Patrascu stubbed out his cigarette. You could have cut the air with a knife. I had violated the rules of respect toward a man who yesterday was still the highest police officer in the Kronauburg District. But contrary to expectation, Patrascu addressed me in a positively paternal way.
“Pavel, is that your name? I’ll tell you what, boy. You don’t understand what you’re getting into here. I don’t know what happened to the priest’s body, and I don’t want to know. I’ll just say this much: up there in your mountain backwater you don’t seem to understand that international politics are involved. Your Johannes Baptiste had the makings of a real, hundred percent martyr. Get this through your heads! This is a Communist state. There’s a priest in the mountains who’s against it? Okay, slit his throat. Not good. Listen, people, there are certain circles far beyond the borders of our country—for the sake of simplicity let’s call them strictly Catholic and anti-Communist—that have a massive interest in such martyr figures. You want my personal opinion? Even though I think all this religious folderol is so much nonsense, these martyrs are going to bring down our idiotic collectivized Socialist delusion. Not today and not tomorrow, but someday. That’s the logic of history. One delusion replaces another. Royalists, Iron Guards, fascists, Communists, clericalists! What do I know? And if you can just grasp the fact that there are also certain circles in our republic that have no interest at all in seeing martyrs from the wrong camp, you’ll also understand why corpses disappear. The memory of people whose blood has been spilled is always dangerous. Martyrs’ blood causes trouble. But if these figures simply disappear like the melting snow in spring, then it’s all over. Over and done with, forgotten. No grave, no flowers, no temple, no gods. No grass grows as fast as the grass on the grave of an unknown soldier.”
“And the fact that in Baia Luna we have no grave to remind us of our priest,” said Istvan Kallay hesitantly, “for that your Security Service is to blame.”
“You should leave now.” Patrascu pushed himself wearily to his feet.
“When spring comes the snow melts,” I said in farewell. “You’re right about that, Commissioner. But in the winter new snow falls.”
“You weren’t listening to me, boy. That snow will melt, too. That’s the wheel of history. You’re young. You want to stop the world from turning. To do that you have to get real close to the wheel. And then it will crush you.”
We descended Castle Hill in silence. The evening bus to Apoldasch had left Kronauburg two hours ago. We decided to spend the night in the waiting room of the train station and take the first bus in the morning. Istvan put his hands deep into his coat pockets to warm them. He took out a pack of Carpatis. That night I smoked my first cigarette.
Chapter Six
FRITZ HOFMANN’S DISCOVERY, DIMITRU’S HEADSTAND,
AND A PERSON WHO WAS SOMEONE ELSE ENTIRELY
That night it snowed again in the mountains. We would have a long march on the footpath from the last bus stop in Apoldasch to Baia Luna, especially under the cloud of our failure to find out anything about the location of Johannes Baptiste’s body except for the disheartening realization that its disappearance was no mere oversight of an incompetent bureaucracy. Behind it rose the shadow of an obscure and ominous force for which I had no name. After our conversation with Patrascu, Petre and Istvan also had no doubt that the wheels of that force would grind up anyone who interfered with their turning. “Keep your flame turned down.” The old commissioner’s sentence kept going through my head, and I was scared.
To our surprise, it was extremely easy going along the footpath beside the Tirnava. We were able to follow in the tracks of a truck with chains that had broken a trail to Baia Luna early that morning. In the track of the tires we discovered another comparatively narrow one: the track of a motorcycle. The police in Apoldasch drove such vehicles and the photographer Hofmann also owned one. Istvan was worried. Tire tracks heading for Baia Luna had not been a good sign lately.
We reached the village at midday and saw that the tracks in the snow led to the Hofmanns’ house. The truck was a make seldom seen on Transmontanian roads. The hood ornament was a three-legged star, and the country code on the trunk was D. Under the muddy splashes on the license plate you could make out the letter M.
“Munich,” said Istvan.
My former comrade Fritz Hofmann’s last day in Baia Luna had dawned. In his black leather getup, Heinrich Hofmann stood next to his motorcycle and was giving instructions to two furniture movers. Fritz and his mother were nowhere to be seen.
