“And then he adds something that I find way out of line—he says he knows what’s best for the bear. He says his corn and bread are better than our nuts and apples, and that a Gypsy’s chain and gadulka are better than our thirty acres.
“But what bugs me most is when he says he loves the bear, and that we’re trying to take away a member of his family.
“‘Man,’ I think to myself, ‘you’re hurting that animal. You’re degrading it. You’re forcing it to behave in a way that’s totally contrary to its nature. You’re making a laughing stock out of a proud wild animal! You’re making a fool of it!’
“But what would a Gypsy understand even if I said all that to him?
“They’d been hearing for years that they’d have to hand over the bears, and they were used to the idea. But they thought it would just end in talk again. They didn’t understand that we weren’t going to let them off. We were building a nature reserve. We had the support of important people—politicians, actors, and journalists. And as soon as they sat down at the same table as us—with food, rakia, and gifts—they were in the losing position, because everyone else was on our side, and they were just Gypsies carrying on traditions from a world that no longer exists.”
5.
“There’s one more thing that’s essential. We were very careful to point out to them that the money they were getting was not a payment for the bear. They often sold each other bears, so at first they just treated us like a new customer on the market.
“One of them says, ‘My bear is only five years old. You’ll have to pay more for him than you pay my neighbor, because his bear is over thirty and won’t last much longer.’ They’d try all sorts of tricks: if you feed an old bear alcohol, he’ll jump about like a young one. So before meeting us they’d give it a bottle of rakia and try to persuade us it was a young one, so we’d have to pay extra for it. Or they’d dye the bear’s fur with tinted shampoo.
“But just as it says in every contract, we stressed from the start that we weren’t going to pay for the bear.
“‘You’ll be getting the money because you’re poor and we want to support you. You’re in a difficult situation. Your source of income has just been discontinued. You won’t have anything to live on, and you’ve got to learn a new trade. Basket weaving, perhaps, or building houses or maybe doing ikebana. Or perhaps you’ll open a grocery store or a scrap yard—it’s up to you.
“‘Considering your difficult situation, we want to support you with such and such a sum of money.’
“We didn’t have to do that, because in Bulgaria training bears to dance had already been delegitimized, and we could have just gone to their houses with the police and taken the bears away. But next day we’d have been taken to court by the organization that protects the rights of Gypsies. And that would have been a fine mess—an animal rights organization being sued by a Roma rights organization. It was better to just give them some cash.
“They’d keep bargaining to the very last. And it’s hardly surprising—they’re Gypsies; that’s their nature. But eventually they’d realize we weren’t going to give way, and that the bear was all that really mattered to us, not its age or the color of its fur. They’d notice we were from a slightly different world from them. A world that doesn’t treat a bear like a commodity, a world that respects every creature and wants every creature to be happy and free.
“Then they’d finally ease up.
“We had to meet with them once or twice more, for supper and rakia. Just a bit more bargaining. Yet again, we’d have to explain that either they must give up the bear for cash or in a month’s time the police would come and they wouldn’t get a penny for it. But gradually the situation was drawing to a close.”
6.
“After the final supper, we’d make an appointment to meet at the notary’s to sign the contracts. But if you think that was the end of the scheming and cheating, you’re wrong.
“The first Gypsy to make a deal with us had two bears. His entire four-generation family lived off it; those were the ones who wanted a million marks to begin with.
“We bargained for a decent price—twenty-something thousand leva. We were very pleased, because he was a famous bear keeper, and we thought that if we came to terms with him, it’d be easier with the others. At least a dozen times we told him: ‘Don’t tell the others how much we’re giving you. You’re the only one getting that much money, because you’re respected and we care about you.’ So the Gypsy nodded, drank with us, and we thought it was all under control. He handed over the bears, and he even smiled.
“We took the animals to our park, settled them in, and started talking to the next few Gypsies, but here we ran into a brick wall. None of them was willing to talk to us. And if any of them did, he brought up a price on the order of a million marks.
“We were sure they’d got that million from the old man—he’d obviously told them a load of bullshit. Man, we were so mad about it, but we’d been expecting this sort of scenario.
“Several months went by, and then someone called us at Belitsa to say the old man was at the seaside, near Varna, and—get this—he was with some bears. The very same bears he’d had the year before.
“We went straight there. He greeted us very nicely and pretended to be surprised that there was something wrong.
“‘But you gave up your bears to us. You were given money for them,’ I told him.
“‘Well, yes . . . You wanted two bears. And you got two bears. So, what’s the problem?’ he said, acting dumb.
“It turned out the old man had bought the bears from his less crafty cousins in the mountains. He had told them exactly what he’d heard from me: that either he’d give them fifteen hundred leva for each bear now, or the police would come and take them away. And he’d given those bears to us for thirty-five thousand each, while hiding his old ones at a neighbor’s house in the meantime.
“I almost burst a blood vessel. I wanted to call the police and get those bears off him by force. But my colleagues said that if we did that none of the Gypsies would ever talk to us again. Besides, we couldn’t be sure the police would be willing to help. They’d been taking bribes from the bear keepers for years, and then turning a blind eye to their illegal campsites. So we let it go. The old man went about with his bears for another five years before we managed to persuade him to give them up. But we had learned an important lesson. From then on, each Gypsy signed a legal commitment never to get another bear for training. If he broke it, we’d confiscate the bear and he’d have to give back the money.
