The Pigs' Slaughter Read online

  The Pigs’ Slaughter

  Florin Grancea

  Copyright © 2010 Florin Grancea All rights reserved.

  ISBN: 145638239X ISBN-13: 978-1456382391 As a narrative nonfiction the contents of this work fall under the protection offered by the First Amendment

  ◎ The front cover picture was first published in "1989 Libertate Roumanie" by Denoel Paris (ISBN 2-207-23695-1)

  TO

  My kids, Mihai (4) and Angela (2) who are lucky to be born and raised in a free country, to Mayo, my beloved wife, to my mother

  who raised me well in a time of struggle and to my father, who

  always protected us and saw things that, at the time, we did not.

  CONTENTS

  Acknowledgments i

  1 December 21st Pg 1

  2 December 22nd Pg 14

  3 December 23rd Pg 39

  4 December 24th Pg 96 5 December 25th Pg 127

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  I wrote this book in two weeks under pressure from my dearest friend Nathan O’Neill. As a many-time guest for dinner, Nathan was always delighted with my Romanian stories and repeatedly asked me to write them down. I did, and having started I raced to the end with him at my side as a Mr. Watson of proofreading.

  Without his support, this book may not have been written at all.

  1. DECEMBER 21ST

  The truth is that I was slaughtering the pig.

  When the Romanian Revolution started and people rushed to overturn Ceauşescu, or rushed to sit in front of their TV sets and watch how people were slaughtered on the streets of Timişoara, Bucharest and Sibiu, I was rushing a knife into a pig.

  The previous day was Ignat's Day, pig slaughtering day in Romania. We were one day late. My Unitra (Polish made) radio was turned on loud tuned to Radio Free Europe. Until a couple of days earlier we could only listen to it after dark, and with the volume turned down. To listen to it in the open would have meant beatings, jail time or even death.

  Was I stupid? Maybe, but I didn’t care anymore. News from Timişoara said that there were thousands and thousands of deaths, so it had to be over soon.

  I rushed to spread the news. The good news: the Revolution continued!

  “Daaad!” My voice straining, my heartbeat quickening, I rushed into the backyard.

  The pig was there, my dad was there, Uncle Lulu was there, too, sipping hot wine from a mug.

  “Where the hell have you been? You're holdin' up the show", said my dad, like I was about to miss all the fun.

  His friend, Mr. Brana, was taking the role of butcher. He had a rather small knife in his hand, pointed with a thin and narrow blade. It didn’t have a blood gutter.

  It always takes three people to slaughter a pig. Two won’t do, four are always too many. That’s why Uncle Lulu was on the hot wine. At 7:00 in the morning, the hot wine was a better choice than a mug of coffee. It was cold out. Really cold.

  Now you could tell that the pig was nervous. These animals that we eat on Christmas day are smarter than dogs and it could see it coming. My father had the rope, Mr. Brana, the knife...

  “Get the bucket ready, will you?”

  A last minute instruction from my dad.

  To slaughter a pig you need a knife, a rope and a bucket. Nothing more, nothing less.

  The tension was mounting. We closed the gate of the small backyard to make the job of catching the pig easier, and the pig didn’t like it. I have heard stories of pigs attacking their would-be slaughterers and mauling them to death, and certainly some crazy pigs were capable of it. Maybe that was the reason my fingers were trembling as I held the bucket... Maybe it was the news on the radio.

  Well, we had a job to do and the news had to wait.

  My father approached the pig with the rope and using his hand started to rub the pig’s head. Pigs like that. I have seen some fall asleep, and even fall flat in a matter of seconds, from a good head rub.

  Well, this particular beast didn’t fall asleep. It was too smart to sleep through its last minutes of life, but for some reason touched its head on my dad’s leg. Affection? Fear? Both?

  The rope had a sliding knot in it and my father let the pig step into it. Its left front leg was trapped but it didn’t realize it. Yet. For the pig this was a wrong move. Now it was almost over. My dad pulled the rope, the pig went down and, like a wrestler, my dad put his weight down on it, holding it down.

