The Pigs' Slaughter

by Florin Grancea

  I had a classmate in the same church. I remember how our teacher, Mr. Napeu, once tried to make him eat salami, and how Silviu refused and battled to keep his mouth closed as the rest of us, rather than pity, envied him. We almost never saw salami, but that’s another story. I also remember how my grandfather said he didn’t like the vegans’ extremism pointing out that "None of them lived to more than 50 years old. You can go and check their section in the cemetery. They all die young”.

  But the future was something we could not anticipate, especially the economic crisis and the inflation. So Sandu the painter wasn’t called when it became warm, and, as a matter of fact, he never set foot inside our house again. Since 1989 we have painted our house only twice. First when my sister married in 1997 and last when I married in 2004, and every time it was my new brother-in-law who painted it, helped by his friend Viorel, that very nice gipsy boy who shared his first name with my father.

  The Colonel was talking about terrorists and also about his suspicion that the terrorists didn’t exist.

  "I was in Sibiu today and I can tell you something. Nobody is shooting at Army positions, but the Army is shooting at everyone else. Everybody is paranoid and they are always saying on the TV that soldiers should fire without waiting for orders”, he said then rushed to empty his wine glass.

  "Good wine, you have here, Grancea”, he said using my father’s last name. "Have some taken to my ABI outside to those soldiers waiting”, he asked me after he helped himself to another glass.

  Curious, I went out and took from the basement an already filled one liter bottle and went outside to the ABI. The soldiers were inside but the engine was off. I could see they were cold. Before I reached the car, the driver rolled down the window and said:

  "You're only bringing one bottle? Can’t you see there are two of us?” so I handed that bottle to him and rushed in to get another one. They were right. Only one bottle on Christmas Eve for two people wasn’t enough.

  Back in my smoke-filled room The Colonel, now with a very red face asked me looking into my eyes:

  "Son, you are free now. Ceauşescu is gone and he’ll never come back. I’m sure his hours are numbered. So tell me, what do you want from this freedom? I wonder, because you are young and you must want different things than we, older people, want”. First I didn’t know what to say. But because I was a top student and always immediately answered all questions put to me, I said without thinking:

  "Shoes, new shoes”.

  My father pretended that he didn’t hear my answer and so did The Colonel. They continued to watch the TV, to hear the messages that the new power was disseminating. They continued to drink their wine.

  Ashamed by my answer, I excused myself and left, and once out I started to cry and the tears fell on my shoes, or should I say on the shoes that I was wearing because that weren’t mine. Almost a year before I'd had to buy new shoes. But because I was growing so fast I couldn’t find any. In the shoe stores, in the adult section, the smallest I could find was the European size 40 and I needed 36. In the kids’ section the biggest shoes were size 35. Too small to fit my growing feet.

  I usually shopped with my family. Never alone. So we went every Saturday evening to a shoe store, in Avrig or in Sibiu to find shoes, but with no success. Finally, exasperated, my mom gave me 100 lei, the same amount that Ceauşescu promised as a pay raise in his last speech, and said:

  Florin, you are a big boy now, go to the shoe store every day after you finish school and you’ll get lucky. If you go on the day they receive new merchandise in the store, I’m sure you’ll be able to find something your size”.

  And I went to buy shoes almost every day. And I kept that bank note of 100 lei in my pocket until its color faded and the paper looked worn out. Only two months after did I have the chance to use it. In Sibiu, from the communist version of a department store I bought, in the women's section, a ridiculous looking azure blue pair of shoes. Size 36, and I paid 60 lei for them . I wanted to buy a size 37, and the store clerk, a nice old lady advised me to wait another couple of months until the store received new supplies, but I could not wait anymore. The shoes I was wearing were so used and full of holes that I looked like a beggar the communist country was showing to us in pictures when they wanted to tell us about how people lived in America. I was 14 and I was in love with Adriana, a classmate, not that she was aware, but still.

