Koch tore himself free from Hermann Schuster and Istvan Kallay, but before he could go for Raducanu’s throat, the militiamen trained their rifles at his chest.
“You can shoot me on the spot, but you’re not taking me to Pitesti!”
“But who said any such thing, Herr Koch?” Raducanu stepped right up to him. “Wait until you’ve had your hearing. Maybe you’re innocent and you’ll be back with your family before you know it.”
As the representatives of state authority drove off with Karl Koch, Grandfather was in the shop complaining of sweats and nausea. Kathalina went to prepare cold compresses; then she saw her father-in-law lying on the floor. He had tipped sideways and fallen off his chair. After a while he opened his eyes again, and I had to tell him everything that had happened in Baia Luna in the past hour. There was a gap in his memory.
At noon on a Saturday in the middle of the summer, the Gypsies set out for the big horse market in Bistrita; just as I was locking up the shop and starting to sweep the steps to the front door I spotted their covered carts crossing the bridge over the Tirnava. I dropped the broom and took off running. I caught up with the caravan in a few minutes. Gasping for breath, I ran to the middle of the column where Buba and her mother Susanna sat in the open rear part of their wagon. From a distance Buba looked like a boy with her short black hair. She waved madly as if she had been longing for this moment. When her mother spotted me she started pummeling Buba with her fists. I was just able to press something into Buba’s hand. I had no breath left to say anything but her name, but Buba cried out, “I’ll wait for you!” before her mother pulled her back into the wagon. I stood there until the Gypsy caravan was lost in the distance. In Buba’s closed fist was a little ID picture showing an earnest young man in a jacket and tie.
Desperately sad, I dragged myself back to the village. I would not feel such pain again until decades later, when I became aware that my love for her was drowning in a swamp of hopeless misfortune.
Dimitru Carolea Gabor had remained behind in Baia Luna with Ion Vadura and his family. He was the man who kept an eye on the Gypsies’ settlement while they were traveling. Dimitru had tried to explain his reluctance to travel by the urgency of his researches, but since he could use only his hands and feet but not his voice, he had met with incomprehension among his tribe. His self-imposed silence necessarily precluded talking to his own people as well as to Grandpa. Dimitru was hardly ever to be seen in the village. Sometimes he shuffled to the watering trough to get himself a jug of fresh water. The sight of him aroused the sympathy of Erika Schuster and my mother, so the two of them took turns cooking an extra midday meal and setting it on the doorstep of the library to keep Dimitru from starving to death.
Grandfather was also undergoing a disconcerting change in those months. Although the times of economic hardship seemed to be coming to an end, his health was not good. The silence of his friend Dimitru weighed heavily on him. He could hardly get up in the morning and went to bed so early in the evening that I was forced to take over his duties in the shop and tavern if our business was to stay afloat. He was sunk in a slough of depression, and even my encouraging words or Kathalina’s tirades of scolding would only briefly lift him out of his lethargy. We gradually began to be seriously concerned.
Working in the business was so demanding that the summer and fall flew by in a flash, even though I grieved for weeks when the Gypsies returned in late summer without Buba. Though I had hoped that her mother would change her mind, I’d never really expected her to.
Our inventory needed restocking for the winter. Since I didn’t want to subject Grandfather to the strain of a long trip in the wagon, I asked Petre Petrov to come with me to buy supplies in Kronauburg. When we reached the compound of the Kronauburg trading organization there was a long line of concessionaires waiting to pay for their purchases. It turned out that because of their restricted hours of operation we would have to wait until the following morning to get our supplies. We decided to spend the night on the hay of the Pofta Buna and have a few beers in town with the money we would save. As a precaution I avoided the immediate vicinity of Hofmann’s photo studio but not of the Kronauburg market square. I had no intention of risking running into the lab assistant Irina. On the lookout for a cheap pub, Petre and I strolled up the medieval Castle Hill. Below the clock tower Petre discovered a shop that appeared to be still in private hands. A sign hung there that said GHEORGHE GHERGHEL. ANTIQUES BOUGHT AND SOLD. ON COMMISSION. In the shopwindow, which hadn’t been cleaned in years, there were various optical instruments on display: antique monocles, old army-issue field glasses and rifle scopes, spyglasses, and even a big telescope on a tripod. Petre was fascinated by the old scopes. Although I was his friend, I’d had no idea he and his father sometimes went out hunting at night with a carbine.
