The Pigs' Slaughter Read online

  The son of a proud nation that was fighting for its freedom, I was celebrating our nation of people who had balls. I didn’t pity those who died in Timişoara, not one single one of them. They died for freedom, they were heroes, and they had certainly bigger balls than I had at the time. We had prayed for the pig when we ate its meat. Now, because the feast was over and we had to make at least 4 kinds of sausages by nightfall, we had to pray again.

  “Thank you Lord for this pig that you brought to our table. Thank you Lord for taking care of us. Take care also of those who left this cruel world these last days at the hands of communists, and keep us safe, keep the Russian pigs away from our country, don’t let them come to crush us in our motherland nest”, my father finished and emptied his glass on the ground. Mr. Brana said “Amen” and emptied his glass as well on the kitchen floor. It was customary to empty one's glass on the ground for the last toast. The souls of the dead had to drink too.

  My mom had removed the carpet in the early hours of the morning and the place was already quite dirty and, anyway, it didn’t matter.

  My father took a knife and cut two blocks of good meat. One for Mr. Brana, for helping us and one for Uncle Lulu, for sipping the hot wine with us. In a starving country where people were risking their lives to overturn the dictator there wasn’t a more appreciated present.

  More drinks and they went home. With an ear for Radio Free Europe, we started to mince the meat, onions and garlic. We had two mincing machines. One that my grandmother got as a wedding present in 1921, and another that my mother got as a wedding present in 1974. I could tell that the one from before WWII was better but, because it was bigger, my father had it to himself.

  “The citizens are taking to the streets and the army is using machine guns on them”, the passionate report that we heard on the radio made us stop for a second.

  “We have to win”, “the pig must go down”, my father said furious and increased the speed of the mincing machine. At that point my granny returned with the washed stomach and intestines. Actually “washed” is a kind word for what happened to them. Of course she had washed them, but washing them was just the start of a long and laborious procedure. First she emptied them. Now, if you have to do this inside be forewarned that it is a stinky procedure. But out in the open air and at minus 10 degrees centigrade it is not so bad. Then she washed them in clean water, and rubbed them in salt. Finally she took a blunt knife and pulled them between its blunt blade and a polished wooden block so that all the interior walls were ejected. In the end only the transparent exterior membrane remained. This was rubbed in salt again, and again washed, and rubbed in salt again and then washed again, until it lost its odour. The same procedures were applied to the small and big intestines, and even harsher treatment for the stomach.

  It was about time to fill them up. Before it got dark, and before my father got drunk. The big intestine became the membrane for “caltabosh”, a specialty made from the head’s meat, lungs, kidneys and heart. The small intestine was divided between the meat sausages, the liver pate and the “sângerete” and the blood sausages. All the other small cuts of meat and head cartilages went into the pig’s stomach to become the highly prized “tobă”, which is also the Romanian word for drum.

  It was suddenly night outside and we were bloody tired. The meat sausages went into the smokehouse. All the other specialties followed after first being boiled. I made the fire. I used the customary willow wood and willow wood sawdust to cover the fire. That was the best smoke I could imagine for our fresh sausages.

  We stayed up to clean the kitchen floor, scrub it with brushes and rinse it with hot water. The next morning my mom would put the carpet back, but that had to wait until the next morning. Soon after my father called it a day.

  And what a day it had been! I was full of meat, the first time in many months, my house was warm and outside, in the snow, the willow smoke was coming out of the smokehouse like a surreal fog. The present was foggy but with signs of prosperity visible, and going to sleep the night before I really hoped for a more prosperous tomorrow.

  “Dad!” I whispered from my room...

  “What? Go to sleep,” his answer came through the door that

  was separating our bedrooms.

  “If Ceauşescu falls, what’s gonna happen?”

  My question hung in the air, frozen for many minutes. “We will be free!”

  I could sense the emotions running deep within my father’s

  thoughts. Free. Like an echo, the word bounced back and forth inside my head. Free. Wasn’t I free at that very moment? Was I in a kind of prison? Free...