  If I had been any younger, I would have rode it too. Kids always ride the pigs while they are being slaughtered. But now I was fourteen and I was replacing my mother with the bucket. My sister never rode the pigs. She couldn’t see a life being taken, not even a pig’s life.

  “Son, be ready with that”, Mr. Brana said in a hushed voice. He threw his unfinished cigarette in the snow. A rectangular hole with some smoke rising out of it appeared near my feet. Then, he got close to my wrestling dad, and waited for me.

  As soon as I had the bucket ready he put his left hand on the pig’s head and with his right he thrust his knife into the pig’s neck. I don't know if you have ever slaughtered a pig, or even had the chance to see one being slaughtered close up. But you can easily imagine it by realizing how similar our anatomy and the pig’s are.

  A 150kg live pig doesn’t look like much. Four legs, fat, with a wide back. The head seems to be attached directly onto the body. It only seems so. Its neck is there.

  Feel your own neck! The base of it at the front...You can feel where the chest bone begins. Less than 20cm below that point is your heart. Less than 20cm below that point on the pig is the pig’s heart too.

  Mr. Brana thrust his knife into the pig’s neck aiming for the heart. Professionals always aim for the heart. Only drunk or dumb people try to behead the pig when they slaughter it. Ridiculous. The fat around the pig’s neck can be very tricky and it is not nice being around an injured animal that outweighs you twice-over.

  The knife goes in and comes out. The blood spurts out in a thick jet stream. The previous year I wasn’t ready and the first of the blood sprayed a wall - 6 meters away. But I was ready this time. The blood started to fill the bucket. There would be about 5 liters in all. Even after the pig stops moving, its heart, or what is left of it, continues to pump blood out of the body. The vicious eyes of the animal calm down and look back at you, sympathetic. A moment later they glaze over.

  “Take the blood to your mom”, Mr. Brana spoke in a professional air, with no sign of the kick of adrenaline he had just had while killing the pig. The blood I collected would be the main ingredient in “sângerete”, the blood sausages which would be our only source of iron over the winter.

  In Romania spinach starts growing in early April, so, without blood sausages a body will, sooner or later, be afflicted by a severe case of anemia - it was better to be with them than without them. Our precious blood for the winter...

  My mom filtered the blood for whatever impurities it might have had and transferred it into a pot. She would add salt, black pepper and herbs and stir it on the fire until the future sausages became soot black and thick paste. Then she would wait.

  I, too, was waiting for something. The public broadcast. Ceauşescu had returned the previous day from Iran. I didn’t know it and he didn’t know it either, but the Iran affair was to be his last trip abroad, only five days prior to his death. But hey, to imagine Ceauşescu dead in December ‘89 was like imagining Santa was real. That public broadcast was supposed to show a huge demonstration in support of Ceauşescu and we all hoped that something would happen. Maybe he would step down, maybe he would heed the protests and loosen his grip on us, anything could happen and I was going to watch it.

  Back in the backyard it was the same group. Only now the pig was dead. A white pig on whit
e snow, Uncle Lulu sipping the hot wine, my dad and Mr. Brana smoking their stinky Romanianmade cigarettes. It was a time when Japanese, British and even Turkish tobacco brands were sold on the black market only. You could buy one pack of 20 cigarettes for a doctor so he would anesthetize you before cutting you open, but never to smoke on the grand occasion of slaughtering your pig.

  The silence was deafening. The few dozen chickens and roosters we kept turned quiet in their roosts. They understood that something "bad" had just happened, or they had smelled the blood I had collected, or...I really don’t know, nor quite give a shit, but they were silent too.

  Despite being 14 at the time I got myself a mug of hot wine and took a long sip. It was hot and sweet. Mine was over boiled so it had little or no alcohol. Just the way I liked it. My mom brought some hot brandy for Mr. Brana and my dad, a home made plum spirit, 55% alcohol, boiled with black pepper. Our outdoor party had to continue despite the freezing temperatures we had in Avrig, and the booze was the answer to Mr. Brana’s prayers.

  “Boy, get the straw ready ”, Mr. Brana addressed me again, and I put my mug down and headed for the barn. Climbed the ladder to where the wheat straw was stored and pushed down the equivalent in volume of a large Japanese goose dove futon. I climbed down and took half of it and spread it over the dead pig.

