The Madonna on the Moon (51 page)

Ilja woke up in a remote area, a side valley of the Alt River, three hours by car from the capital. Behind the façade of a former military barracks was a psychiatric hospital that the
locals talked about in hushed voices. They said anyone sent in there never cast a shadow again.

I
n days gone by, Dimitru had always made great claims about the power of his loins, but if anyone thought that my aunt Antonia, sitting beside him,
would become his lover, the sight of the unequal couple would soon change their mind. While even in hard times, Antonia Botev’s already generous proportions continued to increase, the Gypsy
became skinnier and skinnier. He was actually shrinking, getting smaller and smaller until he was so insubstantial that you hardly noticed him next to the ample body of his companion. No matter
what village they were passing through, they seldom stayed longer than a few hours and always asked after a certain Ilja Botev from Baia Luna. But no one knew of a man with that name. Only
once—it must have been in the seventh or eighth year of their search—a coffin maker in the Maramuresch Mountains told them about a burial that had recently taken place in the cemetery
in Viseu de Jos. If he remembered right, the deceased was over seventy and his name was Botev.

Dimitru purchased one of the ready-made white lacquered children’s coffins the carpenter had stocked up on in anticipation of the coming winter, transferred his father’s bones into
it, and headed for the cemetery the man had named. And there was in fact a freshly dug grave with a cross on which, to Antonia’s and Dimitru’s horror, was written the name Ilja
Botev.

They quickly found the relatives of the deceased, friendly people who offered them hospitality for several days, although they turned out not to be even remotely related to the Botevs of Baia
Luna. Dimitru and Antonia were relieved to discover that the deceased could not possibly have been their friend and father.

The Gypsy and his companion stayed one night and then continued their journey in the knowledge that in a respected family in the far north of Transmontania, there had been a second Ilja
Botev.

Although Antonia and Dimitru were not a couple in the conventional sense, their relationship was nevertheless much more than that of a homeless man and his voluntary companion. For one thing,
Antonia liked being on the move. She even found the constant change of location to be a sort of liberation. For another, she had developed a fondness for Dimitru that sprang neither from the
fleeting excitement of desire nor the established love between husband and wife. Instead, in their relationship she adopted the role of an attentive mother, a role that proved so congenial and
satisfying to Antonia that, for the first time, she realized she had simply slept through her years in Baia Luna.

Although the Gypsy’s physical self was shrinking, he had lost none of his intellectual alertness, but he did develop a state of mind that complemented Antonia’s maternal role. Not
that Dimitru’s behavior was childish. He didn’t complain and whine or make any sort of infantile impression during the day. But at night, when even in the summer he was chilly and
shivering, nothing made him happier than to roll up in a ball and snuggle in the security of her ample body, not like a man but like a sad, hurt little boy.

Aside from the child’s coffin in which Dimitru carried the bones of his father, their most precious possession proved to be Ilja’s Bible. Since for a Black it was an awful thing to
make a firm promise but, once made, an even worse thing to break it, he kept his oath not to open the sacred Scripture again until he had found his friend Ilja. But even in the darkest of dark
times, Dimitru never completely lost his craftiness, and that being so, he waited patiently for Antonia to draw the correct
conclusio
from the two “facticities,” namely, that
he owned a Bible but was not allowed to read it.

“Dimi dear,” said Antonia one August evening as they were lying in the grass next to their wagon, bathed in the last rays of the setting sun, “your oath wouldn’t prevent
me from reading to you from the Scripture, would it?”

“I’m delighted by your wisdom, my love. You recite and I’ll memorize. Once I’ve got the word of God
completamente
by heart, my oath can go to hell. Let’s
get started right away. From chapter one to chapter . . . say, how many chapters did the Lord God dictate to his chroniclers back then, anyway?”

“Many, I’d say. Very many, even.”

From then on, Antonia read aloud, and the next morning she quizzed him on the verses from the night before. Dimitru always had them letter perfect—with book, chapter, and
verse—unless he had indulged in concentration-enhancing beverages. But after a demanding day of driving the wagon his capacity to absorb the text was very limited, and so Antonia’s
evening readings were often restricted to two or three verses.

And so it was that disaster didn’t strike Dimitru Carolea Gabor until the beginning of the eighties, in the twelfth year of his search for his friend Ilja. They had reached the Gospel
According to John, and Dimitru was feverish with excited anticipation, since many passages in it were familiar to him from Papa Baptiste’s sermons. He was especially eager to get to the end,
where the risen Christ descends to earth once more to display his wounds and let doubting Thomas put his fingers in them while the Savior tells him that blessed are they that have not seen and yet
have believed. That sentence was one of Dimitru’s favorites, since the word of God confirmed it was only the timid soul who needed some visible proof but not the trusting soul able to see the
reality of ideas. Thus, of all the sentences the Gypsy’s receptive ear had ever heard, he loved the beginning of the Gospel of Saint John, just like Papa Baptiste in bygone days.

“In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God,” read Antonia. As she continued with “And the Word was made flesh, and dwelt among us,”
her Dimi shone like a comet in the heavens.

“That, my dear, is the most beautiful message ever bestowed on the world.” As Dimitru said that sentence, he had no idea that it would be burned to ashes a few chapters later.

Antonia read on. In the years of reading the Bible aloud, she had always refrained from any commentary so as not to confuse Dimitru in his reception of the sacred word. But then she got to
chapter 3, verse 5, of the Gospel of Saint John: “‘Verily, verily, I say unto thee, except a man be born of water, and of the spirit, he cannot enter into the kingdom of God. That
which is born of the flesh is flesh; and that which is born of the Spirit is spirit.’” Antonia cried, “I know that! My father Ilja recited that in the Baia Luna church to prove
to Kora Konstantin how well he had mastered the art of reading.”

