The Pigs' Slaughter Read online

  But, back on that 22nd of December, 1989, my sister was still watching the TV rejoicing at her new freedom but somehow worried. It was already getting dark and shooting had started around all the Revolution hot spots, the TV station and the Central Committee building. Later that night our new leader, self-elected with the memorable expression “with your permission I'll sign my name as the last on this list” spoken the moment he wrote his name ABOVE everyone else's, Ion Iliescu, was delivering a speech from the very balcony Ceauşescu last spoke to us, and shooting began, but nobody shot at him, they all shot at the buildings around the square. The National Museum of Art was devastated, dozens of paintings forever lost, the University Library was set on fire, thousands and thousands of precious books and documents forever lost, some homes around the square were reduced to ashes along with the people inhabiting them. Their memories were lost forever. Who were they?

  But we didn’t miss any of Iliescu’s speech and we came to love him the way we used to love Ceauşescu. He looked invincible. Speaking from that balcony while everybody was shooting around. Surely the terrorists were lousy shooters. Nobody in that lighted balcony got killed, but people didn't notice the absurdity of it. The evidence. All they wanted to see was a new leader to believe in, a new leader to follow.

  And Romanians followed him. In the May elections held in 1989 Iliescu won the same way the late Saddam Hussein won in Iraq when he was still alive and dictator, but again I was very young and I didn’t know all that. That part of history hadn’t happened yet, we still had time to change it and prevent it, but we did nothing at all. I sat myself down beside my sister, tried another sip of the now very cold cocoa, and watched the TV like in a trance.

  Actually it was captivating. It was like a good movie, a kind of thriller being played and made at the same time. The terrorists (it was made clear by Iliescu that all those shooting their guns were terrorists hired by Ceauşescu to help him get back in power) were ruthless and they were attacking the squares where Ion Iliescu and Petre Roman, a nice guy with no neck wearing a sweater, were.

  God, I hated the terrorists.

  Night fell and my father came back from work. He came back from the city hall where the revolution was in full swing. And because he was a good storyteller he wanted to tell us that particular story in a much better environment, so my mom came up with a crazy idea and we all started to prepare my father’s set. The idea was to bring a dining table up to the room my sister and I shared and dine together while we watched the televised revolution and listen to my father’s story. So we started by folding up my bed, which transformed into a couch, we took the armchairs into the next room and brought from downstairs a dining table and chairs. My mom went into the closet and pulled out the most expensive embroidered white tablecloth we had and glasses followed, then the porcelain and it looked like a party, only that this party was held in front of a TV set and in an unlikely place, the kids’ room.

  Now, when you picture this kids' room, think of bookshelves holding half of my father’s books, two very decent beds draped in cobalt blue covers, one heavy wardrobe that would make proud any granny in Old England, the TV stand, full of books under the TV set, and a blood red carpet, so the room didn’t look like a kids’ room looks in American movies. Still I was shocked. It was my room and all the adults in my house had gathered there to watch the televised revolution AND eat, another unlikely event.

  It was the end of communism and the beginning of freedom, my father told us, so why not, we had to somehow acknowledge that freedom, that we had somehow gotten, and that party was just a way to express it, I thought.

  Soon white bread, pickles, meats and zacusca were on the table and my mother promised us more homemade delicacies were awaiting us the following day. Nobody stood with their backs to the TV set, and for the first hour we just watched in silence.

  “You know, the mayor was literally sent home to wash dishes by the Marsa Mechanical workers”. The mayor at the time was a woman. Never before and never again since. She wasn’t elected mayor but selected by the communist government. All nearby cities had women as mayors and all of them were sent home by the angry people “to cook for their husbands and wash dishes”. It all went off “with no violence”. That was the slogan the crowds in Bucharest chanted while they were being shot at by the hidden terrorists. Although, not all of them went down without a fight. My father lowered his voice when he spoke of how the mayor of Cisnadie was stripped of her clothes and paraded naked to her house by the town’s “revolutionaries”, and I was sure he didn’t like it.

