When all the fruitcakes were in their tins I took the white tablecloth and covered them. Before we baked them they had to double in size. But I was patient. I knew I was close to eating some freshly made fruitcake. When I was younger, my mom never let me eat any before Christmas Eve, when she would cut two or three fruitcakes and get them ready for the carol singers. It was customary to serve them fruitcake, talk with them for a while and then give them money before they left, so everyone stopped fasting one day earlier than we were supposed to. But times had changed and I had stopped fasting on the day we slaughtered the pig. It was as if the pig came before Lord Jesus Christ as my angry grandmother had put it...Anyway, my mom always baked a smaller cake for me, along with a flat sweet cake that we would give to the young men from town late Christmas Eve, when they came to sing traditional Christmas carols.
Baking two fruitcakes at a time, my mom would be watching the oven late into the evening, so she was still doing it, and I was still eating my small fruitcake, from which I cut a slice for my sister, when my father came home.
He was happy to be with us again, in the kitchen, and he started to smoke one of his cigarettes and the smoke that I so much liked combined with the baking smells that were coming from the hot oven and that winter day of December 1989 looked so peaceful, so ordinary, such a precious Christmas moment.
We were almost free, my father told us, Ceauşescu was still on the run, he said, and of course he didn’t know that he had already been a prisoner of Iliescu and his men for more than 24 hours.
That day someone had radioed from Sibiu that terrorists were about to attack Avrig, and the people in the city hall got anxious. My father was going for his coffee break at Auntie Anişoara’s house, and they came after him believing that he was a traitor, but things settled down and Mr. Tatu called for calm. But then they had to send someone up the Church Tower to watch the road from Sibiu with a machine gun and the orders were to shoot at all suspicious looking cars.
The fact is that only two shots were fired that day but nobody was hit. The suspicious car was a car that somebody knew. And, as there were very few cars at the time, all of them were safe to drive without being shot at.
“What about other people just happening to pass by”, I asked, and my father told me that if they flew the red, yellow and blue Romanian flag with the communist part cut out they would not be considered suspicious and be let through. And suddenly it occurred to me that either the revolutionaries were utterly stupid or the terrorists were. But again, I was quite young in 1989, and I didn’t speak up so I wouldn't be considered naive.
My mother started to make cornulete. She would use lots of lard for those cookies. The dough would sit for one night in the cold pantry before being used and made into the most fabulous sweets in the world.
It’s strange to think now of cornulete. The last time I had such treats was more than ten years before sitting down to write this book, but I cannot possibly think about that Revolution without my mouth watering at the thought of how good they were.
With nuts, with prune jam or with Turkish jelly, they were covered in powdered sugar so, when put in your mouth, they would stay hard for just a moment before melting into the most perfect sweet bite that one ever tasted. Their filling, the jam or the Turkish jelly would be the final reward, something that I always tried to keep in my mouth as long as possible before letting it go slowly down, a movement of the tongue and throat that had to be perfectly coordinated with the open mouth for the next cornulete. Strange as it is, I discovered recently, a long time after eating my mom’s cornulete that the Chinese have a similar treat. It's a different shape and doesn't have the same filling as my mom put in hers, but no doubt about it, the same kind of dough. And I wasn’t even as surprised as I was when I ordered a 55 proof Chinese brandy which came with a long name of 5 Chinese characters, only to discover it tasted like the one I used to make with my father from prunes kept in barrels in the sunshine until the fermentation processes made our courtyard smell of alcohol.
That evening I refused to eat supper with the rest of my family. I had had almost all the fruitcake that mom baked specially for me, and I was full. So, when my sister joined my grandmother and my parents in the kitchen for dinner, I stayed with the blaring TV. Of course the revolution was continuing, the shooting sound was still coming from the lone speaker that my Opera TV had, and the people on the screen looked sometimes brave, sometimes scared, sometimes tired. But all of them looked like they were fighting each other to be in the center of the screen, as close as possible to Ion Iliescu, our unelected new leader.
