The Madonna on the Moon
Read The Madonna on the Moon Online
Authors: Rolf Bauerdick
The Madonna on the Moon
First published as
Wie die Madonna auf den Mond kam
in Germany
in 2009 by Deutsche Verlags-Anstalt, Munich.
First published in the United States in 2013 by Alfred A. Knopf,
a division of Random House Inc., New York.
First published in Great Britain in 2013 by Atlantic Books,
an imprint of Atlantic Books Ltd.
Copyright © Rolf Bauerdick, 2009
Translation Copyright © David Dollenmayer, 2013
The moral right of Rolf Bauerdick to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act of 1988.
The moral right of David Dollenmayer to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act of
1988.
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical,
photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.
This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination and not to be construed as real.
Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities, is entirely coincidental.
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
Trade Paperback ISBN: 978 1 84887 504 3
OME Paperback ISBN: 978 1 78239 203 3
EBook ISBN: 978 1 78239 133 3
Printed in Great Britain
Atlantic Books
An Imprint of Atlantic Books Ltd
Ormond House
26–27 Boswell Street
London
WC1N 3JZ
For Louisa, Leonie, and Lutz
Author’s Note
The novel is set in a fictitious country. To emphasize its fictionality, the diacritics required by the Romanian spelling of the names of persons, places, and things have been
dispensed with.
The Madonna on the Moon
CONTENTS
PROLOGUE
No one in Baia Luna had the slightest doubt that the source of Ilja Botev’s visions was not some luminous gift of prophetic insight, but the delusions of a wandering
mind—least of all me, Pavel, his grandson. When I was a little boy, I shrugged off my grandfather’s imaginings as foolish fancies, the result of the influence of the Gypsy Dimitru
Gabor. Dimitru never gave much of a hoot about the laws of reason and logic. But later, as the solid ground of good common sense grew progressively thin and crumbly beneath Grandfather’s
feet, I myself played no small part in the old man’s getting more and more hopelessly tangled up in the net of his fantasies. It was certainly not my intent to have Grandfather make himself
the town idiot, the butt of everyone’s jokes. But what could you say about a tavern owner who sets off in a horse and cart on a secret mission to warn the president of the United States about
the rocket scientist Wernher von Braun, a mysterious Fourth Power, and an impending international catastrophe? Armed, by the way, with a laughable top secret dossier, a treatise on the mystery of
the corporeal Assumption of the Virgin Mary, handwritten and triple-sewn into the lining of his wool jacket.
Today, I see my grandfather Ilja and his Gypsy friend Dimitru in the mild light of my own old age. I am aware of my guilt and know what I owe them, even though, in Baia Luna, memories of the
pair are gradually fading. These days, people look to the future. If you pause to look back you’re a loser. We’re a democracy. There is no more Conducator outshining the sun, no more
party demanding blind obedience, no Security Service throwing uppity subjects into jail. You can think and believe whatever you like. People used to write incendiary pamphlets that had to be
smuggled out of the country. No more. Our borders are open to all our neighbors. We’re free citizens. Our children are growing up in a free country.
Rather late in life I myself became the proud father of two daughters, begotten and born in freedom. Since then, two decades have flown by as if some crazed second hand had slung me through
time. Back in the Golden Age of Socialism, we wanted for everything except time. That we had in abundance. It may be that we threw it away, wasted the best years of our lives in dreary queues.
Today, time is a rare and costly commodity. It’s running away from me while younger generations race memoryless through an eternal present. But when children have forgotten where they come
from, how will they know where they’re heading?
As things now stand, my daughters will soon make me a grandfather in my own right. In anticipation of future grandchildren, I shall turn time back to my youth in the fifties. If I’m going
to tell my children and grandchildren how the Madonna got to the moon, my voice will echo those of my own grandfather Ilja and the Gypsy Dimitru. The two friends dreamed their idea of freedom, and
as a final dying ember in the midst of cold ashes, that dream would be fulfilled in their final days. But I didn’t come to understand that until after the historic Christmas of 1989, when our
country’s Age of Gold ended on the rubbish heap of history.
That was the day the Great Conducator, his hands fettered, hissed the words “pack of Judases” at his drumhead court-martial before singing “The Internationale” one last
time and shouting “Long live the Free and Socialist Republic.” But no one applauded. No one waved little flags. He and his wife only made it halfway to the wall in the yard of the
Targoviste barracks. The president wasn’t even worth the official order “Fire!” but just a couple premature bursts. Without a command.
Ratta-tat-tat.
Spent shells spewed
out and danced on the cold stones. Powder smoke filled the air. Then, riddled with bullets as he was, the Conducator’s knees gave way, and the Golden Age was over. Nevertheless, as the Genius
of the Carpathians (celebrated in the songs of his court poets as the Sweetest Kiss of the Homeland’s Soil) lay there lifeless in his own blood, his suit jacket still buttoned like a
statesman’s but hitched up around his armpits in some disarray, something remarkable occurred.
