With so many requirements and restrictions, only on Sunday you could allow to “take a hold of” the “magazine” program, meanwhile…The New Years Eve program.
At the end of our visit they decided to come to our place for the TV. On our way, while we were having the usual conversations I noticed a sort of movement, actually some soldiers running in different directions. I assumed they have an “emergency” and the agents called their superiors, a usual thing for those in the army. The fact that most of them were not wearing their uniform properly was the reason I adjudge, gossiped and blasted them. It was as if “somebody thrown the clothes on them” and for an old soldier these soldiers with the belts on their hands, with the hook unbuttoned, order less … were distasteful.
One day while I was in Bucharest an old man was arguing: “ Not even the newspapers get in time, when Ceausescu is missing.” They remind us he was paying a visit in Iran. Regardless the situation the army’s wearing was an example for all times. As it was a Sunday and the soldiers were having a day off, they were wearing dirty uniforms, some of them wearing a part of the monition, some not. All this disarray was inexcusable for an institution that believes in “cleanliness and discipline”.
After we gave them the TV, they hurried up … to watch TV.
After “Pacepa’s” run away, while his book: “Red Eye sights” was being read at the “Free Europe” radio, I saved money and bought a tuner that would give me the satisfaction needed while listening the radio’s news. What came to me after the guest left with the TV was to listen the “Europe’s” news that broadcasted all day long, continuously. With this occasion I found out that: “something happens in Timisoara” and that in there were around 4000 dead people. That …
Then I was sure that their news was broadcasted from inside the country and that they don’t know as many things as they should know, since the departure of the ones that gather up the information and go on the field for broadcasting is dangerous considering what was going on. In fact we didn’t wish the country’s denigration, one of the favorite subjects from the chronicles of “Free Europe”, was telling that inside the country were blacked out. This was their “job” in our service. Still we were thankful for this knowing that for the bread they have to eat they had to say what the “masters” wanted them to say.

At evening, HE and SHE, came back from Iran and showed up at TV, along the prime minister (the one that next day will kiss his hand just so he won’t be left in the middle of the revolted crowd. There was also HIS brother, last president of CAP “Scornicesti”, by that time a high secretary of PCR, surrounded by those two flags, one of the country and the other of the party and explained that: “gangs of law breakers, spies and other hussies started a mound of violence by breaking shops, stealing and burning, creating panic in “Timisoara”. By now things look credible since we were so hunger that the step from being hunger to being a law breaker was not big. How this gangs of bandits got so big, over 100.000 of people, was not told.
Maybe sometimes our memory plays tricks on us, showing us things on fragments. Otherwise there is no explanation why our reactions are sometimes exactly opposite than what normally would be. That’s how things happened with the defunct. Hearing about this multitude of people, of the thousands and hundreds of people, he probably thought he was in 1968, when “the Russians got to Czechoslovakia” and when Bucharest’s population and of all the country gathered ad hoc in front of the Headquarters Committee from Bucharest and of the local regions, to tell them and all the Romanians what happened and what we will do in this kind of situation. That’s when people started to appreciate and adulate him, and declaimed his name. Now “the guy” handled an arranged and imposed congregation that “had to” manifest disapproval and express disagreement towards what was happening in “Timisoara”, towards those bandits. Now, as many other times, Romanians did not do their homework, conscientiously. It went out exactly the opposite than what he assumed. Nobody wanted him as a leader anymore. I was telling you only about “him”, as “Pacepa” in his book did not quite blamed “him” only “her”. He was saying that “she (Elena Ceausescu) is the head of all means from this country”. In this case, people did not make mistakes in selecting. They hoot them all. He was tired of everyone, and … everything …
That morning, radio news was ambiguous and censored. At about 11 o’clock I couldn’t bear staying at school without any news and I ran home to try “Free Europe”. On my way I went to a shop to buy bread. We “don’t use to keep” white bread. Black bread was medium corn flour and it had a taste of buck. With all the annoyance I bought one.

What else is there to give to your children for a meal? I saw a portable radio (because the electrical shut down were more than twenty per day, people oriented on “batteries”). I took it and turned it on. It was exactly when they decree “the state of need”, people stupefied from what they were listening not knowing what was to come. I left them and went home. Those days I asked my mother in law to stay with us considering the fact there was no wood, heat or hot water and I got, from year 1987, a stove from an air shaft and when we were colder we used to make a fire in the bathroom heating the flat from the pipe’s power. They assumed that 18° C were enough to heat the flats. There were flats that haven’t been heated more then 10°C ever. Must was blooming on the ceilings and on the walls. I entered the house as a storm, as my mother in law bewared so that I won’t put her down and I was “like a shoot” at the TV. It may have passed years since any TV shows were broadcasted that hour in case there wasn’t a business call of “him”. My mother in law was staring at me as at “the one far from home” whispering something and crossing. I changed my clothes quickly and took a stand in front of “the world’s window” that wasn’t “spinning” as a cat; it was sizzling, with any show. And then suddenly the signal was on and with a hardly gasp on their breath: “Dinescu, Caramitru”and on the second plan, “Sergiu Nicolaescu”, surrounded buy a fuzzy and big group of people. “Dinescu” was the most “smothered”. “Caramitru” presented us “Dinescu”, the one that people knew only from “Free Europe” where his activity and the fact that he was a dissenter in the country were presented. This is how “Caramitru” expressed himself: “I came at the television on a tank. He is the poet you heard of and that you can also see now, “Dinescu”. He would like to inform you about a very important announcement”. Then “Dinescu”, hardly gasping his breath, expressed this words: “Ceausescu run off with a helicopter from the Central Committee at 12:55 o’clock (or it may have been 12:55 o’clock when he shard this words). We are free! The nation got the power. Dealing more with this type of extreme situation, “Sergiu Nicolaescu” came closer and made a full opening of the events in the same time asking for people’s and army support (let us not forget that the army shoot down, both in “Timisoara” and Bucharest, manifestants).