Dancing Bears

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Dancing Bears Page 10

by Witold Szablowski


  From this point on, the whole way back to their house, none of us says a word.

  3.

  Dimitar Stanev began to fall ill as soon as the bears left.

  “And he had always been the healthiest in the family,” says Maryka. “He could sleep outside until late into the fall, covered with any old thing, and never so much as caught a cold. His star turn was wrestling with a bear. The only man who could arm-wrestle everyone in the district, but suddenly he was as weak as a blade of grass.”

  He went to Razgrad to see a doctor. Then to Shumen, then Varna.

  He wandered about the house as if he wasn’t there. He’d start talking, then forget in mid-sentence what he wanted to say.

  “Grandpa always played the accordion beautifully,” says his granddaughter. “One spring, about two years after they took the bears away from us, he finally got up in a good mood. He said you have to go on living. He put on his folk costume, picked up his concertina, and first he went to Varna, then he called to say he was going to Greece with some friends. There he went about the restaurants with his accordion, singing and collecting money.”

  “He was gone for six weeks,” says his wife. “He came back even sadder. ‘I felt like a fool,’ he said. ‘Those songs can’t be sung without a bear.’”

  And he sank into himself again.

  In a year he amassed a whole bag full of medicines. One for high blood pressure, another for liver function, a third for the kidneys. The family still keeps the bag—the kind made of imitation leather. They haven’t the strength to throw it away.

  Perhaps if Dimitar had lived in another country, he’d have found a doctor who’d have diagnosed him with depression, prescribed drugs that would have improved his mood, and maybe even a few therapy sessions, at which he could have talked about his pain after the bears left. Perhaps a therapist could have helped him to deal with the trauma, just as they help the relatives of people who are killed in car accidents or who die of cancer. After all, Misho was part of his life for nineteen years.

  Perhaps if the organization that took away the bears worked in a slightly different way, they’d have suggested that sort of help for him. It’s not hard to guess that if someone has practiced a single profession all his life, it’s hard for him to come up with anything new overnight. Even if we regard his work as barbaric, it’s impossible to deny that Dimitar had a profound relationship with Misho.

  But Four Paws only thinks about the animals. When asked about the bear keepers, they say there are special organizations that take care of Roma rights. The bear keepers should apply to them.

  4.

  A few months after coming back from Greece, Dimitar had his first heart attack. He keeled over in the kitchen, between the table and the fridge.

  He was taken to Razgrad by ambulance. The doctors said his heart was falling apart and that next time he had a heart attack—which was only a matter of time—he wouldn’t survive.

  Dimitar went home, with even more drugs and orders not to get upset about anything. He stopped watching the news. He stopped listening to the radio. He even tried not to drink coffee.

  It was a minor stroke that landed him in a hospital in Varna. He never came home again.

  “Grandpa died last year, of longing. Longing for Misho,” says Veselina, faltering with emotion. And crying.

  Misho is not capable of getting his head around Dimitar’s death. Probably all he knows is that the man was there, for a long time, sometimes as a jab in the side, sometimes as a piece of candy, sometimes as a slice of bread, and then suddenly that man was gone.

  Sometimes the man comes back to him, in a smell or in a flavor. Then Misho loses his reason for a while. But that doesn’t stop him from making excellent progress on the road to freedom.

  He has a proper bear’s diet. He has learned to hibernate and can even dig himself a den. The roots of his teeth, which prevented him from chewing tougher bits of meat, have been extracted by a professional dentist, and the hole made by the nose ring has healed up.

  When spring comes, Misho wakes from his lethargy and goes to find Svetla. He circles her like a shy teenager. Now he goes closer, now he moves away again. He roars, rubs against a tree, and goes up to her again. Svetla patiently watches the performance.

  Until they come together.

  Their attempt to continue the species doesn’t last long. Once it’s over, Svetla plunges into a state of bliss for several weeks. Only after a month or two does she realize something hasn’t gone right. Then both she and Misho start to dance, each in a different corner of the park for dancing bears at Belitsa, the park that’s like something out of a tourist brochure.

  Part Two

  I. Love

  She always had more than enough bread. The best alcohol. Strawberries. Chocolate. Candy bars. I’d have carried her on my back if I only could. So if you say I beat her, or that she had a bad time with me, you’re lying.

  Cuba: The McRevolution Is Coming

  “El Barbudo”—the bearded one—“won’t drag on for much longer,” people are saying all the way from Guantánamo to Pinar del Río.

  “He’s dead already, they’re just afraid to say. So the nation won’t go crazy with grief,” quips Alfonso, a cab driver from Havana. He’s sure of Fidel’s death: a friend’s brother-in-law is a paramedic at the government hospital, and apparently he saw Fidel with his own eyes. According to the brother-in-law, Castro was dying. “High up the ladder they’re already discussing who will replace him and what sort of new regime we’ll have,” says Alfonso. “Because the fact that Communism has failed is obvious. But they can’t just introduce capitalism here overnight either—that would be as if someone who hasn’t eaten for ages were suddenly given five hamburgers all at once. The stomach can’t cope with it. In short, our politicians have to prepare for these changes.”

  “How are they to do that?”

