I weighed the possibilities: an accident, a crime, or the likelihood that he had suffered an epileptic attack and been found lying in a ditch somewhere along the road. I paid a visit to every hospital and police station between Kronauburg and the capital and finally ended up in the central Securitate office on the Calea Rahovei. There they listened to my story, but in that labyrinth of secrecy, no information about the whereabouts of my grandfather was forthcoming. I drove home, fervently hoping that Ilja had returned to Baia Luna in the meantime.
He had not.
To be sure of getting a good place, Ilja Botev was already on the Boulevard of Victory on the afternoon of July 31, 1969, leaning against one of the police barriers. The American president and the Conducator would surely pass by here on the next day. The colorful forest of flags already lining the streets promised a fancy parade.
Two men in black leather jackets came up to Ilja and asked to see his papers.
“Don’t have them with me.”
“Who are you? What are you doing here?”
“Ilja Botev from Baia Luna. I’m waiting.”
“We can see that. Baia Luna? Where’s that?”
“Kronauburg District, Apoldasch Township.”
“You’re telling us you came all the way down from the mountains just to see the American president?”
“I didn’t say that!”
“Then what are you doing here without an ID?”
“None of your business, big shot!”
Quick as a flash, one of the men grabbed Ilja by the wrist and twisted his arm behind his back. His partner patted him down around his waist, from his crotch down his legs to his shoes, then his shirt, belly, and back.
“Nothing. No weapons, no pamphlets. So what are you doing here?”
“That’s my own business.”
The security agent who was holding Ilja’s arm gave it a sharp jerk. The old man grimaced at the pain in his shoulder but gritted his teeth.
“I’m an old man,” groaned Ilja. “Why are you doing this?”
They didn’t answer. The security agents pushed him along and bundled him into the rear of a green car, then drove to the Calea Rahovei. In his entire sixty-seven years of life, Ilja Botev had never before entered a building as huge as the headquarters of the Security Service. The men led him through side wings, corridors, and hallways and finally into a room with two chairs and a battered metal table on which stood a black Bakelite telephone. Although it was summer, the interrogation room was as cold as a refrigerator. The security agents pulled off Ilja’s jacket and pants and left the room, locking the door behind them.
Ilja’s entire body was shivering and his right shoulder hurt like the devil by the time a Securitate major entered the room. He was wearing a fur coat. He began questioning Ilja about the sense and purpose of his long journey and after an hour was convinced that the prisoner was harmless. There were many crazy people in the country, but in all his interrogations, he had never met another nut like this man who insisted he had come all the way from the mountains to the capital to ask President Nixon to send another shipload of chewing gum to Transmontania.
The major handed Ilja his pants and helped him into his jacket. Then he felt something. He tore out the lining of the woolen garment and removed a letter and a black photograph with a dozen white dots. He read the letter, shook his head, and left the room.
After a while, he returned with his superior. Ilja Botev knew the man with the pudgy face who looked him fiercely in the eye.
Colonel Lupu Raducanu picked up Ilja’s letter. It was addressed to the first chairman of the State Council and began with the words “Most honored Comrade General Secretary, Titan and Conducator, we need your help.” Lupu read the letter to the end and grinned. “Well, what do you know. Ilja Botev from Baia Luna. What are we going to do with you, Mr. Botev?”
Ilja said nothing.
“You have total confidence in our country, and you would like our head of state to have some rockets built? Our nation’s very own lunar landing program, financed by the American president! Sounds good.”
Raducanu put a wool blanket over Ilja’s shoulders. “But you must be cold. I think your ideas have a future. We can certainly do something about this.”
Ilja’s eyes were shining confidently.
“I would think,” said Raducanu, “that the Conducator can take care of the Fourth Power. Who else, if not him?”
Ilja nodded.
“If I read this rightly, your client is a certain Jewess by the name of Mary who lives in the Sea of Serenity on the moon, surrounded by shining lights, as proved by the white dots on this photograph.”
“Correct.”
