The Madonna on the Moon (5 page)

“He’s a sorcerer.” Barbu’s laughter broke off suddenly. “He can cast spells. He changes wine to water and turns fields into deserts. The photographer Hofmann is his
right-hand man. Be careful, boy. Watch out.”

Before I could grasp the insanity of her words, she snatched the photograph from me and held it over the burning candle. The flame flickered blue and ate into the paper. When the picture was
half consumed, she pulled it away and blew it out with a few strong breaths. Flakes of ash drifted through the room. The man at her side had been incinerated. She handed me what was left of the
photograph, her kiss now aimed into nothingness.

“Take it. It’s for you.”

I resisted. “What would I do with it?”

“Take it! Take it as a reminder that your Barbu was once Angela Maria Barbulescu.”

Unwillingly I put the picture in my pocket. She sat down next to me on the sofa and put the volume of Eminescu’s poems into her lap. Without opening it, she recited, “A whisper from
your lips so warm has veiled my eyes in gentle night. Encircled by your icy arm I die, succumbing to its might.”

She drank from the bottle and hitched closer to me. The fragrance of roses was lost in her sharp alcoholic breath. She was drunk. My thoughts froze as she ran her fingers through my hair.

“Are you afraid, boy?”

“No,” I whispered.

Suddenly appalled at her own attempted seduction, she withdrew her hand and smoothed out her dress the way she always did when she sat on her desk in school and told us about the Paris of the
East. I sprang to my feet.

“Forgive me, Pavel, please, I’m sorry,” she begged. I was already in the hall putting on my shoes. “Pavel, things are different than they seem. And believe me, people
are, too.”

But I was already out the door and heading up the village street. I tripped over my shoelaces, fell, got to my feet, and ran.

Next morning in school everything was as usual. National anthem, blue dress, percentages, party poems. In the weeks that followed, winter was approaching, and school days passed in the same
monotony, except that I refused to participate in class at all. Barbu left me alone and avoided calling on me until the day in November that began with my grandfather Ilja and his friend Dimitru
trying to capture the beeping of the Sputnik with their tin funnel.

M
ore
zuika,
Pavel! A bottle of Sylvaner! Pavel, my glass has a hole in it!” The customers would be yelling for me, and I would have to
scurry as I did every year on November 6, Ilja’s birthday. After school I would shove aside the crates of vegetables, tubs of sugar syrup, and heavy sacks of potatoes, put away the cash
register and the decimal scale and iron weights, and drag in the wooden tables and wicker chairs from the storeroom. Once the bottles of plum brandy and wine were lined up on the counter, everyone
would trickle in. Hardly a man in Baia Luna would not want to pay his respects to the storekeeper and tavern owner Ilja Botev on his special day. Hans Schneider was never one to refuse a glass of
schnapps, nor his fellow Germans Hermann Schuster and Karl Koch either. Alexandru Kiselev and the bilious blacksmith Simenov would stop by for a more or less extended hour. The Hungarian Istvan
Kallay would stumble home to his wife in the middle of the night, falling down drunk, and Trojan Petrov would most likely introduce his seventeen-year-old son Petre into the circle of grown-up men
for the first time. Of course the hothead Brancusis would also put in an appearance, and it goes without saying that Dimitru the Gypsy would be there, too. The only uncertainty was whether the
ancient priest Johannes Baptiste at almost ninety would find his way to the tavern again this year.

As I gave Grandfather his box of cigars wrapped in red paper that morning, the thought went through my head that it was going to be a long day. While Granddad was enjoying his Cuban, my eye fell
on the clock. I had to go to school. “You haven’t eaten anything yet!” my mother called after me as I slung my schoolbag halfheartedly over my shoulder and left the house. I
wished the hours on the hard wooden school bench were already over. Eighth grade—my last—seemed like it was dragging along so doggedly it would never end. One more long winter, one more
spring, then I would finally have sat out the boredom of school. As I ambled down the village street on that morning of November 6, 1957, I had not the faintest foreboding that when the school bell
rang, it would ring in my last day of school.

