The Madonna on the Moon (10 page)

“Until today no nation in the world was in a position to catapult living beings out of the powerful gravitational pull of the earth. But soon we will be sending not just satellites but our
cosmonauts into weightlessness to raise on the moon the flag of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics in testimony to the accomplishments of our productive powers. American transcontinental
bombers are already ripe for a museum. With the thrust of their engines they can just barely . . .” Then the loudspeaker began to chatter.

Impatiently Ilja twirled the station dial, but gurgling and squeaking noises kept interfering with isolated scraps of the speech until the signal became clear again.

“. . . brown cocaine-lemonade, drug addiction, and the terrible dissonances of jazz music will lead to the downfall of the bourgeoisie. Their young people waste their time in movie
theaters and shady bars. They act like animals in their uncultured dances and trade obscenities on public thoroughfares. Instead of studying science their children chew sticky gum from morning to
night that turns the human face into the stupid visage of a cud-chewing cow.”

Some of the men laughed and pointed to Grandfather’s candy jar. He cut them short with a harsh “Shut up.” Then we heard barking from the loudspeaker. It wasn’t
translated. The commentator explained that the barking was an original recording of the bitch Laika who, shot into the weightlessness of space with the power of a half-million kiloponds, was now
circling the earth in the space capsule Sputnik 2.

“Unbelievable,” cried Alexandru Kiselev, the future transmission assembler in the Stalinstadt tractor factory. “Simply unbelievable. A half-million kilos. What
power!”

“That’s equal to the power of sixty-six thousand six hundred and sixty-six horses,” Grandfather calculated.

“Bunch of crap! Lies and propaganda! Russian bullshit!”

Flushed with anger, Hermann Schuster jumped up and yanked the cord from its socket. The TV gave a pop, and the screen went black.

“Shit on the Russians.” Petre Petrov flew into a rage, too. “They shoot millions into space, and down here on earth people have to eat grass. We’re going to end up just
like their damned collective farmers.”

“What about the new tractor factory? Who built that if not the party, you greenhorn?” replied Alexandru Kiselev. “Tell me how I’m supposed to keep the bellies of my wife
and six children full here in this hole. Tell me how I’m supposed to earn a living from two cows and a couple of sows. Now that winter’s coming. If you know a way out of this misery,
youngster, then say so. Otherwise keep your fresh mouth shut.”

Petre whispered to me that if Alexandru wanted to do something about being poor, he should stop popping buns in his old lady’s oven. But Petre well knew that a seventeen-year-old had no
business saying such a thing out loud in a gathering of men.

The Brancusis and the blacksmith Simenov loudly applauded Kiselev’s words. “We refuse to accept progress, and we defend our backwardness,” said Liviu. “Everybody in the
village plows his own field, and the harvest barely keeps us alive. We kill ourselves toiling behind our draft horses while the party has been building tractors for years. We have excellent grazing
land, but we don’t sell a single quart of milk. Where would we sell it? There’s only a rutted field road to Apoldasch, yet the party’s building new roads all over the country.
We’re the only ones still walking; everywhere else they’ve got buses. Not even to mention our school. Sixty, seventy kids in one classroom, taught by a teacher who’s ideologically
suspect. Yet children are the future. Do we want our young people to end up like Americans, chewing gum, selfish, lazy, and spoiled rotten? Comrade Khrushchev is right.”

Liviu Brancusi sensed that his training course as a politcadre was bearing fruit. The mood in the tavern was swinging in his favor.

“Why don’t we follow the example of our successful neighbors? Why would we want to stay on the side of history’s losers? Why not stand side by side with the winners? I’m
telling you, learning from the Soviet Union means learning to win! The Sputnik is the result of their glorious struggle for progress.”

With that, Liviu’s brother Nico took up the cudgels.

“Listen up, you blabbermouth,” he smugly addressed Dimitru. “Here’s what I have to say to you with your reactionary palaver about Sputnik last night. ‘The
Sputnik’s beeping robs people of their sanity.’ That’s about the stupidest thing I’ve ever heard.”

“Quod erat demonstratum,”
replied Dimitru caustically.

“Hold your tongues! You quarrel like the blind arguing with the sightless!” The men looked over to Johannes Baptiste.

