The Madonna on the Moon (37 page)

My hands began to shake when I picked up the envelope dated December 24, 1948. That was the day of the Oh Unholy Night party at a certain Koka’s house, the day that ended so disastrously
for Angela. Hastily I tore it open. From the first photo a man looked out at me. He was just putting a cigarette to his lips and had a prominent wart on his right cheek. That had to be Albin, the
stranger who paid Angela Barbulescu a visit on her last day in Baia Luna. Dimitru’s cousin Salman had picked up a man along the road with a wart on his cheek the day he brought the television
to Baia Luna for Grandfather’s birthday. The next photo was of a table spread with an expensive buffet. Koka had prepared his guests a huge grilled ham in which an oversize carving knife and
fork were stuck. I didn’t know what the curious things were piled in a pyramid on a silver platter next to the ham, but I guessed they must be the ominous oysters the host would pee on later
that evening. The wager! Angela had mentioned a stupid bet between Koka and Albin about who could guzzle the most “Russian piss” in a minute. It had ended in a fight between the two
contestants. Hofmann had captured the two with his camera, tilting vodka bottles into their mouths. Albin was the one with the wart, so the other must be Koka, the Communist Party functionary. He
was the man who had insulted Angela Barbulescu so coarsely when she said the stupid drinking contest was a tie. He’d called her a cheap Catholic cunt, and her Stefan hadn’t made a move
to shut the creep up. Two other pictures showed Koka dancing while the onlookers applauded. The guy with glasses was probably the doctor, Florin Pauker. Alexa had taken his arm and was laughing.
Her left hand was holding a glass of liqueur. She was wearing her friend’s sunflower dress. There was only one picture from that evening in which Angela appeared, and she was in the
background and out of focus.

Fritz Hofmann was the first to discover these photographs while snooping around in his father’s moving cartons. What he told me just before leaving Baia Luna was true: when Alexa had lain
down on the cleared-off buffet table and spread her legs, Heinrich Hofmann had snapped a few pictures. There were five snapshots of that scene. I put four of them next to one another and had no
difficulty arranging them in chronological order. The only picture in which Stefan Stephanescu appeared was missing. It was in Baia Luna, under my mattress. Stephanescu must have removed himself
from the dicey situation after the first flashbulb went off. Koka was also nowhere to be seen. I guessed that the hand holding a bottle and entering the picture on the right side belonged to the
host. In the other photos, Alexa lolled on the table while Albin, the man with the glasses, and two others beat off.

As I put the photos from Christmas Eve 1948 back into their envelope, my fingers felt another, smaller envelope taped inside the big one. I tore it open, clenched my fists, and gave a short
whoop of triumph. Heinrich Hofmann had ignored the rule of caution. He had not protected his holy of holies. What I was holding against the ceiling light were the negatives. Although you
couldn’t identify much on them with the naked eye, I could make out a pair of female thighs on a deep black background. I knew that would turn into a white tablecloth on the positive. And the
dark spots around Alexa’s private parts were the light traces from the champagne foam spurting from the shaken-up bottle.

Do whatever you want with my pictures.

Heinrich Hofmann had taken some despicable pictures of Angela Barbulescu as well. Against her will. Whatever they showed, they now had no more role to play in the game of threats, blackmail, and
murder, an evil game whose murky rules I could only guess at. Wherever those pictures were now—probably behind the locked iron door to Hofmann’s archives—they had lost all their
power over Angela. But the photo under my mattress whose negative I now carried beneath my sweater still had power.

Hang my picture on every lamppost. I’m not afraid anymore.

All I had to do was turn the threat around. Having his picture on every lamppost would not please the champagne squirter and party boss of Kronauburg, Dr. Stefan Stephanescu.

The muffled tolling of the bells of Saint Paul’s Cathedral reached the cellar. I wasn’t sure if I had counted four or five strokes. Whichever it was, time was short. Quickly I tossed
the pile of wedding pictures back into their carton. Just when I didn’t expect to find anything else, I did. I caught sight of an inconspicuous pack of photos held together with a single
rubber band. They were the pictures for which the only words Fritz had at his disposal were “hard core,” the ones that showed everything in the raw. They must have been taken more
recently. I recognized one of Hofmann’s salesgirls, the one who had been advising the young couple yesterday up in the shop. She had that unmistakable, glorious blond hairdo. I felt an
unsettling mixture of repulsion, fascination, and powerful arousal. There were two or three different women, all of the same type, whom I had not seen before. Same for the men. For some of the
pictures, Herr Hofmann had almost crept right into the woman’s crotch with his camera; others were taken from a greater distance. I rushed my way through them. The beauty with the fluffy
blond hair of an angel recurred. She was undressed and leaning over an older gentleman lying on a bed with his fly open. She was using her mouth. I knew the man. I was a hundred percent sure I had
seen him before. But where? The harder I tried to remember, the more the image retreated into the furthest chambers of my memory. But the present was all the more vivid. When I looked at the
background of the indiscreet photograph, I knew where the picture had been taken. The wallpaper in the rooms of the Golden Star had the same flowered pattern.

I had to go. I stowed the cardboard box back behind the picture frames, straightened up the cellar corridor a bit, knowing that my secret visit would not go unnoticed. I was about to climb out
the lab window and back up the light shaft when I noticed I still had a big erection. I felt the need to relieve myself.

I opened my pants and thought about Irina Lupescu, whom I hadn’t seen among all the women who’d let themselves be photographed. But then I realized I had put Heinrich Hofmann’s
assistant and Security Agent Lupu Raducanu’s fiancée into an unpleasant if not dire situation. She was responsible for the darkroom in the basement. I stopped, buttoned up my pants
again, and crawled out the window.

