Grandfather yawned. The effects of the alcohol were showing. When the waiter called for last orders shortly before nine, Grandfather handed me his wallet and mumbled that I should pay up. Since I had no idea it was customary to leave a tip, all I got from the waiter was a surly “Good night,” and he didn’t bother to escort us to the door.
We climbed the stairs to our room on the sixth floor. To take advantage of the lovely opportunity, Granddad decided to have a short tub bath before going to bed. I lay down on my bed, resigned to wait.
As the clock in Saint Paul’s Cathedral struck twelve, I was tying my shoes. Grandfather’s breathing was even and deep. He was sound asleep. I put the room key into my pocket and pulled the door shut behind me. There was a night-light glowing in the hallway, and the carpeting on the stairs swallowed the sound of my steps. The night doorman was asleep on a chair by the entrance, his chin on his chest. I pushed the door, but it was locked. I shook the night porter awake.
“What’s wrong?” The man jumped to his feet. “Nothing’s going on out there. Everything’s closed.”
“I can’t sleep,” I answered and gave a little cough. “It’s my damn asthma. When you’re from the mountains, town air always bothers you. I need to take a walk to make myself tired.”
“I know what you mean,” the night porter replied sleepily. “I’m from the Schweisch Valley. The air’s better there.” He unlocked the door. “I’ll leave the door open and the key in the lock. When you come back, turn it twice in the lock. Just don’t make any noise and wake me up again with a lot of banging around.”
The streetlights on the market square had been turned off, but I could orient myself well enough by the moon shining in a cloudless sky. I looked around. No light on in any of the buildings. Even what I guessed were the windows of the police station were all dark. I strolled leisurely past Hofmann’s photography studio. I was worried that the airshaft in the back courtyard could be reached only from a street above the market. To my relief, however, I discovered a narrow alley a few yards to the right of Hofmann’s display windows. I struck a few matches, went down it, and stopped before a door with a dozen doorbells and nameplates. The door wasn’t latched tight, and I entered a foyer from which a passageway led out to the dark rear courtyard. I listened for a moment, but everything was still. Then I felt my way forward. On my left was the side of the building in which I guessed were the rooms of Hofmann’s photo shop. I stepped on a metal grate. Beneath it there was an airshaft going down to the basement. I bent down to remove the grate. I could move it a little but couldn’t lift it off. The brief flicker of one of my matches revealed that it would be impossible to get in that way. The grate was secured from below with a chain and padlock. I continued along the side of the building for two or three yards, then I was brought up short when my right foot found nothing to support it. It was a second airshaft. I lay on the ground, reached down into it, and felt a window. I pushed against it, and it swung open into the room. I guessed the depth of the shaft to be about a yard at most. I carefully lowered myself into it, pushed aside the black curtain, and found myself in Hofmann’s darkroom. Slowly I groped my way to the door, felt for the switch above the lintel, and turned on the light. On the cutting table lay a pair of scissors and the remains of the photo paper on which Irina had printed our pass pictures. I opened the darkroom door, stepped into the basement hallway, and turned on the ceiling light. Heinrich Hofmann’s holy of holies, the archive of negatives, was in the next room, Irina had said. I spied the iron door right away, pushed down the latch, and pulled. Nothing happened. I threw all my weight against the door, jiggled and tugged at the heavy latch until there could be no doubt: I would never get into the archive without a key. I was enormously frustrated. I should have thought of this before. If the negatives and pictures I hoped to find were in fact concealed behind this door, then Heinrich Hofmann alone would have access to it. I was certain he wouldn’t leave the key hanging from a hook somewhere in plain sight.
I had rushed blindly into my crusade. What made me think my opponents would fail to observe the elementary rules of their evil game: secrecy and caution? The only thing left for me to do was rummage through the innumerable cardboard boxes stacked to the basement ceiling on the uneven shelves that lined the corridor. I pulled out a carton at random: CODARCEA WEDD., KRONAUBURG 17.05.56 was written on the lid with a thick black crayon. I opened the box. Inside were wedding pictures. Another wedded couple emerged from GHERGHEL WEDD., KRONAUBURG 29.05.56, a pimply-faced groom and a bride you could have taken for his mother. In the carton ILIESCU WEDD. ANN., KRONAUBURG 04.10.55, an elderly couple had obviously posed for the camera on the occasion of their fiftieth anniversary. Under GEORGESCU-BUZAU WEDD., SCHWEISCH VALLEY, 28.04.57, the viewer could not help noticing that the betrothed of the very young groom with a tortured smile on his face had a big belly under her wedding dress.