“Do you know what I suggest, Mr. Botev? I’ll hang on to this letter and give it to the Conducator myself. That way, you don’t need to push your way forward through thousands of people at the parade. The head of state will then confer with President Nixon about the matter. Agreed?”
Ilja nodded again. Raducanu put the letter and the photograph into his pocket, then picked up the telephone. Shortly thereafter, two men in plainclothes entered the room. Before Ilja had time to grasp what Lupu Raducanu meant with the order “Bring him to Dr. Pauker,” the men had given him a shot.
Ilja woke up in a remote area, a side valley of the Alt River, three hours by car from the capital. Behind the façade of a former military barracks was a psychiatric hospital that the locals talked about in hushed voices. They said anyone sent in there never cast a shadow again.
In days gone by, Dimitru had always made great claims about the power of his loins, but if anyone thought that my aunt Antonia, sitting beside him, would become his lover, the sight of the unequal couple would soon change their mind. While even in hard times, Antonia Botev’s already generous proportions continued to increase, the Gypsy became skinnier and skinnier. He was actually shrinking, getting smaller and smaller until he was so insubstantial that you hardly noticed him next to the ample body of his companion. No matter what village they were passing through, they seldom stayed longer than a few hours and always asked after a certain Ilja Botev from Baia Luna. But no one knew of a man with that name. Only once—it must have been in the seventh or eighth year of their search—a coffin maker in the Maramuresch Mountains told them about a burial that had recently taken place in the cemetery in Viseu de Jos. If he remembered right, the deceased was over seventy and his name was Botev.
Dimitru purchased one of the ready-made white lacquered children’s coffins the carpenter had stocked up on in anticipation of the coming winter, transferred his father’s bones into it, and headed for the cemetery the man had named. And there was in fact a freshly dug grave with a cross on which, to Antonia’s and Dimitru’s horror, was written the name Ilja Botev.
They quickly found the relatives of the deceased, friendly people who offered them hospitality for several days, although they turned out not to be even remotely related to the Botevs of Baia Luna. Dimitru and Antonia were relieved to discover that the deceased could not possibly have been their friend and father.
The Gypsy and his companion stayed one night and then continued their journey in the knowledge that in a respected family in the far north of Transmontania, there had been a second Ilja Botev.
Although Antonia and Dimitru were not a couple in the conventional sense, their relationship was nevertheless much more than that of a homeless man and his voluntary companion. For one thing, Antonia liked being on the move. She even found the constant change of location to be a sort of liberation. For another, she had developed a fondness for Dimitru that sprang neither from the fleeting excitement of desire nor the established love between husband and wife. Instead, in their relationship she adopted the role of an attentive mother, a role that proved so congenial and satisfying to Antonia that, for the first time, she realized she had simply slept through her years in Baia Luna.
Although the Gypsy’s physical self was shrinking, he had lost none of
his intellectual alertness, but he did develop a state of mind that complemented Antonia’s maternal role. Not that Dimitru’s behavior was childish. He didn’t complain and whine or make any sort of infantile impression during the day. But at night, when even in the summer he was chilly and shivering, nothing made him happier than to roll up in a ball and snuggle in the security of her ample body, not like a man but like a sad, hurt little boy.
Aside from the child’s coffin in which Dimitru carried the bones of his father, their most precious possession proved to be Ilja’s Bible. Since for a Black it was an awful thing to make a firm promise but, once made, an even worse thing to break it, he kept his oath not to open the sacred Scripture again until he had found his friend Ilja. But even in the darkest of dark times, Dimitru never completely lost his craftiness, and that being so, he waited patiently for Antonia to draw the correct conclusio from the two “facticities,” namely, that he owned a Bible but was not allowed to read it.
“Dimi dear,” said Antonia one August evening as they were lying in the grass next to their wagon, bathed in the last rays of the setting sun, “your oath wouldn’t prevent me from reading to you from the Scripture, would it?”
