Dancing Bears

by Witold Szablowski

  “If she had a toothache, she’d point a paw at her muzzle, and then I’d wet some cotton wool in rakia and put it against the sore spot. I didn’t knock her teeth out, you see. The other bear keepers used to laugh at me, saying one day she’d bite me and I’d get what was coming to me. Maybe I really was stupid. Though one time a drunken student tried to burn her with a cigarette. Vela grabbed his hand in her teeth, but she didn’t clench them. So perhaps my training was sensible. If she had clenched her teeth, it would have been the end of us. They’d have put her to sleep, I’d have gone to jail, and the student would be going about without a hand.

  “I fed her decently, because if she was hungry, she refused to work. She ate eight loaves of bread a day. There’s a Bulgarian proverb that says, ‘A hungry bear won’t dance the horo.’ The horo is our national dance. And I agree with that. You can’t expect an animal to work for you if you don’t give it anything to eat.

  “Once a month we gave her a bath, because she loved to bathe. We’d fetch a tub, Vela would climb into it, and my wife and I would pour in the warm water. She didn’t have a bad time with us. You say you read somewhere about keepers who teach their bears to dance on a heated surface. That’s nonsense. Maybe they used to do that before the war—I don’t know. After the war they certainly didn’t anymore. I never let Vela walk on sunbaked asphalt, to make sure she wouldn’t hurt her paws.”

  7.

  “I was very lucky to land myself a bear that didn’t have to be bullied or beaten to learn tricks. I’d never have been able to do that—I’d sooner have sold her to someone else.

  “Luckily, she loved it all anyway. She had the nature of an artiste. She liked it when people clapped, when they laughed and gave us tips. Or when they poured her beer. She liked that best of all. I’m sure at that reserve where they took her she misses those performances of ours.

  “But like a real artiste, she did have days when she didn’t feel like performing. I’d say, ‘Vela, show us how Gigova jumps the vaulting horse.’ But she’d growl, whine, and complain. All quite normal—she was just having a bad day and didn’t want to work. And I respected that. Sometimes on days like that we used to stand outside the lottery-ticket sales point, and people who’d come to buy a lottery ticket would stroke Vela for good luck. And sometimes we just took the day off.

  “The only time I had to hurt her was when I stuck the ring through her nose.

  “I drove her to the forest. I lit a small bonfire. I heated a metal bar red-hot. I said, ‘This’ll hurt you for a while, little one, but it’s got to be done. Otherwise you and I won’t get along. You’ll do me harm, or you’ll do it to someone else.’

  “There was no alternative. The ring is like a steering wheel for controlling the bear—without it you can’t lead her where you want her to go, or she’ll break loose, and a bear weighs well over four hundred pounds.

  “First I stuck the red-hot bar into her nose. She struggled terribly. She howled. She tried to run away, but I held on to her with all the strength in my knees and elbows.

  “I’m not surprised. A bear has a very sensitive nose. What’s more, I didn’t do it very well, because Vela was my first bear. My brother, Stefan, would definitely have done it better, but I couldn’t ask him. It’s very important for the keeper who’s going to be taking care of the animal to stick in the ring. Why’s that? Because the bear’s going to remember that moment all its life. You stuck the ring through its nose—that means you’re its master. The ring is the steering wheel for the bear, and you’ve got the keys to the ignition.

  “Finally, I managed to make a hole through her nose. It bled for a while, and then there was some pus. She howled, struggled, and looked terrified. I quickly put the wire through the hole and bent it round with pliers. Then a blacksmith tightened it for me, so it would never break. For the next few days, Vela kept grabbing hold of her snout with her paws. After that she forgot about the whole thing and treated the ring like part of her nose.”

  8.

  “Just before she died, my wife told me she couldn’t imagine a better life than the one we had with Vela. She reacted very badly when they took the bear away from us in 2006. Neither of us could eat for a month. We pined for her like mad. I still miss her to this day. My wife is in the other world now. She fell sick a few months after they took Vela away to Belitsa.