“Thank God you’re back safe and sound.” My mother’s relief and happiness were written on her face, while Grandfather betrayed no emotion. I had ridden to Kronauburg in the hearse against his wishes and gotten mixed up in things that weren’t any of my business, in his opinion. Granddad only jerked his thumb toward the bench next to the potbellied stove. “You have a visitor.”
Fritz was sitting in the corner. “I’ve been waiting for you.”
I took off my coat. “What do you want?”
“I want to talk to you. I have something important to show you.”
“Maybe for you, but not for me.”
“You don’t get it, man. It’s very very important! And we’re leaving in an hour at the latest. You think I’d be waiting here for hours if it wasn’t important?”
“I’ve never heard you talk like this before. Usually you’re too busy desecrating churches and not needing anyone for anything. We’re all such idiots here in Baia Luna.”
“Stop it, Pavel, please! I’m serious.”
“Then show me what you have to show.”
Fritz turned his head and saw Grandfather and my mother. “Not right here. Can we go to your room?”
We sat on my bed. Fritz sat up straight and took a deep breath to get the excitement out of his voice.
“You remember last week when you ran over to my house to show me the new television?”
“You mean the same day you blew out the little flame like such a hero and then took off like a chicken?”
“Man, cut it out. Please, Pavel! You wouldn’t believe how happy I was to finally get out of the house that afternoon when you came to bring me to your grandfather’s birthday party. I was suffocating in there. My father and mother were having another fight. Now they’ve separated. My father’s going to move to Kronauburg, maybe even to the capital. My mother and I are going to Germany.”
“To Munich, I guess.”
“Yes, to Munich. Anyway, my father came home day before yesterday to pack up the stuff he’s taking to Kronauburg before the move. He filled two crates and said we could do what we wanted with the rest of the junk. Throw it away or burn it, he didn’t care. He left the two crates in the upstairs hall and threw a blanket over them, then he told me and my mother to keep our mitts off his stuff.”
Fritz took a breath. I said nothing.
“But you know me. He tells me not to do something, and it makes me hot to do it. And yesterday when the old man was back in Kronauburg and Mother was saying good-bye to some people in the village, I went through the crates.”
“And so?” My pulse started racing.
“Here’s what I found.” Fritz reached under his sweater and pulled out a photograph.
“I don’t believe it!” I gaped at it in shock, shame, and arousal. Although the woman’s face was hidden by a man’s naked, out-of-focus behind, I knew at once who was lying there on the table with her legs spread. Her breasts were bare and her dress had been pushed up around her waist, the dress with a sunflower pattern. Five or six men were standing around Angela Barbulescu and grinning. Some of them had dropped their pants around their knees, others had erections jutting out through their open flies. I recognized one of them immediately. He was the only one standing there over her naked flesh who wasn’t beating off. He wore his hair slicked back, had an unfiltered cigarette between his lips, and was spraying sparkling wine from a thick-bellied bottle into Barb
u’s crotch.
“You know the guy with the cigarette?” asked Fritz.
“Sure. This is crazy. I nailed him to the classroom wall last week.”
“Exactly. The picture must be ten years old, but it’s clearly the new party chief of Kronauburg, Dr. Stefan Stephanescu, and his randy buddies. Photographed by my father.”
“Unbelievable!” I exclaimed. All the enmity between Fritz and me melted away. Instead I felt a bond of intimacy I never would have thought possible. “And now I’m going to tell you something. Do you know who that woman is?”
“How would I know? You can’t see her face. Maybe a streetwalker or something. You know what? My old man took more like this. They were in one of the crates, well hidden among piles of old wedding portraits. Only young women in the pictures. All pretty and all blond. I’m telling you, you can see everything. Really hard core. All the men are older. What do you think would happen if this stuff got out? I looked through all the photos, but this is the only one you can recognize Stephanescu on.”
“That’s Barbu lying there.”
Fritz caught his breath. “You’re crazy! How do you know? You can’t see anything . . . I mean, her face.”