  “You should have seen them, lots of people happy and celebrating, but even more drunk”. "They destroyed everything in the Town Hall", my father went on. Lucky for us, the town’s self-proclaimed Revolution leader was Mr. Tatu, my best friend’s father. As a veterinary doctor he was a guarantee of honesty and good conduct.

  “All my life I dreamed about this moment”, he said when he entered the Town Hall's mayoral office, and he recalled the time his father, a priest, was imprisoned many years by the communists for just being a priest and how he, his son, was expelled from medical school before graduating, how he was denied the right to a higher education. How he had struggled to become a veterinarian, in a place where people had no pets but only animals that served them. Cows and horses to be helped birthing, pigs to be castrated so that their meat would taste good, and chickens to be vaccinated. In Avrig nobody bothered to name their cats and dogs. They were just servants, cats to chase away mice, dogs to chase away thieves. Nobody cared if they died. They could be replaced immediately, and for free, so nothing to occupy a vet.

  Mr. Tatu was to become the first MP from Avrig to serve in Parliament from 1990 to 1992. We saw him on the TV a few months later, and we were proud. The people in that first parliament tried to build a democratic regime without knowing what a democratic regime is, they had no more idea what a democracy is than we did, sitting at that table, on the evening of December 22nd, 1989. Entertainment, food, that was what a democratic regime meant to all Romanians, sober or otherwise. After pouring himself a glass of red wine, which, being homemade in late autumn, smelled fruity and fresh, my father continued his story.

  “They completely destroyed the bookstore”, he announced looking us in our shocked eyes:

  “And the library too”.

  Now that was more than unsettling, it was really bad news. The bookstore was the store I loved more than any other. Next door to my auntie Anişoara’s house, it displayed not only books that I loved to buy but also stationery and toys. It was always crowded and would have been especially crowded this time of year. The reason was simple: that bookstore, destroyed and, as I learned later, looted by the revolutionaries, was the only spot my folks could buy me a Christmas present.

  Felicia started to cry. She got it too. No Christmas presents this year. She didn’t believe in Father Christmas anymore. I had told her a couple of years earlier that our parents were the real Santa Claus, but still, she was 13 years old and was looking forward to that Christmas more than anything else.

  I knew that my father would always wait until the very last moment to buy Christmas presents for us. He always did. He didn’t like to rush things and he was also afraid that we would find the presents hidden in the house before Christmas and that was unacceptable. Father Christmas had to come late at night on Christmas Eve, sometimes impersonated by one of my father’s friends, or, simply by putting the presents under the Christmas tree when nobody was around.

  “Why did those morons do something so barbarous?” my sister asked sobbing while collapsing on her bed. She sat there crying and later listening to us all evening until she fell into a deep sleep. Revolutions are too difficult for little girls to grasp. “They wanted to burn all the books about Ceauşescu. And all the books with pictures of Ceauşescu”, my father explained. “And they did. There was a huge fire in the middle of the street, and people got caught up in the heat of the moment. They started burning everything that
they were vandalizing”. I didn’t know then, and neither did my family, that earlier that day Ceauşescu’s dogs, two black Labradors presented to him by Queen Elisabeth and Sir David Steele were clubbed to death by revolutionaries who obviously got caught up in the heat of the moment. How else can those who did the clubbing explain why they did it? I’m sure it was more gruesome than just burning innocent books, than just smashing windows with stones. But Revolutions are bloody and, as I was familiar with the details of the French Revolution, I expected violence. But violence against Ceauşescu-lovers, not against books or dogs.