  “One time I said, ‘Come on, let’s get on the bus and go there. Let’s go and see how our Vela’s doing. Will she recognize us? Has she gone wild by now, or will she still dance? If she starts to dance at the sight of us, that’ll mean she still loves us. Because she loved us just as much as we loved her. I’m sure of it.’

  “But my wife just brushed me off. ‘I’d have to talk to those bandits who stole her away from us. I don’t want to do that,’ she said.

  “Vela’s departure was the greatest tragedy of her life. She believed we’d been done a major injustice. That they’d taken away a member of our family.

  “And I think so too.”

  II. Freedom

  1.

  For as long as they live, nobody in the Stanev family will ever forget the day when Dr. Amir Khalil took away their bears.

  It’s June 2007, and on Pelargonium Street in the small village of Getsovo, in northern Bulgaria, the trees are stunningly green. Vehicles have been driving up to a gray cinder-block twin house since early morning. There are journalists, animal rights campaigners, police, local officials, people who have come to stare, neighbors, and also a gang of kids running about among the adults, throwing sticks at the cars and fooling around. Everyone wants to witness the end—as the media will say tomorrow—of the barbaric tradition of dancing bears. In a short while history with a capital H will occur, the people who have come to stare will go and tell their neighbors about it, and the journalists will tell a worldwide audience.

  In the right half of the twin house lives Dimitar Stanev, a well-built man with a mustache, and his wife, Maryka.

  In the left half live his two sons, with their wives and children.

  Each of the three couples has its own bear. It’s a common custom for bear keepers to live next door to each other and to be blood relatives; they form families of several generations who divide the country into small regions so they won’t get in each other’s way or steal one another’s customers.

  Or, rather, that used to be the case, because the Stanevs are the last bear keepers in Bulgaria, and the last in the European Union. Hence all the people who’ve come to stare, and hence the journalists. Something is irrevocably coming to an end. People like this sort of irrevocable ending.

  For his entire sixty-year life, Dimitar has had no other occupation than bear keeping. Bear keepers came to see him from all over Bulgaria, to get him to teach them the tricks of the profession and sometimes to help them buy a bear cub. He’s a wily old devil, and everyone says his main concern is for his own interests, but he does have a lot of personal charm. On top of this, he knows the business better than anyone. He’s always been able to come up with the answer, and at any given moment he’s always known who might have a bear to sell.

  His brother, Pencho Stanev, who also has a mustache and a cigarette eternally glued to the corner of his mouth, is legendary too. When the director of one of the zoos demanded too high a price for a bear cub, Pencho went and caught a bear for himself in the forest. Or so at least the story goes among all the former bear keepers from Varna to Ruse. They say it was common practice for their grandfathers and great-grandfathers, but for someone in the twentieth century to go and catch himself a bear in the forest? It simply didn’t happen. For years, Gypsies in the Balkans had been buying them from zoo directors or hunters. Catching a bear for yourself was the stuff of legend, so Pencho instantly won the respect of the entire community.

  A few weeks earlier, the Stanevs had signed documents at a notary’s office to confirm that finally, after a seven-year battle, they would han
d their bears over to the Four Paws foundation.

  “The Stanevs’ animals are the last dancing bears in the civilized world,” say the people from Four Paws. And the head of the project, Austrian veterinarian Dr. Amir Khalil, smiles broadly.

  The cameramen set themselves up in the best possible positions for taking pictures. It isn’t easy: all the action will take place in a narrow passage between the Gypsies’ houses and their Bulgarian neighbor’s fence. “What sort of shot should I prepare for?” think the cameramen, as they wonder whether to stand on a car roof, have the camera on their shoulder, or maybe get up in a tree.

