The Madonna on the Moon (62 page)

“Pavel, I think a little glass would help refresh my memories of Papa’s words.”

I laughed. “You can always count on a tavern keeper from the House of Botev.” I fetched four glasses and uncorked a bottle of
zuika.
Buba, Fritz, and I clinked glasses with
Dimitru.

“Innkeeper, my glass has a hole in it!” I refilled it for him. “Well, here’s how it was. Papa Baptiste sat here with me on the chaise longue and said, ‘Dimitru, I
forgive everything you did, but not in the name of the Lord. I’m not authorized to do that . . .’ And that, that tortures me to this very day. Because I’ve never been absolved. I
mean, really absolved. And now I’m scheduled to appear at the Last Judgment. And what then? I want so much to go to the Sea of Serenity and join Ilja there. I promised him I would. But what
if they won’t let me in without absolution? What if God turns thumbs-down on me? What then?”

The Gypsy got up from the red chaise longue. He went to the window and looked up at the sky. He closed his eyes.

We weren’t looking at an old man, but at a small, shy boy who raised his index finger for quiet.

“What are you doing, Dimitru?”

“Shh,” said Buba. “I think Uncle Dimi is rehearsing his appearance before the throne of the Almighty.”

From the small boy’s mouth came a deep bass voice: “The Gypsy Dimitru Carolea Gabor! Please stand before the court! Let us look into the book of your life! Sins, sins, and more sins!
How dare you appear before me? What’s this I read? You sold the Orthodox bottles of milk supposedly from the breasts of my Son’s mother! Shame on you, Dimitru Carolea Gabor! Do you
repent?”

“Not bottles, just tiny little flasks,” answered a higher boy’s voice. “Believe me, Lord. It wasn’t my fault. My father Laszlo had the idea with the milk. What
could I do, Lord? Was I supposed to deny my father? Leave him in the lurch? Like you left your Son so long ago? Didn’t Jesus complain bitterly about you as he hung on the cross? ‘My
God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?’ Did you really expect the same from me? To forsake my father? Why did you put me into the world in the first place? . . . As a Gypsy!”

Dimitru turned from the window, picked up his glass, and drank his very last swallow of
zuika
with the deepest satisfaction.

“That’s just what I’ll say this evening. Believe me, if the Old Man up there falls for it, he’ll let me through to Ilja.” Then Dimitru threw off all the warm
blankets he was wrapped in. “My God, I’m hot. Take me to my Antonia, my dears. After all, Abraham was already a hundred when he . . .”

A Note About the Author

Rolf Bauerdick was born in 1957 in Lehnhausen and now lives in Hiddingsel, Westphalia. After studying literature and theology in Münster, he taught German, religion, and
politics in schools in the Ruhr Valley until 1985. Since 1987, he has worked as a journalist and photographer and has traveled to more than sixty countries. His award-winning articles and photo
essays have appeared in European newspapers and magazines.
The Madonna on the Moon
is his first novel.

David Dollenmayer is a literary translator and professor of German at the Worcester Polytechnic Institute in Worcester, Massachusetts. He has translated works by Bertolt
Brecht, Elias Canetti, Peter Stephan Jungk, Michael Kleeberg, Perikles Monioudis, Anna Mitgutsch, Mietek Pemper, Moses Rosenkranz, and Hansjörg Schertenleib. He is the recipient of the 2008
Helen and Kurt Wolff Translator’s Prize and the 2010 Austrian Cultural Forum Translation Prize.