The Madonna on the Moon (7 page)

When Laszlo Carolea Gabor saw the little troop approaching, he walked slowly out to meet them. Agneta presented him with the cake. A big tear rolled down the
bulibasha
’s cheek and
disappeared into his huge mustache. Then he started to weep uncontrollably. His family at first stood silently around the cake until the men began to cry, too, then the women, and finally the
children. All together they spilled veritable torrents of snot and water so that their wails of joy reached the other end of the village. Then Laszlo Gabor snapped his fingers, and the river of
tears subsided.

“Slaughter three sheep and prepare a feast!” he ordered. Immediately, the whole clan broke out in shouts of joy, and the men began whetting their knives. The Gypsies brought out
their cymbals, fiddles, and drums and marched through the village making an earsplitting racket. Despite their parents’ strict prohibitions, the schoolchildren were the first to start
following them, then came the first hesitant adults, until finally both Hungarians and Saxons had joined the column. At last, the sole concern of every household was not to be the only villager to
miss this extraordinary event.

By early afternoon everyone was dancing on the village square. Johannes Baptiste strolled around, his face beaming with delight and his hand stretched out in benediction. He contributed a cask
of Lake Kaltern red from the rectory cellar and twenty bottles of fruit brandy he had brought with him from Austria on his diaspora. Only the Konstantin family cowered behind their curtains and
prayed the rosary until they were so hoarse they couldn’t anymore.

By midnight, when the last inhabitants were wending their way home unsteady in step but steadfast in faith and old Adamski shouted at the top of his voice that the Protestants could just piss
off, everyone in Baia Luna thought it was the best party the village had ever had. The Gypsies could stay.

To make sure the miraculous feast would never grow pale even in the most distant chambers of memory, Pater Johannes declared an annual and onerous day of penance for the preventive purification
of stubborn hearts. Moreover, he had them build a wooden chapel on the Mondberg to be the new home for the Virgin of Eternal Consolation whose statue had stood in the Baia Luna church for
generations. From then on, the Mother of God would not just remind us of the victory of Christendom over the Mussulmen but also preserve us from coldness of spirit. And nothing seemed to the priest
better suited to that purpose than a penitential hike into the mountains in the frosty midst of December, on the twenty-fourth, the day of Mary’s desperate search for shelter for her unborn
child.

T
he reason I never knew my grandmother Agneta was a blow of fate that struck my grandfather in the winter of ’35. A week before Christmas he
hitched up his nag and drove to Kronauburg with Agneta and the two children: my aunt Antonia and my father-to-be Nicolai. While Ilja restocked his inventory, Agneta and the children visited some
distant relatives. Since the early dusk made a return trip on the same day difficult and, in addition, the first snow began to fall, they decided to spend the night in town and leave for Baia Luna
early the next morning.

By noon the next day their heavily loaded wagon had already reached Apoldasch. Following the road along the Tirnava upstream, the weary horse would have them home in an hour.

That’s exactly what the Gypsy Laszlo and his son Dimitru also were thinking. As luck would have it, they also had business in Kronauburg. They had ordered five hundred medicine bottles
with corks from György the druggist. Not until two decades later did I learn the purpose of those mysterious brown bottles. But I don’t want to get ahead of myself. At any rate, Laszlo
and Dimitru had packed their horses with the cases full of empty bottles and also started out for Baia Luna. Beyond Apoldasch they caught up with Grandfather’s family, and they all decided to
travel the rest of the way together.

As far as I know, the storm came from the southwest, out of the Fagaras Mountains. It was upon them in a matter of minutes, first as thick gray clouds, then high winds, and finally as a
blizzard. Laszlo and Dimitru sprang from their horses. The two Percherons immediately lay down on their sides with their backs to the wind. Grandmother Agneta, my twelve-year-old father-to-be, and
his six-year-old sister crept under their wool blankets in the back of the wagon while Granddad tried to quiet the skittish horse. Panicked, the animal reared up and thrashed his front hooves
against the oncoming storm. Grandfather was just calling for help from the two Gypsies when the nag took off into the gray wall of snow and straight into the icy river. At the last minute, Nicolai
succeeded in jumping out of the swaying wagon. Laszlo rushed toward the vehicle, but before he could get hold of Agneta and little Antonia, the iron-clad wagon wheel struck his forehead so hard
that blood spurted from his mouth and nose and he fell into the snow as if struck by lightning. Without a moment’s hesitation both Grandfather and Dimitru jumped into the river. Blinded by
the wind-whipped snow, they fought their way through the icy chest-deep water toward the screams of Agneta and Antonia. While the nag thrashed around to keep from drowning and just got more and
more entangled in the harness, Grandmother held on to the wooden stanchions of the wagon for dear life with one hand and pressed Antonia to her with the other.

