The Madonna on the Moon (36 page)

“Would the gentlemen care for a table by the window?” A waiter had materialized out of nowhere. He was wearing tails and had a white towel draped casually over his left arm. I
thought at once of what my teacher used to tell us about the Paris of the East. As far as the achievements of civilized culture were concerned, Kronauburg certainly couldn’t hold a candle to
the capital, but at least it could provide a foretaste.

“The window wouldn’t be bad,” I answered and saw myself straightening my shoulders and jutting my chin out a bit. Like on my new ID picture.

“If the gentlemen would please follow me.”

Grandfather had already seated himself, but I allowed the waiter to pull out a chair for me. While we contemplated the table with its starched white tablecloth on which an impressive array of
plates, glasses, and small bowls already awaited us, I tried not to show how impressed I was. As a barroom gofer, of course, I was not unfamiliar with the gastronomic profession, but the
painstaking accuracy with which these knives, forks, and spoons large and small had been placed next to napkins folded into towering pyramids was something else entirely. There was even a vase of
red roses in the middle of the table.

Ilja raised no objection when I took out a pack of cigarettes. The waiter immediately stepped forward and gave me a light.

“What’ve you got to eat?” asked Grandfather.

“The gentlemen would like to see the menu? At your service!”

“Yes, please,” I replied before Granddad could say something else embarrassing and betray our humble origins. In a flash the waiter was back at our table. He opened the menus and
handed them to us. Then he stood there waiting for our order. The guy made me nervous.

“We need a little time.” I again assumed the energetic expression and jutting chin Irina had taught me. It worked. The waiter silently withdrew across the blue carpet. In elaborate
typefaces, the menu itemized suspicious-sounding dishes and dinners of several courses. In this establishment, there were culinary curiosities that apparently occupied the plate not
with
but
à la
something else, like “artichokes à la vinaigrette,” which Grandfather was unable to imagine as something to eat. In addition, the prices were positively
astronomical. But on the last page, under “Rustic Treasures from Our Folk Cuisine,” we discovered the kind of thing our taste buds were longing for. Although the prices were still
lordly, they weren’t dizzyingly high. We motioned the waiter over, and Granddad ordered stuffed cabbage, pork chops, boiled potatoes, and sour tripe soup as an appetizer. “Same for him,
and don’t be stingy with the portions.” The waiter suggested a draft beer with our order, which delighted Grandfather, since in our tavern we as good as never had any beer. I ordered a
mineral water. I feared alcohol would make me sleepy, and I needed a clear head for the night to come.

Although Ilja was licking his lips after the meal and ordered another beer, he was still griping that Kathalina cooked better, but for a town meal it was not bad at all. I, on the other hand,
insisted I had never dined so well in my life. As the waiter was removing our empty plates, he asked if the gentlemen would care for a digestif or an espresso, and now at last I could see how heavy
and coarse and rude life in Baia Luna—where there was only one kind of glass for whatever you drank—must appear to someone from the city. Grandfather, who was acquiring a taste for
beer, ordered another pilsner. “You won’t find better service than here anytime soon, Granddad. Let me treat you to something good,” I said patronizingly and ordered him a double
konjaki
Napoleon. He hadn’t the foggiest what my real motivation was. A tipsy Grandfather falling fast asleep would be useful to me. I could slip out of our hotel room unnoticed.

The
konjaki
was served in a large snifter. I was familiar with such glasses: Stefan Stephanescu had been holding one at the birthday party of young Dr. Florian Pauker while he flirted
with the hopelessly love-struck Angela Barbulescu. That was the very moment Heinrich Hofmann had pressed the shutter release. The proof of whom the woman in the sunflower dress was about to kiss
had gone up in smoke in the teacher’s living room. But that didn’t mean the possibility of proving it was lost forever. From Irina Lupescu I had learned a bit more about Heinrich
Hofmann. If anything in the world was sacred to the photographer, it was the negatives in his archive.

Grandfather yawned. The effects of the alcohol were showing. When the waiter called for last orders shortly before nine, Grandfather handed me his wallet and mumbled that I should pay up. Since
I had no idea it was customary to leave a tip, all I got from the waiter was a surly “Good night,” and he didn’t bother to escort us to the door.

We climbed the stairs to our room on the sixth floor. To take advantage of the lovely opportunity, Granddad decided to have a short tub bath before going to bed. I lay down on my bed, resigned
to wait.

