“I’ve got something to take care of,” Fritz declared.
I shrugged my shoulders apologetically. “Maybe some other time.”
Buba insisted on shaking my hand again, then she smiled and brushed my cheek lightly with her hand. The smell of her hair wafted over to me. No, Buba’s locks didn’t just smell good; they were fragrant with the tang of fire, smoke, and damp earth. I blushed and felt suddenly warm.
Then a voice screeched, “Bubbah! Bubbah! Is somebody there?”
“My mother’s calling. See you in school,” and the Gypsy girl disappeared.
In school! It seemed to me that an eternity had passed since this morning in school when the teacher Angela Barbulescu had assigned me to hang the likeness of the party secretary Stephanescu on the wall. I could still hear her demanding, Send this man straight to hell! Destroy him! but as a thin sound from a gray distance. Nevertheless, I could picture Barbu again, standing before me. Standing before the class in her rubber boots with Fritz’s sentence about his “thing” on the blackboard. And how she wept into the dusty rag for cleaning the board.
Silently Fritz and I left the Gypsy settlement. On our right, just where the village street began a slight rise, stood Angela Barbulescu’s wooden cottage, the cottage I had dashed from, head over heels.
“Why’s there no light in Barbu’s house?” I asked.
“How should I know?” Fritz sounded annoyed.
“A light ought to be on. Barbu always goes to bed late.” I stepped toward the house and saw that the curtains weren’t pulled closed. “She’s not at home,” I concluded. “She’s always in her house, otherwise. She never goes away.”
“She probably tied one on and went to sleep. Like that chucklehead Gypsy,” Fritz answered.
I shook my head without replying. We went back into the village. When we reached the wall of the church, I turned off to the left. I wanted to go to bed. Then I changed my mind without knowing why.
“I’ll walk you home,” I said.
Fritz stopped. He glared at me in hostility. Then the dam broke. The resentment that had been building up in him all evening came pouring out. “You want to walk me home? I haven’t got a home in this hole. Get that through your head! I just live here with my parents. Unfortunately! Everybody in this village is crazy. The crummy priest, the idiotic Gypsy, your stupid grandfather, and you, too. You’re one of them, one of the idiots. You people don’t understand anything! The party, Barbu with her shitty poems, Korolev! Sputnik! The whole idiotic pile of shit. Mary in heaven, what a joke! Absolutely ridiculous.” Fritz was working himself into a rage. “There is no heaven,” he screamed, “and there’s no hell either.” Then he aped Pater Johannes: “‘We proclaim that the immaculate virginal Mary, Mother of God, was taken up into heavenly glory body and soul at the end of her earthly life.’ Shit on Mary. Shit on the whole thing. She isn’t anywhere. And God isn’t anywhere either. God is dead. Your stupid God is dead, you blind fools. You’re all clueless, chuckleheaded idiots.”
To my surprise I realized that I wasn’t afraid. I was only taken by surprise. I’d never seen my schoolmate like this. Furious, trembling with outrage. All the tirades Fritz had fired off certainly hit me, but they bounced off. Bombs without fuses, ineffectual duds. But now our fight had finally arrived. I’d always been afraid of a moment like this, had sought ways of avoiding conflict, but now it was here. And I was astonished at myself. The fight didn’t make me fearful or hesitant. The sluice gates of anger had been opened, and I was awake, alive, courageous. And calm.
“Tell me something I don’t know. It’s been in the cards for a long time that you would leave Baia Luna someday. You aren’t really one of us. You don’t belong here. But I also know you’ll pay a price for leaving. You’ll have to pay it.”
“I don’t have to do anything!” Fritz’s hot anger turned into defiance. “I don’t have to do anything for anybody.”
I laughed in scorn. Only when I was ripe in years would I realize why I was being unfair to Fritz by goading him on. “Five minutes ago you had to do something. You told Buba you had something to take care of. Right this minute? At this time of night?”
Fritz looked up at the church. The hands of the clock in the steeple were invisible in the darkness.
“You always talk like a know-it-all, but nothing happens.” I kept on provoking him. “Go to Kronauburg! I’m going to bed.”
“Wait!”
