Before I could grasp the insanity of her words, she snatched the photograph from me and held it over the burning candle. The flame flickered blue and ate into the paper. When the picture was half consumed, she pulled it away and blew it out with a few strong breaths. Flakes of ash drifted through the room. The man at her side had been incinerated. She handed me what was left of the photograph, her kiss now aimed into nothingness.
“Take it. It’s for you.”
I resisted. “What would I do with it?”
“Take it! Take it as a reminder that your Barbu was once Angela Maria Barbulescu.”
Unwillingly I put the picture in my pocket. She sat down next to me on the sofa and put the volume of Eminescu’s poems into her lap. Without opening it, she recited, “A whisper from your lips so warm has veiled my eyes in gentle night. Encircled by your icy arm I die, succumbing to its might.”
She drank from the bottle and hitched closer to me. The fragrance of roses was lost in her sharp alcoholic breath. She was drunk. My thoughts froze as she ran her fingers through my hair.
“Are you afraid, boy?”
“No,” I whispered.
Suddenly appalled at her own attempted seduction, she withdrew her hand and smoothed out her dress the way she always did when she sat on her desk in school and told us about the Paris of the East. I sprang to my feet.
“Forgive me, Pavel, please, I’m sorry,” she begged. I was already in the hall putting on my shoes. “Pavel, things are different than they seem. And believe me, people are, too.”
But I was already out the door and heading up the village street. I tripped over my shoelaces, fell, got to my feet, and ran.
Next morning in school everything was as usual. National anthem, blue dress, percentages, party poems. In the weeks that followed, winter was approaching, and school days passed in the same monotony, except that I refused to participate in class at all. Barbu left me alone and avoided calling on me until the day in November that began with my grandfather Ilja and his friend Dimitru trying to capture the beeping of the Sputnik with their tin funnel.
More zuika, Pavel! A bottle of Sylvaner! Pavel, my glass has a hole in it!” The customers would be yelling for me, and I would have to scurry as I did every year on November 6, Ilja’s birthday. After school I would shove aside the crates of vegetables, tubs of sugar syrup, and heavy sacks of potatoes, put away the cash register and the decimal scale and iron weights, and drag in the wooden tables and wicker chairs from the storeroom. Once the bottles of plum brandy and wine were lined up on the counter, everyone would trickle in. Hardly a man in Baia Luna would not want to pay his respects to the storekeeper and tavern owner Ilja Botev on his special day. Hans Schneider was never one to refuse a glass of schnapps, nor his fellow Germans Hermann Schuster and Karl Koch either. Alexandru Kiselev and the bilious blacksmith Simenov would stop by for a more or less extended hour. The Hungarian Istvan Kallay would stumble home to his wife in the middle of the night, falling down drunk, and Trojan Petrov would most likely introduce his seventeen-year-old son Petre into the circle of grown-up men for the first time. Of course the hothead Brancusis would also put in an appearance, and it goes without saying that Dimitru the Gypsy would be there, too. The only uncertainty was whether the ancient priest Johannes Baptiste at almost ninety would find his way to the tavern again this year.
As I gave Grandfather his box of cigars wrapped in red paper that morning, the thought went through my head that it was going to be a long day. While Granddad was enjoying his Cuban, my eye fell on the clock. I had to go to school. “You haven’t eaten anything yet!” my mother called after me as I slung my schoolbag halfheartedly over my shoulder and left the house. I wished the hours on the hard wooden school bench were already over. Eighth grade—my last—seemed like it was dragging along so doggedly it would never end. One more long winter, one more spring, then I would finally have sat out the boredom of school. As I ambled down the village street on that morning of November 6, 1957, I had not the faintest foreboding that when the school bell rang, it would ring in my last day of school.
Angela Barbulescu showed up promptly at eight. She was transformed. She wasn’t staring from reddened eyes. Her gaze was open and clear, just as it had been when I spied her sitting at her kitchen table in the wee hours and writing something. She was holding a gray package under her arm. I already knew what was in it, but I didn’t know that its contents would derail my own life.
The previous day, in a pouring rain, a messenger had arrived in Baia Luna. He came into our store, identified himself as a courier from the district administration, and asked after the teacher Barbulescu. Grandfather offered the man an umbrella, which he gratefully accepted.
