The Madonna on the Moon (6 page)

Chapter Two

Send this man straight to hell! Exterminate him!
Whatever Barbu had meant, it exceeded my powers of imagination. Go to hell! Devil take you! How often I had heard
those curses in the barroom. Even Father Johannes Baptiste wasn’t any too choosy when thundering imprecations against the enemies of the faith from the pulpit. But exterminate someone?
Forestall the Last Judgment? Never!

Exterminate! What did that mean anyway? You exterminated weeds, annoying insects, and rats when they got to be a plague. And enemies, of course, but only in war or in self-defense and only if
you were a hero. Father Johannes Baptiste warned us repeatedly in his sermons to beware of all exterminators whose titles ended in “-ist.” The Hitlerists exterminated the Jews, the
fascists murdered the Socialists, the Stalinists sent their enemies to die like dogs in Siberia, and even the capitalists were exterminators who drove their competition into financial ruin and
plunged working families into poverty and misery.

But not in Baia Luna. No one here to my knowledge had exterminated anyone else, and nobody had ever been exterminated. Sure, the Brancusi brothers were Communists and always talked big about how
they were going to wipe out the moneybag landowners and the parasite bourgeoisie. That did sound like extermination. But Liviu, Roman, and Nico Brancusi were basically not such bad guys. I
couldn’t imagine they would ever really kill anyone.

Of course from time to time, there were nasty incidents in the village. Occasional arguments flared up, heated words that sometimes ended in fistfights. But what got people worked up one day was
usually settled by a handshake on the next or forgotten by the day after that. I was never aware of any signs of deep malignity or irreconcilable enmity in the village. To my fifteen-year-old self,
Baia Luna seemed a peaceful place where the indigenous population lived with the Hungarians and Saxons who had settled here centuries ago in an unspoken compact not to make life difficult for one
another.

The Gypsies held to that as well. When people referred to them, they always called them the Blacks, as was customary in Transmontania, even though among the Gypsies in our village were a couple
of flaxen-haired, blue-eyed children who didn’t fit the stereotype at all. The Gypsies didn’t call us the Whites in return; they referred to us as
gaje,
which means
“strangers” but also “fools” or “dummkopfs.”

Nevertheless, we
gaje
considered the Blacks in Baia Luna to be poor but honest folk. They belonged to the Gabor tribe and their ancestors had lived in Hungary. The men wore black
trousers, black jackets, and wide-brimmed black hats. The women dressed in red skirts and braided gold coins and colorful ribbons into their hair. When I was little, I thought the women simply
chose colors they liked, but then I asked Buba Gabor during recess if they meant anything. Buba was pretty as a picture and the only Gypsy girl in the village who through her own stubbornness and
with the encouragement of her uncle Dimitru obtained her family’s permission to attend school at least on uneven days, Monday, Wednesday, and Friday. She told me that among her people, you
could tell from the color of the ribbons if a girl was single, already engaged, or married. I blushed and asked what her own status was in this regard. Buba answered pertly that she wasn’t
allowed to tell that to a
gajo
like me. Then she brushed a black lock out of her eyes and warbled sweetly, “Only a man with beautiful hands can win me.” Whereupon I stuck my
hands into my pockets quick as a flash, who knows why. Buba laughed and ran off.

On summer days, the Gabors strolled up and down the village street or sat in front of their houses playing cards and smoking unfiltered Carpatis. Their proudest possessions were their numerous
children and two dozen powerful Percherons they pastured at the edge of the village. In October they went to the horse market in Bistrita where they used the meeting with other tribes to match-make
for their sons and daughters and change the color of their ribbons. When the Gabors returned to Baia Luna, they celebrated noisy weddings for days on end before returning to their bleak everyday
existence. In the village the Blacks’ idleness was regarded with suspicion but accepted without open hostility, even by the Germans, whose industrious character included deep contempt for any
kind of idleness.

