The Madonna on the Moon

by Rolf Bauerdick

  I had had enough experience behind the bar to see Kora Konstantin’s bitchiness for what it was. She was one of those women with a chronically empty household account and a half-dozen squalling brats who used to get more whippings than bread from their father. That is, they did until Holy Week in 1956, when Grandfather vowed never to serve Raswan Konstantin another drop, whereupon the lush called the whole village together and threatened to break Ilja’s neck and torch the shop of that whole Botev clan. But it never came to that.

  When Kora returned home from confession on the day the Lord was crucified, her children stormed screaming out of the house. Raswan lay dead in the front hall. People say his fly was open, and his hand still held a well-worn and detailed drawing that Kora threw into the stove on the spot. After she had straightened the clothes on the body of her unloved husband, she made known his death by beginning to weep and wail. Since the police had to be notified in a case of unexpected demise, the young Plutonier Cartarescu was called over from Apoldasch. Although he was reputed to be overly punctilious, he had no experience with corpses in front halls and ordered an autopsy in the Kronauburg hospital. A few days later the deceased returned to Baia Luna in a simple spruce coffin on the bed of a horse-drawn cart and several pounds lighter, curiously enough. The cause of death was determined to be heart failure caused by a very high level of arousal. They said that as a result of the engorgement of the inner organs, Raswan’s liver (a liver, by the way, big enough for an ox) had squashed his myocardium.

  Instead of giving Grandfather credit for trying to rescue Raswan from drink, Kora laid into him at every opportunity. As for Ilja’s weak reading skills, however, what the nasty widow had said was true. The wheels of Grandfather’s mind turned slowly, and the logic with which one usually recognizes connections and discovers contradictions was not one of his strengths. Numbers, on the other hand, were never a problem for Granddad. By the age of nine, he reportedly could multiply and divide multidigit numbers in his head without ever making a mistake. So that the other young men of Baia Luna didn’t take him for a weirdo because of this talent, he would now and then take a sip of strong drink. But he gave it up because even a thimbleful of zuika could leave him with a pounding headache, chills, and memory loss. I for one had never seen Grandfather drink a drop.

  They all came. Earlier than usual they gathered in the taproom as if they couldn’t wait to get out of the cold, wet November weather. They congratulated Ilja with a brisk handshake, put down the bottles they’d brought as presents, and found a place to sit. Some of the men just sat dully in their seats while others asked me for dice or cards.

  “What’s the matter, Pavel?” asked Karl Koch. “Your face is more miserable than the weather. Trouble in school?”

  I didn’t answer. The more I tried to banish thoughts of Angela Barbulescu from my mind, the more urgently they crowded forward. Why this crazy assignment? Why was I the one who had to hang the party secretary’s photo on the wall? Why should I keep the half-burned photo of the kissing Barbu as a memento? Herr Hofmann had shot both photos, and he probably knew exactly why Barbu’s life had gone off the rails. Worlds lay between her sunflower dress in the Paris of the East and her grubby blue dress in Baia Luna. Moreover, Herr Hofmann possessed the means to make her life a hell. It was a certainty that Barbu wasn’t in the village voluntarily. Yes, she was a terrible teacher. But she hadn’t always been that way. And then there was Fritz’s nasty rhyme about his thing out to here. The more I recalled that day in class, the more sympathy I felt for my teacher.

  “Don’t pull such a long face, Pavel! Chin up, boy!”

  I tried to smile, but my thoughts were a heavy drag.

  Hermann Schuster took the floor. He dispensed with the usual detour through the rabies problem and got right to the point: the party’s newest five-year plan. Now the trouble begins, Grandfather was saying to himself—I could tell from his expression. But the Saxon Hermann spoke quite calmly. He talked about what they had inherited from their fathers, about tradition, honor, and homeland, and said he wasn’t about to toss his ancestors’ centuries of hard work into the jaws of a state collective. “Everything for the party, nothing for us,” he concluded. “My answer is no, no, and no again.”

  Hans Schneider agreed and told of plans to erect a series of gigantic industrial-type hog farms not far from Apoldasch.

  “All for the export market, all for the Russians,” Hermann Schuster added. “The kolkhoz will be our undoing.”