  The pig was on its back, now, and my father helped it stay on its back with two bricks pushed against its body on both sides. When ready, I took a matchbox, opened it, took out a match, lit it and a moment later the pig was on fire. A few minutes later the fire was out and Mr. Brana and my father turned the pig on its belly and I burned it again with the remaining straw. Time for another mug of hot wine for me and Uncle Lulu and another shot of hot brandy for my father and Mr. Brana.

  “Help me with that door”, my father said and we took down the barn door and lay it on the snow. Beside it was the charred and dead pig resting in an anthracite black spot where the snow had been melted by the fire.

  The three of us (my father, Mr. Brana and I) took the pig by its legs and pushed it onto the door. Uncle Lulu went to the kitchen to hurry my mother with the hot water: the boys were about to give the pig a close shave. The straw fire burned the hairs and dead cells off the pig’s skin, so we had to literally shave it, using hot water and sharp knives. But first we had to clean it with hot water and brushes, which we did.

  In less than an hour the charred looking pig had turned into an appetizing pink dream. I say dream because it was a time when eating meat was an extravagance in Romania. It was December and I had last tasted the forbidden swine in early summer. Every Saturday I had killed a chicken or a rooster for Sunday lunch and supper, but not for the last month and a half. It was the Christmas fasting period: beans, beans, cabbage and then more beans. Just seeing the dead pig made me excited at the thought of suppers to come.

  Anyway, the pig was cleaner than a groom on his wedding day, so Mr. Brana went for the first cut: he chopped its ears off and handed them to me. I took them with delight. A quick move with the knife and my trophy grew bigger with a 15” size notebook piece of skin.

  In few seconds later in the kitchen I saw my mom slicing the skin and the ears and taking half of them upstairs to my sister. It was our snack for the unexpected public broadcast. Kids always eat the pig's ears. Raw. At least in Avrig they do, I'm not sure about kids in other counties. The Bucharest demonstration in support of Ceauşescu was about to begin and, strangely, it was to be aired before noon. We decided that we better watch it. Why? Who cared? Maybe nobody, not me, probably because at the time TV broadcasts amounted to a mere 2 hours of news about Ceauşescu, from 7:00pm to 9:00pm every day.

  The patriotic songs and a computer generated image gave way to the image of a packed square and the building of the Central Committee of the Romanian Communist Party. Ceauşescu was doing his usual blah, blah, blah, promising a 100 lei increase in all salaries, about 4USD, despite the fact that all the stores were empty, with no goods to buy. Students were promised 10 lei more, or 40 US cents.

  Listening to the fire in the terracotta stove I dipped a slice of raw pig ear in salt and put it in my mouth, savoring the moment, but before chewing it I jumped to my feet and screamed. On the TV screen there were images of other screams. Years later I learned that while I was eating the pig’s ears, someone in the crowd shouted “Jos, Ceauşescu!” or “Down with Ceauşescu”, and the rattling of guns or maybe just firecrackers were heard. The crowd started to run, the TV station tried to cut off the transmission but they cut the image feed only. We could still hear the Ceauşescus' fearful voices. They were scared!

  75% of the population of Romania was in front of their TVs, like me and my sister. The other 25% were either on the streets, shouting “Jos, Ceauşescu” or slaughtering their pigs, like my parents, Mr. Brana and Uncle Lulu.

  “Hello, hello”, the brain-dead voice of the god-like former shoemaker blared in the speakers while his wife threw fuel on the fire advising him publicly:

  “Talk to them, talk to them”.

  It was popularly believed that Ceauşescu wasn’t so bad, but – as in many Romanian households – he was under the control of his wife. To have the proof of that feared reality was to provoke even more hysteria.

  Like two broken puppets Ceauşescu and his wife stood there bewildered at what was going on. Why had they called the demonstration? Why had they given orders for the bloody backlash in Timişoara?

  “Stay quietly where you are” tried Ceauşescu again, before being rushed into the building by his underlings. And the live feed was cut and replaced again with patriotic music. According to Radio Free Europe a third of the citizens of Timişoara had been killed. Way too many for Ceauşescu to get away with it by offering 100 lei more in monthly earnings for us Romanians.

