As Kora stared into the abashed faces of those assembled, her lips twitched in a gloating smile. She repeated loudly and clearly, “What was that mother murderer looking for in the library on November sixth? You are silent because you don’t know how cold and calculating evil can be. But Barbu knew. When she entered the library she had already decided our priest had to die. By her hand. But how was she going to get into the rectory secretly that night? She didn’t go to the library for a book. No, she opened a window on the ground floor through which she planned to climb into the rectory at night, unobserved, with her knife. And why was she by chance able to open the window undisturbed on November sixth? Because no one else was in the library! Because the Black Dimitru Gabor wasn’t thinking of his duties but only of the damn schnapps at the birthday party of Botev Ilja, who just led us around by the nose with a passage from the Bible he’s learned by heart.”
I left the church.
“Everybody in this village is crazy . . . and you, too,” Fritz Hofmann had scoffed at me a few minutes before he blew out the Eternal Flame in the church. “What difference does it make if there’s a little lamp burning in this Podunk or not?” For Fritz, it no longer made any difference. But my life was divided into the time before it was extinguished and after. For me the darkened church, while not the cause of the chain of ominous and dangerous events, stood in immediate temporal proximity to them. The murder of the priest, Angela Barbulescu’s baffling unexplained suicide, the stolen Virgin of Eternal Consolation, and the delusional fantasies of Kora Konstantin had changed Baia Luna. The black of night prevailed even on the sunniest of days. Buba was my only ray of light. But when would I see her again?
I sat in our tavern but resisted the temptation to numb myself with zuika. Had Baia Luna really changed, the inhabitants really become different people? Or was it that the dead woman on the Mondberg had forced the village to show its hidden face? I no longer wanted to be one of these people. I wanted out. But where could I go?
I heard voices raised outside. Grandfather entered the taproom, followed by Trojan and Petre Petrov, the Saxons Karl Koch, Hans Schneider, Hermann Schuster, and his son Andreas, along with Karol Kallay, the shepherd Avram Scherban, and to everyone’s surprise even old Bogdan, the father of the three Brancusi brothers. The men shoved two tables together and sat down. Ilja asked if they wanted something to drink. They all declined.
“It doesn’t surprise me that Barbulescu hanged herself,” Avram continued their heated discussion. “You could see it coming. If Fernanda hadn’t listened at the door of our pastor, the mess Barbu made of her life would have stayed in the shadows forever. But murdering the priest? I have my doubts about that.” No one contradicted him.
“If you had seen Baptiste naked and tied to a chair in the middle of that terrible mess—” Karl Koch added. “No woman could have done that. And I’ll bet it wasn’t just one person either.”
“But did you see the faces in that church? It just goes to show what happens when people cling to their superstitions and resist progress. Most people in the village believe that nutty religious fanatic Konstantin,” Bogdan Brancusi said hotly. “But if Barbu didn’t murder the priest, who did? Karl, are you saying that something political is behind this dirty business? Even if my sons are in favor of the kolkhoz, they had nothing to do with it. I’d stake my life on that.”
“Me, too. Your boys would never do such a thing.” Grandfather took the floor. “But we have to ask ourselves, Who had an interest in seeing Baptiste dead?”
“So he couldn’t speak anymore,” Karl Koch added, and everyone nodded in agreement.
“We have to clear up the sequence of events,” I interjected, “to really exclude the possibility that the teacher was responsible for the murder.” Since no one protested, I continued, “Konstantin assumes that Pater Johannes was murdered during the night that Angela Barbulescu disappeared. That was the evening and night of Grandfather Ilja’s birthday. But I’m sure that Johannes and Fernanda were still alive then. We didn’t discover the priest until three days later, after the policeman Patrascu and the security agent Lupu Raducanu had been here.”
