The Madonna on the Moon

Rolf Bauerdick, David Dollenmayer

• Publisher: Atlantic Books
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN:
  9781848875050
• eBook ISBN:
  9781782391333
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literature General
• Index: Literature

Sputnik, the Virgin Mary, a murder... 1957. In the secluded Eastern European village of Baia Luna, life orbits around church, work, home and the pub. This is very much the case for fifteen-year-old Pavel Botev - that is, until the seismic shift of world politics is felt even in his small community. When Communist party officials arrive and claim Baia Luna for the Soviet Union, Pavel's schoolteacher commits grisly suicide. Piecing together her diaries, Pavel slowly unravels the tragic story of his schoolteacher's affair with an ambitious party official and, on the very last page, he finds a single scrawled message - Send him to hell. Naturally, Pavel promises his dead teacher that he'll do just that. Meanwhile, crackled radio reports of the US-Soviet space race keep the villagers occupied and somewhat imaginative; when the statue of the Virgin Mary is stolen from the chapel, Pavel's grandfather and his gypsy best friend assume the obvious - that the Russians have kidnapped it and sent it to the moon. It seems farfetched, but when the old man mysteriously disappears, it seems that maybe the Kremlin really has taken an extraordinary interest in an ordinary place, and only Pavel stands in the way...

CONTENTS

PROLOGUE

Chapter One

Chapter Two

Chapter Three

Chapter Four

Chapter Five

Chapter Six

Chapter Seven

Chapter Eight

Chapter Nine

Chapter Ten

Chapter Eleven

Chapter Twelve

Chapter Thirteen

Chapter Fourteen

Chapter Fifteen

A Note About the Author

PROLOGUE

No one in Baia Luna had the slightest doubt that the source of Ilja Botev’s visions was not some luminous gift of prophetic insight, but the delusions of a wandering mind—least of all me, Pavel, his grandson. When I was a little boy, I shrugged off my grandfather’s imaginings as foolish fancies, the result of the influence of the Gypsy Dimitru Gabor. Dimitru never gave much of a hoot about the laws of reason and logic. But later, as the solid ground of good common sense grew progressively thin and crumbly beneath Grandfather’s feet, I myself played no small part in the old man’s getting more and more hopelessly tangled up in the net of his fantasies. It was certainly not my intent to have Grandfather make himself the town idiot, the butt of everyone’s jokes. But what could you say about a tavern owner who sets off in a horse and cart on a secret mission to warn the president of the United States about the rocket scientist Wernher von Braun, a mysterious Fourth Power, and an impending international catastrophe? Armed, by the way, with a laughable top secret dossier, a treatise on the mystery of the corporeal Assumption of the Virgin Mary, handwritten and triple-sewn into the lining of his wool jacket.

Today, I see my grandfather Ilja and his Gypsy friend Dimitru in the mild light of my own old age. I am aware of my guilt and know what I owe them, even though, in Baia Luna, memories of the pair are gradually fading. These days, people look to the future. If you pause to look back you’re a loser. We’re a democracy. There is no more Conducator outshining the sun, no more party demanding blind obedience, no Security Service throwing uppity subjects into jail. You can think and believe whatever you like. People used to write incendiary pamphlets that had to be smuggled out of the country. No more. Our borders are open to all our neighbors. We’re free citizens. Our children are growing up in a free country.

Rather late in life I myself became the proud father of two daughters, begotten and born in freedom. Since then, two decades have flown by as if some crazed second hand had slung me through time. Back in the Golden Age of Socialism, we wanted for everything except time. That we had in abundance. It may be that we threw it away, wasted the best years of our lives in dreary queues. Today, time is a rare and costly commodity. It’s running away from me while younger generations race memoryless through an eternal present. But when children have forgotten where they come from, how will they know where they’re heading?

