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:
Once upon a time, in the faraway land of the dictatorship of the proletariat, beneath the Balkan mountain there lived a young woman by the name of Lyudmila. She was not a beauty, but she was quick, intelligent, and ambitious. Moreover, she was a princess, the apple of the eye of the mighty King Todor I. After finishing her education and becoming learned in history and many other important, not to mention unimportant, subjects, one day she approached her father with a plan. “Beloved father,” she said, “I have thought long and hard about how to improve the lot of our people.” Her words caught the king’s attention, and he was delighted, as he himself had devoted his whole life to this very aim, alas not very successfully. His kingdom was a sad place, where people and animals dwelled in misery. Something needed to be done before his subjects, having nothing to lose, would rise up and start to rebel against him. Something that would make them love their king even more. “I know how to turn them into harmonious human beings, full of celestial light and eternal beauty. The whole universe would rejoice in our new life of wisdom, truth, and spirituality!” the princess explained to her father.
These words sounded strange to the king’s ears, which were used to a very different vocabulary, but what the heck? If his little darling could do something to change life in the kingdom—even if only in spirit—so much the better. He knew that in order to accomplish this she had to become the high commander of culture. The Council of Elders, or Politburo, approved his decision instantly. Of course, it was merely a formality. So the princess, the apple of the king’s eye, presented to the council her master plan of improving the soul of the entire nation. “Balance will reign in our beloved Bulgaria,” she promised them. The old men applauded; they could do nothing else anyway. They were experienced enough to know that the new language she spoke, and which they could not understand—and were sure that nobody else could either—carried an important message: In real life nothing much would change for them. Or for other subjects, for that matter.