The Madonna on the Moon (2 page)

In a final outburst of anger, Dana snatched the Madonna from the wall, threw open a window, and hurled the picture out into the street. Then she went to the medicine cabinet. While she swallowed
down all the pills she could lay her hands on in a rush of blind rage, passersby on their way to some New Year’s party clutching bottles of cheap sparkling wine were surprised to find lying
on the asphalt of the Strada Fortuna a splintered picture frame with a portrait of the Madonna under shards of glass. She was stretching out a protective hand over the naked Baby Jesus, who sat on
a globe of the world, while her right foot trod on a crescent moon.

On August 14, the eve of the Feast of the Assumption and barely eight months after the beginning of the new millennium, a grizzled but robust man in his midseventies showed up in Baia Luna
asking for Mr. Pavel Botev. They sent him to me and I recognized him at once. The penetrating gaze behind his round glasses was no longer quite so keen as in the photographs I remembered from my
youth, but there was no mistake: it was him. He introduced himself with some other name I’ve forgotten and asked me to guide him up to the Mondberg the following day, to the Chapel of the
Virgin of Eternal Consolation. I agreed.

He told me his story while we climbed to the summit. Of course, I wondered why he had asked in particular for me to guide him up the mountain. Today, I think the old man knew I had already heard
his story long before, not the details of it but its essentials. When we got to the top of the Mondberg, he ignored the chapel of the Virgin and strode straight toward the steep southern flank of
the mountain where there was a small cemetery with five anonymous white crosses.

“Which cross is for Angela?”

“The middle one,” I said.

He knelt down, said a Hail Mary, and got to his feet.

“Thank you, Mr. Botev.” He extended his hand and I shook it.

“Have you reached your goal, Doctor?”

He smiled. “Yes, Mr. Botev, soon. Very soon.”

Then he spread his arms and launched himself silently into the abyss, like an eagle. He flew like a king of the air who no longer wanted to be king. Dr. Florin Pauker was free.

Chapter One

“He’s flying! He’s flying! Long live Socialism! Three cheers for the party!”

The three Brancusi brothers, Liviu, Roman, and Nico, burst into our taproom one evening about eight in a splendid mood, their chests swelling with pride and the cash to stand a few rounds
burning holes in their pockets.

“Who’s flying?” asked my grandfather Ilja.

“The dog of course! Laika! The first animal in space! Aboard Sputnik II! Brandy, Pavel!
Zuika
for everybody! But
avanti
! It’s on us.” Liviu was playing the
big shot, and I could foresee I’d have to run myself ragged the next few hours.

“Gr-gr-gr-gravity has been co-co-conquered! Now nothing can hold back pr-pr-progress. Sp-Sputnik beeps and Laika b-barks all around the w-w-world,” Roman stammered, as he always did
when his tongue couldn’t keep up with his excitement.

“Progress, yes sir,” Nico, the youngest Brancusi, fell in with his stammering brother. “A toast to the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics! Side by side we will be victorious!
We will conquer the heavens!”

“You can keep your schnapps to yourselves.” The Saxons Hermann Schuster and Karl Koch threw on their coats and left the taproom.

Trouble hung in the air that November 5, 1957. It was a Tuesday and the eve of my grandfather Ilja’s fifty-fifth birthday. I was fifteen. In the mornings I reluctantly attended the eighth
(and final) grade, in the afternoons I killed time, and evenings and Sundays I helped my grandfather, waiting on his clientele in our family’s tavern. I should mention that it wasn’t an
inn in the ordinary sense of the word. Ilja, my mother Kathalina, and Aunt Antonia ran a shop by day whose inventory provided the housewives of Baia Luna with the basic necessities. By night, we
moved a few tables and chairs into the shop and transformed it into a pub for the men.

All I understood of the Brancusis’ blabber about progress was that a dog was zooming across the sky in a beeping Sputnik that managed to do without jet engines and rotating propellers and
had nothing in common with ordinary airplanes. At the price, however, of never being able to return to earth. Satellites had escaped the rules of gravity and were on their way to eternal flight in
space.

While the men in the bar were getting hot under the collar discussing the whys and wherefores of the newfangled airships, my grandfather Ilja was unmoved: “Weightlessness—not bad. My
compliments. But the Russian beeping won’t fill my belly.”