  The heat of the moment? I was thinking about that explanation when I realized that they must have burned the school books too. They all had Ceauşescu’s picture on the first page, just behind the cover and, it was the beginning of our freedom, of democracy, so why not? Secretly I wished my father had looted a “Romanian language” textbook for me. Mine was so old and falling to bits. I was easily the 6th or 7th owner. In those days we had to get our textbooks from the motherland. But our communist state was poor, Ceauşescu was trying to pay off all our foreign debt and there was less and less money for us, the kids. Therefore, on the last day of the school year we had to give all our textbooks back to our principal. The teachers would mend them, glue them where necessary, and decide what textbooks could be re-used. Interestingly enough, it seemed that their standards dropped every year. Anyway, when done they would order only the bare minimum of new books, and that was always too few...It was hard for me to remember the last time I got a new book. Was it when I was in first grade? Or the second? It didn’t matter. All that mattered was that the revolutionaries had burned the textbooks too. The textbooks that they never bought for their kids.

  “I won’t buy you a new textbook”, my father once said. “You can use the one that you got from school. If you can read it, if it's not missing any of its pages, then it serves its purpose”, he ruled. Sure they did. My old and decrepit textbooks were there for me when I became fifth in my class. Actually, when I became fifth, I did not want to rise any higher but neither did I want to fall lower. Behind me trailed the rest of my class, the other 39 students. But what purpose had burning those textbooks served? Why were they burned? Because they had a picture of Ceauşescu in them or because the workers that had set them alight wanted to take revenge on the school they did not love so much? The only place that they did not destroy was the local pub. The pub did nothing wrong to them, maybe, and despite what their wives thought, they spared it, went in and ordered drinks, for which they paid. Poor workers, pity their kids and the burned school books. I was too young at the time to have known, but my second guess was right. A few months later in Bucharest coal miners started beating to death or just beating, or just clubbing, or just chasing anybody who looked intellectual.

  “We work, we don’t think” was the slogan that united them against those wearing beards or glasses. They were called to defend the new power, to defend Ion Iliescu and Petre Roman, against the anti-communist parties that organized demonstrations to push for a different change. A change that would exclude excommunists from public life for at least eight years.

  But I was too young. So young that I hated Silviu Brucan, a smart ass Romanian Jew who said that “Romanians are many and stupid” when he predicted that the real change was to come only after 2009, twenty years on. But a few years on all I wanted to be was like Brucan. His books were intelligent, he had arguments, he was always telling the truth. To be Romania's new Brucan. What a beautiful dream! But back in 1989 I was disgusted. My father was disgusted, too, because he didn't know that Brucan said in one of his books that the Revolution turned Romania into a train without a driver. And when nobody knew where the train's engine was, Iliescu and his team (Brucan included) climbed on and took the controls. My father would have agreed with that.

  But I was too young to know that. And my father was too naive in his expectations to have known that. He, like all Romanians who had partied in front of their TV sets or threw away their lives on the streets of Bucharest and Sibiu, had naive expectations of the power change. Now that Ceauşescu had fled and the Revolution had happened, a democratic regime would follow, not another dictatorship, the stores would be filled with goods, everybody would be well-dressed, like in those Nekerman catalogues from West Germany we sometimes had a chance to see.

  The new power, the devil who went by the name of Iliescu, however, had other plans.

  “Nicolae Ceauşescu tarnished the noble ideals of Socialism", Iliescu said earlier that day on TV, hoping he would become a Gorbachev. Because he couldn’t be a Havel. He had to be a Gorbachev. Brucan had been in Moscow earlier that year, not that we, the people, were aware of that, getting orders to organise the Ceauşescus' fall. Glasnost and Perestroika were being implemented in the USSR and it had to happen in Romania too. But Ceauşescu was old, he was stubborn, he was a Stalinist.

  Ceauşescu had to be replaced by Iliescu, and that was why Iliescu was called on, after the Revolution had started, from his office as head of a publishing house, to take control. And he did take control. He signed, as head of that publishing house, documents relating to the capture and trial of the two Ceauşescus. Strange that nobody questioned who he was, strange that they let him appoint General Militaru as the Army Chief. My father was just finishing his story about the vandalism in our tiny town, and my mom was just finishing her meal. I was eating fresh white bread and was trying to decide if it would be better to put some pate on it or not.

