The Madonna on the Moon (15 page)

I saw Karl Koch through the eyes of a boy, but everything I had seen convinced me the courageous Saxon would never draw up that damn list. It was November 8, a Friday. On
Monday the Securitate major would show up in Baia Luna again and demand the list. On the left the names of those who wanted the kolkhoz, on the right the names of those opposed to the
nationalization of their land.

As the gray jeep sped off in the direction of Kronauburg, some of the men clapped their German neighbor on the shoulder and expressed their admiration for his blunt words and the guts it took to
say them.

“‘Pretty boy’! Not bad!” said Istvan. “‘Fatface’ would’ve been even better.”

If I had to guess, I’d say the Hungarian would be on the right side of the list that Karl Koch would definitely not be turning over. Same for the Petrovs and the Deslius. And of course the
Scherban brothers and Grandfather Ilja. On the left the three Brancusis, all of them stout comrades. Certainly their father Bogdan as well, who didn’t till his land anyway, just let it go to
seed. Simenov the blacksmith would also be on the left. I wasn’t sure about the Konstantins and the sacristan Julius Knaup, nor about Alexandru Kiselev. As a future employee of the state
tractor factory, would he dare to have his name on the right side? There was no question where the Saxons stood, except for the photographer Heinrich Hofmann. The Gypsies didn’t even enter
into the picture, since they had nothing to collectivize.

“Man, Karl, have you gone crazy?”

Hermann Schuster shoved the shoulder clappers aside and started rebuking his fellow Saxon. “Did you have to call Raducanu a pretty boy? The man is dangerous!”

“I’ll say whatever I want to. A pretty boy is a pretty boy.”

“Of course,” replied Schuster, “but it was a mistake to call Raducanu that to his face, a really dumb mistake.”

Hans Schneider put in his two cents: “Not here in the street. Let’s go to Ilja’s where we can talk it over in private.” Some agreed and started off toward the
tavern—but only those whose names would have been on the right side.

I was still preoccupied with my fears about the extinguished Eternal Flame and the mysterious disappearance of Angela Barbulescu and so only grudgingly followed Grandfather’s summons to
help him out in the tavern. As I was about to open a bottle of
zuika
, the men signaled me not to. Those who had just been congratulating Karl Koch for his resistance to Lupu Raducanu now
admitted ruefully that Koch’s public protest against the Security Service had been extremely unwise and could have unforeseeable consequences.

Hermann Schuster’s reproach couldn’t be ignored: “If you hadn’t provoked Raducanu, the idea with the list of names would never have occurred to him.”

“You shouldn’t ever tangle with the Securitate, especially not that Lupu. He’s nothing but trouble,” remarked Alexandru Kiselev, whose only dream was to install
transmissions in Stalinstadt.

“Do you realize what you’ve done, Karl?” Hermann Schuster asked his friend with growing urgency. “You know what it means to have the Securitate as an enemy? It means
paragraph one hundred sixty-six: resisting state authority, threatening national security. For that you get two years, five years, maybe even seven years. Off to Aiud or Pitesti. They mess you up.
Is spitting on an asshole’s shoes worth that? If you make this list, we’ll all be in trouble. If you don’t, they’ll just come and get you.”

“Fuck the list,” replied young Petre. “With it or without it, either way they’re going to force us into the kolkhoz. If not today, then tomorrow. And if Karl
doesn’t make the list, somebody else will. The Brancusis or Simenov or whoever. The main thing is they want to divide the village. If we’re fighting each other, it’s easier to
dispossess us.”

“They’re not going to collectivize me!” Karl Koch banged his fist on the table. “You can quote me. I’ve been on the wrong side once already. Never again! I must
have been crazy to run and join that fucking war. I cheered along with everybody else for that strutting rooster and his Third Reich. And I did things I should never have done. Never, never again!
I’m not going to let these crooks turn me into their stooge. Black, brown, or red, I don’t care. Over my dead body.”

“Okay, okay, Karl. We were all stupid.” Hermann Schuster put his arm around his friend’s shoulders. “But man, it’s not just about you. It’s about all of us,
all of us who want to live here together in peace. It’s about your wife and children, too, Karl. Think about Klara, think about Franz and Theresa.”

Karl Koch was silent.

“But it’s true. Petre is right,” Hermann Schuster continued. “Raducanu wants to drive a wedge between us. We can’t let him do it. We need unity.”

