The Madonna on the Moon

by Rolf Bauerdick

  I was burning with curiosity. My white-hot excitement made the last thirty-two years shrink to a single yesterday.

  “These disgusting photographs of Angela must have been in that envelope!”

  “That’s what we have to assume. But how could I have known? Of course, I asked what kind of letter it was, because my old man had never had anything to do with the priest. Now I know my father lied to me. He said he was going to leave the church. His baptismal and marriage certificates were in there—his parish records. I just thought to myself, This chicken is making me see to his affairs. But I left the envelope at home because you unexpectedly came over that afternoon to say that your grandfather had gotten a television for his birthday. I didn’t remember the envelope until we were sitting in the tavern with Johannes Baptiste and the priest was telling those strange stories about Sputnik and the spaceflight project of that Korolev guy. Remember? Before my idiotic attack on the Eternal Flame I said to you and Buba, the Gypsy girl, I had to take care of something. And I really did. I had to mail the envelope. But in the meantime, my father had obviously taken it to the rectory himself. I hadn’t the faintest idea that he had taken such evil pictures of Angela Barbulescu. Now I see clearly that my father assumed that those pictures would be the end of the Barbu in Baia Luna. All that remained was for her to hang herself.”

  “But the pictures disappeared. They were never made public! Johannes Baptiste was murdered and the rectory turned upside down. After which, that idiot Kora Konstantin spread the rumor that Angela Barbulescu had slit the pastor’s throat to silence him and then had condemned herself to death for the deed. Most men in Baia Luna, however, assumed that the Securitate had the pastor on its conscience. They wanted to prevent him from preaching against the kolkhoz. What do you think?”

  “I think the perpetrators were looking for the photographs. That’s why they killed the priest. But I can’t believe that my father would have gone that far. He was a mediocre photographer, a mediocre person, a parasite on the powerful who fantasized about Nietzsche’s Superman. Perhaps he was useful for a while, until he made a mistake in the eyes of some functionary or other. Johannes Baptiste may have been a senile crank, or maybe a wise man. I can’t judge that. But he was certainly not stupid. Once he held the photos of Angela in his hands, he must have wondered, Who are the men in these pictures? Who takes such pictures? And why are they putting these shameful objects into my mailbox all of a sudden? I wonder why my father gave the priest those photos. Did it make sense to ruin a woman who was already at the end of her tether? Dirty pictures don’t just sully the person in them. Most of the dirt remains invisible, sticking to the person who took the pictures and distributed them. My father would only have used the photos as a threat but would never have really published them. And if you ask me who could have had an interest in seeing these blackmail pictures disappear again, then I can only think of Stephanescu. If what the diary says is right, he saw to it that Angela never had her child. In the hands of the priest, those photos could possibly have brought the entire truth about Stephanescu’s machinations to light. And the good doctor wanted to prevent that from happening.”

  I confirmed Fritz Hofmann’s suspicion and told him about visiting the photo lab assistant Irina Lupescu, stealing the negative, and my failed attempt to bring down Stephanescu by pasting the photographs onto the windows of his father Heinrich’s studio.

  “And you say my father had the accident one day after the big party spectacular? By the time we got the news in Germany, he’d been dead for a week. My mother and I have never visited his grave. The Kronauburg regional administration wrote us that Father had gotten caught under a truck on his motorcycle.”

  “Without a helmet,” I added. “That’s what it said in the paper.”

  Fritz Hofmann bit his lip. “There was nothing about that in the letter we got. But that’s impossible. He always wore his helmet. As a child, I never saw him get onto his motorcycle without a crash helmet. Never. Now I don’t know what to think. I always thought Father was a swine. But maybe he was just a coward, a little cog in malevolent machine.”

  “Maybe they were blackmailing him, too?”

  “I don’t know.” Fritz was silent while he studied the photo he had last held in his hand thirty-two years ago. “Who are these horny guys next to Stephanescu the champagne squirter, our new champion of national salvation?”

