"They’re shooting at us!” Trosca yelled in the radio. The shooting continued and there was no response. After another minute, there were 4 dead and another six hiding for their lives inside or under the ABIs. Nobody dared to move. They knew they would be seen. The soldiers shooting at them were on higher ground...
"Trosca, report. Are you still there?”
The calm voice of Colonel Bleort came from the heavy radio Trosca was holding.
"Yes, sir! We have four casualties. Sir! What’s happening?” I had the ministry on the phone. They said you need to confirm you’re Trosca and his men and not terrorists. Shoot three florescent green flares into the sky! Three! You get that? They will respond with more flares and then you'll be safe!” "Roger, sir!”.
Trosca didn’t need to give the order because his men had heard the conversation. Suddenly there was silence. The army soldiers shooting at them stopped. Three similar florescent green flares went up in the black winter sky. The same flares were shot by officers on New Year’s Eve with "borrowed” pistols, since the communist government didn’t organize firework displays. They had to celebrate with their families somehow.
Then the flares started to come down. Lower, lower and Trosca and his remaining 5 men looked towards the positions near the ministry. There was complete silence. Only their heartbeats and the blood dripping from the two ABIs made any sound.
Three bangs, and similar flares started to climb into the sky above the menacing TAB’s. They were happy. Maybe happier than they were on New Year’s.
Two of them got to their feet and started to wave. Boom, boom, boom, boom.
The nearest TAB’s heavy machine gun ripped huge holes through their bodies. Other smaller guns started to rattle and the four survivors responded with fire. Only three of them saw morning alive. Trosca was the last to die that night and after Bleort got the news and screamed again on the phone at someone inside the Ministry, the shooting stopped and didn’t start again.
At that time I was already asleep, despite the fact that my father stayed to watch the revolution from the same armchair where we put Vasile when we mended his gunshot wound. He feared the communists would gain control again. The news was that after they had attacked the Airport in the morning they attacked the Ministry of Defense and were still attacking it as the news came in. A civil war would be even worse than the Russians he thought, before falling asleep where he sat.
He didn’t realize that everything was a joke, a sinister joke. The communists already had taken over, the day before, just after Ceauşescu fled in his white helicopter. Iliescu and his band were about to plunge the country into despair. The whole wave of sympathy that Romania received from Europe was about to be washed away by the new power that wanted power more than they wanted prosperity and democracy for the people. The terrorists that were attacking the Minsitry of Defense were not terrorists but USLA soldiers. The elite troups called to defend the building. Maybe they were people my father served with in the Alpen Corps, from which USLA professionals were recruited, maybe, nobody knows.
Only twenty years later did people start to speak about that night, and they say that Bleort called the ministry four times. The first time to tell them that Trosca and 14 of his men were going to come to help with the terrorist sweep. The second time he called to ask them to cease fire. The third time to say he would fuck them all because they were just a bunch of criminals and, the last time to say the same thing, and something more because he had learned that Trosca had been killed.
How was that possible? Only General Militaru knew. He was in a room full of officers when he was told that his people had opened fire on Trosca, but he preferred to retreat to his office to speak on the phone. He was alone when he set everything up, when he gave the orders, and his orders were followed as they were supposed to be. He was the Minister of Defense, not just some ass working on construction projects for Ceauşescu.
"Every last one” must have been his order, but my father had no idea, his kids, me and my sister, were innocently sleeping beside him on our lined up beds, his wife in the main bedroom and it was already the 24th of December, Christmas Eve that we could celebrate properly, the day of joy, the birth of Christ.
4. DECEMBER 24TH
When I worked as a journalist I sometimes saw raw footage from war-torn African countries and I always felt sick after seeing people set ablaze alive, or people throwing enemies alive on bonfires and part of me believed that such acts of cruelty could never happen in a country like Romania.
Why are people so cruel to each other? I couldn’t understand it. But the truth is that people can stoop lower than animals. We are the scum of the earth.
The story, the real story, of course, is that when people living close to the Ministry of Defense woke up on the morning of the 24th they took from their fruitcakes and from their sweets and food and went to give it to the soldiers defending the Revolution.
"Merry Christmas!”
"Merry Christmas, to you too!”
The fruitcakes changed hands, food changed hands, some
soldiers got handmade woollen sweaters to wear under their military jackets and coats. But this Merry Christmas wishing crowd looked down the street and saw it paved with bullets and used cases. All kinds of calibers. Seven bodies were lying in and around two ARO looking military cars.
A man started to run and used his foot to hit a body in the head. The head, like a real football, detached and rolled over to the joy of those watching. That head had belonged until less than 8 hours before to a hero, Colonel Trosca, the very man that took the Second Army from General Militaru back in 1978.
A football game to play on Christmas Eve! And what a funny football game it was. That head that rolled from one to another only to be hit again symbolized Ceauşescu and their hardship and they took revenge for the days without meat and heat, for the cheap beer and fake coffee.
They would have played that game all day long but someone had the idea of torching the bodies, and they did it with some gas they took from one of the ABI tanks.
