He complained that some of the younger generation were still “Looking for a style and getting lost.” He was predictably anti-American—“American literature has so little”—and said American writers had no influence; his view was due to ignorance ; he was voicing official policy. The fact is that Hemingway, Faulkner and Steinbeck are translated and their influence has been as powerful in Bulgaria as it has been, in its time, in the rest of Europe, East and West. Only out-of-date old Stalinists embarrass the young by going on and on about Hamlet, Shaw and Galsworthy. The splendid old man had just not kept up. He belonged to the generation which turned to the writing of historical novels—it was safer—and to the stories of the Partisans.
Some of the young were indignant about the criticism that they were “looking for a style” and were “lost”. The thaw had not gone far in Bulgaria; socialist realism was still the thing ; but a real conflict between the generations had begun. This does not mean that they are anti-Communist. Indeed, they regard Communism as an elastic, organic, changing way of life rather than a rigid doctrine. Of course they have “troubles” and “difficulties” and “delays”. The most interesting Bulgarian painter—I did not catch his name—has not been allowed to exhibit since 1940. The theatre, I was told apologetically, is very poor. On the other hand, the poets are said to do better.
This was our chatter on one or two evenings when we sat having dinner at the old Russian Officers’ Club, drinking the powerful slivowicz—the plum or the pine-tinctured spirit—and the red wine, smoking the excellent cigarettes from the Rhodope tobacco fields. Our food had a strong Turkish bias but we ate superb smoked salmon, thick and dark in colour and kept in sunflower oil ; good pork, lamb and herb sausages. The Club dates from the liberation of the ’70s and with its red curtains, its lace, its glass screens and its old attentive waiters—about the best in my Eastern European journeys—it suggested an old-fashioned set for a play by Chekhov. It is about the only restaurant that escapes from the awful grandiose negligence of the hotels where one waits and waits in vain for food to come ; and that has not, like others, gone downhill to the level of the popular cafeteria.
There was one tough-looking gay young novelist who talked Spanish. “We are exactly like the Spaniards,” he said. “They had the Moors. We had the Turks. And we have the same feeling for personal dignity and masculinity.”
“And puritanism too?” I asked.
“Oh God,” he exclaimed, “we are the most puritan race in Europe. It isn’t Stalinist puritanism. It has nothing to do with the Party. It is in the bones. People here speak of Romania as if they were going to hell. For us Romania is the Red Light district of Eastern Europe. We are very severe. In the villages a woman could be imprisoned for adultery. If you go to an hotel with your wife you are quite likely to be asked to show your marriage lines. A few months ago I was walking down the street outside this restaurant with my arm round my wife’s waist. We were laughing loudly. A policeman came up and told me to remove my arm from her waist. Then he told her to take my arm and walk decorously. This puritanism has nothing to do with religion because the Greek Church has little influence, and never has had. We have never had a strong religious sense and the despots we have lived under have turned us into sceptics. But these puritan waves sweep over us from time to time. One year they sweep all the lovers out of the parks in the summer; next year it dies down and the lovers go back again.”
My friends were sorry about this and, as far as I could tell, had no serious political troubles in their lives. But one does hear, of course, of political miseries. There was young and clever Mrs. X who was just divorced. During the legal examination her maiden name came to light. It revealed that she was related to one of the condemned men in a notorious political trial a great many years back. She had become suspect at once and was certain that she would lose her job and find the greatest difficulty in getting another.
“I just live from day to day,” she said.
Especially among the spirited and gifted, there are people in all these countries who are in the sort of jam so many Americans got into during the MacCarthy period.
She was a thin, shabby woman with dyed red hair, hard and plain as a good many Bulgarian women are, but she was attractive when she laughed. She was an amusing talker and worked hard, as they all do.
