The Pigs' Slaughter Read online

  “God forbid the Russians come”, my father was worrying when my mom entered the room. She was all purple and radiating with joy. I guess she never completely understood what was going on, but the general idea was: we had to be happy it was over.

  What was over and what was about to begin were things we couldn’t even grasp.

  “What is freedom?” My question was raised again but this time my father answered without thinking.

  “Freedom is when you can do whatever you like to do without the pig Ceauşescu there to stop you”.

  A few years later I was in a train headed for the Black Sea coast. It was crowded and people had to stand in the aisles. There were bags everywhere, sweat and a metallic taste in people's mouths. It was hot. Very hot. So first I didn't quite understand what was happening when all of a sudden, a group of youngsters started to break doors and seats. The toilet door came off first and they opened the carriage doors and dropped it out, all laughing. Knives in hand, they attacked any appliances that could be removed or destroyed while everybody watched in fear.

  "Why are you doing this?" an old man asked them visibly hurt by what he was seeing and he got an answer that echoed my father's:

  "Shut the fuck up, old fart. Maybe you didn't notice but Ceauşescu's gone. There's democracy in Romania and we are free!" Bang! Bang! The train’s toilet, a dirty one, flew out of the water closet and then out of the speeding train. The youngsters were right, after all. They were free...

  From the blaring TV set we could hear people chanting: “We are the people, down with the dictator”, “Ole, ole, Ceauşescu is no more”, “Freedom, freedom” and the like. And we saw the flag. The communist coat of arms cut out and the flag had a hole in its middle yellow stripe.

  I jumped up and took my grandfather’s flag, one with no hole in it, but with no communist coat of arms either, and I hung it outside the front door where it could be seen from the street. I was so proud. My grandfather had had that flag since 1918. He was 14 when Transylvania became, at the end of WWI, a part of Romania, and people from his village marched with handmade Romanian flags to Alba Iulia where they proclaimed their will for unity.

  “Dad, let me see what's happening at the Town Hall”, my sister pleaded again.

  “No, please think”, my dad replied. “It might get dangerous. Some people might shoot their guns and usually it's innocent bystanders that get killed”, he said, with the experience of listening to the real world’s news offered by Radio Free Europe and Voice of America.

  “I am the one that should go”, he continued, “and I would be more relaxed if I knew you were all safe here”.

  “Yes, sir!” All we could do was obey and respect his decision. It was his call, not ours.

  My mom asked if we wanted something, anything, and said she would go help my grandmother with the ribs. I said nothing. I wasn’t exactly delighted with my dad’s decision, and I went downstairs to put some more sawdust on the willow smoking fire. Maybe my sister was right and we were just wasting a good chance to see something happening in that town where usually nothing happened.

  I was about to lock the smokehouse behind me when I heard them. Since the gate had to stay closed at all times I rushed not to the gate but upstairs, from where I could see the street. When I arrived my sister was already there, expectantly, eyes gaping wide.

  Two MLI armored personnel carriers, maybe the last two to ever be finished at Marsa Mechanical, were passing by. On them were people we knew, guns in hand, bottles in hand. They were happy and shouting. They were on their way to Sibiu, to help the Revolution. It was the first time for me to see armored vehicles actually being driven. Usually I saw them covered under military camouflage sheets, loaded on big trailers while they were shipped out of our town.

  They looked crazy and beautiful, and half of me feared them and the other half envied the people driving them. A few seconds after they passed I heard the boom. And the bang, and then all the swearwords the Romanian language can muster, in all possible combinations. My sister turned red.

  What had happened was that the second armored vehicle had taken a corner too tightly and crashed into the Barna's house. That was the fourth house up from ours, the other three being the Olog's, David's and David's.

  The Barna’s house it was and that military machine with all its ammunition stayed pinned in there more than two weeks, well after the Revolution was over. People from the first vehicle wanted to pull it out, but after hours of trying and failing they said they should go to help in Sibiu anyway.

