The Pigs' Slaughter Page 5

  I got into my bed which was not more than a couch and closed my eyes.

  “What if the people going to defend the TV station are mistaken for terrorists?” my father asked and the sanity of his question occupied my thoughts until I was dreaming. What bothers me still today is the fact that I can remember that day so clearly, without being able to remember my dream. Perhaps that dream was not so important, but I now think it was. Sometimes I have premonitions in my dreams. That massacre took place while I was still dreaming.

  3. DECEMBER 23RD

  The fact is that Iliescu had to get a stronger grip on power. The fact is that General Militaru was his man. The fact is that the crowd started to doubt his leadership after he morphed into a Gorbachov and not into a Havel. The fact is that Romanians had to unite against Ceauşescu. Around the new leadership. The fact is that the same Romanians did not know that Ceauşescu had been caught and was waiting for a summary trial, nor the fact that the plan was to execute the two of them anyway. Maybe I wasn’t the only one familiar with the French Revolution, maybe I wasn’t the only one who thought a Revolution must be bloody for Ceauşescu-lovers. For certain, someone was aware of that when he hit the panic button: there were no Ceauşescu-lovers to fight. There were no Ceauşescu-lovers for the people to unite against, no pigs to be sacrificed for the greater good.

  So, while I was turning in my sleep, dreaming the dream that I cannot remember, the Air Force Chief of Staff, General Iosif Rus, was hanging up his military phone after he had barked his orders.

  He did what he had to do, not knowing the bigger picture, perhaps, and went to sleep, too, satisfied with the way power had changed hands. Those who got his orders were already awake. They were no younger than 18 and no older than 19. They were only kids. Some of them, from the countryside, had never seen running water from taps, nor trains, nor helicopters before being enlisted in the military.

  They were sleepy. They had been listening to the Revolution on the radio so long. I didn’t know because I hadn’t been listening to the national radio station, but there had been a revolution there too. All hopes of freedom and all the anger directed at Ceauşescu invaded the Romanian airwaves for those that did not have a TV set, not so few in those days, especially in the countryside. But everyone had a radio, and some soldiers had radios too.

  “I reckon when this Revolution is over, we'll all get to go home sooner” someone said with hope, in the dark, after the light was turned off at 9 pm in their stinking dormitory. The thought, spoken out loud, had come from the area of the room that hosted those with the longest AMR in their unit (in Romanian AMR stands for ‘Au Mai Rămas xxx Zile’ or ‘There are xxx days left’) so everybody started to laugh. New draftees were called ducklings and everyone loved to pick on them. But, when a new batch of draftees entered the unit, the previous batch would be called “veterans” and they would do to the new ducklings all the shit they had endured during their first six months, sometimes more.

  The next group of ducklings was only weeks away. That meant that a third of the soldiers in that dorm were weeks away from their “liberation day”. The current ducklings had another year on their AMR and that was why it was so funny. The one with the radio turned it down and soon they were all asleep. The air was heavy. On that day they had to wash their uniforms and, because the glorious Romanian Army gave them only one each, the next day they had to wear them, wet or not.

  In th e Romania of 1989, that military unit had no clothes dryers, not even ironing facilities. So they did as all soldiers do in that kind of situation: they laid the wet clothes neatly on their mattresses, covered them with their blankets and slept on them, covering themselves with the remaining two sheets. It wasn’t comfortable, but the woollen blankets would suck out almost all the water from their uniforms and the next day these uniforms would look like they had been freshly ironed. Albeit, still wet. In any case, the uniforms would be in better shape than if hung up to dry in that room, and in the morning, when they awoke, at least their uniforms would be there. Sometimes, perhaps often, low-lifes would steal uniforms in better shape than their own because the motherfuckingland was too poor to give them new uniforms just like it was too poor to give us new textbooks.

