Somehow it all made sense. Vasile was a magnet for trouble. The last job he had lasted less than two hours. He crashed the bus he was supposed to drive. Lucky for him nobody was in it when he decorated a ravine with that Made in Romania Rocar bus, and even luckier for him my dad knew his boss and promised to cover the crash. That bus was the property of the people of Romania and destroying public property resulted in prison terms or in paying for life from your salary for the damaged property.
That stupid law was abolished only in the late 90’s. In 1995 when I first got a job in a newspaper there was a sad looking cameraman working with Romanian TV, the same TV station that broadcast the Revolution, and that sad looking cameraman was working for nothing. His entire salary was taken to pay for a BETA camera that was stolen from him while filming something, somewhere.
So Vasile who was again jobless during the Revolution – as he was for the next twenty years – was not required to pay for the bus.
“You are a magnet for trouble!” my mother shouted while she was preparing two over-sized bags. One big jar with fried ribs in lard, two big fruitcakes, a bottle of wine, potatoes and other food for his kids. I was wondering if he could get home with the jar intact, drunk as he was and shot in his leg. But as shot as he was he looked much better than the time he got in that duck incident.
That “duck incident” as my father called it, happened one year before. It was exactly December 23rd and Vasile, after taking a fruitcake, wine and pork ribs and meat came back to get a duck. We had ducks and chickens then and my mom said she was too tired to kill it for him and prepare it, so he should take it alive, as it was. And he did.
He really was a magnet for trouble. When he got home one of his neighbors was, club in hand, looking for thieves outside. That neighbor had been robbed of all five of his ducks that very evening so, when he saw Vasile in the dark carrying a live duck he started to club him without asking any questions, and he continued until Vasile was lying unconscious in the snow. That bastard didn’t even apologize when he was told that he had actually clubbed an innocent person nor was he punished. He had friends in the Communist Militia. And Vasile was a jobless drunk anyway. At least his duck was returned, our duck, and his wife made him soup from it and his girls ate meat again. They weren’t scared by their father’s face which they were used to seeing swollen every now and then.
My father always said that Vasile’s troubles where his mother’s fault. My father’s mother-in-law had raised her two daughters with an iron hand. When my mom was in a boarding school, from which she graduated as a worker, and would ask her for 100 lei, the same amount that Ceauşescu promised as a raise in his final public speech, she used to get a long letter with only 20 lei. "Do you happen to know how difficult it is to make 100 lei?” was the sentence that usually opened that letter.
Yes, my maternal grandmother lived a very poor life in her village of Lodroman, in Alba county. She was a trained nurse but after the war had to leave the hospital in Cluj, where she had a job. Her father was a chiabur, a winegrower. They were a winemaking family and quite wealthy. Until the communists took their fortune and wines. That was the reason why my grandfather, the one I never knew, died. My grandmother from Lodroman always tells me that I look so much like him, but mom cannot tell. Like me she has no memory of him. She was only two years old when, harassed by the new communist power, her father, a war hero, died of illness. Strange that my grandmother blames his illness on the Russians who kept him prisoner in Siberia for many years, not the fact that everything was taken from him before his first and only child was born. So this grandmother that lived in Lodroman and had a hard life buried her second husband before she was forty and was thrown in the street by the in-laws. So she had to build a house by herself, while raising her three kids, and she did it with an iron hand, as I first said, but that iron hand always changed into feathers when it came to Vasile.
"It’s all her fault”, my father was muttering. He was talking about Vasile being married to Teodora.
I remember well how my grandmother from Lodroman came to live in Avrig. My mom was the first in her family to come to our town to work at the glass factory and she brought her sister and then brother along. Her sister married soon after my mom did and Vasile rented a room in town. So, for some reason his mother decided he had to marry and she came and rented a room, close to our house, for three long years and spent her time quilting and selling the clothes and hats that she made and going every day to church for the service.
She knew that Vasile had to get a religious wife and Teodora was a churchgoer. She really was. She was from Oltenia and was working at Marsa Mechanical where she shared a room in an ugly company dorm with her sister. Sunday was their only day off and they put on their best dresses and went to church. There my grandmother from Lodroman would watch them and only after a year of watching those sisters every Sunday, she introduced herself to them. Then she gave them some cakes, and when they were acquainted enough she invited them for lunch. Soon the place she invited them to wasn’t her nearby rented room but our kitchen where Vasile was also invited and after lunch they would go to the Palace gardens or to see a movie. I know that because I was a moviegoer too. We had Romanian movies but on weekends there where either Hollywood movies or Bollywood musicals. It’s hard to tell which were more crowded. The small cinema hall in our town had seated 310 but always sold more than 1000 tickets. When I got lucky I used to share a seat with my sister. Otherwise, I sat on the stage two meters from the screen. That was how I first saw Superman. And Star Wars, 4 and 5.