  “It was a real scoop,” a Bulgarian journalist who was in Getsovo that day will tell me years later. “You had Gypsies who kidnapped or illegally bought bear cubs. They stuck metal rings through their noses, which they called a holka. Bears have extremely sensitive noses. Sticking something like that into their noses is like sticking a rusty nail through a man’s penis. And they pulled the bears along by their noses all their lives, as a way of forcing them to dance. It was a sad sight. The animals were obviously suffering. So that day I felt proud that the people from Four Paws had put a stop to it for once and for all.”

  2.

  Everyone has readied themselves to perfection for the handover of the bears.

  The police are ready for resistance. The Stanev family has always tried to live in harmony with the authorities. But as the entire district knows, the bears are the most important thing in their lives, and they’ve done everything they possibly could to avoid having to give them up.

  The local authorities are ready for success. It’s hard to imagine a better advertisement for the entire region, since the journalists who’ve come include representatives of Europe’s top media.

  The onlookers are ready for a spectacle.

  If anyone is not ready, it’s the bears, who are fidgeting nervously, unable to understand the sudden fuss.

  3.

  The Stanev family is shut indoors, waiting. There’s old Dimitar. There are his two sons, his wife, and a cluster of grandchildren.

  And there are the heroes of the day—nineteen-year-old Misho, seventeen-year-old Svetla, and six-year-old Mima. They’re sitting indoors with the family, with metal rings in their noses, attached to iron chains.

  Misho did some posing for pictures this morning, for which the photojournalists gave him chocolate and Snickers bars. To show how close his family is to the bears, Dimitar’s son Veselin Stanev even pushed his baby son’s foot into Misho’s mouth. The bear gave it a lick. For Veselin this was proof of the animal’s extreme affection for his family—a wild bear would have eaten first the baby, then Veselin, and finally the journalists and their cameras. But Misho isn’t a wild bear. He is—as Veselin stressed—a member of the Stanev family. Fully and legitimately.

  At ten o’clock Dr. Khalil knocks at the Stanevs’ door, to transform the bears’ lives into a dream out of a tourist brochure—with a pine forest, a pool for bathing, and a view of the Rila Mountains.

  What exactly does Dr. Khalil say? Probably the same as usual on these occasions: “Good morning. As agreed by contract, we’ve come for your bears.”

  Or, putting it simpler, “You know why we’re here.”

  More important is what Khalil will tell the journalists when the Stanevs load the bears into the cages made ready for them in advance.

  He says, “Ladies and gentlemen, on June 14, 2007, the Bulgarian custom of dancing bears came to an end.”

  4.

  In an ideal world, as soon as Dr. Khalil had said these words, his people in the uniform fleeces with the Four Paws logo would have carried Misho, Svetla and Mima out of the Stanevs’ house in turn. That would have looked really good in the news, and the radio reporters would have had interesting sound effects, such as the bears’ roaring. (As the Four Paws foundation is supported by donations, it needs to ensure that the media has good photos and good audio.) The photojournalists would have taken some fabulous pictures, and the whole business would have been over and done with easily.

  But that is not what happened.

  First, Veselin Stanev left Dr. Khalil standing at the door and came outside to inform the journalists that anyone who wanted exclusive pictures of the handover of the last dancing bears, taken inside the home of the last bear keepers, would have to pay one thousand euros.

  “I told him he was out of his mind,” says Vasil Dimitrov from Four Paws. “I said I had no intention of translating that into English. But he insisted, so I told the journalists I felt stupid saying it, but this dumb, grasping Gypsy wanted a thousand euros for pictures. Why dumb? How else would you define that sort of behavior? But you know what? A reporter from one of the German TV channels just reached into his pocket, took out the money, and handed it to him. Germans never cease to amaze me.”

  So Dimitrov, the German film crew, and the Stanev family disappeared into the cinder-block house with the cages.

  Mima, the youngest bear, let herself be lured into the cage without any trouble. The younger of the Stanev brothers put a piece of bread in the corner of the cage and made a fierce face, so the bear didn’t even try to put up resistance.

  But with the other two bears it wasn’t quite so easy.