“Another time, on the day agreed upon at the notary’s, we drove up to the house with the police, a vet, and the media, but the Gypsy and his bear weren’t there. Instead, there were about forty people waiting for us: women, children, cousins, and some old folks. So we questioned his wife, but she didn’t know a thing; she just started to scream and shout. We asked the cousins, but they didn’t know anything either. We called the guy’s cell—it was off.
“I was really pissed, because these had been tough negotiations, and now the entire team had driven all the way to Ruse for the bear—from Belitsa that’s a six-hour drive.
“It was pointless to keep them there, outside the house, so we sent the team back again, while a colleague and I set off to look for him in the neighboring villages.
“On the first two days we had no luck.
“On the third day someone told me he was hiding at his cousins’ place, two villages farther on.
“So I went there, but they refused to open the door.
“I said, ‘Tell Stanko I’m on my own. Tell him we’ve got to talk. The police are going to find him any minute.’
“They went to tell him. Fifteen minutes went by; then at last he came out. ‘You saw what was happening at my house, huh?’ he says. ‘When people found out I was giving up my bear, even cousins I’d never met before turned up. T
hey brought tents and pitched them outside my house. You can’t give me the money there or they’ll take it all off me!’
“I started to think quickly. The ambulance was back in Belitsa now. Another day would go by before it could get here, before we could get everything organized. Meanwhile he might change his mind four times or hide two villages farther away—he could do anything.
“You never know what a Gypsy might have in his head. They really couldn’t imagine life without those bears. At all the training sessions I attended our colleagues in Austria kept repeating to us: when you don’t know what to do, remember that the most important thing is the bear.
Your goal—the bear.
Your mission—to free the bear.
The bear, of the bear, for the bear, with the bear, about the bear.
“So I asked, ‘How did you bring him here?’
“And he showed me an old Zhiguli,* with a trailer, and said: ‘In that.’
“I crossed myself, sent my colleague ahead in our vehicle, and said, ‘Let’s go.’
“To which the Gypsy said he didn’t have a driver’s license, and if we were caught, there could be trouble.
“‘What the fuck?’ I thought. ‘You’ve been driving a bear up and down the coast in an old Zhiguli for the past twenty years without a license?’
“But what was I to do? We attached the trailer to the Zhiguli, I got behind the wheel, and we drove off. At first the bear sat there quietly, but later we had to drive along a stretch of the Burgas-to-Sofia highway. And every time a container truck passed us, the bear was so terrified that it stood up on its hind legs and started shaking the trailer.
“You can imagine how a Zhiguli behaves on the road when a 440-pound animal starts rocking the trailer. It was swaying left and right. I drove along the hard shoulder, but there were moments when it threw us right over to the left.
“So I said to the Gypsy, ‘This is impossible! Think of something!’
“Then he said I should pull up at the next gas station. So I stopped. He bought a bottle of rakia and poured it on the bear’s paw, and the bear put the paw in its mouth and licked off the alcohol. It drank the whole bottle, and from then on we drove all the way to Belitsa without any more trouble. When we got there, the bear was immediately sent for medical examination and quarantined. What about the Gypsy? He must have gone back to Ruse in that Zhiguli of his somehow.
“How did he get home? I don’t know. I never asked. Frankly, their lives were of no interest to me once they’d given up the bears.”
IV. History
1.
“I’ll tell you something, but it’s a secret,” says Maryka, Dimitar’s wife, and stares into my eyes, as if trying to read in them whether I can keep a secret or whether I’m going to blab about it to anyone who’ll listen. Maryka wonders for a while, eyeing me in an attempt to determine if I’m friend or foe. Finally, she says: “After the war the Communists tried to ban bear training. And they would have, just like in other countries. But they couldn’t, for one single reason. My father-in-law had a phone number that could change the decisions of Communist Party headquarters in Sofia itself.”
I don’t believe it. Maryka must be able to see that, because she asks, “Do you want to know where he got that number from?”
And then she tells me the tale of her father-in-law.
The story begins during the Second World War. Comrade Pencho Kubadinski—a dark, handsome, twenty-something-year-old who, thanks to a year with the partisans, has grown up and become a man—is forced into hiding.
During the Second World War, Bulgaria cooperated closely with Hitler. Its soldiers took part in the Third Reich’s invasions of Greece and Yugoslavia. They were dispatched all over the Balkans, to keep order and to combat the local resistance movements. In Bulgaria itself the resistance movement was weak and divided, and for a long time it didn’t pose a major threat to the government troops.
But there were some exceptions, one of which was Kubadinski’s unit, August Popov. Most of its members were prewar Communists, who beginning in 1942 regularly nipped at the heels of the Bulgarian troops in the thickly forested areas around Shumen and Razgrad.
In the spring of 1943, the Bulgarian resistance movement, though still weak, becomes troublesome enough for the government in Sofia to launch an offensive. Soldiers travel about the villages looking for partisans and persecuting people accused of helping them. The noose starts to tighten around the necks of Kubadinski and his comrades.
