Vasile and Teodora would share a seat and after they would buy an ice-cream from the ice-cream machine which had only two flavors, vanilla and cocoa. That’s right, not chocolate, because chocolate wasn’t used to make it, but cocoa ice-cream. In less then 3 months they decided to marry and they got the standard one bedroom apartment from our communist country, and my parents bought them all the furniture and things they needed.
But Teodora wasn’t the woman that my grandmother from Lodroman was looking for. Her cooking skills were poor and she didn’t know how to keep a house. She had lived below the poverty line when she was young, always eating what was to be found in stores, not what they produced or made themselves. She was a true product of our communist government. In 1989 we heard news that Ceauşescu wanted to make everybody eat in canteens and huge canteens were about to be constructed. In Bucharest they were almost ready. Resembling circus tents they were called the Hunger Circuses. Ceauşescu’s plan was to forbid people from cooking and eating at home. Be that as it may, I have to acknowledge that his mad plan suited Teodora very well who didn’t cook and didn’t make Vasile happy.
He continued to drink and change jobs and my grandmother, after a failed attempt at moving in with them to teach Teodora how to keep a house and mend clothes for a husband left pissed off for Lodroman.
She eventually came back. In 1992 my grandmother became senile and she sometimes left home and wasn’t able to find her way back. So my father went to Lodroman and came to an agreement with his mother-in-law so that she would come and live with us and watch over my grandmother. And she did, and watched over her, but never put much effort into the job. My mom was the one that cooked for the entire family, washed all our clothes, bathed my senile grandmother and, when she was confined to her bed without hope of recovery, slept in the same room with her. We were people, not animals and people had to pass away with their kin holding their hands and lighting candles for the soul to see the light of heaven and the way to the Holy Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit.
As a communist to be, I used to say that I didn’t believe in God! But it seems that the magnet for trouble was watched over by the Holy Trinity on that evening and he got home with the fruitcakes and jar of fried ribs in lard and the other food and wine we prepared for his family. But neither the Father, nor the Son, nor the Holy Spirit were working on that late evening in Bucharest.
Or at least they were only contemplating what people were doing with their free will.
The truth is that people don’t quite understand what free will is. And they certainly didn’t understand what freedom should be. Or, some of them did, but avoided setting the people free as much as possible.
The new Defense Minister, General Militaru was definitely from the latter category. Iliescu wanted terrorists and he was about to provide them. The whole country wanted the terrorists caught and he wanted to provide that, too, he wanted to serve. Ceauşescu had stopped Militaru from serving eleven years before 1989. It was 1978 and Militaru was a three star general when he was pulled out of active duty and given a position in management in the Construction Industry Ministry — luckily for him.
He was lucky. Ceauşescu feared the Russians. Militaru’s name came out in the Raven’s file as a GRU agent. The GRU was the secret service of the Red Army, and this was the reason why Ceauşescu took the Second Army from Militaru’s command and gave him that petty job in the construction industry. He would have been killed if Ceauşescu didn’t fear the Soviet backlash, that’s for sure.
Twenty years after 1989 I see the events more clearly. But on that night I was young and stupid, and open to being manipulated like the other 23 million Romanians.
It all started with a character that you don’t know yet but you already hate. This man, because a man he was, was General Ion Hortopan. Only a couple of days before, when I was starting to smoke the pig, he was smoking the barricades around the Intercontinental Hotel in Bucharest. The soldiers that killed Jean Louis Calderon, the French journalist that would become a street name, were following his orders.
Maybe that was why he wanted to do something to stay afloat, maybe that was why Militaru decided to use him, I don’t know, even now, twenty years later.
However, it all started when General Hortopan entered a meeting of the new power with the chief of USLA, the Romanian version of SWAT, and said loudly:
“Fighting has broken out outside Bucharest. Private-Major Popa has been captured. He was with USLA”.
“I’m sure that Trosca is behind this!” replied the Romanian SWAT chief, General Ardelean. “Only he could be behind this.” Strangely enough, that name didn’t ring a bell for anyone. How were they to know that Trosca was the man that took the Second Army from General Militaru in 1978?
As a counter-intelligence agent with the Second Army Trosca was the one that put Militaru on the Raven’s List. Trosca was the one that conducted house searches at Militaru’s home, Trosca was the one that called Militaru a traitor, and at that moment Trosca was the Major Chief of Staff of USLA. It all looked like the events wouldn’t go as planned, but that was only because Iliescu took his time while he made Militaru, officially, the Minster of Defense. Iliescu was tired, everybody was tired. But they had made it. They had taken control of the locomotive, as Brucan had put it, so they had to follow some bureaucratic procedures. For example when Iliescu signed the papers that started procedures for the Ceauşescus’ trial one day before, he was officially only the head of the Technical Publishing House, but 24 hours later he was the head of FSN, the National Salvation Front, the iron grip that took Romania from Ceausecu and kept it away from the historical liberal, social democrat and christian democrat parties.
Not even a month later the FSN called on all workers to beat the shit out of those protesting the new communist-looking power, and they did it again when Iliescu and Roman asked the miners of Valea Jiului to beat up people who were pushing for reforms. The miners came and any intellectual-looking people they caught they beat, some they left with life-long injuries, some they simply killed. “Intellectual-looking” were the students, those they found in universities, in libraries, in bookstores, people wearing beards and glasses.
“We work, we don’t think” was the miners’ slogan and surely Iliescu thanked them for saving the Revolution, or more like his ass and power, or whatever.
But on that 23rd of December the miners were a card still to be played. The man of the day was Trosca.
Trosca was the one with the intelligence, with the information that, combined, would unveil who the people who climbed into Brucan’s locomotive were. And that was the very reason Militaru called General Ardelean after receiving the ministry officialy from Iliescu, along with his 4th general star. “Take 600 USLA troups and come to the ministry. There are snipers in the surrounding buildings. Come and take them out”. His order was clear. So General Ardeleanu phoned the Romanian SWAT, his own troops and spoke with colonel Bleort. “I understand, sir! Colonel Trosca is standing right here, sir!, Yes, sir!”, was what Bleort yelled into the military phone, before giving the orders to Trosca.
On that night there were 647 USLA professional soldiers in Romania. 30 of them were guarding Embassies, 80 were sent to Sibiu to clear out the terrorists there, but Trosca didn’t want to take all of the remaining 500 or so.
First he was suspicious. He knew who had given the orders. He knew that there were soldiers in the ministry that didn’t need outside help for a sweep, he knew what had happened at Otopeni that morning.