thisdoesnthaveatitle

[i will translate this into romanian, too, when i have some time. possibly add more detail.]

since a previous post of mine and ana's "primele amintiri... sunt neplacute" - but really for a very long time now - i've wanted to write something down about my own experience with what happened in romania in '89 (now known as the "was it a revolution?" revolution; and maybe i'll get around to analyzing that wikipedia article someday). i did this before, in tenth grade (when i had the advantage of being much closer to the time of the actual events) but that text was much more about how unsettling and yet oddly "reassuring" in a way it was to have my brush with what as a kid i'd always thought of as every generation's inevitable "war" experience.

this will be about something else, though. because now, all these years later, i'm still trying to make freakin' sense of it. and to settle my emotions around it. and to find out more about it. it's all in such a fog - and it's not just my bad memory that makes it so.

i won't give all the possible detail so that i can first tell the story as i remember it. so i apologize if it's not easy to follow or understand.

it was 1989. i don't know what month exactly, but i think it was the middle of the summer because i believe i was on vacation at the time. i remember my dad taking me for a walk outside and telling me something strange. he said that someone had to do something, or that at least he felt he had to do something, and that he'd made up his mind about it but since it would affect me, too, he wanted to tell me in advance and know what i thought. but this something sounded strange - from another dimension-strange - to me. my dad said that he was going to vote against ceausescu in the fall. that he thought it was time, that he was convinced things had to finally start changing. i have no clue what i thought, it was crazy and unthinkable, we shouldn't even have been discussing the upcoming "elections." there was nothing to discuss. and most people thought it dangerous to utter such words, anywhere. i think i said "hm, ok."

i actually don't remember much else about my reaction to it, except perhaps that i couldn't quite wrap my brain around it. maybe i forgot it for a while... but then my dad told both me and my mom that he had written a letter and then showed us where it was hidden and told us that if/when something happened to him, if he disappeared for example, we should have that letter to prove what he had wanted and planned to do. just in case.

in the meantime, as a middle schooler i was a "pioneer" ("comandant de detasament" which meant leader of the class), doing pioneer things which were strictly school related and didn't feel at all connected to the party... but i wasn't really thinking about that. in fact, i realized only recently that my dad was a party member but my mom wasn't - though i suppose i knew it at some level, it wasn't actually an issue that entered my consciousness. few people were not members. i think teachers (like my mom) had more leeway in choosing to join the party or not than most other people.

anyway, then school started. actually, to be more exact, "practical field work" started; for the first month or so of the school year, instead of attending school, kids past fourth grade went together with all their classmates to do "voluntary" farm work somewhere. that year, my school was picking grapes again (one of the better gigs, though it has put me off grapes for the rest of my life). i was in seventh grade and enjoying myself because the people in my class were great and we always had a good time together. i think i forgot about the whole "my dad was going to do something crazy and what will happen" thing for a while. then we went back to school. and then, at the end of october or the beginning of november, there were "elections" (actually, i believe they were pre-elections among lower party ranks before it was all taken to the congress of the romanian communist party where ceausescu would be declared, yet again, party leader and therefore president of the republic for another five-year term).

and so one day after school, instead of going home i had to go with one of my best friends and her mom to their house. my sister, too. something had happened - and my dad was in trouble. but we didn't talk about it. amazingly enough, i don't remember all that much. i remember people weren't talking to us. but we went back home, and back to school. my dad got fired from his job immediately, and strange people started coming to our house. or at times my dad had to go somewhere to meet with certain people. i don't know if we talked about that, but i don't think i wanted to go into it, anyway. everything seemed temporary, all of a sudden. i wasn't necessarily scared, just holding my breath, maybe. this took a couple of weeks. the strange people were around our house quite a lot - a couple of them. my physical education teacher was always making allusions to people's parents who had done something wrong. that i remember.

(later, my dad told me that during his talks with the securitate people, just like when they came to our house, he only had to talk and go over what had happened and why he'd voted against - nothing more. he's also said that once someone told him something kind of cryptic at the time: "don't worry, you'll get back your job and we'll still be here"! which is quite interesting.)

and that was it, really. in december things spun out of control, and ultimately it was in a "good" way. in a good way because it saved us, i'm quite sure... my dad did eventually get back his job, at the beginning of 1990. and we were all "free" (and "communism"-free and "democratic") as a country - though disillusion about how much had really changed soon followed.

as to what happened during the "revolution" itself... that's another long story! right afterwards, my dad took me to bucharest too while university square was still being guarded by heavily armed soldiers and military machinery, and i remember vividly that we were told to go around some railing but my dad refused: "it's now a free country and we can go wherever we want." hehe. my dad is totally crazy. sometimes, that's a good thing!

ps: any of my friends and family who are reading this blog and were there when this was happening (you know who you are :P) can comment on or contest the accuracy of what i've described here. please do!