“I just know it is. A hundred percent guaranteed, believe me. But I don’t have time to explain.”
“Holy shit,” groaned Fritz. “I never understood what Father meant a couple months ago. One weekend he asked me how school was going, and I told him how Barbu was always blabbering about the Paris of the East and how civilized it was and all. Father just said the teacher should teach us something useful instead of digging up the past or he would make her life a hell. Pavel, I’m sure there’s something really nasty going on here, but I don’t know what. And I’m leaving for Germany soon.”
“You always said you were going to move to Kronauburg. Is it because of the dirty pictures you don’t want to live with your father?”
“I decided long ago I didn’t want anything to do with my father.”
“But why? I always thought you two got along well. You both swear by that Nietzsche guy.”
Fritz stood up and unbuckled his belt. When he dropped his pants I bit my lip so as not to cry out in anger. His thighs were covered with welts, some blue-violet, some black. He showed me his scarred backside.
“The last beating I owe to those party verses. The old man didn’t like me improving on that stupid poem.”
Instantly I grasped why Fritz had stopped participating in gym class. While my classmates and I were still being sent off to school in short pants, I had secretly envied Fritz as the only student in Baia Luna who wore long pants even in the summer. His father Heinrich had bought them at a haberdasher’s in Kronauburg. What made Fritz so grown up in my eyes did nothing more than conceal the evidence of his father’s abuse. I thought of what my teacher Angela Barbulescu had called after me as I stormed out of her cottage: “Pavel, things are different than they seem.”
“Fritz! Your mother’s waiting for you!” Kathalina called up the stairs.
“I have to go, Pavel. Keep the photo and do something with it. Put some stones in the road of those scumbags.”
I hid the picture under my mattress. Birta was waiting in the tavern. I went outside with Grandfather and my mother to say good-bye to Fritz and Frau Hofmann. The Mercedes stood there with its motor running. Parked beside it was Herr Hofmann’s motorcycle with two crates strapped to the rear seat. Herr Hofmann walked over to his son and put out his hand. Fritz put his hands in his pockets.
“See that you make something of yourself in Germany.” Hofmann put on his helmet and mounted his bike without a second glance at his wife and Fritz. Birta was so embarrassed she didn’t say a word. She just shook our hands.
“Good luck,” said Fritz. “Too bad I have to go. And about that thing with the light in the church: I’m really sorry if you got into trouble for that. But what difference does it make if there’s a little lamp burning in this Podunk or not?”
As I went back inside, it started snowing again. The flakes drifted to earth, heavy and slow. The calendar showed Friday, November 15, 1957. Winter had definitely arrived. Baia Luna was facing long months when the village would drowse away in deepest isolation. With so much snow no one could get out of Baia Luna and no one could get in. But there was also something soothing about the loneliness. The security officer Raducanu still hadn’t come to pick up the list of names. Until spring Karl Koch would be spared the sight of the pretty boy.
November 6, A. Barbu, library key. Return!!!”
I put the note in my pants pocket. I told my mother I was bored and I was going to the rectory library to see if Dimitru could recommend a book to me.
“You want to borrow a book?” asked my mother in astonishment.
Even Grandfather, dozing behind the counter in the absence of customers, woke up. “Don’t let Dimitru pawn off any trash on you.” He handed me a bottle of zuika. “Books won’t warm you up. Tell Dimitru not to drink the bottle all at once, and he should show his face sometime.”
I pressed the bell at the rectory, but it didn’t ring. However, since Simenov the blacksmith had done such a thorough job of breaking the lock, it was easy to push the door open. I could hear wild ranting and raving from the library. At first I thought Dimitru was arguing with someone from his tribe, but then I realized he was alone and quarreling with himself. The noisy Gypsy didn’t hear me knocking. I pushed down the latch. As I crossed the threshold I instantly had to duck to avoid being hit by a folio.
I was shocked. Dimitru’s forehead was wrapped in cloth rags, since he’d beaten it bloody against the door when he saw the murdered Papa Baptiste. With his pathetic bandage he was the timeless image of a defeated soldier after a lost battle. Then he saw me.