“I’m delighted by your wisdom, my love. You recite and I’ll memorize. Once I’ve got the word of God completamente by heart, my oath can go to hell. Let’s get started right away. From chapter one to chapter . . . say, how many chapters did the Lord God dictate to his chroniclers back then, anyway?”
“Many, I’d say. Very many, even.”
From then on, Antonia read aloud, and the next morning she quizzed him on the verses from the night before. Dimitru always had them letter perfect—with book, chapter, and verse—unless he had indulged in concentration-enhancing beverages. But after a demanding day of driving the wagon his capacity to absorb the text was very limited, and so Antonia’s evening readings were often restricted to two or three verses.
And so it was that disaster didn’t strike Dimitru Carolea Gabor until the beginning of the eighties, in the twelfth year of his search for his friend Ilja. They had reached the Gospel According to John, and Dimitru was feverish with excited anticipation, since many passages in it were familiar to him from Papa Baptiste’s sermons. He was especially eager to get to the end, where the risen Christ descends to earth once more to display his wounds and let doubting Thomas put his fingers in them while the Savior tells him that blessed are they that have not seen and yet have believed. That sentence was one of Dimitru’s favorites, since the word of God confirmed it was only the timid soul who needed some visible proof but not the trusting soul able to see the reality of ideas. Thus, of all the sentences the Gypsy’s receptive ear had ever heard, he loved the beginning of the Gospel of Saint John, just like Papa Baptiste in bygone days.
“In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God,” read Antonia. As she continued with “And the Word was made flesh, and dwelt among us,” her Dimi shone like a comet in the heavens.
“That, my dear, is the most beautiful message ever bestowed on the world.” As Dimitru said that sentence, he had no idea that it would be burned to ashes a few chapters later.
Antonia read on. In the years of reading the Bible aloud, she had always refrained from any commentary so as not to confuse Dimitru in his reception of the sacred word. But then she got to chapter 3, verse 5, of the Gospel of Saint John: “‘Verily, verily, I say unto thee, except a man be born of water, and of the spirit, he cannot enter into the kingdom of God. That which is born of the flesh is flesh; and that which is born of the Spirit is spirit.’” Antonia cried, “I know that! My father Ilja recited that in the Baia Luna church to prove to Kora Konstantin how well he had mastered the art of reading.”
“That’s right,” said Dimitru. “Keep reading.”
And then he heard from Antonia’s lips the words of Jesus, “‘If I have told you earthly things, and ye believe not, how shall ye believe, if I tell you of heavenly things? And no man hath ascended up to heaven, but he that came down from heaven, even the Son of Man.’”
“What was that you just said?”
Antonia repeated the last sentence.
In horror, Dimitru grabbed the Bible out of her hands and broke his promise. He said softly, “‘And no man hath ascended up to heaven, but he that came down from heaven, even the Son of Man.’”
“What’s wrong, Dimitru?” asked Antonia, who was as bewildered as she was anxious about the expression on her companion’s face.
“It was all for nothing. Mary never went up to heaven in the flesh. It says so right here. God himself says in his very own words that only one person ever ascended to heaven. Only Jesus, the Son of Man. No one else. Why didn’t anyone tell us? If only I had known this earlier! I would never have let Ilja leave Baia Luna. It’s my fault and no one else’s. I pulled my friend into the biggest mistake of my life. Mary was mortal and stayed mortal. She’s not on the moon. She returned to the dust of earth. Ilja will never forgive me, never.”
“But Mary is in heaven! You told me yourself you saw her that time on the Mondberg, looking through the telescope.”
“Antonia, Antonia,” Dimitru wept. “I did see her! For sure! But I can’t remember anymore. I was so drunk because your nephew Pavel gave us all that schnapps to take along!”
“And what about the pope’s dogma? The Assumption of God’s mother into heaven was an infallible promulgation!”
“A lie! I don’t know why, but it was a lie. How should a Gypsy like me know why the pope puts his own word above the divine word in the Gospel?”
Since Antonia had no answer, she could feel her Dimitru shrivel in her arms to a pitiful little old man.
