The Pigs' Slaughter Read online

  In Sibiu the Securitate troops locked their guns in the basement the moment the Revolution started while the army attacked their building and completely destroyed it. Nobody shot at the army in Sibiu but the army shot at everyone. Anyone moving at night was a suspect, old foes were targeted..."Shoot at will", was the order and they all wanted to be brave. All the soldiers had brave hearts and wanted to kill their invisible enemy. The army captain that fired a rocket propelled grenade from inside a toilet was an idiot, of course, he got badly injured, but a hero, no more, no less. He rose in the ranks after the Revolution ended and, having been injured “in action”, got financial benefits too.

  Bang, bang.

  I was still cracking the nuts and my sister was still helping me when at the airport the brave hearts, the cold-blooded killers who would also claim to be heroes, finally understood what had happened. They could see themselves being punished and tried to cover up their attack, so they made the survivors collect the bodies. But they were too late and the bodies were rigid. Frozen in the exact position they had fallen when the bullets sprayed through their bodies. They were unceremoniously piled on a truck. Small pieces were picked up too. And nobody really understood why, but the truck that took them to the city morgue got back too quickly.

  The soldiers driving the truck were ordered to get rid of the “evidence” and when they said they did, their superiors were satisfied. General Militaru was satisfied, so they could take a rest and drink the brandy they had smuggled into their unit a few days earlier. But the truth is that they had failed. All the 48 bodies, Private Buta included, were supposed to disappear but they didn't have the guts to do it, so they abandoned the bodies, a grotesque pile, on a forklift inside the Cargo Terminal of the same Otopeni Airport. The workers arriving at work in the terminal on the morning of 25th of December, a Monday, discovered the frozen and inanimate pile and people were talking about terrorists. Nobody told them, “We did it!” or “We are sorry!”

  Why would they? It was like a nightmare, and sooner or later nightmares are forgotten. No one had a Bible in their hands. Romania was secular. They didn't fight to get rid of Ceauşescu so they could read the Bible. Rather to drink Coca-Cola...

  It was still morning when, thanks to my sister, I finished with the nuts. So I took them downstairs and grated them so that my mom could mix them with sugar, lemon juice and cocoa powder. Felicia was following with the hammer, the small anvil and the tablecloth.

  The lard looked good in those huge pots. At 6 in the morning there were only white pieces of fat in them, but now those pieces of fat were fried pork rinds.

  “Hey, those look good!” I said and planned to have some with sliced onions and white bread for lunch. So my mom gave me a look that said despite the Revolution happening outside our gates, we still had to fast, but I no longer cared. Like my father and sister's, my diet had changed since the pig’s funeral feast. I took one rind, dipped it in salt, and slid it into my mouth. Heavenly. Mom was consumed with her pots so she saw nothing.

  To tell you the truth, the lard was a tough business. First of all, the quantities were huge. Secondly, you had to take care not to over fry it. From the beginning my mom had put water in the pots and she had to make sure some water always remained in the pots until the end. Otherwise the taste would be ruined. My dad used to say, and he was right, that overheated pig fat turned toxic, so we had to take care, which we did. My mom always carefully watched the lard until the end. When it was done, after turning off the fire, she fished out the pork rinds and put them in a traditional pot made of ceramic so it would look good when the rinds would be brought from the pantry for breakfast or dinner.

  The phone rung once. My mom picked it up and turned white. She sat down and went “uh, uh” for about 10 minutes, then said, “Take care” and hung up.

  On the other end of the line was Auntie Anişoara. Moments before revolutionaries at the Town Hall, as drunk as the day before, stormed their house looking for my father. It turned out that my father was doing what he always did, taking his break in his sister’s house. Why? Because he always got real hot coffee there - in those days the nearby coffee shop only served substitutes - and because he could use a clean toilet. He was, at 39 years old, still Auntie Anişoara’s little brother.

  But the revolutionaries didn’t know my father’s habits and they assumed he was trying to contact terrorists over the phone and give them information about how many people were defending the Town Hall, in order to get everyone killed.