I cleared away entire piles of cartons in order to at least spot-check the boxes at the bottom that had probably not been opened since the forties. But I didn’t find anything but grooms staring straight into the camera while the brides were usually in profile, gazing up at their betrothed. Otherwise just parents of the bride, bridesmaids holding bouquets, children with baskets of flowers, large and small wedding parties with now and then a reception banquet or brides dancing with their fathers. And scattered everywhere among the wedding pictures, photos of party comrades and Heroes of Labor having medals pinned on them.
At the end of two hours all I had to show was the knowledge that Heinrich Hofmann demanded strict orderliness from his female employees. They were required to enter names, places, and dates on every cardboard box. I could have kept looking until the following evening; here in this corridor I was not going to find any evidence that the partners in crime Hofmann and Stephanescu used pornographic photos to silence people. Or make them talk. Or make them do whatever.
“I let him take pictures of me.” For a fee. Angela Barbulescu had recorded Alexa’s sentence in her diary. Back in those days, in the capital, her former friend had hinted that some men were ready to pay a lot of money to see such pictures. And some were willing to pay even more so that no one would see them. Alexa spread her legs and let them take pictures, as Stephanescu had put it. Somewhere there were some photos like that of Angela. All those years in Baia Luna she had been terrified someone would slip them to the priest Johannes Baptiste. All those years, fear had kept her lips sealed. Heinrich Hofmann had shot the photos in the office of a doctor who had aborted the baby in her womb. Whatever they were like, my former teacher had not allowed them to be taken voluntarily. They had done something to her she didn’t want done.
I sat down on a canister full of used lab chemicals. I had left traces in this corridor. Too many traces. Tomorrow morning at the latest, Irina Lupescu would discover that someone had broken in. Dejectedly, I lit up a Carpati. I imagined the doorbells jingling at this moment, and Irina descending the basement stairs in her clattering heels. My dear friend Pavel, she would say with a smile, here’s the key to the negatives. Now Hofmann is finally going to get what he deserves. And that swine Stephanescu, too. I’ve canceled my engagement. I can’t stand the sight of that Lupu guy. You and I will take care of these crooks.
I thought of Buba. What would she say now? What would her third eye see? I felt only that she was far away. I closed my eyes and saw Fritz Hofmann, but not in Germany. He was somewhere out in the world, on the go, harried and haunted, always searching. Fritz was always looking through a camera, like his father. When I opened my eyes again, I saw the carton.
Among broken picture frames carelessly jumbled in a corner, I could see the brown cardboard. I ground out the cigarette with my shoe and cleared away the frames. It was clearly one of the cartons Heinrich Hofmann had transported on his motorcycle when he moved from Baia Luna to Kronauburg. I pulled it out of the corner. It was heavy.
