The Madonna on the Moon

by Rolf Bauerdick

  There was no way I was going to ask the photographer directly. And Fritz was dead to me in any case. Under other circumstances, I might have asked the priest for advice, but if I approached Johannes Baptiste with the riddle of the death of God after the incident with the Eternal Flame, he would deny me absolution until the end of time. The only remaining possibility was Dimitru the Gypsy, Lord of the Library. Maybe its collection included even the works of Nietzsche. If so, Dimitru was sure to have studied them.

  I left the church and set off for the library. Winter was on its way—a good time to read, which I otherwise never did.

  If it had snowed during the night on Friday, then the four men who gathered on the village square on Saturday morning to visit Pater Johannes would have noticed the strange footprints on their way to the rectory. But the first snowfall of the winter of ’57 didn’t begin until midday. Karl Koch, Petre Petrov, Kallay the Hungarian, and Hermann Schuster stood at the rectory door, and the latter pushed the bell. Fernanda the housekeeper would surely let them in, although in the last few days she had turned every visitor away from her Johannes’s door so he would run no chance of being disturbed while preparing his Sunday sermon. But the men were determined not to let themselves be brushed off. They had a more urgent need for their pastor’s advice than ever before.

  “I’m going to see Dimitru in the library,” I explained, hoping to forestall any suspicion that I wanted to get mixed up in the adults’ business.

  “You can forget the library. Nobody’s opening the door,” said Petre. “We’ve been ringing the bell the whole time.” Karl Koch belabored the heavy wooden door with his fists. Hermann Schuster had just suggested calling Simenov the blacksmith, who knew how to crack any lock, when Dimitru came shuffling up to the rectory on his way to the library.

  “Oh! You here? Blessed are those who seek words of wisdom, for—”

  “Nobody’s answering the door,” said Karl Koch. “Something’s wrong.”

  Dimitru produced a key. “Did you ring?”

  “Do we look like idiots?” snapped Petre. “We’ve been ringing the bell for half an eternity.”

  “Then there’s something wrong.” Dimitru unlocked the door.

  Everything was quiet on the ground floor and in the library. Following the Gypsy, the men climbed the stairs and found the door to Johannes Baptiste’s private apartment cracked open. When they called out his and Fernanda’s names and got no response, I followed them. No one paid any attention to me. Hermann Schuster pushed the door and met with resistance. “The rug must be jamming it,” he said. They all pushed the door together. They had to push aside something heavy: Fernanda. She lay in the entrance hall in her white apron. There were no signs of injury on her. Karl Koch knelt down and felt for her pulse. The housekeeper was cold and stiff.

  Immediately it became clear that the men would never be able to seek the priest’s advice again. He would never preach again. Prepared for the worst, they entered the parlor, and when they didn’t find Johannes Baptiste there, they proceeded to his study. I stayed in the background as they came upon a scene of devastation. Books shad been tumbled off the shelves, drawers pulled out of the chests. The typewriter lay smashed on the floor. The rug was strewn with sheets of paper and notes. And in the midst of it all sat Johannes Baptiste on his desk chair. The thing that was terrible was not that the priest was dead but the way he had been killed. Johannes sat there naked with his hands tied, his head bowed, and his chin resting on his blood-spattered chest. When Karl Koch gently raised his head, a horrific wound opened up. Someone had slit the priest’s throat.

  Dimitru just stared in dumbfounded disbelief. Then he ran to the door. Again and again he hammered his head against the doorpost. In silence.

  The others rubbed dry tears from their eyes. No one said a word. All words were dead, expired even before they were thought.

  “What’s that?” asked Petre quietly. He pointed to something that looked like a piece of gray string.

  The men looked at one another, perplexed. The string was hanging out of the priest’s mouth.

  “A shoelace?” Hermann Schuster finally said the word. “What’s a shoelace doing there?”

  When Karl Koch hesitantly took hold of the gray string, he could feel it wasn’t a shoelace. Hermann Schuster nodded to him, and Karl pulled. Hanging from the string in his fingers was a dead mouse.

  “Who would do such a thing?” whispered Istvan Kallay, pressing his hands against his eyes.