When Grandfather and Dimitru finally reached them through the biting cold, Antonia hung stiff and blue from her mother’s arm. The men expended their last bit of strength and pulled the two
of them to the bank. Dimitru immediately tore Antonia’s wet clothes from her body and wrapped her in a horse blanket. “Rub, rub!” he shouted to Nicolai. “Rub your sister
warm or she’ll die!” Then Dimitru’s eyes fell on his father. Laszlo lay dead in the snow, a blood-red wreath spreading around his head.

“God give me a long life to mourn you,” Dimitru cried out and turned to Ilja and Nicolai. “Take the horses and get mother and daughter into bed at once!” He clapped his
hands, and the Percherons got to their feet. “Ilja, take your daughter, and you, Nicolai, take your mother. Mount and ride home! I’ll come on foot.”

“No,” Ilja protested. “We’re not leaving you and your father here alone.”

Dimitru didn’t listen. Instead, he raged and howled the soul out of his body, uttering curses so foul that the shivering Agneta blushed red and was infused with a moment of warmth.
“Leave me be!” the Gypsy screamed and clapped the horses’ flanks with the flat of his hand, sending them trotting off. Dimitru struggled out of his stiff frozen coat and took off
his shoes and his pants. Then he started running. “A Gypsy is tough!” he screamed into the storm. “And I’m a Gypsy. A Gypsy! I’ll live forever! Live to mourn my father
forever. Father, dear Father!” Then his voice was swallowed by the storm.

Thanks to the endurance of the Percherons, Grandfather’s family arrived safely in the village an hour later. Neighbors hurried over to wrap the half-frozen family in thick feather
comforters and brew gallons of peppermint tea.

Amazingly it was little Antonia who was up and about first. By the next morning she was completely recovered, and Ilja, too, aside from a powerful head cold, seemed to have survived unscathed.
But his wife was so thoroughly chilled that she couldn’t warm up despite a double goose-down comforter. For three days her body was shaken by frightening chills so that it was all Grandfather
could do to get a spoonful of hot elderberry juice into her mouth. Around the clock, Ilja and Nicolai watched by Agneta’s bedside, rubbing her hands to get them warm and laying hot towels on
her forehead.

After a while, Grandmother seemed to get better. She even sat up a bit and was able to lift a cup of honey-sweetened milk to her mouth with her own hand. But then the cold in her body turned to
heat. Agneta was burning up, and the mercury in the fever thermometer rose above one hundred four degrees. She groaned, was racked with chest pains, and could hardly breathe. She coughed and
vomited. When they finally called Dr. Bogdan from Apoldasch, he diagnosed acute pneumonia. The only hope for Agneta was a new drug called penicillin. He didn’t have any himself, but some
could almost surely be obtained from György the druggist in Kronauburg. Hermann Schuster leaped into the saddle. When he returned ten hours later with the promised tablets, my grandma had just
died in Granddad Ilja’s arms.

Foresters found Dimitru in Apoldasch at the place where the road to the Schweisch Valley and Kronauburg forks off. In the blizzard he had run in the wrong direction, gone in a circle several
times, and finally completely lost his orientation in the darkness of the night. The foresters wrapped his frozen body in sheepskins and took him to the Apoldasch forge where the young blacksmith
Emil Simenov was working at the time, before getting married and taking over the smithy in Baia Luna. The grumpy Simenov was known to be no great friend of the Gypsies’. But actually, he was
no great friend of anybody’s. Whenever the men in Grandfather’s tavern reproached the gruff fellow for his sour mood and lack of human kindness, Simenov would always answer, “And
who was it who saved the Black blabbermouth in ’35? You or me? He was a block of ice when they carried him into my forge, and if I hadn’t put Dimitru Carolea Gabor next to the fire he
never would have thawed out. And who loaned the Black a warm shirt, overalls, and hobnail boots and never got them back? Me or you? With my own hands I schlepped that miserable weakling back to
Baia Luna, him and his idiotic little bottles. Those Blacks are nothing but trouble.”

