The Madonna on the Moon (13 page)

“No school today! Barbu’s not there!” Buba had seen me coming and ran up. “I thought you were sick with a cold.”

“Where did you hear that?” I pretended my mother hadn’t told me about her visit.

Buba tapped her forehead. “The third eye. You should know by now that Uncle Dimi and I have second sight. I hope you realize what an honor it is for a
gajo
like you to even hear
about that. ’Cause we Gypsies . . .”

“Where’s Barbu?”

Buba tossed her hair back.

“I don’t know. She’s just not here.”

“And what does your third eye see?” I mocked her.

Buba bowed her head and closed her eyes.

What is this, some act? That’s what I wanted to say, but the words stuck in my throat. Buba stood there frozen, like a statue. Then she folded her hands and slowly, slowly lifted her head
toward the sky. I hardly dared to breathe. She looked wonderful: dirty and beautiful. Her tousled hair, handsome face, her velvet skin, and full, dark lips.

Suddenly Buba started shaking; then just as abruptly, she stood stock-still and stared at me with eyes like saucers. “I’m afraid,” she whispered.

A chill ran down my spine. “What do you see?”

“I see flowers, bright yellow sunflowers.”

“Anything else?”

“Her hair, Barbu’s hair blowing in the wind.”

Buba started running toward the lower end of the village, where her people lived.

I walked after her, not hurrying. I could never have caught up with her anyway. On my way to the Gypsies’ I saw that Barbu’s curtains were still not pulled closed. When I got to
Dimitru’s house I clapped my hands.

“Enter, please,” called a strange voice, “and leave all cares behind.”

I slipped off my shoes and went into Dimitru’s room. He wasn’t there.

“Don’t be afraid,” said a Gypsy with a huge mustache. “I am Salman, Dimitru’s cousin.” Salman was sitting on a stool that was missing one leg. In his lap was
a wooden board and on it a frying pan full of onions and mutton, dripping with fat. He offered me a piece of bread and held out the pan for me. “Dip it in and chew it slowly. It will banish
the spirits of the night.”

I declined. “Where’s Dimitru? Where’s Buba?”

“Dimitru is in the library. Urgent studies. Just don’t ask me what’s the matter with him or I’ll have to start worrying. ‘Where are you going so early?’ I
asked him this morning. And you know what he replied? ‘If I don’t rescue Mary I’m a lost soul.’ That’s what he said. Can you beat it? What Mary did he mean? Yesterday
he was quite cheerful, and now this woman has turned his head. Something must have happened yesterday, at that birthday party. And I’ll tell you: whatever it was, it wasn’t
good.”

“And where’s Buba?”

“In school, where do you think?”

“There’s no school today. The teacher has disappeared.”

Salman furrowed his brow. “Where could a teacher disappear to in this Podunk?” Without waiting for an answer, he put down his pan, wiped his greasy mouth on his shirtsleeve, and got
to his feet. The stool fell over. Soon Salman returned with Buba in tow. He eased down onto the rickety stool again and offered us a seat on Dimitru’s bed.

“Buba, I have to know what else you saw at Barbu’s,” I begged. “Please tell me.”

“Only yellow sunflowers and her hair in the wind.”

“But Barbu has short hair. I can’t imagine it blowing in the wind.”

“I don’t know either. But that’s how I saw it: long blond hair. I’m sure. And her hair was tied up in a kerchief, like a ponytail.”

“Like on my photo” slipped out.

“What photo? Did some girl with blond hair give you a picture?”

I could see she was jealous, but I didn’t answer her question about a blonde. “When did you see Barbu last? She lives right next door to you.”

“I wasn’t in school yesterday, so day before yesterday” was her brief answer. “Not since.”

“Barbu?” Salman chimed in. “You mean Miss Barbulescu?”

“Yes, do you know her?”

“I don’t. Never seen her. But yesterday I gave some guy a ride. I drove my wagon over from Kronauburg with that television for Dimitru. I picked up the man on the way here, after
I’d passed Apoldasch. I felt sorry for him, on foot in such shitty weather. So I took him along. Should have thought twice about it, though. Talked my ear off the whole way, he did.
Who’d I know in Baia Luna? Did I know the schoolteacher? (How would I?) Then the guy followed me right in here as if he owned the place and asked Dimitru like some cock of the walk if he
would be so kind as to identify the domicile of the village schoolteacher Miss Angela Barbulescu. ‘Right over there,’ was all my cousin said. Wham, the guy is gone. Not even time for a
word of thanks. He could at least have helped me unload that heavy TV.”