Well concealed among old wedding pictures, Fritz Hofmann had discovered the pictur
e from the Christmas party in 1948, the one in which Alexa, wearing her friend Angela’s sunflower dress, was spreading her thighs and Stephanescu was spraying a bottle of champagne. I tipped over the carton and stood before a disordered pile of black-and-white photographs. Among them lay a dozen yellowed paper envelopes. I pawed my way through weddings, weddings, and more weddings, all presumably from the early postwar era. Then I picked up the envelopes. Some bore the date 1946 or 1947. The photos had probably all been taken in the capital. Innocuous pictures of young people, shot in the summer. I guessed they were university students. They were strolling through town with their girlfriends, holding hands on park benches or in sidewalk cafés, flirting and making funny faces in front of the statue of the poet Mihail Eminescu. In some of the envelopes were photos Heinrich Hofmann had taken in the evening at parties. There was much laughter and more drinking. With only a few exceptions, the men had combed their hair straight back with pomade, had their arms around their girls, and were grinning into the camera. Angela Barbulescu was not in any of the pictures, which was logical, since she hadn’t met Stephanescu until later. I recognized him in some of them right away. He was always in the center, with a cigarette in the corner of his mouth and usually surrounded by two or three attractive women. He clearly preferred blonds even then. I couldn’t find anything lewd in any of the snapshots, however. But one of the pictures gave me a start. Stephanescu was lolling on a sofa with his arm around a smiling young woman. It wasn’t the fact that his hand was clearly in her décolletage that surprised me, however. It was the woman’s dress. It had a striped pattern. Angela Barbulescu had exchanged her sunflower dress for her friend’s striped one for the Christmas party in 1948. But this picture was from the envelope labeled 1947. The pretty brunette with the full lips at Stephanescu’s side could only be Alexa. The small glass in her hand was another proof of her identity. I knew from Angela’s diary that Alexa stuck to liqueurs. I had always imagined Alexa as a wild and dissolute woman. It was hard for me to correct that image. The girl so breezily allowing Stephanescu to grope her breast seemed more like a pretty, somewhat-overexcited schoolgirl with the physical endowments of a woman.
My hands began to shake when I picked up the envelope dated December 24, 1948. That was the day of the Oh Unholy Night party at a certain Koka’s house, the day that ended so disastrously for Angela. Hastily I tore it open. From the first photo a man looked out at me. He was just putting a cigarette to his lips and had a prominent wart on his right cheek. That had to be Albin, the stranger who paid Angela Barbulescu a visit on her last day in Baia Luna. Dimitru’s cousin Salman had picked up a man along the road with a wart on his cheek the day he brought the television to Baia Luna for Grandfather’s birthday. The next photo was of a table spread with an expensive buffet. Koka had prepared his guests a huge grilled ham in which an oversize carving knife and fork were stuck. I didn’t know what the curious things were piled in a pyramid on a silver platter next to the ham, but I guessed they must be the ominous oysters the host would pee on later that evening. The wager! Angela had mentioned a stupid bet between Koka and Albin about who could guzzle the most “Russian piss” in a minute. It had ended in a fight between the two contestants. Hofmann had captured the two with his camera, tilting vodka bottles into their mouths. Albin was the one with the wart, so the other must be Koka, the Communist Party functionary. He was the man who had insulted Angela Barbulescu so coarsely when she said the stupid drinking contest was a tie. He’d called her a cheap Catholic cunt, and her Stefan hadn’t made a move to shut the creep up. Two other pictures showed Koka dancing while the onlookers applauded. The guy with glasses was probably the doctor, Florin Pauker. Alexa had taken his arm and was laughing. Her left hand was holding a glass of liqueur. She was wearing her friend’s sunflower dress. There was only one picture from that evening in which Angela appeared, and she was in the background and out of focus.
Fritz Hofmann was the first to discover these photographs while snooping around in his father’s moving cartons. What he told me just before leaving Baia Luna was true: when Alexa had lain down on the cleared-off buffet table and spread her legs, Heinrich Hofmann had snapped a few pictures. There were five snapshots of that scene. I put four of them next to one another and had no difficulty arranging them in chronological order. The only picture in which Stefan Stephanescu appeared was missing. It was in Baia Luna, under my mattress. Stephanescu must have removed himself from the dicey situation after the first flashbulb went off. Koka was also nowhere to be seen. I guessed that the hand holding a bottle and entering the picture on the right side belonged to the host. In the other photos, Alexa lolled on the table while Albin, the man with the glasses, and two others beat off.
As I put the photos from Christmas Eve 1948 back into their envelope, my fingers felt another, smaller envelope taped inside the big one. I tore it open, clenched my fists, and gave a short whoop of triumph. Heinrich Hofmann had ignored the rule of caution. He had not protected his holy of holies. What I was holding against the ceiling light were the negatives. Although you couldn’t identify much on them with the naked eye, I could make out a pair of female thighs on a deep black background. I knew that would turn into a white tablecloth on the positive. And the dark spots around Alexa’s private parts were the light traces from the champagne foam spurting from the shaken-up bottle.