“That’s right,” said Dimitru. “Keep reading.”

And then he heard from Antonia’s lips the words of Jesus, “‘If I have told you earthly things, and ye believe not, how shall ye believe, if I tell you of heavenly things? And
no man hath ascended up to heaven, but he that came down from heaven, even the Son of Man.’”

“What was that you just said?”

Antonia repeated the last sentence.

In horror, Dimitru grabbed the Bible out of her hands and broke his promise. He said softly, “‘And no man hath ascended up to heaven, but he that came down from heaven, even the Son
of Man.’”

“What’s wrong, Dimitru?” asked Antonia, who was as bewildered as she was anxious about the expression on her companion’s face.

“It was all for nothing. Mary never went up to heaven in the flesh. It says so right here. God himself says in his very own words that only one person ever ascended to heaven. Only Jesus,
the Son of Man. No one else. Why didn’t anyone tell us? If only I had known this earlier! I would never have let Ilja leave Baia Luna. It’s my fault and no one else’s. I pulled my
friend into the biggest mistake of my life. Mary was mortal and stayed mortal. She’s not on the moon. She returned to the dust of earth. Ilja will never forgive me, never.”

“But Mary is in heaven! You told me yourself you saw her that time on the Mondberg, looking through the telescope.”

“Antonia, Antonia,” Dimitru wept. “I did see her! For sure! But I can’t remember anymore. I was so drunk because your nephew Pavel gave us all that schnapps to take
along!”

“And what about the pope’s dogma? The Assumption of God’s mother into heaven was an infallible promulgation!”

“A lie! I don’t know why, but it was a lie. How should a Gypsy like me know why the pope puts his own word above the divine word in the Gospel?”

Since Antonia had no answer, she could feel her Dimitru shrivel in her arms to a pitiful little old man.

Chapter Thirteen

Today, as I look back over my life, the Age of Gold seems like the rise and fall of a distant star, a sun that gives light and warmth for a while, expands into a huge red
giant, and finally collapses under the weight of its own mass. In the end, all that remained of the New Nation was a greedy black hole that had devoured years of my life and turned the ardent
dreams of my youth to ice.

We couldn’t see colors any longer. Although the meadows of Baia Luna were green in spring, the sky blue in summer, and the snow white in winter, all we could see was gray. We were blind.
And we were mute. There was a time when we were silent for fear of the Security Service. But my fear of Colonel Raducanu and his henchmen had never crippled me. It just kept me on my guard. We were
mute because of the emptiness behind the words. There was nothing there but an abyss. Of course we still spoke, but things dissolved and disappeared in their names. Time was so used up that names
had no more need of things. You could no longer point to something and say, That’s what that is called.

The church was no longer the house of God but just dead stone walls. The steeple clock was no longer a clock. The priest was no longer a shepherd of his flock, and the cemetery no longer a final
resting place, just somewhere to stow corpses. Even the Eternal Flame was nothing but a wick glimmering in oil. Nothing was what it was called anymore.

Our family-run co-op market with its empty shelves was a store in name only. There was no sugar, no milk, no oil, only rationed cornmeal and canned tomatoes. We had plenty of those, but nothing
else. To have at least a few drops of fat floating in their soup on holidays, the village women trekked to the district capital—on foot, since the buses couldn’t run without diesel
fuel. I remember vividly my mother coming back with a pig’s foot and two chicken feet. As furious as Kathalina was, she vented her anger on the priest. “Go to hell, you
gravedigger!” she told him to his face. Every morning Antonius Wachenwerther ate eggs, sausages, and the bacon parishioners brought him, while the village children went for weeks without so
much as a swallow of milk.

As for me, I stopped going to church when the priest had the bones of the unbaptized Gypsy Laszlo Gabor disinterred. That act met with the approval of some people in the village, but not
everyone. The Kallays, the Petrovs, and the Scherban brothers weren’t seen at Mass thereafter, or Hermann Schuster either. The Saxon was unable to say the Lord’s Prayer anymore. He
couldn’t force himself to say “Give us this day our daily bread” along with Wachenwerther. Sadly, Schusters’ Hermann died shortly after the revolution, and Istvan Kallay as
well. I wish the two of them could have experienced the era of freedom.

The red giant imploded, but not with a powerful bang. It winked out so quietly and gradually that, at first, people in Baia Luna didn’t even notice that the Age of Gold had collapsed. The
man whose glory outshone the sun had cooled to a dead star. His final rays still glimmered here and there, long after people began whispering that they had been extinguished forever by a firing
squad against a wall in the courtyard of a military barracks.

S
omething’s happening. I’m sure something’s going on.” Excitedly, Petre Petrov turned to Istvan Kallay’s son Imre and me.
“You try it.”

We’d been hunched in front of the radio for hours turning the knob, but reception of Radio Free Europe kept getting interrupted.

“They’re jamming it,” Imre guessed. “They don’t want us to know what’s happening in our own country.”

All we’d been able to find out was that there was fighting in the city of Timisoara. There’d been an insurrection. Finally, Imre found a Hungarian station. According to their news
broadcast, the army and armored units of the Securitate from the capital had been sent to the Banat region in the western part of the country to put down the revolt with tear gas, water cannons,
shields, and riot sticks. The Protestant pastor Laszlo Tokes had started the ball rolling with his courageous sermons. His audience grew by the day and took away a single message: the Conducator
had to go. Obviously, Tokes’s own bishop had stabbed him in the back. The Securitate had pressured him to discipline the pastor by transferring him to a village so far out in the sticks it
wasn’t to be found on any map of Transmontania.