A Guided Tour Through the Museum of Communism (8 page)

Now I live near Beltisa, in a beautiful park and resort—a destiny I share with some twenty other colleagues in the dancing profession. It is our new home, created especially for us—with the help of some European foundation, I assume. But as I get easily bored in this paradise, I decided to write a book of testimonies about life in captivity before the fall of Communism. Inevitably, that means writing about people as well. How could I avoid them? They held us captive, but our destinies were intertwined in so many other ways, too. It is not easy to understand that they also suffered. Because, even though they were the subjugators of animals, they were captives as well.

As my front paws are good for nothing because of my rheumatism, I am forced to dictate this manuscript to a pleasant young girl, an animal rights activist who comes here to help feed us. Evelina brings me apples and grapes, my favorite fruits. She is twenty years old—still almost a cub in human terms. At the beginning of this project it moved me to see how distressed she was by my stories, how hard it was for her to learn that we had suffered so much. But then I realized that she was troubled not only by the fact that we had been tortured, but also that we had withstood torture without even a squeak. She could not understand our passiveness. Evelina belongs to a new generation that grew up after the fall of Zhivkov's regime, free from Communist Party ideology. I realized that recently, when she asked me, “But why didn't you do something? You are so much bigger, so much stronger than the people who held you imprisoned! ʺ Yes, why didn't we? “I'll tell you why, young lady: Because the thought never occurred to us, that's why! That was the secret of both Zhivkov's and Angel's rule—not only was your body captured, but so was your mind. I learned only in hindsight that what keeps one enslaved is one's own captive mind,” I told her. “And if you are still wondering, Was there no one else to stand up for our rights, no one to stop this unbearable torture?—like neighbors or the police, or other citizens—I tell you: No! They all watched us dance and laughed! It amused them to see a huge and dangerous animal reduced to a pitiful clown. It proved their domination. A sad story of how beastly people can be, given the chance.”

 

 

Ah, it is perhaps useless to try to tell new kids what it was like to live before, to dance while somebody else yanks your chain . . . Nevertheless, I see it as my task. “You need to know that, you need to remember,” I say to Evelina, and she smiles at me with her beautiful, innocent smile, that of a child who doesn't know what I am talking about. But all the while she understands the suffering of defenseless animals better than the suffering of the people. I must say that she has a point there. From where she stands, it is not easy to see that Bulgarian people were treated pretty much like us. They could not do much to change
their
own condition as “dancing bears,” so to speak. And maybe, after all, they did not want to.

My life with Angel, his big family, and his five dogs, of which Dobri was my best friend was . . . how can I put it? Once I was tamed, I guess it was bearable. Yes, the word is bearable. It means that I got used to such a life, one gets used to anything. We traveled a lot; he played the
godoulka
fiddle and the drum while I danced. On a good day Angel would collect decent money and then he would be nice to me. In the evening we would eat together and get drunk on beer, and sometimes even on his favorite brandy,
rakija
. On a bad day he would curse my laziness and my bitch of a mother. That would make me sad. But at least he did not beat me. I knew that it was customary to beat us dancers, and I must admit that I was grateful to Angel that he did not practice it.

I was the most famous dancing bear in the whole of Bulgaria. We traveled from his village in the mountains to the seaside, to Varna, Plovdiv, Blagoevgrad, Ruse, even to Sofia. I remember how curious and excited I was when I was young, and I must say that I learned to enjoy such a life sometimes. In the years after the collapse of the Zhivkov regime, we were even filmed several times by foreign TV crews. Angel naively believed this would contribute to my fame and his budget—and even to Bulgarian tourism. But it proved to be exactly the opposite, because this led animal rights activists straight to us later on . . .

I believed that Angel and I were friends after all those years of living and performing together. This in spite of the fact that he kept me on a chain, with a ring through my nose. He convinced me that it was more for the sake of appearance. “This is for your own safety, eh! People would go mad if they saw a bear walking free in the street,” he used to say, reassuringly. “They would kill you right away. People are cruel, believe you me. I have seen it many times in my life.” As if I did not know that!