“What’d he look like?”

“Big guy, I’ll tell you, six-six if he was an inch. A tank. Long brown coat, hat, mustache—like mine, but lighter. Mid- to late thirties, I’d say, if somebody can guess
the age of you
gaje
at all. A suspicious character, believe you me. Had a wart on his cheek. The right one. No, hang on . . . the left one from my vantage point . . . a big fat one,
I’m telling you. It looked funny, and I asked myself, Why doesn’t he get that thing removed? Just a little cut and it’d be gone. Anyway, the guy didn’t thank me.
Didn’t like Gypsies. A Black like me can smell that.”

I stood up.

“Where are you going?” asked Buba.

“To Barbu’s house.”

“I’m coming, too.”

There were already some men and women from Baia Luna gathered in front of the teacher’s cottage. Hermann Schuster Junior had told his parents about Barbu’s absence. His father had
asked his wife Erika to look in on her because his head was still hurting from the blow with the wine bottle. Now Erika and her son Hermann were at a loss. They were standing in front of
Barbu’s house along with Julia Simenov and her father Emil, Julius Knaup the sacristan, and about a dozen schoolkids. The widow Kora Konstantin stood a little off to one side, rosary in hand
and mumbling the first Ave Marias of the Joyful Mysteries.

“What are we waiting for?” asked Simenov urgently. The blacksmith had shouldered his sledgehammer and pushed Barbu’s garden gate open with his boot. “We may have to break
open the front door,” he muttered as I pushed past him. I pressed on the latch, and it wasn’t locked. The key was in the lock on the inside.

“Out of the way. Beat it. Get lost, kid,” said the smith testily.

“She’s my teacher and not yours,” I responded and stepped into the hall. “Miss Barbulescu?” I called, “Miss Barbulescu?”

“Hello! Is anyone here? Please say something,” Erika Schuster joined in. No one answered. “We’ll have to take a look,” said Frau Schuster. Boldly she opened the
door to the parlor.

Barbu wasn’t there. The room looked just like I remembered it from my only visit. Neat and clean. A pile of firewood was stacked by the stove. Hermann’s mother felt the stove.
“Lukewarm. She didn’t build a fire. She must not have been here last night.”

“She’s been drinking again,” remarked Simenov, “and not just a drop.”

On the table stood an empty bottle and a glass. I picked up the glass.

“Give it here!” The blacksmith grabbed the glass from me and gave it a quick sniff. “
Zuika!
What’d I say?”

Something wasn’t right. I remembered that ill-fated evening when Barbu came on to me on her sofa. She’d been drinking then, too. But with the practiced eye of a bartender I had
noticed immediately that there was no glass to be seen anywhere. Barbu drank straight from the bottle. This glass in her parlor could only mean that in her last hours in Baia Luna, Angela
Barbulescu had not been alone. Someone had been drinking with her. I kept this hunch to myself.

“The whole bottle!” was Erika Schuster’s shocked suspicion. “She must still be so drunk she’s wandering around somewhere. And in such cold, with frost on the way.
We should look and see if she took a coat with her.”

Emil Simenov took a look around the front hall. “A black coat with a fur collar?”

“Yes,” called Frau Schuster.

“It’s still here.”

Erika Schuster opened the door to the bedroom. “Oh, she makes her bed!” The Saxon housewife seemed genuinely surprised and then proceeded to peer into every corner. With an energetic
“I guess it’ll be okay,” she pulled open the door to the closet. “One, two, three. Three wool sweaters,” she counted out loud.

“We have no more business here,” the smith decided. “Let’s go. She’ll turn up again.”

“One skirt. And two blue dresses!”

Frau Schuster still had her nose in Angela Barbulescu’s closet. I looked over her shoulder. The closet smelled like roses. I knew what I was looking for and guessed that I wouldn’t
find it. One hanger was empty. The dress with the yellow sunflowers was missing. I looked around and couldn’t spot the framed portrait of Stephanescu either.

As the gossips would later whisper, when I walked out the garden gate onto the village street I looked like the Grim Reaper in person. Schoolchildren apparently shied away at the sight of me,
and Kora Konstantin broke her rosary, whose beads then hailed down onto the heads of the little gawkers. The Gypsy Susanna Gabor exclaimed, “We’re going home right this minute!”
She grabbed her daughter Buba by the hair with one hand while pointing at Barbu’s house with the other: “Bad luck lives under that roof.”