“Next Sunday,” he announced, “I shall address the pressing questions of today from the pulpit. And I expect to see every one of you in church, Catholic, Communist, or
heathen.” Johannes Baptiste pointed to Ilja’s television. “What we’ve just heard from this apparatus is the beginning of the end. Pandora’s box is open and I say to
you that a line has been crossed. Space travel of any kind—by a dog or a man—should be banned
in principio
and
ex cathedra
. Excursions into space are per se a mortal
sin against the spirit. Man has no business in the infinity of the universe except to seek his Almighty Maker.”

“Sic est,”
Dimitru agreed. “Truly, a truer word was never spoken.”

“The Socialist riffraff don’t give a fig for the Lord’s commandments,” roared the Saxon Schuster. “They test God’s patience,” he shouted. “To hell
with the Communists.” Whereupon Roman, the middle Brancusi brother, couldn’t keep his seat a moment longer.

“You tra-tra-tra-traitor!” he screamed at Schuster, stammering as always when he got overexcited. He rushed over to the Saxon and with the words “Da-da-damned Hitlerist!”
shattered an empty Sylvaner bottle on his head. Schuster gave a brief twitch, then keeled over like a wet sack. While a few men came to the aid of the unconscious fellow and carried him outside,
Grandfather managed with quite a bit of difficulty to keep the outraged guests from going for the Brancusis.

“You haven’t heard the last of this,” the three of them cried defiantly before making a quick getaway.

Hermann Schuster slowly regained consciousness, still woozy from the bang on his skull. Kristan Desliu, Karl Koch, and I helped him drag his way home through the rain. Erika Schuster blanched
when she caught sight of her husband with a big bruise on his forehead. She put up water for tea and wrapped his head in moist towels, but Hermann tore them off, pushed the chamomile tea away, and
pretended nothing special had happened in the taproom.

The tavern emptied out after the fight. Most of the men went home sober and cranky. By the clock it wasn’t even seven yet. Ilja’s fifty-fifth birthday celebration was over before it
had really begun.

Grandfather was at a loss. “Satellites circle the earth, and we humans have gone off the tracks. Believe me, Pavel, the world is out of joint. The maelstrom of evil grows strong
again.”

I could read Grandfather’s thoughts. I knew exactly what was on his mind at this moment: his son, Nicolai, my father. Grandfather had already witnessed the fatal pull of perdition when the
rabid tirades of the Führer in Berlin had lured the Saxons to their radios, and even his peace-loving neighbors had gotten fired up for the mad idea that their chancellor would bring them home
to the Reich of their ancestors. It didn’t turn out that way. Instead, there was a war that cast its shadows even over Baia Luna, and my father joined the wrong side. He lost his life because
he thought it was the right one.

In the fall of 1940, Wehrmacht units had marched into Transmontania, their ally against Stalin. The boys had run off, the best young men in Baia Luna, led by Karl Koch, Hermann Schuster, and
Hans Schneider. And Nicolai Botev. They had all volunteered for the imminent campaign against the Soviets. They intended to achieve a glorious victory over the Bolsheviks, melt down the tanks and
cannon of the godless troops of the red star, and recast them as bells that would ring in the victory of the Cross over Communism.

The war had left no trace in my memory. I was three years old when it ended. But for my grandfather, it had never ended. He lived with his loss. He had lost his future, Nicolai, his only son. I
don’t believe a day went by when Ilja didn’t think of him, even though he still had his daughter-in-law Kathalina and me. And of course his daughter Antonia, too. I know that
Grandfather wished Antonia had left his house long ago. With his whole heart he longed for her to find a decent husband. But the prospects weren’t good for him to acquire a new family and
more grandchildren. A train wreck of a love affair that no one would talk about had derailed my aunt’s life to such an extent that she sought refuge in indifference and laziness. She
conscientiously took care of the bookkeeping and paperwork for the store, but that was the extent of her household duties. Most of the time she lay in bed, salving her sorrow with chocolates and
pralines and otherwise watching indifferently as her ample proportions increased with each passing day.

I was now fifteen and soon would have school behind me. Grandfather was asking more and more often what I had in mind for the future. I didn’t have an answer.

“Innkeeper, another drop?”

Dimitru pulled us back into the present. He was sitting in the corner beside the stove next to Johannes Baptiste and my school friend Fritz. Granddad set up Sylvaner and
zuika
while I
went to the storeroom to get the broom and dustpan. I swept up the shards of the bottle Roman Brancusi had smashed on Hermann Schuster’s hard skull and then sat down with the mixed
company.

“Pavel, you can take the rest of the night off,” said Granddad. “The bar is closed.”