  It was all paranoia, the same paranoia that gripped the minds of the defenders of the Otopeni Airport, but nobody was able to reason. My auntie said that my dad was lucky. He was caught sipping coffee while cheering about the news on the success of those defending Otopeni. And the revolutionaries got happy, too, and they were invited to sit down and have some coffee, which they did. They were served cakes and finally they left with my father as their friend and not as their enemy to do revolutionary things that my auntie did not understand inside the Town Hall.

  My mom was quite upset.

  It was Uncle Ion’s fault, once again, and she had seen it coming since she heard about the Velvet Revolution in Czechoslovakia. Now that her worst fears had turned into an ugly reality, she felt desperate.

  Uncle Ion was my father’s older brother. My grandfather wanted him to become a priest. We were Greek orthodox so our priests marry, and, in a time when almost all Romanians were farmers and had no other wishes than continuing farming, my grandfather paid huge amounts of money to give Uncle Ion an education. The best education available. Violin lessons included, Uncle Ion went to high school in Sibiu when WWII started, but when it ended, with communists taking over the country, the king going into exile and priests being hunted down and imprisoned, my grandfather’s dream was shattered.

  But with his background as a half farmer the communists took Uncle Ion and made him an army officer and in a few years he was in the Secret Police, the infamous Securitate, working in intelligence, defending his country. Or so was the story. Did he do bad things in Fagaras where he was based? I don't know. He never told his family what he was doing and nobody asked questions, in return. And with that status quo we had lived many years.

  But now that the regime change was upon us and the Securitate was blamed for everything that had gone wrong in Romania in the past 40 and something years, people remembered. People remembered who the Securitate officers were, who their kin were, and my mom hated being related to Uncle Ion. She didn’t like them, Uncle Ion and Aunt Dorina. Unlike Uncle Lulu who visited us every second day, we used to see Uncle Ion only twice a year. He lived in a flat in Sibiu, 20 km from our house, and came to visit only for the pig.

  Until my grandfather’s death we used to keep three pigs. One for us, one for Uncle Ion and one that my grandfather would share with Uncle Lulu.

  “Mommy, when you’re old we’ll raise you a pig every year”, Aunt Dorina said to my grandmother every time they met. “We’ll visit you and bring you sweets”, she used to go on, but it never happened. My grandmother was already old when Aunt Dorina was promising sweets, more than 70, and she had diabetes. They hardly ever came and when they did they were always empty handed. And, after 1987 when Uncle Ion had that stroke that left him half paralyzed, they stopped coming at all. In 1989 when my grandfather died, only my cousin, Ioan, their only spoiled child, came to the funeral service. Aunt Dorina refused to let her husband know of his father’s death. She didn’t want to “shock him”. And she didn’t shock him with the news of my grandmother’s death either, in 1994, nor with the news of my father’s death, a year later in 1995.

  Although half paralyzed, Uncle Ion wasn’t stupid, so he figured out that his closest kin had died but they told him first stories of hospitals and disease and only later when they couldn’t lie anymore, the truth. But it was always too late. For him and for us. It was said that all Securitate big shots "had strokes” when they retired. They knew too much. This was only the second positive th
ing about Uncle Ion I could think of. The first is when I was a first grader in Elementary school and got hepatitis, he came to my mom and gave her one liter of olive oil. That was the first and the last time before 1989 we saw olive oil. He asked my mom to cook with it for me because, sick as I was, my liver would accept it better than the lard we used to eat. One liter of olive oil… The good in him loved his little brother, and in return my father worshiped him too. He would visit his brother every time he was in Sibiu and he would tell me that he grew up on Uncle Ion’s shoulders. So many forests my Uncle had crossed with his little brother around his neck in the early 50's that my father learned those forests well before he learned his way to school.

  I remember Uncle Ion as an overweight officer, with black sunglasses, carrying a hunting gun every time he stopped to visit.