“But no one saw Pater Johannes alive after he left my birthday party that evening,” Grandfather said. Hermann Schuster interrupted him. “Pavel’s right. It’s true that none of us saw Johannes Baptiste after that. But Fernanda was still alive. I’m sure of that. She turned away everyone who came to the rectory door because Pater Johannes didn’t want to be disturbed while he worked on his sermon. I know that from my wife. Erika wanted to talk to Baptiste the day after Ilja’s birthday, but Fernanda absolutely refused to let her in because Johannes didn’t want to be disturbed under any circumstances. By then the Barbulescu was probably already hanging from her branch.”
“I think we won’t get anywhere until we know who the devil had an interest in making sure that sermon never got delivered. Everybody knew that Pater Johannes was intending to preach against the damned collectivization.” Karl Koch was getting worked up. “The fucking Securitate has people rotting in jail just for making stupid jokes about the party. A sermon against the kolkhoz would have been a huge thorn in the side of the big shots.”
“Do you know anyone who had to go to jail?” the old Brancusi challenged him.
“You hear about these things,” replied Koch.
“See there. You don’t know anyone personally,” scoffed Brancusi, “but you act like all Communists have nothing better to do than go around murdering priests.”
“I didn’t say that.” Koch jumped up. “But that repulsive pretty boy Raducanu—he’s capable of anything. He better not show his face around here again.” The men rapped on the tables in agreement.
“Pavel, bring us a drop.” I fetched the bottle of zuika. For the first time I got myself a glass, too, and drank with them. Nobody objected. Petre Petrov offered me a Carpati. I ignored my grandfather’s disapproving look and took one.
Then Petre spoke up and reminded everyone of his drive to Kronauburg with Istvan and me and our visits with the pathologist Paula Petrin and the retired commissioner with the wiry hair. “Patrascu knows more than he lets on. But he’s retired and wants his peace and quiet. He hinted that the authorities were behind the murder of the pastor and the disappearance of his body. They have no patience with anti-Communists and can’t afford to make them into martyrs and let their graves become pilgrimage sites. Patrascu told us more than once that the business with Johannes Baptiste would burn us badly unless we kept our flame turned down low.”
“And I’m sure that wasn’t a threat,” added Istvan Kallay. “It was a warning. But Petre is right. On the one hand Patrascu acts like all this Bolshevik terror doesn’t get under his skin, and on the other, he’s right in the middle of it. He knows all about the murder of Pater Johannes, but he won’t say anything.”
“He’s so afraid he’s pissing himself,” conjectured Petre.
Hans Schneider shook his head. “For twenty years nobody gave a fart what Pater Johannes preached in church. But now that he’s already pretty soft in the head, he’s suddenly a threat to the Securitate? Hard to believe. We shouldn’t lose sight of the possibility that Barbulescu did have something to do with it. Of course she couldn’t have committed the crime by herself. Maybe she had an accomplice, maybe even someone here in the village.”
“The murderers came from the city. I’m one hundred percent sure of it!”
“Buy why, Pavel? Since when are you clairvoyant?” Karl Koch asked.
“Funny you should be the one to ask. After all, you were there at the crime scene holding the proof in your hand and then you threw it out the window.”
Koch’s mind was racing. “Goddamnit! The mouse! The murderers had stuffed a mouse into Baptiste’s mouth. Only the tail was hanging out—like a piece of string.”
“And they sure didn’t catch the mouse in the rectory. They must have brought it along,” I said. “That mouse came from town. How often do you
think we had to copy out the story of the city mouse and the country mouse in school? Well, there was a point to it after all. City mice are gray. But the mice here in Baia Luna are brown. The murderers didn’t think of that.”
“The mouse really was gray,” Hermann Schuster now recalled. “You got a head on your shoulders, Pavel.”
Grandfather nodded. “He sure does.”
“But why was he killed? The Security Service got wind that in his old age Pater Johannes was planning to make things hot for the Bolsheviks,” guessed Karl Koch. “The Securitate’s always sniffing the wind.”
