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 thing 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.