Dimitru Carolea Gabor stood up and took the floor. Some of the men lowered their chins in contempt. After all, didn’t people say the Gypsy had his feet in the clouds and thought with his
tongue? Dimitru clutched his right fist to his heart as if taking an oath. He stood there like a rock and swore that the chirping flying contraption was the work of the Supreme Comrade of all
Comrades, Joseph Vissarionovich Stalin himself. While still alive, he’d ordered a whole armada of Sputniks to be built. “Sly machines camouflaged as harmless balls of tin, under way on
secret missions, and now they even have a dog onboard. I don’t quite get the point of that yapper among the stars, but I’ll tell you something: those aluminum spiders aren’t
poking their antennae into the sky just for fun. The Supreme Soviet has something up its sleeve. That beeping, that cosmic cicada, robs peaceful human beings of their sleep and of their sanity,
too. And you know what that means? If you’re crazy, you turn into a zombie, and the world revolution just goose-steps right past you. And then, comrades”—Dimitru stared at the
three Brancusis—“then you’ve finally achieved the equality of the entire proletariat. The idiot among equals thinks everyone’s smart.”

“In your case, the beeping seems to be working already.” Liviu tapped his finger on his forehead to mock the crazy Gypsy. “You Blacks are nothing to write home about, anyway.
Why don’t you do something productive for a change? Under Stalin, you all would’ve been—”

“Right!
Exactamente!
What’d I tell you?” Dimitru interrupted him. “Joseph was a sly dog. But he had problems getting everyone proletarianized. Big problems.
Because his policy of state control just couldn’t achieve the equality of all the Soviets. Sure, the Supreme Comrade really tried hard: bigger jails, higher prison walls, bread and water,
half rations. He tried to rub out the last vestiges of inequality with more and more gallows and firing squads. But what did that achieve? Joseph had to keep expanding the labor camps for the
unequal. The boundaries of the prisons grew incalculably vast. Today no one knows who’s in and who’s out. What a dilemma. The Supreme Soviet can’t keep track of it all anymore.
That’s why they need Sputnik. The beeping eliminates the mind and the will. And where there’s no will, there’s no—”

“Who needs this bullshit?” yelled Nico Brancusi. Purple with rage, he jumped up and glared around at the assembled company. “Who wants to hear this crap, goddamnit!” From
way back in his throat he hocked up a loogie and spat it onto the floorboards with the words, “Gypsy lies! Black talk!”

Dimitru drummed his fingers nervously on the table.

“It’s the truth,” he said. “If my calculations are correct, Sputnik will be flying over the Transmontanian Carpathians between the forty-sixth degree of latitude and the
twenty-fourth degree of longitude in the morning hours of my friend Ilja’s special day. It’ll be beeping right over our heads. I’m telling you, Sputnik is the beginning of the
end. And you, Comrade Nico, you can offer your naked ass to whoever you want, that’s your business. But I’m a Gypsy, and you’ll never find a Gypsy in bed with the
Bolsheviks.”

Nico went for the Gypsy’s throat, but his brothers held him back. Dimitru emptied his glass, belched, and after whispering to grandfather, “Five on the dot. I’ll be waiting for
you,” left the tavern without a backward glance.

I
didn’t know what to think about all the excitement. I went to bed but had a hard time falling asleep. The Gypsy had probably catapulted himself
out of the track of logical thought again (as so often in the past) with his hair-raising speculations about the beeping Sputnik.

But my bedtime prayer (which admittedly I usually forgot) suddenly gave me pause. “Our Father, who art in heaven, hallowed be thy name. Thy kingdom come . . .” Now, at fifteen, I was
already clear that the kingdom of heaven was not about to arrive in the foreseeable future, at least not in Baia Luna. But it was different with the Sputnik. The kingdom of heaven might not be
expanding on earth, but on the other hand, man was heading for the heavens. Or at least an earthly creature was: a dog. Surely the beast would soon be dead of starvation. But what was a dead mutt
doing in the infinity of space anyway? Up where the Lord God and his hosts reigned, as our aged parish priest Johannes Baptiste thundered from his pulpit every Sunday.