  “Well, the way it’s always done in similar situations. Making sure they’ll retain some privileges. That no one will take away their fortunes. That their people will be able to found businesses. If they can work it out, we’ll have changes here. Like in Poland, like in Germany, like in Romania.”

  “Which politicians? Raúl Castro?”

  “Nooo,” says Alfonso, pouting. “It’s already happening behind his back. The Castro brothers are mentally stuck at the level of the Cold War. The guys who are working it all out between them are the sort of people whose names neither you nor I are aware of. I know a guy who has a decent car, and he sometimes drives them. Jackals. Well dressed, plenty of cash. That’s how it always works—you ought to know.” And Alfonso casts me a reproachful glance, as if he’s looking at someone who’s clueless about life. That’s probably how I appear in his eyes: not only, despite the assurances of the brother-in-law, do I not believe in Castro’s death, but I don’t even know how regimes change.

  Maria, who owns a small stall selling eggs in downtown Havana is of a different opinion. “Fidel is alive,” she says. “But he can’t understand what’s going on around him. He’s being kept alive artificially. And, it’s true, by now the decisions are made behind his back.”

  Maria claims to know the driver who took Castro to the hospital. “They put a pen in his hand to make him sign things, but it’s Raúl moving the hand,” she says with unwavering certainty.

  “All that’s nonsense,” fumes Mirurgia, a true Communist. Her husband works at one of the ministries, and so—as she claims—he has access to the latest, most definite information. “Fidel Castro is getting better and better, and all his enemies will be surprised how much good he’s still going to do for Cuba. He’ll live to a hundred and ten or maybe more. Nobody’s going to crush our revolution,” she says, her dewlap all but quivering with indignation that anyone could think differently.

  There are just as many opinions as there are people. Just as many more or less imaginary friends, each of who
m has access to information from the summit of power. And just as many ideas about what will happen to Cuba when the older Castro brother finally dies.

  Brushes instead of indicators

  In the tourist town of Varadero I rented a car, the cheapest on offer—a Peugeot 206.

  Although it was cheap, its red registration plates made me into a superman.

  First of all, renting a car for ten days costs the same amount as a traffic cop earns in two years. Second, it’s mainly tourists who drive around Cuba with red registration plates, and a good many Cubans make their living from tourists. That’s probably why I was only stopped once by a policeman. I brazenly ran into him while driving the wrong way. He saluted and politely asked me not to do it again. He seemed fearful.

  Third, a car in Cuba is a rarity. The buses run infrequently, and irregularly, and they often break down. When they run out of lightbulbs for their indicators, the drivers fix brushes to a string and then pull it, from the left or the right, if they want to make a turn. And that’s if they know where to buy the brush. Anyone who has to go anywhere hitches a ride. There are even special shelters for hitchhikers, so-called alternative transport points. A uniformed employee stops the cars and assigns seats. You wait for hours. That’s why anyone who could squeezed into my car. In eight days my passengers included

  twenty-five farmworkers;

  six policemen in uniform and one in plain clothes;

  four engineers;

  eight nurses and two doctors—all in white tunics;

  one priest, assistant to the local bishop;

  six soldiers;

  twelve kids, on their way to or from school;

  three pregnant women and four carrying babies;

  twelve retired people, and many others.

  In total, well over one hundred people.

  The true Communist: may Fidel live for as long as possible!

  I’m on the road from Santiago de Cuba to the Sierra Maestra, where Fidel conducted his revolution. From here, in 1959, he set off to conquer Havana, and he and his guerrillas launched the ultimate storm against the American-backed troops of President Fulgencio Batista.

  The jungle here is virginally audacious and unrestrained, making me feel that if I were to stop the car for half an hour, it would force its way inside, destroy the upholstery, and open its jaws wide enough to scarf me down, Peugeot and all. Everything here is intensely green—there’s not just one but dozens of different shades of green, with brightly colored birds moving around in it, like commas in a sentence.

  It’s a place created to remain wild. The road seems absurd here, a gray-and-blue ribbon that someone has accidentally dropped among mountains coated with foliage and flecked with multicolored birds. Standing by this road I see a stout, stylish, black woman of over fifty. I stop and invite her to get in. She carefully settles herself, adjusts her suit and the pillbox hat that’s pinned to her raven-black hair, and we drive off in the direction of the nearest small town.

  “Witek,” I introduce myself by my nickname, once my guest is sitting comfortably. I already know that her name is Mirurgia, and she’s on her way home from visiting her mother, who lives in these mountains.

  “Fidek?” she says, unable to pronounce my name.

  “No, not Fidel. But while we’re on the subject of El Comandante . . . ,” I say, smiling to myself.

  This is how I start a conversation about the dying Castro. A direct question would be inappropriate—criticism of El Barbudo carries the risk of jail. But, perhaps emotionally stirred by the illness, and what looks like the imminent demise of the older Castro brother, people are talking to me in a surprisingly frank and open way. Both those who love Castro and those who wish him ill.

  Mirurgia belongs to the former category.

  “I wish he had twice as long a life ahead of him,” she says with a tone of regret, and adjusts her hat again.

  “Why is that?”

