The Pigs' Slaughter

by Florin Grancea

  "We love you, mommy”, we both cried out, and rushed to her and dad. And all that I saw on their faces was pure happiness.

  Only today, after so many years, do I realize that she must have stayed awake into the night making those woollen winter clothes for us and I realize how difficult it must have been for her, and I love her for it. I also love my father for his support. That present was the most beautiful present I ever got for Christmas. I was sure I would get nothing, but I got something which was more valuable than all the things that our looted and destroyed bookstore offered, or all the things that the revolution brought us in hypermarkets.

  We were already downstairs, new hats and new socks on when we heard the young men singing for our neighbor. Next it was our turn. So we waited. And we heard the gate opening and then closing and many many footsteps gathering before our door. Then, those 30 or so young men started to sing as loud as they could "Joseph and Mary” and that carol literally crashed against our chests and our bodies, and hearts got to know that it was Christmas.

  My father started to cry and I realized that he never had cried when we listened to that carol before, when my grandfather was still with us. "Why are you crying?” I once asked him and he said he cried because he was the oldest in our family, that he remembered how it was when he was in the pack, singing those beautiful carols, and he cried because he was the next man in our family to die.

  I swear to God, I was so young when he talked with me about why he cried when he listened to that carol that I couldn’t really understand him. I tried to, but it felt so strange to cry at that very happy moment. Only years later, in 1995, when my father had been buried 10 months, I started to cry the very moment the words "Joseph and Mary” hit my chest, and I cried like my father did and like my grandfather did before him, knowing everything my father used to know, and my grandmother was dead too. Only my mother, my sister, and I were left. We gave the young men money for their performance, because money was everything those days. Money had become more important than life.

  However, back in 1989 we gave the young men the sweet cheese cake that my mom made for them and a kilo of smoked ham. That particular ham we made from the pig’s muscles situated along the back bone. It was kept in salt for one day and smoked for another two. We used to eat it raw if smoked more than 10 days. It was still fresh so the young men had to fry it before thrusting it into their stomachs. We also gave them 100 lei, the same amount that Ceauşescu promised everybody in his last speech.

  The following year was to be the last year people gave those sweet cakes and meat to the carol singers. Romania wasn’t starving anymore and imported meat was available in food stores all the time. The young men didn’t fast and those cakes and the meat they got they couldn’t eat. So when they got drunk they had food fights with the bread and meat, and threw it in the snow, and the old people saw it, and we all just stopped giving those traditional gifts. And they got only money, until Romania entered the European Union in 2004 and young people migrated in mass to work in construction, as babysitters, as dishwashers and cleaning toilets for our wealthier European brothers and entire streets were left without their young people's packs. I heard that the heads of families still cry. The only difference is that they cry not because they are hit with the lyrics of "Joseph and Mary”, but because there are no lyrics to hit them. No carols, except those re-mixed modern carols coming out of not old black and white, but new color TV sets. Merry Christmas, Romania, wherever you are!

  It was already early when we went to bed, leaving, as customary, the gate open. That was for carol singers, whoever they were. Also sometimes friends or relatives came, even at three or four in the morning. But my father called it a day. He was sure that on that particular night, when the good people of Romania and its soldiers under the command of Iliescu, were battling terrorists and vicious forces of the former regime, we would have no visitors. So I got into my warm bed in which my mother had placed as usual at my feet a fire heated ceramic tile wrapped in towels. That would keep warm for hours, and I happily welcomed sleep. I was free, I had a happy and loving family, and I had nothing to fear. The only thing ahead was Christmas Day, the most peaceful and full of love day of the year.

  Strange as it is, those warm feelings of love and peace were utterly absent from Colonel Kamenici’s head in Targoviste. Not that he was dead or he wasn’t capable of feeling love and peace. He could, but not on that bloody night. He was still cursing Boboc and Stoica for their lack of guts. Why didn't those two suckers kill Nicolae and Elena? He could’t understand it. His orders were clear. At least clearer than those he gave to Tecu and Mares on the morning of the 23rd. Why the hell did them sonsof-bitches not comply?

  "It’s you or him! You got it?” "You are finished”. "Only one of you will survive this Revolution alive”. The words of General Voinea, the head of the First Army, were banging ever louder in his head.

  Half an hour later, as if his prayers had been answered by the God he didn’t believe in, their unit was attacked with gunfire from the north. So he took a TAB and drove it to the tanks’ positions where he had a long discussion with the tanks commander, lieutenant-colonel Mutu.

  "How many tanks could he count on if they were to take the two Ceauşescus in a march to Bucharest?” was his question. "Sixteen” was the answer.

  "And, if we are attacked on our way there?” he asked again. "Then we will stop, group the tanks together and fight”, was the answer.

  "And, if we are outnumbered and overpowered?” he asked again and lieutenant-colonel Mutu said calmly:

  "Then we kill Ceauşescu.”

  Twenty years after that night we can only guess that that plan wasn’t pursued because it was impossible to overpower 16 heavy TR80 Army Tanks. To overpower them one had to have 16 brand new soviet tanks or 20 brand new Abraham tanks, and it wasn’t likely the invisible terrorists could get their hands on heavier artillery.

