Strangely we were all calm. Very calm. Maybe that was because we could see the bullet, maybe because we could see that the blood flow wasn’t as bad as we all thought. Maybe because we expected something much worse.
Before my mom could do anything to stop him Vasile pulled out his pocket knife and took the bullet out. The blood started to flow and my father took Vasile’s hands while mother clean the wound with the only thing we ever used for cleaning wounds, 98% pure alcohol.
“Don’t waste it!” Vasile said. “You should treat my insides with it.”
He continued to be light-hearted. Drunk and funny, until he had a bandage and a new sock. Unfortunately we didn’t have other boots to offer him so he had to wear the one with the hole in it, and he wore it for at least five years after that night. His story was simple. He got my mom’s message and was about to come for the fruitcake when a drunk friend of his asked him to go to Sibiu to see the Revolution. The story was that food shops were only selling alcohol because of the lack of food, had been vandalised by the angry mobs and inside there was still plenty of free brandy. They were lucky to catch the noon train and made their way into the revolution-torn city looking for booze. The stores were looted indeed, but there was nothing left in them. However, the people on the street involved in the Revolution had brandy with them and they shared, so he got drunk. He was running towards the train station when someone shot at him and he got under a car. And gunfire was hitting the car above him from time to time or every time he moved. And he got shot and ran and somehow nobody shot him in the back. And he took a train and there were people on the train but he was afraid to show them he was wounded. They were talking about terrorists. About how evil the terrorists were. Always posing as decent people. So he sat there for 45 minutes and bled in silence in his boots and got off in Avrig. He came to our house not on the roads but along the train tracks and then crossed gardens until he got on our street, unseen by suspicious people but heard by their dogs.
Somehow it all made sense. Vasile was a magnet for trouble. The last job he had lasted less than two hours. He crashed the bus he was supposed to drive. Lucky for him nobody was in it when he decorated a ravine with that Made in Romania Rocar bus, and even luckier for him my dad knew his boss and promised to cover the crash. That bus was the property of the people of Romania and destroying public property resulted in prison terms or in paying for life from your salary for the damaged property.
That stupid law was abolished only in the late 90’s. In 1995 when I first got a job in a newspaper there was a sad looking cameraman working with Romanian TV, the same TV station that broadcast the Revolution, and that sad looking cameraman was working for nothing. His entire salary was taken to pay for a BETA camera that was stolen from him while filming something, somewhere.
So Vasile who was again jobless during the Revolution — as he was for the next twenty years — was not required to pay for the bus.
“You are a magnet for trouble!” my mother shouted while she was preparing two over-sized bags. One big jar with fried ribs in lard, two big fruitcakes, a bottle of wine, potatoes and other food for his kids. I was wondering if he could get home with the jar intact, drunk as he was and shot in his leg. But as shot as he was he looked much better than the time he got in that duck incident.
That “duck incident” as my father called it, happened one year before. It was exactly December 23rd and Vasile, after taking a fruitcake, wine and pork ribs and meat came back to get a duck. We had ducks and chickens then and my mom said she was too tired to kill it for him and prepare it, so he should take it alive, as it was. And he did.
He really was a magnet for trouble. When he got home one of his neighbors was, club in hand, looking for thieves outside. That neighbor had been robbed of all five of his ducks that very evening so, when he saw Vasile in the dark carrying a live duck he started to club him without asking any questions, and he continued until Vasile was lying unconscious in the snow. That bastard didn’t even apologize when he was told that he had actually clubbed an innocent person nor was he punished. He had friends in the Communist Militia. And Vasile was a jobless drunk anyway. At least his duck was returned, our duck, and his wife made him soup from it and his girls ate meat again. They weren’t scared by their father’s face which they were used to seeing swollen every now and then.
My father always said that Vasile’s troubles where his mother’s fault. My father’s mother-in-law had raised her two daughters with an iron hand. When my mom was in a boarding school, from which she graduated as a worker, and would ask her for 100 lei, the same amount that Ceauşescu promised as a raise in his final public speech, she used to get a long letter with only 20 lei. “Do you happen to know how difficult it is to make 100 lei?” was the sentence that usually opened that letter.
Yes, my maternal grandmother lived a very poor life in her village of Lodroman, in Alba county. She was a trained nurse but after the war had to leave the hospital in Cluj, where she had a job. Her father was a chiabur, a winegrower. They were a winemaking family and quite wealthy. Until the communists took their fortune and wines. That was the reason why my grandfather, the one I never knew, died. My grandmother from Lodroman always tells me that I look so much like him, but mom cannot tell. Like me she has no memory of him. She was only two years old when, harassed by the new communist power, her father, a war hero, died of illness. Strange that my grandmother blames his illness on the Russians who kept him prisoner in Siberia for many years, not the fact that everything was taken from him before his first and only child was born. So this grandmother that lived in Lodroman and had a hard life buried her second husband before she was forty and was thrown in the street by the in-laws. So she had to build a house by herself, while raising her three kids, and she did it with an iron hand, as I first said, but that iron hand always changed into feathers when it came to Vasile.
“It’s all her fault”, my father was muttering. He was talking about Vasile being married to Teodora.
I remember well how my grandmother from Lodroman came to live in Avrig. My mom was the first in her family to come to our town to work at the glass factory and she brought her sister and then brother along. Her sister married soon after my mom did and Vasile rented a room in town. So, for some reason his mother decided he had to marry and she came and rented a room, close to our house, for three long years and spent her time quilting and selling the clothes and hats that she made and going every day to church for the service.
She knew that Vasile had to get a religious wife and Teodora was a churchgoer. She really was. She was from Oltenia and was working at Marsa Mechanical where she shared a room in an ugly company dorm with her sister. Sunday was their only day off and they put on their best dresses and went to church. There my grandmother from Lodroman would watch them and only after a year of watching those sisters every Sunday, she introduced herself to them. Then she gave them some cakes, and when they were acquainted enough she invited them for lunch. Soon the place she invited them to wasn’t her nearby rented room but our kitchen where Vasile was also invited and after lunch they would go to the Palace gardens or to see a movie. I know that because I was a moviegoer too. We had Romanian movies but on weekends there where either Hollywood movies or Bollywood musicals. It’s hard to tell which were more crowded. The small cinema hall in our town had seated 310 but always sold more than 1000 tickets. When I got lucky I used to share a seat with my sister. Otherwise, I sat on the stage two meters from the screen. That was how I first saw Superman. And Star Wars, 4 and 5.