Angela Barbulescu showed up promptly at eight. She was transformed. She wasn’t staring from reddened eyes. Her gaze was open and clear, just as it had been when I spied her sitting at her
kitchen table in the wee hours and writing something. She was holding a gray package under her arm. I already knew what was in it, but I didn’t know that its contents would derail my own
life.

The previous day, in a pouring rain, a messenger had arrived in Baia Luna. He came into our store, identified himself as a courier from the district administration, and asked after the teacher
Barbulescu. Grandfather offered the man an umbrella, which he gratefully accepted.

“Must be something important in that package,” Granddad opined, giving the messenger an opening to let off some steam.

“This is my last delivery, thank God! Three hundred village schools in two weeks. My bones are weary, let me tell you. My sacroiliac is killing me. And this shitty weather. Two whole hours
it took me to get to this godforsaken hole. My diesel got stuck in the mud three times. Three times! They whine and complain in the office when I don’t keep to my schedule, but no one tells
them that the roads up here are a joke. Potholes like bomb craters.”

I was listening with only half an ear when the courier started talking about a new party secretary in Kronauburg, a capable man with a bright future whose portrait was to be hung in all the
schools of the district. I think that afternoon was the first time I heard the name Stefan Stephanescu. At any rate, the courier intimated that the new secretary wasn’t one of your puffed-up
party hacks and bullshit artists, know-it-alls without a clue.

Barbu dispensed with the national anthem. Instead, she unwrapped the gray package and took out a framed photograph. Although there were boys who were better than me with tools, I was the one she
chose to put a nail in the wall and hang it up immediately to the right of the energetic visage of President Gheorghiu-Dej, whom the men of Baia Luna referred to respectfully, with a hand
discreetly covering their mouth, as “Little Stalin.” Sullenly, I walked to the front of the classroom and climbed onto a chair. Restlessness spread through the class. Angela Barbulescu
handed me a hammer and the portrait in its matte gold frame. I bent down to take the photograph from her. The same fragrance of roses reached my nostrils as on the terrible evening on the sofa in
her parlor. She whispered something to me. It took me a moment to grasp the force of her words. Just two short sentences. I heard them distinctly despite the jumble of voices in the classroom. But
there was a time lag as their meaning sank in. I held the picture up to see where I should place the nail. Then I recognized the man I was about to nail to the wall.

“Send this man straight to hell! Exterminate him!”

The hammer slipped from my hand and banged my toe. The sharp pain made me wince. I fell off the chair. The classroom roared with glee.

Send this man straight to hell! Exterminate him!

I knew the person in the picture. I had seen the man looking at me with a winning smile once before. Only now his hair wasn’t shiny with pomade, and his tie was properly tightened. Along
the bottom edge of the picture was the saying
CHILDREN ARE OUR FUTURE
. It was the man with many fiancées. The man for whom Barbu had puckered her lips in happier
days. The man she had burned out of the photo whose surviving half was in my room, stuck between the pages of
Das Kapital
by Karl Marx.

“Quiet! Be quiet!” Barbu shouted, breaking the spell that had shocked and paralyzed me. “For this masterful portrait we are indebted to the eye of a photographer who has done
so much to advance the art of making pictures with light. As you all know, his son Fritz will soon have to find his own way into the world of adulthood, and perhaps one day he will follow in his
father’s footsteps.”

Everyone’s eyes flew to Fritz Hofmann. Slowly he leaned back in his chair and pretended he was about to yawn. With the exclamation “Bravo, bravo, bravo!” he clapped his hands.
Barbu ignored the provocation and explained that the person in the picture was the new party secretary of Kronauburg, Dr. Stefan Stephanescu, honors graduate of the university in the capital and a
specialist in economic administration.

“But remember: not everything that’s framed and glitters is gold.” The class grew quiet. “To distinguish the genuine from the fake,” she continued, “requires
the greatest wisdom of heart and brain. Perhaps someday Dr. Stephanescu will meet a person who’s up to the job.”

“Amen!” called Fritz.

