“Only five each!" and my father would bring home just five oranges and five bananas. And we would keep them in our room, the kids room, and life became so much brighter.
The bananas would change color from that green that only bananas have to a bright yellow, and we would eat them over the next ten days. One day a banana, one day an orange, until we had no more and life was gray again as it usually was from the 5th of January, the last day of our winter celebrations, John the Baptist’s day, to the Ignat's Day, pig slaughtering day, on December 20th.
“Christmas without the smell of oranges is not the Christmas I was looking for”, I said in a fake happy voice not wanting to make mom suffer more than she already was, but I got no reply. I guess I shouldn’t have said that. That year we could not do our orange worshipping ritual of cutting the oranges and eating them while beautifully preserving their skins.
Maybe you've seen it, maybe not, maybe you've done it, maybe not, but to peel an orange and leave behind a beautiful flower you just need a sharp knife and some patience. First, with a single cut you open the orange across the bottom. Then cut the skin with vertical strokes from that open bottom to 3cm from the top. You can go on 6 to 8 times, depending on how big the orange is, and then start to peel while keeping the skin in one piece. The final result is an empty orange which we used to display in an empty glass, and day by day we would watch its color with hope, without knowing that 15 years later in Romania another “revolution” would take place, the Orange Revolution. The people voted massively against the former communists who were not expelled from power in the bloody events of 1989, but rather reconfirmed in it.
We displayed those orange skins every year, until they turned into flowers, and threw them out only in early summer, when their orange color would have turned dark and not be a pleasant sight anymore.
I was still thinking about oranges and bananas when my mom changed places with me and furiously continued to knead the dough. She was so much more experienced and it seemed fun and easy. I was sure it was not. I needed all my strength to keep the kneading bowl in place, while my mother’s hands performed like an industrial dough kneading machine we used to see on the news, almost every day.
What a country of masochists Romania was… The sadistic TV crews always showed collective farms producing even more food and Romania ranked number five in wheat exports in the world, but we had to buy bread with coupons!
My dad stood in line once a year for our oranges and bananas, but I stood in line almost every day for bread. For one hour, for two hours, three, for as long as it took.
The bread shop was run by Mrs Presecan, a soft looking, stocky lady in her 40’s. She would wait from morning to early afternoon in her empty store where she had nothing to sell, while people started to gather outside. It was always better to get there early, but with school, lunch, chores and friends wanting to play, it was impossible most of the time, so I usually ended up around halfway down from the top of the line. And while there, shorter than the adults around me, I used to listen to their talk, usually local gossip, sometimes political jokes, sometimes food recipes, and constantly move my weight from one foot to the other, watching the ground for familiar looking stones, following with my eyes ants that had already got food for their homes...
“Half of their lives people just wait”, comforted my father when I used to complain, and I guess he was right. I was always waiting for something. Thinking about countries that I had visited in the books I had read, or in my dreams after listening to people talking about them.
And then the bread truck would show up, and people would push towards the shop doors, pushing and kicking their way, not thinking about the kids standing in line. Sometimes without once touching the ground with my feet I was carried in and out, but that was life and I had to buy bread, my family trusted me to do it. I had no other choice.
The truck always came down the road and then turned around in the middle of the street, hitting the breaks when its rear was parallel with the bread shop door.
And the driver and the other deliveryman would get out and the people push with even more impatience. But they would first smoke their stinky cigarettes, and then, just before the crowd was going to literally go crazy they would open the back doors. Round bread would shine from inside the truck and no matter how powerful the sunshine was, to us the bread shined even stronger.
Its perfume however was more hypnotic than its shining and suffocating inside that pack of hungry adults I could hear stomachs protesting and, as the two deliverymen started to unload the truck all conversations ceased, fists clenched exact change, hands got the bread coupons ready for stamping.
If you think that unloading a truck full of bread takes time, you’re wrong! It doesn’t. Or at least it didn’t back in 1989 when the deliverymen would take the boxes full of bread and empty them on the floor, creating a pile of bread that almost filled up the small bread shop.
Mrs Presecan stood behind the counter, knife ready.
When I first visited Germany and France I saw that only some bakers had knives on the counters and only in very expensive bakeries where customers would choose to buy a cut of bread instead of the whole thing. But Mrs Presecan’s shop wasn’t a posh German bakery and we didn’t buy part loaves because it was our choice.
On our monthly bread coupon was written the amount we would get. We didn’t want to buy less, and we couldn’t buy more, so Mrs Presecan’s knife had to slice bread in quarters or thirds every time she couldn’t sell full loaves.
Often the bread picked up from the floor was dirty, but when you get a dirty loaf you can always dust it as you do a dirty cloth.
“Three and a quarter loaves, please”, I used to say and hand over my coupon to be stamped and the right change, never bills. Before my grandfather died in 1987 I used to say “Three and a half loaves, please”, and it was like my grandfather was supposed to eat only a quarter of a loaf, nothing more, nothing less.
Three and a quarter loaves was the amount that a family of two adults, two kids and a grandmother was entitled to buy in communist Romania. I am glad I didn’t think so much about it at the time. I could have easily gone crazy, as other people did, and do or say things that may have gotten us imprisoned or even killed.