Chapter Thirteen
THE ABYSS BEHIND THE WORDS, UNEXPECTED ENCOUNTERS,
AND THE MOST DANGEROUS FOE OF ALL
Today, as I look back over my life, the Age of Gold seems like the rise and fall of a distant star, a sun that gives light and warmth for a while, expands into a huge red giant, and finally collapses under the weight of its own mass. In the end, all that remained of the New Nation was a greedy black hole that had devoured years of my life and turned the ardent dreams of my youth to ice.
We couldn’t see colors any longer. Although the meadows of Baia Luna were green in spring, the sky blue in summer, and the snow white in winter, all we could see was gray. We were blind. And we were mute. There was a time when we were silent for fear of the Security Service. But my fear of Colonel Raducanu and his henchmen had never crippled me. It just kept me on my guard. We were mute because of the emptiness behind the words. There was nothing there but an abyss. Of course we still spoke, but things dissolved and disappeared in their names. Time was so used up that names had no more need of things. You could no longer point to something and say, That’s what that is called.
The church was no longer the house of God but just dead stone walls. The steeple clock was no longer a clock. The priest was no longer a shepherd of his flock, and the cemetery no longer a final resting place, just somewhere to stow corpses. Even the Eternal Flame was nothing but a wick glimmering in oil. Nothing was what it was called anymore.
Our family-run co-op market with its empty shelves was a store in name only. There was no sugar, no milk, no oil, only rationed cornmeal and canned tomatoes. We had plenty of those, but nothing else. To have at least a few drops of fat floating in their soup on holidays, the village women trekked to the district capital—on foot, since the buses couldn’t run without diesel fuel. I remember vividly my mother coming back with a pig’s foot and two chicken feet. As furious as Kathalina was, she vented her anger on the priest. “Go to hell, you gravedigger!” she told him to his face. Every morning Antonius Wachenwerther ate eggs, sausages, and the bacon parishioners brought him, while the village children went for weeks without so much as a swallow of milk.
As for me, I stopped going to church when the priest had the bones of the unbaptized Gypsy Laszlo Gabor disinte
rred. That act met with the approval of some people in the village, but not everyone. The Kallays, the Petrovs, and the Scherban brothers weren’t seen at Mass thereafter, or Hermann Schuster either. The Saxon was unable to say the Lord’s Prayer anymore. He couldn’t force himself to say “Give us this day our daily bread” along with Wachenwerther. Sadly, Schusters’ Hermann died shortly after the revolution, and Istvan Kallay as well. I wish the two of them could have experienced the era of freedom.
The red giant imploded, but not with a powerful bang. It winked out so quietly and gradually that, at first, people in Baia Luna didn’t even notice that the Age of Gold had collapsed. The man whose glory outshone the sun had cooled to a dead star. His final rays still glimmered here and there, long after people began whispering that they had been extinguished forever by a firing squad against a wall in the courtyard of a military barracks.
Something’s happening. I’m sure something’s going on.” Excitedly, Petre Petrov turned to Istvan Kallay’s son Imre and me. “You try it.”
We’d been hunched in front of the radio for hours turning the knob, but reception of Radio Free Europe kept getting interrupted.
“They’re jamming it,” Imre guessed. “They don’t want us to know what’s happening in our own country.”
All we’d been able to find out was that there was fighting in the city of Timisoara. There’d been an insurrection. Finally, Imre found a Hungarian station. According to their news broadcast, the army and armored units of the Securitate from the capital had been sent to the Banat region in the western part of the country to put down the revolt with tear gas, water cannons, shields, and riot sticks. The Protestant pastor Laszlo Tokes had started the ball rolling with his courageous sermons. His audience grew by the day and took away a single message: the Conducator had to go. Obviously, Tokes’s own bishop had stabbed him in the back. The Securitate had pressured him to discipline the pastor by transferring him to a village so far out in the sticks it wasn’t to be found on any map of Transmontania.
The Madonna on the Moon Page 39