The mountain scenery of Bulgaria is spectacular. The northern frontier is the Danube and its plain; south of this is the Balkan range, then a valley, warm and subtropical, opens out getting wider and wider until it reaches the Black Sea: south of the plain rise the superb Rhodope mountains and along their crest lies the frontier with Greece. I drove out to the mountain resort outside Sofia among the fiery autumn trees and watched the schoolchildren dancing and singing in their open-air classes and sat out in the sun with the cheerful family parties. We drank a glass of pastis—the Greek ouzoo—ate cucumbers, tomatoes—for this, as they say, is the season of the pickle jars—and ate veal soup, pork kebab in paprika sauce and quantities of grapes. The wasps buzzed around. The modern hotels and resort restaurants are very good. One might have been in the Guadarrama in Spain.
Later on I drove to Plovdiv, the second largest town in the country, lying in the hot dusty plain, and went to a couple of collective farms. Plovdiv is some eighty or ninety miles south-east of Sofia on the excellent international road to Istanbul. There is little traffic on this road.
We got down from the frosty cold of Sofia into the hot and lazy airs of the plain and we drove down the long straight avenues of yellow poplars, beeches and oaks blazing in wild madders, ochres, scarlets and gold. It was like driving tens of miles through fire. In the sunny haze, the tall yellow trees seem to be floating or dancing on the blue mountains and the light is strong. And mile after mile under the trees the roses were in flower. It was a landscape of black soil where the maize had been cut. The streets of the little towns on the way were packed with country people, wandering about under the acacias in the streets; and under the acacias, once more, the roses.
One of the collective farms occupied the land of four villages with a population of 10,000 people. The villages themselves are scattered collections of two-storey red-brick houses with long deep porches. The older houses are covered with vines. The headquarters of the collective was in one of these houses at a cross-roads. Motor-bicycles and bikes were propped against the wall, in a strong smell of silage. (They chop up maize stalks for this, pasturage being poor in the plains.) The head of the collective was an official, I suppose a Party member, not from this neighbourhood; but he had local assistants, warm, huge-fisted farmers who give one a crushing hand grip and look one fearlessly in the eye in a manly fashion. The offices of the collectives are always the same. There is a simple desk where the chief sits with a row of agricultural books on it. There is a table covered with red baize and with a jug of water and a fly-whisk. On the wall there is a picture of Lenin—busts of Lenin and Stalin are in a large number of Bulgarian offices and shops; Khruschev is less often seen.
The chief did not lecture me, but in practical fashion got out his papers with all the figures written in longhand on them and answered questions. The labour force, he said, was 3,500 men and women. The farm grew grain, a variety of flax, wheat, tomatoes and apples. It had 5,000 sheep—the British have been sending breeding-stock—350 cows, 30,000 hens and 1,500 pigs. The farm hired their machinery from a state pool. (They were delighted by the machine milker.) They were proud of having fulfilled its grain quota—half of the unrest among satellite peasants is caused by putting delivery quotas too high, especially to discourage the uncollectivised—and also of having beaten the Italians that season in the rush for the tomato market in Vienna. Another farm I visited had done the same but confessed that they had not, in their enthusiasm, learned to make sound tomato boxes, like the Italians. The Turks buy meat. It is impossible to say what real wages are, but the average annual earning of a worker I was told is 14,000 leva (the tourist rate is twenty-seven to the pound, certainly an ov
ervaluation) and the worker is paid in a series of advances of 500 leva through part of the year and collects the balance at the end. His normal rate is on the basis of a low norm called a working day, but in fact any day he is likely to work more than his norm and is paid accordingly. Later on in Sofia, when I was asking what kind of law suits came on at the court I was told that the favourite court case is a dispute of a worker or peasant with the State organisation about the calculations of hours and pay. This kind of dispute is always protracted.
There was a fine, rugged, shaggy-haired farmer of about fifty sitting with us in the office of the Collective. He sat swatting flies, which swarmed in the sticky air and he had sly, shrewd, laughing peasant eyes. I asked him what difference he had found between this system of farming here and the one he had grown up in. He said:
“We never had big estates in Bulgaria—well except for one or two large demesnes belonging to the monasteries of the Orthodox Church. There were one or two big farmers, a lot of medium farmers and then the rest— poor fellows living on eighteen acres, some of it rich, in the market garden areas, some poor. Although they were poor, they could live. On the whole, life has always been good in this country.”
