The Madonna on the Moon

by Rolf Bauerdick

  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.

  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.

  The 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 th
e 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.