  “Help what?” their wives were shouting from the small crowd of Revolution lovers that had gathered around the poor Barna’s house. The Revolution started in a very unfortunate way for him, but, although he was unaware of it, in a few years the entrepreneurial freedom the Revolution brought would turn him into a well-off business man.

  “Help what?”, the echo turned into engines roaring. The "Revolutionaries" got into or climbed onto the MLI, all very drunk, with no exception.

  That day the people in Sibiu were fortunate. Although many were killed around the military garrison, the drunken revolutionaries never made it to their city. They were stopped by a wise military patrol and ordered back to Marsa Mechanical: they were driving a military vehicle with no army markings!

  I was following my father onto the street to see the MLI that had gotten stuck in the Barna's house but I only got a glimpse of it. He ordered me back inside our front yard and, reluctantly, I followed his order. Almost all old Transylvanian houses look like small fortresses, and despite ours having more garden space around it, a heavy gate separated us from the rest of the world. We could easily withstand a siege if karma turned someone or something against us.

  The front yard was deep in snow. The trees were white with icicles. Breathtaking. I stood there for a long time waiting for my father to come back inside and ask him about the accident. Eventually I got cold and took a leak. It was fascinating to see the yellow urine melting the snow, creating a deep crevasse in it. I smiled. My folks would go crazy (again) after seeing the “evidence” left behind by the animal they were feeding. We always had guests, friends or relatives, twice a day or even more often. Now that Christmas was just about here, we could expect even more people dropping in. The thought of it made my silly leak look more shameful than it was, so the moment my father entered the gate I stamped my foot into the snow to cover my dirtiness. What a trained animal I was.

  At first, my father said nothing, as we were walking toward the kitchen. The kitchen and the bathroom were separated from the rest of the house and we used the back door to get to them. The smell of the fried meat my mother was preparing got stronger as we got closer.

  “Let’s have some ribs with white bread”, my father said, suddenly hurrying me towards the kitchen.

  I could have easily fainted as I entered the kitchen. Four large glass jars were lined up and my mother was already filling one with fried ribs. On the stove in the biggest frying pan that we had, other ribs were changing color to cinnamon brown, the meat retreating towards the bones.

  “I’ll have two. With sour cabbage”, I told mom.

  When it came to food, I wasn’t polite to her. As the young man of the house I was imitating my father who used few words to ask for food or drink. It took me many years to get rid of that habit, and even now, at 34, when back home I still expect her to fetch me water or bread when I need more.

  Sitting down, my father started to devour the lard-fried ribs and bread and talk about the armored vehicle that had crashed near us. My mom was taking it seriously. She was white - she usually was - but now she was whiter and scared.

  “The Marsa Mechanical workers are marching. They'll be here in a few minutes. I’m going with them”, my father said almost whispering.

  “No, you can’t do that, you have to stay here with us”, my mom replied, shaking the long fork that she was holding at him. “You don’t understand”, my father loudly retorted, "I have to go with them. I should
be at the Town Hall, it’s safer for me, for us, if I go with them. Look, if something happens I’ll be on the side of those throwing the stones not the ones getting them in the head."

  Now that was smart, I thought, but it was a short-lived thought. The Marsa Mechanical workers were already passing my house, so my father jumped to his feet, took his coat and vanished.

  I tried to run after him, but my mom’s eyes stopped me short. I never saw that kind of look on her face and, shocked as I was, I decided to stay and comfort her. It turned out to my advantage in the end anyway. I got to finish my father's ribs too. With sour cabbage they were delicious. And that year's cabbage was especially good. We made it as always, about 200kg in a huge plastic barrel and, during the long months of winter it was present, in one form or another, every day on our table. But we couldn't finish it all so on special occasions we used to give some pickled cabbages to our gypsy neighbors who were always happy to receive them.