Night was already drawing to a close when the floorboards in the hall creaked. I heard cautious footsteps, as if someone didn’t want to be heard. Grandfather was taking great pains not to
wake up my mother Kathalina, Aunt Antonia, and me. The footsteps descended the stairs and died out in the interior of the shop. I waited awhile, got dressed, and stole downstairs, full of
curiosity. The outside door was open. It was pitch black.

“Fucking shit,” hissed a voice. “Goddamn crappy weather!” It was Dimitru.

“Be quiet or you’ll wake up the whole village.”

“I prayed, Ilja, I mean I really beseeched the Creator to make short work of it and with one puff of his almighty breath sweep away these goddamn clouds. And what does he do when just once
a Gypsy asks for something? He sends us this fog from hell. We can forget about hearing the Sputnik in this pea soup.”

I hid behind the doorjamb and peered outside. Dimitru was right. It had been raining buckets for days, and now the fog had crept down from the mountains. You couldn’t even see the outline
of the church steeple. Five muffled strokes of the clock penetrated the night. Ilja and Dimitru looked up at the sky. They cocked their heads, put their hands behind their ears, and listened again.
Obviously in vain. Disappointed, the two shuffled back into the shop. They didn’t see me.

“Ilja, I’m wondering if it wouldn’t make sense to go back to bed for a while,” said Dimitru.

“It does make sense.”

Then the Gypsy’s gaze fell on the tin funnel my grandfather always used to pour the sunflower oil delivered in canisters from Walachia into the bottles the village housewives brought.

“Man, Ilja, that’s it! Your funnel. We’ll use it as a megaphone, only in reverse. You’ve heard of the principle of the concentration of sound waves—
sonatus
concentrates
or something like that? We can use it to capture even the faintest hint of a noise.”

The two went back outside and took turns sticking the tin funnel first into their left ear and then their right, hoping to amplify the sound. For a good quarter of an hour they swiveled their
heads in all directions.

When at last I cleared my throat and wished them good morning, they gave it up.

“So, Dimitru, you’re going to let Sputnik steal your sanity?” I ribbed him.

“Go ahead and laugh, Pavel. Blessed are those who neither see nor hear but still believe. Let me assure you, it’s beeping.
Evidentamente
. We just can’t hear
it.”

“No wonder,” I pretended to be sympathetic. “The November fog. It swallows everything up and you can’t hear a thing. Not the calves bleating, not even the cocks crowing.
To say nothing of Sputnik, it’s so far away. Beyond the pull of gravity, if I’ve got it right.”

“Good thinking, Pavel! You’re right, when it’s foggy the Sputnik’s not worth much. The Supreme Comrade didn’t think of that. Between you and me and in the cold
light of day, Stalin was pretty much of an idiot. But don’t spread it around. That can get you into trouble nowadays. And now, forgive me, but my bed is calling.”

Grandfather looked a little sheepish. It made him self-conscious to be caught holding a funnel to his ear out in front of the shop on his fifty-fifth birthday.

“Pavel, go with Dimitru so he doesn’t break his neck on the way home. You can’t see your hand in front of your face.”

Out of sorts, I groped my way with Dimitru to the lower end of the village where his people lived. At the doorstep of his cottage he put his hand to his ear again and listened.

“Give it up, Dimitru. What’s the point?”

“
Sic est
. You’re right,” he said, thanked me for my company, and disappeared inside.

Was it mere coincidence? No idea. But just as I set off back through the village, the roosters began to crow, and across from the Gypsy settlement a weak light shimmered through the fog. For the
second time on that early morning I let myself be driven by curiosity. The light was shining from the cottage of Angela Barbulescu, the village schoolteacher. This early in the morning!
“Barbu,” as we called her, usually slept till all hours. She seldom showed up for class on time, and once in front of the class, she often stared at us from swollen eyes because the
brandy from the previous evening was still having its effect. I left the street and peeked through her window. She was sitting at the kitchen table with a warm wool blanket thrown over her
shoulders. Incredible! She was sitting there writing something. She lifted her head from time to time and looked at the ceiling as if seeking the right word. Much more than the fact that Barbu was
apparently getting something important down on paper at this ungodly hour, it was her face I found astonishing. In the last few years of school, I had come to think she was disgusting. I never
looked at her except with contempt, if not revulsion.