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

trousers, black jackets, and wide-brimmed black hats. The women dressed in red skirts and braided gold coins and colorful ribbons into their hair. When I was little, I thought the women simply
chose colors they liked, but then I asked Buba Gabor during recess if they meant anything. Buba was pretty as a picture and the only Gypsy girl in the village who through her own stubbornness and
with the encouragement of her uncle Dimitru obtained her family’s permission to attend school at least on uneven days, Monday, Wednesday, and Friday. She told me that among her people, you
could tell from the color of the ribbons if a girl was single, already engaged, or married. I blushed and asked what her own status was in this regard. Buba answered pertly that she wasn’t
allowed to tell that to a
gajo
like me. Then she brushed a black lock out of her eyes and warbled sweetly, “Only a man with beautiful hands can win me.” Whereupon I stuck my
hands into my pockets quick as a flash, who knows why. Buba laughed and ran off.
    On summer days, the Gabors strolled up and down the village street or sat in front of their houses playing cards and smoking unfiltered Carpatis. Their proudest possessions were their numerous
children and two dozen powerful Percherons they pastured at the edge of the village. In October they went to the horse market in Bistrita where they used the meeting with other tribes to match-make
for their sons and daughters and change the color of their ribbons. When the Gabors returned to Baia Luna, they celebrated noisy weddings for days on end before returning to their bleak everyday
existence. In the village the Blacks’ idleness was regarded with suspicion but accepted without open hostility, even by the Germans, whose industrious character included deep contempt for any
kind of idleness.
    T he fact that the hearts of the Saxons weren’t paralyzed by zealous piety was due to the influence of Pater Johannes. I knew only the vague
outlines of his story. What was certain was that in 1935, two years after the Hitlerists had seized power in Germany, the abbot of the Benedictine monastery in Melk had dispatched Baptiste from the
Danube into the mountains of Transmontania. The order probably hoped to get rid of Brother Johannes in his old age, since he was already approaching seventy back then.
    Once Johannes Baptiste had moved into the empty rectory in Baia Luna with wagonfuls of theological books and philosophical writings, the most fantastic rumors began circulating in the village,
spread mainly by the sacristan Julius Knaup, the overweight Kora Konstantin, and her equally fat mother Donata. People said Johannes Baptiste had fathered a bastard child with a Viennese hooker. It
was also rumored that despite tortures of self-castigation he had been unable to keep his hands off the boy sopranos in the monastery choir. Even worse for the Catholics was the accusation that
Baptiste had been banished to Baia Luna for delivering heretical sermons abusing the Holy See in Rome and even Pope Pius himself.
    These poisonous rumors must have left my grandfather no peace. On a Sunday in the autumn of 1935 he screwed up his courage and asked the priest over a Sunday-morning glass of wine in the tavern,
“Reverend, are the things people say about you true?”
    Johannes Baptiste’s answer would enter the annals of the village as “the tavern sermon.”
    First Pater Johannes burst out laughing, slapped his thigh, and claimed he hadn’t created just
one
bastard with the strength of his loins but dozens of them. Then, however, the
pater turned very serious.
    “Yes,” he said to the assembled men, “they sent me to you in the mountains because I followed my conscience and not my vows to the order and the Holy Father in Rome.”
    Then Pater Johannes told about a contractual agreement called a concordat between the Vatican and the German Reich, whose chancellor was about to plunge the world into a yawning abyss. The evil