  I was rebelling like all 14-year-old rebels, so wasn’t I free? Wasn’t my dad free? Because we lived in a house and not in an apartment. We were required to give, according to the rules, a pig, our pig, to our motherland. Our motherland was fucking hungry and wanted to eat our pig. But we just slaughtered it for ourselves. Because we had no grain and no potatoes to raise two pigs...And we never fucking gave our pigs to our motherland! We did have choices, didn't we? We lived in a communist country and we lived in fear, but for some reason I didn't think of myself as not being free.

  I rolled over under the heavy woolen duvet and fell asleep. I was free. I was going to be free. My last vivid memory of that 21st of December was the willow smoke perfume lingering on my dirty fingers.

  As it happens, the perfume of smoke was Jean Louis Calderon's last vivid memory too. As I drifted off he was being killed near the Intercontinental Hotel in Bucharest, one block away from the soon to be renamed, Jean Louis Calderon Street. That street, that area must have felt familiar to him, as the buildings there resembled his very own Paris and the neighborhood around Liberation headquarters, but he never imagined these streets going under French names.

  As a Frenchman he knew what was unfolding before his eyes and why he was there. Vive la Révolution!

  In 1789 his countrymen and women took to the streets to fight against tyranny. Liberté, Égalité, Fraternité were becoming so palpable, so real. “Fraternité” was the key word and that was why he refused to watch the events from the safety of the Intercontinental Hotel, like all the Anglo-Saxon journalists. So there he was, on the street, surrounded by tanks and soldiers. People shouting, guns rattling, a barricade being raised like back in 1789 and then being attacked. And defended. And conquered. And it was that girl that he saw, happy and beautiful, facing the bullets and he wanted to be like her, wanted to get to know her and wanted to remember her forever. But smoke was the last thing he was able to think of. Jean Louis Calderon died in an anti-climax to his own exciting life of storytelling.

  2. DECEMBER 22ND

  Waking up on December 22nd I didn’t think about Jean Louis Calderon. I didn’t know him and his story, and, even 5 years later, when I was myself an apprentice journalist running to press conferences held in some French-looking buildings on Jean Louis Calderon Street, it never crossed my mind that the street was named after a journalist.

  Unlikely. Maybe a composer or a painter that everyone but me knows. That had to be it. That was the non-story that Jean Louis Calderon Street told.

  As it happens, my dad took a day off on that 22nd of December. It was Friday and it had nothing to do with the pig. “If something happens it’s better not to be there”, he said to my mom when she left at 6:30 for her job. She had a job in a glass factory that employed half of my town’s population. The other half was employed at Marsa Mechanical, a factory hidden in the woods that made huge dump trucks and armored military vehicles. My father had worked for both, but he got bored and changed his job to one that gave him freedom. So, on that December 22nd he was head of the Civil Defense in Avrig, my tiny Transylvanian town.

  As a matter of fact nobody else worked with him in the Civil Defense. The Civil Defense was a nonexistent department in the Town Hall, created maybe because Ceauşescu had had a bad dream once in Bucharest.

  “I have to think about measures for times when floods,
fires and earthquakes happen. Also hiding places for when the Russians decide to bomb us”, he once told me.

  “But we never have floods, fires or earthquakes here,” I replied. "And there is nowhere to hide here, I never heard of shelters in Avrig”. My reply made him laugh:

  “That’s why I took this job”. He had to report to the military, now and then, and the military, in the person of "The Colonel" started to attend our picnics on Sunday. They were a nice family from Cisnadie, one that we kept in touch with even after my dad had gone to meet Jean Louis Calderon.

  But of course that was something I didn’t know that morning. News like from another world blared from the radio. Radio Free Europe was informing us that Ceauşescu's days were numbered. There was a Revolution happening in Romania, a bloody revolution, and Romanians were united and standing against their "beloved" dictator.