The men sat together awhile longer but didn’t make much progress toward deciding what to do about the disunity threatening the village. The only sure thing was that Karl Koch was not going
to make a list of names. No one, however, had a useful suggestion for how the Saxon should behave when Lupu Raducanu showed up again on Monday. More stymied than purposeful, they all agreed to wait
and see what Pater Johannes would say in his sermon on Sunday. But then because of the urgency of the situation, they decided to seek the priest’s advice the next morning. With the authority
of the clergy behind them, they hoped it would be easier to resist the power of the Securitate.

I was shocked when Karl Koch got up to go home. He looked tired and gray, older by several years and smaller than usual. Suddenly I understood what fear is. Without being afraid myself, I saw
what fear can do to someone. Hermann Schuster’s appeal to think of his wife and two little children had awakened it in him. He was disabled by a power that snuck up on him with the question,
What will happen if . . . ?

I tried to imagine what Karl Koch must be thinking. What would happen if he didn’t write down the names? What if on Monday he just went and hid out in the woods for a few days? Raducanu
would leave, empty-handed. But the major would be back again sometime with ten or twenty of his people. They would come looking for him but wouldn’t be able to find him. But what then? What
would happen to his wife and his children? Who would look after them? What about the others in the village? Would the Security Service interrogate Karl Koch’s friends as accessories to an
enemy of the state? And what if Koch stayed in the village and confronted Raducanu with the words: Fuck your list, Fatface, write it yourself! That would mean Aiud or Pitesti. I didn’t even
know where those two towns were, but I knew there were big prisons there. People said that anyone who made it out of them was never the same again. After two or three years in the clink, the wives
no longer recognized their husbands nor children their fathers.

T
hat Konstantin woman is nuts,” said my mother Kathalina at the supper table. “She really believes the devil himself’s been running
around the village at night. Sometimes I have to wonder what kind of place this is, anyway.”

“Whoever pays attention to anything Kora says is beyond help. Best thing is just to let it go in one ear and out the other,” Grandfather replied. “But it is a funny thing about
that blood. Everyone in the village is scratching their heads about the trail of blood from the altar to the horse trough. I’d sure like to know what went on that night.”

I was relieved. No one seemed to have the least inkling that Fritz and I had anything to do with what happened. Strangely enough, no one said anything about the Eternal Flame being out. Could it
be burning again? Had Johannes Baptiste or the sacristan Knaup relit it? I’d have to take a look. Next morning, when the delegation of men paid the priest a visit to confer about Karl
Koch’s list and how to get out of it, I’d go into the church.

E
ven though the modest flicker of the red lamp was hardly noticeable in the daylight, I saw immediately that it wasn’t burning. But nobody else
had noticed. With the little box of matches still in my pocket I could reestablish order.

But I didn’t. It was Fritz Hofmann who had blown out the light, not me. And it was up to him to straighten things out insofar as that was possible. Surely the Christian God was merciful
and forgave every sinner: every liar, every thief, perhaps even every murderer, as long as he truly repented. But there probably wasn’t much that could be done about someone who blew out the
Eternal Flame. Fritz would be punished. Maybe not today or tomorrow, but sometime or other he would pay for his sacrilege. On the other hand, what if God was in fact dead, as that Nietzsche guy
claimed? Then Fritz Hofmann had nothing to fear, for a dead God cannot punish. But could God be dead? Could he die at all? If he’s dead, I reasoned, then he must have been alive at some
point. But if he was once alive, then he had to be both almighty and immortal, because a god who wasn’t almighty and immortal was no kind of god. The true God, however, could obviously not be
dead because of his immortality. Accordingly, Nietzsche was wrong. But was that thinker really so limited that I, a simple barroom gofer, could overturn his declaration that God was dead with a few
logical arguments? I had to discover what Nietzsche really meant and, while I was at it, find out something about Heinrich Hofmann—what he believed, what he thought.

There was no way I was going to ask the photographer directly. And Fritz was dead to me in any case. Under other circumstances, I might have asked the priest for advice, but if I approached
Johannes Baptiste with the riddle of the death of God after the incident with the Eternal Flame, he would deny me absolution until the end of time. The only remaining possibility was Dimitru the
Gypsy, Lord of the Library. Maybe its collection included even the works of Nietzsche. If so, Dimitru was sure to have studied them.