“Must be something important in that package,” Granddad opined, giving the messenger an opening to let off some steam.
“This is my last delivery, thank God! Three hundred village schools in two weeks. My bones are weary, let me tell you. My sacroiliac is killing me. And this shitty weather. Two whole hours it took me to get to this godforsaken hole. My diesel got stuck in the mud three times. Three times! They whine and complain in the office when I don’t keep to my schedule, but no one tells them that the roads up here are a joke. Potholes like bomb craters.”
I was listening with only half an ear when the courier started talking about a new party secretary in Kronauburg, a capable man with a bright future whose portrait was to be hung in all the schools of the district. I think that afternoon was the first time I heard the name Stefan Stephanescu. At any rate, the courier intimated that the new secretary wasn’t one of your puffed-up party hacks and bullshit artists, know-it-alls without a clue.
Barbu dispensed with the national anthem. Instead, she unwrapped the gray package and took out a framed photograph. Although there were boys who were better than me with tools, I was the one she chose to put a nail in the wall and hang it up immediately to the right of the energetic visage of President Gheorghiu-Dej, whom the men of Baia Luna referred to respectfully, with a hand discreetly covering their mouth, as “Little Stalin.” Sullenly, I walked to the front of the classroom and climbed onto a chair. Restlessness spread through the class. Angela Barbulescu handed me a hammer and the portrait in its matte gold frame. I bent down to take the photograph from her. The same fragrance of roses reached my nostrils as on the terrible evening on the sofa in her parlor. She whispered something to me. It took me a moment to grasp the force of her words. Just two short sentences. I heard them distinctly despite the jumble of voices in the classroom. But there was a time lag as their meaning sank in. I held the picture up to see where I should place the nail. Then I recognized the man I was about to nail to the wall.
“Send this man straight to hell! Exterminate him!”
The hammer slipped from my hand and banged my toe. The sharp pain made me wince. I fell off the chair. The classroom roared with glee.
Send this man straight to hell! Exterminate him!
I knew the person in the picture. I had seen the man looking at me with a winning smile once before. Only now his hair wasn’t shiny with pomade, and his tie was properly tightened. Along the bottom edge of the picture was the saying CHILDREN ARE OUR FUTURE. It was the man with many fiancées. The man for whom Barbu had puckered her lips in happier days. The man she had burned out of the photo whose surviving half was in my room, stuck between the pages of Das Kapital by Karl Marx.
“Quiet! Be quiet!” Barbu shouted, breaking the spell that had shocked and paralyzed me. “For this masterful portrait we are indebted to the eye of a photographer who has done so much to advance the art of making pictures with light. As you all know, his son Fritz will soon have to find his own way into the world of adulthood, and perhaps one day he will follow in his father’s footsteps.”
Everyone’s eyes flew to Fritz Hofmann. Slowly he leaned back in his chair and pretended he was about to yawn. With the exclamation “Bravo, bravo, bravo!” he clapped his hands. Barbu ignored the provo
cation and explained that the person in the picture was the new party secretary of Kronauburg, Dr. Stefan Stephanescu, honors graduate of the university in the capital and a specialist in economic administration.
“But remember: not everything that’s framed and glitters is gold.” The class grew quiet. “To distinguish the genuine from the fake,” she continued, “requires the greatest wisdom of heart and brain. Perhaps someday Dr. Stephanescu will meet a person who’s up to the job.”
“Amen!” called Fritz.
I slunk back to my seat with a blue and swollen toe. I was surprised to discover that my fright was fading, and in its place I felt a previously unknown clarity. Exterminate this man! That demand had knocked my legs out from under me, but I was on my feet again, calm and collected. Send him straight to hell! Only a crazy person, a drunk who had drowned her mind in zuika, could have whispered such a mad assignment into the ear of a fifteen-year-old, into my ear. Me, Pavel Botev? I’m supposed to exterminate this Dr. Stephanescu? What a joke! A man I don’t even know, who looks anything but unpleasant in his photos. No. I wasn’t about to let a lunatic recruit me for some dirty business. Never.