  And so General Militaru was introduced. He looked old and he looked tall. He was ugly, without doubt, but he promised to help the Revolution. The Army was on our side, and as its new chief of staff he made sure it stayed with us, with the people, with the Revolution. We did not know that General Militaru (his name in Romanian means the military man) was a soviet agent, but Iliescu did. He was his man, and that man was there for a job, but nobody watching TV or dying on the streets was aware of that.

  He was replacing, the story went, General Vasile Milea. “Who?” I asked my father, and he said that General Milea was the one who saluted Ceauşescu during the military parade every August 23rd, the day of our communist motherfuckinland. And I vaguely remembered a rather fat uniform, saluting with pride, the dictatorial couple.

  “General Vasile Milea was a hero” was the story that was told by the blaring black and white Opera TV set, and he was killed by forces loyal to Ceauşescu. That was the story and that was the reason why the new power named several long boulevards after him, one of them in Sibiu. But he wasn’t killed. He shot himself, aiming for the heart, but he missed. He killed himself for not being able to stop the Revolution. He died of blood loss in his office, the very one from which the armed forces were ordered against defenseless civilians during the events of the previous days. That was the official verdict of a criminal investigation into his death. The conclusion was reached in 2005, long after all of us had gotten used to his name, and gotten used to taking buses from General Vasile Milea Boulevard to the train station.

  “I need you two to help me with the pots for the lard. I will start making it first thing in the morning, but the pots are too heavy and I need you to set them on the stove”. My mom was always practical. There was a Revolution happening, but so was the lard making, and she could not miss the chance to do it right. That lard was the grease that our health depended on in 1990, it made up a good part of the ingredients of our soap, it kept our pig ribs safe from mold, and so on.

  “Let’s wash those pots, first of all”, my father said. “I’m sure they’re dusty”.

  We entered the basement, where those two 50 liter pots were waiting for us. We used them to make lard, various kinds of jam, the zacusca and the tomato juice I loved to drink after school. But they were stored in the basement most of the time, which meant we had to wash them before using them, every time. We washed them outside, with hot water fetched from the kitchen, near the place where we slaughtered the pig. Despite the fact that we had cleaned the
spot afterwards, the now frozen dirt was still coal black from the straw fire that had burned off the pig’s hair and dirt.

  Once washed we went inside the kitchen and put one pot on the hub and the other on the stove. We had a hub that we used mainly in summer and a stove that we used, for the extra heat, in winter. Between them was the water tap which we used to put some water in both of those huge pots. If we were cannibals those pots would have easily accommodated some people for boiling, but we weren’t. My mom would put the pig’s fat and all the fatty parts of the pig in them, first thing the following morning, and boil them until all the fat dissolved and, before all the water was gone, she would turn off the fire under the pots and add salt. Then she would put the hot lard in the jars that held the fried ribs and the remaining lard into small jars that she would use for cooking. Vegetable oil was only used in our house when fasting, before Christmas and before Easter and every Wednesday and Friday throughout the year. We were supposed to be fasting and not eat meat, fish, milk, eggs or anything made from them. Lard was from our pig and she could not cook with it on those days.

  When I got back upstairs, the lights were off, but the TV was still blaring out light and sound. My sister was sleeping and my mom had cleared the table of food. My father’s glass of wine and a half full carafe were waiting. From the TV I soon learned that people in Bucharest had been called on to stay in the streets to defend the revolution. That the so-called terrorists were “shooting from all sides” and that the TV station was under heavy attack. “Come and defend the TV station”, Iliescu or one of his team encouraged the citizens and those fearing a Ceauşescu comeback stayed on the streets. “Shoot on sight”, was the televised message to all the soldiers who were fighting for the revolution.