I met with human cruelty for the first time when my mother was killed. It was a beautiful spring day, and we had just climbed up to a hill when we heard a strange sound. Only one shot was fired, and our mother collapsed right in front of us. I still remember her last glance at us, full of despair. My sister and I spent a day hiding in a cave nearby. We were small cubs, alone, hungry, and frightened. The hunter's dogs found us. I never saw my sister again, and for a while I kept wondering if perhaps she had become a dancer, too? Or was she living in a cage in a zoo or, even worse, in a circus? I asked my young friend Evelina, did she know what a circus was. To my surprise she answered that she had only seen it on TV. Of course, she added, she would never, ever go to see poor tamed animals performing ridiculous and humiliating tasks. True, I agree that these animals are much worse off. I sometimes think of lions and elephants freezing during our long winters, and I don't know how they can survive. Perhaps I should collect their testimonies, too? Although here, in this refuge, I have heard enough terrible stories from other bears, as each of us has our own to tell.

Angel kept me in the yard together with his five dogs. In the beginning I thought I was a dog! And day after day, he also taught me how to dance. He said that he needed to teach me to dance in order to go around and make money with me. I must say that I don't like to go back to that particular memory of my torture, of jumping like crazy on a hot metal plate while listening endlessly to his fiddle . . . This is how they trained us: They either heated a large piece of metal or just spread hot coal on the ground, and then forced us to step on it and “dance.” We bears immediately realized that it was better to spare at least two paws, so we would stand up on our hind legs and lift first one, then the other. It looks like dancing to people, I guess. For some reason it even makes them laugh. All I can say is that it is unbearably painful. Afterward you lie in a corner, half dead, licking your blisters and the raw flesh of your wounds . . . and you are only a baby. But it was useless to expect pity; in a traditional peasant society there is no pity for either domestic or wild animals. They are there to be used and abused. They must be made useful. In their Marxist lingo, it was called “productive labor,” I remember. Even a dog, the first domesticated animal ever, has to work. He guards the house or the herd. A cat catches mice. No place for pets in the countryside! A child plays with a chicken and has it for soup the next day. Most animals are bred to be killed, anyway. The only difference is that domestic animals are rarely tortured the way we were.

But in the beginning of the seventies a change happened in Bulgaria, when Lyudmila Zhivkova, the daughter of Todor Zhivkov, was appointed to a number of high party and state offices. She was installed in high positions while her relatives occupied lower ones. Her appointment was not at all unusual; when a king or a dictator does something like that, it is hardly a surprise. After all, Bulgaria was not alone in this; such was the custom in other, similar societies, like Romania and Albania. But the difference was that Lyudmila was not incompetent. On the contrary, she was a historian by training, and even wrote a few books (supposedly with a little help from her staff). She studied history in Sofia and Moscow, and even spent some time at Oxford University researching a book about Turkish-Bulgarian relations. From 1972 on, and within a very short period of time, Lyudmila became: chairwoman of the Committee for Culture; a member of the Central Committee and the Politburo; chairwoman of the Commission for Science, Culture, and Education; the People's representative (MP) in their Parliament; and a member of the Council of Ministers. In 1975 Lyudmila became the minister of culture.

I know that many saw her for what she really was: a second generation of the Communist
nomenklatura
children, groomed to become the heir to her father's throne. At that time Bulgarians did not live in the twentieth century, as people call it—we bears count time differently. They were stuck in medieval times, when the country was treated as the private property of a family, and power was handed down from father to son. Or, in the case of Lyudmila, to daughter. In many old Bulgarian folk songs, a woman is a magical creature, a mediator between the earth and the sky, between the natural and the supernatural. Such a woman is called a
samodiva
, or a wild fairy, and she possesses the untamed spirit necessary to maintain balance in the universe. It turned out that Lyudmila did indeed act as if she were a
samodiva
, linking two totally opposite worlds, one material and the other mystical and occult. Raised with the atheism and materialism of Marxist dogma, she embraced the opposite: yoga, Hinduism, and Buddhism, as well as the folk medicine of Peter Dinev and the prophecies of Vanga, an allegedly clairvoyant illiterate peasant woman.

In fact, the story of Lyudmila reminds me of our old fairy tales . . . In my view, a fairy tale about her would run somewhere along the following lines: