But the people didn’t cooperate. They shielded their pastor, and their demonstrations grew larger and larger. Workers in the state-owned enterprises refused to lift a finger and called for a strike. They streamed out of the factories chanting “Freedom! Freedom! Down with the tyrant! Death to Communism” and waving Transmontanian flags with holes cut in the middle where the red star used to be.
Then the first shots, the first blood, the first fatalities among the demonstrators.
We went over to the Kiselev twins’ place—Petre Petrov, Imre Kallay, Andreas Schuster, and I—and sat ourselves down in front of their TV. Drina apologized for not having any cookies to offer us. The Conducator stepped in front of the cameras of the state network. His wife Elena straightened his tie. If the subsequent testimony of one of his bodyguards is to be believed, she hissed at him, “Don’t start babbling again!” The Conducator spoke, and the people still listened. It was the evening of December 20, 1989.
“Hooligans,” he said. “Hooligans are to blame! They throw stones at shopwindows, torch nice cars, and want to destroy our Age of Gold.”
“‘Huligens’? What’s that?” said Petre. I had no idea what kind of people our head of state was talking about either. Then we learned about all the other people who were to blame for threatening law and order in our country: reactionary rioters in the pay of capitalist imperialism were to blame, notorious disturbers of the peace financed by counterfeit money from the wallets of Western intelligence agencies were to blame. They were being paid by spies from England, France, America, even from Russia. The only world leaders we could still count on were the Chinese. They were holding the banner aloft. Shirkers were to blame, too, that pack of lazy good-for-nothings. And the Gypsies were the worst of the lot, an ungrateful people despite the lovely homes they had been given. They slunk along behind the huligens, waiting until the terrorists threw stones through the windows and then plundering the people’s jewelry stores. And who had incited them? Who was stirring all this up? Budapest! The Hungarians were behind it, directing the uprising after betraying their own Socialism. Now they wanted to snatch half of Transmontania for themselves. And the Democratic Germans were traitors, too, the ones who had just awarded him the golden Karl Marx Medal and sworn that neither ox nor ass could keep them from achieving world-class status. We’d been betrayed by the Poles as well, paying more attention to the pope and their Black Madonna than to Lenin. And the Czechoslovaks weren’t a bit better, not to mention the Bulgarians. Fraternal republics my eye! Judas states in thrall to international capital was more like it. Sure, there were some things in our country that needed improvement. But the expensive oil we had to buy from the Soviets was to blame, and the missing hogs we needed to fatten so we could pay the Russians for their oil. And what about Gorbachev? It was his idiotic glasnost that was plunging the world into chaos. Of course, freedom would continue to be guaranteed in our country. Everyone was welcome—Cubans, Chinese, and North Koreans. But basically (so declared the Conducator afterward in the back room), his incompetent cabinet ministers were to blame.
“M-m-make these hooligans shut up!” he bellowed at his generals. “Or I’ll put you all up against the wall!”
Elena intervened to calm him down and soothe his feelings. “First we’ll declare a state of emergency: organize a lovely rally, distribute flags, produce red banners. Everything’s going to be okay.”
The functionaries had to watch videos from Tiananmen Square in Peking so they’d get it through their heads how a resolute state brought rebellious demonstrators to their senses. The president set up a hotline for an emergency conference with every regional secretary in the country. They all agreed to organize gasoline, assemble any buses that were still operational, and send seasoned collectivists to the capital to cheer on the regime.
All except one.
In Kronauburg, Dr. Stefan Stephanescu’s telephone was permanently busy. Later, the chroniclers would write that those were the hours when he was mustering up important people to form a Front for National Salvation and Rebirth.
December 21, 1989: Red flags, red banners, eternal gratitude as far as the eye could see. In the Paris of the East, ten thousand people held aloft placards with pictures of the royal couple—although at a considerably younger age—and the masses pledged their loyalty to the nation, the party, and eternal loyalty to the Conducator.
Imre, Petre, and I were still sitting in front of Drina’s TV. We couldn’t believe our eyes. What had Radio Free Europe been talking about? Rebellion? Uprising? Revolution? Where were they?