  Amazingly enough, the volatile Brancusi brothers reacted with remarkable objectivity to the attacks of Schuster and Schneider. Liviu Brancusi defended the planned state takeover of agriculture and the industrialization of Transmontania as the footprint of progress. “We must emerge at last from the shadows of obsolescence.” Following the Soviet example and under the leadership of the Central Committee, Liviu declared, ninety percent of bourgeois property had already been returned to the people. Industry and banking, transportation and wholesaling, had been successfully transferred into the hands of the working class, ditto the hospitals, theaters, and movie houses. Then he began to rattle off statistics about rising quotas for milk production and feedlots in the regions of Prahova, Covasna, and Buzau until he threatened to drown in a sea of numbers.

  Hermann Schuster took advantage of Liviu’s pause for breath. “But now let’s have a toast to our birthday boy!”

  Just as the men were raising their glasses, somebody started kicking against the door with heavy boots.

  Grandfather opened it. There stood Dimitru the Gypsy, wet through and through, panting, and holding a huge crate covered by a dripping wool blanket with both hands.

  “Room, make room!” he called, gasping for air and pushing into the taproom with his crate. The Scherban brothers jumped up and pushed aside the bottles on the bar while the muscular Karl Koch gave the skinny Dimitru a hand. Together they heaved the box onto the bar. Dimitru was panting like a dog and collapsed into a chair while the others looked on in curiosity. Then he proclaimed ceremoniously, “By the blessed hump of Simon of Cyrene I swear this damn technology breaks your back. Give us a glass, Ilja.”

  Granddad grinned and filled a glass with his own hand. Dimitru drank. Everyone was staring at the draped box in anticipation. The Gypsy rose, tapped Grandfather on the shoulder, and urged him to unwrap his birthday present. “For you. On your special day.”

  Ilja hesitated in embarrassment.

  “Go ahead,” said Liviu Brancusi, insulted that his propaganda speech had been cut short by the muddleheaded Gypsy, someone he considered totally incapable of helping to construct the New Nation. Grandfather stepped forward. Cautiously he pulled the wet blanket from the box. The awestruck men froze where they were. Before them stood a brand-new television set.

  It was a gigantic apparatus with tubes and a polished glass screen, a case of fine wood, and ivory-colored knobs and push buttons. Speechless, Ilja examined the TV, tears of joy running down his cheeks.

  The thought flashed through my head that not even the Hofmanns had such a luxurious piece of equipment. I absolutely had to show Fritz the TV. He would be amazed. I ran off to his house, and he didn’t need any persuading. “Gotta see that,” he said.

  When we returned, Grandfather was still standing silent before the imposing tube. Then he tentatively pushed one of the buttons. Nothing happened.

  “Current,” said Dimitru. “You need electric current.”

  “Here,” called young Petre Petrov. Under the shelf with jars of pickled cucumbers he had discovered an outlet. Petre pulled a wooden stool in front of the shelf. Carefully Karl Koch and Alexandru Kiselev lifted the heavy appliance onto the stool while Petre plugged the cord into the outlet.

  “You turn it on,” Grandfather said to Dimitru. The Gypsy put down his glass and took up a position in front of the new acquisition while the men formed a half circle behind him.

  “All right then,” said Dimitru, raising his right index finger theatrica
lly, and then slowly lowering it onto the power button. There was a crackling noise. After a while, tiny flames flickered up in the glass tube behind the screen and then a little lamp shimmered greenly. “That,” the Gypsy solemnly intoned, “is the Magic Eye.”

  Instantaneously the screen brightened, and millions of teeny points of light flickered like snow crystals, interrupted by a black bar running repeatedly down the screen from top to bottom. From the loudspeaker emerged a soft rustling that swelled and swelled until it was a farting, earsplitting rattle. Petre Petrov turned down the volume knob.

  “We have to find a channel,” he said.

  Dimitru nodded in agreement. “That’s right. No reception without a channel and no picture without reception.”

  Petre fiddled for a while with all the buttons and dials but couldn’t coax a picture from the machine. “The antenna! Dimitru, where’s the antenna?”

