Florin Grancea - The Pigs' Slaughter

I wrote this book in two weeks under pressure from my dearest friend Nathan O’Neill. As a many-time guest for dinner, Nathan was always delighted with my Romanian stories and repeatedly asked me to write them down. I did, and having started I raced to the end with him at my side as a Mr. Watson of proofreading.

Without his support, this book may not have been written at all.

The truth is that I was slaughtering the pig.

When the Romanian Revolution started and people rushed to overturn Ceauşescu, or rushed to sit in front of their TV sets and watch how people were slaughtered on the streets of Timişoara, Bucharest and Sibiu, I was rushing a knife into a pig.

The previous day was Ignat’s Day, pig slaughtering day in Romania. We were one day late. My Unitra (Polish made) radio was turned on loud tuned to Radio Free Europe. Until a couple of days earlier we could only listen to it after dark, and with the volume turned down. To listen to it in the open would have meant beatings, jail time or even death.

Was I stupid? Maybe, but I didn’t care anymore. News from Timişoara said that there were thousands and thousands of deaths, so it had to be over soon.

I rushed to spread the news. The good news: the Revolution continued!

“Daaad!” My voice straining, my heartbeat quickening, I rushed into the backyard.

The pig was there, my dad was there, Uncle Lulu was there, too, sipping hot wine from a mug.

“Where the hell have you been? You’re holdin’ up the show”, said my dad, like I was about to miss all the fun.

His friend, Mr. Brana, was taking the role of butcher. He had a rather small knife in his hand, pointed with a thin and narrow blade. It didn’t have a blood gutter.

It always takes three people to slaughter a pig. Two won’t do, four are always too many. That’s why Uncle Lulu was on the hot wine. At 7:00 in the morning, the hot wine was a better choice than a mug of coffee. It was cold out. Really cold.

Now you could tell that the pig was nervous. These animals that we eat on Christmas day are smarter than dogs and it could see it coming. My father had the rope, Mr. Brana, the knife…

“Get the bucket ready, will you?”

A last minute instruction from my dad.

To slaughter a pig you need a knife, a rope and a bucket. Nothing more, nothing less.

The tension was mounting. We closed the gate of the small backyard to make the job of catching the pig easier, and the pig didn’t like it. I have heard stories of pigs attacking their would-be slaughterers and mauling them to death, and certainly some crazy pigs were capable of it. Maybe that was the reason my fingers were trembling as I held the bucket… Maybe it was the news on the radio.

Well, we had a job to do and the news had to wait.

My father approached the pig with the rope and using his hand started to rub the pig’s head. Pigs like that. I have seen some fall asleep, and even fall flat in a matter of seconds, from a good head rub.

Well, this particular beast didn’t fall asleep. It was too smart to sleep through its last minutes of life, but for some reason touched its head on my dad’s leg. Affection? Fear? Both?

The rope had a sliding knot in it and my father let the pig step into it. Its left front leg was trapped but it didn’t realize it. Yet. For the pig this was a wrong move. Now it was almost over. My dad pulled the rope, the pig went down and, like a wrestler, my dad put his weight down on it, holding it down.

If I had been any younger, I would have rode it too. Kids always ride the pigs while they are being slaughtered. But now I was fourteen and I was replacing my mother with the bucket. My sister never rode the pigs. She couldn’t see a life being taken, not even a pig’s life.

“Son, be ready with that”, Mr. Brana said in a hushed voice. He threw his unfinished cigarette in the snow. A rectangular hole with some smoke rising out of it appeared near my feet. Then, he got close to my wrestling dad, and waited for me.

As soon as I had the bucket ready he put his left hand on the pig’s head and with his right he thrust his knife into the pig’s neck. I don’t know if you have ever slaughtered a pig, or even had the chance to see one being slaughtered close up. But you can easily imagine it by realizing how similar our anatomy and the pig’s are.

A 150kg live pig doesn’t look like much. Four legs, fat, with a wide back. The head seems to be attached directly onto the body. It only seems so. Its neck is there.

Feel your own neck! The base of it at the front…You can feel where the chest bone begins. Less than 20cm below that point is your heart. Less than 20cm below that point on the pig is the pig’s heart too.

Mr. Brana thrust his knife into the pig’s neck aiming for the heart. Professionals always aim for the heart. Only drunk or dumb people try to behead the pig when they slaughter it. Ridiculous. The fat around the pig’s neck can be very tricky and it is not nice being around an injured animal that outweighs you twice-over.

The knife goes in and comes out. The blood spurts out in a thick jet stream. The previous year I wasn’t ready and the first of the blood sprayed a wall — 6 meters away. But I was ready this time. The blood started to fill the bucket. There would be about 5 liters in all. Even after the pig stops moving, its heart, or what is left of it, continues to pump blood out of the body. The vicious eyes of the animal calm down and look back at you, sympathetic. A moment later they glaze over.

“Take the blood to your mom”, Mr. Brana spoke in a professional air, with no sign of the kick of adrenaline he had just had while killing the pig. The blood I collected would be the main ingredient in “sângerete”, the blood sausages which would be our only source of iron over the winter.

In Romania spinach starts growing in early April, so, without blood sausages a body will, sooner or later, be afflicted by a severe case of anemia — it was better to be with them than without them. Our precious blood for the winter…

My mom filtered the blood for whatever impurities it might have had and transferred it into a pot. She would add salt, black pepper and herbs and stir it on the fire until the future sausages became soot black and thick paste. Then she would wait.

I, too, was waiting for something. The public broadcast. Ceauşescu had returned the previous day from Iran. I didn’t know it and he didn’t know it either, but the Iran affair was to be his last trip abroad, only five days prior to his death. But hey, to imagine Ceauşescu dead in December ‘89 was like imagining Santa was real. That public broadcast was supposed to show a huge demonstration in support of Ceauşescu and we all hoped that something would happen. Maybe he would step down, maybe he would heed the protests and loosen his grip on us, anything could happen and I was going to watch it.

Back in the backyard it was the same group. Only now the pig was dead. A white pig on white snow, Uncle Lulu sipping the hot wine, my dad and Mr. Brana smoking their stinky Romanianmade cigarettes. It was a time when Japanese, British and even Turkish tobacco brands were sold on the black market only. You could buy one pack of 20 cigarettes for a doctor so he would anesthetize you before cutting you open, but never to smoke on the grand occasion of slaughtering your pig.