As the clock in Saint Paul’s Cathedral struck twelve, I was tying my shoes. Grandfather’s breathing was even and deep. He was sound asleep. I put the room key into my pocket and
pulled the door shut behind me. There was a night-light glowing in the hallway, and the carpeting on the stairs swallowed the sound of my steps. The night doorman was asleep on a chair by the
entrance, his chin on his chest. I pushed the door, but it was locked. I shook the night porter awake.

“What’s wrong?” The man jumped to his feet. “Nothing’s going on out there. Everything’s closed.”

“I can’t sleep,” I answered and gave a little cough. “It’s my damn asthma. When you’re from the mountains, town air always bothers you. I need to take a walk
to make myself tired.”

“I know what you mean,” the night porter replied sleepily. “I’m from the Schweisch Valley. The air’s better there.” He unlocked the door. “I’ll
leave the door open and the key in the lock. When you come back, turn it twice in the lock. Just don’t make any noise and wake me up again with a lot of banging around.”

The streetlights on the market square had been turned off, but I could orient myself well enough by the moon shining in a cloudless sky. I looked around. No light on in any of the buildings.
Even what I guessed were the windows of the police station were all dark. I strolled leisurely past Hofmann’s photography studio. I was worried that the airshaft in the back courtyard could
be reached only from a street above the market. To my relief, however, I discovered a narrow alley a few yards to the right of Hofmann’s display windows. I struck a few matches, went down it,
and stopped before a door with a dozen doorbells and nameplates. The door wasn’t latched tight, and I entered a foyer from which a passageway led out to the dark rear courtyard. I listened
for a moment, but everything was still. Then I felt my way forward. On my left was the side of the building in which I guessed were the rooms of Hofmann’s photo shop. I stepped on a metal
grate. Beneath it there was an airshaft going down to the basement. I bent down to remove the grate. I could move it a little but couldn’t lift it off. The brief flicker of one of my matches
revealed that it would be impossible to get in that way. The grate was secured from below with a chain and padlock. I continued along the side of the building for two or three yards, then I was
brought up short when my right foot found nothing to support it. It was a second airshaft. I lay on the ground, reached down into it, and felt a window. I pushed against it, and it swung open into
the room. I guessed the depth of the shaft to be about a yard at most. I carefully lowered myself into it, pushed aside the black curtain, and found myself in Hofmann’s darkroom. Slowly I
groped my way to the door, felt for the switch above the lintel, and turned on the light. On the cutting table lay a pair of scissors and the remains of the photo paper on which Irina had printed
our pass pictures. I opened the darkroom door, stepped into the basement hallway, and turned on the ceiling light. Heinrich Hofmann’s holy of holies, the archive of negatives, was in the next
room, Irina had said. I spied the iron door right away, pushed down the latch, and pulled. Nothing happened. I threw all my weight against the door, jiggled and tugged at the heavy latch until
there could be no doubt: I would never get into the archive without a key. I was enormously frustrated. I should have thought of this before. If the negatives and pictures I hoped to find were in
fact concealed behind this door, then Heinrich Hofmann alone would have access to it. I was certain he wouldn’t leave the key hanging from a hook somewhere in plain sight.

I had rushed blindly into my crusade. What made me think my opponents would fail to observe the elementary rules of their evil game: secrecy and caution? The only thing left for me to do was
rummage through the innumerable cardboard boxes stacked to the basement ceiling on the uneven shelves that lined the corridor. I pulled out a carton at random:
CODARCEA WEDD.,
KRONAUBURG 17.05.56
was written on the lid with a thick black crayon. I opened the box. Inside were wedding pictures. Another wedded couple emerged from
GHERGHEL WEDD.,
KRONAUBURG 29.05.56,
a pimply-faced groom and a bride you could have taken for his mother. In the carton
ILIESCU WEDD. ANN., KRONAUBURG 04.10.55
, an elderly couple
had obviously posed for the camera on the occasion of their fiftieth anniversary. Under
GEORGESCU-BUZAU WEDD., SCHWEISCH VALLEY
,
28.04.57
, the viewer
could not help noticing that the betrothed of the very young groom with a tortured smile on his face had a big belly under her wedding dress.

I cleared away entire piles of cartons in order to at least spot-check the boxes at the bottom that had probably not been opened since the forties. But I didn’t find anything but grooms
staring straight into the camera while the brides were usually in profile, gazing up at their betrothed. Otherwise just parents of the bride, bridesmaids holding bouquets, children with baskets of
flowers, large and small wedding parties with now and then a reception banquet or brides dancing with their fathers. And scattered everywhere among the wedding pictures, photos of party comrades
and Heroes of Labor having medals pinned on them.