All I remember is that I fell into bed exhausted with Buba’s words in my ear, “Sleep, Pavel, you need sleep.”

I
n the following days, the rumor pot boiled over in Baia Luna, and everyone had a spoon in it except for the Gypsy Dimitru, who never left the rectory
library. He didn’t even touch the food Buba left on the doorstep for him. The largely subsided discussion of Angela Barbulescu’s obscure origins was revived. Kora dropped hints about
Barbu being a “nimmfomaniac” who had been lured back to the capital, while Scherban the shepherd was absolutely convinced he had heard Barbu howling with the wolves up near Fagaras the
night before. Probably stark naked, too, Erika Schuster suggested. At least, it was strange that not a single thing was missing from Barbulescu’s closet.

The sacristan Julius Knaup also added fuel to the rumor that diabolical powers could have played a part in the disappearance of the teacher. Aghast, he told everyone about the furious struggle
that had taken place in the church. First he discovered the curtain torn down at the entrance, and next he saw that someone had knocked over the lectern on the altar. And the blood! Blood
everywhere! Smeared on the steps to the altar, on the lectern, in the nave. Some men had immediately run off with Julius Knaup to follow the trail. It petered out by the watering trough, where they
could only find hoof prints, which Kora Konstantin’s brother-in-law Marku interpreted as an infallible sign that the Goat-Footed One himself had emerged from the mouth of hell to defile the
church and on his way back home simply took Barbu along into the Realm of Darkness. Neither Marku Konstantin nor the sacristan Julius Knaup mentioned the fact that inside the church the Eternal
Flame was no longer burning.

Father Johannes Baptiste could have shed some light on the darkness of rumor, but he had withdrawn into the rectory to work on his sermon for that coming Sunday. He had his stalwart housekeeper
Fernanda turn away anyone who rang his doorbell. The news that the priest had explicitly ordered even Communists like the Brancusis to come to church on Sunday had already spread through the
village, and everyone expected some fireworks. But several people doubted the weight of his words, for Johannes Baptiste’s senility was growing more obvious by the day. He was getting grayer,
wearier, and more confused. And next Sunday? Would he once again thunder combative words from the pulpit? Go up against the Bolsheviks on the Sputnik question? How would he react to the
party’s plans to collectivize the farmers in a kolkhoz? When the dispossessors arrived, would he demand unquestioned obedience to the state? “Render unto Caesar the things which are
Caesar’s” was one of his favorite sayings. On the other hand, Pater Johannes had always been a friend of the farmer. But was he on their side now? Would he call upon them to disobey,
resist, even revolt?

Only later did I hear all about these questions and the whole brouhaha. I was sleeping, and my mother Kathalina and Grandfather Ilja left me in peace.

When I woke up refreshed on Friday morning, I came to a decision: nothing would prevent me from finding out what was behind Barbu’s disappearance. But first I had to free myself from the
burden of damnation the overbearing priest Johannes Baptiste had heaped on my head. My deep resentment of the old man had been transformed while I slept. The heat of my anger had given way to cool
calculation. I was unjustly suspected of a grave offense. To violate the Eternal Flame could cost a Catholic his salvation. But I hadn’t committed the crime. I wanted nothing more to do with
Fritz Hofmann, ever. But betray him? I would never do that. There was only one way out of my dilemma: confession.

In contrast to my original resolve never to honor the priest with another word, I would go and confess to him. It was surely a great violation to intentionally conceal a sin in the confessional,
but could the opposite possibly be wrong? Could it be sinful to confess to a shameful deed even if you hadn’t done it? Was such a person a bald-faced liar? A sinner? Or wasn’t he really
a sort of martyr—a saint like those early Christians who preferred being torn apart by lions in the Colosseum to kissing Caesar’s image on a coin. I would admit that in the midst of an
inexplicable blackout of my faith, I had extinguished the Eternal Flame, and I would repent and do penance for my sin. And then the crime would be gone from the world and my inner peace restored
without me ratting on Fritz Hofmann. After Sunday Mass I would wait for Pater Baptiste outside the sacristy and ask for the sacrament of absolution.

O
n Friday, November 8, the second day after Barbu’s disappearance, they called Plutonier Cartarescu over from Apoldasch, less out of real concern
than not to leave any stone unturned.