Yes, Koki knows that you are about to ask him why they cried for the old dictator, with his royal splendor and his personality cult? For good reason, though: He gave them a good life. Most of the people in Yugoslavia were peasants who had moved to cities after World War II but remembered their hard lives in the villages. The Marshal spoiled them. Like him, they enjoyed life far beyond their means. That is why the political opposition never blossomed in this country. People were satisfied with their lives, with their standard of living. They were happy to travel abroad. To wear blue jeans and Italian shoes. To read foreign books and newspapers, watch movies and TV programs from the West. With these crumbs of freedom Yugoslavia differed from the Soviet bloc countries. How little a difference it was—and how big at the same time!
Yet, this moment of his death and the paralysis of the whole of Yugoslavia was perhaps the finest moment, the height of his personality cult. Just as if the Marshal belonged to some great royal family, say the Romanoffs or the Habsburgs. If only the Marshal could see it, Koki is sure he would be really pleased with himself. Over 200 foreign delegations attended his funeral, as well as 127 heads of state. Whether you believe it or not, that was more than at Churchill’s or Kennedy’s funerals. Maybe because he was the symbol of a “third way” at a time of polarization for many poor nations, regardless of the fact that this way led nowhere in the end. Anyway, the whole world was in Belgrade that day, as we used to say here at his residence at Brioni. Yes, his funeral was quite a spectacle, and it made Koki proud. Even more so because Koki knew some of the attending dignitaries personally. In a way, if one could forget the sadness of the occasion, it was a magnificent event. Surely never to be repeated for any of the buggers whom Koki would later see on this island in his long life.
No doubt, the citizens of the many small states that emerged from the breakup of Yugoslavia will judge the Marshal’s role in history and the controversies surrounding his rule. These days, Koki hears that they are asking themselves whether he was a great Communist leader or a crook—as if the two were mutually exclusive! In the end, let me tell you that Koki doesn’t want to get involved in such matters. Koki the parrot, his court jester, knows only that he did not need to beg for food back then. He performed for food, yes, but he did not beg.
No, thanks, I’ve had enough of your peanuts for today. Now, fuck off and go wash your feet!
III
THE BEAR AND THE PRINCESS OF LIGHT
My name is Tosho, Tosho the Dancing Bear. My stage name, that is; otherwise I am Todor. As in Todor Zhivkov, our beloved Bay Tosho, our Tato. I was named after him by a toothless old Gypsy Roma fittingly named Angel. Angel belonged to the only nonintegrated people in Europe, the one that managed to resist the Communists’ attempts at social engineering to create “new men”—as well as any other kind of social integration. He bought me from hunters and brought me up and trained me to dance. His family had owned bears for seven generations; we were their only source of income. Angel loved Todor Zhivkov, the first secretary of the Communist Party, the president of Bulgaria, and the most reliable ally of the USSR in the Soviet bloc. He is one of those who claims that during the thirty-three years of Zhivkov’s rule he felt more of a human being than he does today. By that he means that all of his eleven children went to school, even if only for a year or two. Health care, housing, employment opportunities, and social welfare—all of it was more available to his people before. Nowadays, however, said Angel, in the new, united Europe we are being persecuted more and more. Not only in Bulgaria, but all over Eastern Europe. In Hungary and Slovakia, in the Czech Republic, Romania, and Slovenia we are being expelled, beaten, stabbed, forcibly sterilized, shot dead, or burned alive in arson attacks. Our kids are still placed in schools for the handicapped, which predetermines their future… But maybe his memory is failing him. Anyway, twenty years after Zhivkov has been gone from power, he still keeps a newspaper clipping of Bay (Uncle) Tosho’s photo taped on the wall, right above his black-and-white TV set.
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! “ 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.