As things now stand, my daughters will soon make me a grandfather in my own right. In anticipation of future grandchildren, I shall turn time back to my youth in the fifties. If I’m going to tell my children and grandchildren how the Madonna got to the moon, my voice will echo those of my own grandfather Ilja and the Gypsy Dimitru. The two friends dreamed their idea of freedom, and as a final dying ember in the midst of cold ashes, that dream would be fulfilled in their final days. But I didn’t come to understand that until after the historic Christmas of 1989, when our country’s Age of Gold ended on the rubbish heap of history.

That was the day the Great Conducator, his hands fettered, hissed the words “pack of Judases” at his drumhead court-martial before singing “The Internationale” one last time and shouting “Long live the Free and Socialist Republic.” But no one applauded. No one waved little flags. He and his wife only made it halfway to the wall in the yard of the Targoviste barracks. The president wasn’t even worth the official order “Fire!” but just a couple premature bursts. Without a command. Ratta-tat-tat. Spent shells spewed out and danced on the cold stones. Powder smoke filled the air. Then, riddled with bullets as he was, the Conducator’s knees gave way, and the Golden Age was over. Nevertheless, as the Genius of the Carpathians (celebrated in the songs of his court poets as the Sweetest Kiss of the Homeland’s Soil) lay there lifeless in his own blood, his suit jacket still buttoned like a statesman’s but hitched up around his armpits in some disarray, something remarkable occurred.

A spasm of horror seized the members of the firing squad. Instead of being intoxicated with victory, they were beset by fear. Bewildered by their own deed, the militiamen didn’t dare look at the fallen dictator. They averted their petrified gaze from the Titan of Titans whose wide-open eyes stared at the sky in incomprehension. A few young fellows cast furtive glances at their commander and hastily crossed themselves behind his back, then they grabbed shovels and threw a few spadefuls of dirt onto his face. Those eyes! Nobody could stand up to them except the scrawny curs who smelled warm blood. With lolling tongues and tails between their legs they crept closer. They had no appreciation for the final, frank expression on the face of a man who, at the moment of his death, revealed with disarming honesty that he really had no idea what had actually occurred on that Christmas Day in 1989.

Following the execution, Dr. Florin Pauker noted the time—2:45 p.m.—on the death certificate. Rather accidentally, he had been present at the self-appointed Revolutionary Tribunal of National Salvation. He was a neurologist, not a coroner. Only a few days earlier the party had relieved him of his duties as director of the psychiatric hospital in Vadului and given him a new position as military surgeon in Targoviste. And since he and his wife Dana saw no point in celebrating Christmas, Dr. Pauker had switched on-call days with a colleague. And now it was his duty to officially confirm the clinical death of the Conducator and his spouse.

Florin Pauker bent over the corpse, searched for a pulse, and looked into the dead man’s eyes, possibly a moment too long. He scribbled a hasty signature on the death certificate, then reached for the telephone, asked to be connected to the Athenee Palace Hotel in the capital and put through to the presidential suite. After uttering the words “It’s over,” he got into his Dacia and drove back to the capital and home to his wife in the Strada Fortuna. There Dr. Pauker told her that the revolutionary tribunal had put up against the Targoviste barracks-yard wall not evil incarnate, but innocence.

His wife Dana and his daughter Irisetta, their only child, stated that their husband and father changed fundamentally after this Bloody Christmas, as they called the day of the revolution. “His personality changed one hundred eighty degrees. He turned sentimental. He was no longer the energetic physician with an intellect keen as a knife to whom I’d been faithful for more than thirty years,” Dana told a French journalist who was trying to reconstruct the fall of the Conducator.

“It was terrible,” daughter Irisetta confirmed. “Father turned into an empty-headed, sentimental softy. He started to go out all the time—not to breathe the fresh air of freedom but intending to comfort all the unhappy brats he could find.” He crammed his pockets full of American chewing gum and the multicolored lollipops that bald detective who suddenly appeared on TV always sucked on during an investigation. On every street corner children surrounded her father, and he would give each one something. But every time he spotted a kid with big eyes, he would start to shed bitter tears. She didn’t dare go out with him anymore, she was so ashamed of her father’s never-ending weeping and wailing.