T
he fact that the hearts of the Saxons weren’t paralyzed by zealous piety was due to the influence of Pater Johannes. I knew only the vague
outlines of his story. What was certain was that in 1935, two years after the Hitlerists had seized power in Germany, the abbot of the Benedictine monastery in Melk had dispatched Baptiste from the
Danube into the mountains of Transmontania. The order probably hoped to get rid of Brother Johannes in his old age, since he was already approaching seventy back then.

Once Johannes Baptiste had moved into the empty rectory in Baia Luna with wagonfuls of theological books and philosophical writings, the most fantastic rumors began circulating in the village,
spread mainly by the sacristan Julius Knaup, the overweight Kora Konstantin, and her equally fat mother Donata. People said Johannes Baptiste had fathered a bastard child with a Viennese hooker. It
was also rumored that despite tortures of self-castigation he had been unable to keep his hands off the boy sopranos in the monastery choir. Even worse for the Catholics was the accusation that
Baptiste had been banished to Baia Luna for delivering heretical sermons abusing the Holy See in Rome and even Pope Pius himself.

These poisonous rumors must have left my grandfather no peace. On a Sunday in the autumn of 1935 he screwed up his courage and asked the priest over a Sunday-morning glass of wine in the tavern,
“Reverend, are the things people say about you true?”

Johannes Baptiste’s answer would enter the annals of the village as “the tavern sermon.”

First Pater Johannes burst out laughing, slapped his thigh, and claimed he hadn’t created just
one
bastard with the strength of his loins but dozens of them. Then, however, the
pater turned very serious.

“Yes,” he said to the assembled men, “they sent me to you in the mountains because I followed my conscience and not my vows to the order and the Holy Father in Rome.”

Then Pater Johannes told about a contractual agreement called a concordat between the Vatican and the German Reich, whose chancellor was about to plunge the world into a yawning abyss. The evil
handwriting was long since on the wall, legible for everyone, but his Austrian homeland had deteriorated into a land of the blind. His countrymen were bedazzled by their pride in knowing that pure
Aryan blood flowed in their veins, drunk on the idea of being part of the Germans’ Thousand-Year Reich. Instead of resisting this madness of the blood with all the power of papal authority,
the Vatican was eating humble pie before the German gangsters and courting the goodwill of the Führer so he would treat the church kindly.

“But I’m telling you, the Lord God didn’t permit his Son to be nailed on the cross so that something like this could happen. Not for a church that’s asking the devil to
be nice to the clergy and leave its priests alone. If you do business with Satan, you’ve already got one foot in hell. Just like the people here in the village who sit in front of their
radios in the evening listening to that loudmouth from Berlin promise to bring them home to the Reich.”

Grandfather told me the young Saxons Karl Koch, Anton Zikeli, and Schneiders’ Hans got all hot under the collar when he said that, smashed their glasses against the wall, and came that
close to laying hands on the priest. Which they would all come to bitterly regret later, after the war. Back then, however, the ethnic Germans accused Pater Johannes of getting mixed up in worldly
affairs instead of looking after people’s souls as a priest should. An accusation Johannes Baptiste let go unanswered.

“Either you’re a Catholic or a Hitlerist! They’re mutually exclusive. Heaven or hell, it’s your choice! Either we love our neighbors as ourselves, or we destroy those
we’ve declared to be our enemies. And mark my words, the Hitlerists are going to be the worst destroyers that evil has ever brought forth. First the Germans will kill the Jews, then the
Gypsies, and then anyone else who isn’t like them. The Catholics won’t cry out in protest when the killing begins. They’ll keep going to Mass on Sunday, crossing themselves, and
singing ‘Praise the Lord.’ But not me. I’ll keep reminding everyone that our Lord Jesus Christ himself was a Jew. If his people had not taken on the heavy burden of nailing him to
the cross, how could he have redeemed us? Without Golgotha, no Ascension. History will show if I’m right or wrong. And believe me, I pray every day that the good Lord will make me wrong. Even
if I have to pay for my disobedience toward the Holy Father in Rome with eternal damnation.”