  After eating my father's ribs I didn't leave mom for the TV. Together we continued to fry new ribs and put them in the big jars. They were salty and smelled good. A few months later, when completely covered in opaque white lard, every once in a while I would take one out with a fork, and eat it with white bread and onion. The truth was that I preferred to eat the ribs with fresh tomatoes, but when the tomato season started the ribs were already gone. My auntie’s house in Brasov was where I had had ribs with fresh tomatoes in the middle of summer. My aunt had no children, so their pig was always too much for them, and that was why it always lasted so long.

  Felicia, my sister came to call us upstairs to watch the Revolution together.

  “'We' took over the TV station. The revolutionaries are speaking on TV, you have to hurry”, she said hurrying herself with pickles and a super sized fried sausage. That 'we' that she used was the same one used when supporting the Romanian national team in soccer games. 'We' against the 'others', but on that particular occasion I didn't know who the 'others' were. I only knew Ceauşescu, and we were all against him.

  My sister always ate pickles, and, when we had them, sausages. We grew up together but I cannot remember her ever eating soup. Or staying at the table until everyone had finished. Maybe that was the reason she was so small, so thin. Too many pickles, and to hell with everything else! Even now that she has turned 33, I don’t think she is a gram over 40 kilos.

  Before following her upstairs with a snack and a hot cocoa for myself, we had to help mother put the jars in the cool room. This room was adjacent to the kitchen, built so the sunshine never touched its walls. Its floor was non insulated concrete and it had two small and always open windows - one at floor level, and the other one under the ceiling - so even on a hot summer day the temperature inside never climbed above 9 degrees centigrade.

  The next day was the day we had to melt the pig’s fat into lard and pour it over the ribs, covering them, to keep them edible until summer. I had heard that some people kept their fried meat in oil, but my mother never veered from the traditional way. First of all the sunflower oil that was sold in Romania at the time had a rancid taste, and secondly because the dishes cooked with oil, and not with the traditional lard, were nothing like my mom's food.

  As we settled down in front of the TV, our backs to the terracotta stove and the door, Ceauşescu was already being captured with his wife. They were ditched by their pilot who told them he had run out of gas, so they tried, farsically, to highjack a car to flee in. They promised the driver money, but they were turned in and brought to a military camp in Tragoviste, the former capital of Walachia, the very place from where our kings (including Vlad, the Impaler) had ruled from.

  But we didn’t know all that. We, like all Romanians, and the entire world that existed beyond our borders which was probably watching us, did not know that. But the people on the TV screen, the archangels of freedom, who proclaimed first the end of Ceauşescu and only later, under pressure from the revolutionary mob, the end of communist rule in Romania, knew. They were already preparing the Ceauşescus' slaughter. The summary trial. The execution.

  But they said nothing about their plans. Nor anything about their already having taken control of the country. Instead they called on the people to come out of their homes and onto the streets, to defend the Revolution.

  “Come and defend the TV station”, they urged on air. And my mother’s hands turned whiter and whiter as she clung to her armchair with an ever-tightening grip.

  She didn’t voice it but I could see she was worried about father, being caught now in a similar turmoil. What if he had to "defend the revolution"? What if he was shot and killed? Now the TV, not Radio Free Europe was talking about thousands and thousands of deaths, about people murdered, cremated and dumped in sewage drains.

  “Come and help me with the smoke”, my mom said, and I felt that she was trying to do something, anything, other than just sitting there, worried about my father, about us, about the Revolution.

  “What do you think will happen?” I asked, and she responded, blurting out the words:

  “We will have food”.

  “What do you mean, we will have food?” My question came because all I could think of were the sausages being smoked in OUR smokehouse, the jambon still in salt, the two huge pig-long pieces of fatback in salt, in OUR basement too.

  “Remember when we went on that trip to Hungary?” asked my mother like she was dreaming with her eyes wide open. “There was plenty of food. Remember the supermarket with plenty of meats and cheese and bread and nobody waited in long lines to buy anything. The people didn't look desperate like shoppers do here.”

  “But, mom, Hungary was a communist country, back then.”

  “I know, but I heard that in Germany stores are even bigger, and better supplied than in Hungary.”

