Free A Guided Tour Through the Museum of Communism by Slavenka Drakulic

Zhivkov’s and Angel’s rule—not only was your body captured, but so was your mind. I learned only in hindsight that what keeps one enslaved is one’s own captive mind,” I told her. “And if you are still wondering, Was there no one else to stand up for our rights, no one to stop this unbearable torture?—like neighbors or the police, or other citizens—I tell you: No! They all watched us dance and laughed! It amused them to see a huge and dangerous animal reduced to a pitiful clown. It proved their domination. A sad story of how beastly people can be, given the chance.”
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    Ah, it is perhaps useless to try to tell new kids what it was like to live before, to dance while somebody else yanks your chain . . . Nevertheless, I see it as my task. “You need to know that, you need to remember,” I say to Evelina, and she smiles at me with her beautiful, innocent smile, that of a child who doesn’t know what I am talking about. But all the while she understands the suffering of defenseless animals better than the suffering of the people. I must say that she has a point there. From where she stands, it is not easy to see that Bulgarian people were treated pretty much like us. They could not do much to change their own condition as “dancing bears,” so to speak. And maybe, after all, they did not want to.
    My life with Angel, his big family, and his five dogs, of which Dobri was my best friend was . . . how can I put it? Once I was tamed, I guess it was bearable. Yes, the word is bearable. It means that I got used to such a life, one gets used to anything. We traveled a lot; he played the godoulka fiddle and the drum while I danced. On a good day Angel would collect decent money and then he would be nice to me. In the evening we would eat together and get drunk on beer, and sometimes even on his favorite brandy, rakija . On a bad day he would curse my laziness and my bitch of a mother. That would make me sad. But at least he did not beat me. I knew that it was customary to beat us dancers, and I must admit that I was grateful to Angel that he did not practice it.
    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