Vasile and Teodora would share a seat and after they would buy an ice-cream from the ice-cream machine which had only two flavors, vanilla and cocoa. That's right, not chocolate, because chocolate wasn’t used to make it, but cocoa ice-cream. In less then 3 months they decided to marry and they got the standard one bedroom apartment from our communist country, and my parents bought them all the furniture and things they needed.
But Teodora wasn’t the woman that my grandmother from Lodroman was looking for. Her cooking skills were poor and she didn’t know how to keep a house. She had lived below the poverty line when she was young, always eating what was to be found in stores, not what they produced or made themselves. She was a true product of our communist government. In 1989 we heard news that Ceauşescu wanted to make everybody eat in canteens and huge canteens were about to be constructed. In Bucharest they were almost ready. Resembling circus tents they were called the Hunger Circuses. Ceauşescu’s plan was to forbid people from cooking and eating at home. Be that as it may, I have to acknowledge that his mad plan suited Teodora very well who didn’t cook and didn’t make Vasile happy.
He continued to drink and change jobs and my grandmother, after a failed attempt at moving in with them to teach Teodora how to keep a house and mend clothes for a husband left pissed off for Lodroman.
She eventually came back. In 1992 my grandmother became senile and she sometimes left home and wasn’t able to find her way back. So my father went to Lodroman and came to an agreement with his mother-in-law so that she would come and live with us and watch over my grandmother. And she did, and watched over her, but never put much effort into the job. My mom was the one that cooked for the entire family, washed all our clothes, bathed my senile grandmother and, when she was confined to her bed without hope of recovery, slept in the same room with her. We were people, not animals and people had to pass away with their kin holding their hands and lighting candles for the soul to see the light of heaven and the way to the Holy Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit.
As a communist to be, I used to say that I didn’t believe in God! But it seems that the magnet for trouble was watched over by the Holy Trinity on that evening and he got home with the fruitcakes and jar of fried ribs in lard and the other food and wine we prepared for his family. But neither the Father, nor the Son, nor the Holy Spirit were working on that late evening in Bucharest.
Or at least they were only contemplating what
people were doing with their free will.
The truth is that people don’t quite understand what free will is. And they certainly didn’t understand what freedom should be. Or, some of them did, but avoided setting the people free as much as possible.
The new Defense Minister, General Militaru was definitely from the latter category. Iliescu wanted terrorists and he was about to provide them. The whole country wanted the terrorists caught and he wanted to provide that, too, he wanted to serve. Ceauşescu had stopped Militaru from serving eleven years before 1989. It was 1978 and Militaru was a three star general when he was pulled out of active duty and given a position in management in the Construction Industry Ministry - luckily for him.
He was lucky. Ceauşescu feared the Russians. Militaru’s name came out in the Raven’s file as a GRU agent. The GRU was the secret service of the Red Army, and this was the reason why Ceauşescu took the Second Army from Militaru’s command and gave him that petty job in the construction industry. He would have been killed if Ceauşescu didn’t fear the Soviet backlash, that’s for sure.
Twenty years after 1989 I see the events more clearly. But on that night I was young and stupid, and open to being manipulated like the other 23 million Romanians.
It all started with a character that you don’t know yet but you already hate. This man, because a man he was, was General Ion Hortopan. Only a couple of days before, when I was starting to smoke the pig, he was smoking the barricades around the Intercontinental Hotel in Bucharest. The soldiers that killed Jean Louis Calderon, the French journalist that would become a street name, were following his orders.
Maybe that was why he wanted to do something to stay afloat, maybe that was why Militaru decided to use him, I don’t know, even now, twenty years later.
However, it all started when General Hortopan entered a meeting of the new power with the chief of USLA, the Romanian version of SWAT, and said loudly:
"Fighting has broken out outside Bucharest. Private-Major Popa has been captured. He was with USLA”.
"I’m sure that Trosca is behind this!” replied the Romanian SWAT chief, General Ardelean. "Only he could be behind this.” Strangely enough, that name didn’t ring a bell for anyone. How were they to know that Trosca was the man that took the Second Army from General Militaru in 1978?
As a counter-intelligence agent with the Second Army Trosca was the one that put Militaru on the Raven's List. Trosca was the one that conducted house searches at Militaru’s home, Trosca was the one that called Militaru a traitor, and at that moment Trosca was the Major Chief of Staff of USLA. It all looked like the events wouldn’t go as planned, but that was only because Iliescu took his time while he made Militaru, officially, the Minster of Defense. Iliescu was tired, everybody was tired. But they had made it. They had taken control of the locomotive, as Brucan had put it, so they had to follow some bureaucratic procedures. For example when Iliescu signed the papers that started procedures for the Ceauşescus’ trial one day before, he was officially only the head of the Technical Publishing House, but 24 hours later he was the head of FSN, the National Salvation Front, the iron grip that took Romania from Ceausecu and kept it away from the historical liberal, social democrat and christian democrat parties.