“You say you prefer the collective farm to the private system?” I said. “Why?”
His answer was shrewd.
“Under the private system,” he said, “if a farmer has a good year and has money in his pocket, he has only one idea—to buy more land. Land has always been the peasant’s passion. He buys land at the expense of his house, his family and the pleasures of life. In the collectives you can’t buy land so you spend money on your home and family, furnish it better. You take seaside holidays.”
This collective made its own wine, enough to supply a litre a day free to everyone. The juice was bubbling away in huge vats in an open barn. There was a pretty country house nearby and obviously the vineyard and presses had belonged once to a comfortable private family who had laid out pretty gardens under the trees—whathad become of them? The man in charge was middle-aged and had the high seriousness the art always brings out, and when we sat at a stone table under the trees drinking a glass or two he said, in the tone of a true connoisseur, that his wine had something of Moulin à Vent in it. He was not far wrong.
It turned out that he had been sent to Dijon to learn the trade when he was a young man and, until then, like all good Bulgarians, thought that the water of the Balkans was superior to any liqueur. He had been horribly shocked when his French landlady had brought him a bowl of water to wash in: he thought it sacrilege to wash in water! This raised a question I did not care to ask. The vintner was a travelled worker of the old school. Afterwards the friend who had come with me said, “Did you notice he described himself as a technician? It’s the new vanity here. Everyone likes to be called a technician now. Even Silenus would call himself a technician if he were reborn in Bulgaria.”
We drove round over fields and rough roads. We visited several houses occupied by farm workers. Perhaps they were show places. Except for things like refrigerators and washing-machines they were modest new villas or bungalows such as one sees in suburban Britain or America, well furnished, with a standard contemporary wallpaper on the wall, good beds, cots for the children, spotlessly clean. One I especially liked. The basement was used for storage and down some steps we saw a huge tub filled with fermenting wine. Tending it stood the delinquent old uncle of the family, bottle-nosed, limping “because he didn’t feel so well today.”
It was his second barrel this year, he said; he had already drunk most of the first. He obviously did not restrict himself to the farm’s free litre. He told me this furtively, under the vines that were trellised over the little yard and with a sly glance at his disapproving relations. He took us on a poetic visit to each branch of the vines telling us which grapes were the best. Grandfather was there, a blue-eyed and soldierly old man with white moustaches fit for an Emperor of the old régime, who said he hoped I had not come with a bomb in my pocket and was a man of peace. At this his grandchild, a baby in arms, threw its china doll at me and smashed it.
“It’s all right for us. We don’t want war. We’ve had enough. But you’ll have to keep an eye on the younger generation,” he said to his daughter-in-law.
On another farm the girls were packing the apples and tomatoes in the sheds and one stout old lady marched up and asked, did I want world peace?—it is the stock political question put to all foreigners indicating how they have been taught to believe they lived in a hostile world. The very words they used in their work show it: they speak of tomato-packing brigades, sabotage—if something goes wrong—shock workers, etc., etc., and there are always posters showing capitalist soldiers, usually American, in tanks shooting down Chinese, Viet Namese and Korean peasants. The Partisans are glorified and indeed the general atmosphere of siege reminded me of Britain during World War II. A war atmosphere is maintained to make them feel that their system is engaged in a daily battle. But in the packing sheds there was laughing good nature. They like a joke and at the end of the day I found myself in a broken-down shed drinking with three sinful old men who were distilling a ferocious raw apple spirit like Calvados.
We drove off in the dust as the women were coming in from the fields with mattocks on their shoulders, fine creatures in bunched-out skirts and with white scarves on their heads; some young men were just finishing off a new football stadium and cinder track, which had the usual large portrait of Lenin and another of a hero of the Resistance on the gate. There was a House of Culture where they held socials and saw films. Our guide was a huge peasant and very proud. We overtook his own sheep being driven home in the evening, for each man is allowed a bit of land for himself, five sheep, a cow and a few hens, which he can sell.