  “This is nothing you should be seeing.” Hermann Schuster took my arm and tried to hustle me out of the study. But I was rooted so firmly to the spot that the Saxon couldn’t move me even an inch. I stood petrified before the naked old man on the chair. I felt nothing, but I saw everything. Every detail. I was transformed into a machine, a photographic apparatus that could fix events in an image but felt nothing. Something in this image caught my attention, something that burned itself onto my retina. It wasn’t the pastor or the gaping wound, not the blood or the men covering their faces with their hands and not wanting to believe what they saw. In the midst of the books and papers on the floor there was a little white piece of torn paper. There were only a few words on the handwritten note. I was too far away to read them. The only word I could clearly make out was a name: “Barbu.”

  That name broke my rigid spell. Whatever else had happened in this room, my one thought was: I have to have that note.

  “We’ve got to report this.” Hermann Schuster turned to go. Kallay and Koch followed, walking backward and still staring, fascinated by the gruesome scene. Petre, who had never paid me much attention before, took my hand. Like a longtime intimate. “Come on, Pavel. It’s not good to stay here.”

  My eyes were glued to the piece of paper. I wanted to just pick up the note but I couldn’t. No, I had to. Right now. Once the police started to examine everything it would be too late. Something crashed in the stairwell. Hermann Schuster’s knees had given way, and he’d fallen. “Petre! Come quick and help!” Petre Petrov jumped for the stairs. A few steps, and I shoved the note into my pocket.

  The men decided at first to just announce to the village of Baia Luna that the priest had died. This was absolutely not the time to make the circumstances of his death public, especially because it would frighten the women and children. That afternoon they would call an assembly, but first they had to do what was always done whenever a villager passed away. Karl Koch hunted up Julius Knaup and instructed the sacristan to toll the mourning bell. Within two minutes the village square was filled with people shaking the snow out of their hair and wondering which of the old folks the bell was for. When the name Johannes Baptiste made the rounds, everyone gasped. The women broke down in tears. The men bowed their heads or stared helplessly into the silent descent of the snowflakes and didn’t know what to do with their hands. Then someone finally extended his hand to a neighbor who passed the handshake on until all the men and women were walking around in silence, consoling one another. Even the Brancusis, for whom hostility to the church and clergy was a revolutionary article of faith, mixed in with the mourners, genuinely moved by the pain at the loss and realizing that Johannes had always been their opponent but never their enemy.

  Karl Koch made the mistake of warning everyone not to enter the rectory under any circumstances until the police in Apoldasch had been notified. After this warning a tense silence prevailed until people realized what the Saxon was saying. When Avram Scherban called out, “What do we need the police for? Our good shepherd was almost ninety and now he’s dead,” shock and fury gripped the mourners. People at the edge of the crowd started saying that the pastor had not died a natural death. Everyone began talking at once; some even shouted angrily that Karl Koch should tell them what was going on. At last Petre Petrov couldn’t control his emotions any longer and shouted, “They slit his throat. They killed him. Him and Fernanda. They murdered him, silenced him—silenced him for good!”

  Petre stum
bled over to his mother and broke down. While Aldene Petrov bent over her son, everyone else, men and women, rushed to the rectory. Only the Gypsies stood off to one side of the square, shivering in their thin clothes and the silent fear that, from now on, Baia Luna would not be a good place for them.

  Schuster, Kallay, and a few other strong men tried to keep the advancing crowd from entering the rectory. They didn’t succeed.

  The first who rushed the building pushed their way forward to the scene of the crime, where their yelling ceased. Silence filled the room, spread to those pushing in from behind, in the halls, on the stairs, on the village square. Slowly, gradually it became quiet. You could hear the snow falling.

  “He’s an angel now,” a voice suddenly called. Everyone looked at Dimitru. “And he should look like an angel. And so should his Fernanda.” Everybody stepped aside to make way for the Gypsy. Dimitru was bringing a stack of snow-white bedsheets.