“Let’s go in here.”
I expected an aged gentleman with snow-white hair, but instead a young fellow just a little older than myself asked if he could help us. While Petre had the clerk show him the rifle scopes from the window, only to be disappointed that even the used instruments far exceeded his financial resources, I took a look around.
I discovered what I wouldn’t have expected in my wildest dreams. Among piles of radios with tubes, a gramophone, and used typewriters stood an enlarger.
“How much for that?”
“I’ll have to ask my uncle,” said the clerk. “He’s sick. But I know he won’t sell that separately. Only the complete darkroom set. The whole thing belonged to a retired judge who spent all his free time crouching in the underbrush to take pictures of reclusive forest animals. He died last spring.”
“When can you find out the price from your uncle?”
“Right now. He lives one flight up and he’s in bed. He’s . . . ah, how shall I put it . . . sick in his head. I have to tell you that we don’t own the building. The owner has sold it to a big shot in the party. And since Uncle Gheorghe found out he’ll have to move out of here and won’t be able to find any other place because he’s a private dealer, he’s been brokenhearted.” The young man disappeared and was back in a few minutes. “Gheorghe is sleeping, and I don’t want to wake him. But I’d guess the whole thing, with a camera, would be about three thousand.”
I swallowed hard. That was half a year’s salary for my grandfather.
“But Uncle Gheorghe’s not a highway robber. If he likes you he’ll sometimes sell you something for less than he paid for it himself. But I’m sure he wouldn’t sell it for less than two thousand. Come by again when he’s awake and ask him.”
I didn’t fool myself into thinking I’d ever be able to come up with the money.
Around six o’clock Petre and I went into a bar. It was a rundown dive whose interior was just as shabby as its exterior led us to expect. The grimy gorilla of a bartender had dandruff in what was left of his sparse hair. But since our thirst and weariness were greater than our desire to look for another place, we sat down at a table near the window.
“Is there beer?” asked Petre.
“But of course, gentlemen.”
The bartender opened two bottles, wiped off the lips on his apron, and put them on the table. Then I saw the two women. One of them was slumped over the bar and dozing; the other was looking at us. It was only a matter of time before she came over.
I hadn’t even set the bottle down after my first swallow and there she was in front of me. She wore a cheap dress that was much too tight around her buttocks and breasts.
“I’m Luca. Mind if me and my colleague join you? Just for a little. For somebody to talk to. She’s from the capital and doesn’t know anybody here.”
We looked at each other, and since we didn’t say no right away, Luca called, “Come on, Ana. These guys are okay.”
The other woman almost fell down as she slid off the bar stool. She tried to walk straight, but she swayed right and left and had to steady herself on the chairs.
“Actually, we
don’t want—”
I cut Petre off: “Have a seat.” It was like a punch in my gut: the woman who could hardly walk straight wasn’t named Ana. She looked like someone with nothing more to live for. Her right eye was black and blue, and when she forced herself to smile you could see past her cracked lips that she was missing two upper teeth. There was nothing left of the child-woman who once let Dr. Stephanescu squirt champagne between her legs. Petre slid over, and the drunk woman collapsed on a chair while Luca squeezed in next to me.
“I’ll have a beer, too,” she said boldly. “And a liqueur for my friend if you guys are paying.”
I ignored the request. “Hello, Alexa.”
“Her name’s Ana.” Both Luca and Petre corrected me at the same time.
I’d expected a surprised reaction, but the woman just looked at me wearily. “Ana, Marina, Elena, Alexa—whichever you want, boy.”
The bartender brought over another beer and a water glass half full of liqueur.
