I entered the church in broad daylight, took the steps to the chancel two at a time, and unlocked the tabernacle. Everything was there as I had left it. The photo of Angela puckering for a kiss, the one of her former friend Alexa with the sunflower dress hitched up and the negative that went with it, and the four black postcard-sized pictures with one large and eleven small white dots all lay between the pages of the green notebook. I opened the diary, and for one heartbeat the smell of fire, smoke, and damp earth rose from its pages. Hope for nothing and you won’t be disappointed. I was dismayed as Buba’s image came to my mind. “That’s not right, Pavel,” she had said to me as I held her in my arms. “Whoever hopes for nothing is not a flesh-and-blood human being.”
I took the diary and the pictures, locked the tabernacle, and left the little silver key in the lock for Antonius Wachenwerther. Then I went straight to the Gypsies, to Susanna Gabor.
“Where’s Buba?”
Buba’s mother shivered in the icy coldness I was giving off. She’d become old. Her hair was disheveled and her back bent. The large eyes she had passed on to her daughter had shrunken to narrow slits from which she peered suspiciously at me.
“I know nothing. Get lost, gajo! I don’t know where she is.”
I was in a cold fury. I grabbed Susanna and locked my hands around her throat. “I’ll wring your neck,” I said so fiercely that Susanna went white with fear.
“I-I-Italy.”
I let her go. “What did you say?”
The Gypsy woman dropped onto a chair and sobbed, “Buba’s in Italy. It’s not what I wanted, believe me. The men said she would send home a lot of money every month, so I let those fellows take her. They were heading for Italy by way of Yugoslavia. But no money ever came. I haven’t heard from Buba since.” Susanna sobbed tearlessly. “It’s not what I meant to happen. It was all because of how you shamed us. But I don’t care about the money anymore, if only Buba would come back. You can have her as far as I’m concerned. Go to Italy and bring her back.”
As I walked back into the village, my old schoolmate Hermann called to me, “Come over and lend a hand!” I ignored the invitation and went home to bed. A trip to Italy was an utter impossibility for me.
Meanwhile, the inhabitants of Baia Luna were busy getting ready for the festive installment of the new priest Antonius Wachenwerther. The schoolchildren were learning poems by heart. The men were currying their horses and polishing their wagons to a high shine. And the women sat at their sewing machines late into the night, making white and yellow parade banners and costumes in the old Kronauburg peasant style. It was high time for me to make another trip to the T.O. in Kronauburg, but I had so little motivation that I postponed the restocking until after the priest’s arrival. Which would have consequences for my grandfather Ilja, since his epilepsy medicine was running low.
The installation ceremony for Antonius Wachenwerther went off to everyone’s satisfaction. That is, it did until the High Mass. The procession took place in such an orderly, disciplined way it led the vicar-general of Kronauburg to smile approvingly upon the inhabitants of Baia Luna. The young pastor himself seemed not at all dissatisfied, although he still avoided direct eye contact with members of his flock. The procession was led by a splendid white horse with braided mane and colored ribbons on his tail. Andreas Schuster sat astride him with a straight back, carrying the flag of our patron saint. After Antonius Wachenwerther came the vicar-general and other priests from the diocese. The school children followed with their teacher, the women with the small children, the young men, the older men, and the Gypsies. Bringing up the rear—although actually not part of the procession—was Karl Koch, who had somehow lost his place and was being barked at by two stray dogs.
The scandal came during the closing service in the church. But first it has to be mentioned that during the procession, somebody suddenly realized that the Kronauburg clergy had forgotten to bring consecrated fire for the Eternal Flame. The vicar-general, a thoroughly practical churchman, had thereupon hurried over to a group of men and asked for some matches. When I produced a pack of matches from my pocket, the priest whispered that I should go light the Eternal Flame, but to hurry. I agreed and so the little red lamp was burning once more when I sat, as in the days of my youth, with my grandfather and the Gypsy in one of the front pews to listen to the new pastor’s first sermon.
Without any words of greeting, Antonius Wachenwerther launched right into an explanation of why he was not allowed to preach from the pulpit. The Second Vatican Council (no one in the congregation had any idea what that was) forbade God’s word being promulgated from on high, which he personally very much regretted for the sake of the honor of the divine word. Then he intimated that there was at least one good thing about the reforms of those modernizing intellectuals in Rome, since they were finally declaring war on the superstitions rampant among the common folk. In only two weeks, on August 15, the Feast of the Assumption, he intended to make it clear that the corporeal Assumption of Mary into heaven was not to be understood literally, since according to the Bible this was reserved for the Son of God exclusively. Besides which, the veneration of Woman, as clearly evidenced by the naked breasts of Eve, only distracted Man from devoting himself completely to the mystery of the virginity of the Mother of God. I cast a glance at Dimitru, but the Gypsy had fallen asleep.
After the credo, litany, and Lord’s Prayer, Father Wachenwerther prepared to celebrate Holy Communion. Just as the new priest was about to transform the profane bread and wine into the sacred body and blood of Jesus Christ through the Eucharistic words, Grandfather Ilja started to get dizzy.