December 22, 1989: More and more people kept streaming into the capital. Without flags, without banners, without placards. A boundless sea of dark faces, determined to do something, but still waiting. The TV cameras showed the first fists hammering on the gates to the Central Committee’s building. Then the camera panned to the balcony. The Conducator appeared and stepped to the microphone, minus his scepter. Black sport coat, white shirt, dark tie with a pattern of dots that looked like tiny suns. When he opened his mouth, people’s anger broke out. Excited yells, shrill whistles. Helpless and intimidated, the head of state raised both hands: Double wages, triple wages! They’re yours! Higher pensions, more child support, too. Enough to eat, warmer apartments—it would all be ordered. The Conducator mutated into an ancient little boy, promising to make up for everything without even knowing what he’d done wrong. No one heard him. The loudspeakers were loud, but the people were louder. They raged, booed, bellowed, a roaring hurricane of fury. Crucify him! Crucify him! Responsible parties at the TV station were still ruled by fear. Were they allowed to show that? The final beam of light from the dying star was still on its way, still capable of burning someone. Then we heard nothing more. The TV guys had turned off the audio.
When a helicopter took off at noon from the roof of the building where the Central Committee held its meetings, the screens remained dark.
We turned on Drina Kiselev’s radio and found Radio Free Europe. The station announced that the dictator and his wife had fled. But Petre and I were doubting Thomases. We wanted to see, not just hear. We waited until afternoon, when images again flitted across the picture tube.
At a long table in the old Royal Palace sat the leaders of the revolution: Voiculescu, Roman, Brucan, Mazilu. There were also a couple of generals, officers who had gone over to the people’s side. Except for Iliescu, recipient of the Hammer and Sickle Medal, I’d never heard their names before. And how would I have? They were all second- and third-tier party comrades now emerging from the shadows. Each of them had a go at the microphone. Then it was Mircea Dinescu’s turn, a dissident writer under permanent house arrest. He announced the flight of the dictator couple. But I had no eyes for the poet, only for the man sitting to his left: graying hair carefully combed back, serious demeanor. They handed him the microphone.
“Dear Comra—.” Dr. Stefan Stephanescu stopped short, grinned. Everyone laughed except for the poet. “Honored ladies and gentlemen. In this revolutionary hour I appeal to everyone in our country, and announce the formation of a Front for National Salvation. The Conducator and his wife, who have plunged our nation into the abyss, are about to be apprehended. They will have to answer for their crimes before the law, and I promise you, our courageous and long-suffering people . . .”
I saw the cameramen crowding around Stephanescu, shoving and pushing one another aside. Someone was forging his way to the podium through the pack of journalists, moving ahead easily and without using his elbows, as if unaware of the tumult around him. It seemed they were voluntarily opening up a path for him. He approached Stephanescu without haste, almost sedately. You could only see him from behind. His light clothing identified him as a foreigner, a Westerner. American, perhaps? He raised a camera to his eye. There were a few flashes, and Stephanescu smiled.
Suddenly there were shots, the TV images wobbled, rifle fire rattled and grenades detonated. The cameras cut to the square in front of the former Ro
yal Palace: running figures, burning barricades, wailing sirens. And repeatedly: shots, blood, the wounded, and the dead. The remaining stalwarts of the Conducator brought death until the very end. In the midst of it all moved the man in light-colored clothing. Calmly and without the slightest fear, he shot his pictures. I knew that walk, got a fleeting glimpse of his face. It had been more than thirty years since I’d last seen him. Petre Petrov didn’t recognize him, but I was absolutely sure: Fritz Hofmann had returned, treading in his father’s footsteps, a photographer documenting the end of the Age of Gold.
I stood up to leave Drina Kiselev’s living room.
“You’re leaving at such a historic moment?” Petre was indignant.
But in ten minutes I was back with a green diary and two photographs in my pocket. I looked at Petre and said only, “Wachenwerther has a German Volkswagen.”
“Count me in.”
