CHAPTER FOURTEEN
The Bad and the Good
The Sofia I returned to in October 1990, again by train from Romania, was a different city from the one I had previously known. Dimitrov’s corpse had been cremated, and the white neoclassical mausoleum across from the Grand Hotel Bulgaria was now defaced with anti-Communist graffiti. Instead of whispering, people laughed and grumbled openly in the street. Icons and other religious art were being sold in the city’s parks. In place of one newspaper, Rabotnichesko Delo (Worker’s Task), which nobody read, there were many newspapers that everybody was reading. The Byzantine and neo-Byzantine churches—rather than seeming to repose at a fearful, statuesque distance, as in the past—appeared as an organic element of the present, no longer distorting public life, but helping to heal it. Even before Zhivkov’s November 1989 downfall, these churches had always seen a light trickle of supplicants, mainly old people. But now they stirred with activity. Both old and young lined up to purchase beeswax candles. I recall one pretty dark-haired woman, with purple leotards and matching lipstick, kneeling down on the marble floor in a bath of yellow light from the stained-glass windows, and kissing an icon.
Guillermo found me in the lobby. He wore a tasteful brown suit, with a blue pinstriped shirt and a red tie and matching handkerchief. He was sixty-six, but looked younger than ever.
“My dear, I’m sorry I’m late but I’m so busy these days. Robby, I am now a stringer for UPI and, my boy, there is such news in Sofia. We are in a deep economic crisis, Robby. It is worse than the Balkan Wars. At least then we were united against the Serbs and the others. But we Bulgarians are divided. And all they do in Parliament is talk, talk, talk. When will we see some action? Can’t they see the population is waiting for new laws? We have too much democracy now in Bulgaria.…”
I steered Guillermo across the square to the Viennese Café at the Sheraton Hotel, opened since the last time I had visited Sofia, where Guillermo polished off a cappuccino and strawberry shortcake, with large doses of whipped cream.
Guillermo began pulling papers out of his briefcase. He was unstoppable, insisting on reading me, word for word, the last two stories he had filed for UPI, about the fuel shortages and the power struggle between the Communists, who now called themselves “socialists,” and the opposition Union of Democratic Forces (UDF).
“Robby, may I tell you something? These UDF people—do not think that they are such heroes. You think they are former dissidents? Certainly not. Most are the children of the nomenklatura. And all of a sudden they have become democrats. They are opportunists. They scream all the time about the crimes of Zhivkov. That’s all they can talk about. Robby, you know I have always been in my heart a dissident. But we must stop concentrating on the past. And you know who can help us? The king, Simeon.1 He lives in Madrid, but maybe he’ll come back.”
That night we went to the journalists’ club. There, too, the atmosphere had changed. The crowd was much younger than I had remembered it: men in pressed jeans, and attractive women in credible local copies of the latest Italian fashions. Although the table conversations were heated, the feeling of intimacy had vanished. Politics, not personal intrigue, now dominated the discussions. I felt a twinge of nostalgia and of time passing. In a few years or so, I foresaw the club being remodeled: people would smoke less, and the atmosphere would not be altogether different from that of a supper club in Washington, D.C. I also realized what a false and completely selfish perspective this was; for the Bulgarians, such a transformation would, in every respect, be welcomed.
Guillermo mentioned that after forty-five years, he was quitting the Communist—now Socialist—party. The reason: the man the party had just chosen as its new leader, Aleksandar Lilov, was among the Central Committee members who had denounced Boris Temkov that day in 1964, without even knowing him. In the wake of Zhivkov’s downfall, Guillermo told me, Temkov had been released from internal exile and for the first time in twenty-six years was free to return to Sofia. At the BTA, the entire staff had demanded, and secured, the ouster of Boyan Traikov as director. “And the most wonderful thing, Robby, is that after forty-four years the American College, my old alma mater, will be reopened.”
Although it was only October, the weather was freezing and overcast. Rain clouds smudged the sky like candle smoke on an icon. The café where I met Guillermo the next morning, like all the interiors in downtown Sofia apart from the Sheraton Hotel, was unheated. The night before, I had slept curled up under many blankets in the Grand Hotel Bulgaria, able to see my breath in the dark. I was still cold: not the pleasant, temporary cold of the West, where you get warm as soon as going indoors; but the grinding, continuous cold of Eastern Europe, where your stomach and ribs ache from clenching your muscles for hours on end, bent over, trying to keep warm. This was the cold that Bulgarians were gearing up for, as they faced the economic aftershocks of the Gulf crisis—which had begun the previous August when Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait—and the collapse of Communism. Here, as elsewhere in the Balkans, you had to suffer with the others in order to understand.
