Next day the two of them had me explain how to set up the telescope and use the camera, film, and flashbulbs. They asked my mother to pack them supplies for a few days. After Dimitru suggested that peering through the telescope’s eyepiece for long stretches could cause eye strain and necessitate concentration-enhancing beverages, I added a couple bottles of schnapps, although I felt the stirrings of a bad conscience. After all, I was the one who had enabled the two Mariologists in the first place by taking them to Gheorghe Gherghel’s shop.
“Don’t forget your loony pills,” Kathalina razzed them.
In the evening, the pair set off.
At about midnight they reached the chapel where the Virgin of Eternal Consolation had once stood. In a clearing between the rocks they set up camp, rammed the tripod into the ground, and mounted the telescope on it. They thanked the powers of heaven for their clear view of the bright, almost full moon and followed up with a supplication that the Mother of God not shrink from the telescope’s glassy eye. When it came to deciding who should look through the telescope first, the two started quarreling. Each wanted to let the other go first. Finally Ilja aimed the instrument in the direction of the moon.
The moment Ilja pressed his own orb against the eyepiece of the Keplerian telescope, he departed this earth. His mouth agape in astonishment, he entered the space between times. Studying the lunar map had been worth the effort. The Jesuit Giovanni Battista Riccioli had done his work well. What Ilja was now seeing conformed in every detail to the astronomer’s cartographic record. As if his spirit were bridging heaven and earth, he floated between the chasms and ravines of monumental mountain chains, flew over wrinkled ridges and corroded crests, and glided above endless desert wastes. Gray-shadowed plains opened before him, punctuated by jagged walls and piles of reddish-brown rocks. In between emerged what looked like the branchings of dry riverbeds, towering crater walls, round or oval, some like gigantic maws, others without number as tiny as the head of a pin. Ilja recognized the crater named after the Roman historian Pliny. It lay in the north of the Mare Tranquillitatis, the Sea of Tranquility, where it bordered on the southern edge of the Mare Serenitatis.
“I’ve got it!” Ilja cried.
“What?”
“The Sea of Serenity.”
“What’s there?” Dimitru stopped shivering with cold and started trembling with excitement. “Can you see her?”
“No. Take a look yourself!”
“That’s really it. The Mare Serenitatis. But all I see is stones.”
The question “What do you see?” and the answer “Nothing” would be repeated often in the course of the next four nights, but with longer and longer pauses in between. Since their eyes were smarting, they would spell each other every half hour. To no avail. When the moon sank below the dark horizon, they would talk awhile to confirm there was nothing to talk about. Otherwise, they encouraged each other not to grow impatient—anything but that. With the first rays of the rising sun, Ilja would walk down to a little spring to quench his thirst and take his epilepsy pills while Dimitru permitted himself a few glasses of zuika so he could sleep through until evening. On the last day of May, a Wednesday (they had long since run out of bread, sausage, and bacon), they decided to stick it out for one more night, until Thursday, the first of June, despite their growling stomachs, aching backs, and bleary eyes. When at last night fell and the moon rose, Dimitru uncorked the last bottle of plum brandy. Because Ilja complained that looking through the telescope was making him dizzy and he was getting black spots in front of his eyes, Dimitru—his speech already a little slurred—called him a stubborn mule who should go to bed. Whereupon Grandfather crawled into their tent.
Dimitru kept watch. His eye was glued to the ocular, watching the Mare Serenitatis even though his dry throat was tortured by thirst. From time to time he would nod off for a few seconds and tip over to one side, then start awake again and force himself to keep looking until at last he was overcome with the impression that the moon was beginning to gently rotate. Dimitru spun along with it, dipping into the cascading colors of the rainbow bay Sinus Iridum, growing intoxicated by the purple of the Palus Somni, ecstatic at the geometric purity of the Taruntius crater’s concentric circles. From the Mare Humorum he roamed westward, passing the Sea of Clouds and reaching the Mare Nectaris, turned north until his eye crossed the Plinius crater and returned at last to its starting place, the Sea of Serenity. He took a last swallow of zuika and mustered what strength he had left to keep his eye to the telescope.
