Its perfume however was more hypnotic than its shining and suffocating inside that pack of hungry adults I could hear stomachs protesting and, as the two deliverymen started to unload the truck all conversations ceased, fists clenched exact change, hands got the bread coupons ready for stamping.
If you think that unloading a truck full of bread takes time, you’re wrong! It doesn’t. Or at least it didn’t back in 1989 when the deliverymen would take the boxes full of bread and empty them on the floor, creating a pile of bread that almost filled up the small bread shop.
Mrs Presecan stood behind the counter, knife ready.
When I first visited Germany and France I saw that only some bakers had knives on the counters and only in very expensive bakeries where customers would choose to buy a cut of bread instead of the whole thing. But Mrs Presecan’s shop wasn’t a posh German bakery and we didn’t buy part loaves because it was our choice.
On our monthly bread coupon was written the amount we would get. We didn’t want to buy less, and we couldn’t buy more, so Mrs Presecan’s knife had to slice bread in quarters or thirds every time she couldn’t sell full loaves.
Often the bread picked up from the floor was dirty, but when you get a dirty loaf you can always dust it as you do a dirty cloth.
“Three and a quarter loaves, please”, I used to say and hand over my coupon to be stamped and the right change, never bills. Before my grandfather died in 1987 I used to say “Three and a half loaves, please”, and it was like my grandfather was supposed to eat only a quarter of a loaf, nothing more, nothing less.
Three and a quarter loaves was the amount that a family of two adults, two kids and a grandmother was entitled to buy in communist Romania. I am glad I didn’t think so much about it at the time. I could have easily gone crazy, as other people did, and do or say things that may have gotten us imprisoned or even killed.
“Can I have one more today?” I was speaking at once with shame and fear. “We have guests today”. I was ashamed. The people around me would think that if Mrs Presecan granted my request, people at the end of the line would go to their kids empty handed. The fear was because I always knew there was the possibility that I wouldn’t get the desired bread and we wouldn’t be able to feed our guests as we were supposed to.
Suddenly my mom straightened her back. The dough was ready. It looked and smelled good. She covered it with a white piece of cloth and then asked me to wash my hands.
The bowl with the dough was covered sitting on a chair, right in the middle of the kitchen. That image was so familiar to me and always so new. Before my grandfather’s death, my granny used to bake bread twice a week. Her bread was much tastier than what we had to eat that Christmas. But 1986 was the last year we got our share of wheat from the CAP, the Romanian version of the Soviet kolkhoz, and in early 1987 the mill stopped milling wheat. It didn’t close. That mill had a line for corn, too, but why would I care about that?
No wheat to mill no flour to buy, no bread to bake. It was a few months before my grandfather died that my parents decided to rebuild that section of our house which housed the kitchen and in the process we demolished our oven and with it a huge part of our lifestyle.
It didn’t seem important to me at the time to rebuild a traditional wood burning oven, but afterwards, when we couldn’t eat oven-dried prunes or oven-dried pears, or have fruitcakes baked in that oven, life became duller than before.
“If you rebuild the house, I will surely die”, said my grandfather to my dad, and we all looked at him in sympathy. Despite not showing much of the 82 years he had lived before 1986, his age was catching up with him and he was, as always, right. He died in 1987 of pulmonary cancer. The doctors tried to cure an ulcer he had on his ear with radiation, and they exposed him to too much. He died coughing up his lungs, but his ear was just fine. A huge victory for the doctor that cured him.
It was late afternoon and he was lying in his bed, the whole family around him, to be with him, to hear his stories. Simion Grancea had only 8 years of formal schooling. But his father was a sergeant in the Austro-Hungarian Imperial Army and he wanted to pass away with dignity.
“I guess that I’d be an old fool to say au revoir”, he said in a low voice and everybody understood at once what was about to happen. “Can I have a last moment to myself?” he asked again and without waiting for a response he turned away from us and we distinctly heard his last breath.
Two days later, when his body was laid in the coffin in our front room and I got a few moments alone with him I touched his cold hand that used to take me so many times to see the trains. I promised I would leave Avrig and go further than anyone in our family ever had, so the people of the world, the free world, would hear my name, his name and see how noble his kin was, is. Our nickname was “The Sergeants” and we were proud…
But then, how could we possibly have known that rebuilding that part of the house would kill my grandfather? He had said the same when he planted that walnut tree at the end of the garden: “When this tree is as wide as my chest I will die”, and that tree was as wide as his chest for as long as I can remember…
Who could have known?
The third day after he died I got a day off school. I was at Mrs Presecan’s bread shop in the morning, waiting for the bread truck. I was there with Uncle Lulu and his car, a forest green Dacia 1300 with a French engine. Uncle Lulu was an accountant at the Glass Factory and had some leverage everywhere so he placed a private order with the Bread Factory in Sibiu. We were there for 800 large butter rolls, 300g each, that we planned to give with handkerchief-wrapped candles to the mourners that would see Sergeant Simion off on his last journey.
And the truck came but there were no people to flock around and push to get into the small bread shop. Money changed hands and the truckers didn’t throw the butter rolls on the floor but placed them carefully in Uncle Lulu’s car.
Then out of nowhere Bogdan and Emil, my friends and classmates passed by and I rushed to them and gave them some butter rolls that they could eat with everybody else at school. Uncle Lulu scolded me. He feared we wouldn’t have enough for all the mourners that would come. But my friends got the rolls and a few days later at school they were still talking about it like they were some kind of heroes. I felt that funerals definitely had some benefits, at least for those still living.
In the end, Uncle Lulu was almost right, but still, with fingers crossed, we had enough for everyone who came to pay their respects. “Odihneasca-se in pace” (Rest in peace), the people said, and those were exactly the same words that the bread deliverymen used as a goodbye.
The deliverymen moved on for they were late. That day everybody would wait an hour more in front of the bread shop, but not so impatient as usual. They would already have butter rolls at home thanks to their family members who had seen my grandfather off on his last journey.
Back upstairs Felicia was still watching the Revolution live on the blaring black and white TV. I was there only to steal a candy from the box with the Christmas tree ornaments. Those candies came wrapped in bright colored paper and their purpose was to hang in the Christmas tree. I remember that when I was little they used to be chocolate candies. Then, when I entered school in 1982 they turned in chocolate covered jelly, and then, after 86’ they were just sugar candies. They could just as well use sugar candies, chocolate was too expensive for the people, Ceauşescu had thought one day…