“Oh my goodness! What an honor, what joy, what happiness! Is it really you, Pavel? Come to the place of intellect?”
I couldn’t fend off Dimitru’s hugs and noisy kisses. I freed myself from his embrace, and he picked up the tome he had just hurled across the room. He rapped his knuckles on the leather binding. “This here is the handbook of the universe. I tell you, Pavel, the cryptological language of these researchers of the heavens will be the death of me yet. Formulas as long as your arm, gravitational laws, centrifugal rotations, parabolic accelerations. Everything multiplied by pi. Nothing but uneven numbers and mathematical horrors.”
“Is that why you’re so angry? You’re letting this shopworn old doorstop about the universe get you all steamed up?”
Dimitru put his hand on the bandage. “A hothead can always find a reason to get hot. As if a yummy apple in Eden can help it if that idiot Eve takes a bite. No, Pavel, those astronomical bureaucrats aren’t driving me crazy with their calculations. It’s just, it’s just . . .” Dimitru rubbed his eyes so he wouldn’t cry. “It’s just that I miss Papa Baptiste so much. He’s gone. I’ll never be able to ask his advice again. Never, you understand?”
Dimitru finally calmed down. I got up the courage to ask him if his problem had anything to do with the beeping Sputnik and the Assumption of Mary the Mother of God.
“Absolutely!” Dimitru’s eyes shone like a child’s who feels himself understood. Then he sang the praises of Papa Baptiste, extolled the wisdom and foresight snatched from humanity in general and the Baia Lunians in particular by those cowardly killers. He complained that the burden of knowledge now rested solely on the weak shoulders of a single poor Gypsy.
“But what is the problem?” I asked earnestly. “How would Pater Johannes help you out of your dead end?”
“That’s the exact word, my boy. Even better: a double dead end. There’s no going forward, and the way back is blocked, too. And you know where the dead end ends?”
“No idea.”
“I’ll tell you: the dead end of my research ends far away. More precisely, I’m stuck somewhere between heaven and earth.”
“In outer space? Up in the sky?” I didn’t understand. “Whe
re did you get such an idea?”
“Listen: let’s assume that the corporeal Assumption of Mary the Mother of God is a fact. Vatican dogma, infallibly proclaimed by Pope Pius, and, despite that, completely correct. With me so far?”
“Yes.”
“Good. Rising bodily from the dead isn’t a matter of just hopping on the spiritus sanctus and zooming into the firmament. Rising bodily from the dead—for a person, especially a woman (and after all, that’s what our Mother of Jesus was)—means the whole of you goes up to heaven, thighs, buttocks, breasts, and all.”
“Sounds logical,” I agreed. “So where are they? I mean, where’s the entire Mary?”
“That’s the sixty-four-thousand-dollar question I’ve been working on, and I may be on the brink of a decisive breakthrough.”
“What do you mean? Haven’t you had a clue up to now? Didn’t you know where the Mother of God was?”
“Do you think I’m an idiot? Of course I had a clue. But a clue doesn’t count. What counts is proof. I’ve been collecting evidence, making hypotheses, and counting on the power of logic. ‘Stick to facticities!’ That’s what Papa Baptiste always advised, not once, but a thousand times. And that’s what I stick to. Fact is, the Russians want to go to the moon. Determined to. But that’s suspicious. More than suspicious, I’d say. The Russian president promised his people not vodka and pork chops but a moon flight. Preferably on the anniversary of the Revolution. The Bolsheviks aren’t about to mount such a gigantic operation with their rockets just to look at some old rocks on the moon and put up a pathetic flag that can’t even flutter. Not a fart’s worth of wind up there, you know.” And Dimitru rapped on the handbook for the far reaches of the universe again. “It’s all in here. You just have to replace the word ‘atmosphere’ with ‘intestinal wind’ to more or less understand it all.”
“You mean to say that the Russkies are such idiots they’d fly to the moon just to look for Mary? You believe that nonsense that Johannes Baptiste said? He thought the Russkies were looking for the Lord God in outer space, too.”
The Madonna on the Moon Page 15