  “Thanks to him, we’re the last country that isn’t led on a string by the USA. We have a superb education and health-care system. Nobody’s dying of hunger here. You only have to look at Dominica, or Haiti, which are on America’s leash. They’ve got nothing to eat there. But in the stores here you can buy anything . . .”

  Mirurgia is the most genuine Communist I’ve ever met. She’s a party member, head of her local Committee for the Defense of the Revolution, and wife of a civil servant working at a ministry. A badge with a revolutionary star pinned to the lapel of her suit adds to her dignity. She even has a picture of Fidel in her wallet. She shows it to me: Fidel, still young, with a cigar, his beard flecked with gray.

  “Yes, but ordinary Cubans don’t have access to those stores,” I tell her. “You can only get everything in tourist stores, for pesos convertibles,” hard currency for foreigners. “I’ve seen empty shelves in the stores that are for everyone.”

  “Of course, we do have some problems. The Americans do everything they can to weaken our economy . . .”

  “What does your economy rely on?”

  “Sugarcane, tobacco, the best cigars in the world. Is that enough?”

  “To feed eleven million people? Well, I don’t know . . .”

  “There are the tourists too. Well over two million. They travel around the entire coast; in Havana they’re in every other restaurant. Even here, in the Sierra Maestra, my mother sees them almost every day.”

  It’s true. Fidel started letting them in after the collapse of the USSR, when Cuba was on the brink of destitution. Foreigners began to appear at the abandoned resorts again, and the wallets of those in power started to fill with cash. For Raúl Castro’s people, mainly from the military, are the ones behind the tourist boom.

  “If life’s so good, why are there so many beggars here? Why are there so many jineteras—prostitutes?”

  “Because they have no honor,” says Mirurgia indignantly. “They want to be given money for nothing, but in Cuba you have to work. An honest person earns a living by working, not—forgive me—by selling their ass. My parents lived in the countryside, and there was terrible poverty. There were times when we ate soup made of tree bark. Everything I have today I gained through hard work. I finished school, and I went to college. I’m a construction engineer, I build houses, and my greatest pride is the city hospital in Havana. I was responsible for a whole floor of it, and Fidel himself congratulated me. Is that possible in any other country in the Caribbean? In those places they’re still eating bark to this day. But may our palomito live for two hundred years! Without him they’ll turn this country into a bordello.”

  The host: time costs money

  As I was having my breakfast in Matanzas, a tourist paradise located on a bay of the same name, a provocatively dressed young woman arrived at the guesthouse. She looked about seventeen. She’d been lured in by the car with red registration plates. She started telling me about her grandmother who was seriously sick, and to whom I absolutely had to drive her. I wanted to help and was already putting on my shoes, when my host stopped me.

  “She’d have made you drive around the district until something happened between you,” he explained later. “Whether it happened or not, you’d have had to give her some money. For the time spent together. Lots of people try to earn money like that around here.”

  The precedent for extracting money from foreigners comes from above. For years on end, Fidel lived on Soviet rubles. When the Soviet Union collapsed, he found a new sponsor, Hugo Chávez of Venezuela. Fidel’s German biographer, Volker Skierka, cites this anecdote: “The name of the Cuban citizen Fidel Castro first entered the White House files in 1940. On November 6 of that year the young boarder at the Jesuit Dolores College in Santiago de Cuba sent a three-page letter to US President Franklin D. Roosevelt congratulating him on his re-election. Before signing off, with a bold flourish, ‘Goodby Your friend,’ he added a personal request: ‘If you like, g
ive me a ten dollars bill American . . . I would like to have one of them.’ . . . He received no reply from the president, only a letter of thanks from the State Department. Nor did it contain a ten-dollar bill. No one could then suspect that the boy would grow up and confiscate everything that the North Americans owned in Cuba.”*

  “He also confiscated everything that the Cubans owned. So they ‘confiscate’ whatever they can from the tourists. It’s a sort of historical justice,” laughs the rep for one of the tourist companies.

  The worker: I’d exchange my wife

  José Mendoza, a handsome man of mixed race, is sprawling on the backseat like the king of low-capacity cars. He got into my Peugeot at the side of the major highway from Matanzas to Santa Clara, known as the Autopista Nacional. Outside the windows of our little car, as it blazes along at sixty miles per hour, the shadows of palm trees, extremely long at this time of day, flash by. We pass several immense sugarcane plantations, to which the workers are driven in big Soviet ZIL trucks. At the sight of his pals, José shouts loudly, waves his arms, and swells with pride that today he’s not traveling with them but with me.

  “It’s the first time I’ve been in a car that has a machine to make it cold inside,” he says, smiling, as he feels the breeze from the air-conditioning on his skin. “I usually go to work squeezed in like a sardine. I work at the Fernando de Dios Agro-Industrial Complex, a big sugarcane plantation. Every morning a ZIL goes round the villages picking us up, and if it doesn’t break down, it gets us to work by eight.”

  “Is it good work?”

  “It’s tough. We cut the cane with machetes. I spend ten hours a day waving a machete, with a short break at the hottest time.”

  “How much do you earn?”

  “Ten dollars. A month.”

 

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