  I could tell my father was afraid. Expectant and afraid. As an employee of the Town Hall he WAS the fucking state! Why did he have to change his job? He had nothing to fear as a technician with Marsa Mechanical, but that wasn’t the situation anymore.

  “Go and get the smoke going, or we ain’t gonna eat sausages this year”, my father ordered. “Then, come back to the kitchen, we still have work to do”.

  The willow I got that year was so dry that it took me less than a minute to make the fire. I watched it for a few moments while I warmed my hands. The fire was in a large bucket placed right beneath our sausages, caltaboshi, pate and toba. They all looked cold, with traces of fat dripping from last night. I had to be quicker. The smokehouse wasn’t supposed to be hot. Minus temperatures were preferred. I took a bag of willow sawdust and poured it onto the fire. The secret was to use just enough to keep the fire going beneath it and produce smoke. If I poured more than just enough, the fire would go out and there would be no smoke. If I poured less than just enough, the fire would eat through the sawdust and burn with open flames, something which we had to avoid. The meats would surely rot if warm.

  I was satisfied with my work and looked at my watch making a mental note. Every hour I had to come back to pour more sawdust into the bucket. I went to the door, and then, kicking the cat to stop the hungry animal from getting in, I went out and locked the smokehouse door behind me. It wasn’t unheard of that thieves, especially gypsies, would steal people’s sausages at night or in broad daylight, so I had to be careful. Only a couple of days before, when my neighbors got up to slaughter their pig for Ignat's Day, they discovered it gone. Three empty bottles of beer had been dropped where the pig was, and the Militia man said: "Smart, they took it while you were asleep so you wouldn't hear anything", but then he added, "If you find out who the thieves are, inform us straightaway so we can arrest them", and he hurried away because he, too, had a pig to kill. At that moment, my entire family was counting on me and I was going to do it right.

  “Well done!” My father said to me when I entered the kitchen. From the window he could see the smoke rising from under the heavy snow that covered the roof of the smokehouse. He didn’t know, and neither did I, but it was the last winter we would see that roof. The following spring we knocked the smokehouse and rebuilt it beside the barn. My mom wanted more space for flowers in the front yard and the smokehouse stood in her way.

  Breakfast was rye bread, beans, pickles and zacusca, a Romanian version of ratatouille, over-boiled so we used it as a spread. I wolfed it down in big mouthfuls. My grandmother entered the kitchen with a big frying pan. My dad brought a heavy wooden board from outside and his butcher knife. I finished my meal quickly. Felicia, my sister, had already taken her breakfast upstairs to eat it in our room.

  Now, that the table was clean, my dad set half of the pig’s ribs on it and he started to separate them with a sharp knife. I helped. One hour we worked in silence. After we were done we put the separated ribs in two empty and clean buckets and placed them back in the pantry.

  He came back with the other half of the pig’s ribs and then fixed a drink and lit a cigarette. It was time for me to go and check the news. The TV was upstairs with my sister.

  “Romanians, remain in front of your TV sets! An important communiqué for the Nation will soon follow!”

  As soon as I entered the room I heard the announcement. The voice from the black & white Opera TV set was reproducing a stereotypical message from war movies about the 23rd of August, 1944, the day Romania changed sides in the war and started to fight against the Germans. Making friends with the fucking Russians wasn’t a choice I supported, nor understood. As a Junior High School student, then in my last year, I was quite opinionated and called all ugly teachers and students – not that there were many – “as beautiful as the Russian language”.

  It all started with my grandfather who had told me how in the First World War and then again in the Second World War our house was commandeered by Germans, and how the Germans were civilized, didn’t leave dirty toilets behind and how they paid a fair price for what they got.

