The Madonna on the Moon (3 page)

Yet the Barbu I saw early on the morning of November 6, 1957, was different. She was bright and clear. Beautiful, even. Someday in the not-too-distant future I would understand what was
happening in Angela Barbulescu’s cottage that morning, and it would plunge me into the abyss. But how could I have known it in that dreary November dawn?

P
avel, you’re not going to tell Kathalina about that dumb idea with the funnel, are you? Your mother is not amused by that stuff.”

“I didn’t see anything. Especially not on your birthday. Word of honor.”

That took a load off Grandfather’s mind, whereupon I shook his hand, wished him happy fifty-fifth, and gave him a package wrapped in shiny red paper.

As she did every year, my mother (and Granddad’s daughter-in-law) had asked Adamski the mailman to purchase a box of cigars in Kronauburg, the district capital. Ilja unwrapped his present,
knowing full well he would soon be holding a wooden box with sixty Caballeros Finos, each thick as his thumb. Sixty cigars were the precise number Grandfather needed for his systematic smoking
habits, plotted out for the year ahead. Sixty cigars were exactly enough for one every Sunday, one each for the parish fairs on the Feast of the Assumption, the Feast of the Virgin of Eternal
Consolation (the patron saint of Baia Luna), and two or three other holidays. When he added in the birthdays of his closest friends and compensated for the doubling that sometimes occurred when a
religious or secular holiday such as All Saints’, Christmas, or the Day of the Republic fell on a Sunday, then the inevitable result was that one final Caballero remained for his birthday,
just before he opened the box for the following year.

Ilja thanked me and, contrary to his customary procedure of smoking only in the evening, decided to allow himself then and there the pleasure of a Cuban, as he called his cigars. He pulled out
his last Caballero and lit up. “America”—he sighed and blew a few smoke rings into the air—“America! What a country!”

Of course, my mother Kathalina and I knew that Ilja’s Cubans had never seen the hold of a transatlantic freighter. The Cyrillic letters on the cigar bands betrayed the fact that the
tobacco had been rolled in a Bulgarian factory near Blagoevgrad and probably transported across the Danube on the new Bridge of Friendship between Ruse and Giurgiu in a diesel rig. But
Mother’s lips were sealed, leaving her father-in-law with the conviction that Cuba was the most marvelous among the United States of America.

By the age of five or six, I had already guessed that Granddad could barely read. Up to then I had hung devotedly on his lips when he told me stories or pretended to be reading one from a book.
But I began to notice that sometimes he got the plot hopelessly tangled up, mixing up persons, places, and times and very seldom turning the page. Once I started first grade, my suspicions were
confirmed. So as not to embarrass Grandfather I didn’t tell anyone about my discovery. And since Ilja could juggle numbers with great facility and my unmarried aunt Antonia, who had set up
her digs in the garret upstairs, took care of the bookkeeping for our family’s shop, Ilja’s defect remained for many years hidden from the rest of the village and even from the Gypsy
Dimitru.

My father Nicolai, on the other hand, certainly had no problem reading and writing when still alive. I gathered that from the underlinings and marginal notes he had made, as a young man, in a
volume of poetical works by Mihail Eminescu. The only other things of any value he left me were
Das Kapital
by Karl Marx and a beat-up chess set with the stub of a candle replacing the
missing white queen.

I had no memories of my father. For me, Nicolai Botev was a stranger who existed only in a framed photograph standing in the glass-fronted cabinet in the living room. It showed him as a soldier
on leave and a note on the back dated it to December 1942. With his thin cheeks, Nicolai sits next to my mother in a sleigh in front of the snow-covered slope of Cemetery Hill in Baia Luna. I am
about one year old and stand between his knees, wrapped in a scarf and with a Kazak cap pulled down over my ears. There was something unsettling about this family photo that always caught my eye.
It was Father’s hands. They lay on my shoulders limp and lifeless, incapable of providing support.

On winter evenings, my mother would take the photo out of the cabinet and sit silently in her chair holding it on her lap. She could sit that way hour after hour until sleep wrote an ethereal
smile on her face. She never talked about my father. I think she wanted to hide the fact that she thought about him constantly so I wouldn’t be reminded that he was gone. But his absence
seemed quite natural to me. Besides, Grandfather made sure that nobody in the village could complain that I didn’t have enough paternal oversight.