Once Petre’s army carbine was stowed in the trunk, we roared off and reached the capital early the next morning. It was two days before Christmas, and the night had not ended, the day hadn’t begun, and the acrid smell of tear gas hung in the cold December air.
Petre joined a group of rebellious miners from Lupeni who didn’t quite know whom to shoot at in the confusion of the revolt, and I sat myself down on a greasy sofa in the foyer of the Hotel Intercontinental. That’s where the press people stayed. I waited for the man who had once extinguished the Eternal Flame in Baia Luna and on whom I had pinned the blame for betraying the priest Johannes Baptiste.
Then he came ambling down the stairs. Despite the heavy bag of photo equipment hanging from one shoulder, his step had something light-footed about it, as if no one and nothing could surprise him. No doubt at all that it was Fritz Hofmann. My heart was pounding. This man was a stranger. “You aren’t really one of us,” I had told him once. Now he was back, back from another world.
I walked up to my old school friend. Fritz blinked and stopped short. Then he let the bag slide off his shoulder.
“Pavel Botev,” he cried and spread his arms, but then immediately let them fall again. For a split second I had the impression that Fritz wasn’t looking at me but through me. We shook hands like two people who don’t trust their own joy.
“How could you stand to stay in this country, Pavel?”
“I ask myself the same question. And that’s why I’m here.”
While shots echoed through the capital, Fritz Hofmann’s cameras stayed in his bag. We sat in his hotel room until the morning of Christmas Eve. Fritz listened, talked, and surprised me with a frank openness I had not expected.
“So now you’re a photographer, like your father.”
“Yes. Like my father, but with one difference. He photographed the powerful because he wanted to belong. I make pictures because I know that I’ll never belong anywhere.”
“How do you mean?”
“A long time ago you said something I never thought at the time would turn out to be true for me. Remember the night before I blew out the Eternal Flame? You said I’d have to pay a price for leaving Baia Luna, and you were right.”
“Did I really say that? It was such a long time ago.”
“Not for me, although this is the first time I’ve been back in the country in more than thirty years. When I moved to Germany with my mother I was sure I would soon forget Baia Luna, and I probably would have if I hadn’t gotten a letter from Julia the spring after we moved.”
“From Julia Simenov in our class?”
“Yes. She told me they’d found the teacher Barbulescu up on the Mondberg during the Christmas procession. Julia really reproached me. She wrote that my impertinence had driven the Barbu to take her own life, when I wrote the sentence on the blackboard about my thing getting hard. The worst thing was that Barbu didn’t take the switch to me. I wish she had thrashed me. Blows never bothered me very much. But when she just stood there at the board and cried, I had to get out of there. I couldn’t bear to look at her. Do you still remember how we took the drunk Gypsy home that night, on your grandfather’s birthday? I noticed right away that there weren’t any lights on in Barbu’s house and it didn’t take a genius to figure out she had done something to herself. Doesn’t matter, I told myself again and again, doesn’t matter. She was only a broken-down drunk. And I blew out the light in the church to prove that nothing mattered. I was just stupid. Then Julia writes me that it was my fault that the teacher resorted to the rope. I didn’t mean to hurt Barbu, Pavel. It was a game, just like the imaginary numbers we wrote in our notebooks during class. I wanted to see how much I could get away with, but I never meant for her to do something to herself because of me.”
I was silent, as a sign that I understood.
“Believe me, as a photographer I’ve seen half the world in the last twenty years, and always the dirty side of it, really bad, bad things. If there’s a conflagration somewhere, I have to go there. It’s like a compulsion. That’s the price I pay. I can’t stand staying anywhere too long. But I wanted my photographs to show what people can do to other people. Not because I’m so noble. For me, all beauty is boring, empty. Only war is real—war, catastrophe, famine, suffering, and pain. When I see the pain of others, I feel alive.”
“That’s a dangerous life,” I said in embarrassment.