Luckily Comrade Pencho knows a few Gypsies from before the war, when they lived a couple of villages away from his home town of Loznitsa. He asks for their help.
The Gypsies don’t refuse.
So begins one of the most colorful tales about the Bulgarian resistance movement. The Gypsies Kubadinski knows make their living as bear keepers. In fact, the government has banned keeping bears for the duration of the war, but nobody has time to implement the ban. The bear keepers are still going from village to village just as before, and in exchange for a performance people are giving them eggs, milk, and sometimes a bit of meat.
Pencho Kubadinski joins them. Whether he spent a few days or a few months with the bear keepers is now a mystery, but a few legends have survived from that time.
One of them tells how one day soldiers surrounded the Gypsy camp where Comrade Pencho was living. The Gypsies quickly disguised him as a woman. They clothed him in a long, flowery dress and a brightly colored headscarf, and so they got him out of danger.
Another says that Comrade Pencho learned how to handle the bears, and they were extremely obedient to him, as if they could sense that here they were dealing with a man of unusual character.
And the last one tells how Comrade Pencho tried for himself to wrestle with a bear, and that he did pretty well at it.
The Gypsy who formed the closest friendship with Comrade Kubadinski was Stanko Stanev, Maryka’s father-in-law, father to Dimitar and Pencho. The same Dimitar Stanev who was the last Gypsy to give up his bears to the Four Paws foundation, and the same Pencho Stanev who reputedly caught a wild bear in the forest and managed to train it to dance.
Apparently, they became such good friends that Pencho was named after Comrade Kubadinski.
“My father-in-law saved his life. The Bulgarian soldiers would have shot him on the spot,” says Maryka. “He never forgot that. And when the Communists tried to ban bear keeping, Pencho stood up for us. He used to come by our house and drink rakia. My father-in-law could call Kubadinski on any matter. Did he ever call? He didn’t have to. Everyone knew he could, and that was enough.”
2.
After the war Bulgaria begins to take determined steps along the path to Communism, and Comrade Pencho plays an increasingly important role on this journey. Within the structure of Communist power, he will reach the very top—he will become one of the dictator Todor Zhivkov’s closest collaborators.
Zhivkov’s career is like the socialist version of the American dream come true: from poor little shepherd boy to party first secretary. Zhivkov was from a town called Pravets, where he was born into an indigent peasant family. At seventeen, he enlists in the Communist youth movement. During the war, like Kubadinski, he fights with the antifascist partisans, but in the environs of Sofia.
Straight after the war the young partisan becomes chief of Sofia’s militia, and at the same time he moves up within the structure of the Communist Party. He is promoted by Vulko Chervenkov himself, first secretary of the Bulgarian Communist Party, a hard-line Stalinist who rules Bulgaria with an iron fist, on the Soviet model. Zhivkov knows that if he wants to go high, he must stay as close as possible to Chervenkov. His mind is filled with thoughts of the top job.
The chance to assume it appears surprisingly quickly, in 1953, along with the death of Stalin. At this point Chervenkov loses influence. To save himself from utter downfall, he proposes his then forty-two-
year-old protégé as his successor in the first secretary’s chair. He wants to keep the prime minister’s portfolio for himself.
At the time, Zhivkov isn’t widely known to his comrades, so they all regard Chervenkov’s decision as brilliant: the new first secretary will be the old one’s puppet. Chervenkov will run the whole show from behind the scenes.
But the comrades underestimate Zhivkov, who has been working on his position in the party for a good few years, and on assembling a group of people who are going to work to support him.
This group includes Pencho Kubadinski.
As early as 1956, on the wave of the thaw after the famous speech in which Khrushchev openly describes the true nature of Stalinism for the first time, Zhivkov takes the remains of power away from Chervenkov. The speed at which the formerly omnipotent prime minister is deposed by the man who owes him everything is astonishing. From then until 1989, Zhivkov is the supreme ruler of Bulgaria. “He was the longest ruling first secretary in this part of the world,” stresses Ilya Hristov, a historian from Sofia.
For all this time, Kubadinski is on his side: at the turn of the 1960s and 1970s, when there are several attempted military coups; when Zhivkov orders the execution of his political enemies; when he sends his political opponents to a camp modeled on the Gulag at a place called Belene; and when he asks Khrushchev to incorporate Bulgaria into the Soviet Union as one of its republics (Khrushchev refused).
“Kubadinski is a highly ambiguous figure,” says Hristov. “On the one hand, he probably wouldn’t have had anything against incorporating our country into the USSR. He and Zhivkov pushed very hard for the Warsaw Pact to invade Czechoslovakia in 1968, for instance. He was very insulting about the Turks, of whom we have over a million in Bulgaria, and whom the Communists persecuted. On the other hand, he really was a man of the people, and he really did believe in Communism; unlike many apparatchiks, Kubadinski was not just a cynical fraud. Whereas I don’t know if Zhivkov really did believe in Communism. I think it more likely that he believed in himself and the only thing he cared about was his own career and his own position.”
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