  So I put on my new azure blue and ridiculous looking women's shoes and walked away from the store, with my old shoes in a plastic bag. Those shoes would be repaired and used for gardening by my mother. That was the way it was. We never really threw anything away, not unless they were completely destroyed and could not possibly be used.

  Anyway, my women's shoes lasted less than I expected. In less than one month my feet were already too big for them so I was sweating with fear every morning when I put them on. Pain. Blood. Pain. Terrible pain. Every step was a nightmare and I was doing it to myself. Nobody was forcing it on me. That was sick. That was how communism felt for me and that is, right now, my strongest memory of those days.

  I used to hide my wounded feet, but one day my mom saw my bloody socks and cried out and I had to take my shoes off and she was saying she was sorry and that she loved me, and she was crying and wouldn't stop... Until the evening, when she phoned Auntie Anişoara and spoke with her and she sent me to visit her right away.

  I remember it being almost night when I got there. I was barefoot. My mom wouldn’t let me wear those azure blue shoes again, so I entered my auntie’s house without taking any shoes off.

  It was obvious she was shocked, too, but she tried to hide it. She gave me some sweets and then she gave me a pair of new socks and she invited me to the bathroom to wash and I did, and then, with motherly care my auntie mended my wounds and put the new socks on my feet.

  "You look much better”, she said to me smiling, and I couldn’t help to remember that she was a kindergarten teacher, but then she said suddenly:

  "The real present is not the socks, but these shoes”, and a moment later she handed me a mocha brown and slightly heavy shoe box.

  "Mihai, your cousin, wore these shoes when he entered high school”, she whispered. I opened the box eagerly. There the shoes were, in very good condition.

  How ever happy I was, that fact still remained that they were used shoes. But I took them and put them on, and they were my size, comfortable shoes.

  Back home I asked my mother for pitch black leather paint and a thin brush. I repainted the shoes back to their original color and let them dry. The next day was an exciting morning. I put them on and rushed to school where I had a rehearsal for a play I was in, only to hear my teacher, Roxana Braga, the young and extremely beautiful wife of Braga, the writer, exclaim: "Nice new shoes, you got there, Florin!”, and I couldn’t tell if she really thought they were nice or she was mocking me for wearing someone else’s old shoes. Anyway, it wasn’t the first time I had to suffer because of my rare foot size. A few winters before, my sister got a new pair of skating boots for Christmas. White. They shined like the blade they were carrying underneath, and while they did, I couldn't help wanting a pair for myself too. The plan was that we both would get skating boots that Christmas but my mom could’t find my size. But when I was already giving up hope, my dad put an announcement in the local newspaper, so one or our friends saw it and called us to tell us that a neighbor of his had a daughter and that she had had skating boots when she was in Junior High School. So my parents took a present to those strangers and asked them to sell them, if they still had them, to us, and they were nice people and took the money. So, like in a fairytale story before January ended I started to skate awkwardly beside my already experienced sister. We had some very nice winters back in the 80’s and we used to skate on frozen ponds or icy roads, and we stopped only then we had outgrown the boots, and we never got others to replace them. Those were the times. So years later, my mom gave our skating boots to Vasile’s daughter and they u
sed them for a couple of weeks before their father traded them for booze. Pufoaică brandy perhaps, I’m not sure.

  I hope you can understand how frustrated I was with shoes in communism. That was the reason I said what I wanted from our new freedom was to get a decent pair of shoes. Nothing more, nothing less. And I got the following year a new pair of white sneakers. The first and the last until 1994. I was living then in a rented apartment in Sibiu. My father wanted me to live close to my new High School. But we were terribly poor. We had trouble finding money to pay the rent and prices were skyrocketing. So I had to go to school every day with my one and only pair of sneakers and they got so many holes in them that my socks were visible from several different angles. Only when I graduated did my father buy me a new pair of buckskin brown leather dress shoes, but, then he died, and because that pair was the best pair we had in our house, we decided he should wear them on his final journey. God curse Iliescu and his men forever. Hungry people are never free, hungry people are always easy to manipulate, hungry people can’t even die in their own shoes, and this was the "freedom" we had after 1989.