I
n the 1950s two hundred and fifty people lived in Baia Luna, distributed among thirty houses. To the southeast rose the Mondberg with the pilgrimage
Chapel of the Virgin of Eternal Consolation, to the west the village was bordered by the mighty cliffs of the Carpathians, while the village fields and pastures extended in a northerly direction
until one’s gaze was lost in the landscape of the distant Transmontanian hills. Below the Mondberg flowed the Tirnava. After the spring thaw the river became a raging torrent, but in the hot,
dry summers the Tirnava shriveled to a thin, foul-smelling trickle, and the fish jumped onto the bank so as not to suffocate. Following the river downstream, one came to a wooden wayside cross in
memory of the tragedy that occurred during the blizzard of 1935, and continuing on foot, one could reach the neighboring village of Apoldasch in an hour and a half.

The ascent of the Mondberg took three hours. Once my legs were strong enough to survive the climb without whining and whimpering, Granddad regularly took me along to the Virgin of Eternal
Consolation. As we entered the chapel, we crossed ourselves and presented our compliments to the Mother of God. As a child I always found the Madonna a bit creepy. Her face, carved from red beech
centuries ago by a sculptor of manifestly modest talent, was anything but beautiful. The Queen of Heaven stood on a pedestal, and when I looked up at her, I found her expression more tortured than
majestic. With files and chisels, the artist had set about his work quite coarsely, so that Mary’s gentleness only touched me on second or third glance. The right foot of the Mother of God
peeked out from under her enveloping cloak and trod on a crescent moon. Obviously the sculptor had no sense of proportion. He made Baby Jesus, who sat on the globe with Mary’s protective hand
above his head, too small. By contrast, the Madonna’s imposing breasts were too big, as was the crescent moon. Generations of believers interpreted the foot on the crescent as a symbol of the
Virgin’s victory over the Turks, who under the sign of the crescent moon had tried by force to turn Europeans into Mussulmen. But which—thanks to the heavenly intervention of the Virgin
of Eternal Consolation—they failed to do in Baia Luna.

After paying our respects to the Mother of God, Grandfather and I sat on the rocks among the juniper bushes. With the stock phrase “Then let’s take a look and see what Kathalina has
packed up for us,” Granddad would open his rucksack and take out a thermos of sweet black tea, hard-boiled eggs, tomatoes, bacon, and ham sandwiches. After lunch Ilja stretched out on the
warm grass, napped for a half hour, and awoke refreshed. Then we sat awhile longer, gazing out over the countryside.

If, like the Mother of God (who is known to have ascended bodily into heaven), one could take off from the Mondberg, Grandfather explained, one would at some point settle to earth in America.
And he stretched out his arm and pointed in the direction where he thought the skyscrapers of a city he called “Noueeyorka” were located. According to Grandfather, that splendid city
would obviously be the only logical goal of such a flight. Dimitru had also assured him it was so and declared that the geographic space between the towns of Baia Luna and Noueeyorka was like an
electromagnetic field between positive and negative poles in which one pole without the other would be reduced to a void of nothingness. Seen in this light, the American Noueeyorka owed its very
greatness to the existence of Baia Luna. From Grandfather I learned that, thanks to an independent disposition, an American never concerns himself with petty details and on principle always thinks
on a gigantic scale. The Americans build the tallest buildings in the world, roll the best cigars, and in honor of the Mother of God erected the most colossal of all statues of the Virgin at the
gates of Noueeyorka, surrounded by water on all sides. Mary guarantees the inhabitants of the skyscrapers peace, prosperity, and protection from enemy attack. The burning torch in her hand not only
shows the way for ships from all over the world, but the broken chains at her feet also promise new arrivals freedom from all forms of servitude. That’s why seven beams of light emerge from
the crown on her head, each beam bigger than the church steeple of Baia Luna. Dimitru had interpreted the number 7 as Mary’s seven closest confidants, of whom the Lord God, the Son of God,
and the Holy Spirit represented the Fields of Heaven, while the four Evangelists were in charge of earthly affairs.

I couldn’t find a city with the name Noueeyorka on the globe at school, but the story about the giant Madonna and her blazing torch seemed to be true, for at my school-friend Fritz
Hofmann’s house I had seen an impressive poster of Mary hanging on the living room wall. I stared at it openmouthed. There she was. I was surprised to find a picture of the Madonna here in
the house of the photographer Hofmann, since Fritz and his parents Heinrich and Birta were ethnic Germans with no interest in the Catholic religion and were the only people in the village not to
attend Mass. It was also strange that the statue stood not in Noueeyorka but clearly in New York, as one could read on the poster in black and white. Since Herr Hofmann had a photographic studio in
the district capital of Kronauburg, it seemed logical to ask if he had taken this impressive picture with his own camera. The only response I got was a gruff “No!”

