Her own daughter refused to become a traditional leather tailor, and that job was a job that only a woman could do. Another grandson was not what she had wanted, so when Felicia was born she fussed about her so much that I wasn’t yet two when I attacked my sister’s cradle with a stick and hit her face in an act of jealousy that now, as a parent myself, I can’t imagine ever doing.
That December in 1989, my grandmother was so close to her dream coming true. She had taught my sister the fine art of needles and everything a young lady had to know, but Felicia was still a child. She was thin and didn’t have the strength to work the needle on the sheep skin. Grandmother did everything by hand and had never heard of a leather tailor who had leather sewing machines. But my grandmother always thought in a couple of years Felicia would be strong enough.
She couldn’t have known that the first lesson she gave my sister was also to be the last one. No leather, no sheep skins, no silk, no needles. The last leatherwork master in that area died at 90 years old a few years before and nobody wanted to take over his stinky, underpaid work. The industrial leather makers dyed the sheep skins while my grandmother wanted them white, or they did not use skins with wool, or they didn’t bother to use sheep skin because shoes were made of pig’s skin.
Afterwards, when she had gone senile, after being just sad, sometimes when I gave her lunch during the long summer holidays I had in high school, I thought of the senility not as a curse but a blessing. The young people of our town started to wear, even on Christmas, blue jeans jackets, instead of her traditional leather vests.
Yes, things changed rapidly after 1989. Borders opened and my father went to visit Turkey.
“When we got out of that bus we looked like a prune basket”, he told me laughing bitterly at the fact that everybody in those days turned to jeans. How stupid I was to be happy to get rid of my school uniform when the entire country stupidly took on capitalism’s Turkish counterfeit Levi’s jeans.
The truth is that at that very moment I wasn’t thinking about Levi’s. Not even in my dreams did I see myself owning an original pair of jeans. I wasn’t a doctor’s son or an apparatchik’s son. We were poor so we had to wear tailored clothes and there was no way around it.
However, the way they prepared the speech, with Iliescu in the middle, was obvious. They knew things that we didn’t and they were about to tell us something any moment now.
“Something has happened! Dad, Felicia, mom, hurry up, something is going to be announced on the TV”.
I was rushing back with my father, shoulder to shoulder, my sister trailing behind us, and we heard from the doorway “The dictator and his wife have been caught”, and we shouted for joy. We were free.
“God help us, he won’t reach a deal with the revolution”, my father said, and as we listened the dictator was about to be put on trial for those thousands of people killed in Timişoara, for the crimes of communism and for keeping us in fear and hunger. “Now, if only the Russians would stay out of it”, he said and he nervously lit a cigarette completely forgetting that he was in the kids’ room and not his smoking haven kitchen.
When we were cheering at the news of the two Ceauşescu’s being caught while on the run they were experiencing already their 28th hour of captivity.
When they were taken to that military compound in Targoviste, they asked the commander, Colonel Kamenici, who he was taking orders from.
“With the situation in Bucharest, in my papers it is written that I shall take orders from General Gusa, the commander of chiefs of staff of the Romanian Army”, he answered.
“From the one that I sent to Timişoara to clean up the city and couldn’t do the job properly?” Ceauşescu replied.
“Then, from the new minister of defense, Nicolae Militaru”, the commander said tentatively.
“Impossible”, Ceauşescu answered. “Militaru is a KGB agent I personally fired from the Army. It must be someone else”.
“From General Stănculescu”, answered the commander, because Stănculescu, after organizing the repression in Timişoara was now organizing Ceauşescu’s firing squad.
“Yes, you’re right. Son, you are taking orders from General Stănculescu. That’s your minister not Militaru. I made Stănculescu the Army minister this morning”, Ceauşescu had said, and he appeared to be happy about that fact. He was in good hands he thought, unlike his not yet senile wife who saw it coming. When they fled the building of the Central Committee one day before, she had spat on all the generals there. “Traitors! Traitors!” she called them and she was right. After 28 hours of being held captive, with armed guards at the door, she was, as we were, but with completely different feelings, waiting for something gruesome.
I was about to go down to the basement to fetch the wine my father sent me to get when I heard a loud knocking at the gate. Leaving the heavy glass decanter in the snow, I ran upstairs but only when I was inside the house did I say:
“Dad, someone’s at the gate!”
He looked worried muttering:
“Must be Vasile. He is late as usual. Mom left word for him to come and get the Christmas fruitcakes”
He stood up and with deliberate movements started to walk to the door. I wanted to follow, but he asked me to stay behind. He was afraid, I could tell, and so was mom, but I didn’t quite understand why. With Ceauşescu prisoner and awaiting trial we were already free, weren’t we?
“Nuţa!” My father’s half hysteric half nervous voice erupted from downstairs and we all rushed to see what was happening. My mom’s 29 year old half brother was drunk, I could tell without getting too close, but that didn’t bother my dad who was trying to carry him inside.
As strange as it was, my dad was insisting to help Vasile to walk despite my uncle’s protests. Only when they got really close did I understand why. Behind them was a trail of what could only be blood. Somehow Vasile had gotten injured, and we all rushed to help.
Clean towels were whipped out of the closet by my furious mother.
“How dare you come here drunk and in this shape?” “Do you think we have it easy here?” she went on.
Half crying, Vasile protested:
“No, you don’t understand”.
“What don’t I understand? You are drunk, that’s what I understand”, she roared at him.
“Nuţa, Nuţa!”, her brother cried using her nickname. “I was there, I went to see the Revolution!” he said and my mother seemed to get even angrier. Surely an injury got while fighting was a lot worse than one got from falling on icy roads. After Vasile was set on the armchair facing the blaring TV, from which the now victorious Iliescu acted as Ceauşescu’s clone with nobody seeming to notice, we all saw that the blood in the snow and on our carpets was coming from his left boot. Curious, I took a closer look. Something was wrong. I knew those boots as the previous winter they were my father’s, but they didn’t have a hole in them then. They did now.
My sister saw it, too, and she quickly went out to get some fresh air. I also was getting lightheaded, but still, as the young man of the house I had to stay to see what it was.
Blood was not a new sight for me. Only a couple of days before I had collected liters of it into a bucket from our slaughtered pig, but the source of the blood was new. Vasile, despite being the drunk that he was, was a nice uncle. He took me fishing many times and bought me candies when I gave him some of my father’s wine. Not a very good deal for my father, I should say.
A handmade woollen sock was slid off his foot. Blood soaked. Then my mom carefully removed it and placed it in a basin she had somehow grabbed from the bathroom downstairs in no time at all.
Now you have all seen at least one Terminator movie. When the Governor of California was shot you could see the metal inside his human-like body. That was exactly what I saw that night. The bullet that made a hole in Vasile’s boots was buried in his leg just above the ankle.