There are always private traders in the street markets —my host was extravagant enough to pay twenty-five leva for five lemons in the market at Provdiv. The only blot on this collective—in the farmer’s opinion, but not in mine—was the tumble-down colony of the gypsy camp. The long red sunset was colouring the fields of maize and the Rhodope mountains had turned hard and purple; along a track came one of these gypsy youths singing, with his scythe on his shoulder.
“I don’t understand these people,” the farmer said angrily. “Once they’ve got a bit of money they stop work and sing and dance and drink and fight and gamble and won’t work until it’s gone. They won’t move into the new houses. We must move them out.” Occasionally gypsies produce a first-class doctor or lawyer.
“Or, in Spain, a bullfighter or a dancer,” I said. He was very shocked as any successful farmer is if you praise a gypsy.
The city of Plovdiv is large and pretty, a place of acacias and flowers, lying on the steep bumpy hills of the Maritza river land—the river that flows down to Greece. Plovdiv has its modern side and is known for its international exhibitions. It has several mosques and some Turkish population. One of the hills is dominated by the enormous statue of a Russian soldier affectionately called Aloysha—the generic name for Russian soldiers. Plovdiv was a lazy, dusty, pleasant place. A troupe of Viet Nam dancers came into the hotel, carrying bunches of chrysanthemums—tiny people, delicate, thin, ill-dressed and pathetic beside the solid Bulgarians. Some twenty Party notabilities, looking like businessmen at a convention, were having a silent lunch together; one wondered who mistrusted whom.
There are some fine examples of old Boyar houses in the town—the Boyars were the small gentry or nobles who were suborned or destroyed by the Turks. Many turned to the Moslem faith to escape the massacres and savageries of the time. The Bulgarians are proud that, in this century, they stopped the Nazis sending the Bulgarian Jews to the gas chambers. The liberal spirit is fundamentally strong, but the Party officials go through contortions of silence or polite evasion if one praises Israel. There was a busy market in Plovdiv, under the trees, selling maize, flour and such foods in sacks, saffron, herbs. Some were selling old oil lamps and loofahs. The fleece hat, the
jodhpur-like black or brown trousers with deep waist-bands were common.
Now that the Mediterranean and the Adriatic are virtually closed to them, half the holiday-makers of the Eastern European States make for the Black Sea and especially for the Bulgarian resorts near Varna and the newer one south of it at Bourgas. They have become a workers’ Riviera with the wealth and folly removed, bronzing and healthy and youthful, the reward of the sound citizen. Architecturally they are modern in the best sense. The sands are golden, and although connoisseurs find the water of the Black Sea sluggish and not buoyant enough, the wind hard and the landscape of the coastal plain dull, there is no doubt about the placid enjoyment of the holiday life there.
Travellers report that the Bulgarian quarter is far superior to the Crimea, which is all mass hostels and sanatoria. The Bulgarians have preserved a carousing spirit; the wine-drinking, sun-soaking nations always do. For myself the Bulgaria of the mountain towns and superb landscapes is more dramatic. Tirnovo toppling down the sides of its gorges, with its strange murals of the fifteenth century and the famous tenth-century monastery at Rila which is a strange mixture of caravanserai and the religious life. I have met young women students from the West who have taken their motor-bicycles to Bulgaria and have enjoyed every moment of their life with an hospitable people.
We drove back to Sofia in a comfortable Russian car. The cafés in the country towns were packed and roaring. Life there must have been what it had always been. If the main streets of Sofia were empty at night, the back streets were thronged. The crowd were strolling up and down in a paseo which recalled the habits, though not the electric animation of the Spanish evenings. It was a family crowd. The streets were darkish, for neon-lighting and lamps were few. There were dozens of tailors working late, the sewing-machines humming away, the flat-irons and presses thumping, while the radio played music that had an Oriental note. Many of the tailors squatted cross-legged on the tables. There were queues for fish. The hairdressers were crowded with women.
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