Fritz hesitated before answering. “Maybe so, seen from outside. But for me, peace and quiet are unbearable. Homelessness has become my home. But I’m tired, Pavel. Always on the go and never really getting anywhere. Photographing the world’s atrocities so I won’t have to see that one image from Baia Luna. As if I could shove aside a terrible picture with even more terrible pictures. But I don’t succeed. Barbu keeps reappearing, as if emerging from black waters. I often go for months without seeing it, but then I see her again, alone and dragging herself up the Mondberg. And before she puts the noose around her neck, she says, Fritz, you’re just like your father. Pavel, when you came up to me today in the lobby I was really happy, until Barbu suddenly appeared behind you. She was standing by the back wall of the classroom, and I was sitting beside you again on the bench, rewriting party poems by that guy . . .”
“Margul-Sperber!”
“Exactly! Alfred Margul-Sperber. ‘Hymn to the Party’!” Fritz smiled and then he had to grin. “Be honest, Pavel, weren’t my verses poetic masterpieces compared to that rhymed nonsense in the schoolbooks?”
“Now look about. Where’er you bend your gaze, / Another party idiot is born, / And our Miss Barbu’s daily drunken daze, / Shall be in progress long before the morn,” I quoted from memory. I reached for Fritz Hofmann’s cigarettes and lit myself a Marlboro. “By the way, Angela Barbulescu was totally aware of all your rewrites. And of our fantastic solutions in math, too. She really did think you had talent as a poet, Fritz. Everything was different than we thought. Her death may not have been a suicide. What Julia wrote you isn’t right. It’s possible that Angela’s death was only rigged to look like a suicide, that she was really hanged by someone else. On the day she was last seen in Baia Luna she was visited by a certain Albin, a big strong guy with a wart on his cheek. This Albin was a buddy of Stefan Stephanescu’s and your father’s. Fritz, I know Angela Barbulescu’s death had nothing to do with your dumb scribbling. It had to do with those filthy photos you found in your father’s moving crate.”
“What? What are you saying?”
I got out Angela’s diary and took out of it the lewd photo Fritz had left with me. Fritz started reading without another word. Occasionally he would narrow his eyes as if he couldn’t believe what was in the green notebook. Not until he got to Angela’s entries about the Christmas Eve party at the apartment of the party boss Koka did Fritz make a comment.
“But what about this photo from my father’s moving crate? Before I left for Germany, you claimed the naked woman was the teacher Barbulescu, but it was her friend Alexa.”
“Right. But when I told you that, I hadn’t read the diary yet. How wa
s I supposed to know that the two women had exchanged dresses?”
“I can’t believe this,” Fritz read aloud from Angela’s farewell letter to Stephanescu: “The photos that Hofmann made of me with your disgusting friends are repulsive. They kept my mouth closed for a long time. But no longer. As far as I’m concerned, Hofmann can send those pictures to the village priest. Do whatever you want with them. Hang my picture on every lamppost. I’m not afraid anymore.”
Fritz was pale. I showed him the half-burned photo of the young Angela puckering for a kiss. “That’s what she looked like before she took up with the wrong crowd.”
Fritz looked at the woman with the blond ponytail for several minutes, closed his eyes, and balled his fists. Then he took a deep breath. “Pavel, I’m starting to understand what must have happened. On the day you were supposed to hang up Stephanescu’s portrait in our classroom, the teacher said you had to see the smiling doctor from Kronauburg in the right light. Not everything that glittered was gold, she said, or something like that. I had no idea what she meant, but I told my father about it because I was so angry. My father was a pig. I can say that today without hate, but he really was a filthy swine. As he was about to whip me with his belt again, I threatened that the Barbu was going to expose his friend Stephanescu, without really knowing what there was to expose. I remember just how I grinned at my father and threatened him. ‘If Stephanescu falls, you’re done for. Without the secretary and the party bosses, you’re all washed up.’ But I didn’t have a clue what I was saying.”
“What about your father? How did he react?”
“For one thing, he didn’t whip me black and blue. He let me be. For another, the next day he had me put a sealed envelope into Father Baptiste’s mailbox.”
The Madonna on the Moon Page 40