Fritz walked over to the stone wall, the thick wall that was said to have once protected the church of Baia Luna from the assaults of the Mussulmen. He went along the wall to the oak portal leading into the churchyard.
“Come on!” he called to me.
“What are you going to do?”
“Come on,” Fritz repeated. “You want to see something happen, don’t you? So I’m going to prove something to you.”
“What?”
“That Nietzsche is smarter than you pious Catholics. Your church is nothing but a crypt for your God. Are you coming or not?”
I followed him. Without hesitating. Led not, as one might suppose, by Fritz Hofmann’s imperious tone but by some vague instinct. Nietzsche! I had no clue about all the things that graphomaniac had committed to paper. But my curiosity had been piqued. I had read the name several times already, F. W. NIETZSCHE, stamped in gold on the spines of dark brown leather bindings. The books stood in a bookcase in the Hofmanns’ parlor next to the poster of the Virgin of the Torch. Fritz’s father got something out of Nietzsche. But what? I didn’t give a hoot for Nietzsche, but I was interested in something else: the shady existence of Heinrich Hofmann. He was the only person in Baia Luna who had to know something about the past of the teacher Barbulescu. Fritz had said his father and Dr. Stefan Stephanescu were good friends. Hofmann had taken the studio portrait of the party secretary of Kronauburg for display in classrooms and government offices. In the Paris of the East, moreover, he’d taken that snapshot of the pretty Angela soulfully puckering her lips for Stephanescu. I hoped perhaps to learn more about Heinrich Hofmann from Fritz and from Nietzsche. About his opinions. Maybe this Nietzsche fellow concealed a piece of the puzzle that was this man I didn’t trust, without being able to say exactly why Herr Hofmann struck me as suspicious.
As we stood below the church tower, the clock struck the hour. I counted ten strokes. In their courtyard the Schuster family’s German shepherd started up, first with sharp barking and then with threatening growls until he finally stopped. At the same time, it got dark as it always did at ten o’clock, when the power plant in Kronauburg shut off the current for the streetlights in all the district villages.
Fritz pressed down the latch of the church door, which was never locked on Pater Johannes’s orders.
“Why is it so dark?” hissed Fritz.
“Try pushing the curtain aside,” I suggested sarcastically. I groped my way past him and felt for the heavy velvet that on cold days protected the congregants from drafts. I pulled it aside, and we ducked into the nave.
Fritz Hofmann was in a church for the first time in his life. The stale air crept into our nostrils, a stuffy mixture of cold incense, melted wax, and human perspiration.
“Does it always smell this bad?”
I didn’t answer, just stood still for a moment until my eyes adjusted to the weak light. It flickered from an oil lamp on the wall to the right of the sanctuary and bathed the interior of the Lord’s house in a warm red shimmer. I looked around. Everything was in its place: to my right the steps up to the choir stalls, baptismal font, and pulpit; to my left two rows of pews, one for men and one for women, the kneelers for receiving Holy Communion, and beyond them the chancel, lectern, the high altar with the Holy of Holies and the image of Christ Pantocrator, then the carved side altars with the damned and the saved at the Last Judgment. I knew that on the bas-reliefs the damned were tearing their hair and grinding their teeth while the righteous exulted and rejoiced. Every detail so vividly visible
when I attended Mass on Sunday was there, discernible only as a shadow in the dull glow of the Eternal Flame. I had been taught that the light testified to the presence of Christ and was a pledge of his existence in the form of the sacred bread in the tabernacle, though I’d never paid much attention to the lamp in the daytime. But now, at night, the small red lamp drew all my attention to itself. Silent and unobtrusive, the oil lamp burned as if it had no intention of illuminating the world but only of taking away a bit of its darkness.
Fritz strode up the center aisle to the front of the church. His leather shoes clacked on the stone floor and echoed from the arches. He stopped at the baptismal font and flicked his fingers in the water. Some drops moistened my face. Then he plunged both hands into the font and made crazy gestures with his left hand meant as a parody of crossing himself.
“See?” he said, “I’m baptizing myself. With water, stagnant H2O.”
“Of course it’s water,” I answered quietly. “Let’s go.”
“Just a second. Just one more little demonstration. Watch this. I’m going to show you how dead your God is inside this tomb. And he won’t even notice, I promise.”