  Maybe that was the reason why the two Ceauşescus didn’t spend their last night in military beds, as they had spent the two nights before, but seated inside a TAB armored personnel carrier, along with their impossibly stinky and sleepy guards. Kamenici ordered Nicolae and Elena to get in a TAB. They would be in danger, if the headquarters were stormed by hostile forces. First they didn’t want to but they had to comply. With them, their guards Stoica and Boboc and another one, an officer with Tragoviste’s Militia. The driver was a civilian. Those were the times. The Army started to fight for the people and not against them so they had to welcome civilians that wanted to lend a hand, not that they were in any need of civilians there. So the TAB started its noisy engine to start its heater and everybody tried to sleep while they waited for morning.

  But that TAB wasn’t the only one with a running engine there. Behind it was another one and in this one Kamenici was waiting. He had with him lieutenant-colonel Dinu, and as a driver he had private Stoican; another one, named Birtan was holding an AKM. There was a radio man and another soldier. It wasn’t crowded, but they all started to breathe easy when Kamenici went out for a smoke, everybody thought. But as Kamenici was smoking he called his driver.

  Many years after that night, private Stoican recalled: "Kamenici was smoking. He was wearing a pufoaică”. It was the same kind of winter coat that was turned into alcohol after being dipped in urine and shit by the Revolution-loving Romanian people.

  "He had his hands in his pockets, and he asked me:” "You, you know who’s in that TAB?”

  "So what could I possibly say? So I said:”

  "Sir, I heard something but I can’t be sure, sir!”

  "And he told me:”

  "If you want a place in the history books, go over there and shoot them both”.

  Stoican was trying to control his fear when Kamenici went to the TAB holding Ceauşescu and pulled the driver out. He told the man he was a civilian and it was Christmas Eve.

  "Go to your wife and kids, thank you for what you did for the Revolution, Merry Christmas and God bless you a
nd your family” he said, and asked the reluctant Stoican to take his place. "I didn’t want to, but I had no power to say no. I was almost crying. I begged my commander to change his mind because I wasn’t shaved and I couldn’t present myself before our supreme commander in the shape I was in. But there I was inside. Kamenici had to push me to get me in, but once I was in the driver’s seat I saw them. They were wearing military clothes and looked at me with bright eyes. Stoica and Boboc had guns on their knees but they were almost asleep. They tried to open their eyes but they were so tired that they couldn’t. If Ceauşescu had wanted to take one of their guns he could have done it. Paisie however wasn’t sleeping but his gun was sticking out a crenel (a shooting hole), and sometimes he would just speak with Ceauşescu”.

  Stoican was awake almost all night and so was Paisie and Ceauşescu. He tried to decide whether he should kill Ceauşescu and his wife or not.

  "Should I kill them or should I not kill them?” that was his dilemma. He tried to find a reason for doing it or a reason for not doing it, but he couldn’t come to a conclusion, so the morning found him unprepared and undecided.

  In 1998 Iulian Stoica officially declared that Stoican confessed that night that his orders were to kill everyone in the TAB, and it made sense. Both Stoica and Boboc were the traitors that didn’t follow similar orders the previous afternoon, weren’t they? But all of them were still alive and an angry Colonel Kamenici called the mission off and invited the half frozen people into his headquarters and phoned Bucharest to report that Ceauşescu and his wife were alive and well and asked for advice. But the killing machine that had been created to assassinate Ceauşescu was already rolling, without his knowledge. A team was being put together at that very hour, and everything was to go as planned, the long transition, the economic crises were all about to begin.

  5. DECEMBER 25TH

  On Christmas Day I woke up at 4 am. Liviu, my godfather and his brother Dan, together with their young wives were singing carols at the top of their voices under our window. I only got up to greet them with the traditional "Merry Christmas” and went back my bed while my parents went down for an early breakfast with our unexpected guests.

  Later that day my dad said that Dan looked like a ghost. He was worried about him but the reason behind those haunted eyes, that had scared my father, we found out only months later, when Dan was finally ready to talk.

  When the Revolution started to spread on 22nd, Dan was at home in Odorheiu Secuiesc. That small and beautiful city, where my mother's cousin was married to a Hungarian, had a majority Hungarian population. Romanians were few. Some, like my mother's cousin were teachers at the school, teaching Romanian as a foreign language to the local kids, others like Dan were working in the Army, Police or Securitate. Although the local Communist Party Organization was almost 100% Hungarian, the local folks somehow perceived the Romanians as "dictator lovers” so for them the local Revolution was more a Revolution against Romanians.

  Dan was at his job that morning when he sensed the danger and decided it was time to get his young wife out of town before it was too late, and decided it was best for them to flee in a military truck. They were packing when the revolutionaries marched from the local factories where they worked to the City Hall to take over. Thousands of people marching in unison, shouting in Hungarian antiCeauşescu slogans.