  “The one nearest Stephanescu must be the doctor, Florin Pauker. He was the go-to guy for unwanted pregnancies. I don’t know the next one, but this one here, the big hulk with the mustache and the wart, is Albin. He’s the one who was in Baia Luna the afternoon Angela disappeared. And the hand holding the bottle, on the right edge, could be the one they called Koka. The party was at his place, and he was in a drinking contest with Albin.”

  “You didn’t happen to come across a photo of Koka?” Fritz asked.

  “No. Why do you ask?”

  “Pavel, don’t tell me you really didn’t know how potentially explosive these pictures are—or, rather, used to be?”

  “Sure, of course. Stephanescu didn’t send the security agent Raducanu to find the darkroom in Baia Luna just for fun.”

  “But on whose orders? It may be that even Stephanescu was only a middleman. If the Kronauburg District secretary kowtowed to anyone, it was this Koka from the capital. That’s why he didn’t say a word when Koka insulted his Angela at the Christmas party. But he doesn’t have to fear the cobbler anymore. The man who peed on the oysters way back then fled in a helicopter two days ago.”

  “What? The Conducator? But what does the head of state have to do with Koka in Angela’s diary?”

  “Man, Pavel! I thought you knew. They’re one and the same. Koka is the Conducator.”

  “How do you know?”

  “It’s obvious. Besides, everything’s there in the diary. At Christmastime in ’48, Stephanescu made fun of the uneducated shoemaker in the party, but he put his tail between his legs when Koka called Angela a cheap Catholic cu—Well, you know what he called her.”

  “But the Conducator met with the most powerful men in the world! He was no shoemaker!”

  “Yes, he was. Koka was an early nickname. His onetime buddies called him that before they learned to fear him. Everyone in other countries knew that the Conducator insisted on mixing his drinks with American Coca-Cola, even at state receptions. You wouldn’t believe how many jokes people made about it. The best Bordeaux and Coca-Cola! Champagne with Coke! All the big-shot politicians would drop their jaws at state banquets. Of course, no statesman made jokes about it in public. But we journalists did. The Conducator is a total laughingstock, and so is his wife. Angela wrote in her diary that he married somebody called Lenutza, the hot number who swallowed down the pissy oysters on Christmas Eve. Her maiden name was Petrescu. Lenutza was a real slut. Later, they made her out to be a revolutionary heroine of the working class. As the woman at the side of the Conducator, of course, she couldn’t be called Lenutza anymore, and Lenny was too cutesy for her. After the wedding she adopted the name Elena, probably to divert attention from her background. With only three years of elementary school, you’re not likely to be a chemist with multiple Ph.D.’s, the state’s leading scientist, and the most powerful woman in the country—except maybe in this particular country.”

  “It’s unbelievable. In Baia Luna we didn’t have the faintest idea what was going on in the rest of the country.”

  “Angela’s friend Alexa,” Fritz continued, “told her that Koka had loaned my father the money to buy a motorcycle and had given him the use of his apartment for those special photo sessions. Apparently, some of the pictures were taken without the subjects’ knowledge. That can only mean that my father, Stephanescu, and Koka were in it together, until my father made a mistake and showed the pictures of Barbu to Johannes Baptiste.”

  I recalled the warning of the wiry-haired police commissioner: Keep your flame turned down, or you’ll have a fire on y
our hands that will burn you badly.

  “So you figure that Stephanescu and your father were only the Conducator’s accomplices?”

  “I have no idea, but it’s possible. They all profited, at least financially. My father gained access to the highest social circles even though he could hardly make a decent wedding portrait. It doesn’t matter. But in any event, Stephanescu must have had a huge stake in keeping the champagne photo under lock and key. The picture couldn’t do any damage to Koka, since he wasn’t in the picture. By now it’s all ancient history and doesn’t matter anymore. At this point, the Conducator and his Lenutza won’t have a shot at a normal trial. If I read the situation right, they’ve only got a few hours left to live. And I’ll bet that as soon as that threat is gone, our party secretary from Kronauburg is going to be the man of the hour.”

  “What? That scumbag?”