At first I assumed it was the cloud of incense.
But then Ilja stood up with staring eyes, pointed to the empty pedestal where the Virgin of Eternal Consolation used to stand so many years ago, and cried out to everyone’s horror, “The priest is lying! He’s lying to us. Mary lives! In the flesh! Enthroned in the Sea of Serenity. Down with the church! Down with the pope! Down with the Fourth Power!”
Grandfather uttered a piercing scream, flailed his arms, and dashed forward into the chancel. Dimitru, torn from his slumbers and still half asleep, jumped up and ran after him, but one of his friend’s uncontrolled fists struck him so hard on the temple that he fell against the communion rail and didn’t get up again. In an instant, the powerful arms of some of the men were grabbing for my grandfather, but it wasn’t easy to subdue him until he suddenly went as limp as an empty sack and collapsed.
At that moment, the golden communion goblet fell from the hands of the priest. The consecrated hosts went spinning in all directions, and the blood-red wine spilled out onto the altar cloth. In horrified embarrassment, the young priest disappeared into the sacristy while the vicar-general kept his composure and picked up the hosts.
Hermann Schuster, Hans Schneider, and I firmly ushered my dazed grandfather out of the church.
The priest was so demoralized at his disastrous installation in office that he remained embittered for years. But instead of giving vent to his anger at Grandfather’s irreverent behavior, Antonius Wachenwerther took refuge in silent rancor which, in the course of his time in office, took root as a profound antipathy to anyone who even mentioned the name Botev in his presence.
As you would expect of an epileptic, Ilja had no memory of his seizure and, despite the tireless pleading of Hermann Schuster, was unwilling to utter an apology to Antonius Wachenwerther. Instead, Grandfather kept babbling about a Fourth Power that was now active in Baia Luna in the person of the new priest. Which was why it was urgent that he get to the capital, since everyone knew that in two days the American president Richard M. Nixon would be honoring the Conducator with a visit. Hermann thought Grandfather’s announcement was just crazy talk, but he humored Ilja by asking him who this ominous Fourth Power was.
“It’s in the Vatican. The pope and his people are betting everything on the Mother of God not ever being found. That’s why Wachen
werther is turning the dogma of Mary’s corporeal Assumption upside down. He’s making a redeemed woman and mother into a disembodied virgin. He wants to distract us from the fact that she’s alive. The crescent beneath her feet proves she reigns on the moon, and that’s why Khrushchev asked Gagarin about God.”
“Man, Ilja, what’s gotten into you? Since you’ve had this moon sickness you’ve been getting weirder by the day.” Hermann Schuster grabbed Grandfather by the collar and was giving him a good shaking, trying to bring him back to reality, when he was brought up short by Grandfather asking, “Hermann, you were in the war. Tell me the truth: did you know that the Germans killed all the Jews?”
The Saxon let Grandfather go. “Yes, Ilja, I knew it. But I didn’t want to believe it. I was young and at the front. What could I have done about it?”
“Probably nothing, but the pope in Rome could have. He should have cried out, Hermann. But he didn’t. And so he promulgated the dogma of the corporeal Assumption of the Mother of God in 1950. You want to know why? Because his bad conscience about the Jews was torturing him. He left the Chosen People in the lurch during the Third Reich. Just like Johannes Baptiste used to say, never in history did the Church ever lift a finger for the Jews, even though they had to bear the heavy burden of crucifying their fellow Jew Jesus so we could be redeemed. The pope wanted to do Mary a favor with his dogma certifying that she had not returned to dust. By announcing her Assumption, Rome managed to save at least one Jew, if only posthumously.”
Hermann Schuster was speechless.
Grandfather continued undeterred: “Then things got complicated for the Vatican. It all started with Sputnik. When he promulgated the dogma, the pope couldn’t have known that one day man would overcome gravity and land on the moon. If the dogma was true, then someone would eventually find Mary, the Russians or the Americans or whoever. But that was definitely not something the Vatican wanted to happen. And so the clergy is putting all their efforts into the Madonna remaining undiscovered. The best thing would be if nobody ever again got the idea to look for her. That’s why Wachenwerther announces that the dogma is not meant literally—so that anybody who keeps on searching will look like an idiot.”
After trying for two hours to follow what Ilja was saying, Hermann Schuster felt like his skull was going to explode. Weighed down by the sad certainty that the morbus lunaticus had befuddled the brain of the formerly commonsensical tavern keeper, Hermann shuffled back to his Erika, while for the first time in his life Grandfather set about the difficult task of composing a letter in his clumsy hand, addressed to the last man on earth who had the power to challenge the Fourth Power.
As I learned later, Grandfather asked his daughter, my aunt Antonia, to take needle and thread and carefully sew that document into the lining of his wool jacket—with triple stitches, just in case.
It was the last day of July 1969, and Richard M. Nixon’s visit to the capital had been announced for August 1. That an American president was about to visit a Socialist country for the first time just a few days after a successful landing on the moon was due to the influence of the Conducator, who was said by the poets to outshine even the sun. A parade from the airport to the Palace of the Republic was planned with stops along the route for handshaking with the crowd. It was a once-in-a-lifetime chance for Ilja.