  That was the image that Dan's best friend, a Hungarian, saw when he suddenly realized that people would recognize Dan's car, parked so close to the City Hall, as a car driven by a Romanian. The number plates said it all. They were from an area with very few Hungarians, so he had to be quick. He smashed a window and got in. He tried to start it by connecting wires as he had once seen in some American movie, but people from the steadily closing march started to run towards the car. They knew the car! They could see the license plates!

  In a second Dan's best friend was surrounded. He tried to get out and talk some sense into those workers, to tell them there was no need to vandalize that car, his friend's car, but he was punched in the head through the broken window. He tried again, but there were already too many people around the car and they started to hit him as they turned the Dacia upside down.

  He was confused when they did that and, because he wasn't wearing a seat belt, was on the car's ceiling trying to figure out how to best get out of the car but also the best way to get away from the boots that were trying to reach him through the shattered windows. He still wasn't afraid. He believed he would get out eventually, so he was more sorry for Dan's car than for himself. But then he could smell it and let out a scream. And he screamed until the flames of the torched car entered his lungs, and kicked, trying to get out and got kicked by heavy boots and...

  People were already leaving when Dan went to pick up his car to park it inside the military unit and he saw it was burning. He wanted to leave immediately but something had caught his eye, so he casually walked towards the car until he was standing beside it and could look inside. It was there. That leather jacket that his friend had bought from Hungary last summer. There were no other jackets like that in the whole of Romania and that burning jacket was on something that was definitely human. His eyes started to fill with tears, for the first time in so many years. He hadn't cried since his mom died when he was still a child, but he was crying then. He felt the world falling apart and started to run, to get away.

  The first victim of the Revolution in Odorheiu Secuiesc was a Good Samaritan. But the second was not. The second was the head of the local branch of Securitate, and the people who killed him took his head out of the building they had set on fire and played football with it. What a happy mood there was, communism was collapsing and they were using their freedom for what western people usually use it: leisure!

  But at four in the morning on Christmas Day I was oblivious to all that. I didn't know that Kamenici was still waiting in his TAB to hear shots in the other. I didn't know that the most mysterious man of the Romanian Revolution, Gelu Voican Voiculescu, the same one that was about to become Romania's Ambassador to Tunisia, was assembling the men who were about to judge Ceauşescu in a kangaroo court.

  Iliescu himself signed a decree on December 22nd, minutes after he got confirmation that Ceauşescu had been captured. I didn't know that 20 years after people and journalists would still be debating whether that signature was valid or not, whether Iliescu was officially the head of the new power or whether he was still just the head of the Technical Publishing House.

  So I was innocent in my sleep and, when I woke up for the second time that morning it was already 10:00am. My mother used to let me sleep in during holidays. I often stayed up reading books way past midnight. Liviu, Dan and their young, beautiful wives were already gone and our gate was closed. Christmas Day was a day when nobody went out, so nobody came to visit. Christmas Day was a day when even the Church was closed. The Christmas mass started and ended before the roosters rang in the morning at 8, so why bother keeping the gate open all day long?

  In the kitchen I refused breakfast, favoring, as always on Christmas, fruitcakes, cakes and cookies. I was washing everything down with a mug of hot milk – my mom was there so cold milk wasn't an option – when my father announced the day's schedule.

  "Today they're gonna kill Ceauşescu, and I plan on watching it. Let's go all upstairs and play Scrabble or a card game of twist, sing carols and watch the television”.

  Now that was a first. We usually stayed in my grandmother's room and listened to her stories. Before that we used to listen to my grandfather's stories, and they were so interesting.

  My grandmother had interesting stories too. Her best one was about when her sister died. She was with her, in her final moments.

  "Floare”, she said to my grandmother, and that's "Flower” in Romanian.

  "Floare, can you see that white dove on the stove?” her dying

  sister asked.

  "No, my dear, there's no white pigeon on the stove!” my

  grandmother re
plied.

  "Oh, Floare, you can't see it because He didn't come for you.

  He said that you still have to wait. But He's here for me. The

  Holy Spirit, Floare, the Holy Spirit! He's here for my soul. God

  bless you too.” she had said and her soul was taken, probably by

  a white bird that waited for her on the hot stove, to say goodbye.

  It was the year I was born, 1975, during the winter. And the bird

  was right, my grandmother, despite being the first born, had to

  wait for it another nineteen long years.

  So there we were, half watching TV, playing Scrabble with my

  unbeatable father and listening to carols. My grandmother only

  came for a couple of hours, she went to her room. She didn't like

  the TV and the news it spread. On Christmas one had to think

  about the miracle of Nativity not about people being shot. “The world is going to end. People killing each other in the

  Holy Week of Christmas, nothing good will come out of this!” she half shouted and left, leaving my father and me smiling. We were the idiots. We smiled believing that grandmother was too

  old but the fact remains, she was the only one that got it right. But in less than five minutes my grandmother was back with

  terrible news. Our neighbor, Comrade Stoica, a devoted party

  member who really believed in communism despite living in a

  huge house that others could not afford, had died. He was really

  young, not even 40, but even more terrible was the news that he