  Then again, in those days everybody used to steal. When the shops were empty, and stomachs empty, too, the country’s economy changed into a barter economy. People would steal products from the companies they were working for and trade those products for others, until they managed to trade something for food. The military was no different. Even the words used to describe it changed. Nobody used the word “steal” anymore. “Steal” was negative. So they used “complete” instead. They were “completing” their needs, and having your wet uniform under your butt was the same as keeping it safe, out of reach of any “completing” that was going on at night.

  Usually the uniforms were almost dry at 6 in the morning, and they were perfect after breakfast, but that wasn’t to be the case that particular day. The alarm sounded at 3:00am when they had almost another three hours of welcomed sleep ahead of them. Swear words, curses, a corporal hitting crying ducklings. The air was damper than usual. Wet socks on skeletal feet, wet underwear on, wet shirt on, a dry sweater, the uniform, also still wet, dry boots, a dry winter coat, a dry winter hat, all went on. Gloves on hands and they were running. Everybody took an AKM on their way out and the frost fiercely attacked their knees, and it was like the marrow was being sucked out of their bones and their bones were like those in “racituri”, the pig gelatin they had with black pepper every January 1st.

  The 83 kids dressed in army uniforms were lined up in the cold night and read the mission. Terrorists were going to attack the International Airport, the only International Airport that Romania had. Ceauşescu’s plane, that fabulous 707 that copied the American Air Force One, was there on the tarmac, and Ceauşescu planned to attack the airport, get on it and flee Romania with all the people’s money. So they had to fight back, they had to protect the airport.

  I was still sleeping when they got in the three military trucks that their unit was able to somehow scrape. Fuel was scarce that day, and filling the fuel tanks with diesel had required emptying the fuel tanks of all cars and trucks parked there. Ceauşescu’s plane. Cold and freezing, everyone of them dreamed they would have a chance to get on it soon. But not one of them did.

  I was asleep at 5 in the morning and dreaming my impossibleto-remember dream. Did I fly in Ceauşescu’s plane in my dream? I don’t know. I was afraid of flying. My father called planes “flying coffins”. But six years later, when I flew for the first time in my life, I flew in that plane.

  B ack in 1996, I was working as a journalist to pay for my studies in journalism. My father had been dead more than a year when I was sent abroad to the Former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia to write about Meleşcanu’s visit there. Meleşcanu was the head of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, a hotshot, married to a newscaster. A good communist.

  And the Macedonians wanted to kill me.

  The train I boarded in Sofia, Bulgaria, emptied in Nish. It stopped there for several hours before starting to move again towards Macedonia. It was my first time abroad, but it wasn't exciting. Maybe because I looked too young. I was 20 but I didn’t even look 19. And I was traveling with an American soldier.

  “US Army?”

  “Yes.”

  “In the business of slaughtering people?”

  “No, in the one of saving them!”

  “So you save the real slaughterers?”

  “If I get lucky I get to save their victims too”.

  He was a M.A.S.H. and had spent his leave in Istanbul and was heading back to his unit in Skopje. He was looking to buy some food but there wasn't any. Yugoslavia was a country – or I should say still a country – devastated by ethnic war. I offered him a couple of sandwiches I was carrying with me.

  “Try these. They’re made with Sibiu Salami, the best salami in the whole world” I said, and he liked them. We tal
ked. M.A.S.H was being aired in Romania at the time and he saw the word on the TV program guide in the paper I was carrying and he thought it was funny. He was the first American I ever met and he was a good talker. But we stopped at the border and armed guards entered our compartment. They searched him, but not like they searched me. My bag flew open and I was embarrassed. My underwear was everywhere and I felt like I had lost my dignity, and they were asking me for money.