“Can I have one more today?” I was speaking at once with shame and fear. “We have guests today”. I was ashamed. The people around me would think that if Mrs Presecan granted my request, people at the end of the line would go to their kids empty handed. The fear was because I always knew there was the possibility that I wouldn’t get the desired bread and we wouldn’t be able to feed our guests as we were supposed to.
Suddenly my mom straightened her back. The dough was ready. It looked and smelled good. She covered it with a white piece of cloth and then asked me to wash my hands.
The bowl with the dough was covered sitting on a chair, right in the middle of the kitchen. That image was so familiar to me and always so new. Before my grandfather’s death, my granny used to bake bread twice a week. Her bread was much tastier than what we had to eat that Christmas. But 1986 was the last year we got our share of wheat from the CAP, the Romanian version of the Soviet kolkhoz, and in early 1987 the mill stopped milling wheat. It didn’t close. That mill had a line for corn, too, but why would I care about that?
No wheat to mill no flour to buy, no bread to bake. It was a few months before my grandfather died that my parents decided to rebuild that section of our house which housed the kitchen and in the process we demolished our oven and with it a huge part of our lifestyle.
It didn’t seem important to me at the time to rebuild a traditional wood burning oven, but afterwards, when we couldn’t eat oven-dried prunes or oven-dried pears, or have fruitcakes baked in that oven, life became duller than before.
“If you rebuild the house, I will surely die”, said my grandfather to my dad, and we all looked at him in sympathy. Despite not showing much of the 82 years he had lived before 1986, his age was catchi
ng up with him and he was, as always, right. He died in 1987 of pulmonary cancer. The doctors tried to cure an ulcer he had on his ear with radiation, and they exposed him to too much. He died coughing up his lungs, but his ear was just fine. A huge victory for the doctor that cured him.
It was late afternoon and he was lying in his bed, the whole family around him, to be with him, to hear his stories. Simion Grancea had only 8 years of formal schooling. But his father was a sergeant in the Austro-Hungarian Imperial Army and he wanted to pass away with dignity.
“I guess that I’d be an old fool to say au revoir”, he said in a low voice and everybody understood at once what was about to happen. “Can I have a last moment to myself?” he asked again and without waiting for a response he turned away from us and we distinctly heard his last breath.
Two days later, when his body was laid in the coffin in our front room and I got a few moments alone with him I touched his cold hand that used to take me so many times to see the trains. I promised I would leave Avrig and go further than anyone in our family ever had, so the people of the world, the free world, would hear my name, his name and see how noble his kin was, is. Our nickname was “The Sergeants” and we were proud...
But then, how could we possibly have known that rebuilding that part of the house would kill my grandfather? He had said the same when he planted that walnut tree at the end of the garden: “When this tree is as wide as my chest I will die”, and that tree was as wide as his chest for as long as I can remember...
Who could have known?
The third day after he died I got a day off school. I was at Mrs Presecan’s bread shop in the morning, waiting for the bread truck. I was there with Uncle Lulu and his car, a forest green Dacia 1300 with a French engine. Uncle Lulu was an accountant at the Glass Factory and had some leverage everywhere so he placed a private order with the Bread Factory in Sibiu. We were there for 800 large butter rolls, 300g each, that we planned to give with handkerchief-wrapped candles to the mourners that would see Sergeant Simion off on his last journey.
And the truck came but there were no people to flock around and push to get into the small bread shop. Money changed hands and the truckers didn’t throw the butter rolls on the floor but placed them carefully in Uncle Lulu’s car.
Then out of nowhere Bogdan and Emil, my friends and classmates passed by and I rushed to them and gave them some butter rolls that they could eat with everybody else at school. Uncle Lulu scolded me. He feared we wouldn't have enough for all the mourners that would come. But my friends got the rolls and a few days later at school they were still talking about it like they were some kind of heroes. I felt that funerals definitely had some benefits, at least for those still living.
In the end, Uncle Lulu was almost right, but still, with fingers crossed, we had enough for everyone who came to pay their respects. "Odihneasca-se in pace" (Rest in peace), the people said, and those were exactly the same words that the bread deliverymen used as a goodbye.
The deliverymen moved on for they were late. That day everybody would wait an hour more in front of the bread shop, but not so impatient as usual. They would already have butter rolls at home thanks to their family members who had seen my grandfather off on his last journey.
Back upstairs Felicia was still watching the Revolution live on the blaring black and white TV. I was there only to steal a candy from the box with the Christmas tree ornaments. Those candies came wrapped in bright colored paper and their purpose was to hang in the Christmas tree. I remember that when I was little they used to be chocolate candies. Then, when I entered school in 1982 they turned in chocolate covered jelly, and then, after 86' they were just sugar candies. They could just as well use sugar candies, chocolate was too expensive for the people, Ceauşescu had thought one day...
But they were something I could play with. I had discovered that I could replace the candy inside the wrapper with a piece of paper, and the effect would be the same, so every now and then I was indulging myself in the sweets. Not as often as I wished. Those candies were supposed to last until the 5th of January, and dad would be concerned if he saw I was eating too much sugar.