  “Oh shit!” The Gypsy clapped his hand to his forehead. “What a disaster! My cousin Salman, the blockhead. I told him ten—no, twenty times, ‘Just don’t forget the stupid antenna when you arrange for the TV.’ And what does Salman do? He forgets it. May he drown in the Flood, that certifiable halfwit. What time is it?”

  “Almost five,” answered Petre Petrov.

  “Oh holy shit! At five on the dot, you’ll see that your Black philosopher Dimitru is no ignorant blabbermouth. Sputnik, I tell you. State TV is broadcasting a program about Sputnik. At five on the dot. Oh no, no, no,” the Gypsy moaned. He pushed all the buttons, twirled all the dials, and banged the box with his fist. “Madonna, help me!” he cried. “Almost five and no picture. My cousin, the idiot, that fart-faced jerk!”

  “Thou shalt not curse!” Everyone turned to the door. With shuffling feet, a cane in one hand and a present wrapped in brown paper in the other, Johannes Baptiste came into the room. The men immediately offered him a chair. The priest presented Grandfather with his present and sat down. Then he raised a hand as if in blessing. “May I have a glass of water? And don’t let me interrupt you, brothers.”

  Dimitru crossed himself. “Forgive me, Papa Baptiste.” The Gypsy grasped the priest’s hand, planted a kiss on it with his moist lips, and stammered, “Papa Baptiste, please help. The power of your consecrated hands can drive the crafty devils of technology out of this box. A single word of blessing, a quick prayer, a splash of holy water.”

  Before Johannes Baptiste could answer, someone called out, “Forget that pious mumbo jumbo and find some wire.”

  Everybody stopped short and looked over at the person who’d uttered those words: Fritz Hofmann. A schoolboy! The snotty photographer’s son! What could he have to say to a group of grown men?

  “Get a piece of fence wire for the antenna. That’ll work.”

  The men were speechless. Only Pater Johannes remarked, “The boy is right.”

  Hermann Schuster and I disappeared into the storage room, where we cut a few yards from a bale of barbed wire. I pulled the wire through a cracked-open window and wrapped the end around the roof gutter while Schuster took the other end and improvised a connection to the antenna socket on the TV.

  Suddenly the sound of a string orchestra emerged from the speaker. The men applauded and pounded one another on the back. Dimitru beamed, knelt down, and kissed the screen, but then jerked back in horror.

  “Electricity,” he cried and rubbed his lips anxiously. “The whole box is full of electricity.”

  “We can use the box as a radio,” Petre Petrov decided.

  Dimitru calmed down. “Bene bonus. A TV with sound is better than a radio without a picture anyway.” No one disagreed.

  It beeped a few times, and then a gong sounded. “Five p.m.” Then a sonorous male voice announced an address by the first secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union. While the screen flickered snow, we heard the voice of Nikita Sergeyevich Khrushchev overlaid by the voice of an interpreter.

  “From this day forward the history of mankind must be rewritten. With Sputnik a new era has begun. And it is we who have rung in this new era. Who has any more interest in that TV dog Lassie when our Laika has already circled the world a hundred times? America has been defeated.”

  Grandfather jumped up in outrage. “Never!”

  “The Union of Soviet Socialist Republics,” emerged from the box, “has won a decisive victory over the United States of America in the race to conquer space. The Union of Soviet Socialist Republics has mobilized the elite of its proletarian intelligentsia to overcome the forces of gravity for the first time in human history. The Union of Soviet Socialist Republics is the shaper of the future.”

  “Turn off that crap,” cried Hermann Schuster, whose blood started to boil at the very mention of the word “Socialist,” ever since he had returned to his Transmontanian homeland from the coal mines of Donezk six years after the end of the war, reduced to nothing but skin and bones.

  “Hear, hear! Proletarian intelligentsia! Creator of the future! Just like we’ve always said,” called Liviu Brancusi.

  “Until today no nation in the world was in a position to catapult living beings out of the powerful gravitational pull of the earth. But soon we will be sending not just satellites but our cosmonauts into weightlessness to raise on the moon the flag of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics in testimony to the accomplishments of our productive powers. American transcontinental bombers are already ripe for a museum. With the thrust of their engines they can just barely . . .” Then the loudspeaker began to chatter.

  Impatiently Ilja twirled the station dial, but gurgling and squeaking noises kept interfering with isolated scraps of the speech until the signal became clear again.

