That was a first. My father would usually receive his guests in the kitchen, where they would eat, drink and smoke until the food, and the cigarettes ran out. The wine never ran out. We made a few hundred liters every year.
I said to my mom in a hurry what dad wanted and rushed upstairs to listen to The Colonel. He was always telling interesting stories and I really wanted to be like him in the future. At 18 I was supposed to go to the Army and I wanted to be in the paratroops. I was fascinated by planes and ships but I never had the chance to see a plane, except those flying at high altitude above us, or a warship. But as a paratrooper I would be around planes all day long and I would not work in the fields or on construction sites as the military usually did. Dreams. I had so many.
The Colonel came to us because he was a man with a mission. He came to inspect my father but as people were going home for Christmas Eve, from the town hall, he wanted to go to a warm place, too, and listen to carols and eat and have some wine. So there he was, and my father was more than happy to have him as a guest, despite the fact that on Christmas Eve we usually had people coming and going, not staying with us for more than 30 minutes.
That year was definitely special. My mom felt it, too, when she entered with food and wine. The kids’ room, the one with the TV set, was already filling up with smoke.
“Hey, you know it’s not allowed to smoke here”, my mom said, only half angry. “The walls will get dirty”, she pointed, forgetting somehow me and Felicia.
“Doesn’t matter. As soon as it gets warm we will have Sandu the house painter, here, to refresh the entire house”, happily replied my father.
He was talking sense. Every second year we had Sandu the house painter, repaint our house inside, and every 6 years we had him do his magic outside too. Along with Mr. Bara, the tailor, he was self-employed. We liked him but we couldn’t get close because he belonged to a different church. They celebrated the sabbath on Saturday, and that was the main reason Sandu refused to take a regular job and started to paint houses. Before 1989 only Sunday was a holiday, Saturday being a half day for workers. Another reason was that Sandu’s religion asked him to be a strict vegan. He couldn’t eat meat, fish, eggs or dairy products, so we couldn’t invite him to eat with us on Sundays, the day we usually had guests. Sunday was a day we had to celebrate by eating our best food. We could be strict vegetarians from Monday to Saturday, but Sunday was different.
I had a classmate in the same church. I remember how our teacher, Mr. Napeu, once tried to make him eat salami, and how Silviu refused and battled to keep his mouth closed as the rest of us, rather than pity, envied him. We almost never saw salami, but that’s another story. I also remember how my grandfather said he didn’t like the vegans’ extremism pointing out that “None of them lived to more than 50 years old. You can go and check their section in the cemetery. They all die young”.
But the future was something we could not anticipate, especially the economic crisis and the inflation. So Sandu the painter wasn’t called when it became warm, and, as a matter of fact, he never set foot inside our house again. Since 1989 we have painted our house only twice. First when my sister married in 1997 and last when I married in 2004, and every time it was my new brother-in-law who painted it, helped by his friend Viorel, that very nice gipsy boy who shared his first name with my father.
The Colonel was talking about terrorists and also about his suspicion that the terrorists didn’t exist.
“I was in Sibiu today and I can tell you something. Nobody is shooting at Army positions, but the Army is shooting at everyone else. Everybody is paranoid and they are always saying on the TV that soldiers should fire without waiting for orders”, he said then rushed to empty his wine glass.
“Good wine, you have here, Grancea”, he said using my father’s last name. “Have some taken to my ABI outside to those soldiers waiting”, he asked me after he helped himself to another glass.
Curious, I went out and took from the basement an already filled one liter bottle and went outside to the ABI. The soldiers were inside but the engine was off. I could see they were cold. Before I reached the car, the driver rolled down the window and said:
“You’re only bringing one bottle? Can’t you see there are two of us?” so I handed that bottle to him and rushed in to get another one. They were right. Only one bottle on Christmas Eve for two people wasn’t enough.
Back in my smoke-filled room The Colonel, now with a very red face asked me looking into my eyes:
“Son, you are free now. Ceauşescu is gone and he’ll never come back. I’m sure his hours are numbered. So tell me, what do you want from this freedom? I wonder, because you are young and you must want different things than we, older people, want”. First I didn’t know what to say. But because I was a top student and always immediately answered all questions put to me, I said without thinking:
“Shoes, new shoes”.
My father pretended that he didn’t hear my answer and so did The Colonel. They continued to watch the TV, to hear the messages that the new power was disseminating. They continued to drink their wine.
Ashamed by my answer, I excused myself and left, and once out I started to cry and the tears fell on my shoes, or should I say on the shoes that I was wearing because that weren’t mine. Almost a year before I’d had to buy new shoes. But because I was growing so fast I couldn’t find any. In the shoe stores, in the adult section, the smallest I could find was the European size 40 and I needed 36. In the kids’ section the biggest shoes were size 35. Too small to fit my growing feet.
I usually shopped with my family. Never alone. So we went every Saturday evening to a shoe store, in Avrig or in Sibiu to find shoes, but with no success. Finally, exasperated, my mom gave me 100 lei, the same amount that Ceauşescu promised as a pay raise in his last speech, and said:
Florin, you are a big boy now, go to the shoe store every day after you finish school and you’ll get lucky. If you go on the day they receive new merchandise in the store, I’m sure you’ll be able to find something your size”.
And I went to buy shoes almost every day. And I kept that bank note of 100 lei in my pocket until its color faded and the paper looked worn out. Only two months after did I have the chance to use it. In Sibiu, from the communist version of a department store I bought, in the women’s section, a ridiculous looking azure blue pair of shoes. Size 36, and I paid 60 lei for them . I wanted to buy a size 37, and the store clerk, a nice old lady advised me to wait another couple of months until the store received new supplies, but I could not wait anymore. The shoes I was wearing were so used and full of holes that I looked like a beggar the communist country was showing to us in pictures when they wanted to tell us about how people lived in America. I was 14 and I was in love with Adriana, a classmate, not that she was aware, but still.
So I put on my new azure blue and ridiculous looking women’s shoes and walked away from the store, with my old shoes in a plastic bag. Those shoes would be repaired and used for gardening by my mother. That was the way it was. We never really threw anything away, not unless they were completely destroyed and could not possibly be used.
Anyway, my women’s shoes lasted less than I expected. In less than one month my feet were already too big for them so I was sweating with fear every morning when I put them on. Pain. Blood. Pain. Terrible pain. Every step was a nightmare and I was doing it to myself. Nobody was forcing it on me. That was sick. That was how communism felt for me and that is, right now, my strongest memory of those days.
I used to hide my wounded feet, but one day my mom saw my bloody socks and cried out and I had to take my shoes off and she was saying she was sorry and that she loved me, and she was crying and wouldn’t stop… Until the evening, when she phoned Auntie Anişoara and spoke with her and she sent me to visit her right away.