Before I could grasp what he had in mind, he had vaulted the communion rail into the chancel. He climbed the steps and picked up one of the chairs where the altar boys sat during the sermon. He pushed the chair under the cast-iron bracket from which the red glass sanctuary lamp was suspended on delicate chains. I saw the light falling on the hymn board whose wooden numerals directed the congregation to number 702 in the Catholic hymnal. “Almighty God, We Praise Thy Name” was the last hymn that had been sung in church.
“No lamp burns forever,” cried Fritz. Then he drew in his breath and blew. The little flame flickered for one or two seconds as if warding off death. Then it went out.
I remember that at that moment the Gypsy girl Buba popped into my head, her chapped hand on my cheek, her fragrant hair, and the screechy voice of her mother, “Bubbah, is somebody there?” When Fritz Hofmann’s breath extinguished the Eternal Flame, the thought of Buba flared up for a brief instant. I was again astonished. I felt that in the midst of the darkness, I was watching myself with the eyes of a stranger who was simultaneously an intimate friend. I saw all the possibilities: I could yell, call Fritz crazy, rush forward, grab the defiler of the temple, beat him up, apply my fist to his belly, his face. I could run away, call the priest, ring the bell. All those choices were open to me. I could choose, but I didn’t. I followed my feet and simply left. With my eyes closed, the way I had gone hundreds of times before, every Sunday since I could walk. As the church door creaked, a cry reached my ears. A voice broke into falsetto, the echoes multiplied and overlapped in the darkness. “Hey, wait for me! How am I supposed to find my way out of here?”
I tossed and turned in my bed. Grandfather Ilja and my mother were asleep, and from the next room I could hear the regular snores of Aunt Antonia, too. Sleeping was out of the question for me. My heart was pumping the blood so powerfully through my body that my neck veins bulged and my head felt like it was going to burst. This had been going on for two or three hours.
I got up, opened the window, and looked out into the night. Inhale, exhale, inhale, exhale. Turn off your thoughts. Calm down. I registered the silence lying over Baia Luna but couldn’t become part of it. This stillness was deceptive. It had no location. Came from nothingness.
Fritz Hofmann hadn’t merely blown out a burning wick; he had overstepped a limit. He had violated a prohibition that was so unquestionable, so indubitable, that it had no need to be named or voiced. The boundary was invisible but real. It was the boundary, the hidden threshold that only reveals itself at the moment it is violated. A threshold beyond which there was no going back.
If only I hadn’t gone along. If only I had grabbed hold of Fritz, torn the chair from his hands. Then I could go to school in the morning, calculate percentages, willingly copy down everything Miss Barbulescu assigned.
On the other hand, why should I feel responsible or guilty for the deeds of others? Fritz is Fritz and I’m me. That was my exoneration, the absolution from my gnawing sense of guilt. But I had allowed Fritz to act, left him alone with his Nietzsche. With cool calculation I had used him just to make something happen so I could find out about his father.
I pulled on my sweater and stepped into my pants. Carrying my shoes, I stole silently down the steps. In the store I grabbed a box of matches. Then I slipped out the back door, tied my shoes, and ran to the church. The gate was still open. It was so dark I almost tripped over the heavy velvet curtain, which had been pulled off its rod and lay on the stone floor. I lit a match and went down the middle aisle to the chancel. Cautiously I approached the sanctuary. The chair Fritz had stood on was still there under the extinguished lamp. There was a smell of scorched oil and singed wick. I stuffed the box of matches into my pocket and crept up the altar steps in the dark. In a few moments everything would be back the way it had been. I straightened up, and the top of my head banged hard against something. The lectern fell over with a crash, and my body shuddered at the sharp pain. I put a hand to my head and felt warm blood wetting my hair and dripping onto the floor. Then someone pushed open the door from the sacristy. Someone entered the chancel slowly, with a heavy tread, carrying a petroleum lamp in one hand: Johannes Baptiste. He came toward me and held the lamp up to my blood-smeared face.
“Pavel!” the priest cried in shock and disappointment. “You, Pavel! What are you doing here? What have you done?”
“I . . . I only wanted to . . .”