And just as twelve faint strokes from the distant Apoldasch church reached his ear, he saw her. In the middle of an unprepossessing crater on the southwestern edge of the Mare Serenitatis, she flared up, her shining face turned toward the earth. And surrounding her on the edge of the crater, arranged like the numbers on a clock face, stood the twelve apostles. From their open mouths issued the angelic Salve Regina, Mater misericordiae.
Dimitru was weeping with happiness when he suddenly remembered his mission. He mounted the camera onto the telescope, fired the flashbulbs to light up the night sky, and took one picture after another. Then he collapsed, drunk on zuika and even drunker on bliss, embracing the telescope in his arms like a lover after a night of love.
Grandfather woke him as the sun was almost at noon.
“Well?” he asked.
Dimitru said only, “Ilja my friend, our expedition is a triumph.”
While Grandfather packed up the telescope and the camera with its precious film, Dimitru fetched the grazing Percheron and hitched it to the wagon. Then they headed for home.
I saw her. Sine dubio. She appeared to me just as she did to Saint John the Evangelist,” said Dimitru, handing me the camera. “It’s all in there, Pavel. Now we need your services. Are you sure you can turn the film in this thing into a real picture on paper?”
“No problem.” Although my curiosity was roused about Dimitru’s photographic results, I was feverish to finally develop the picture whose negative was hidden safe and sound in the tabernacle of the Baia Luna church. “I’ll get right to work on it tonight,” I said.
Since Grandfather and the Gypsy were completely ignorant of technical matters, they left setting up the darkroom to me. When I said I would need running water for the lab, Dimitru had the idea that I could refit what had been Fernanda Klein’s laundry room in the rectory for my purposes. It had been standing empty for years.
Setting up the darkroom didn’t cause me any significant difficulties. The previous owner had kept his enlarger in good working order and also saved all the instructions. I had conscientiously studied the explanations in them. Under cover of night, I carried the equipment into the laundry room in the cellar of the rectory, hung the windows with dark cloth, set up the enlarger on an old ironing table, and made sure the timer and the light source were working. Then I followed the instructions for mixing soda, sodium sulfide, Metol, and fixing salts with water and poured the developer and the fixer into their respective trays. Then I turned on the darkroom light and opened the packages of photographic paper.
To my disappointment, most of the packs had already been opened. They contained exposed photographs of no interest to me, although they revealed a lot about the passions of their former owner. Brown bears and stags in rut fighting over territory were clearly some of his favorite subjects. Unfortunately, however, very few unexposed sheets remained for my own enlargements.
I took out my most precious possession, the negative, which I had previously retrieved from the church. I clamped the strip of film into the film carrier and turned on the enlarger light. I turned a crank that raised the enlarger head high enough that the cone of light spread out to poster size. I focused the image, turned off the light, and put an experimental piece of paper into the easel. Since I had no idea how long to expose the image, it took me a few tries to find the right value.
Two hours later I was looking at the fruits of my labor: five photographic posters hun
g from a wash line in the rectory basement. Two of them got spoiled during the drying process. That left three. The enlargements showed Dr. Stephanescu with pomaded hair, spraying champagne between the naked thighs of a woman in a sunflower dress while a man I assumed to be Florin Pauker was masturbating in the background. These three enlargements would be a bombshell. Their explosive power would topple the party chief Stephanescu from his pedestal. Hang my picture on every lamppost, Angela had written in her diary. I knew an even better place to present the Kronauburg party boss to the public. Intoxicated by the thought of my successful crusade, I made a mistake.