  “Can you shoot our dog? It’s too noisy”, our neighbors once asked him, and I now suspect they were insane, and he did. He called to the white dog to come and sit. “Roll over”, he said, and the dog was playful and rolled over. So he put the rifle’s nuzzle into the dog’s ear and before I could close my eyes I heard a bang, and the dog’s ear filled up with blood. My neighbor said, “Thank you!” and served us drinks. Then he took his dead dog and dumped it on the river bank to rot.

  One liter of olive oil… I remember it came in a moss green can, and my mom used it as if it were something sacred and she cooked separate food for me and I got well.

  But one liter of olive oil could not pay for all the shit my mom had to take from her brother-in-law's wife. After her marriage with my father, unapproved by Uncle Ion, Aunt Dorina had the crazy idea that, since my dad would inherit the house he shared with my grandparents, the young couple should pay compensation to Uncle Ion and Aunt Anişoara. And at a time when combined my dad and my mom made just 2000 lei, they had to pay 10,000 lei to each of his siblings. Maybe she hated my mom because she broke her leg during their wedding party, stepping on some cherries that someone had dropped on the floor. Who knows?

  And then there were the pigs my parents were slaving overalways given as presents. And the wine, and the homemade brandy, and the cereals too. I wonder now how my mom didn't go crazy when my dad always accepted whatever his father, brother or sister said? Was it that she loved him so much or was it that she understood that my father was 20 years younger than his siblings, always a child in their eyes?

  I do not know for sure, but I know and I knew back then in 1989 that a relative in the Securitate, even a retired one with a poison pill in his mouth, was bad karma for us. Worse, we may suffer, despite the fact that we didn’t get along very well.

  It turned that Aunt Dorina was scared by the terrorists too. And the people in their building, many of them linked with the army or with the Securitate, barricaded the entrance of their building and discussed what to do if terrorists came and attacked them. So they decided to get those with hunting rifles on the roof as guards. My cousin Ioan was one of them, and he stood on that roof, rifle in hand, until my uncle heard where his spoiled son was, and in broken words – he had a speech impediment after he was paralyzed – he ordered him to come down before being spotted by the real terrorists or the Army hunting for terrorists.

  I was bringing the pots with the fried ribs and my mom was filling them up with hot lard, when the phone rung again. I picked up and it was that drunk voice I was expecting the most: our family’s godson.

  “Open the gate, if you have it closed, I'm coming with the tree”, he said and I was already running. Finul (godson in Romanian) Moisică presented us, every year, with a Christmas tree. He had access to the forest where he did jobs for the forestry department using his own horse and cart. Our friends, who got their trees in the market, always envied us for the beauty of ours. But with the Revolution, I was fearing we would have to give up on having a beautiful tree that year and go buy an ugly one, the kind that Ceauşescu could not export to other countries, or worse, not have a Christmas tree at all.

  I opened the gate and went back to the kitchen where my mom asked me to fetch some brandy. Finul Moisică was a heavy drinker. With the brandy on the table we kept bringing pots with ribs or just empty pots until the lard was all in the pantry, waiting to save the day, during the following year. Finul Moisică didn’t come until my mom finished washing the pots. I was moving the second one back into the basement and thinking I would check the willow smoke under the sausages, when he entered our front yard carrying a silver Christmas tree.

  “Thank you, thank you”, I ran out to greet him and he proudly put the tree in the snow, before he entered the house where he had all the brandy in the bottle.

  “I must go now, my horses are getting cold”, he said, and took his handmade whip that I so much admired and went out onto the street where the two horses waited impatiently. He climbed into the cart and showed them the whip but he didn’t have to use it, he never did, they were already galloping homeward. “It doesn’t matter how drunk I get, once in my carriage my horses take me home” he once said, and that must have been the truth because from where I was standing before closing the gate, he didn’t look like he was steering them.

  Before going back to the kitchen where my mom was about to ask for help with the fruitcakes, I climbed under the roof to find the Christmas Tree stand. Unused all year, sometimes it got rusty. But I was lucky that year. I found it dirty but otherwise in good shape.