At the end of two hours all I had to show was the knowledge that Heinrich Hofmann demanded strict orderliness from his female employees. They were required to enter names, places, and dates on
every cardboard box. I could have kept looking until the following evening; here in this corridor I was not going to find any evidence that the partners in crime Hofmann and Stephanescu used
pornographic photos to silence people. Or make them talk. Or make them do whatever.

“I let him take pictures of me.” For a fee
. Angela Barbulescu had recorded Alexa’s sentence in her diary. Back in those days, in the capital, her former friend had
hinted that some men were ready to pay a lot of money to see such pictures. And some were willing to pay even more so that no one would see them. Alexa
spread her legs
and let them take
pictures, as Stephanescu had put it. Somewhere there were some photos like that of Angela. All those years in Baia Luna she had been terrified someone would slip them to the priest Johannes
Baptiste. All those years, fear had kept her lips sealed. Heinrich Hofmann had shot the photos in the office of a doctor who had aborted the baby in her womb. Whatever they were like, my former
teacher had not allowed them to be taken voluntarily. They had done something to her she didn’t want done.

I sat down on a canister full of used lab chemicals. I had left traces in this corridor. Too many traces. Tomorrow morning at the latest, Irina Lupescu would discover that someone had broken in.
Dejectedly, I lit up a Carpati. I imagined the doorbells jingling at this moment, and Irina descending the basement stairs in her clattering heels. My dear friend Pavel, she would say with a smile,
here’s the key to the negatives. Now Hofmann is finally going to get what he deserves. And that swine Stephanescu, too. I’ve canceled my engagement. I can’t stand the sight of
that Lupu guy. You and I will take care of these crooks.

I thought of Buba. What would she say now? What would her third eye see? I felt only that she was far away. I closed my eyes and saw Fritz Hofmann, but not in Germany. He was somewhere out in
the world, on the go, harried and haunted, always searching. Fritz was always looking through a camera, like his father. When I opened my eyes again, I saw the carton.

Among broken picture frames carelessly jumbled in a corner, I could see the brown cardboard. I ground out the cigarette with my shoe and cleared away the frames. It was clearly one of the
cartons Heinrich Hofmann had transported on his motorcycle when he moved from Baia Luna to Kronauburg. I pulled it out of the corner. It was heavy.

Well concealed among old wedding pictures, Fritz Hofmann had discovered the picture from the Christmas party in 1948, the one in which Alexa, wearing her friend Angela’s sunflower dress,
was spreading her thighs and Stephanescu was spraying a bottle of champagne. I tipped over the carton and stood before a disordered pile of black-and-white photographs. Among them lay a dozen
yellowed paper envelopes. I pawed my way through weddings, weddings, and more weddings, all presumably from the early postwar era. Then I picked up the envelopes. Some bore the date 1946 or 1947.
The photos had probably all been taken in the capital. Innocuous pictures of young people, shot in the summer. I guessed they were university students. They were strolling through town with their
girlfriends, holding hands on park benches or in sidewalk cafés, flirting and making funny faces in front of the statue of the poet Mihail Eminescu. In some of the envelopes were photos
Heinrich Hofmann had taken in the evening at parties. There was much laughter and more drinking. With only a few exceptions, the men had combed their hair straight back with pomade, had their arms
around their girls, and were grinning into the camera. Angela Barbulescu was not in any of the pictures, which was logical, since she hadn’t met Stephanescu until later. I recognized him in
some of them right away. He was always in the center, with a cigarette in the corner of his mouth and usually surrounded by two or three attractive women. He clearly preferred blonds even then. I
couldn’t find anything lewd in any of the snapshots, however. But one of the pictures gave me a start. Stephanescu was lolling on a sofa with his arm around a smiling young woman. It
wasn’t the fact that his hand was clearly in her décolletage that surprised me, however. It was the woman’s dress. It had a striped pattern. Angela Barbulescu had exchanged her
sunflower dress for her friend’s striped one for the Christmas party in 1948. But this picture was from the envelope labeled 1947. The pretty brunette with the full lips at
Stephanescu’s side could only be Alexa. The small glass in her hand was another proof of her identity. I knew from Angela’s diary that Alexa stuck to liqueurs. I had always imagined
Alexa as a wild and dissolute woman. It was hard for me to correct that image. The girl so breezily allowing Stephanescu to grope her breast seemed more like a pretty, somewhat-overexcited
schoolgirl with the physical endowments of a woman.