I looked over at Fritz, but he indicated no desire to go home.

“We’ll hang around a bit,” I said. “It’s still early.”

Fritz nodded, and Father Johannes said, “I always like having young people around.” Grandfather didn’t object.

I heard the ticking of the clock whose hour hand had just passed seven. Johannes Baptiste was twiddling his thumbs, a habit that always meant he was looking for a good opportunity to start
talking. Then he cleared his throat.

“So Dimitru, you think there’s a shady story no one can see through behind this Sputnik?”

“Absolutely!”

“And what dark plot do you see at work?”

Dimitru fumbled around looking for an answer. “I’m very close to a
conclusio,
if only—”

“So you know nothing,” Baptiste cut him off. “Does the name Sergei Pavlovich Korolev mean anything to you?”

“A Russian, I’m guessing.”

“A Ukrainian,” said Johannes Baptiste. “A luminary of rocket technology. The best. For years, Korolev has been developing a secret program of manned spaceflight with thousands
of engineers working for him. Bad, very bad. And today we’ve learned”—Baptiste pointed at the television—“that the Sputnik is only a first step toward the illusion of
human omnipotence. The way things stand now, the Bolsheviks have really managed to overcome the powerful gravitational forces of the earth. Against nature. First a dog, then a chimp, then a man.
But I tell you that according to Holy Scripture, an ascension into the heavens is reserved for the Lord Jesus. Besides him, according to God’s design, only one other person of flesh and blood
has been granted bodily admission into heaven. And as you very well know, Dimitru, it was Mary the Mother of Jesus. That’s how Pope Pius in Rome laid it down in a secret dogma in
1950.”

“Sic est,”
agreed the Gypsy.

“Back to Korolev. What does this crafty Ukrainian have in mind? That’s the question that preys on my mind. In fact, it’s a burning question. What’s the Soviet Engineer
Number One looking for in the vastness of the firmament? It’s a riveting question. And the answer is much more riveting.” The priest took a swallow of water. “You heard it today
from this flickering doomsday box. From Khrushchev’s own lips. The Soviets want to send cosmonauts into the heavens and raise the Communist flag on the moon.”

“So what? Let them do it,” Fritz interrupted the priest in a snotty voice.

“And you would be Fritz Hofmann, the lad who just had the idea of using wire for the antenna? A clever fellow, no doubt, although I’ve never seen you in church. But you should keep
quiet, Mr. Know-It-All, when an old man is talking about things you haven’t got the foggiest notion of.”

Fritz tried to conceal how much this reprimand had hurt him as the Benedictine continued. “If my information is correct, Korolev is working with a man by the name of Yury Gagarin. When
Khrushchev was elevated to first secretary last year, Korolev and Gagarin got personal audiences in the Politburo. They spread their rocket plans out on Khrushchev’s desk and asked for money
for a titanic space program. A lot of money.”

“And they got it,” Dimitru interjected. “Probably double what they asked for. I suspect the army raised the ante a fair amount.”

“In any event, Korolev can build his rockets—as many as he wants. But only under top secret conditions somewhere out in the steppes of Kazakhstan and only on condition that he never
uses the word ‘ascension.’ He’s only allowed to refer to it by the code name ‘the Project.’ If he doesn’t”—and Baptiste made his fingers into
scissors—“they’ll cut out his tongue.”

“But why would the chief of all the Soviets want to cut out people’s tongues,” Grandfather put in his oar, “just on account of a Russki flag on the moon that
nobody’s going to see from down here anyway?”

“Forget the flag,” replied Johannes Baptiste. “That’s just to taunt the Americans and rub their noses in Soviet superiority. Pure vanity. That’s also why the
Sputnik sends out those signals. From a scientific perspective, the
beep-beep
makes no sense. Basically, the Sputnik is just announcing, Listen up, listen up. I exist. I’m up here.
Of course, that’s how Khrushchev drives his opponent Eisenhower stark raving mad and demonstrates to the Americans that the Bolsheviks’ engineers are faster, smarter, and further along.
Remember, we’re in the world political phase of a Cold War that sometimes produces quite heated skirmishes. Even in Baia Luna, to which the ringing skull of our doughty Hermann Schuster can
attest. Without a doubt the Kremlin wants to win the race against the capitalist system of the USA. But that’s not the heart of the problem. The essence of an ascension is something
completely different. And I claim that Korolev knows what it is.”