Later that day cousin Ioan would call us to tell us in a quite self-satisfied voice that he knew one of those people. It was the assassin-looking guy always standing beside Iliescu and his name was Dan Iosif. After the Revolution it was said that he was the one in the crowd who shouted “Down with Ceauşescu” and that he was among the first to enter the Central Committee building. People would go on to say that it was there he made his first million, looting Ceauşescu’s foreign currency coffers.
It was dark outside and the lights were turned off. I was still alone in front of the TV, watching the Revolution with delight. School uniforms were to be abolished, they said. We could go to school in our own clothes! I was so happy.
One year on, I was a high school student in Sibiu and, being from a small town, I was the least well-dressed in my class. My parents had no money to buy me the fancy clothes my classmates were wearing and the girls never paid any attention to me. The other eight boys in my class didn't seem to be bothered about what I was wearing, until Bogdan, my best friend and halfHungarian, now a trauma doctor, said “Stay away from Circo, he’s always making fun of you”, and he was right. Luckily, soon after Circo found the math and chemistry that we were doing too difficult for him, and moved to another class. At least, the small group of boys that remained, were all my friends, but the girls there never changed, always acting over precious, sadistic and cheap.
But again, on that 23rd of December 1989, the prospect of going to school without a uniform, for the first time in my life, was thrilling. My handmade Sunday clothes were both my mother's and my pride and joy. Everything she couldn’t make we ordered at Mr. Bara's, Avrig’s one and only tailor.
I was friend and classmate with his son, Ovidiu, a very good boy that used to beat me up every time he saw me in kindergarten, but who, only God knows why, turned into a compassionate and fight hating pupil.
When I think back to then, I think that I was quite fortunate to grow up near people like Mr. Bara. As a tailor he was one of only a handful of people in Avrig that were allowed by the communist state to have a private business. He worked at his home, 100 meters up the road from ours, and he would receive us, friends, neighbors and customers with candies and coffee. There, while waiting to be measured, or trying to see if pants would fit or asking him to make the ones that we were wearing a little bit longer, we could look at old German Nekerman magazines from which Mr. Bara used to get inspired when launching Avrig’s latest exclusive fashion.
While he was tailoring pants and jackets and shirts and suits and dresses for wedding-goers, churchgoers and funeral-goers alike, my grandmother was tailoring leather to make sheepskin vests for the young men in our town.
Like Mr. Bara, my grandmother was a certified master craftsman.
In 1993 when she died she was working with her hand up in the air on an invisible vest and she knew she was dying and asked my mom, as she was suddenly aware of herself, to finish her work after she was gone.
Over the years she hopelessly and helplessly tried to get apprentices, but the girls that parents sent her always quit. They hated – because the communist government made them hate – anything traditional. They were peasant-born but somehow so similar in the way they thought to the girls in my posh high school. They all hated handmade things, they all wanted to dress like people in the West, like those that lived their lives from day one in democracies.
On
that very evening my grandmother was eating downstairs with my sister, the grandchild that she loved more than her own sons. She liked my sister more than she liked me, that was a fact. On the night I was born she came to Brukenthal palace, the same one devastated by Russian soldiers after WWII, and, because the rule was that nobody could enter the part of the Palace deliveries were carried out in, asked from the street: “What is it?”
“It’s a boy”, shouted my young and beautiful mom, from a high window, like those women with blue blood that delivered boys and girls there during the 19th Century, but my grandmother said “Not again!”, in a very upset voice, and then she left, taking the handmade cake with her, not once looking back.
One year and a half my mom had to endure the chores and anger that grandmother prepared for her while she was walking away in the night from the Palace. I was her third grandson, born almost two decades after Uncle Ion gave her a grandson, Ioan and Auntie Anişoara, another one, Mihai. And she had waited all those years for a miracle, for a granddaughter and the granddaughter wouldn’t come.
Her own daughter refused to become a traditional leather tailor, and that job was a job that only a woman could do. Another grandson was not what she had wanted, so when Felicia was born she fussed about her so much that I wasn’t yet two when I attacked my sister’s cradle with a stick and hit her face in an act of jealousy that now, as a parent myself, I can't imagine ever doing.
