Now I know, that was how I was supposed to feel. That was how the new leadership had planned it, it was just like General Militaru had imagined it. So I looked at Iliescu and Roman with adulation, and I loved them and prayed for them and wished them all the strength and good luck they needed in their fight against Ceauşescu.
How was I supposed to know that my prayers were already answered? How was I supposed to know Ceauşescu had been captured one day before when his capturers played with us and were pretending, on national television, that they were still hunting him down? How was I supposed to know there were no terrorists fighting for Ceauşescu but only brave soldiers fighting against invisible terrorists? And killing youngsters dressed in our country’s wet uniforms?
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.