Do whatever you want with my pictures.
Heinrich Hofmann had taken some despicable pictures of Angela Barbulescu as well. Against her will. Whatever they showed, they now had no more role to play in the game of threats, blackmail, and murder, an evil game whose murky rules I could only guess at. Wherever those pictures were now—probably behind the locked iron door to Hofmann’s archives—they had lost all their power over Angela. But the photo under my mattress whose negative I now carried beneath my sweater still had power.
Hang my picture on every lamppost. I’m not afraid anymore.
All I had to do was turn the threat around. Having his picture on every lamppost would not please the champagne squirter and party boss of Kronauburg, Dr. Stefan Stephanescu.
The muffled tolling of the bells of Saint Paul’s Cathedral reached the cellar. I wasn’t sure if I had counted four or five strokes. Whichever it was, time was short. Quickly I tossed the pile of wedding pictures back into their carton. Just when I didn’t expect to find anything else, I did. I caught sight of an inconspicuous pack of photos held together with a single rubber band. They were the pictures for which the only words Fritz had at his disposal were “hard core,” the ones that showed everything in the raw. They must have been taken more recently. I recognized one of Hofmann’s salesgirls, the one who had been advising the young couple yesterday up in the shop. She had that unmistakable, glorious blond hairdo. I felt an unsettling mixture of repulsion, fascination, and powerful arousal. There were two or three different women, all of the same type, whom I had not seen before. Same for the men. For some of the pictures, Herr Hofmann had almost crept right into the woman’s crotch with his camera; others were taken from a greater distance. I rushed my way through them. The beauty with the fluffy blond hair of an angel recurred. She was undressed and leaning over an older gentleman lying on a bed with his fly open. She was using her mouth. I knew the man. I was a hundred percent sure I had seen him before. But where? The harder I tried to remember, the more the image retreated into the furthest chambers of my memory. But the present was all the more vivid. When I looked at the background of the indiscreet photograph, I knew where the picture had been taken. The wallpaper in the rooms of the Golden Star had the same flowered pattern.
I had to go. I stowed the cardboard box back behind the picture frames, straightened up the cellar corridor a bit, knowing that my secret visit would not go unnoticed. I was about to climb out the lab window and back up the light shaft when I noticed I still had a big erection. I felt the need to relieve myself.
I opened my pants and thought about Irina Lupescu, whom I hadn’t seen among
all the women who’d let themselves be photographed. But then I realized I had put Heinrich Hofmann’s assistant and Security Agent Lupu Raducanu’s fiancée into an unpleasant if not dire situation. She was responsible for the darkroom in the basement. I stopped, buttoned up my pants again, and crawled out the window.
Five minutes later I opened the door to the hotel. The doorman was asleep. The clock above the desk said a quarter past five. I reached our room without encountering anyone else. Grandfather was asleep. I needed a cigarette. When I reached for them in my pocket, I discovered I had made a mistake. My matches and a pack of Carpatis lay on a canister of chemicals in Hofmann’s cellar corridor.
After two hours of restless sleep, I was awakened by Ilja. He was groaning and complaining about a headache. “It was that konjaki Napoleon.”
We did without breakfast, and on the dot of eight we were walking down the corridor of the state registration office with our ID pictures. The often-criticized bloated bureaucracy of the new republic and its sluggish and unqualified personnel were nowhere in evidence that morning. By eight thirty a clerk was handing me my new ID while remarking how stiff and serious I looked in the picture. Then she gave Grandfather his new ID to sign.
“I can read, but I can’t write,” he said. The clerk reached for an ink pad. “Happens more often that you’d think. You can sign it with your thumb.”
Shortly thereafter we were sitting in the collectivization office in the room for State Trade Organization concessions A–D and drinking a Turkish coffee. An hour later, Grandfather had signed a contract for the concession of the Baia Luna branch of the Kronauburg regional grocers’ cooperative. Moreover, he was no longer a private tavern owner but the possessor of a state liquor license to dispense spirits up to eighty proof. To be sure, only until 10:30 p.m. on weekdays and 9:00 p.m. on Sundays.
The Madonna on the Moon Page 28