  At the stroke of four Julius Knaup and Marku Konstantin started pulling the bell ropes and hung on them into the night, ringing themselves to exhaustion. Six men carried Fernanda Klein on their shoulders, six Johannes Baptiste, three on the left and three on the right, and all of Baia Luna followed. With infinite slowness the procession moved through the village, through the first snowfall. Flakes fell on white linen, on two dead faces carried on strong shoulders that were still too weak, white flakes on dark coats and on blond, brown, and black heads that didn’t shake them off. Every man, woman, and child held a candle in their left hand and cupped their right around the flame to protect it from the wind.

  We reached the church, and the pallbearers laid the bodies on the altar, where they slept in white like an elderly couple. There was singing but no loud prayers, no murmured rosaries. Only the tolling of the bells and sometimes a cough from the chilly pews. The church was bright with all the candles held in hands onto which hot wax dripped, so bright that no one noticed the Eternal Flame was no longer burning.

  I sat up front on the right side of the nave beside Grandfather Ilja and Dimitru. The women sat on the left. Around midnight the children were asleep in their mothers’ arms, the candles had burned down, and the bells had fallen silent.

  When Hermann Schuster and Istvan Kallay were just reaching the police station in Kronauburg with their team of horses, the first inhabitants of Baia Luna were returning to their homes, filled with sorrow and wondering fearfully who would do such a thing. Whatever evil lurked behind the murder of two human beings, it had done more than just kill them. That most silent day Baia Luna had ever experienced ushered fear into the village. I wasn’t sure, but on my way home I thought I had seen Fritz Hofmann and his mother Birta among all the shadowy faces streaming out of the church.

  The note: since I had snatched the piece of paper from the devastation in the study and under the nose of the murdered priest, it had been knocking around in my head, but I hadn’t been able to think clearly about it. The image of the naked Baptiste on his chair raged in my brain, loomed larger, more powerful, threatened to burst my skull, and left no room for anything else. I sat on my bed. The note was on my nightstand in the lamplight: “6.11. A. Barbu, library key. Return!!!”

  That’s all that was on the scrap of paper, hastily scribbled in pencil. What was clear was that only a man had such angular, spiky handwriting. The housekeeper Fernanda hadn’t written it, Johannes Baptiste had, and obviously on November 6. Not until I reviewed the events of that day did I understand how the note came to be written.

  November 6 was the previous Wednesday. I’d gotten up earlier than usual, caught Grandfather holding a tin funnel to his ear, and given him the Cubans for his birthday. Then I went to school, listless as ever. “Send this man straight to hell! Destroy him!” Angela Barbulescu had whispered in my ear. At noon I’d seen the teacher for the last time, when she shuffled to the blackboard, took the rag and wiped out Fritz’s sentence about his “thing.” In the afternoon Dimitru’s cousin Salman from Kronauburg had driven the television to Baia Luna in his cart, picked up some ugly guy on the way, and given him a ride to the village. Probably Barbu had known the stranger and had a drink with him in her parlor, she from the bottle as always, he from a glass. After that she’d disappeared. But the note revealed that before she did, Angela Barbulescu had paid a visit to the pastor on that Wednesday afternoon, before three o’clock. Because at three, Dimitru was already lugging the television into the tavern. While the men were admiring the appliance I’d run off to tell Fritz Hofmann about my grandfather’s birthday present. Fritz had come right back with me. And right after that, Johannes Baptiste arrived at the tavern where he remained until late that evening. Thus there was no time later than the early afternoon, after school, when Barbu could have been at the priest’s.

  “Library key.” The pastor had given Barbu the key to the library. Normally Johannes Baptiste had nothing to do with the rectory library. Whoever wanted to borrow a book would go to Dimitru. But at that particular time he wasn’t in the library because he was busy with the television. Pater Johannes—everybody knew his memory was increasingly letting him down—had given the key to “A. Barbu” and made a note to himself: “Return!!!” The note was supposed to remind him not to forget to retrieve the key in case the teacher (with her reputation as a slattern) didn’t return it herself. Had Barbu returned the key? The question seemed to me of secondary importance. Much more important was, What was my teacher looking for in the library? And on the afternoon of November 6, of all days! Couldn’t she have waited until the next day, when Dimitru would be lying on his red chaise longue again, whiling away the hours with his studies? Which book was so important to Barbu that she had to bother the old pastor that very afternoon for the key? And where was that book now? If a book was missing from the library, there was only one person who would know: Dimitru.

