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

surprise she answered that she had only seen it on TV. Of course, she added, she would never, ever go to see poor tamed animals performing ridiculous and humiliating tasks. True, I agree that these animals are much worse off. I sometimes think of lions and elephants freezing during our long winters, and I don’t know how they can survive. Perhaps I should collect their testimonies, too? Although here, in this refuge, I have heard enough terrible stories from other bears, as each of us has our own to tell.
    Angel kept me in the yard together with his five dogs. In the beginning I thought I was a dog! And day after day, he also taught me how to dance. He said that he needed to teach me to dance in order to go around and make money with me. I must say that I don’t like to go back to that particular memory of my torture, of jumping like crazy on a hot metal plate while listening endlessly to his fiddle . . . This is how they trained us: They either heated a large piece of metal or just spread hot coal on the ground, and then forced us to step on it and “dance.” We bears immediately realized that it was better to spare at least two paws, so we would stand up on our hind legs and lift first one, then the other. It looks like dancing to people, I guess. For some reason it even makes them laugh. All I can say is that it is unbearably painful. Afterward you lie in a corner, half dead, licking your blisters and the raw flesh of your wounds . . . and you are only a baby. But it was useless to expect pity; in a traditional peasant society there is no pity for either domestic or wild animals. They are there to be used and abused. They must be made useful. In their Marxist lingo, it was called “productive labor,” I remember. Even a dog, the first domesticated animal ever, has to work. He guards the house or the herd. A cat catches mice. No place for pets in the countryside! A child plays with a chicken and has it for soup the next day. Most animals are bred to be killed, anyway. The only difference is that domestic animals are rarely tortured the way we were.
    But in the beginning of the seventies a change happened in Bulgaria, when Lyudmila Zhivkova, the daughter of Todor Zhivkov, was appointed to a number of high party and state offices. She was installed in high positions while her relatives occupied lower ones. Her appointment was not at all unusual; when a king or a dictator does something like that, it is hardly a surprise. After all, Bulgaria was not alone in this; such was the custom in other, similar societies, like Romania and Albania. But the difference was that Lyudmila was not incompetent. On the contrary, she was a historian by training, and even wrote a few books (supposedly with a little help from her staff). She studied history in Sofia and Moscow, and even spent some time at Oxford University researching a book about Turkish-Bulgarian relations. From 1972 on, and within a very short period of time, Lyudmila became: chairwoman of the Committee for Culture; a member of the Central Committee and the Politburo; chairwoman of the Commission for Science, Culture, and Education; the People’s representative (MP) in their Parliament; and a member of the Council of Ministers. In 1975 Lyudmila became the minister of culture.
    I know that many saw her for what she really was: a second generation of the Communist nomenklatura children, groomed to become the heir to her father’s throne. At that time Bulgarians did not live in the twentieth century, as people call it—we bears count time differently. They were stuck in medieval times, when the country was treated as the private property of a family, and power was handed down from father to son. Or, in the case of Lyudmila, to daughter. In many old Bulgarian folk songs, a woman is a magical creature, a mediator between the earth and the sky, between the natural and the supernatural. Such a woman is called a samodiva , or a wild fairy, and she