  Her argument was undefeatable so I put my handmade ski hat on to go outside. I usually did not bother with a coat, but I always took a hat, when going outside. Gloves, too, sometimes. When door handles drop in temperature 20 below zero, I had better wear gloves before touching them. Otherwise, my hands would stick to them, which is an interesting sight to see, but not to experience.

  Anyway, it wasn’t that cold on that 22nd of December, so I decided to go with just my hat. My mom followed me and I really did not understand why. It was my job to light the fire, not hers, so I assumed she didn’t really trust my way of doing it or my ability.

  The fire in the bucket was still going, under layers of willow sawdust, but it desperately needed more wood chips. Carefully I started to remove the burned and unburned sawdust to uncover the amber coals. I covered them with big chunks of dry willow and started to blow my lungs out to start a new fire. Soon I was done. But just as I was about to cover that new fire in wooden chips and willow sawdust, my mom threw something in the flames.

  I understood what when I saw it opening and a very young and thin version of my father started to burn. She was burning their Communist Party ID cards, two small cranberry red booklets containing their names and pictures and a few stamps.

  “It’s getting hot in here, you better cover the fire”, she stated dreamily. I obeyed, thinking how long it would take for my father's picture to burn, how that smoke would affect the sausages hanging above and why it was necessary for her to burn those IDs. It was impossible to hide their membership in the Communist Party, if that was what she was trying to do. Everybody we knew were communists. Both of my grandmothers were not, but my grandfather, the only one I knew, was a communist. Not a proud one. He was forced to hand over his horse to the communist government in the early ‘60s, but he was red.

  Soon, the smoke was thick enough for us to leave. I wanted to go upstairs to watch more television. I was 14 and television hungry. We had only two hours of mostly news about Ceauşescu and the countries he had visited, and I wanted more television.

  In the summer of 1989, I was in Lodroman, the village where my maternal grandmother used to live and watched three American movies. One was a Vietnam
war movie, the other one was a police movie and the last one a comedy. I had paid the owner of the VCR player 60 lei for me and my sister and that was the first time I had seen a color television. I sat for nearly 5 hours on the floor, in a room covered with teenagers, all of them paying all their savings to watch those movies, and I wished communism would end so that we could buy our own color TV set and VCR player. I guess freedom for me back in 1989 was nothing more and nothing less.

  Two years on, in 1991 I was watching the same Opera TV set and I still did not have a VCR player. Only in the summer of 1992 did we have the money to buy a secondhand German-made Blaupunkt color TV set and a secondhand Japanese Akai VCR player. It was a big event, not only for us, but for all our neighbors, too, who gathered at our house. We all watched, in a cramped room, the same Vietnam war movie that I had seen in 1989, in the summertime, and my only thought was how stupid I was to believe that freedom was watching lots of TV and owning home entertainment systems. I could not help but observe how my happy-to-be-there neighbors envied us for having that color TV set, even if it was an old one which came in a retro wooden box, probably one that some very fat Germans full of beer and hot dogs, threw out on New Year’s Day, along with an oversized VCRplayer, made in 1983 by Akai, a maker that was better known in Romania than in Japan.

  But of course back on December 22nd, 1989, I was still a child. One that was very difficult to entertain. I had read all of my fathers 1000 or so books and the insignificant tiny town library had nothing I was interested in reading. Reading was my life but in my countryside I had already read all I could get my hands on. I even read the Bible that very year, mainly because it was the only book I hadn’t read on our bookshelves...And, to my surprise, I found it to be a good book!

  Maybe that was the reason I was desperate to watch TV, to watch American movies...Our communist society urged us to be secular, and the capitalist era that started in 1989 made that a priority too. So, soon I had my share of my long dreamed of American entertainment and in my first year of "freedom" I proudly kept records of all the American movies I managed to watch. And I didn’t stop until I had more than 1000 entries in that scrapbook and considered myself the most pathetic idiot of the free world. Freedom was more than eating popcorn and watching Hollywood movies, that's for sure.