BLACK DECEMBER

Ten minutes between the sentence and the wall.Târgoviște, 25 December 1989. A court has just sentenced Nicolae Ceaușescu to death.They do not pass. Men with no insignia come through the gate, kill twenty-two people, eight of them in the first nineteen seconds, and drive the President out through the snow.The officer who sent them was not in the courtyard and did not stay to watch. What he wanted has never been established, and the answer everybody uses is loyalty.By January the revolution is something people are careful not to mention, the border has quietly stopped opening, and a dismissed paratrooper is queueing for cooking oil in Lugoj under the name Ilie Mocanu, tractor mechanic.He does not build an army. He builds a filing system.For nine and a half years they write down what the state does, in the state's own words: names, dates, and the signature of the officer who signed for each one. They are not trying to rescue anybody. They are building a case for a court that does not exist.And somewhere there are nine minutes of film of a courtyard in the snow, and one lieutenant of twenty-three knows where he put it, and he has told nobody, and nobody has asked.