  “They were crying,” says Maryka, Dimitar’s wife. “I know it’s hard to believe a bear can cry like a person. But I’ve spent half my life with bears, and I know what I’m saying. They were weeping tears as big as peas.”

  “I don’t know if they were crying,” says Vasil Dimitrov, shrugging. “But I do know that the Stanevs didn’t make their task any easier. They were the ones crying, shouting, and flinging themselves about—now at us, now at the bears. The granny was tearing her hair out, the granddad kept whacking us with his stick and calling us thieves. Their son told us to fry in hell. I’m sure none of it had a positive effect on the bears. Mima went into the cage. Svetla let herself be persuaded by a sheer miracle. But Misho was stubborn. They battled with him for an hour. Veselin and Dimitar tried to persuade him by putting candy in the cage and whispering in his ear. But Misho wouldn’t do it—he stood up on his hind legs, roaring and panting.

  “‘I can forcibly drag him in there by the nose,’ said Veselin. ‘But if the ring snaps off, I don’t know what will happen. He could make mincemeat of us. Don’t forget he’s a wild animal. If his instincts awaken, we’re dead.’

  “They wanted me and the German TV crew to get out of their house. The Germans didn’t need telling twice—they’d already managed to film two bears, so why take the risk?

  “But I was afraid Misho’s resistance was just another Gypsy trick. I didn’t believe a word of it, so I said I’d stay through to the end.

  “They weren’t keen, but they agreed. And once the Germans had gone, Dimitar called his little grandson, who looked about five years old. The child went into the room, said something into the bear’s ear, cuddled up to him, gave him a scratch, ruffled his fur, and then went into the cage himself.

  “As if hypnotized, Misho went in after him.

  “My hair stood on end. I realized that if anything happened to the child—if Misho so much as grazed him—our entire celebration would be shot down in flames.

  “All of us—the bears, the Stanevs, and I—were very anxious. I was scared someone would shout, something would bang, or someone would knock at the door and Misho would react out of stress and do something stupid. A bear has two-inch claws. If he used them, there’d be nothing left of the boy’s face but pulp. It really wouldn’t have taken much.

  “You’re asking why I agreed to let him get inside the cage at all? But nobody asked for my opinion! He did it before I was aware of what was happening.

  “Besides, we were eager to get the bears out of there without injecting any tranquilizers. We were driving them to the park that our foundation had opened at Belitsa, in the Pirin Mountains, for bears rescued from Gypsy c
aptivity. Once there, we’d have to anesthetize them for a while to do some medical tests, and that sort of injection can’t be given too often. So as they knew a way to get the bear to go into the cage without an injection, why not? They’ve lived with these bears, the kid was their son, so maybe they knew what they were doing.

  “We closed the cage at one end. Misho was calm. There was just the problem of how to get the child out of there.

  “The cages we use to transport the bears have gates that open at either end. The father told the boy to put his head as close as possible to the other exit. He’d open it quickly, the child would jump out of the cage, and the bear would stay inside it.

  “The only catch was that the child had no desire to come out of the cage at all. He was cuddling up to Misho, ruffling his fur, kissing him on the head, and refusing to listen when told he had to leave him.

  “The situation was tense. Svetla and Mima started growling. Veselin was in a rage, cursing and fuming, but in an undertone to avoid upsetting the bear unnecessarily. Everyone was waiting for Grandpa Dimitar to do something, utter a single word and cast a spell—on the boy or the bear. Cough, spit—do anything whatsoever to untie the knot.

  “But old man Stanev didn’t do a thing. He just stared out of the window, looking totally absent.”

  5.

  Nobody could have guessed that this was the very first manifestation of the illness that would soon lay the old man in his grave.

  6.

  Several very long minutes went by. Finally, the child’s father, Veselin Stanev, persuaded him to see reason. Vasil from Four Paws opened the cage door, the boy came rolling out of it, and the other exit was secured.