  500 Deutschemarks, and I didn't want to give it to them and they pulled me out of the train, pushing me with their guns until inside the train station’s office. Some uniforms were playing poker. A wooden table, lots of money. Money that I recognized and money that I didn’t. Bottles with spirits. Serbian slivovitz. Or Macedonian. Or whatever. They were drinking straight from those bottles. And there were guns too. On the same table. The one who looked like the boss wrote “500DM” on a piece of newspaper. They were quite organized, I thought, asking for the same price. With those guns on the table he could have easily asked for double that. But I didn’t pay so, with a black, oversized handgun in his hand he said something to me. But I heard nothing. It was the second time I had been so close to a gun. The first time was during the Revolution and that gun was on a table, too, beside a bottle of brandy. I was lightheaded, and I started to think whether what I was feeling was indeed fear.

  They could kill me on the spot and nobody would know I had been on that train. That was what was going through my head when I started to lie. I told them in English I was a journalist, going to Skopje to interview their president, a guy called Gligorov. It seemed that they did not understand a word so I tried to repeat that Gligorov word, over and over again. I wasn’t there for Gligorov, I was there for Meleşcanu, but they didn’t know who the fuck Meleşcanu was, nor did they care.

  The boss stood up and he didn't look happy, he showed me the gun and suddenly a door opened and a young female officer entered and asked me in English for a Press ID, and I handed mine to her. Suddenly she was half screaming at them and the boss barked some order and a soldier took me by the arm and rushed me outside. I thought they were going to shoot me but then I saw the train and it was moving. First slowly and then faster, and the soldier was half carrying me towards it and I climbed in half disembodied. I had managed to catch a hold of the last handle of the last door. An unlikely scene, because it was night on the border between Yugoslavia, still a country back in 1996, and FYROM, something pretending to be a country but which at the time was not.

  The shocked M.A.S.H was packing my bag. The incident brought us together in that train and that was the only incident on the way to our destination. We said our goodbyes. We were young, with hopes of a bright future. But so were the soldiers from Campina, when they boarded those three trucks six years earlier.

  We did not know that September 11 would come, and in 1989 the soldiers from Campina knew even less. We didn’t know that the US would fight another three wars over the following years, that his countrymen would bomb the shit out of Serbia beyond the border we had just crossed.

  The short story is that I had heard that Meleşcanu had come in a 707, Ceauşescu’s plane, to open the Romanian embassy there. Romania was still a poor country in 1996 and its kids still used decrepit textbooks in school, but we were spending the pennies we had on our diplomatic shit. And we were so proud of our shit.

  “Excellency, you should see the residence of our ambassador. He lives better than any other European ambassador here”, said one of Meleşcanu’s trusted men, very proud of himself.

  Anyway, I told the folks in the Embassy my story and they arranged for me to fly back to Bucharest in the same plane, but only after they accused me of trying to ruin the friendship between the two countries with absurd claims and that everything I had said was in order to get a free ride back on the 707. It was a “convenient claim”, as the moron in the embassy had put it.

  So we went to the airport. A rather small one. Smaller than the central train station built by some Japanese companies after the earthquake that flattened Macedonia in the 70's. Romania had built some flats there, too, after the same earthquake, and I could pick them out quite easily. They were the ugliest in Skopje. Not that they were any uglier than the flats back home.

  We got on that plane and it looked nice, it had a saloon, and furniture, but it was no Air Force One, or at least not what we see in American movies. I sat in the back beside a Romanian pilot I had met in Skopje, in that hotel where I could not flush my toilet and nobody cared to clean my room. He, too, was offered a bottle to pour tap water in the toilet after he took a dump. And we were going up and down and up and down and left and then right. And so it went on and on.

  “Not a bad landing for a beginner”, said my pilot friend, and after we landed everyone was patting Meleşcanu on the back:

  “Well done, Mr. Minister”.

  “That was the smoothest landing I ever experienced, your Excellency”.

  Before 1989 all we had was Ceauşescu, but it was 1996 and we were free. People still "completed", when they could, everything they wanted from our motherfuckingland, and Meleşcanu wanted to land a 707. Ceauşescu’s 707...Others wanted more. That was the reason why those 83 kids from Campina had to die quickly, like my pig. Big shots were waiting in line for benefits.