That December in 1989, my grandmother was so close to her dream coming true. She had taught my sister the fine art of needles and everything a young lady had to know, but Felicia was still a child. She was thin and didn’t have the strength to work the needle on the sheep skin. Grandmother did everything by hand and had never heard of a leather tailor who had leather sewing machines. But my grandmother always thought in a couple of years Felicia would be strong enough.
She couldn’t have known that the first lesson she gave my sister was also to be the last one. No leather, no sheep skins, no silk, no needles. The last leatherwork master in that area died at 90 years old a few years before and nobody wanted to take over his stinky, underpaid work. The industrial leather makers dyed the sheep skins while my grandmother wanted them white, or they did not use skins with wool, or they didn’t bother to use sheep skin because shoes were made of pig’s skin.
Afterwards, when she had gone senile, after being just sad, sometimes when I gave her lunch during the long summer holidays I had in high school, I thought of the senility not as a curse but a blessing. The young people of our town started to wear, even on Christmas, blue jeans jackets, instead of her traditional leather vests.
Yes, things changed rapidly after 1989. Borders opened and my father went to visit Turkey.
“When we got out of that bus we looked like a prune basket”, he told me laughing bitterly at the fact that everybody in those days turned to jeans. How stupid I was to be happy to get rid of my school uniform when the entire country stupidly took on capitalism’s Turkish counterfeit Levi’s jeans.
The truth is that at that very moment I wasn’t thinking about Levi’s. Not even in my dreams did I see myself owning an original pair of jeans. I wasn’t a doctor’s son or an apparatchik’s son. We were poor so we had to wear tailored clothes and there was no way around it.
However, the way they prepared the speech, with Iliescu in the middle, was obvious. They knew things that we didn’t and they were about to tell us something any moment now.
“Something has happened! Dad, Felicia, mom, hurry up, something is going to be announced on the TV”.
I was rushing back with my father, shoulder to shoulder, my sister trailing behind us, and we heard from the doorway “The dictator and his wife have been caught”, and we shouted for joy. We were free.
“God help us, he won’t reach a deal with the revolution”, my father said, and as we listened the dictator was about to be put on trial for those thousands of people killed in Timişoara, for the crimes of communism and for keeping us in fear and hunger. "Now, if only the Russians would stay out of it”, he said and he nervously lit a cigarette completely forgetting that he was in the kids’ room and not his smoking haven kitchen.
When we were cheering at the news of the two Ceauşescu’s being caught while on the run they were experiencing already their 28th hour of captivity.
When they were taken to that military compound in Targoviste, they asked the commander, Colonel Kamenici, who he was taking orders from.
"With the situation in Bucharest, in my papers it is written that I shall take orders from General Gusa, the commander of chiefs of staff of the Romanian Army", he answered.
"From the one that I sent to Timişoara to clean up the city and couldn't do the job properly?" Ceauşescu replied.
“Then, from the new minister of defense, Nicolae Militaru”, the commander said tentatively.
“Impossible”, Ceauşescu answered. “Militaru is a KGB agent I personally fired from the Army. It must be someone else”.
“From General Stănculescu”, answered the commander, because Stănculescu, after organizing the repression in Timişoara was now organizing Ceauşescu’s firing squad.
“Yes, you’re right. Son, you are taking orders from General Stănculescu. That’s your minister not Militaru. I made Stănculescu the Army minister this morning”, Ceauşescu had said, and he appeared to be happy about that fact. He was in good hands he thought, unlike his not yet senile wife who saw it coming. When they fled the building of the Central Committee one day before, she had spat on all the generals there. “Traitors! Traitors!” she called them and she was right. After 28 hours of being held captive, with armed guards at the door, she was, as we were, but with completely different feelings, waiting for something gruesome.
I was about to go down to the basement to fetch the wine my father sent me to get when I heard a loud knocking at the gate. Leaving the heavy glass decanter in the snow, I ran upstairs but only when I was inside the house did I say:
“Dad, someone’s at the gate!”