Torched, Trosca’s head was placed on the spare wheel mounted on an ABI’s hood. Someone put a cigarette in its charred lips and almost everybody, before returning to their peaceful homes for their peaceful Christmas Eve, for carols and fruitcake and all those little things that turn a normal day into the most perfect Christmas Eve, spat on that head.
"Merry Christmas!” they shouted to the soldiers defending the Ministry building, before leaving, and, they said "Merry Christmas” again on December 25th in the morning, when they came to give the soldiers more fruitcake and food, and the bodies were still scattered on the ground, and Colonel Trosca’s head was still there with that cigarette in its charred lips mounted on the car, and we were the people that I didn’t believe capable of the cruelties that I was seeing in raw footage from places like Africa.
I woke up happy.
Christmas Eve was by far, the best day of the year. As usual, I was already alone in my room. My sister was
already up and her bed was made up neatly. I did mine quickly and then I opened the bottom drawer of a bookshelf and I took out the vacuum cleaner.
My parents’ room was first, ours came second and, lastly I did the hallway. Only after finishing did I want to go downstairs. I was placing the vacuum cleaner back in its box when my mom and my sister entered the room holding cleaning cloths and buckets of hot water. They had to dust everything and use wet brushes to brush the Persian carpet we had in our parents’ room.
After saying good morning I was already making my escape before my mom invented another chore for me.
"Your breakfast is on the table under that white cloth!”, my mom said to my back, but I was thinking "Fruitcake, fruitcake, fruitcake, milk”.
And fruitcake it was!
Now that was a beautiful morning. I put the home made butter and jam back in the pantry and returned the bread to the cupboard and started to eat the three kinds of fruitcake that we made a day earlier and dr
ink cold milk. I don’t know why my mom always wanted us to drink the milk hot, but with her upstairs I could have it my way. Cold, in a tall glass. That day’s particular glass had a red Santa painted on it and in white, close to the top was written in English: "Merry Christmas, Florin!”. It was my favorite.
I got the glass from my mom’s glass factory the same year my grandfather died . The workers’ union made Christmas bags for every child whose parents worked there. Usually sweets, but on that particular year they were allowed by the factory’s director to produce personalized glasses for all the kids. The message on the glasses had to be in English. They were not allowed to write "Merry Christmas!” in Romanian, and the red Santa wasn’t supposed to come before New Year’s Eve.
It surely sounds insane, but the communist government promoted a secular Santa despite the fact that in the western world Santa was already secular!
A Christian Father Christmas, as we used to call him, wasn’t supposed to wear a red coat, live at the North Pole and have his sled pulled by a red-nosed Rudolph & Co. The real Father Christmas was just an idea. He used to live in Heaven and he was the husband of the woman that allowed the Holy Virgin Mary to give birth to Jesus in the stable. We were told that he got so mad that his wife allowed strangers close to their animals that he cut off both her hands, as any other reasonable and sane Middle Eastern man would have done.
But God saw what he had done and sent the Holy Spirit to fix the woman’s hands and her hands jumped from the ground and glued themselves back to the woman's battered arms, the same way the liquid metal Terminator did with its own hands. So Father Christmas saw the will of God and after King Herod killed all children younger than two he sold all his possessions and bought food to feed the Jewish kids in his town. And then he died of hunger himself because, having sold everything, death was his only possible fate. He got to go to Heaven and from there sometimes, not always and not to all kids, he would present kids with gifts, or, warm the hearts of adults causing them to buy gifts for kids.
See what I’m saying? Our Father Christmas had nothing to do with Santa. Santa was as secular as Father Frost on New Year’s Eve. Father Frost was the name of the communist Santa.
Anyway, the workers’ union managed every year to distribute their bags on December 24th, and even now in Romania, after so many years, Santa comes on Christmas Eve, rather than Christmas Day from the North Pole or wherever he comes from.
Who cares? Santa is secular anyway.
But on that particular 24th of December, I was waiting for Father Christmas. The real one. Only Father Christmas could warm all hearts and turn evil people into good folk. And Father Christmas was real. Not in the way Santa is believed to be in the western world with the idiots from NORAD tracking his sled.
Father Christmas was real because he warmed the communist hearts and made them put oranges and bananas in stores before Christmas, and not after it, in January, or something. He was real because the God-hating communists sold Christmas ornaments in communist stores, beautiful handmade and hand-painted Christmas globes. Because workers were sent to cut Christmas trees from Ceauşescu’s forests and people could buy them to decorate their homes for Christmas and not only New Year’s Eve.
I knew that whatever Christmas presents we got they were from our parents, but Father Christmas definitely played his role when my mom and dad could save money for presents.
I emptied my "Merry Christmas, Florin!” glass and took a kitchen knife and went outside. The Christmas tree was standing in the snow in the same spot Finul Moisică had left it the day before. I took it and hit it against the clean ground twice. The snow at its bottom fell off. Then I started to cut the bottom off so that it would fit in our homemade Christmas tree stand.
The stand had a 15cm pipe right in the middle of it and it was into that pipe I had to fit and fix the Christmas Tree. My father said that when a friend of his made us that stand we had no bigger pipe, and that was the reason I or my father had to work for half an hour or so every year outside chopping at the Christmas tree so it would fit in that pipe.
