I miss you, Papa
Baptiste! How I miss your wise advice! You must know, Pavel, that in all heavenly matters, no one could put one over on Papa. No one! What have you got there under your coat, by the way?”

I took out the bottle of
zuika.
“Best regards from Granddad.”

Dimitru spread his arms and made to launch another attack of affection, which I escaped with a quick sidestep, so that he ended up kissing the bottle instead. “The world,” he
soulfully declared, “isn’t on the brink of the abyss just yet.” Then he pulled out the cork, threw it into the corner, and drank.

Outside of school I hardly read anything at all, and I hadn’t entered the library intending to change. My curiosity was not for all those books standing on the shelves but only for the
single, ominous book that my investigation still needed. But I was unsure if this was the right time to ask Dimitru which book the teacher Angela Barbulescu had borrowed from the library. Instead
of taking Baptiste’s note from my pocket, I asked, “Dimitru, do you have the writings of a certain Nietzsche in your library?”

The Gypsy jumped up as if stung by a hornet. His hand flew from forehead to chest to shoulders and back as he crossed himself repeatedly. He tipped up the
zuika
and glugged half the
bottle at one go. “That’s nothing for a boy of your age! If you ask to read his lucubrations I’m compelled to refuse permission in my capacity as director of the
library.”

I counterattacked. “You’re just scared, Dimitru. You don’t want me to read that God is dead. You’re afraid that that Nietzsche told the truth. Because if God is dead all
your hypotheses are nonsense. Then there’s no Mary in the sky. Am I right?”

He closed his eyes and then stared fixedly at the ceiling. I regretted attacking Dimitru so hard-heartedly. It seemed like an eternity until the Gypsy gave an almost imperceptible nod. Then he
opened his eyes and tore off his bandage. His blood-encrusted forehead shocked me, and then he uttered the most deliberate sentences I had ever heard from Dimitru Carolea Gabor.

“We come from God and we return to God. Alpha and omega, the beginning and the end. I would never have dared to doubt that, Pavel. Never. Not until I saw Papa Baptiste, saw that old man on
a chair and so much, so much blood. There was no more heaven. Only earth, nothing but earth. Dust to dust without beginning or end. Since then I’ve been afraid, Pavel. Yes, you’re
right, I’m afraid. Not of the devil and not of that Lupu Raducanu and his gang of thugs that everyone in the village fears. I’m afraid that we come from the void and return to the
void.”