“And now it’s the other way around: they’re making things hot for us. Haven’t you noticed that our village is coming unglued?” Grandfather spoke with a passion no one thought was in him. “Since Johannes’s death it’s been one disaster after another. Don’t you see that Baia Luna’s going downhill? What’s left of our community? One-half backs the crazy Konstantin while the other’s groping around in a fog. Securitate! I’m always hearing about the all-powerful Securitate. The evil is right here in the village. We have to ask ourselves who told the Securitate what Baptiste was planning to say from the pulpit and how dangerous it would be for the state. They didn’t sniff that out with their own noses. Someone must have told them about the sermon, must have told Raducanu or whoever. Otherwise they wouldn’t have sent a death squad up here. Can’t you see that among our ranks right here in the village there must be one or more traitors?”
The men swallowed.
“Traitor!” I picked up my glass and drank. Then I stood up and—for the first time right in front of Grandfather—I fetched myself a pack of cigarettes from the shelf behind the cash register. I took a drag on my Carpati and stubbed it out. A monstrous idea occurred to me. Traitor! Yes, I knew someone who wasn’t a traitor but would be capable of playing that role, someone I still had a score to settle with.
“Anyone could be the Judas,” said the Hungarian Kallay. “Everyone knew that Baptiste had announced that he would preach against Communism.”
“How do you know that?” objected Hermann Schuster. “Remember, the idea for the sermon came to Johannes after the Bolshevik blah-blah on TV. After Khrushchev’s speech. After the Russians had shot their Sputnik into space. The spaceflight of a dog opened up Pandora’s box. That’s what our pater claimed, right here in Ilja’s taproom. And he intended to preach about it.”
“But I’m sure he talked about the kolkhoz, too,” Ilja replied. “Late in the evening, after the Brancusis broke that bottle on your head . . .”
“For which my sons have formally asked forgiveness,” old Bogdan interrupted. “Why stir that pot up again?”
“Anyway,” Grandfather continued, “my birthday party was spoiled, and you had all gone home. Pater Johannes didn’t leave until later. He stood here in the door and already had his cane in his hand. I offered to walk him to the rectory, but he refused. He just said he’d see me on Sunday in church. And then he said something about Sputnik being the last straw, and it was high time to confront the collectivists in the spirit of the biblical message.”
“Who else was present when Johannes said that?” Karl Koch was feverish with impatience.
Grandfather thought it over. “Me, of course. Pavel. And Dimitru.”
“The Gypsy! You think the Black betrayed Johannes to the Securitate?” Hermann Schuster was horrified. “Dimitru of all people . . . No, he’s a blowhard but he wouldn’t do such a thing.”
“I think he would,” spoke up Scherban the shepherd. “A Gypsy has neither friend nor foe. Like Judas. A Gypsy would sell his own mother for hard cash. I was always against letting that Gabor clan move into the village. What do they want here, anyway?”
“It wasn’t Dimitru,” Ilja countered. “He’s no traitor. Besides, there was nothing for him to betray. By the end of the evening he didn’t know what was going on because he was dead drunk. He fell down the steps outside, and I think he broke a couple ribs. Pavel had to drag him home.”
“But who’s left as an informant? I’ll kill the bastard.” Koch was boiling mad.
I knocked my glass over. The zuika ran across the table. All eyes turned to me.
“There was somebody else.” I hesitated a moment, but it was too late to take it back. “There was somebody else here that evening besides Pater Johannes, Dimitru, Grandfather, and me: Fritz Hofmann!”
For two or three heartbeats the men were frozen and speechless. Not because they lacked the words. I guessed there were too many thoughts pushing forward. A thousand images raced through their heads. The enormous tension of the previous hours, days, even weeks congealed in a single name. Fritz Hofmann! A schoolkid!