It’s strange that my mother agree with him. And even stranger was the fact that she was constantly making me sweets and buying acacia honey. Every day before going to bed, long after having brushed my teeth, she would give me a big spoon of honey, it was like a ritual, but a ritual that I so much enjoyed. And I was a healthy kid who had no cavities. They would come later, after leaving my house to go to high school in Sibiu where I switched from the healthy food I was used to, to the canteen and junk food that appeared on the market after the Revolution.
On the TV set the Revolutionaries were running the country. They were fighting from Studio 6 of the TV station and it appeared that the terrorists were trying to break in.
“The Russians just can’t come”, I said to my sister and started to remember the story that we were told so many times in school by our teacher. The story of how the Russians were camped in the Brukenthal palace in Avrig, and how over the winter they completely destroyed the place, burned down all the late 18th Century and early 19th Century antique furniture, how they stole everybody's long winter coats and watches.
“One day three soldiers went into that wine cellar and started to drink, and they got drunk and started to fire their guns and cracked a huge wine casket only to drown in it”. That was the story. The true one. But the Russian commander said that his men had been intentionally drowned and the cellar’s owner was shot and buried like a common thief while those three drunks were put in the same cemetery as war heroes.
Those were tough times and I really hoped we wouldn't have to live through such times.
But hard times were to come. We didn’t know it yet, the people on the TV screen were only impostors. Starting with Iliescu, the apparatchik that wanted to be our Gorbachev, with Petre Roman, the son of Walter Roman, the very Jew that came from Moscow in a Soviet tank to install the communist regime in Bucharest, along with his friend and Jew, Ana Pauker, with General Stănculescu, house man of the Ceauşescus.
They were there to stop us from living our democratic dreams, to stop us from reforming the country. When the Czechs sold their Skoda enterprises to Volkswagen in Germany for 1 Deutchemark, Romanians were fooled by Iliescu and Roman into shouting “We don’t sell our country”. And we didn’t. We gave it for free to the people on that TV screen and their families and friends. And they did with what they got the only thing they could have done. Destroyed everything and started a sale.
Maybe worse than the Russians, the deep economic crisis that followed in the early 90’s, with sky rocketing inflation, brought us stress and despair. But I didn’t know that those things would come. Neither did the soldiers defending the TV station from the invisible terrorists. With one exception they all looked like kids and most of them were malnourished after so many months in our glorious shovel and plough wielding Army.
That one exception was a big, well-fed soldier, defending the TV tower with only a small handgun. “You're so fucking big, why don’t you have a bigger gun?” a captain asked him. “Give him a machine gun!” the captain barked the order to his unit leader, and he got the biggest machine gun on that barricade. He felt so proud carrying it and shooting it in the night towards the invisible terrorists. How was he supposed to know that twenty years later he would be the biggest Romanian ever? Weighting almost 400 kilos, with a waist line of more than 2 meters, shitting in a bucket because he couldn’t fit into the bathroom? When he was shooting the machine-gun he was under the illusion he was getting the terrorists. But the real terrorists were the people he was defending, and his biggest foe was capitalism. Its junk food, its Coca-Cola and potato chips, the super-sized meals that he came to enjoy. His wife would cook every day as if it were Christmas day, forgetting the fasting and the simple way of life that they enjoyed before getting married, before Romanian communism met its end, before her husband started to grow bigger an
d bigger until he became trapped in their own living room.
Watching the Romanian Revolution live was exciting but we were getting tired. Many years later, I once rented the entire season 1 of "24", that blockbuster American drama, and watched it in 18 hours, and the feeling was exactly the same. It was exciting and interesting to watch but at the same time it was painful to continue watching it for so long.
That was why I left my sister with my grandmother to watch TV and went to the kitchen to see the fruitcake.
As I had been hoping the beer yeast had done its magic and now the kneading bowl looked like a balloon ready to burst. On the table the kneading board (a 1.5 meter wooden square) was already oiled. In all cook books I have read the same old advice of putting flour on the board when kneading and flattening dough. But this only increases the amount of flour in the dough, so we used oil instead.
Now it was time for some fun. Me and my mom took chunks of dough, flattened them on the board until less than 1cm thick and then covered them with ground nuts, cocoa powder and sugar, lemon peel in sugar, or, as a variation, raisins soaked in brandy with vanilla oil, or, yet another variation, diced Turkish jelly. Then we would roll the dough into a long cylinder shape and we would place it in a buttered rectangular cooking tin.
We had many cooking tins. We were always baking fruitcakes. Some of the fruitcakes went to another uncle of mine, my mom’s halfbrother, Vasile. He was an alcoholic who was always losing his job but who already had a family and three little girls. His wife was from Oltenia and they clearly were a good match. She never baked, so we felt that it was our duty to supply them with fruitcakes. We couldn’t leave them have a Christmas table without Christmas cakes.
My mom phoned their neighbor and asked him to send her brother for the Christmas supplies later on that day. This was how things worked in Romania. Not many people had phones. The telephone company was completely analog and could not provide numbers for everyone.
The Pigs' Slaughter Page 8