A spasm of horror seized the members of the firing squad. Instead of being intoxicated with victory, they were beset by fear. Bewildered by their own deed, the militiamen didn’t dare look
at the fallen dictator. They averted their petrified gaze from the Titan of Titans whose wide-open eyes stared at the sky in incomprehension. A few young fellows cast furtive glances at their
commander and hastily crossed themselves behind his back, then they grabbed shovels and threw a few spadefuls of dirt onto his face. Those eyes! Nobody could stand up to them except the scrawny
curs who smelled warm blood. With lolling tongues and tails between their legs they crept closer. They had no appreciation for the final, frank expression on the face of a man who, at the moment of
his death, revealed with disarming honesty that he really had no idea what had actually occurred on that Christmas Day in 1989.
Following the execution, Dr. Florin Pauker noted the time—2:45 p.m.—on the death certificate. Rather accidentally, he had been present at the self-appointed Revolutionary Tribunal of
National Salvation. He was a neurologist, not a coroner. Only a few days earlier the party had relieved him of his duties as director of the psychiatric hospital in Vadului and given him a new
position as military surgeon in Targoviste. And since he and his wife Dana saw no point in celebrating Christmas, Dr. Pauker had switched on-call days with a colleague. And now it was his duty to
officially confirm the clinical death of the Conducator and his spouse.
Florin Pauker bent over the corpse, searched for a pulse, and looked into the dead man’s eyes, possibly a moment too long. He scribbled a hasty signature on the death certificate, then
reached for the telephone, asked to be connected to the Athenee Palace Hotel in the capital and put through to the presidential suite. After uttering the words “It’s over,” he got
into his Dacia and drove back to the capital and home to his wife in the Strada Fortuna. There Dr. Pauker told her that the revolutionary tribunal had put up against the Targoviste barracks-yard
wall not evil incarnate, but innocence.
His wife Dana and his daughter Irisetta, their only child, stated that their husband and father changed fundamentally after this Bloody Christmas, as they called the day of the revolution.
“His personality changed one hundred eighty degrees. He turned sentimental. He was no longer the energetic physician with an intellect keen as a knife to whom I’d been faithful for more
than thirty years,” Dana told a French journalist who was trying to reconstruct the fall of the Conducator.
“It was terrible,” daughter Irisetta confirmed. “Father turned into an empty-headed, sentimental softy. He started to go out all the time—not to breathe the fresh air of
freedom but intending to comfort all the unhappy brats he could find.” He crammed his pockets full of American chewing gum and the multicolored lollipops that bald detective who suddenly
appeared on TV always sucked on during an investigation. On every street corner children surrounded her father, and he would give each one something. But every time he spotted a kid with big eyes,
he would start to shed bitter tears. She didn’t dare go out with him anymore, she was so ashamed of her father’s never-ending weeping and wailing.
To brighten up his melancholy mood, Dr. Pauker undertook numerous trips during the nineties. He was drawn to the holy sites of Christendom, especially the places where people said that in days
gone by Mary the Mother of God had appeared. At first he visited local pilgrimage towns in Transmontania, then he journeyed to Fatíma in Portugal and Medjugorje in Bosnia. But neither in the
little town of Lourdes in the French Pyrenees nor from the Black Madonna of Czestochowa did the neurologist find the relief he was seeking for his melancholy soul.
For Dana, her husband’s metamorphosis into a sanctimonious sissy was almost unbearable. To her it was humiliating and even intellectually insulting that Florin brought back suitcases full
of kitschy implements from these trips: plaster statuettes of the Madonna, vials of holy water and plastic rosaries, bottles of miraculous fluids, and postcards that when waggled back and forth
showed first the crucified Christ with his crown of thorns, eyes downcast in sorrow, and then transfigured, lifting them up to heaven. With every new devotional object that entered the house, Dana
sensed that the path her husband was on was destined never to cross hers again.
Not for lack of trying on her part. For years, Dana Pauker had appealed to his long-dormant intellectual powers. She invoked his years as the seasoned director of a neurological institute and
pleaded with him to come to his senses: in vain.
As she was preparing their apartment for New Year’s Eve dinner on the final night of the last millennium and ten years after the revolution, she noticed to her dismay that Florin had
removed the portrait of the Conducator from the living room wall. For ten years she had fought to have his picture left in place, ten years of resistance to what she called the arbitrariness of
historical consciousness. And now Florin had simply taken the portrait down from the wall and replaced it with a photograph of a statue of the Virgin. Dana Pauker knew she had lost the battle. She
was alone. Their last friends from the party had turned their backs on them. The Paukers had disappeared into the void of social insignificance. Who wanted anything to do with a washed-up doctor
who wandered the streets with a rosary, handing out sticky sweets?