Not even a month later the FSN called on all workers to beat the shit out of those protesting the new communist-looking power, and they did it again when Iliescu and Roman asked the miners of Valea Jiului to beat up people who were pushing for reforms. The miners came and any intellectual-looking people they caught they beat, some they left with life-long injuries, some they simply killed. "Intellectual-looking" were the students, those they found in universities, in libraries, in bookstores, people wearing beards and glasses.
"We work, we don’t think” was the miners’ slogan and surely Iliescu thanked them for saving the Revolution, or more like his ass and power, or whatever.
But on that 23rd of December the miners were a card still to be played. The man of the day was Trosca.
Trosca was the one with the intelligence, with the information that, combined, would unveil who the people who climbed into Brucan’s locomotive were. And that was the very reason Militaru called General Ardelean after receiving the ministry officialy from Iliescu, along with his 4th general star. "Take 600 USLA troups and come to the ministry. There are snipers in the surrounding buildings. Come and take them out”. His order was clear. So General Ardeleanu phoned the Romanian SWAT, his own troops and spoke with colonel Bleort. "I understand, sir! Colonel Trosca is standing right here, sir!, Yes, sir!”, was what Bleort yelled into the military phone, before giving the orders to Trosca.
On that night there were 647 USLA professional soldiers in Romania. 30 of them were guarding Embassies, 80 were sent to Sibiu to clear out the terrorists there, but Trosca didn’t want to take all of the remaining 500 or so.
First he was suspicious. He knew who had given the orders. He knew that there were soldiers in the ministry that didn’t need outside help for a sweep, he knew what had happened at Otopeni that morning.
But the order was clear, and he had to go. So he took 14 soldiers he could trust, boarded 3 ABI - laughable light armored military-grade Romanian-made Jeep-looking 4x4 ARO vehicles and off he went, into the night.
Two years previously a Romanian made ARO with a Japanese made engine came in first in the World Famous ParisDakar endurance rally, but it was slow, and noisy and uncomfortable to drive. A car for shepherds, was how it was known and at school everybody made fun of those kids whose fathers had AROs.
This is why, even when I am told, 20 years after that night that one of those three ABIs broke down halfway to its destination, I’m not surprised.
Perhaps the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit were doing their work that night. The five in it had to stay behind and their lives were spared.
But Trosca had to go on to defend his new Minister of Defence, the traitor that he had pulled out of the Army, General Militaru.
It was dark and when they got close to the new and huge ministry building, he started to believe that Militaru was right. Someone was attacking the building, but they weren’t snipers. Coz what he heard was heavy fire, AKM’s and heavier than those.
And then the Ministry came into view and then he knew he was right about Militaru back in ‘78, so he ordered his men to stop and they just watched what was going on, thinking. After 10 minutes of watching he picked up his radio and called Bleort. He didn’t have time to think that all words starting with BLE in Romanian had negative meanings. Like "bleg”, which is weak, or "blenoragie” which was a sexually transmitted disease...
"Sir, allow me to report, sir!” he said.
"Yes”, Bleort said eagerly.
"Here at the Ministry there is a motorcade of 7 or 8 Army TABs, two trucks full of army soldiers, two AROs and they have all been shooting their guns at the ministry for ten minutes and now they have stopped to reload.”
"Whhhhaaaaat?” At the other side of the city, Bleort suddenly stood up. He was a spy, too, and he smelled treason. "No way!” he yelled to his man.
"That's the truth!” replied Trosca.
"At the Ministry, you say?”, Bleort went again, sweating... "They have been shooting at the National Ministry of Defense and now they have stopped, roger that, sir.” "And now they've stopped?” Bleort asked nervously. "Yes, they have, sir!”, Trosca replied.
"Well, stop your vehicles by the last tank defending the Ministry and call us back so we can contact the ministry”, ordered Bleort, with the feeling that that was the last order he would ever give Trosca.
"Roger that, sir”, was the reply, and the two ABIs were already advancing until they stopped, as they were told, by a tank that had turned off its lights. Moments later everybody was shooting at them.
Like millions of Romanians, that night I was watching the Revolution live with my family. After so many years of seldom being used, the TV had become the most important member of our family. Crying or shouting the TV was like
a baby that had to be watched 24 hours a day.
When one of us went downstairs to take a shower or use the toilet or to get a piece of fruitcake, he or she would ask, for the first time in Romania's history, "what happened while I was away?” But we were told only the things that we were allowed to watch, not everything.
We were told that the Army had become a target of the terrorists. After the bloody repression that the Army had taken part in in Timişoara and Bucharest, the Army was now fighting for the people and not against them. But we never imagined that the Army was fighting the Army. There weren’t enough dead bodies. Enough for who? Even now I wish I knew for sure... Three survivors of that night are still looking for the same answer.
Back in 1989 inside their ABI two men were killed instantly by heavy machine guns. Those bullets 20 or so centimeters long left one of them without the lower part of his face. The hole left, opened widely to expose the throat and the terror in his eyes replaced the scream that would come only as a spray of blood from his lungs. And it stayed open as the others started to hide behind his body, on the floor of that ABI.
The Pigs' Slaughter Page 10