F
ritz Hofmann and I were the same age, and in the mornings we attended the village school, crammed together in one classroom with sixty boys and girls
between the ages of seven and fifteen. There were enough seats for everyone, however, because the Gypsies seldom or never sent their children to school. Angela Barbulescu was the teacher for
everyone. At the beginning of the fifties, the Ministry of Education had sent her to Baia Luna from the capital—under compulsion, it was rumored, although the reasons for this measure
remained obscure. I had overheard the men in Grandfather’s tavern say that she used to be quite good-looking and took care to conceal her tendency to drink too much. But at some point,
she’d lost all sense of shame. The village women, however, maintained that Barbu could never have lost her feel for when the bounds of decency had been overstepped, since she’d never
had a woman’s natural instinct for propriety in the first place. After all, when she went up to the altar to receive the Body of the Lord on her first Sunday in the village, everybody at Mass
had seen her hands. Her fingernails were painted a garish blood red. Kora Konstantin even reported that the obscene trollop had prevented her from listening to the priest’s words in the
proper spirit of devotion. Kora put into circulation that Barbu had something called a “nimmfomaniac” character defect and had been banished to the mountains to cure this inclination. I
hadn’t heard any gossip about her for a long time, however. Angela Barbulescu’s nail polish had cracked and peeled. And besides, the wives and mothers behind their curtains gave her no
chance to go more than three steps unobserved.

In my last year of school Barbu shuffled to class every morning wearing rubber boots and a dark blue dress with shiny grease stains and a smell like rancid butter. Often she would stand
unsteadily at the blackboard, struggling to stay on her feet. While she waved her pointer around to direct the national anthem, we had to stand at attention, put our hands on our hearts, and crank
out all eight verses. After that she quizzed us on local history. The younger kids sat and listened while we older ones sang the praises of the deeds of Michael the Brave, conqueror of the Turks,
rattled off historic dates from the Dacians to Gheorghe Gheorghiu-Dej, and explained for the millionth time why Catholic Baia Luna had not joined the Protestants in the previous centuries and had
never been captured by the Turks. Then we sang the song to the Virgin about the patron saint full of grace and her protective cloak. Then it was time for math.

Grades 1 to 4 added and subtracted columns of figures from zero to a hundred. Grades 5 to 8 had to multiply four- and five-place numbers and calculate the percentage increases in the quotas for
milk production and fattened hogs since the collectivization of agriculture, even though the farms in the district of Kronauburg had yet to be nationalized. Luckily, Barbu never gave our results
more than a cursory glance. That’s why my neighbor Fritz Hofmann and I finished the assignment in a flash by writing down fantastically inflated numbers.

But when Miss Barbulescu was sober and having a good day, she sat on her desk, smoothed out her blue dress, and told us about life in the Paris of the East, which is what they called the
capital. “A glittering gem of Western culture,” she often repeated. She praised the powerful voices of its nightclub singers and the grace of the “chorines of
Swan
Lake,
” waxed ecstatic about the mirrored halls of culture, the temples of dramatic art, and the moving-picture palaces where top stars of the American silver screen enchanted audiences
with their art. So poignant was her depiction of two lovers named Rhett and Scarlett that I found myself listening closely and feeling a twinge of sympathy.

In the moments she spent gazing pensively out the window, the teacher dreamed herself into the world of “ahpray culture.” Something like that was what she called high society’s
habit of going to the very best restaurants after they’ve been to some cultural event—not to eat or even to dine but rather to enjoy a “sumptuous repast.” I had no idea back
then what a sump had to do with the most elegant form of taking nourishment. As for cultivated drinking, she told of waiters in tails gliding silently around four-star establishments with a hundred
different glasses on hand for a hundred different cocktails, which particularly astonished me, since in Grandfather’s tavern we had one kind of glass on offer. But as I listened to Barbu
praising the men in evening dress dispensing wine a few splashes at a time into crystal flutes and carefully dabbing up the drip with white linen napkins and at the same time looked into the
brandy-ravaged face of my teacher, it was clear to me that something had gone wrong in her life.