I left the church and set off for the library. Winter was on its way—a good time to read, which I otherwise never did.

If it had snowed during the night on Friday, then the four men who gathered on the village square on Saturday morning to visit Pater Johannes would have noticed the strange footprints on their
way to the rectory. But the first snowfall of the winter of ’57 didn’t begin until midday. Karl Koch, Petre Petrov, Kallay the Hungarian, and Hermann Schuster stood at the rectory door,
and the latter pushed the bell. Fernanda the housekeeper would surely let them in, although in the last few days she had turned every visitor away from her Johannes’s door so he would run no
chance of being disturbed while preparing his Sunday sermon. But the men were determined not to let themselves be brushed off. They had a more urgent need for their pastor’s advice than ever
before.

“I’m going to see Dimitru in the library,” I explained, hoping to forestall any suspicion that I wanted to get mixed up in the adults’ business.

“You can forget the library. Nobody’s opening the door,” said Petre. “We’ve been ringing the bell the whole time.” Karl Koch belabored the heavy wooden door
with his fists. Hermann Schuster had just suggested calling Simenov the blacksmith, who knew how to crack any lock, when Dimitru came shuffling up to the rectory on his way to the library.

“Oh! You here? Blessed are those who seek words of wisdom, for—”

“Nobody’s answering the door,” said Karl Koch. “Something’s wrong.”

Dimitru produced a key. “Did you ring?”

“Do we look like idiots?” snapped Petre. “We’ve been ringing the bell for half an eternity.”

“Then there’s something wrong.” Dimitru unlocked the door.

Everything was quiet on the ground floor and in the library. Following the Gypsy, the men climbed the stairs and found the door to Johannes Baptiste’s private apartment cracked open. When
they called out his and Fernanda’s names and got no response, I followed them. No one paid any attention to me. Hermann Schuster pushed the door and met with resistance. “The rug must
be jamming it,” he said. They all pushed the door together. They had to push aside something heavy: Fernanda. She lay in the entrance hall in her white apron. There were no signs of injury on
her. Karl Koch knelt down and felt for her pulse. The housekeeper was cold and stiff.

Immediately it became clear that the men would never be able to seek the priest’s advice again. He would never preach again. Prepared for the worst, they entered the parlor, and when they
didn’t find Johannes Baptiste there, they proceeded to his study. I stayed in the background as they came upon a scene of devastation. Books shad been tumbled off the shelves, drawers pulled
out of the chests. The typewriter lay smashed on the floor. The rug was strewn with sheets of paper and notes. And in the midst of it all sat Johannes Baptiste on his desk chair. The thing that was
terrible was not that the priest was dead but the way he had been killed. Johannes sat there naked with his hands tied, his head bowed, and his chin resting on his blood-spattered chest. When Karl
Koch gently raised his head, a horrific wound opened up. Someone had slit the priest’s throat.

Dimitru just stared in dumbfounded disbelief. Then he ran to the door. Again and again he hammered his head against the doorpost. In silence.

The others rubbed dry tears from their eyes. No one said a word. All words were dead, expired even before they were thought.

“What’s that?” asked Petre quietly. He pointed to something that looked like a piece of gray string.

The men looked at one another, perplexed. The string was hanging out of the priest’s mouth.

“A shoelace?” Hermann Schuster finally said the word. “What’s a shoelace doing there?”

When Karl Koch hesitantly took hold of the gray string, he could feel it wasn’t a shoelace. Hermann Schuster nodded to him, and Karl pulled. Hanging from the string in his fingers was a
dead mouse.

“Who would do such a thing?” whispered Istvan Kallay, pressing his hands against his eyes.

“This is nothing you should be seeing.” Hermann Schuster took my arm and tried to hustle me out of the study. But I was rooted so firmly to the spot that the Saxon couldn’t
move me even an inch. I stood petrified before the naked old man on the chair. I felt nothing, but I saw everything. Every detail. I was transformed into a machine, a photographic apparatus that
could fix events in an image but felt nothing. Something in this image caught my attention, something that burned itself onto my retina. It wasn’t the pastor or the gaping wound, not the
blood or the men covering their faces with their hands and not wanting to believe what they saw. In the midst of the books and papers on the floor there was a little white piece of torn paper.
There were only a few words on the handwritten note. I was too far away to read them. The only word I could clearly make out was a name: “Barbu.”