“Barbu is nuts. Stephanescu is a good guy, a close friend of my father’s.”
Fritz’s words sounded like a casual remark, but I pricked up my ears. Heinrich Hofmann! My silent misgivings about Fritz’s father’s questionable pretentions to artistry immediately found new and bitter nourishment. My mistrust grew to a dark suspicion but was still obscure, since except for a large dose of personal dislike I found no basis for it whatsoever. Only one thing was clear: Barbu and Stephanescu had a common acquaintance. But “acquaintance” was much too weak a word. Fritz’s father Heinrich must be a friend of this doctor, who in his turn had been my teacher’s lover in earlier years. Something must have happened between the two of them, something unpleasant, malign even, or why would Barbu reduce to ashes the face of a man she had once kissed? And so what if Barbu still had a score to settle with this guy? That was her business! But what did Herr Hofmann have to do with it? He’d taken Stephanescu’s picture at least twice, once when he was a student and now again as the Kronauburg party secretary. Hofmann frequented higher circles. He had influence. He exercised power. And with that power he had it in for Barbu. Before fall vacation, Fritz had threatened that his father would make her life a hell. The teacher’s face had blanched deathly white. She was afraid. But why? I was wider awake than ever before, burning with curiosity.
Suddenly it made sense to me that Fritz had been explaining his lack of interest in school by saying that his days in Baia Luna were numbered. “Father’s looking for a house in Kronauburg, and once he’s found a suitable piece of real estate we’re out of this hick town.” I couldn’t believe Fritz was serious. The very thought of voluntarily moving away would never have occurred to Germans like the Schusters or the Schneiders. But once the picture of Herr Hofmann’s friend Stephanescu was hanging on our classroom wall, I realized that Fritz had been telling the truth. Soon he would turn his back on Baia Luna. I looked over at him. As always, he was sprawled on the school bench—and suddenly for me he was no longer a friend but a stranger—looking cool and unapproachable. But the coldness of alienation didn’t just emanate from Fritz. The chasm separating us yawned within me, as if it had always been there and only now became visible.
“Reader, page eleven,” announced Barbu. “The patriotic poem by Hans Bohn. Julia, please begin!”
Julia Simenov, top student in the class, stood up and recited in a clear voice,
“I love the land of the Carpathian forests,
So rich in natural beauty and so vast,
The land of new construction and of heroes,
Where each new day is better than the last.”
We were told to get out our notebooks. While everyone except Fritz and me was writing down the words of the patriotic poem, Barbu leaned against the wall at the back of the classroom. She tugged at her blue dress and rubbed her chin while I chewed on my pencil. I didn’t notice her advancing until she had almost reached us. She walked up to Fritz. She ran her hand over his head. It seemed to me a dreamy, strangely absentminded, and almost involuntary gesture. I heard her say, “Tell your father it’s over. Barbu isn’t afraid anymore.”
Fritz looked her right in the eye. Mockingly. Then he rose from his seat and walked up to the blackboard cool as a cucumber. He picked up a piece of chalk and wrote,
When Barbu whispers in my ear,
my thing gets hard and out to here.
I felt hot and cold all over. Although shocked by Fritz’s impudence, I was impressed by his daring. I was sure the older kids would burst out laughing. But it stayed quiet. Someone in the first row dropped a pencil. Barbu walked quite slowly up to the front. In a second she would pick up her stick and start whipping him and screeching, striking again and again. And Fritz wouldn’t bat an eye. He would grin like always when Barbu cut him into kind ling, screamed herself into a fury, and finally collapsed in exhaustion. But Barbu didn’t strike. She wiped the blackboard clean with a rag and then blew her nose into it and rubbed her eyes. The chalk dust mixed with her tears and smeared her face.
“You can go home now,” she said softly.
Her voice sounded infinitely weary. But everyone stayed seated. Only Fritz hastily packed up his schoolbag and disappeared. Then the bell rang. Angela Barbulescu took Stephanescu’s picture down from the wall and shuffled out of the classroom in her rubber boots.