Dimitru would have liked to accompany his friend but couldn’t. He lay in bed with a concussion, so shaken he even forgot to ask for morphine. Ilja explained his plan to the Gypsy in a few words and kissed him farewell on the forehead. Dimitru nodded weakly and said only, “My friend, I’m with you. Be careful for both of us.”
“Are you out of your mind? Where are you going?” Kathalina shouted at her father-in-law when she saw him bringing the horse out of the barn.
“To America!” he called, not because that was his destination but because he mistrusted even his nearest and dearest when it came to this mission.
I didn’t even try to stop Grandfather from leaving. There was no point, and he was sure to show up again in a few days. But I was starting to realize that instead of protecting Grandfather from his Madonna madness, I was letting him get deeper and deeper into trouble.
With Grandfather’s disappearance, Dimitru’s time in Baia Luna was also running out. At first he had wanted to await Ilja’s return in the library, but then he decided to leave Baia Luna immediately. It was the day on which he cursed Antonius Wachenwerther and prayed to God that there really was a hell.
A few days after taking office, the new priest had set about putting things in order in his parish. First he had all Catholics in the community register and set up church records; Johannes Baptiste had never kept any. Then he set his sights on the parish library. At Wachenwerther’s instructions Dimitru, who had retired to his red chaise longue, had to remove that piece of furniture to the basement and surrender the key to the library. The priest spent one day in there alone, sorting through everything. He had all the books he deemed inappropriate for the parishioners stacked up in the laundry room where, in the course of the coming years, the musty smell of moldering paper would gradually drive out the scent of roses.
Then he inspected the cemetery. With the comment that the half-empty and useless hole next to the grave of Fernanda Klein was a testimony to the neglect of the churchyard, he had it filled in. Based on the names on the crosses, he then had the sacristan Julius Knaup give him an introduction to the history of the families of Baia Luna. The priest halted before a grave covered with elaborate decorations and cast a skeptical eye on the pile of plastic flowers that engulfed its cross.
“Who’s buried here?”
“Laszlo Gabor, the father of that unspeakable Gypsy from the library. He died in 1935 under mysterious circumstances on the banks of the Tirnava right where a mother and daughter from our village were in the middle of the icy stream crying for help. And if I may be permitted to say so, Gabor died unbaptized.”
In his militant determination to defend the Catholic faith against the forces of disintegration, the priest had the mortal remains of Laszlo Gabor exhumed and his bones stacked in a wooden crate.
Dimitru didn’t utter a sound as the sacristan delivered his father’s bones to him with the remark that there was still room on the slope above the cemetery wall next to Barbulescu.
Within the hour, Dimitru had loaded a covered wagon with the wooden crate and his other possessions and hitched up his horse. He drove over to our house to say good-bye.
“Kathalina and Pavel, my dears, thank you for everything.”
Mother turned away in tears.
“Where are you going, Dimi?” asked Antonia, who had heaved herself out of bed.
“I’m going to join my father. But first I’m going to look for your father, my friend Ilja, and keep looking until I find him.”
“Then I’m going with you. That is, if it’s all right with you to have such a large woman along.”
“It’s fine with me, Antonia.”
“Take this as a keepsake.” Kathalina handed Dimitru the Bible the priest Johannes Baptiste had given Grandfather on his fifty-fifth birthday. “I hope Ilja gets some sense in his head and comes back soon. He won’t miss the Bible, and if he does, at least he’ll know the word of God is in good hands.”
“Thank you for this gift. I’m accepting it, Kathalina, but you understand that I won’t read it again until I’ve found Ilja.”
I decided to wait a few more days for Grandfather and then begin looking for him myself. I gave Dimitru a farewell embrace and asked him to please send me a message if he heard any news about the whereabouts of his niece Buba.
His only reply was “Remember the foolish virgins, Pavel. When they got to the wedding, the oil in their lamps was all burned up.” Then he squeezed onto the box next to Antonia and drove his wagon with the wooden crate over the Tirnava bridge for the last time in his life.
It remains to be mentioned that the catastrophic floods of the following yea
r carried away more than the iron bridge. When the river overran its banks, the clay-brick dwellings of the Gypsies dissolved in the floodwaters. The homeless Gabor clan thereupon moved with their horses and wagons to the outskirts of Apoldasch, where the men were recruited as assistants to the workers constructing a dam on the upper reaches of the Tirnava. From then on, a giant power plant controlled the waters of the river in the spring and provided the Kronauburg District, including Baia Luna, with round-the-clock current until the time when the great shortages began, money and materials dried up, and the country went dark. But by that time, in Baia Luna, there was nothing left to remind people that Gypsies had once lived there.
When Grandfather had not returned to Baia Luna two weeks after his departure for America (of course, no one believed that was where he was going), I set off to find him. I guessed that Ilja had taken the train from Kronauburg to the capital to be at the state visit of Richard M. Nixon after leaving his wagon in the care of the owner of the Pofta Buna. But the latter denied knowing anything about an Ilja Botev from Baia Luna.
The Madonna on the Moon Page 38