“Ana’s only been here since November,” Luca explained. “She had her best years in the capital, right, Ana? Isn’t that what you said?”
Alexa nodded weakly and sipped her liqueur. Then she put her trembling index and middle finger up to her mouth, and I offered her a Carpati. She inhaled eagerly and gazed off in a dream.
“She’s had too much,” Luca whispered to me as if it were a secret.
“I gotta take a piss.” Petre stood up, and the bartender pointed to a door with peeling paint. Alexa reached for her glass again, and I got up and put my arm around her. There was only one way for me to get through to this woman. I whispered something into her ear that I would regret only a second later: “Angela’s sunflower dress looked good on you.”
In a flash, the woman beside me was gripped by fear. Her glass fell to the floor and shattered. She jumped up and stumbled out the door. Luca rushed at me, but I ducked her slap. “What’d you say to her, you fucking pervert?” Then she ran out after her.
“What happened to the ladies?” asked Petre as he noticed the glass shards and sticky mess under his feet.
“They left.”
“Thank God. Shall we have another beer?”
“I’ve had enough.” I wished Luca’s slap hadn’t missed.
As the fall progressed, it became clear that it had been a mistake for Grandfather to stop following the advice of Dr. Bogdan, who had passed away in the meantime. The country doctor had warned Ilja over the years that because of his childhood poisoning in the vat of mash, his delicate constitution couldn’t stand even small amounts of alcohol. Dr. Bogdan had been right. Although he very seldom got the shakes, his memory was beginning to fail him.
It started with him taking an order from one of the housewives and then standing blankly in front of the shelves, not recalling what he had meant to get. Kathalina noticed that her father-in-law, who used to be able to find his way around the world of numbers blindfolded, now often made mistakes to his own disadvantage when adding up the accounts receivable. Women began asking for me when they wanted quick service, while Grandfather retreated more and more into an imaginary world because he couldn’t cope with the real one.
For the men, too, Ilja wasn’t the same old tavern keeper anymore. They often had to ask him three or four times to refill their glasses, and although he did so politely at first, he began to get more and more cranky. He even started losing his temper and cursing like a trooper if anyone dared to speak to him when he was sitting in front of the TV. At first he only watched the news and Soviet movies, but gradually he started watching everything that flickered across the screen, even the test pattern at the end of the day. Another of Grandfather’s quirks was that the television could never be turned on before six o’clock, the official closing time for his T.O. concession. My mother and I could live with that, especially since Grandfather also had days of mental clarity now and then, days on which he was his usual, congenial self.
However, Kathalina’s patience ran out in 1960 when a powerful autumn storm snapped off the antenna. Granddad wouldn’t leave his seat in front of the idiot box and kept pulling his chair closer and closer. Every time the black bar slid down the screen he clapped like a child and cried, “There it is again! There it is again!”
In our despair at the change in Ilja’s character and his increasing senility, mother and I went to talk to Hermann Schuster. The only thing he could think to do was to pack Grandfather into the wagon and drive him to the hospital in Kronauburg to be examined. I insisted on going along with Grandfather and the Saxon, partly from real concern but also partly because I wanted to take the opportunity to visit someone in the hospital: Dr. Paula Petrin.
In the presence of the specialists in the department of neurology Ilja was fortunately granted one of his rare moments of clarity. He understood that something was wrong with him and he would need to be admitted to the hospital for a period of observation and examination. It was agreed that we could pick him up again in six weeks.
As Hermann Schuster was heading for the exit from the People’s Hospital, Health of the Fatherland, I asked him to give me five minutes. Without waiting for his reply, I scooted down the steps and followed the sign for the Institute of Pathology until I reached the yellowish door that said DR. MED. PAULA PETRIN, SPECIALIST FOR INTERNAL MEDICINE. I knocked.
“Yes?”
I entered. The doctor looked up from a desk piled high with files.
“What is it?” she asked. I sensed none of her former congeniality.
“Pavel Botev. From Baia Luna. Three years ago three of us were here looking for the corpse of our dead pastor, Johannes Baptiste.”