“Get out! Get out of the house of God!” thundered the priest. “You shall never, ever enter this house again.”
By the time I realized the shattering enormity of his words, Johannes Baptiste had disappeared into the sacristy with a final “Go to hell!” I left.
At the edge of the village square I bent over the hollowed-out tree trunk that served as a watering trough and washed my hands. I plunged my head into the cold water and rinsed the sticky blood from my face and hair.
What should I do? Who could I talk to? Grandfather Ilja would certainly take the side of the priest. I could also forget about my mother. And Johannes Baptiste himself? Should I seek him out during the coming day and explain the misunderstanding, protest my innocence to a blustery old man who had banned me from God’s house without the slightest question about the circumstances? A man who had cursed me, damned me to hell, me, who only wanted to restore order? Fury rose up within me. Who did this priest think he was that he could make himself the judge over good and evil?
No, I would not go see him. Even though from this night on, Fritz Hofmann was dead as my friend, I would not betray him. I would never become a Judas in order to beg absolution from this self-righteous man of God, absolution for something I hadn’t done. Never.
I was about to turn sixteen. I was stuck in a swamp halfway between a boy and a man. As I washed my bloody face in the cattle trough on the village square of Baia Luna in the middle of the night, I understood I was alone. For the first time I felt the pain of not having a father, felt empty and abandoned. I had never missed my father. The photograph was enough for me, the one my mother took out from behind its pane of glass on winter nights when she sat in her chair and dreamed her way back to her husband, to my father Nicolai Botev. A stranger. Now I longed for that stranger who had gone off to war and never returned. He had taken something from me, something that lay cut off and withered in distant Russia, a piece of my roots, a source of confidence. I longed for a firm hand, a strong arm, and the reassuring belief that everything would turn out all right in the end. And yet I felt not just pain, not just sorrow and anger. An unknown feeling sprouted within me, pushed its way into my consciousness, grew larger, stubborn at first, but then powerful and strong. On the night the Eternal Flame was extinguished in Baia Luna, I learned that I stood alone in the world. And that knowledge produced an appetite for life. Back in my bed in the predawn twilight
, I wept bitter tears of happiness. I felt free.
I was still asleep when the school bell rang. Mother and Grandfather let me sleep, so I didn’t know Buba Gabor had come into the store shortly before eight. Before leaving her house she had checked on her uncle Dimitru, still fast asleep under a mountain of sheepskins after his fall down our porch steps. Buba later told me that she was surprised to discover that her uncle had turned around in his sleep and his feet were resting on the pillow. She didn’t tell me that she had hurriedly searched his jacket pockets and swiped a few coins.
“What’s wrong with you, boy?” exclaimed my mother as I came down the stairs shortly before nine. I had dark circles under my eyes, and my hair was in matted hanks. “Sit down!” she commanded and immediately began examining my head wound. There was a gash on my forehead above the hairline. Mother said I was lucky the laceration wasn’t too deep.
“What happened?” she asked. Grandfather Ilja was concerned, too. I waved them off and said I had banged my head against a low lintel down at Dimitru’s when I took the drunken Gypsy home last night. Satisfied with this explanation, my mother fetched some gauze for a bandage and ordered me to bed. I gruffly refused to be nursed.
“Oh, before I forget,” said Mother, “you had a visitor this morning. Buba was here. I think she wanted to walk to school with you.”
“You think so, or did she say so? Buba’s never done that before.”
“She asked for you. I told her you were still asleep and maybe had a cold. You were so cold yesterday, and you sat by the stove half the day. Anyway, Buba seemed disappointed. Then she bought a handful of chewing gum. It was amazing. She tore off the silver foil and stuffed it all in her mouth.”
“I have to go to school,” I said, threw on my jacket, and was out the door. It had turned cold overnight. Although the sun was breaking through the clouds, you could feel that winter was close at hand. There was already some snow on the mountains. The cries of children drifted over from the school yard. I looked up at the church tower. The clock said nine fifteen. There was no recess at that time of the morning. The teacher hadn’t shown up for school, and I had no doubt whatsoever that she wasn’t going to. Never again would Barbu teach in Baia Luna.
The Madonna on the Moon Page 9
