Florin Grancea - The Pigs' Slaughter

Stoican was awake almost all night and so was Paisie and Ceauşescu. He tried to decide whether he should kill Ceauşescu and his wife or not.

“Should I kill them or should I not kill them?” that was his dilemma. He tried to find a reason for doing it or a reason for not doing it, but he couldn’t come to a conclusion, so the morning found him unprepared and undecided.

In 1998 Iulian Stoica officially declared that Stoican confessed that night that his orders were to kill everyone in the TAB, and it made sense. Both Stoica and Boboc were the traitors that didn’t follow similar orders the previous afternoon, weren’t they? But all of them were still alive and an angry Colonel Kamenici called the mission off and invited the half frozen people into his headquarters and phoned Bucharest to report that Ceauşescu and his wife were alive and well and asked for advice. But the killing machine that had been created to assassinate Ceauşescu was already rolling, without his knowledge. A team was being put together at that very hour, and everything was to go as planned, the long transition, the economic crises were all about to begin.

On Christmas Day I woke up at 4 am. Liviu, my godfather and his brother Dan, together with their young wives were singing carols at the top of their voices under our window. I only got up to greet them with the traditional “Merry Christmas” and went back my bed while my parents went down for an early breakfast with our unexpected guests.

Later that day my dad said that Dan looked like a ghost. He was worried about him but the reason behind those haunted eyes, that had scared my father, we found out only months later, when Dan was finally ready to talk.

When the Revolution started to spread on 22nd, Dan was at home in Odorheiu Secuiesc. That small and beautiful city, where my mother’s cousin was married to a Hungarian, had a majority Hungarian population. Romanians were few. Some, like my mother’s cousin were teachers at the school, teaching Romanian as a foreign language to the local kids, others like Dan were working in the Army, Police or Securitate. Although the local Communist Party Organization was almost 100% Hungarian, the local folks somehow perceived the Romanians as “dictator lovers” so for them the local Revolution was more a Revolution against Romanians.

Dan was at his job that morning when he sensed the danger and decided it was time to get his young wife out of town before it was too late, and decided it was best for them to flee in a military truck. They were packing when the revolutionaries marched from the local factories where they worked to the City Hall to take over. Thousands of people marching in unison, shouting in Hungarian anti-Ceauşescu slogans.

That was the image that Dan’s best friend, a Hungarian, saw when he suddenly realized that people would recognize Dan’s car, parked so close to the City Hall, as a car driven by a Romanian. The number plates said it all. They were from an area with very few Hungarians, so he had to be quick. He smashed a window and got in. He tried to start it by connecting wires as he had once seen in some American movie, but people from the steadily closing march started to run towards the car. They knew the car! They could see the license plates!

In a second Dan’s best friend was surrounded. He tried to get out and talk some sense into those workers, to tell them there was no need to vandalize that car, his friend’s car, but he was punched in the head through the broken window. He tried again, but there were already too many people around the car and they started to hit him as they turned the Dacia upside down.

He was confused when they did that and, because he wasn’t wearing a seat belt, was on the car’s ceiling trying to figure out how to best get out of the car but also the best way to get away from the boots that were trying to reach him through the shattered windows. He still wasn’t afraid. He believed he would get out eventually, so he was more sorry for Dan’s car than for himself. But then he could smell it and let out a scream. And he screamed until the flames of the torched car entered his lungs, and kicked, trying to get out and got kicked by heavy boots and…

People were already leaving when Dan went to pick up his car to park it inside the military unit and he saw it was burning. He wanted to leave immediately but something had caught his eye, so he casually walked towards the car until he was standing beside it and could look inside. It was there. That leather jacket that his friend had bought from Hungary last summer. There were no other jackets like that in the whole of Romania and that burning jacket was on something that was definitely human. His eyes started to fill with tears, for the first time in so many years. He hadn’t cried since his mom died when he was still a child, but he was crying then. He felt the world falling apart and started to run, to get away.

The first victim of the Revolution in Odorheiu Secuiesc was a Good Samaritan. But the second was not. The second was the head of the local branch of Securitate, and the people who killed him took his head out of the building they had set on fire and played football with it. What a happy mood there was, communism was collapsing and they were using their freedom for what western people usually use it: leisure!

But at four in the morning on Christmas Day I was oblivious to all that. I didn’t know that Kamenici was still waiting in his TAB to hear shots in the other. I didn’t know that the most mysterious man of the Romanian Revolution, Gelu Voican Voiculescu, the same one that was about to become Romania’s Ambassador to Tunisia, was assembling the men who were about to judge Ceauşescu in a kangaroo court.

Iliescu himself signed a decree on December 22 nd, minutes after he got confirmation that Ceauşescu had been captured. I didn’t know that 20 years after people and journalists would still be debating whether that signature was valid or not, whether Iliescu was officially the head of the new power or whether he was still just the head of the Technical Publishing House.

So I was innocent in my sleep and, when I woke up for the second time that morning it was already 10:00am. My mother used to let me sleep in during holidays. I often stayed up reading books way past midnight. Liviu, Dan and their young, beautiful wives were already gone and our gate was closed. Christmas Day was a day when nobody went out, so nobody came to visit. Christmas Day was a day when even the Church was closed. The Christmas mass started and ended before the roosters rang in the morning at 8, so why bother keeping the gate open all day long?

In the kitchen I refused breakfast, favoring, as always on Christmas, fruitcakes, cakes and cookies. I was washing everything down with a mug of hot milk — my mom was there so cold milk wasn’t an option — when my father announced the day’s schedule.

“Today they’re gonna kill Ceauşescu, and I plan on watching it. Let’s go all upstairs and play Scrabble or a card game of twist, sing carols and watch the television”.

Now that was a first. We usually stayed in my grandmother’s room and listened to her stories. Before that we used to listen to my grandfather’s stories, and they were so interesting.

My grandmother had interesting stories too. Her best one was about when her sister died. She was with her, in her final moments.

“Floare”, she said to my grandmother, and that’s “Flower” in Romanian.

“Floare, can you see that white dove on the stove?” her dying sister asked.

“No, my dear, there’s no white pigeon on the stove!” my grandmother replied.

“Oh, Floare, you can’t see it because He didn’t come for you. He said that you still have to wait. But He’s here for me. The Holy Spirit, Floare, the Holy Spirit! He’s here for my soul. God bless you too.” she had said and her soul was taken, probably by a white bird that waited for her on the hot stove, to say goodbye. It was the year I was born, 1975, during the winter. And the bird was right, my grandmother, despite being the first born, had to wait for it another nineteen long years.