Chapter Two
HONEST GYPSIES, PIOUS SAXONS,
AND THE STUDIES OF THE BLACK PHILOSOPHER
Send this man straight to hell! Exterminate him! Whatever Barbu had meant, it exceeded my powers of imagination. Go to hell! Devil take you! How often I had heard those curses in the barroom. Even Father Johannes Baptiste wasn’t any too choosy when thundering imprecations against the enemies of the faith from the pulpit. But exterminate someone? Forestall the Last Judgment? Never!
Exterminate! What did that mean anyway? You exterminated weeds, annoying insects, and rats when they got to be a plague. And enemies, of course, but only in war or in self-defense and only if you were a hero. Father Johannes Baptiste warned us repeatedly in his sermons to beware of all exterminators whose titles ended in “-ist.” The Hitlerists exterminated the Jews, the fascists murdered the Socialists, the Stalinists sent their enemies to die like dogs in Siberia, and even the capitalists were exterminators who drove their competition into financial ruin and plunged working families into poverty and misery.
But not in Baia Luna. No one here to my knowledge had exterminated anyone else, and nobody had ever been exterminated. Sure, the Brancusi brothers were Communists and always talked big about how they were going to wipe out the moneybag landowners and the parasite bourgeoisie. That did sound like extermination. But Liviu, Roman, and Nico Brancusi were basically not such bad guys. I couldn’t imagine they would ever really kill anyone.
Of course from time to time, there were nasty incidents in the village. Occasional arguments flared up, heated words that sometimes ended in fistfights. But what got people worked up one day was usually settled by a handshake on the next or forgotten by the day after that. I was never aware of any signs of deep malignity or irreconcilable enmity in the village. To my fifteen-year-old self, Baia Luna seemed a peaceful place where the indigenous population lived with the Hungarians and Saxons who had settled here centuries ago in an unspoken compact not to make life difficult for one another.
The Gypsies held to that as well. When people referred to them, they always called them the Blacks, as was customary in Transmontania, even though among the Gypsies in our village were a couple of flaxen-haired, blue-eyed children who didn’t fit the stereotype at all. The Gypsies didn’t call us the Whites in return; they referred to us as gaje, which means “strangers” but also “fools” or “dummkopfs.”
Nevertheless, we gaje considered the Blacks in Baia Luna to be poor but honest folk. They
belonged to the Gabor tribe and their ancestors had lived in Hungary. The men wore black trousers, black jackets, and wide-brimmed black hats. The women dressed in red skirts and braided gold coins and colorful ribbons into their hair. When I was little, I thought the women simply chose colors they liked, but then I asked Buba Gabor during recess if they meant anything. Buba was pretty as a picture and the only Gypsy girl in the village who through her own stubbornness and with the encouragement of her uncle Dimitru obtained her family’s permission to attend school at least on uneven days, Monday, Wednesday, and Friday. She told me that among her people, you could tell from the color of the ribbons if a girl was single, already engaged, or married. I blushed and asked what her own status was in this regard. Buba answered pertly that she wasn’t allowed to tell that to a gajo like me. Then she brushed a black lock out of her eyes and warbled sweetly, “Only a man with beautiful hands can win me.” Whereupon I stuck my hands into my pockets quick as a flash, who knows why. Buba laughed and ran off.
On summer days, the Gabors strolled up and down the village street or sat in front of their houses playing cards and smoking unfiltered Carpatis. Their proudest possessions were their numerous children and two dozen powerful Percherons they pastured at the edge of the village. In October they went to the horse market in Bistrita where they used the meeting with other tribes to match-make for their sons and daughters and change the color of their ribbons. When the Gabors returned to Baia Luna, they celebrated noisy weddings for days on end before returning to their bleak everyday existence. In the village the Blacks’ idleness was regarded with suspicion but accepted without open hostility, even by the Germans, whose industrious character included deep contempt for any kind of idleness.
The fact that the hearts of the Saxons weren’t paralyzed by zealous piety was due to the influence of Pater Johannes. I knew only the vague outlines of his story. What was certain was that in 1935, two years after the Hitlerists had seized power in Germany, the abbot of the Benedictine monastery in Melk had dispatched Baptiste from the Danube into the mountains of Transmontania. The order probably hoped to get rid of Brother Johannes in his old age, since he was already approaching seventy back then.
The Madonna on the Moon Page 4