The Madonna on the Moon Read Free Page B

word. Much more than the fact that Barbu was
apparently getting something important down on paper at this ungodly hour, it was her face I found astonishing. In the last few years of school, I had come to think she was disgusting. I never
looked at her except with contempt, if not revulsion.
    Yet the Barbu I saw early on the morning of November 6, 1957, was different. She was bright and clear. Beautiful, even. Someday in the not-too-distant future I would understand what was
happening in Angela Barbulescu’s cottage that morning, and it would plunge me into the abyss. But how could I have known it in that dreary November dawn?
    P avel, you’re not going to tell Kathalina about that dumb idea with the funnel, are you? Your mother is not amused by that stuff.”
    “I didn’t see anything. Especially not on your birthday. Word of honor.”
    That took a load off Grandfather’s mind, whereupon I shook his hand, wished him happy fifty-fifth, and gave him a package wrapped in shiny red paper.
    As she did every year, my mother (and Granddad’s daughter-in-law) had asked Adamski the mailman to purchase a box of cigars in Kronauburg, the district capital. Ilja unwrapped his present,
knowing full well he would soon be holding a wooden box with sixty Caballeros Finos, each thick as his thumb. Sixty cigars were the precise number Grandfather needed for his systematic smoking
habits, plotted out for the year ahead. Sixty cigars were exactly enough for one every Sunday, one each for the parish fairs on the Feast of the Assumption, the Feast of the Virgin of Eternal
Consolation (the patron saint of Baia Luna), and two or three other holidays. When he added in the birthdays of his closest friends and compensated for the doubling that sometimes occurred when a
religious or secular holiday such as All Saints’, Christmas, or the Day of the Republic fell on a Sunday, then the inevitable result was that one final Caballero remained for his birthday,
just before he opened the box for the following year.
    Ilja thanked me and, contrary to his customary procedure of smoking only in the evening, decided to allow himself then and there the pleasure of a Cuban, as he called his cigars. He pulled out
his last Caballero and lit up. “America”—he sighed and blew a few smoke rings into the air—“America! What a country!”
    Of course, my mother Kathalina and I knew that Ilja’s Cubans had never seen the hold of a transatlantic freighter. The Cyrillic letters on the cigar bands betrayed the fact that the
tobacco had been rolled in a Bulgarian factory near Blagoevgrad and probably transported across the Danube on the new Bridge of Friendship between Ruse and Giurgiu in a diesel rig. But
Mother’s lips were sealed, leaving her father-in-law with the conviction that Cuba was the most marvelous among the United States of America.
    By the age of five or six, I had already guessed that Granddad could barely read. Up to then I had hung devotedly on his lips when he told me stories or pretended to be reading one from a book.
But I began to notice that sometimes he got the plot hopelessly tangled up, mixing up persons, places, and times and very seldom turning the page. Once I started first grade, my suspicions were
confirmed. So as not to embarrass Grandfather I didn’t tell anyone about my discovery. And since Ilja could juggle numbers with great facility and my unmarried aunt Antonia, who had set up
her digs in the garret upstairs, took care of the bookkeeping for our family’s shop, Ilja’s defect remained for many years hidden from the rest of the village and even from the Gypsy
Dimitru.
    My father Nicolai, on the other hand, certainly had no problem reading and writing when still alive. I gathered that from the underlinings and marginal notes he had made, as a young man, in a
volume of poetical works by Mihail Eminescu. The only other things of any value he left me were
Das Kapital
by Karl Marx and a beat-up chess set with the