To brighten up his melancholy mood, Dr. Pauker undertook numerous trips during the nineties. He was drawn to the holy sites of Christendom, especially the places where people said that in days gone by Mary the Mother of God had appeared. At first he visited local pilgrimage towns in Transmontania, then he journeyed to Fatíma in Portugal and Medjugorje in Bosnia. But neither in the little town of Lourdes in the French Pyrenees nor from the Black Madonna of Czestochowa did the neurologist find the relief he was seeking for his melancholy soul.

For Dana, her husband’s metamorphosis into a sanctimonious sissy was almost unbearable. To her it was humiliating and even intellectually insulting that Florin brought back suitcases full of kitschy implements from these trips: plaster statuettes of the Madonna, vials of holy water and plastic rosaries, bottles of miraculous fluids, and postcards that when waggled back and forth showed first the crucified Christ with his crown of thorns, eyes downcast in sorrow, and then transfigured, lifting them up to heaven. With every new devotional object that entered the house, Dana sensed that the path her husband was on was destined never to cross hers again.

Not for lack of trying on her part. For years, Dana Pauker had appealed to his long-dormant intellectual powers. She invoked his years as the seasoned director of a neurological institute and pleaded with him to come to his senses: in vain.

As she was preparing their apartment for New Year’s Eve dinner on the final night of the last millennium and ten years after the revolution, she noticed to her dismay that Florin had removed the portrait of the Conducator from the living room wall. For ten years she had fought to have his picture left in place, ten years of resistance to what she called the arbitrariness of historical consciousness. And now Florin had simply taken the portrait down from the wall and replaced it with a photograph of a statue of the Virgin. Dana Pauker knew she had lost the battle. She was alone. Their last friends from the party had turned their backs on them. The Paukers had disappeared into the void of social insignificance. Who wanted anything to do with a washed-up doctor who wandered the streets with a rosary, handing out sticky sweets?

In a final outburst of anger, Dana snatched the Madonna from the wall, threw open a window, and hurled the picture out into the street. Then she went to the medicine cabinet. While she swallowed down all the pills she could lay her hands on in a rush of blind rage, passersby on their way to some New Year’s party clutching bottles of cheap sparkling wine were surprised to find lying on the asphalt of the Strada Fortuna a splintered picture frame with a portrait of the Madonna under shards of glass. She was stretching out a protective hand over the naked Baby Jesus, who sat on a globe of the world, while her right foot trod on a crescent moon.

On August 14, the eve of the Feast of the Assumption and barely eight months after the beginning of the new millennium, a grizzled but robust man in his midseventies showed up in Baia Luna asking for Mr. Pavel Botev. They sent him to me and I recognized him at once. The penetrating gaze behind his round glasses was no longer quite so keen as in the photographs I remembered from my youth, but there was no mistake: it was him. He introduced himself with some other name I’ve forgotten and asked me to guide him up to the Mondberg the following day, to the Chapel of the Virgin of Eternal Consolation. I agreed.

He told me his story while we climbed to the summit. Of course, I wondered why he had asked in particular for me to guide him up the mountain. Today, I think the old man knew I had already heard his story long before, not the details of it but its essentials. When we got to the top of the Mondberg, he ignored the chapel of the Virgin and strode straight toward the steep southern flank of the mountain where there was a small cemetery with five anonymous white crosses.

“Which cross is for Angela?”

“The middle one,” I said.

He knelt down, said a Hail Mary, and got to his feet.

“Thank you, Mr. Botev.” He extended his hand and I shook it.

“Have you reached your goal, Doctor?”

He smiled. “Yes, Mr. Botev, soon. Very soon.”

Then he spread his arms and launched himself silently into the abyss, like an eagle. He flew like a king of the air who no longer wanted to be king. Dr. Florin Pauker was free.

Chapter One

BAIA LUNA, NEW YORK, AND ANGELA BARBULESCU’S FEAR

“He’s flying! He’s flying! Long live Socialism! Three cheers for the party!”