When Emil Simenov saw the three Brancusi brothers nodding in agreement, he cooled off and shut up again.

Johannes Baptiste scheduled the joint burial of my grandmother Agneta and Dimitru’s father Laszlo for the forenoon of December 22. As far back as anyone can remember, that burial in the
year 1935 was the biggest in the history of the village. Dozens of delegations arrived from Bessarabia and the Bukovina, from the Banat and Walachia, from Dobruja and even the distant Budapest to
pay their last respects.

At the wake following the interment there were so many mourners to serve that the Gabor tribe ran up debts for years to come and had to sell all their gold jewelry and horses. No one in Baia
Luna would fail to be at the cemetery, and the brass band from Apoldasch played so soulfully that the mourners’ breath stood still and their tears froze to icy pearls. The villagers certainly
felt sympathy for Laszlo the Gypsy, but more for my grandfather and the half orphans Antonia and Nicolai. In acknowledgment of their part in the death of the young mother, even the wholesaler Hossu
brothers from Kronauburg showed up. They promised Grandfather to replace the wares swept away by the Tirnava for free, and they kept their word.

On the day before the double burial, Johannes Baptiste had seen to it that there wouldn’t be a scandal. While inspecting Cemetery Hill he saw that the hired grave diggers had already
finished a hole in the ground. Then he heard quiet voices coming from beyond the cemetery wall. The organist Marku Konstantin and the sacristan Knaup were sinking a hole in the frozen ground with
pickaxes and shovels while Konstantin’s sister-in-law Kora looked on.

“What’s the meaning of this?” asked the priest.

“This hole’s for the Gypsy,” answered Julius Knaup. “He’s not baptized.”

The Benedictine flushed with righteous anger. Not even for a second had it ever occurred to Father Johannes to wonder whether Laszlo Gabor had a baptismal certificate. Nor would the thought ever
have crossed his mind to scrape a hole for the upright Gypsy in unconsecrated ground.

“You have five minutes,” he thundered, “exactly five minutes. If not, I’m going to pray every morning, noon, and night that your dirty souls will be crawling through the
filth of hell to the end of time.”

Two minutes later, as Grandfather loved to relate with a grin, the hole was filled.

As far as I know, Laszlo Carolea was the first of the Gabor tribe whose mortal remains found their rest in consecrated ground. Full of gratitude, the Gypsies went en masse to the priest’s
house after the burial of their
bulibasha
and insisted that each one get to kiss the blessed hand of the man of God. Then, led by Dimitru, they asked to receive the sacrament of baptism,
and their request was granted. Without protest, Dimitru allowed Pater Johannes, with both hands, to push his bushy head three times—in the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy
Ghost—into the holy water of the baptismal font, which gave Kora Konstantin another chance to be indignant to the marrow.

Once the Gypsies had celebrated their new role as children of God for three days, the church of Baia Luna would almost burst at the seams on Sundays. A half hour before the bells tolled, the
Gabors were already waiting in front of the entrance, intent on receiving the Body of Christ. In the course of time, however, their zeal for the sacred magic cooled rapidly. Once they discovered
that, despite incense, holy water, and the blessing of the priest, their everyday cares continued undiminished, the rituals of the Mass began to bore them.

Except for Dimitru.

I cannot remember ever not seeing him in church on Sunday except in the summer when opaque business dealings forced him to travel. Whenever Johannes Baptiste ascended to his pulpit, Dimitru sat
in the front pew next to his friend Ilja with his mouth agape. I watched Dimitru practically ingesting every word that fell from the pulpit, unlike Grandfather, who sometimes nodded off during the
sermon.

With the tragedy at the river, a friendship had developed between the two men, a spiritual fraternity which—if I may be allowed to anticipate—would survive the storms of time, even
if Grandfather didn’t know very much about Dimitru’s life.

“By the way, can you swim?” he had asked the Gypsy years after they had jumped into the icy Tirnava together.

“I should hope so,” Dimitru answered. “I was already a fish in my mother’s belly.” Yet everyone in the village knew that the scaredy-cat Dimitru even feared
splashing some puddle water into his shoe when it rained.