Florin Grancea - The Pigs' Slaughter

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.

The Colonel was already drunk when he got into his ABI to leave. We saw him to the gate, me, my sister, my father and my mother. Our grandmother was already asleep, not interested in political change.

“These are for you”, he said to my mom and he gave her 6 military cans of beef. “They are war supplies. We took them all. Let us just hope the fucking Russians don’t attack us, because in that event our soldiers will have nothing to eat”, he said, and he climbed in the Jeep-like ABI, and those two soldiers waiting for him were as drunk as he was, but that didn’t matter, coz the ABI’s engine came to life and the car rolled away into the night. As usual in my town, lacking street lights, it was pitch dark. It was a moonless night, and we couldn’t see the stars. Clouds were gathering. But from every house there were fairytale lights. There were the candles burning on the Christmas trees, and the trees were placed as usual so they could be seen from outside. They were all beautiful, and the town itself was beautiful and that was the first time that day I felt like it was Christmas Eve. We all felt it so we went inside and knocked on my grandmother’s door, and woke her up. My mom brought to her first floor room Christmas fruitcakes, sweets and warm milk for everyone. Coffee for my father and we all ate and sung carols and talked like a family. We were waiting for the young men from town to come and sing their traditional carols so that we would all know it’s Christmas. Lord Jesus was about to come again into the world as a baby, and we were all there to celebrate it. That was more important than the revolution continuing in the blaring Opera TV set upstairs, more important than our life without decent shoes.

Christmas was a magical time. It was the day after Ignat’s Day that all young men and women, which means everyone over 15 years old, gathered in packs. Each street had its own pack, or, in places with shorter streets, a few blocks had their own pack. All these packs had names. Ancient names. Names from times when communism wasn’t yet invented by Marx. Like Pietrari, the Stone Masons. They were from a street not very far from ours. But nobody, not even the old people, ever remember anyone there in the stone business. And these packs would go to a host family, and they would sing carols, pray and do other small preparations. Fasting was required and of course everybody dressed in traditional white clothes. Girls with pitch black skirts and vests, boys with those white sheepskin vests embroidered in red, made by my grandmother.

It was nightfall on the 24th they were waiting for. And it was already the 24th.

“Are they coming?” my mom asked anxiously.

“Yep”, replied my father, quite satisfied. “Christmas cannot start without their carols. The Revolution asked them, however, to be decent this year, because many people have died and we should mourn them. So there won’t be any meteleauă this year”. He hadn’t finished when I was already gasping for air. Meteleauă was my favorite festival. It was the winter number one event and was supposed to happen on the 28th. It was like a carnival. The boys in each pack would dress up as something funny and, usually drunk, they paraded through the town. They were supposed to do stupid things to keep away devils, and they were so funny. Meteleauă was also a process of initiation. The young child would get drunk for the very first time and would parade through the entire city as a man should, with his head up, proud, and his mom and dad would wave from the crowd and he would know that he was a man, and everyone would treat him like he was a man, from then on. So he would stop greeting everybody with sărut-mâna or “I kiss your hand” and would say “Hello” or “Good day” instead.

No more meteleauă was news as sad as no Christmas presents. But as we were waiting there, my mom started to smile and said:

“I heard something upstairs. You kids go and check under the Christmas tree. Perhaps it was Father Christmas”, and she didn’t have time to finish her sentence. We rushed past her and went straight to the Christmas tree, and yes, something was waiting there for us. Our presents were light and we opened them eagerly. Each of us had a handmade woollen set of hat, muffler, gloves and socks. Mine were royal blue and my sister’s were scarlet. There were some chocolates too.

“We love you, mommy”, we both cried out, and rushed to her and dad. And all that I saw on their faces was pure happiness.

Only today, after so many years, do I realize that she must have stayed awake into the night making those woollen winter clothes for us and I realize how difficult it must have been for her, and I love her for it. I also love my father for his support. That present was the most beautiful present I ever got for Christmas. I was sure I would get nothing, but I got something which was more valuable than all the things that our looted and destroyed bookstore offered, or all the things that the revolution brought us in hypermarkets.

We were already downstairs, new hats and new socks on when we heard the young men singing for our neighbor. Next it was our turn. So we waited. And we heard the gate opening and then closing and many many footsteps gathering before our door. Then, those 30 or so young men started to sing as loud as they could “Joseph and Mary” and that carol literally crashed against our chests and our bodies, and hearts got to know that it was Christmas.

My father started to cry and I realized that he never had cried when we listened to that carol before, when my grandfather was still with us. “Why are you crying?” I once asked him and he said he cried because he was the oldest in our family, that he remembered how it was when he was in the pack, singing those beautiful carols, and he cried because he was the next man in our family to die.