Dimitru’s pictures of the Madonna still needed to be developed. As I was taking the film out of the camera, the sudden memory of what the lab assistant Irina Lupescu had told me hit me like a club: even the smallest bit of light would spoil the film. I was holding Dimitru’s film in my hands and realized with horror that the lamp was still on. The last glimmer of hope that a bit of detail might still be recognizable blinked out as I pulled the film from the developer. The strip was as transparent as glass, which meant that the positive would be nothing but a black surface. But there was no way I could show my face to Dimitru and my grandfather with such a thing. I considered what to do. Their belief that they had captured the Mother of God on film was nothing but the cuckoo idea of two crazy but harmless old men whose notions were arcane but not dangerous. Should I disappoint them? Or should I make them happy with a bit of photographic sleight of hand? Dimitru had claimed he saw what Saint John had described in Revelation. As well as I could recall, a sign had appeared in the heavens—a shining woman with the moon beneath her feet and a crown of twelve stars on her head. I had to get something like that onto paper.
I searched my pockets for all the change I had: a big ten-cent piece and about a dozen smaller aluminum coins. There were only four photo papers left in the pack, all the size of a postcard. I put an unexposed piece under the enlarger and placed the big coin right in the middle, then I scattered the other coins around it. I snapped on the enlarger light for just a second or two and then put the paper into the bath of developer. After just a few seconds, it turned black with a round white spot in the center, surrounded by smaller white dots. I repeated the procedure with the other papers, washed them in water, and waved them in the air until they dried.
Grandfather and Dimitru were still sitting at the kitchen table. They had waited all night. Dimitru was panting with impatience. “Well? And so? Did they turn out?”
“Depends,” I answered. Then I put the four black photos with white dots on the table.
Dimitru froze. “What’s that supposed to be?”
“I don’t know what you shot up there on the Mondberg,” I replied coolly, “but it does look remarkable, somehow. Could be the moon and stars. But maybe the flashes were too bright and overwhelmed everything else.”
“But that’s not the Madonna.” Grandfather was also deeply disappointed. “What’d you go and photograph, Dimitru? You said you saw her.”
“I did see her, I swear I did. I really saw her.”
“And what did your Madonna look like?” Dimitru didn’t detect the sarcasm in my tone.
“Beautiful! She looked just beautiful. Madonnas always look beautiful.”
Dimitru stood up. Disappointed, disconsolate, and dog tired, he shuffled back to the Gypsy settlement and went to bed. For seven days and seven nights he buried himself beneath the covers and exuded such an air of bitterness that even his own people didn’t dare speak to him.
When he finally emerged from his lair on a Saturday morning, he frightened the Gypsy children and not just them. Dimitru’s lush black beard had turned gray. He set off for the library where he hadn’t set foot since the end of his vow of silence. Books still lay scattered about, and the air was still pregnant with the stale odors of rumination. Dimitru pushed back the curtains, threw open the windows, and started airing it out. Then he set about putting all the books back on the shelves. Once he had transformed the chaotic mess into a model of order, he returned to his tribe, sat down on a chair in the warm June sunshine, and called for the women. He asked them to remove on the spot anything about him that reminded them of the biblical Moses, and the women obeyed. Fifteen minutes later, he was rid of his magnificent beard. When that was done, he climbed into the bathtub and had them scrub his back and towel it dry. Then he doused himself with Tabac Oriental, slipped into a white shirt, put on the black suit he usually wore only on business trips, put a wide-brimmed hat on his head, and strolled over to his friend Ilja’s house.
Kathalina, Grandfather, Aunt Antonia, and I were sitting in the kitchen, and we all did a double take when Dimitru walked in.
“Unbelievable!” said Antonia. “What a fine handsome fellow you are!”
Kathalina too was mightily impressed. “It looks like you’ve finally gotten some sense in your golden years. Sit down and have a bite.”
When the women had cleared the table, Dimitru said, “Ilja, I was an idiot. I thought the Blessed Virgin would conform to the laws of optical instruments. Can there be a worse error? How can an intelligent person even assume the Madonna would allow herself to be conjured onto a piece of paper in some chemical brew in a laboratory?”
Grandfather fetched the pictures with the white dots. “Just look, Dimitru! Look at this! It doesn’t look so bad. When you saw the Madonna, was she very bright?”
“Like a shining sun.”
“And the apostles—were they there, too?”