  I took it downstairs, washed it and poured boiling water on it. It was my mother’s idea of cleanliness and since we took our shoes off before entering the house – the kitchen an exception – I guess that the boiling water was another Japanese thing that she loved without being herself Japanese.

  In the kitchen mom was dissolving beer yeast in lukewarm milk. In Romania yeast came in 500 gram packs which resembled over-sized pieces of butter, not in powder form as it usually comes in the rest of the world. When buying such a yeast pack we would cut it in 20 pieces, 25 grams per piece, and freeze them until they were needed. On the table I could count 3 pieces of white paper, one piece for each kilo of flour that we had weighed before. Twenty years after the Revolution yeast, usually imported, is sold dry in small plastic packages. Only when she's lucky can my mom get her favorite real yeast. And then her fruitcakes grow as they used to when Ceauşescu was still alive and we just small children that knew no other sweets other than those we helped my mother make.

  The milk was brought out, put in a pot which my mom put close to the stove. A bottle with sunflower oil with which we would rub our hands was brought out too. The oil rubbing was to prevent the dough from sticking to our fingers.

  The flour was in a very large bowl so, after washing my hands carefully in hot water, I made a hole in the middle of it in which my mom started to break eggs. On the eggs went some sugar, a big spoon of salt, lemon peel and the yeast smelling lukewarm milk. First with big folding movements then, as the flour started to stick to my fingers, with shorter but faster strokes, I kneaded the dough. Three kilograms of flour is a lot to knead and for that reason it wasn’t the job of a single person. The kneading would have to last for more than an hour, so it was an impossible task for just one of us to do alone.

  I started as usual and continued until I couldn't anymore and handed it over.

  When mom was younger and I was yet unable help her, she would have finished kneading in half an hour or so, but then our fruitcake wasn’t as good as Aunt Anişoara’s was. That was until they told us their secret which was that they took turns kneading, for an hour or so.

  It was getting painful. Eventually I couldn’t move my hands without moving the whole kneading bowl so I asked for help.

  “I’m sorry about this year’s oranges”, my mom said without looking at me.

  “With all this fighting going on I’m afraid we won’t be able to get oranges at all”, and I was right, she was sour, and sad.

  We worshipped oranges. Bananas too.

  In 1989 we had food coupons, something that people in the Western World
probably had during WWII, but those coupons were just for bread, sugar and oil. Not for oranges, not for bananas or anything else.

  Usually just before Christmas, all orange worshippers gathered in front of the one and only food store in that town – and I cannot call that Alimentara a supermarket, nor I can call it a grocery store, it mostly sold alcohol and sardines in oil – and waited. For hours or for days. When they were tired and wanted to sleep they would leave their bags on the pavement to wait for them. And then, the next day at 5 in the morning, or even earlier, they would go and stand in that line again, and they would continue to do that ritual until the divine oranges would show their orange light in that dark store.

  Now I can close my eyes and see that Alimentara and the people waiting outside and it’s not just an impression, but the real thing, the real gray thing, and all I can think is that our life in communism was colorless. We had no colors during winter, the snow was white only for a couple of days, but we had gray, lots of gray and mud, and when we were lucky the mud was frozen and it was so cold that we were spared the smell of the other orange worshippers that gathered for days just to be able to touch the color of countries with no lines for food and no secret police.

  My father was usually the one who fought the cold and the body odors to get us oranges.

  “Only five each! Only five each!”, was the yell that replaced the nonexistent “Welcome!”. And if you could picture the dirty and arrogant shopkeepers and the hungry and desperate crowd that waited outside for a couple of days or more you can only agree with the revulsion of Ceauşescu’s wife, Elena. When she saw a similar line for food, she said to our Great Nation’s leader “Look at those worms! They’re like worms on carrion!”. She was partly right. When the state didn't provide hot water in winter people smelled like worms on a corpse.