…or how we spent the revolution/coup d’état.
My memories of those days of Christmas 1989 are somewhat blurred. I remember there were rumours of unrest in the streets of Timișoara. A support rally for the communist party was organised in Bucharest. Sometime before Christmas Eve, the phone rang: dad was called to go “protect the factory” he was working in as an engineer. He gambled and didn’t go. A friend of his came over to bring us some Christmas presents, but then couldn’t get back home, as there was shooting around the television building he had to pass on his way. So he returned and we spent Christmas together in our mansard, afraid and curious and glued to the tv: eventually, the dictator couple was overthrown. Live broadcast! “We’re free! Democracy, at last!” dad yelled.
My great grandma, born 1904, had immigrated from Switzerland in 1927. Now she ranted from behind the stove: “…Democracy?! We needed 500 years to learn how to deal with democracy. And you think you got it all just like that, overnight?”
Dad got frantic: “You bitter old woman! Can’t you, for once, rejoice?”
30 years passed in a blink.