“Why did those morons do something so barbarous?” my sister asked sobbing while collapsing on her bed. She sat there crying and later listening to us all evening until she fell into a deep sleep. Revolutions are too difficult for little girls to grasp. “They wanted to burn all the books about Ceauşescu. And all the books with pictures of Ceauşescu”, my father explained. “And they did. There was a huge fire in the middle of the street, and people got caught up in the heat of the moment. They started burning everything that they were vandalizing”. I didn’t know then, and neither did my family, that earlier that day Ceauşescu’s dogs, two black Labradors presented to him by Queen Elisabeth and Sir David Steele were clubbed to death by revolutionaries who obviously got caught up in the heat of the moment. How else can those who did the clubbing explain why they did it? I’m sure it was more gruesome than just burning innocent books, than just smashing windows with stones. But Revolutions are bloody and, as I was familiar with the details of the French Revolution, I expected violence. But violence against Ceauşescu-lovers, not against books or dogs.
The heat of the moment? I was thinking about that explanation when I realized that they must have burned the school books too. They all had Ceauşescu’s picture on the first page, just behind the cover and, it was the beginning of our freedom, of democracy, so why not? Secretly I wished my father had looted a “Romanian language” textbook for me. Mine was so old and falling to bits. I was easily the 6th or 7th owner. In those days we had to get our textbooks from the motherland. But our communist state was poor, Ceauşescu was trying to pay off all our foreign debt and there was less and less money for us, the kids. Therefore, on the last day of the school year we had to give all our textbooks back to our principal. The teachers would mend them, glue them where necessary, and decide what textbooks could be re-used. Interestingly enough, it seemed that their standards dropped every year. Anyway, when done they would order only the bare minimum of new books, and that was always too few…It was hard for me to remember the last time I got a new book. Was it when I was in first grade? Or the second? It didn’t matter. All that mattered was that the revolutionaries had burned the textbooks too. The textbooks that they never bought for their kids.
“I won’t buy you a new textbook”, my father once said. “You can use the one that you got from school. If you can read it, if it’s not missing any of its pages, then it serves its purpose”, he ruled. Sure they did. My old and decrepit textbooks were there for me when I became fifth in my class. Actually, when I became fifth, I did not want to rise any higher but neither did I want to fall lower. Behind me trailed the rest of my class, the other 39 students. But what purpose had burning those textbooks served? Why were they burned? Because they had a picture of Ceauşescu in them or because the workers that had set them alight wanted to take revenge on the school they did not love so much? The only place that they did not destroy was the local pub. The pub did nothing wrong to them, maybe, and despite what their wives thought, they spared it, went in and ordered drinks, for which they paid. Poor workers, pity their kids and the burned school books. I was too young at the time to have known, but my second guess was right. A few months later in Bucharest coal miners started beating to death or just beating, or just clubbing, or just chasing anybody who looked intellectual.
“We work, we don’t think” was the slogan that united them against those wearing beards or glasses. They were called to defend the new power, to defend Ion Iliescu and Petre Roman, against the anti-communist parties that organized demonstrations to push for a different change. A change that would exclude excommunists from public life for at least eight years.
But I was too young. So young that I hated Silviu Brucan, a smart ass Romanian Jew who said that “Romanians are many and stupid” when he predicted that the real change was to come only after 2009, twenty years on. But a few years on all I wanted to be was like Brucan. His books were intelligent, he had arguments, he was always telling the truth. To be Romania’s new Brucan. What a beautiful dream! But back in 1989 I was disgusted. My father was disgusted, too, because he didn’t know that Brucan said in one of his books that the Revolution turned Romania into a train without a driver. And when nobody knew where the train’s engine was, Iliescu and his team (Brucan included) climbed on and took the controls. My father would have agreed with that.
But I was too young to know that. And my father was too naive in his expectations to have known that. He, like all Romanians who had partied in front of their TV sets or threw away their lives on the streets of Bucharest and Sibiu, had naive expectations of the power change. Now that Ceauşescu had fled and the Revolution had happened, a democratic regime would follow, not another dictatorship, the stores would be filled with goods, everybody would be well-dressed, like in those Nekerman catalogues from West Germany we sometimes had a chance to see.
The new power, the devil who went by the name of Iliescu, however, had other plans.
“Nicolae Ceauşescu tarnished the noble ideals of Socialism”, Iliescu said earlier that day on TV, hoping he would become a Gorbachev. Because he couldn’t be a Havel. He had to be a Gorbachev. Brucan had been in Moscow earlier that year, not that we, the people, were aware of that, getting orders to organise the Ceauşescus’ fall. Glasnost and Perestroika were being implemented in the USSR and it had to happen in Romania too. But Ceauşescu was old, he was stubborn, he was a Stalinist.
Ceauşescu had to be replaced by Iliescu, and that was why Iliescu was called on, after the Revolution had started, from his office as head of a publishing house, to take control. And he did take control. He signed, as head of that publishing house, documents relating to the capture and trial of the two Ceauşescus. Strange that nobody questioned who he was, strange that they let him appoint General Militaru as the Army Chief. My father was just finishing his story about the vandalism in our tiny town, and my mom was just finishing her meal. I was eating fresh white bread and was trying to decide if it would be better to put some pate on it or not.
And so General Militaru was introduced. He looked old and he looked tall. He was ugly, without doubt, but he promised to help the Revolution. The Army was on our side, and as its new chief of staff he made sure it stayed with us, with the people, with the Revolution. We did not know that General Militaru (his name in Romanian means the military man) was a soviet agent, but Iliescu did. He was his man, and that man was there for a job, but nobody watching TV or dying on the streets was aware of that.
He was replacing, the story went, General Vasile Milea. “Who?” I asked my father, and he said that General Milea was the one who saluted Ceauşescu during the military parade every August 23rd, the day of our communist motherfuckinland. And I vaguely remembered a rather fat uniform, saluting with pride, the dictatorial couple.
“General Vasile Milea was a hero” was the story that was told by the blaring black and white Opera TV set, and he was killed by forces loyal to Ceauşescu. That was the story and that was the reason why the new power named several long boulevards after him, one of them in Sibiu. But he wasn’t killed. He shot himself, aiming for the heart, but he missed. He killed himself for not being able to stop the Revolution. He died of blood loss in his office, the very one from which the armed forces were ordered against defenseless civilians during the events of the previous days. That was the official verdict of a criminal investigation into his death. The conclusion was reached in 2005, long after all of us had gotten used to his name, and gotten used to taking buses from General Vasile Milea Boulevard to the train station.