Five minutes later I opened the door to the hotel. The doorman was asleep. The clock above the desk said a quarter past five. I reached our room without encountering anyone else. Grandfather was
asleep. I needed a cigarette. When I reached for them in my pocket, I discovered I had made a mistake. My matches and a pack of Carpatis lay on a canister of chemicals in Hofmann’s cellar
corridor.

After two hours of restless sleep, I was awakened by Ilja. He was groaning and complaining about a headache. “It was that
konjaki
Napoleon.”

We did without breakfast, and on the dot of eight we were walking down the corridor of the state registration office with our ID pictures. The often-criticized bloated bureaucracy of the new
republic and its sluggish and unqualified personnel were nowhere in evidence that morning. By eight thirty a clerk was handing me my new ID while remarking how stiff and serious I looked in the
picture. Then she gave Grandfather his new ID to sign.

“I can read, but I can’t write,” he said. The clerk reached for an ink pad. “Happens more often that you’d think. You can sign it with your thumb.”

Shortly thereafter we were sitting in the collectivization office in the room for State Trade Organization concessions A–D and drinking a Turkish coffee. An hour later, Grandfather had
signed a contract for the concession of the Baia Luna branch of the Kronauburg regional grocers’ cooperative. Moreover, he was no longer a private tavern owner but the possessor of a state
liquor license to dispense spirits up to eighty proof. To be sure, only until 10:30 p.m. on weekdays and 9:00 p.m. on Sundays.

“How come the bureaucracy is finally getting its butt in gear?” Grandfather inquired as we were leaving.

The lady cleared her throat. “Let me put it this way: official efficiency has improved enormously since Comrade Dr. Stephanescu became first party secretary of Kronauburg. If you ask me,
that man is a blessing for everyone.”

I didn’t ask her anything. How wrong that was suddenly came home to me just as we were entering the central warehouse of the T.O. to pick up our supplies at last.

“I wonder what the new prices are going to be,” said Ilja. “The Hossus were always fair, at least.”

The Hossus! Exactly! A few times I had caught a glimpse of the Hossu brothers when I accompanied Grandfather on his trips to the wholesalers. I didn’t know their first names, but I knew
their faces. I had seen one of them last night, but I hadn’t been able to place him exactly. An older gentleman enjoying himself with a blond angel in a hotel room—certainly that could
occur from time to time. But that he would voluntarily allow himself to be photographed in the act—probably not.

Chapter Ten

As our overloaded wagon crossed the bridge over the Tirnava in Baia Luna toward evening, the news that Botevs’ shop had not just fresh but extraordinary wares for sale
spread like wildfire. We hadn’t even completely unloaded the wagon, and women were already lining up to replenish their household stocks of sunflower oil, salt, sugar, and flour. There was
even—for the first time and especially for the ladies, as grandfather pitched it—lemon-scented dish detergent, tins of cream for delicate hands, and two vials of Rêves de la Nuit
perfume, one of which Vera Raducanu purchased immediately, while the second bottle would remain on our shelves for years to come, until Dimitru the Gypsy and I finally found a use for it. But most
sought-after were the bittersweet exotic fruits only the oldest residents could recall having seen (but never tasted) during the monarchy.

Ilja explained that the low but curiously unrounded prices, prescribed by state decree down to the last decimal, were the result of a national subvention policy he himself did not understand.
His new status as an associate of the state cooperative provoked Hermann Schuster to make the malicious remark, “Now you’re in league with the Communists, too.”

Erika Schuster defended Grandfather from her husband’s attack and told him to forget that awful political stuff and judge things by the bottom line. The village women agreed with Erika.
But the children were deeply disappointed when Granddad explained that from then on there would be just fruit drops with raspberry flavor but no more genuine chewing gum. Since their sad juvenile
eyes continued to weigh on his mind, however, he invented the fairy tale that a raging storm in the Atlantic had prevented the resupply ship from America from dropping anchor punctually in the
Black Sea port of Constanta, but that it would arrive soon. He didn’t tell them that the director of the Kronauburg trade organization had declared American chewing gum to be a decadent
excrescence of capitalist consumer behavior, and as such it had been completely eliminated from their product line. From then on, the children still reached into Ilja’s candy jar but
despaired of getting at the raspberry drops melted together in a sugary clump.

All in all, people in Baia Luna were coming to the conclusion that times might not be exactly rosy, but they weren’t black either. As long as the regime in the capital was lowering prices
and the collectivists from Kronauburg hadn’t shown up yet, although village life might not settle back into its old routines, at least there was an acceptable orderliness even without a
priest, a Madonna, and an Eternal Flame. Of course, parents were not pleased that there was still no teacher for the school, but that too would certainly get straightened out in a year or two.

The cooperative model seemed to be paying off for our shop. Grandfather had paid with cash from our family savings for half the first batch of wholesale stock and gotten the other half on
consignment, according to which he would pay for the rest once he’d sold it. If we subtracted the expenses of staying overnight at the Golden Star and eating in the restaurant, there was
still some money left over. At my urging, before we left Kronauburg to return to Baia Luna Grandfather made a down payment on a piece of equipment that would enable us to bring some “cultural
enrichment” to the monotony of life in the village: an antenna for the TV. Ilja’s guess was correct that a functioning apparatus would considerably increase the attraction of our
taproom, which had been flagging of late. As soon as the postman brought the first month’s salary and it was time for another buying trip to Kronauburg, he would pay the balance for the
antenna. And when Grandfather served the men fresh Sylvaner and a few cases of Kronenbräu to boot, even the most dyed-in-the-wool anti-Bolshevist had to admit that although Socialism in
general was an instrument of the devil, it undoubtedly also had its good side. From then on, instead of playing cards in the tavern and rolling dice for the check, the men stared at the TV
screen.