  Back upstairs, after crying, I found my dad and The Colonel absorbed in the story of the Revolution. The news was that the military unit that had Ceauşescu as prisoner was under heavy attack. The brave soldiers of our motherland were defending it with their lives and Ceauşescu couldn’t possibly escape. "I’m sure they'd rather put a bullet in his head than let him leave with the terrorists”, said The Colonel, and my half drunk father approved with a loud burp.

  The fact is that the sound made by the gas gathered in my father’s stomach was louder than all the noises combined in and around Targoviste military base where Ceauşescu was held. Nobody was attacking it, so Kamenici couldn’t wait anymore. His nails were already gone, anyway. Somebody had to attack them. It was Ceauşescu or him, General Voinea’s threat was there, in his head, so somebody had to attack them.

  It was early evening when somebody fired a shot, a single shot at their building. And all hell broke loose. Every soldier took their gun to the windows and started to fire outside the compound. Nobody was firing at them but that wasn’t the important thing. The important thing was that everybody believed that they were being attacked, as the TV said, by superior forces.

  He ran towards the room where Ceauşescu and his wife were being held and shouted:

  "These headquarters are being overrun. Kill them and fall back to defensive positions. Save yourselves!”

  Those that got the orders were major Ion Boboc and lieutenant-major Iulian Stoica. The first of them would remember years later:

  "It was about 5:00p.m. when something happened. A diversion, I think. Somebody fired towards our positions from the high school across the road. At that moment everybody started to shoot. It was hell on earth. People were shooting from offices, hallways, the dorms upstairs, and us, being inside, we had the impression that a battle was taking place inside the building. But the reality is that nobody was shooting but us. So the commander came and gave that order and left. A few moments later everybody deserted the headquarters. Left behind were only me, Stoica and the two Ceauşescus. I didn’t want to kill them so I got out of the room. The place was deserted. Silent. Everybody was outside in defensive positions. There were phones ringing, but nobody to pick them up or to ask what to do? So I looked outside and saw two soldiers with their guns pointed towards the headquarters' doors and I realized what it was all about. After executing Ceauşescu we were to be shot for not defending the prisoners, or for deserting. And they would have said that Ceauşescu was killed by strangers that entered the headquarters during that confused battle.

  So I didn’t go out. We waited there, and in one hour everybody was back, working as if nothing had happened”. But the reality is that the trap was more evil than Boboc first thought. That was because he only heard Kamenici shouting the order while he was in the room with Ceauşescu and his wife. Stoica was outside the room, and he got another order, a direct and whispered one:

  "The headquarters are lost, in the enemy's hands. Put an AKM clip in Ceauşescu and one in Elena”.

  "Then he left me. But the next day on 25th he accused me of treason. Because I didn’t execute his order. I didn’t do it and that was smart because a friend, an officer, had been ordered to open fire with the 14.5mm heavy machine gun on the room holding Ceauşescu if he heard gunshots from inside. ‘Flatten the building’, was the order” confessed Stoica in 1994 in front of the "1989 Commission”.

  So, The Colonel was right! Someone was definitely ready to put a bullet in Ceauşescu’s head before handing him over to the nonexistent terrorists, but his imagination was, as you see, very poor. He recognized this, during a house party, just weeks before my father died, and he said that we were all wrong, we did a very bad thing to kill Ceauşescu like a pig, on Christmas Day. Actually I didn’t think that, at the time. I was twenty and still very young, and still very upset at my lack of decent shoes during and after communism, but when I got older and saw how decently the Iraqi people treated Saddam Hussein, how well conducted his trial was, I bowed in respect. Then I knew that we had been worse than animals in 1989, or at least those who took power in Romania were worse than animals. They wanted money, they wanted power, but they did nothing for the hungry people. For the starving bodies they destroyed all of Romania’s agriculture favoring GMO foods imported from the West. And for starving minds they prepared sex, cheap TV dramas, Latin American telenovelas, Sandra Brown’s books and mindnumbingly stupid variety shows.