After these words, my grandfather Ilja never again doubted the honesty of the man of God. Anybody who raised his voice against the Benedictine was banned from Ilja’s tavern on the spot.
And that’s how Johannes Baptiste became the most respected priest who ever preached from the pulpit in Baia Luna, even though in my youth he had already lost a lot of his Bible knowledge.
Unforgotten among the congregation was the previous year’s Christmas sermon in which he placed Judas among the three Wise Men from the East and sent him hurrying to Bethlehem where the
repentant traitor paid back the thirty pieces of silver with interest.

The Gypsies loved their Papa Baptiste. It was thanks to him they hadn’t been driven out of Baia Luna. Dimitru’s people turned up in the village late in the summer of 1935, just when
the rumors about Pater Johannes were particularly rank. Their
bulibasha,
Dimitru’s father Laszlo, had asked the village council to permit his tribe to stay. As their leader, he
proposed that they could move into a location below the village, on the banks of the Tirnava, where a few tumbledown stalls had fallen prey to high water in earlier years. As compensation for a
residency permit the Gypsy men offered to help the farmers with their harvest in the fall. In addition, they knew everything about horses of all breeds. And last but not least, he, Bulibasha Laszlo
Carolea Gabor, personally guaranteed that no one from his family had ever been accused of burglary or been taken to police custody for unjustified inebriation. The village council, consisting of
four indigenous, four Hungarians, and four Saxons, considered the proposition briefly behind closed doors. Then they informed Laszlo that the Gypsies had until Sunday to make themselves scarce.

As the men, women, and children of Baia Luna set off for church on Sunday, the Gypsies were still there. Johannes Baptiste celebrated Mass as usual. From Grandfather I know that the Gospel
reading for that Sunday was the parable of the miracle of the loaves and fishes and the feeding of the five thousand, but the priest didn’t stick to that. He read from the Christmas story.
Four months early. Only he didn’t announce the good tidings of the birth of the Lord but the less-good tidings about the pregnant Mary and Joseph, the father of her child, desperately looking
for someplace to stay. The scandal came after Johannes Baptiste had consecrated the bread and wine for the Eucharist. The faithful rose and moved forward toward the communion rail. They knelt and
stuck out their tongues but waited in vain for the host. Baptiste refused them the Body of the Lord. Instead, he splashed the congregation with a cascade of holy water while crying out, “And
Jesus said, ‘Inasmuch as ye have done it unto one of the least of these my brethren, ye have done it unto me.’ And now go to the Gypsies and think about that commandment.”

Even now my grandfather couldn’t suppress an impish smile when he related what happened then. Fat Donata collapsed at the altar in a faint with her yammering daughter Kora trying in vain
to hold her up. Some men had their noses so put out of joint by the priest that they stormed out of the church and on the spot composed a fiery letter of protest to the bishop of Kronauburg. The
indignant postman Adamski even called for a schism and demanded that the whole congregation join the Protestants. Then Hermann Schuster emerged from among his outraged fellows. He called for quiet,
and since he was and still is a respected person in the village, the crowd in fact calmed down after some grumbling.

“We have to do what our priest has ordered us to do. We must bear our cross just as the Redeemer had to bear his.” No one dared to contradict Schuster’s words. Then Grandfather
Ilja’s young wife Agneta emerged from the door of the family’s shop. In her hands she held a golden-brown Bundt cake she had baked to have with coffee that afternoon. She strode right
through the crowd and straight as an arrow to the lower end of town where the Gypsies were encamped. Ilja followed her. Hermann Schuster and his wife Erika as well as a dozen other inhabitants of
Baia Luna joined them, while it suddenly occurred to others that they had a sick cow, or the women said the Sunday roast had to come out of the oven right that minute.