The Madonna on the Moon (39 page)

Desperately sad, I dragged myself back to the village. I would not feel such pain again until decades later, when I became aware that my love for her was drowning in a swamp of hopeless
misfortune.

Dimitru Carolea Gabor had remained behind in Baia Luna with Ion Vadura and his family. He was the man who kept an eye on the Gypsies’ settlement while they were traveling. Dimitru had
tried to explain his reluctance to travel by the urgency of his researches, but since he could use only his hands and feet but not his voice, he had met with incomprehension among his tribe. His
self-imposed silence necessarily precluded talking to his own people as well as to Grandpa. Dimitru was hardly ever to be seen in the village. Sometimes he shuffled to the watering trough to get
himself a jug of fresh water. The sight of him aroused the sympathy of Erika Schuster and my mother, so the two of them took turns cooking an extra midday meal and setting it on the doorstep of the
library to keep Dimitru from starving to death.

Grandfather was also undergoing a disconcerting change in those months. Although the times of economic hardship seemed to be coming to an end, his health was not good. The silence of his friend
Dimitru weighed heavily on him. He could hardly get up in the morning and went to bed so early in the evening that I was forced to take over his duties in the shop and tavern if our business was to
stay afloat. He was sunk in a slough of depression, and even my encouraging words or Kathalina’s tirades of scolding would only briefly lift him out of his lethargy. We gradually began to be
seriously concerned.

Working in the business was so demanding that the summer and fall flew by in a flash, even though I grieved for weeks when the Gypsies returned in late summer without Buba. Though I had hoped
that her mother would change her mind, I’d never really expected her to.

Our inventory needed restocking for the winter. Since I didn’t want to subject Grandfather to the strain of a long trip in the wagon, I asked Petre Petrov to come with me to buy supplies
in Kronauburg. When we reached the compound of the Kronauburg trading organization there was a long line of concessionaires waiting to pay for their purchases. It turned out that because of their
restricted hours of operation we would have to wait until the following morning to get our supplies. We decided to spend the night on the hay of the Pofta Buna and have a few beers in town with the
money we would save. As a precaution I avoided the immediate vicinity of Hofmann’s photo studio but not of the Kronauburg market square. I had no intention of risking running into the lab
assistant Irina. On the lookout for a cheap pub, Petre and I strolled up the medieval Castle Hill. Below the clock tower Petre discovered a shop that appeared to be still in private hands. A sign
hung there that said
GHEORGHE GHERGHEL
.
ANTIQUES BOUGHT AND SOLD
.
ON COMMISSION
. In the shopwindow, which hadn’t been
cleaned in years, there were various optical instruments on display: antique monocles, old army-issue field glasses and rifle scopes, spyglasses, and even a big telescope on a tripod. Petre was
fascinated by the old scopes. Although I was his friend, I’d had no idea he and his father sometimes went out hunting at night with a carbine.

“Let’s go in here.”

I expected an aged gentleman with snow-white hair, but instead a young fellow just a little older than myself asked if he could help us. While Petre had the clerk show him the rifle scopes from
the window, only to be disappointed that even the used instruments far exceeded his financial resources, I took a look around.

I discovered what I wouldn’t have expected in my wildest dreams. Among piles of radios with tubes, a gramophone, and used typewriters stood an enlarger.

“How much for that?”

“I’ll have to ask my uncle,” said the clerk. “He’s sick. But I know he won’t sell that separately. Only the complete darkroom set. The whole thing belonged to
a retired judge who spent all his free time crouching in the underbrush to take pictures of reclusive forest animals. He died last spring.”

“When can you find out the price from your uncle?”

“Right now. He lives one flight up and he’s in bed. He’s . . . ah, how shall I put it . . . sick in his head. I have to tell you that we don’t own the building. The owner
has sold it to a big shot in the party. And since Uncle Gheorghe found out he’ll have to move out of here and won’t be able to find any other place because he’s a private dealer,
he’s been brokenhearted.” The young man disappeared and was back in a few minutes. “Gheorghe is sleeping, and I don’t want to wake him. But I’d guess the whole thing,
with a camera, would be about three thousand.”