  “. . . brown cocaine-lemonade, drug addiction, and the terrible dissonances of jazz music will lead to the downfall of the bourgeoisie. Their young people waste their time in movie theaters and shady bars. They act like animals in their uncultured dances and trade obscenities on public thoroughfares. Instead of studying science their children chew sticky gum from morning to night that turns the human face into the stupid visage of a cud-chewing cow.”

  Some of the men laughed and pointed to Grandfather’s candy jar. He cut them short with a harsh “Shut up.” Then we heard barking from the loudspeaker. It wasn’t translated. The commentator explained that the barking was an original recording of the bitch Laika who, shot into the weightlessness of space with the power of a half-million kiloponds, was now circling the earth in the space capsule Sputnik 2.

  “Unbelievable,” cried Alexandru Kiselev, the future transmission assembler in the Stalinstadt tractor factory. “Simply unbelievable. A half-million kilos. What power!”

  “That’s equal to the power of sixty-six thousand six hundred and sixty-six horses,” Grandfather calculated.

  “Bunch of crap! Lies and propaganda! Russian bullshit!”

  Flushed with anger, Hermann Schuster jumped up and yanked the cord from its socket. The TV gave a pop, and the screen went black.

  “Shit on the Russians.” Petre Petrov flew into a rage, too. “They shoot millions into space, and down here on earth people have to eat grass. We’re going to end up just like their damned collective farmers.”

  “What about the new tractor factory? Who built that if not the party, you greenhorn?” replied Alexandru Kiselev. “Tell me how I’m supposed to keep the bellies of my wife and six children full here in this hole. Tell me how I’m supposed to earn a living from two cows and a couple of sows. Now that winter’s coming. If you know a way out of this misery, youngster, then say so. Otherwise keep your fresh mouth shut.”

  Petre whispered to me that if Alexandru wanted to do something about being poor, he should stop popping buns in his old lady’s oven. But Petre well knew that a seventeen-year-old had no business saying such a thing out loud in a gathering of men.

  The Brancusis and the blacksmith Simenov loudly applauded Kiselev’s words. “We refuse to accept progress, and we defend our backwardness,”
said Liviu. “Everybody in the village plows his own field, and the harvest barely keeps us alive. We kill ourselves toiling behind our draft horses while the party has been building tractors for years. We have excellent grazing land, but we don’t sell a single quart of milk. Where would we sell it? There’s only a rutted field road to Apoldasch, yet the party’s building new roads all over the country. We’re the only ones still walking; everywhere else they’ve got buses. Not even to mention our school. Sixty, seventy kids in one classroom, taught by a teacher who’s ideologically suspect. Yet children are the future. Do we want our young people to end up like Americans, chewing gum, selfish, lazy, and spoiled rotten? Comrade Khrushchev is right.”

  Liviu Brancusi sensed that his training course as a politcadre was bearing fruit. The mood in the tavern was swinging in his favor.

  “Why don’t we follow the example of our successful neighbors? Why would we want to stay on the side of history’s losers? Why not stand side by side with the winners? I’m telling you, learning from the Soviet Union means learning to win! The Sputnik is the result of their glorious struggle for progress.”

  With that, Liviu’s brother Nico took up the cudgels.

  “Listen up, you blabbermouth,” he smugly addressed Dimitru. “Here’s what I have to say to you with your reactionary palaver about Sputnik last night. ‘The Sputnik’s beeping robs people of their sanity.’ That’s about the stupidest thing I’ve ever heard.”

  “Quod erat demonstratum,” replied Dimitru caustically.

  “Hold your tongues! You quarrel like the blind arguing with the sightless!” The men looked over to Johannes Baptiste.

  “Next Sunday,” he announced, “I shall address the pressing questions of today from the pulpit. And I expect to see every one of you in church, Catholic, Communist, or heathen.” Johannes Baptiste pointed to Ilja’s television. “What we’ve just heard from this apparatus is the beginning of the end. Pandora’s box is open and I say to you that a line has been crossed. Space travel of any kind—by a dog or a man—should be banned in principio and ex cathedra. Excursions into space are per se a mortal sin against the spirit. Man has no business in the infinity of the universe except to seek his Almighty Maker.”