  The Colonel was already drunk when he got into his ABI to leave. We saw him to the gate, me, my sister, my father and my mother. Our grandmother was already asleep, not interested in political change.

  "These are for you”, he said to my mom and he gave her 6 military cans of beef. "They are war supplies. We took them all. Let us just hope the fucking Russians don’t attack us, because in that event our soldiers will have nothing to eat”, he said, and he climbed in the Jeep-like ABI, and those two soldiers waiting for him were as drunk as he was, but that didn’t matter, coz the ABI’s engine came to life and the car rolled away into the night. As usual in my town, lacking street lights, it was pitch dark. It was a moonless night, and we couldn’t see the stars. Clouds were gathering. But from every house there were fairytale lights. There were the candles burning on the Christmas trees, and the trees were placed as usual so they could be seen from outside. They were all beautiful, and the town itself was beautiful and that was the first time that day I felt like it was Christmas Eve. We all felt it so we went inside and knocked on my grandmother’s door, and woke her up. My mom brought to her first floor room Christmas fruitcakes, sweets and warm milk for everyone. Coffee for my father and we all ate and sung carols and talked like a family. We were waiting for the young men from town to come and sing their traditional carols so that we would all know it’s Christmas. Lord Jesus was about to come again into the world as a baby, and we were all there to celebrate it. That was more important than the revolution continuing in the blaring Opera TV set upstairs, more important than our life without decent shoes.

  Christmas was a magical time. It was the day after Ignat's Day that all young men and women, which means everyone over 15 years old, gathered in packs. Each street had its own pack, or, in places with shorter streets, a few blocks had their own pack. All these packs had names. Ancient names. Names from times when communism wasn’t yet invented by Marx. Like Pietrari, the Stone Masons. They were from a street not very far from ours. But nobody, not even the old people, ever remember anyone there in the stone business. And these packs would go to a host family, and they would sing carols, pray and do other small preparations. Fasting was required and of course everybody dressed in traditional white clothes. Girls with pitch black skirts and vests, boys with those white sheepskin vests embroidered in red, made by my grandmother.

  It was nightfall on the 24th they were waiting for. And it was already the 24th.

  "Are they co
ming?” my mom asked anxiously.

  "Yep”, replied my father, quite satisfied. "Christmas cannot start without their carols. The Revolution asked them, however, to be decent this year, because many people have died and we should mourn them. So there won’t be any meteleauă this year”. He hadn’t finished when I was already gasping for air. Meteleauă was my favorite festival. It was the winter number one event and was supposed to happen on the 28th. It was like a carnival. The boys in each pack would dress up as something funny and, usually drunk, they paraded through the town. They were supposed to do stupid things to keep away devils, and they were so funny. Meteleauă was also a process of initiation. The young child would get drunk for the very first time and would parade through the entire city as a man should, with his head up, proud, and his mom and dad would wave from the crowd and he would know that he was a man, and everyone would treat him like he was a man, from then on. So he would stop greeting everybody with sărut-mâna or "I kiss your hand” and would say "Hello” or "Good day” instead.

  No more meteleauă was news as sad as no Christmas presents. But as we were waiting there, my mom started to smile and said:

  "I heard something upstairs. You kids go and check under the Christmas tree. Perhaps it was Father Christmas”, and she didn't have time to finish her sentence. We rushed past her and went straight to the Christmas tree, and yes, something was waiting there for us. Our presents were light and we opened them eagerly. Each of us had a handmade woollen set of hat, muffler, gloves and socks. Mine were royal blue and my sister’s were scarlet. There were some chocolates too.