  “Sure. At the moment, Stephanescu is still holding back, but his people are already constructing a legend about him. They’ll say he was always a man of the people and an opponent of the Conducator. Of course no one noticed anything of the kind. It’s known as ‘inner opposition.’ Besides, Dr. Stephanescu is supposed to have been pulling the strings that brought down the Conducator. That’s how they’re clearing the path for his political future.”

  “It’s . . . it’s not right” were the only words I could get out. Without thinking, I opened Angela Barbulescu’s diary: “‘His hour will come when he’s reached the top.’ What does this mean, Fritz? Angela has been dead for more than thirty years.”

  “It’s very mysterious. Oh, by the way, there’s someone else who’s displaying a remarkable interest in our Dr. Stephanescu, a woman to be exact. It was yesterday at the press conference, as they were introducing the Front for National Salvation. There was a woman sitting among the journalists, and when all my other colleagues were holding up their microphones and taking notes, she just sat there without moving. And she reminded me of Buba Gabor.”

  “Buba? How come? What did she look like?”

  “She looked good. I mean very good for her age. But not like people around here, and not like a Gypsy either. She was dressed in Western clothes, from southern Europe, I’d say. She looked like a Spanish woman, or an Italian.”

  “And what was she doing at the press conference?”

  “No idea. She just caught my attention. Maybe because she was shivering even though the room was heated. She didn’t notice me, just kept looking at Stephanescu with a really strange expression. How can I describe it? Not obtrusive, more detached, as if she was waiting for something to happen. Most of the time her eyes were closed. She was in sort of a trance, if you see what I’m trying to say.”

  “I understand perfectly. It was Buba! And Buba knows that Stephanescu will fall when he’s reached the top. She knows our teacher’s prophecy. Buba and I read the diary together. But we should help the Savior of the Nation along in his fall. It’s high time to roll a couple stones into the path of the good doctor. How do you get near these big shots, Fritz?”

  “With a press pass.”

  “Have you got one?”

  “Of course. Several, in fact, and even a couple from American press agencies. In America they aren’t worth the paper they’re printed on, but around here they can open a lot of doors. Your Salvation Front people are drooling for any reporter who can lend them even a hint of international publicity. The Conducator is like that, too. But what do you have in mind?”

  “I’ll think of something.”

  Fritz laughed and handed me a stick of American chewing gum. “Okay. Whatever you think up—if you’re sawing at Stephanescu’s throne, I’ll saw with you.”

  It was the afternoon of Christmas Eve, and Petre Petrov had been waiting in the foyer of the Interconti for hours. It was crawling with people: rebelling students, injured demonstrators, military personnel, party cadres, undercover security agents, members of the National Front, black-market currency traders, photographers. Nobody knew who belonged to whom or what side they were on, least of all the Western journalists for whom the uncertain fate of the Conducator had much higher news value than the confusion and struggle for spoils surrounding the political future of the country.

  When Petre finally discovered me in the crowd, he barked at me, “Where’ve you been all this time? I thought we wanted to make a revolution.”

  Before I could answer, Petre did a double take. He stared at the man beside me and searched the farthest corners of his memory. Then he came at the photographer with his fists clenched. “Hofmann, you asshole, you priest murderer! What the fuck are you doing here?”

  It was all I could do to restrain Petre. “No, Petre. Stop! It wasn’t like that. Fritz had nothing to do with betraying Baptiste. I guarantee it one hundred percent. It was Stephanescu.”

  Petre broke off his attack.

  “What am I supposed to have done? Betrayed Baptiste?” Fritz was dumbfounded. “Are you guys out of your minds?”

  “Pavel used to claim that you and your father turned the pastor over to the Securitate because he was going to preach against fucking Socialism and collectivization. Then you took off for Germany.”

  “Bullshit,” I said and blushed. “Petre, you got it all wrong.”

  Fritz put on the impudent grin I remembered from our school days together. “So now the score is one to one. You had all the trouble because of the Eternal Flame, and the betrayal was chalked up to me. Still tied, okay?”

  “Okay,” I said. Then someone tapped me on the shoulder.

  I turned around.

  “You still get just as red as you used to.”

  “Buba? No! Yes, it’s you! You’re here?”