The three Brancusi brothers, Liviu, Roman, and Nico, burst into our taproom one evening about eight in a splendid mood, their chests swelling with pride and the cash to stand a few rounds burning holes in their pockets.

“Who’s flying?” asked my grandfather Ilja.

“The dog of course! Laika! The first animal in space! Aboard Sputnik II! Brandy, Pavel! Zuika for everybody! But avanti! It’s on us.” Liviu was playing the big shot, and I could foresee I’d have to run myself ragged the next few hours.

“Gr-gr-gr-gravity has been co-co-conquered! Now nothing can hold back pr-pr-progress. Sp-Sputnik beeps and Laika b-barks all around the w-w-world,” Roman stammered, as he always did when his tongue couldn’t keep up with his excitement.

“Progress, yes sir,” Nico, the youngest Brancusi, fell in with his stammering brother. “A toast to the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics! Side by side we will be victorious! We will conquer the heavens!”

“You can keep your schnapps to yourselves.” The Saxons Hermann Schuster and Karl Koch threw on their coats and left the taproom.

Trouble hung in the air that November 5, 1957. It was a Tuesday and the eve of my grandfather Ilja’s fifty-fifth birthday. I was fifteen. In the mornings I reluctantly attended the eighth (and final) grade, in the afternoons I killed time, and evenings and Sundays I helped my grandfather, waiting on his clientele in our family’s tavern. I should mention that it wasn’t an inn in the ordinary sense of the word. Ilja, my mother Kathalina, and Aunt Antonia ran a shop by day whose inventory provided the housewives of Baia Luna with the basic necessities. By night, we moved a few tables and chairs into the shop and transformed it into a pub for the men.

All I understood of the Brancusis’ blabber about progress was that a dog was zooming across the sky in a beeping Sputnik that managed to do without jet engines and rotating propellers and had nothing in common with ordinary airplanes. At the price, however, of never being able to return to earth. Satellites had escaped the rules of gravity and were on their way to eternal flight in space.

While the men in the bar were getting hot under the collar discussing the whys and wherefores of the newfangled airships, my grandfather Ilja was unmoved: “Weightlessness—not bad. My compliments. But the Russian beeping won’t fill my belly.”

Dimitru Carolea Gabor stood up and took the floor. Some of the men lowered their chins in contempt. After all, didn’t people say the Gypsy had his feet in the clouds and thought with his tongue? Dimitru clutched his right fist to his heart as if taking an oath. He stood there like a rock and swore that the chirping flying contraption was the work of the Supreme Comrade of all Comrades, Joseph Vissarionovich Stalin himself. While still alive, he’d ordered a whole armada of Sputniks to be built. “Sly machines camouflaged as harmless balls of tin, under way on secret missions, and now they even have a dog onboard. I don’t quite get the point of that yapper among the stars, but I’ll tell you something: those aluminum spiders aren’t poking their antennae into the sky just for fun. The Supreme Soviet has something up its sleeve. That beeping, that cosmic cicada, robs peaceful human beings of their sleep and of their sanity, too. And you know what that means? If you’re crazy, you turn into a zombie, and the world revolution just goose-steps right past you. And then, comrades”—Dimitru stared at the three Brancusis—“then you’ve finally achieved the equality of the entire proletariat. The idiot among equals thinks everyone’s smart.”

“In your case, the beeping seems to be working already.” Liviu tapped his finger on his forehead to mock the crazy Gypsy. “You Blacks are nothing to write home about, anyway. Why don’t you do something productive for a change? Under Stalin, you all would’ve been—”

“Right! Exactamente! What’d I tell you?” Dimitru interrupted him. “Joseph was a sly dog. But he had problems getting everyone proletarianized. Big problems. Because his policy of state control just couldn’t achieve the equality of all the Soviets. Sure, the Supreme Comrade really tried hard: bigger jails, higher prison walls, bread and water, half rations. He tried to rub out the last vestiges of inequality with more and more gallows and firing squads. But what did that achieve? Joseph had to keep expanding the labor camps for the unequal. The boundaries of the prisons gre...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title page
• Copyright page
• Contents