  “But not the Russians!” he always said with clenched fists. The story was that when the Russian soldiers came, they took all of his tomatoes, apples and chickens, and when he asked for money they fired their guns over his head and punched him to the ground. A few days later, when more Russians came, his coat and his watch were taken. And his wine too. Then, in the cold spring of 1945, when his house was commandeered by an officer, the soviet bastard wanted to rape his daughter. My Aunt Anişoara was 13 in ’45, and my grandfather used his Colt Revolver to protect her. He told me that he pushed the officer for 3 kilometers with the gun, and let him run away only after they were far away from our village. He couldn’t kill the man, and he hoped he wouldn’t be able to come back, wouldn’t be able to tell which village it was.

  So it goes that my grandfather lived year after year with the fear that that particular officer would come back, from Berlin or from Moscow, to take revenge for the night spent in the unknown woods. That was the story.

  All this came back to me like a flash in my mind. I was already rushing downstairs with the news. Who could have known then that I was destined to make a living from producing and selling news in the future? Not me. Back in December 1989 I was thinking of becoming a doctor in the future. Doctors always had money, they were respected and they were maybe the only profession that didn't have to applaud Ceauşescu. We all had to clap for our dictator on important occasions, such as his visits, school year opening ceremonies, graduation parties and the like.

  “Dad, it’s over! Ceauşescu is finished!” I shouted at my dad, as I entered the kitchen, and he stood up and came and hugged me. “That’s the best news I've ever heard”, he said delighted, poured a drink and went to the phone. He sounded so happy and acted like we had just won the lottery, but the anxiety and fear never left his eyes.

  Phone calls to my mom – she said that people in the glass factory were getting ready to march to take over the Town Hall – to friends and relatives. It was like New Year’s night when he called everyone for New Year's greetings.

  “We should get the ribs ready for the lard”. It was my grandmother, insensible as always to political situations but very much sensitive to food issues.

  The ribs had to be cut in pieces 5cm long and salted and then deep fried in lard. Then they had to be placed in 5 liter jars and covered in lard. The lard would solidify into a bright white color. Here and there a cinnamon brown shadow reveals it’s a meat jar and not merely a lard jar. Then, everyday, my mom would take a greasy fried piece of rib and put it in a pan, fry it with chopped onion and garlic. This is how all cooking begins in Romania, it doesn’t matter what the desired dish is. The vegetables chosen and subsequent preparations make the difference.

  Chop. Chop.

  The butcher knife went up and down, up and down, cutting the ribs with precision. My grandmother was readying the 5 liter glass jars and heating the fry pan. After my dad is done it would be her job to finish and preserve the ribs.

  With nothing left to do in the kitche
n I went to see my fire and add sawdust to the smokehouse's bucket. Then I was back upstairs, where my sister was already sitting comfortably in the front of the TV.

  I didn’t know at the time, but most of my countrymen spent their Revolution watching TV. Somehow the TV crews that were supposed to transmit another attempt by Ceauşescu to calm the people by speaking to the crowds started to broadcast live images of the revolt. The very large square in front of the Central Committee of the Romanian Communist Party was packed with people attacking the infamous building. It was our Bastille, but Jean Louis Calderon was already dead and didn’t see it fall. Those tortured and killed by the Secret Police in its basements in the aftermath of communist power being installed in Romania at the end of WWII, didn’t see it either. Maybe some of them could have foreseen today’s events, but I’m sure that they never imagined that almost all their countrymen would stay at home, watch TV, sip drinks and pat each other on the back.

  “Let’s go into town and see what's happening”. It was my sister Felicia, as usual, coming up with a crazy idea.

  “Are you nuts?” I asked and didn’t wait for her reply. My dad was about to enter the room, the only one with a TV set back then, and he had overheard her proposal.

  “I forbid you to go outside the gate. The gate will stay closed until I say so”, went my dad, with unexpected calmness. Then he put down the tray he was carrying, two mugs of hot cocoa for us and a hot coffee for him.

  Sipping our drinks we watched with enthusiasm how people entered the Central Committee building, how they threw things from the balcony where Ceauşescu last stood, how they were trying to address us, the people watching and encouraging them.