I swallowed hard. That was half a year’s salary for my grandfather.

“But Uncle Gheorghe’s not a highway robber. If he likes you he’ll sometimes sell you something for less than he paid for it himself. But I’m sure he wouldn’t sell
it for less than two thousand. Come by again when he’s awake and ask him.”

I didn’t fool myself into thinking I’d ever be able to come up with the money.

Around six o’clock Petre and I went into a bar. It was a rundown dive whose interior was just as shabby as its exterior led us to expect. The grimy gorilla of a bartender had dandruff in
what was left of his sparse hair. But since our thirst and weariness were greater than our desire to look for another place, we sat down at a table near the window.

“Is there beer?” asked Petre.

“But of course, gentlemen.”

The bartender opened two bottles, wiped off the lips on his apron, and put them on the table. Then I saw the two women. One of them was slumped over the bar and dozing; the other was looking at
us. It was only a matter of time before she came over.

I hadn’t even set the bottle down after my first swallow and there she was in front of me. She wore a cheap dress that was much too tight around her buttocks and breasts.

“I’m Luca. Mind if me and my colleague join you? Just for a little. For somebody to talk to. She’s from the capital and doesn’t know anybody here.”

We looked at each other, and since we didn’t say no right away, Luca called, “Come on, Ana. These guys are okay.”

The other woman almost fell down as she slid off the bar stool. She tried to walk straight, but she swayed right and left and had to steady herself on the chairs.

“Actually, we don’t want—”

I cut Petre off: “Have a seat.” It was like a punch in my gut: the woman who could hardly walk straight wasn’t named Ana. She looked like someone with nothing more to live for.
Her right eye was black and blue, and when she forced herself to smile you could see past her cracked lips that she was missing two upper teeth. There was nothing left of the child-woman who once
let Dr. Stephanescu squirt champagne between her legs. Petre slid over, and the drunk woman collapsed on a chair while Luca squeezed in next to me.

“I’ll have a beer, too,” she said boldly. “And a liqueur for my friend if you guys are paying.”

I ignored the request. “Hello, Alexa.”

“Her name’s Ana.” Both Luca and Petre corrected me at the same time.

I’d expected a surprised reaction, but the woman just looked at me wearily. “Ana, Marina, Elena, Alexa—whichever you want, boy.”

The bartender brought over another beer and a water glass half full of liqueur.

“Ana’s only been here since November,” Luca explained. “She had her best years in the capital, right, Ana? Isn’t that what you said?”

Alexa nodded weakly and sipped her liqueur. Then she put her trembling index and middle finger up to her mouth, and I offered her a Carpati. She inhaled eagerly and gazed off in a dream.

“She’s had too much,” Luca whispered to me as if it were a secret.

“I gotta take a piss.” Petre stood up, and the bartender pointed to a door with peeling paint. Alexa reached for her glass again, and I got up and put my arm around her. There was
only one way for me to get through to this woman. I whispered something into her ear that I would regret only a second later: “Angela’s sunflower dress looked good on you.”

In a flash, the woman beside me was gripped by fear. Her glass fell to the floor and shattered. She jumped up and stumbled out the door. Luca rushed at me, but I ducked her slap.
“What’d you say to her, you fucking pervert?” Then she ran out after her.

“What happened to the ladies?” asked Petre as he noticed the glass shards and sticky mess under his feet.

“They left.”

“Thank God. Shall we have another beer?”

“I’ve had enough.” I wished Luca’s slap hadn’t missed.

A
s the fall progressed, it became clear that it had been a mistake for Grandfather to stop following the advice of Dr. Bogdan, who had passed away in
the meantime. The country doctor had warned Ilja over the years that because of his childhood poisoning in the vat of mash, his delicate constitution couldn’t stand even small amounts of
alcohol. Dr. Bogdan had been right. Although he very seldom got the shakes, his memory was beginning to fail him.

It started with him taking an order from one of the housewives and then standing blankly in front of the shelves, not recalling what he had meant to get. Kathalina noticed that her
father-in-law, who used to be able to find his way around the world of numbers blindfolded, now often made mistakes to his own disadvantage when adding up the accounts receivable. Women began
asking for me when they wanted quick service, while Grandfather retreated more and more into an imaginary world because he couldn’t cope with the real one.