  I stood amazed, looking Buba up and down. Fritz had been right. She was different. She no longer fit the pale image I still clung to, the sad remains of my youthful memories, and yet I recognized in her the Buba who had once been so dear to me. She was beautiful. She had a wool shawl thrown over her shoulders to protect them from the wintry cold, and it made her seem light, almost weightless. The wrinkles around her eyes magnified their shine, and she emanated a warmth that made me afraid instead of joyful. When Buba unconsciously brushed the black locks from her eyes and pulled at a gold earring with her slender fingers, I stuck my hands in my pockets in embarrassment.

  I was abashed. My threadbare jacket, faded pants, and run-down shoes were much more than just cheap clothes. They testified to a shabbiness that over the years had worked its way from outside to inside and taken possession of me. I wanted to hide. I was facing a woman who knew she was a woman. But I was not a man who considered himself worthy of her. I desperately tried to remind myself that it was Buba Gabor who had given herself to me in the most wonderful hour of my life. She was here, but I had vanished.

  “Ah . . . ah . . . are you here because of Stephanescu?” I stammered, trying to hide my shame.

  “No . . . that is, not really. I just flew in from Milan two days ago. Your aunt Antonia sent me a message about Uncle Dimitru. This is going to be his last Christmas. Uncle Dimi is dying. But Antonia wrote me that he can’t go yet. Something’s still missing. I don’t know what it is, but I had to come back from Italy so he can look forward to his end. That’s why I’m here. What about you?”

  Someone knocked me to the ground. A commotion had started in the foyer, and in a few moments it turned into a panic. Outside, shots crackled through the streets again, at first only scattered, but then machine guns opened up in front of the Interconti, cross fire shattered the front windows, sirens wailed, and people screamed and ran for their lives into the hotel lobby.

  Fritz put a stick of gum in his mouth and hung his cameras around his neck. “I’ll see you later.”

  When I got back to my feet, rebels were carrying in a badly wounded man. They laid him gently onto the floor. The bystanders turned away in distress. There was nothing to be done for the victim. His upper body was almost completely separated from his lower extremiti
es, but his eyes were still flickering. The man was about my age, and when I looked into his face, I had to suppress a scream of horror. I owed this man a debt. I knelt down and took his limp hand from which the warmth was ebbing.

  “Thank you, Matei,” I whispered to the nephew of the Kronauburg antiques dealer Gheorghe Gherghel. Matei showed no sign of recognition. I crossed myself and closed the eyes of the faithful ally who had once warned me about the security agent Raducanu.

  “I want to see Dimitru,” I said to Buba.

  “You’ll see him. I’ll take you to him and your aunt. You’ll be shocked, like me. But first we have something to take care of. That is”—Buba hesitated before finishing her sentence—“I don’t really know if I can still talk about ‘we’ in our case.”

  Unsure of myself, I started to babble, “I saw Fritz on TV and recognized him. I had to come here. We weren’t getting any news about the revolution in Baia Luna.”

  “So you’re here on account of your friend from school. Well, why should you be looking for me just now, when you haven’t looked for me in thirty years? I guess that means I—”

  “But you . . . you didn’t send any word either,” I interrupted her. “You only came back on account of your uncle, too!”

  “Are you going to argue with me? Think it over. What do you know about my life? Don’t you know that a man looks for a woman, but the woman finds the man? Don’t fight with me about it. I can fight better than you. I learned that in Italy. I’ll tell you, any guy who groped me without paying got a slap in return that made him run home crying to Mama.”

  I was speechless, unable to utter a word in reply.

  “But what do you know about life in Italy? I’ve been sitting in this miserable hotel for two days hoping you would come looking for me. Uncle Dimi said, ‘Buba, dreaming doesn’t pay, not in times like this, anyway. Forget your Pavel. He’s stuck in Baia Luna.’ Do you actually know how much faith Dimi set in you? He loved you like a son. Much, much more, in fact. I was still a girl when he said to me, ‘Pavel’s the right one for you. Pavel Botev can do something that no other gajo has ever succeeded at. He can turn the world upside down.’ Yes indeed, that’s exactly what my uncle said. But you, you—”