  With my mouthful of raw pig’s ears I rushed into the backyard to tell the news.

  Dad, it's happening, the people in Bucharest have started a revolt”, I shouted overjoyed.

  Mr. Brana froze, Uncle Lulu froze, and my dad froze too. I was so loud maybe the neighbors had heard it too.

  “We still have to work on this pig”, said my father, his words double edged, while my mother rushed with the hot wine and hot brandy again.

  “I just hope the fucking Russians don’t invade us” said my father, and I remembered how impressed he was when he visited Hungary, the one and only foreign country he had been to, when he saw the traces of the Soviet bullets on the beautiful buildings of Budapest. Their 1956 revolt was crushed by Soviet tanks and as a father he feared for us.

  “You’re right, man, we still have to work on this pig”, echoed Mr. Brana, whatever the real meaning of his words were.

  When I gave them the news he was about to cut off the pig’s legs. The pig was on its belly, bricks positioned on either side of it, so he went to work on it surgically. First all four feet were chopped off and laid aside. My mom would salt them and hang them in the smokehouse. Then the legs followed. One hind leg was put in salt immediately. Four days in salt and then 1 month in the smokehouse, and then hung up to dry further. This was the method of choice for the best meat we could consume raw. The other three legs went into the kitchen where my mom started to take the meat off of them. With a small knife she cut off the fat and threw it into a bucket, the resulting fat-trimmed meat would go into another one. Two buckets full, another two to go, I carried the full buckets into the cold room and locked everything down. Our cats and dog were prowling around, waiting for a treat. If we were careless they would grab everything and this could never happen. The meat was more precious than their lives and I cared more about my family and our food supply than I cared for them.

  Another two buckets in the cold room and I had to help my father put the fatback in salt.

  Imagine the pig, now, with no legs. The next task was to cut the fat off the carcass. Mr. Brana made a long cut from the neck to the tail, and then cut off the back of the pig in two wide and heavy pieces. It is called “slănínă"
in Romanian and it is mostly fatback. We do not remove the skin. These pieces are heavy and they have to withstand hanging on hooks for many months.

  I took the meat down into the basement and put it on a table. I put several kilos of salt on one strip and then covered it with the other strip covering that with salt again. The salt would suck the water out of it, helping to preserve it. I know that the meat industry injects salt water and shit into meat products to make them weigh more in order to deceive clueless customers, but this was not our way of doing it. We loved our food, our natural food.

  Back in the backyard the pig's head was cut off. After being washed and smashed to get at the brains – a delicacy children love to eat – it went into a big pot to be boiled. Its meat and cartilage would fill the pig's stomach and become what is known as "tobă", a heavy spicy sausage.

  It was time, so Mr. Brana took a butcher knife and cut the pig’s spine in two. Opened like this the body revealed its insides to us. The short knife collected for my mom the lungs, liver, kidneys, and the damaged heart. All of which went into a pot to be boiled. The stomach and the intestines went into a bucket to be washed in the river, and the bladder, washed with water, was cut in pieces and fed to the cats and dogs. It was the only part of the pig that we did not use.

  It was before 2:00 pm when my mom gathered us around the table for the pig's funeral feast. Like in real funerals, after burying a beloved, people gather to share food and drinks in remembrance. We had to have a ceremony for our pig as well. Lovely and welcomed it was, because we could eat the meat without sinning, four or five days before Christmas! The pig's ears were meat, too, but somehow the rules were not as strict when applied to them. Only a couple of ears are not a big deal, and I never saw a pig with more than two.

  For the feast, boneless red meat was fried with onions, sweet paprika, pepper and salt. After six weeks on beans and cabbage it was, served with homemade fresh bread, an angel's feast. Of course, empty glasses were quickly refilled and the euphoria – mainly the one that had to be suppressed in the past – could be expressed with conviction and hope. Fourteen years old, holding a plate of meat, a mug of hot wine in hand, in a kitchen crowded with half-drunk people and buckets full of meat, bones and fat, it was the first, and I suspect the last, time that I was really proud of being Romanian.