For the men, too, Ilja wasn’t the same old tavern keeper anymore. They often had to ask him three or four times to refill their glasses, and although he did so politely at first, he began
to get more and more cranky. He even started losing his temper and cursing like a trooper if anyone dared to speak to him when he was sitting in front of the TV. At first he only watched the news
and Soviet movies, but gradually he started watching everything that flickered across the screen, even the test pattern at the end of the day. Another of Grandfather’s quirks was that the
television could never be turned on before six o’clock, the official closing time for his T.O. concession. My mother and I could live with that, especially since Grandfather also had days of
mental clarity now and then, days on which he was his usual, congenial self.

However, Kathalina’s patience ran out in 1960 when a powerful autumn storm snapped off the antenna. Granddad wouldn’t leave his seat in front of the idiot box and kept pulling his
chair closer and closer. Every time the black bar slid down the screen he clapped like a child and cried, “There it is again! There it is again!”

In our despair at the change in Ilja’s character and his increasing senility, mother and I went to talk to Hermann Schuster. The only thing he could think to do was to pack Grandfather
into the wagon and drive him to the hospital in Kronauburg to be examined. I insisted on going along with Grandfather and the Saxon, partly from real concern but also partly because I wanted to
take the opportunity to visit someone in the hospital: Dr. Paula Petrin.

In the presence of the specialists in the department of neurology Ilja was fortunately granted one of his rare moments of clarity. He understood that something was wrong with him and he would
need to be admitted to the hospital for a period of observation and examination. It was agreed that we could pick him up again in six weeks.

As Hermann Schuster was heading for the exit from the People’s Hospital, Health of the Fatherland, I asked him to give me five minutes. Without waiting for his reply, I scooted down the
steps and followed the sign for the Institute of Pathology until I reached the yellowish door that said
DR
.
MED
.
PAULA
PETRIN
,
SPECIALIST FOR INTERNAL MEDICINE
. I knocked.

“Yes?”

I entered. The doctor looked up from a desk piled high with files.

“What is it?” she asked. I sensed none of her former congeniality.

“Pavel Botev. From Baia Luna. Three years ago three of us were here looking for the corpse of our dead pastor, Johannes Baptiste.”

Paula’s face brightened.

“Yes, of course. I remember you very well. I sent you to old Patrascu.”

“We went to see him. But he didn’t know anything about the body either.”

“Nice of you to come by again. Unfortunately I’m under a lot of pressure at the moment. In a half hour I have to be putting an important report onto our director’s desk. Your
pastor was Catholic, not Reformed, right?”

“Exactly.”

“As far as I know, Catholic priests are not buried in their parishes but in the episcopal cemetery. I haven’t been in Saint Paul’s in a long time, but there’s a cathedral
treasury, a kind of museum, in there, and from the treasury there’s a passageway that leads to an interior courtyard with the graves of priests and bishops. Maybe that’s where your
pastor is. Sorry, but I’ve got to get back to work.”

“Many thanks for the tip.” I turned toward the door. “How’s the old police commissioner, by the way?”

“Didn’t you hear? He’s dead. Good old Patrascu was only able to enjoy his retirement for two or three weeks.”

“What did he die of?”

“His heart gave out. He probably smoked too many Carpatis.”

“Did you examine the body?”

“No, why should I?”

Hermann Schuster agreed at once to take a detour past Saint Paul’s, and we found the cemetery just as Paula Petrin had described it. The oldest gravestones went back to the eighteenth
century. The most recent grave was relatively new. The dirt had settled, and it was bordered with irregular stones. Chiseled onto the simple gravestone was
JOSEPH AUGUSTIN
METZLER
, 16/3/1872–12/11/1957.

“Strange,” I said. “Almost all the stones have the birthplace and the place of death. Pastor Metzler’s doesn’t even say what parish he served.”

“Curious,” agreed Schuster. “This Metzler died about the same time as our Baptiste.”

As we left the cemetery, any hope that we could clear up the disappearance of Pater Johannes’s body disappeared.