The Madonna on the Moon by Rolf Bauerdick Read Free Book Online Page A

her right in the eye. Mockingly. Then he rose from his seat and walked up to the blackboard cool as a cucumber. He picked up a piece of chalk and wrote,
    When Barbu whispers in my ear,
    my thing gets hard and out to here.
    I felt hot and cold all over. Although shocked by Fritz’s impudence, I was impressed by his daring. I was sure the older kids would burst out laughing. But it stayed quiet.
Someone in the first row dropped a pencil. Barbu walked quite slowly up to the front. In a second she would pick up her stick and start whipping him and screeching, striking again and again. And
Fritz wouldn’t bat an eye. He would grin like always when Barbu cut him into kind ling, screamed herself into a fury, and finally collapsed in exhaustion. But Barbu didn’t strike. She
wiped the blackboard clean with a rag and then blew her nose into it and rubbed her eyes. The chalk dust mixed with her tears and smeared her face.
    “You can go home now,” she said softly.
    Her voice sounded infinitely weary. But everyone stayed seated. Only Fritz hastily packed up his schoolbag and disappeared. Then the bell rang. Angela Barbulescu took Stephanescu’s picture
down from the wall and shuffled out of the classroom in her rubber boots.

Chapter Two

    HONEST GYPSIES, PIOUS SAXONS,
    AND THE STUDIES OF THE BLACK PHILOSOPHER
    Send this man straight to hell! Exterminate him!
Whatever Barbu had meant, it exceeded my powers of imagination. Go to hell! Devil take you! How often I had heard
those curses in the barroom. Even Father Johannes Baptiste wasn’t any too choosy when thundering imprecations against the enemies of the faith from the pulpit. But exterminate someone?
Forestall the Last Judgment? Never!
    Exterminate! What did that mean anyway? You exterminated weeds, annoying insects, and rats when they got to be a plague. And enemies, of course, but only in war or in self-defense and only if
you were a hero. Father Johannes Baptiste warned us repeatedly in his sermons to beware of all exterminators whose titles ended in “-ist.” The Hitlerists exterminated the Jews, the
fascists murdered the Socialists, the Stalinists sent their enemies to die like dogs in Siberia, and even the capitalists were exterminators who drove their competition into financial ruin and
plunged working families into poverty and misery.
    But not in Baia Luna. No one here to my knowledge had exterminated anyone else, and nobody had ever been exterminated. Sure, the Brancusi brothers were Communists and always talked big about how
they were going to wipe out the moneybag landowners and the parasite bourgeoisie. That did sound like extermination. But Liviu, Roman, and Nico Brancusi were basically not such bad guys. I
couldn’t imagine they would ever really kill anyone.
    Of course from time to time, there were nasty incidents in the village. Occasional arguments flared up, heated words that sometimes ended in fistfights. But what got people worked up one day was
usually settled by a handshake on the next or forgotten by the day after that. I was never aware of any signs of deep malignity or irreconcilable enmity in the village. To my fifteen-year-old self,
Baia Luna seemed a peaceful place where the indigenous population lived with the Hungarians and Saxons who had settled here centuries ago in an unspoken compact not to make life difficult for one
another.
    The Gypsies held to that as well. When people referred to them, they always called them the Blacks, as was customary in Transmontania, even though among the Gypsies in our village were a couple
of flaxen-haired, blue-eyed children who didn’t fit the stereotype at all. The Gypsies didn’t call us the Whites in return; they referred to us as
gaje,
which means
“strangers” but also “fools” or “dummkopfs.”
    Nevertheless, we
gaje
considered the Blacks in Baia Luna to be poor but honest folk. They belonged to the Gabor tribe and their ancestors had lived in Hungary. The men wore black