He looked worried muttering:
“Must be Vasile. He is late as usual. Mom left word for him to come and get the Christmas fruitcakes”
He stood up and with deliberate movements started to walk to the door. I wanted to follow, but he asked me to stay behind. He was afraid, I could tell, and so was mom, but I didn’t quite understand why. With Ceauşescu prisoner and awaiting trial we were already free, weren’t we?
“Nuţa!” My father’s half hysteric half nervous voice erupted from downstairs and we all rushed to see what was happening. My mom’s 29 year old half brother was drunk, I could tell without getting too close, but that didn't bother my dad who was trying to carry him inside.
As strange as it was, my dad was insisting to help Vasile to walk despite my uncle’s protests. Only when they got really close did I understand why. Behind them was a trail of what could only be blood. Somehow Vasile had gotten injured, and we all rushed to help.
Clean towels were whipped out of the closet by my furious mother.
“How dare you come here drunk and in this shape?” "Do you think we have it easy here?” she went on.
Half crying, Vasile protested:
“No, you don’t understand”.
“What don’t I understand? You are drunk, that's what I understand”, she roared at him.
“Nuţa, Nuţa!”, her brother cried using her nickname. “I was there, I went to see the Revolution!” he said and my mother seemed to get even angrier. Surely an injury got while fighting was a lot worse than one got from falling on icy roads. After Vasile was set on the armchair facing the blaring TV, from which the now victorious Iliescu acted as Ceauşescu’s clone with nobody seeming to notice, we all saw that the blood in the snow and on our carpets was coming from his left boot. Curious, I took a closer look. Something was wrong. I knew those boots as the previous winter they were my father’s, but they didn’t have a hole in them then. They did now.
My sister saw it, too,
and she quickly went out to get some fresh air. I also was getting lightheaded, but still, as the young man of the house I had to stay to see what it was.
Blood was not a new sight for me. Only a couple of days before I had collected liters of it into a bucket from our slaughtered pig, but the source of the blood was new. Vasile, despite being the drunk that he was, was a nice uncle. He took me fishing many times and bought me candies when I gave him some of my father’s wine. Not a very good deal for my father, I should say.
A handmade woollen sock was slid off his foot. Blood soaked. Then my mom carefully removed it and placed it in a basin she had somehow grabbed from the bathroom downstairs in no time at all.
Now you have all seen at least one Terminator movie. When the Governor of California was shot you could see the metal inside his human-like body. That was exactly what I saw that night. The bullet that made a hole in Vasile’s boots was buried in his leg just above the ankle.
Strangely we were all calm. Very calm. Maybe that was because we could see the bullet, maybe because we could see that the blood flow wasn’t as bad as we all thought. Maybe because we expected something much worse.
Before my mom could do anything to stop him Vasile pulled out his pocket knife and took the bullet out. The blood started to flow and my father took Vasile’s hands while mother clean the wound with the only thing we ever used for cleaning wounds, 98% pure alcohol.
“Don’t waste it!” Vasile said. “You should treat my insides with it.”
He continued to be light-hearted. Drunk and funny, until he had a bandage and a new sock. Unfortunately we didn’t have other boots to offer him so he had to wear the one with the hole in it, and he wore it for at least five years after that night. His story was simple. He got my mom’s message and was about to come for the fruitcake when a drunk friend of his asked him to go to Sibiu to see the Revolution. The story was that food shops were only selling alcohol because of the lack of food, had been vandalised by the angry mobs and inside there was still plenty of free brandy. They were lucky to catch the noon train and made their way into the revolution-torn city looking for booze. The stores were looted indeed, but there was nothing left in them. However, the people on the street involved in the Revolution had brandy with them and they shared, so he got drunk. He was running towards the train station when someone shot at him and he got under a car. And gunfire was hitting the car above him from time to time or every time he moved. And he got shot and ran and somehow nobody shot him in the back. And he took a train and there were people on the train but he was afraid to show them he was wounded. They were talking about terrorists. About how evil the terrorists were. Always posing as decent people. So he sat there for 45 minutes and bled in silence in his boots and got off in Avrig. He came to our house not on the roads but along the train tracks and then crossed gardens until he got on our street, unseen by suspicious people but heard by their dogs.
The Pigs' Slaughter Page 9