I remember it being almost night when I got there. I was barefoot. My mom wouldn’t let me wear those azure blue shoes again, so I entered my auntie’s house without taking any shoes off.
It was obvious she was shocked, too, but she tried to hide it. She gave me some sweets and then she gave me a pair of new socks and she invited me to the bathroom to wash and I did, and then, with motherly care my auntie mended my wounds and put the new socks on my feet.
“You look much better”, she said to me smiling, and I couldn’t help to remember that she was a kindergarten teacher, but then she said suddenly:
“The real present is not the socks, but these shoes”, and a moment later she handed me a mocha brown and slightly heavy shoe box.
“Mihai, your cousin, wore these shoes when he entered high school”, she whispered. I opened the box eagerly. There the shoes were, in very good condition.
How ever happy I was, that fact still remained that they were used shoes. But I took them and put them on, and they were my size, comfortable shoes.
Back home I asked my mother for pitch black leather paint and a thin brush. I repainted the shoes back to their original color and let them dry. The next day was an exciting morning. I put them on and rushed to school where I had a rehearsal for a play I was in, only to hear my teacher, Roxana Braga, the young and extremely beautiful wife of Braga, the writer, exclaim: “Nice new shoes, you got there, Florin!”, and I couldn’t tell if she really thought they were nice or she was mocking me for wearing someone else’s old shoes. Anyway, it wasn’t the first time I had to suffer because of my rare foot size. A few winters before, my sister got a new pair of skating boots for Christmas. White. They shined like the blade they were carrying underneath, and while they did, I couldn’t help wanting a pair for myself too. The plan was that we both would get skating boots that Christmas but my mom could’t find my size. But when I was already giving up hope, my dad put an announcement in the local newspaper, so one or our friends saw it and called us to tell us that a neighbor of his had a daughter and that she had had skating boots when she was in Junior High School. So my parents took a present to those strangers and asked them to sell them, if they still had them, to us, and they were nice people and took the money. So, like in a fairytale story before January ended I started to skate awkwardly beside my already experienced sister. We had some very nice winters back in the 80’s and we used to skate on frozen ponds or icy roads, and we stopped only then we had outgrown the boots, and we never got others to replace them. Those were the times. So years later, my mom gave our skating boots to Vasile’s daughter and they used them for a couple of weeks before their father traded them for booze. Pufoaică brandy perhaps, I’m not sure.
I hope you can understand how frustrated I was with shoes in communism. That was the reason I said what I wanted from our new freedom was to get a decent pair of shoes. Nothing more, nothing less. And I got the following year a new pair of white sneakers. The first and the last until 1994. I was living then in a rented apartment in Sibiu. My father wanted me to live close to my new High School. But we were terribly poor. We had trouble finding money to pay the rent and prices were skyrocketing. So I had to go to school every day with my one and only pair of sneakers and they got so many holes in them that my socks were visible from several different angles. Only when I graduated did my father buy me a new pair of buckskin brown leather dress shoes, but, then he died, and because that pair was the best pair we had in our house, we decided he should wear them on his final journey. God curse Iliescu and his men forever. Hungry people are never free, hungry people are always easy to manipulate, hungry people can’t even die in their own shoes, and this was the “freedom” we had after 1989.
Back upstairs, after crying, I found my dad and The Colonel absorbed in the story of the Revolution. The news was that the military unit that had Ceauşescu as prisoner was under heavy attack. The brave soldiers of our motherland were defending it with their lives and Ceauşescu couldn’t possibly escape. “I’m sure they’d rather put a bullet in his head than let him leave with the terrorists”, said The Colonel, and my half drunk father approved with a loud burp.
The fact is that the sound made by the gas gathered in my father’s stomach was louder than all the noises combined in and around Targoviste military base where Ceauşescu was held. Nobody was attacking it, so Kamenici couldn’t wait anymore. His nails were already gone, anyway. Somebody had to attack them. It was Ceauşescu or him, General Voinea’s threat was there, in his head, so somebody had to attack them.
It was early evening when somebody fired a shot, a single shot at their building. And all hell broke loose. Every soldier took their gun to the windows and started to fire outside the compound. Nobody was firing at them but that wasn’t the important thing. The important thing was that everybody believed that they were being attacked, as the TV said, by superior forces.
He ran towards the room where Ceauşescu and his wife were being held and shouted:
“These headquarters are being overrun. Kill them and fall back to defensive positions. Save yourselves!”
Those that got the orders were major Ion Boboc and lieutenant-major Iulian Stoica. The first of them would remember years later:
“It was about 5:00p.m. when something happened. A diversion, I think. Somebody fired towards our positions from the high school across the road. At that moment everybody started to shoot. It was hell on earth. People were shooting from offices, hallways, the dorms upstairs, and us, being inside, we had the impression that a battle was taking place inside the building. But the reality is that nobody was shooting but us. So the commander came and gave that order and left. A few moments later everybody deserted the headquarters. Left behind were only me, Stoica and the two Ceauşescus. I didn’t want to kill them so I got out of the room. The place was deserted. Silent. Everybody was outside in defensive positions. There were phones ringing, but nobody to pick them up or to ask what to do? So I looked outside and saw two soldiers with their guns pointed towards the headquarters’ doors and I realized what it was all about. After executing Ceauşescu we were to be shot for not defending the prisoners, or for deserting. And they would have said that Ceauşescu was killed by strangers that entered the headquarters during that confused battle.
So I didn’t go out. We waited there, and in one hour everybody was back, working as if nothing had happened”. But the reality is that the trap was more evil than Boboc first thought. That was because he only heard Kamenici shouting the order while he was in the room with Ceauşescu and his wife. Stoica was outside the room, and he got another order, a direct and whispered one:
“The headquarters are lost, in the enemy’s hands. Put an AKM clip in Ceauşescu and one in Elena”.
“Then he left me. But the next day on 25th he accused me of treason. Because I didn’t execute his order. I didn’t do it and that was smart because a friend, an officer, had been ordered to open fire with the 14.5mm heavy machine gun on the room holding Ceauşescu if he heard gunshots from inside. ‘Flatten the building’, was the order” confessed Stoica in 1994 in front of the “1989 Commission”.
So, The Colonel was right! Someone was definitely ready to put a bullet in Ceauşescu’s head before handing him over to the nonexistent terrorists, but his imagination was, as you see, very poor. He recognized this, during a house party, just weeks before my father died, and he said that we were all wrong, we did a very bad thing to kill Ceauşescu like a pig, on Christmas Day. Actually I didn’t think that, at the time. I was twenty and still very young, and still very upset at my lack of decent shoes during and after communism, but when I got older and saw how decently the Iraqi people treated Saddam Hussein, how well conducted his trial was, I bowed in respect. Then I knew that we had been worse than animals in 1989, or at least those who took power in Romania were worse than animals. They wanted money, they wanted power, but they did nothing for the hungry people. For the starving bodies they destroyed all of Romania’s agriculture favoring GMO foods imported from the West. And for starving minds they prepared sex, cheap TV dramas, Latin American telenovelas, Sandra Brown’s books and mindnumbingly stupid variety shows.