“Like the stars on her shining crown.”
Ilja tapped the photos excitedly with his finger. “Man, Dimitru, that’s it. In the middle, the white circle—that’s her. Right in the middle of the black darkness, you see? But she’s so bright she just outshines everything else. All around her, those little dots, those are the apostles. The pictures are proof for those who can read the language of signs.”
Dimitru pricked up his ears. “Interesting. What you’re saying has some merit.” Then he counted—to eleven. “There’s a dot missing. There ought to be twelve. Twelve apostles, twelve white dots. But I only count eleven.”
“Exactly, I noticed that, too.” You could read the excitement in Grandfather’s face. “Since I started reading the Bible, I’ve been thinking logically. You should, too, Dimitru. There should be eleven apostles, not twelve, and you know why?”
“Tell me!”
“At the Last Supper Jesus had twelve gathered around him. But we have to assume his Mother up there on the moon doesn’t want her son’s betrayer anywhere near her. Judas is number twelve, and logically, he’s not there.”
“Sic est! I agree. I bet the traitor is sitting up there in the Mare Moscoviense cursing his thirty pieces of silver.” Dimitru went to stroke his beard but realized he was grasping at thin air. “You’re a smart fellow, Ilja. Nevertheless, we have to be reasonable. To people with the eyes to see, this photographic paper only proves what they already know. But the blind remain blind.”
“You’re probably right,” admitted Grandfather. “So what should we do with the pictures now?”
“Forget the photos,” I broke in on their feckless conversation. “I found a new station on the radio. It’s the best insider tip so far: shortwave, 3564 kilohertz, Radio Free Europe from Munich. You don’t need to save the world anymore ’cause the Yanks are building a monster of a spaceflight center in Huntsville, Alabama. And they’ve named a man to be director of all the other engineers who’s supposed to be better than your archenemy Korolev. And you know who the new American rocket director is?”
“Wörner von Braun,” said Dimitru, “a German.”
“Wow, you’re really up-to-date! Wernher von Braun’s his name, all right. Do you know anything else about him?”
“How could I? The announcer on Radio London always yaks too fast.”
“I told you, Radio Free Europe is better. Anyway, this von Braun understands something about rockets. He was Reich Engineer Number One
under the Führer. Now he’s an American citizen and believes in God like every good American. His wife confirms it, and by the way, her name’s Maria.”
Grandfather and Dimitru were fidgeting. I took out a piece of paper. “Here, I wrote it down so I wouldn’t forget what von Braun said on the radio: ‘Above all, we must honor God who created the entire universe. Day by day, in deep reverence, man continues to explore and tries to understand it with his science.’”
“The German really said that?”
“Guaranteed, although a few years back, he built fairly nasty rockets for the Hitlerists. He seems to have cleaned up his act. Maybe he has something to atone for?”
Dimitru moved his head to and fro. “Cleaned up his act, you think? Could be. But Germans are sly and never forget. Wörner von Braun still has an account to settle with the Bolsheviks now that he’s been forced to resign from the Thousand-Year Reich. Wörner won’t forget that he was liberated and had to scrap his lovely rockets. I bet Wörner von Braun would stop at nothing to keep the Soviets from raising their hammer-and-sickle banner on the moon just like they raised it on the Reichstag. That must still rankle.”
Grandfather’s commentary: “And that’s why the Americans know they won’t find anyone else in the whole world to build them better rockets than this von Brown German.”
“Right. On the radio they also said that Kennedy had pressed a few billion dollars on von Braun to build a gigantic Saturn rocket that will overshadow all the rockets the Soviets have managed to construct up to now.”
“I’ll draw the conclusio,” said Dimitru, reaching out his hand to Grandfather. “Congratulations, Ilja. America doesn’t need us anymore. We’ve carried out our mission.”
“What a shame,” sighed Grandfather. “I wanted so much to go to Noueeyorka.”
“You may still, someday,” I comforted him. “But for now you can be sure you’re on the right side. America will win.”
The Madonna on the Moon Page 33