  But was it right to visit him alone? I needed an ally, a friend. Fritz was dead to me. Hermann, the son and namesake of the Saxon Schuster, was a decent guy but much too clueless for me to explain the whole story to him, beginning with Barbu’s sunflower dress and ending with what happened to the Eternal Flame. What about Petre Petrov? Petre had taken me by the hand in the murder room, and for a moment we had been partners in pain. But I hardly knew Petre. He was two years older and beginning to enter into the world of the men. He usually didn’t have much to do with younger boys like me. I only knew one person I would want to tell everything to: Buba, except I didn’t see her in my mind’s eye, couldn’t conjure up her image. I knew about her eyes, her open laugh, her cheeky remarks, soft hands, and the smell of earth and smoke in her hair. But I couldn’t see or hear or taste her. And I wouldn’t see her or taste her as long as the picture in my head and heart, the image of the naked Pater Johannes tied up on his chair, left no room for anything else.

  Something evil had come over Baia Luna. It had stolen Fernanda and our Good Shepherd from the village and introduced fear. A knife through the throat had not just silenced the pastor but also made him deaf for all time. Pater Johannes would never listen to anyone again. That was what caused my despair. Out of the house of God! Go to hell. Those were the last words I had heard from the priest’s lips. Johannes Baptiste had died in the mistaken belief that I, Pavel Botev, had extinguished the Eternal Flame. And the priest would never ever hear, No, no, no, Pater Johannes. It wasn’t what you think. I bit my pillow in the night to keep from crying out in grief.

  On Sunday morning Hermann Schuster, Istvan Kallay, and their haggard horse returned from Kronauburg. They had driven all night. “The police are on their way to investigate the murder,” said Istvan while Schuster unhitched the nag.

  They arrived at midday. Two jeeps and a black hearse. In one jeep sat Plutonier Cartarescu and the fat policeman, in the other six uniformed officers.

  “What a fucking pain,” complained the fat cop with the bird’s nest of hair. Despite the cold he was dabbing sweat from his brow. He clamped his cap under his arm and introduced himself with rank
and name: “District Commissioner Captain Patrascu. Never had been to Baia Luna in my whole life, and now I’m here again, twice in three days! Things are really poppin’ up here. First a teacher disappears and now this.” He lit up a Carpati. “Where’s the crime scene?”

  Kristan Desliu pointed toward the rectory. “But the deceased are in the church.”

  “What? The bodies are in the church! Who took them there?” Plutonier Cartarescu was livid.

  “We did.”

  “Are you crazy? That’s a serious offense: interference in police work! Crime scenes are not to be touched under any circumstances. How are we supposed to investigate now that you’ve tampered with the evidence? Who was responsible for this unauthorized transport?”

  “Calm down, calm down,” said Patrascu. “Let’s take a look first.”

  While some of the policemen waited on the village square, the commissioner, Cartarescu, and two officers walked to the rectory. Since the door had fallen shut, they called for Simenov the blacksmith who broke it open with a powerful jerk of his crowbar. An hour later the officers returned from their inspection.

  “Complicated, complicated,” Patrascu said and took a drag on his cigarette. “Thousands of footprints—in front of the house, on the stairs, everywhere you look. Nothing to be done about it. Kind of a mess up there. What were we going to find? We don’t even know what to look for. You can see the perpetrators were looking for something, too. But the way they threw stuff around they probably didn’t find anything useful either.”

  “What do you mean the perpetrators didn’t find anything?” Cartarescu didn’t understand. “How can you tell?”

  “Experience. Burglars only throw things around when no one’s home. But if someone’s there, there’s a different procedure. Believe me, if I hold a straight razor to your throat you’re gonna tell me where everything is: money, jewelry, booze, important papers, whatever. You’re gonna spill the beans in a flash, voluntarily—if you can call it voluntary under the circumstances. Unless there isn’t anything hidden. In which case the boys will turn everything upside down until they realize there’s nothing to be found. Then if they’re smart crooks they just beat it. But I’ll tell you what: if they’re pissed off, they’ll slice you open. That’s what we got here.”