  Back in those trucks it was bloody cold. There were twenty soldiers in each one, seated face to face on the two benches in the back of the trucks. You know, you've seen that scene hundreds of times in American movies. But the soldiers in the three trucks did not look like those American hotshots. First of all they were all thin. Secondly, they were just kids. Thirdly, they were scared and tired.

  It was so bloody cold. The cold that they welcomed at home when smoking sausages. Actually those sausages were on everyone’s mind. In a couple of days, on Christmas Day, their moms would come to visit and they would bring fresh sausages. And white bread. And they would sit down on a bench and wolf if all down while their mothers cried. They would cry at the sight of their babies so thin, so malnourished, so much more men than before they left home.

  Only the luckiest would get 24 hours leave, but with the shooting in Bucharest it was pointless believing you had such luck. A couple of soldiers opened their packs of biscuits and started to eat them with cheese. Another thing one does not, cannot, see in American movies. In those movies soldiers eat chocolate and square meals. The 83 from Campina got no chocolate when they got in their trucks, only a pack of army biscuits, made without any butter or vegetable oil and so hard they had to keep them in their mouths for a long time before taking a bite. Then there were the three shapeless pieces of cheese, expired maybe years before that December night in 1989...They had their own water in their canteens, tap water, the coldest tap water in Romania, the very same that washed their uniforms the night before.

  They were too young and, as I already said, much like myself, unaware that those biscuits with cheese were about to become their last supper. They sat close to each other to catch each other's body heat, closing their eyes, some of them going back to sleep.

  “You can say you are a soldier only when you are able to sleep while standing and walking”, my father used to tell me, proud indeed that he had served. Years later, I am proud I didn’t. I became a man without serving in the Army, but it happened that way only because of the revolution. Otherwise, I would have had to serve for probably one year in the military. Military training for a couple of months and then, for the rest of the term, working in agriculture, or construction, as was customary those days.

  But I didn’t serve because, and it sounds so egotistical, those 83 big children from Campina, and others like them were about to die for me, for us, for nothing.

  Death was waiting. Impatiently. The trucks stopped at a checkpoint. It was the Airport security's first checkpoint. As with all other checkpoints they were let through. A few hundred meters closer to the airport and the trucks had to stop again. Another checkpoint. This time a uniform that survivors would know
later as lieutenant-major Ionescu, got in the first truck to show them the way, he claimed. But his orders were to wait there, which he couldn’t anymore. It was cold, so cold, and he wanted to get out of the cold, to have a smoke. So the uniform got in and with a smelly burst the trucks were on the move again and someone dropped his canteen and water was spilling all over and suddenly there was more blood spilling than water, faces missing, the terrible sound of bullets hitting the truck and the even more terrible sound of bullets biting through winter coats, finally dry uniforms...and flesh. 22 soldiers were killed in seconds. Engines died too. Somewhere in the distance machine guns were rattling at them.

  Even if you have slaughtered a pig or you watched a pig being slaughtered for you, you still cannot imagine the fresh human blood flowing in that truck. With the pig things are controlled, the blood is collected in a bucket, and the meat, when the pig is opened with a knife, looks more like the meat you see at a butcher's: it doesn’t bleed.

  But not human flesh. I know that because I had to listen many times to Uncle Gheorghe and his war stories. Uncle Gheorghe was my grandmother’s brother-in-law and in WWII he came home only because he was a better killer. Better than those seven Russians and five Germans that he killed with his knife and bare hands.

  Uncle Vasile, my grandmother’s brother, was not as tough. As a baker he loved his bread and loved the people who ate it, so he was killed in WWI, by French troops, and he definitely did not fight back. He died like a lamb, my grandmother used to say. She couldn’t use the word “pig”, despite the fact that those Frenchmen who got her brother saw in him not the baker whose bread they would have loved to eat, but a pig wearing an Austrian uniform.