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.
“Only five each!” and my father would bring home just five oranges and five bananas. And we would keep them in our room, the kids room, and life became so much brighter.
The bananas would change color from that green that only bananas have to a bright yellow, and we would eat them over the next ten days. One day a banana, one day an orange, until we had no more and life was gray again as it usually was from the 5th of January, the last day of our winter celebrations, John the Baptist’s day, to the Ignat’s Day, pig slaughtering day, on December 20th.
“Christmas without the smell of oranges is not the Christmas I was looking for”, I said in a fake happy voice not wanting to make mom suffer more than she already was, but I got no reply. I guess I shouldn’t have said that. That year we could not do our orange worshipping ritual of cutting the oranges and eating them while beautifully preserving their skins.
Maybe you’ve seen it, maybe not, maybe you’ve done it, maybe not, but to peel an orange and leave behind a beautiful flower you just need a sharp knife and some patience. First, with a single cut you open the orange across the bottom. Then cut the skin with vertical strokes from that open bottom to 3cm from the top. You can go on 6 to 8 times, depending on how big the orange is, and then start to peel while keeping the skin in one piece. The final result is an empty orange which we used to display in an empty glass, and day by day we would watch its color with hope, without knowing that 15 years later in Romania another “revolution” would take place, the Orange Revolution. The people voted massively against the former communists who were not expelled from power in the bloody events of 1989, but rather reconfirmed in it.
We displayed those orange skins every year, until they turned into flowers, and threw them out only in early summer, when their orange color would have turned dark and not be a pleasant sight anymore.
I was still thinking about oranges and bananas when my mom changed places with me and furiously continued to knead the dough. She was so much more experienced and it seemed fun and easy. I was sure it was not. I needed all my strength to keep the kneading bowl in place, while my mother’s hands performed like an industrial dough kneading machine we used to see on the news, almost every day.
What a country of masochists Romania was… The sadistic TV crews always showed collective farms producing even more food and Romania ranked number five in wheat exports in the world, but we had to buy bread with coupons!
My dad stood in line once a year for our oranges and bananas, but I stood in line almost every day for bread. For one hour, for two hours, three, for as long as it took.
The bread shop was run by Mrs Presecan, a soft looking, stocky lady in her 40’s. She would wait from morning to early afternoon in her empty store where she had nothing to sell, while people started to gather outside. It was always better to get there early, but with school, lunch, chores and friends wanting to play, it was impossible most of the time, so I usually ended up around halfway down from the top of the line. And while there, shorter than the adults around me, I used to listen to their talk, usually local gossip, sometimes political jokes, sometimes food recipes, and constantly move my weight from one foot to the other, watching the ground for familiar looking stones, following with my eyes ants that had already got food for their homes…
“Half of their lives people just wait”, comforted my father when I used to complain, and I guess he was right. I was always waiting for something. Thinking about countries that I had visited in the books I had read, or in my dreams after listening to people talking about them.
And then the bread truck would show up, and people would push towards the shop doors, pushing and kicking their way, not thinking about the kids standing in line. Sometimes without once touching the ground with my feet I was carried in and out, but that was life and I had to buy bread, my family trusted me to do it. I had no other choice.
The truck always came down the road and then turned around in the middle of the street, hitting the breaks when its rear was parallel with the bread shop door.
And the driver and the other deliveryman would get out and the people push with even more impatience. But they would first smoke their stinky cigarettes, and then, just before the crowd was going to literally go crazy they would open the back doors. Round bread would shine from inside the truck and no matter how powerful the sunshine was, to us the bread shined even stronger.