How was that possible? Only General Militaru knew. He was in a room full of officers when he was told that his people had opened fire on Trosca, but he preferred to retreat to his office to speak on the phone. He was alone when he set everything up, when he gave the orders, and his orders were followed as they were supposed to be. He was the Minister of Defense, not just some ass working on construction projects for Ceauşescu.
“Every last one” must have been his order, but my father had no idea, his kids, me and my sister, were innocently sleeping beside him on our lined up beds, his wife in the main bedroom and it was already the 24th of December, Christmas Eve that we could celebrate properly, the day of joy, the birth of Christ.
4. DECEMBER 24TH
When I worked as a journalist I sometimes saw raw footage from war-torn African countries and I always felt sick after seeing people set ablaze alive, or people throwing enemies alive on bonfires and part of me believed that such acts of cruelty could never happen in a country like Romania.
Why are people so cruel to each other? I couldn’t understand it. But the truth is that people can stoop lower than animals. We are the scum of the earth.
The story, the real story, of course, is that when people living close to the Ministry of Defense woke up on the morning of the 24th they took from their fruitcakes and from their sweets and food and went to give it to the soldiers defending the Revolution.
“Merry Christmas!”
“Merry Christmas, to you too!”
The fruitcakes changed hands, food changed hands, some
soldiers got handmade woollen sweaters to wear under their military jackets and coats. But this Merry Christmas wishing crowd looked down the street and saw it paved with bullets and used cases. All kinds of calibers. Seven bodies were lying in and around two ARO looking military cars.
A man started to run and used his foot to hit a body in the head. The head, like a real football, detached and rolled over to the joy of those watching. That head had belonged until less than 8 hours before to a hero, Colonel Trosca, the very man that took the Second Army from General Militaru back in 1978.
A football game to play on Christmas Eve! And what a funny football game it was. That head that rolled from one to another only to be hit again symbolized Ceauşescu and their hardship and they took revenge for the days without meat and heat, for the cheap beer and fake coffee.
They would have played that game all day long but someone had the idea of torching the bodies, and they did it with some gas they took from one of the ABI tanks.
Torched, Trosca’s head was placed on the spare wheel mounted on an ABI’s hood. Someone put a cigarette in its charred lips and almost everybody, before returning to their peaceful homes for their peaceful Christmas Eve, for carols and fruitcake and all those little things that turn a normal day into the most perfect Christmas Eve, spat on that head.
“Merry Christmas!” they shouted to the soldiers defending the Ministry building, before leaving, and, they said “Merry Christmas” again on December 25th in the morning, when they came to give the soldiers more fruitcake and food, and the bodies were still scattered on the ground, and Colonel Trosca’s head was still there with that cigarette in its charred lips mounted on the car, and we were the people that I didn’t believe capable of the cruelties that I was seeing in raw footage from places like Africa.
I woke up happy.
Christmas Eve was by far, the best day of the year. As usual, I was already alone in my room. My sister was
already up and her bed was made up neatly. I did mine quickly and then I opened the bottom drawer of a bookshelf and I took out the vacuum cleaner.
My parents’ room was first, ours came second and, lastly I did the hallway. Only after finishing did I want to go downstairs. I was placing the vacuum cleaner back in its box when my mom and my sister entered the room holding cleaning cloths and buckets of hot water. They had to dust everything and use wet brushes to brush the Persian carpet we had in our parents’ room.
After saying good morning I was already making my escape before my mom invented another chore for me.
“Your breakfast is on the table under that white cloth!”, my mom said to my back, but I was thinking “Fruitcake, fruitcake, fruitcake, milk”.
And fruitcake it was!
Now that was a beautiful morning. I put the home made butter and jam back in the pantry and returned the bread to the cupboard and started to eat the three kinds of fruitcake that we made a day earlier and drink cold milk. I don’t know why my mom always wanted us to drink the milk hot, but with her upstairs I could have it my way. Cold, in a tall glass. That day’s particular glass had a red Santa painted on it and in white, close to the top was written in English: “Merry Christmas, Florin!”. It was my favorite.
I got the glass from my mom’s glass factory the same year my grandfather died . The workers’ union made Christmas bags for every child whose parents worked there. Usually sweets, but on that particular year they were allowed by the factory’s director to produce personalized glasses for all the kids. The message on the glasses had to be in English. They were not allowed to write “Merry Christmas!” in Romanian, and the red Santa wasn’t supposed to come before New Year’s Eve.
It surely sounds insane, but the communist government promoted a secular Santa despite the fact that in the western world Santa was already secular!
A Christian Father Christmas, as we used to call him, wasn’t supposed to wear a red coat, live at the North Pole and have his sled pulled by a red-nosed Rudolph & Co. The real Father Christmas was just an idea. He used to live in Heaven and he was the husband of the woman that allowed the Holy Virgin Mary to give birth to Jesus in the stable. We were told that he got so mad that his wife allowed strangers close to their animals that he cut off both her hands, as any other reasonable and sane Middle Eastern man would have done.
But God saw what he had done and sent the Holy Spirit to fix the woman’s hands and her hands jumped from the ground and glued themselves back to the woman’s battered arms, the same way the liquid metal Terminator did with its own hands. So Father Christmas saw the will of God and after King Herod killed all children younger than two he sold all his possessions and bought food to feed the Jewish kids in his town. And then he died of hunger himself because, having sold everything, death was his only possible fate. He got to go to Heaven and from there sometimes, not always and not to all kids, he would present kids with gifts, or, warm the hearts of adults causing them to buy gifts for kids.
See what I’m saying? Our Father Christmas had nothing to do with Santa. Santa was as secular as Father Frost on New Year’s Eve. Father Frost was the name of the communist Santa.
Anyway, the workers’ union managed every year to distribute their bags on December 24th, and even now in Romania, after so many years, Santa comes on Christmas Eve, rather than Christmas Day from the North Pole or wherever he comes from.
Who cares? Santa is secular anyway.
But on that particular 24th of December, I was waiting for Father Christmas. The real one. Only Father Christmas could warm all hearts and turn evil people into good folk. And Father Christmas was real. Not in the way Santa is believed to be in the western world with the idiots from NORAD tracking his sled.
Father Christmas was real because he warmed the communist hearts and made them put oranges and bananas in stores before Christmas, and not after it, in January, or something. He was real because the God-hating communists sold Christmas ornaments in communist stores, beautiful handmade and hand-painted Christmas globes. Because workers were sent to cut Christmas trees from Ceauşescu’s forests and people could buy them to decorate their homes for Christmas and not only New Year’s Eve.