Paula’s face brightened.
“Yes, of course. I remember you very well. I sent you to old Patrascu.”
“We went to see him. But he didn’t know anything about the body either.”
“Nice of you to come by again. Unfortunately I’m under a lot of pressure at the moment. In a half hour I have to be putting an important report onto our director’s desk. Your pastor was Catholic, not Reformed, right?”
“Exactly.”
“As far as I know, Catholic priests are not buried in their parishes but in the episcopal cemetery. I haven’t been in Saint Paul’s in a long time, but there’s a cathedral treasury, a kind of museum, in there, and from the treasury there’s a passageway that leads to an interior courtyard with the graves of priests and bishops. Maybe that’s where your pastor is. Sorry, but I’ve got to get back to work.”
“Many thanks for the tip.” I turned toward the door. “How’s the old police commissioner, by the way?”
“Didn’t you hear? He’s dead. Good old Patrascu was only able to enjoy his retirement for two or three weeks.”
“What did he die of?”
“His heart gave out. He probably smoked too many Carpatis.”
“Did you examine the body?”
“No, why should I?”
Hermann Schuster agreed at once to take a detour past Saint Paul’s, and we found the cemetery just as Paula Petrin had described it. The oldest gravestones went back to the eighteenth century. The most recent grave was relatively new. The dirt had settled, and it was bordered with irregular stones. Chiseled onto the simple gravestone was JOSEPH AUGUSTIN METZLER, 16/3/1872–12/11/1957.
“Strange,” I said. “Almost all the stones have the birthplace and the place of death. Pastor Metzler’s doesn’t even say what parish he served.”
“Curious,” agreed Schuster. “This Metzler died about the same time as our Baptiste.”
As we left the cemetery, any hope that we could clear up the disappearance of Pater Johannes’s body disappeared.
Fourteen days later, a white ambulance drove into Baia Luna. It wasn’t the fact that Ilja Botev had been released from the hospital earlier than expected that raised a stir in the village, but the splendid way the State Trade Organization apparently looked after its members and even provided them with transportati
on free of charge.
Grandfather got out smiling and waving. “I’m cured!” he called.
Kathalina, who seldom expressed her joy in a physical way, threw her arms around her father-in-law and began kissing him. Ilja was bursting with praise for the skill of the doctors in Kronauburg, especially a neurologist whose name he couldn’t remember. Grandfather said he had felt completely healthy for the first three or four days after his arrival at the hospital, and none of the doctors could find anything abnormal. He even overheard one of them use the word “malingerer” as they were talking out in the hallway. But then he had a strange attack he had no memory of. The doctors later kept referring to it as “gran moll.” Granddad said that one morning after tea with white bread and marmalade, he’d had a kind of flash in his head. Afterward he must have uttered a piercing scream, gone into spasms, and fallen to the floor. He’d turned blue and bitten his tongue without feeling any pain. When he woke up his tongue had hurt terribly, but that wasn’t as bad as his embarrassment at not having controlled his bowels during the seizure. But that was normal with this illness, the doctors had told him after they saved him from choking to death.
“I had to put on an oxygen mask and they gave me shots. When I could talk again, they told me I was lucky not to be living in the Middle Ages or even earlier.”
“Why?” I asked.
“Back then they thought epileptics were possessed by the devil, and they drilled holes in their heads to let the evil spirits escape. Today they have medicine for it. If I take my tablets regularly—they have this stuff in ’em, something like ‘fennyteen’ and ‘mazypeen’—the attacks may not stop completely, but they’ll be under control. That’s what the nerve doc with the glasses said. He was real educated and knew everything about my illness. They used to call it Saint John’s disease because people prayed to that apostle to make the seizures stop. But today they know that something doesn’t flow right in the brain when you have epilepsy. People used to think it was caused by the moon. Lunacy. Even the Romans talked about morbus lunaticus. It’s right there in the Bible, the doctor told me. Gospel of Matthew, chapter seventeen.”
The Madonna on the Moon Page 30