Then they all started talking at once. Everyone had a stone to contribute to the mosaic of a family of traitors they were putting together. Was it an accident that only a week after Johannes Baptiste’s murder a German truck turned up in the village and the Hofmanns left Baia Luna for good? Hadn’t the priest reprimanded the boy in front of all the men in Ilja Botev’s tavern as the know-it-all Hofmanns’ Fritzy. Couldn’t you just see the cold fury in the kid’s face after that dressing-down? Of course, a schoolboy scarcely could have access to the means of converting his thirst for revenge into a deed. But what about his father? Heinrich Hofmann, who had nothing but contempt for everything that happened in the village. The art photographer. The divorced art photographer. Who wanted no truck with the Good Lord. And had money. Drove a big Italian motorcycle. And didn’t his wife have an electric stove? The fancy-dancy Herr Hofmann! He never said hello, and Ilja’s tavern wasn’t good enough for him, and he preferred the high society in the city. He was on intimate terms with that Dr. Stephanescu, the top collectivist in the whole Kronauburg District. Fritz and Heinrich Hofmann were obviously both traitors, two peas in a pod. Along with the party bigwigs. They sent the butchers to our village to make an example of Johannes, the old priest who followed the word of God and not the laws of the temporal authorities.
I had scared myself. I sensed the hidden power I could exercise. With the mere naming of a name I had given the course of things a new direction. My direction. The reaction unleashed by the name Fritz Hofmann had hurled me into adulthood. Now my voice carried weight. Now the men had accepted me into their circle. I wasn’t a boy anymore. Many years later I would understand it was guilt that had put out the last spark of my childhood soul. When I said the name of my former schoolmate and friend, I became guilty. Consciously, intentionally, and calculatedly. If Fritz Hofmann wouldn’t atone for the deed he had committed, then he would have to atone for a deed he certainly could not have committed.
Fritz had blown out the Eternal Flame. He had defiled the church, and I had been cursed by Johannes Baptiste for the deed. Go to hell, the priest had condemned me. When he was murdered, he died in the mistaken belief that I, Pavel Botev, had sullied myself with the shame of a sacrilegious act, while the imbecilic fans of Kora Konstantin thought Angela Barbulescu was behind all of this madness. Only Fritz could have and should have washed the teacher clean of this infamy, but instead of accepting responsibility for his deed he had scrammed, taken off for Germany. Fritz Hofmann had abandoned me, left me alone with the extinguished lamp in the church, with all the madness in the village, and with the knowledge of his father’s swinish activities. Under my mattress was the photo of a naked woman in a sunflower dress, a woman by the name of Alexa, between whose thighs Stefan Stephanescu was squirting a bottle of champagne. Photographed by Heinrich Hofmann. Wasn’t it more than just compensation if the men in the taproom blamed Fritz and his overbearing father for a betrayal they certainly hadn’t committed?
I reached for my pack of cigarettes and offered the men Carpatis. Petre, old Brancusi, and the shepherd took one. Grandfather neglected to give me a disapproving look. I was grown up. The men had accepted me as one of their own. But I didn’t really belong. There was no place left for me in Baia Luna, in this disrupted, divided village. Kora Konstantin’s crowd
disgusted me; the men in the taproom were as honest as they were clueless. Their anger at the betrayal of Johannes Baptiste was genuine, but it had no outlet. Fritz Hofmann was gone, his father unreachable and protected by his political connections. No one could get at them. Sure, in a burst of fury Karl Koch had sworn to take revenge on the high-class Hofmann, and the impulsive Petre Petrov talked big about going to Kronauburg when the snow melted to throw a couple Molotov cocktails into a certain well-known photography studio. But in the foreseeable future, their anger would dissipate and give way first to bitter resentment and finally to an oppressive feeling of helplessness.
And the real guilty party?
I was lonely and alone and had no other choice but to hang on and wait things out until I could avenge Angela Barbulescu. She was dead and had not taken the party secretary with her to hell. What would happen with that vicious man I was supposed to destroy? The teacher had made me into her instrument, and I was ready for my crusade, ready for a battle, though I didn’t know when, where, or with what weapons it would be fought. The only indisputable thing was that I had to go to Kronauburg as soon as the snow had melted.
The Madonna on the Moon Page 24