We heard many stories of Christmas trees that fell down and entire households were lost in the resulting fires. Yes, that’s right. Back then all ornaments were made from very thin painted glass and we could place real candles on the Christmas tree, taking care not to place them below upper branches, and we used to light those candles and tell Christmas stories in their dim but beautiful light.
How beautiful it was. But still, I had to chop and chop until my Christmas tree was just a little bit thicker than its stand. And I was sweating hard to get it done that year.
As usual the tree was taller than it needed to be. Our ceiling was 3m high, but that Christmas tree was also 3m high so I had to cut about 3cm off it to allow for the top decoration and stand.
Furious hacking took the bottom off in minutes. But that was only the beginning. The knife was sharp enough to cut the young tree, but I had to hold the tree upright all the time, so as not to damage its branches. The whole process became more and more difficult.
Think I had protective gloves? Think again. Communist Romania wasn’t a consumer society and we had no such gloves. Even people working in industry with hot iron sometimes had to work with bare hands, and it’s amazing what people can learn to endure in time. But I didn't have tough hands and as a fourteen year old my skin was still like a child's. The cold tree started to hurt my fingers as it sucked the heat out of them, long before I was tired from cutting. But I couldn’t stop. Not then. I couldn’t take a break, I couldn’t cry for help. The bottom of the tree was getting thinner and thinner so I had to continue for the joy of that day.
My dad would be so proud. It used to be his job and while I was standing beside him in the cold, in the years of my childhood, it seemed a very easy job to do. Cut. Turn. Cut. Turn. And cut again. But the job wasn’t easy. Even the task of keeping the tree up was a complicated one. But perseverance was the key so I continued until I had it done.
Stretching my back, 40 minutes after I had started, I set the tree standing in the snow and I went inside for a hot cocoa and the stand I had cleaned.
Cocoa was my favorite drink that time of year. On rainy days too. I always made it myself, not trusting my mom to do it right. Three tablespoons of Dutch cocoa, three tablespoons of sugar and, because it was so cold outside, an egg yolk. Then came the frenetic mixing while the milk was being heated on the hub. The secret of a tasty drink was to pour the milk into the mug little by little and as you mixed it in.
And there I was, with a mug of hot cocoa at the window, looking outside at the snow. That morning my mom must have made the willow fire. Smoke had started to fill the smokehouse. The snow on its roof was already butter yellow and I hoped it would melt in the next couple of days. A butter yellow roof wasn’t a sight that suited Christmas.
My father wasn’t home and I supposed that he was at the town hall, in the middle of our town’s own revolution. With the communist mayor gone and the communist party office completely vandalized there wasn’t so much to do there. Some soldiers from the Military Unit guarding the Marsa Mecanichal had been brought in to help defend the building in case of a terrorist attack, but with Ceauşescu prisoner that was unlikely to happen.
My hands were already hot when I finished the hot cocoa drink. We always had first class cocoa powder from the Netherlands or China, so my mornings were always perfect. That Seagull cocoa powder we got in those big orange cans from Shanghai was especially delicious. But we weren’t always lucky enough to find it every time so we had to buy the lower quality Dutch cocoa.
I couldn’t have known that day that freedom would, in a matter of only a couple of months, bring to our stores tons of instant cocoa drinks made by Nestle which compared in taste with the cocoa that I made that day, like tap water in New Delhi compares to Evian.
Yes, capitalism wasn’t as delicious as we imagined it.
"What’s this? Chicken or fish?” was a question that I never asked be
fore we were "free". Chickens during communist times would take more than a year to grow big enough to eat. And they tasted like chicken. Fish tasted like fish. Pork tasted like pork not like salted something or other. The food produced in Romanian farms was all organic, the word steroids hadn't yet entered the Romanian vocabularly and antibiotics were just for very sick people not for the birds, fish and mammals in our food chain.
I took the cleaned and polished Christmas tree stand outside. The front yard was the best spot to fix the tree into it, and not in our parents' room, where the tree traditionally stood.
I placed the support on a patch of clean icy ground, where it was unlikely to get dirty, and I brought the tree over to it. I only had one go at getting it set in the stand right.
I intentionally left the end of the tree a little bit larger than the pipe in which I was going to set it, so when in, it would stay in. Carefully I placed the tree right over the dark pipe and then I forced it down into it with an almost perfect hit. When I lifted the tree again in the air the stand lifted, too, so I hit it once again, with all my strength. I was done.
Satisfied I took the tree upstairs. When I entered the hallway my mom was there on the phone.
"Why don’t you go to the doctor?” she was asking in a pissed off tone. "Ceauşescu has been caught, you are safe - the police won’t ask questions about how you got wounded”.
I realized that she was on the phone with Vasile. Later I learned that he called her to tell her he needed something stronger than wine. His leg had doubled in size over night and brandy was the best painkiller he could think of.
His wife Teodora was about to arrive to fetch some bottles.
My mom spoke in a very angry tone.
The Pigs' Slaughter Page 11