The next day was the day we had to melt the pig’s fat into lard and pour it over the ribs, covering them, to keep them edible until summer. I had heard that some people kept their fried meat in oil, but my mother never veered from the traditional way. First of all the sunflower oil that was sold in Romania at the time had a rancid taste, and secondly because the dishes cooked with oil, and not with the traditional lard, were nothing like my mom’s food.
As we settled down in front of the TV, our backs to the terracotta stove and the door, Ceauşescu was already being captured with his wife. They were ditched by their pilot who told them he had run out of gas, so they tried, farsically, to highjack a car to flee in. They promised the driver money, but they were turned in and brought to a military camp in Tragoviste, the former capital of Walachia, the very place from where our kings (including Vlad, the Impaler) had ruled from.
But we didn’t know all that. We, like all Romanians, and the entire world that existed beyond our borders which was probably watching us, did not know that. But the people on the TV screen, the archangels of freedom, who proclaimed first the end of Ceauşescu and only later, under pressure from the revolutionary mob, the end of communist rule in Romania, knew. They were already preparing the Ceauşescus’ slaughter. The summary trial. The execution.
But they said nothing about their plans. Nor anything about their already having taken control of the country. Instead they called on the people to come out of their homes and onto the streets, to defend the Revolution.
“Come and defend the TV station”, they urged on air. And my mother’s hands turned whiter and whiter as she clung to her armchair with an ever-tightening grip.
She didn’t voice it but I could see she was worried about father, being caught now in a similar turmoil. What if he had to “defend the revolution”? What if he was shot and killed? Now the TV, not Radio Free Europe was talking about thousands and thousands of deaths, about people murdered, cremated and dumped in sewage drains.
“Come and help me with the smoke”, my mom said, and I felt that she was trying to do something, anything, other than just sitting there, worried about my father, about us, about the Revolution.
“What do you think will happen?” I asked, and she responded, blurting out the words:
“We will have food”.
“What do you mean, we will have food?” My question came because all I could think of were the sausages being smoked in OUR smokehouse, the jambon still in salt, the two huge pig-long pieces of fatback in salt, in OUR basement too.
“Remember when we went on that trip to Hungary?” asked my mother like she was dreaming with her eyes wide open. “There was plenty of food. Remember the supermarket with plenty of meats and cheese and bread and nobody waited in long lines to buy anything. The people didn’t look desperate like shoppers do here.”
“But, mom, Hungary was a communist country, back then.”
“I know, but I heard that in Germany stores are even bigger, and better supplied than in Hungary.”
Her argument was undefeatable so I put my handmade ski hat on to go outside. I usually did not bother with a coat, but I always took a hat, when going outside. Gloves, too, sometimes. When door handles drop in temperature 20 below zero, I had better wear gloves before touching them. Otherwise, my hands would stick to them, which is an interesting sight to see, but not to experience.
Anyway, it wasn’t that cold on that 22nd of December, so I decided to go with just my hat. My mom followed me and I really did not understand why. It was my job to light the fire, not hers, so I assumed she didn’t really trust my way of doing it or my ability.
The fire in the bucket was still going, under layers of willow sawdust, but it desperately needed more wood chips. Carefully I started to remove the burned and unburned sawdust to uncover the amber coals. I covered them with big chunks of dry willow and started to blow my lungs out to start a new fire. Soon I was done. But just as I was about to cover that new fire in wooden chips and willow sawdust, my mom threw something in the flames.
I understood what when I saw it opening and a very young and thin version of my father started to burn. She was burning their Communist Party ID cards, two small cranberry red booklets containing their names and pictures and a few stamps.
“It’s getting hot in here, you better cover the fire”, she stated dreamily. I obeyed, thinking how long it would take for my father’s picture to burn, how that smoke would affect the sausages hanging above and why it was necessary for her to burn those IDs. It was impossible to hide their membership in the Communist Party, if that was what she was trying to do. Everybody we knew were communists. Both of my grandmothers were not, but my grandfather, the only one I knew, was a communist. Not a proud one. He was forced to hand over his horse to the communist government in the early ’60s, but he was red.
Soon, the smoke was thick enough for us to leave. I wanted to go upstairs to watch more television. I was 14 and television hungry. We had only two hours of mostly news about Ceauşescu and the countries he had visited, and I wanted more television.
In the summer of 1989, I was in Lodroman, the village where my maternal grandmother used to live and watched three American movies. One was a Vietnam war movie, the other one was a police movie and the last one a comedy. I had paid the owner of the VCR player 60 lei for me and my sister and that was the first time I had seen a color television. I sat for nearly 5 hours on the floor, in a room covered with teenagers, all of them paying all their savings to watch those movies, and I wished communism would end so that we could buy our own color TV set and VCR player. I guess freedom for me back in 1989 was nothing more and nothing less.
Two years on, in 1991 I was watching the same Opera TV set and I still did not have a VCR player. Only in the summer of 1992 did we have the money to buy a secondhand German-made Blaupunkt color TV set and a secondhand Japanese Akai VCR player. It was a big event, not only for us, but for all our neighbors, too, who gathered at our house. We all watched, in a cramped room, the same Vietnam war movie that I had seen in 1989, in the summertime, and my only thought was how stupid I was to believe that freedom was watching lots of TV and owning home entertainment systems. I could not help but observe how my happy-to-be-there neighbors envied us for having that color TV set, even if it was an old one which came in a retro wooden box, probably one that some very fat Germans full of beer and hot dogs, threw out on New Year’s Day, along with an oversized VCRplayer, made in 1983 by Akai, a maker that was better known in Romania than in Japan.
But of course back on December 22nd, 1989, I was still a child. One that was very difficult to entertain. I had read all of my fathers 1000 or so books and the insignificant tiny town library had nothing I was interested in reading. Reading was my life but in my countryside I had already read all I could get my hands on. I even read the Bible that very year, mainly because it was the only book I hadn’t read on our bookshelves…And, to my surprise, I found it to be a good book!
Maybe that was the reason I was desperate to watch TV, to watch American movies…Our communist society urged us to be secular, and the capitalist era that started in 1989 made that a priority too. So, soon I had my share of my long dreamed of American entertainment and in my first year of “freedom” I proudly kept records of all the American movies I managed to watch. And I didn’t stop until I had more than 1000 entries in that scrapbook and considered myself the most pathetic idiot of the free world. Freedom was more than eating popcorn and watching Hollywood movies, that’s for sure.