That day someone had radioed from Sibiu that terrorists were about to attack Avrig, and the people in the city hall got anxious. My father was going for his coffee break at Auntie Anişoara’s house, and they came after him believing that he was a traitor, but things settled down and Mr. Tatu called for calm. But then they had to send someone up the Church Tower to watch the road from Sibiu with a machine gun and the orders were to shoot at all suspicious looking cars.
The fact is that only two shots were fired that day but nobody was hit. The suspicious car was a car that somebody knew. And, as there were very few cars at the time, all of them were safe to drive without being shot at.
“What about other people just happening to pass by”, I asked, and my father told me that if they flew the red, yellow and blue Romanian flag with the communist part cut out they would not be considered suspicious and be let through. And suddenly it occurred to me that either the revolutionaries were utterly stupid or the terrorists were. But again, I was quite young in 1989, and I didn’t speak up so I wouldn’t be considered naive.
My mother started to make cornulete. She would use lots of lard for those cookies. The dough would sit for one night in the cold pantry before being used and made into the most fabulous sweets in the world.
It’s strange to think now of cornulete. The last time I had such treats was more than ten years before sitting down to write this book, but I cannot possibly think about that Revolution without my mouth watering at the thought of how good they were.
With nuts, with prune jam or with Turkish jelly, they were covered in powdered sugar so, when put in your mouth, they would stay hard for just a moment before melting into the most perfect sweet bite that one ever tasted. Their filling, the jam or the Turkish jelly would be the final reward, something that I always tried to keep in my mouth as long as possible before letting it go slowly down, a movement of the tongue and throat that had to be perfectly coordinated with the open mouth for the next cornulete. Strange as it is, I discovered recently, a long time after eating my mom’s cornulete that the Chinese have a similar treat. It’s a different shape and doesn’t have the same filling as my mom put in hers, but no doubt about it, the same kind of dough. And I wasn’t even as surprised as I was when I ordered a 55 proof Chinese brandy which came with a long name of 5 Chinese characters, only to discover it tasted like the one I used to make with my father from prunes kept in barrels in the sunshine until the fermentation processes made our courtyard smell of alcohol.
That evening I refused to eat supper with the rest of my family. I had had almost all the fruitcake that mom baked specially for me, and I was full. So, when my sister joined my grandmother and my parents in the kitchen for dinner, I stayed with the blaring TV. Of course the revolution was continuing, the shooting sound was still coming from the lone speaker that my Opera TV had, and the people on the screen looked sometimes brave, sometimes scared, sometimes tired. But all of them looked like they were fighting each other to be in the center of the screen, as close as possible to Ion Iliescu, our unelected new leader.
Later that day cousin Ioan would call us to tell us in a quite self-satisfied voice that he knew one of those people. It was the assassin-looking guy always standing beside Iliescu and his name was Dan Iosif. After the Revolution it was said that he was the one in the crowd who shouted “Down with Ceauşescu” and that he was among the first to enter the Central Committee building. People would go on to say that it was there he made his first million, looting Ceauşescu’s foreign currency coffers.
It was dark outside and the lights were turned off. I was still alone in front of the TV, watching the Revolution with delight. School uniforms were to be abolished, they said. We could go to school in our own clothes! I was so happy.
One year on, I was a high school student in Sibiu and, being from a small town, I was the least well-dressed in my class. My parents had no money to buy me the fancy clothes my classmates were wearing and the girls never paid any attention to me. The other eight boys in my class didn’t seem to be bothered about what I was wearing, until Bogdan, my best friend and halfHungarian, now a trauma doctor, said “Stay away from Circo, he’s always making fun of you”, and he was right. Luckily, soon after Circo found the math and chemistry that we were doing too difficult for him, and moved to another class. At least, the small group of boys that remained, were all my friends, but the girls there never changed, always acting over precious, sadistic and cheap.
But again, on that 23rd of December 1989, the prospect of going to school without a uniform, for the first time in my life, was thrilling. My handmade Sunday clothes were both my mother’s and my pride and joy. Everything she couldn’t make we ordered at Mr. Bara’s, Avrig’s one and only tailor.
I was friend and classmate with his son, Ovidiu, a very good boy that used to beat me up every time he saw me in kindergarten, but who, only God knows why, turned into a compassionate and fight hating pupil.
When I think back to then, I think that I was quite fortunate to grow up near people like Mr. Bara. As a tailor he was one of only a handful of people in Avrig that were allowed by the communist state to have a private business. He worked at his home, 100 meters up the road from ours, and he would receive us, friends, neighbors and customers with candies and coffee. There, while waiting to be measured, or trying to see if pants would fit or asking him to make the ones that we were wearing a little bit longer, we could look at old German Nekerman magazines from which Mr. Bara used to get inspired when launching Avrig’s latest exclusive fashion.
While he was tailoring pants and jackets and shirts and suits and dresses for wedding-goers, churchgoers and funeral-goers alike, my grandmother was tailoring leather to make sheepskin vests for the young men in our town.
Like Mr. Bara, my grandmother was a certified master craftsman.
In 1993 when she died she was working with her hand up in the air on an invisible vest and she knew she was dying and asked my mom, as she was suddenly aware of herself, to finish her work after she was gone.
Over the years she hopelessly and helplessly tried to get apprentices, but the girls that parents sent her always quit. They hated — because the communist government made them hate — anything traditional. They were peasant-born but somehow so similar in the way they thought to the girls in my posh high school. They all hated handmade things, they all wanted to dress like people in the West, like those that lived their lives from day one in democracies.
On that very evening my grandmother was eating downstairs with my sister, the grandchild that she loved more than her own sons. She liked my sister more than she liked me, that was a fact. On the night I was born she came to Brukenthal palace, the same one devastated by Russian soldiers after WWII, and, because the rule was that nobody could enter the part of the Palace deliveries were carried out in, asked from the street: “What is it?”
“It’s a boy”, shouted my young and beautiful mom, from a high window, like those women with blue blood that delivered boys and girls there during the 19th Century, but my grandmother said “Not again!”, in a very upset voice, and then she left, taking the handmade cake with her, not once looking back.
One year and a half my mom had to endure the chores and anger that grandmother prepared for her while she was walking away in the night from the Palace. I was her third grandson, born almost two decades after Uncle Ion gave her a grandson, Ioan and Auntie Anişoara, another one, Mihai. And she had waited all those years for a miracle, for a granddaughter and the granddaughter wouldn’t come.