I slunk back to my seat with a blue and swollen toe. I was surprised to discover that my fright was fading, and in its place I felt a previously unknown clarity.
Exterminate this man!
That demand had knocked my legs out from under me, but I was on my feet again, calm and collected.
Send him straight to hell!
Only a crazy person, a drunk who had drowned her mind in
zuika,
could have whispered such a mad assignment into the ear of a fifteen-year-old, into my ear. Me, Pavel Botev? I’m supposed to exterminate this Dr. Stephanescu? What a joke! A
man I don’t even know, who looks anything but unpleasant in his photos. No. I wasn’t about to let a lunatic recruit me for some dirty business. Never.

“Barbu is nuts. Stephanescu is a good guy, a close friend of my father’s.”

Fritz’s words sounded like a casual remark, but I pricked up my ears. Heinrich Hofmann! My silent misgivings about Fritz’s father’s questionable pretentions to artistry
immediately found new and bitter nourishment. My mistrust grew to a dark suspicion but was still obscure, since except for a large dose of personal dislike I found no basis for it whatsoever. Only
one thing was clear: Barbu and Stephanescu had a common acquaintance. But “acquaintance” was much too weak a word. Fritz’s father Heinrich must be a friend of this doctor, who in
his turn had been my teacher’s lover in earlier years. Something must have happened between the two of them, something unpleasant, malign even, or why would Barbu reduce to ashes the face of
a man she had once kissed? And so what if Barbu still had a score to settle with this guy? That was her business! But what did Herr Hofmann have to do with it? He’d taken Stephanescu’s
picture at least twice, once when he was a student and now again as the Kronauburg party secretary. Hofmann frequented higher circles. He had influence. He exercised power. And with that power he
had it in for Barbu. Before fall vacation, Fritz had threatened that his father would make her life a hell. The teacher’s face had blanched deathly white. She was afraid. But why? I was wider
awake than ever before, burning with curiosity.

Suddenly it made sense to me that Fritz had been explaining his lack of interest in school by saying that his days in Baia Luna were numbered. “Father’s looking for a house in
Kronauburg, and once he’s found a suitable piece of real estate we’re out of this hick town.” I couldn’t believe Fritz was serious. The very thought of voluntarily moving
away would never have occurred to Germans like the Schusters or the Schneiders. But once the picture of Herr Hofmann’s friend Stephanescu was hanging on our classroom wall, I realized that
Fritz had been telling the truth. Soon he would turn his back on Baia Luna. I looked over at him. As always, he was sprawled on the school bench—and suddenly for me he was no longer a friend
but a stranger—looking cool and unapproachable. But the coldness of alienation didn’t just emanate from Fritz. The chasm separating us yawned within me, as if it had always been there
and only now became visible.

“Reader, page eleven,” announced Barbu. “The patriotic poem by Hans Bohn. Julia, please begin!”

Julia Simenov, top student in the class, stood up and recited in a clear voice,

We were told to get out our notebooks. While everyone except Fritz and me was writing down the words of the patriotic poem, Barbu leaned against the wall at the back of the
classroom. She tugged at her blue dress and rubbed her chin while I chewed on my pencil. I didn’t notice her advancing until she had almost reached us. She walked up to Fritz. She ran her
hand over his head. It seemed to me a dreamy, strangely absentminded, and almost involuntary gesture. I heard her say, “Tell your father it’s over. Barbu isn’t afraid
anymore.”

Fritz looked her right in the eye. Mockingly. Then he rose from his seat and walked up to the blackboard cool as a cucumber. He picked up a piece of chalk and wrote,

I felt hot and cold all over. Although shocked by Fritz’s impudence, I was impressed by his daring. I was sure the older kids would burst out laughing. But it stayed quiet.
Someone in the first row dropped a pencil. Barbu walked quite slowly up to the front. In a second she would pick up her stick and start whipping him and screeching, striking again and again. And
Fritz wouldn’t bat an eye. He would grin like always when Barbu cut him into kind ling, screamed herself into a fury, and finally collapsed in exhaustion. But Barbu didn’t strike. She
wiped the blackboard clean with a rag and then blew her nose into it and rubbed her eyes. The chalk dust mixed with her tears and smeared her face.

“You can go home now,” she said softly.

Her voice sounded infinitely weary. But everyone stayed seated. Only Fritz hastily packed up his schoolbag and disappeared. Then the bell rang. Angela Barbulescu took Stephanescu’s picture
down from the wall and shuffled out of the classroom in her rubber boots.