“This is the most exciting time in our history, but also the most difficult time,” Guillermo told me. “The state security files may not be opened, at least while most of us are alive. Yes, people want to know about the murder of Markov, about the Pope, but there is more to it than that. For forty-five years, Robby, we were under this system. Everybody has a file. All of us at one time or another said this, or that. Robby, believe me, you must believe, I was not like others. I never worked for the DZ [state security]. But maybe, if the files were opened, it will be written that, at such and such a time, your friend Guillermo said such and such a thing that was used against such and such a person.” Guillermo was raising his eyebrows and pulling up his shoulders under his overcoat in an expression of infinite possibilities and levels of interpretation.
“Do you want to set neighbor against neighbor? Nobody wants to open those files. And if they open them, what will they find? Okay, maybe something about the Markov murder, but also something about how this or that bigshot in the UDF was once an informer for the DZ. We will see. But Robby, one thing you must know”—he gripped my arm—“I, Guillermo Angelov, was always a social democrat, an internationalist. I never worked for the DZ.” Guillermo looked worried, paranoid that I might suspect him of something.
The wind rattled the windowpanes of the café. I looked out at the leaden sky and the waves of gilded church domes that defined Sofia’s skyline. I knew that whatever it was that Guillermo might have done, if he had done anything at all, I had long ago forgiven him for it.
* * *
In the blackening twilight, I walked up Boulevard General Zaimov. The globular street lamps had come on only a few minutes before. Now they went out again: another blackout. Due to the fuel shortage, one hour in three there was no electricity. I pushed open a creaky iron door and entered a dark hallway whose gray walls bore graffiti. I walked up the steps and knocked at the door on the second floor. The door opened. In a candle’s flickering shadow was a short woman with straight gray hair and a face that was at once lively and intelligent. A candle in her hand, she led me into the living room, whose windows faced the ghostly horse chestnut trees of a park across the street.
“I’m Vessa. This is my daughter, Anna, and my granddaughter, Vanessa.”
I shook hands with a pretty, dark-haired woman and admired an eighteen-month-old baby that was raising havoc. The room was cold. The partial darkness revealed a few Oriental carpets, some book-lined shelves, and Asian (particularly, Chinese) artifacts. For an author of forty books, Wilfred Burchett hadn’t collected all that much. I thought of the massive libraries I had seen of people who had not accomplished a fraction of Burchett’s literary activity. Like Reed and Bourchier, Burchett had led a gypsy life, living out of a suitcase, collecting friends, not things. Unlike Reed, whose books sold well in his lifetime, and Bourchier, who received a staff salary and pension benefits from The Times (of London) near the end of his life, Burchett really went out on a limb: withdrawing to Communist Bulgaria at age sixty-nine, in order to write a book and work as a freelancer for Bulgarian journals.
Burchett died in 1983, two years after my first visit to Bulgaria. Vessa met her husband during Burchett’s first trip to Bulgaria in 1949, to cover the purge proceedings against Traicho Kostov, a Communist wartime Resistance hero who was executed that year as a “Titoist” spy, only to be posthumously rehabilitated. “I was working at BTA then and was assigned to be Wilfred’s Bulgarian translator. We fell in love. I was expelled from the party for having married a foreign journalist. It was difficult to convince people in the party that Wilfred was not hostile like the other Westerners, but sympathetic to us.”
“How do you think your husband would have reacted to the revolution in Eastern Europe?”
“He would have been fascinated. It’s not true that Wilfred was a Communist. He was not a spy. Deep in his heart, Wilfred was a perestroika man before his time. He once said to me, ‘Vessa, we must admit that the people’s democracies do not work.’”
“Tell me,” Anna broke in, “how is Guillermo, is he still a Communist?” Her tone was mocking.
“I don’t think Guillermo is a Communist,” I said.
“Good, so he has learned.” Anna said that the problem in Bulgaria was that the Communists were still trying to retain power, and what the country needed was capitalism and the return of exiled King Simeon.
The mother shot the daughter a harsh look. “Royalty is the new fad,” Vessa said. In her opinion, the opposition, by refusing to cooperate with the ruling Communists, was responsible for the instability in the country. Burchett’s family was little different from any other: the children had rebelled against the political values of the parents.
The lights went back on as I was preparing to leave. “My father was not a Communist,” Anna said to me in a pleading tone.
“Was his book on Bulgaria ever published?”
“Only in Portuguese, by a Brazilian publisher.”
* * *
On that last trip to Bulgaria in 1990, I set out from Sofia with my backpack to tour some of the country. Unlike in Romania, hitchhiking was impossible here; there were simply too few cars on the road due to the fuel shortage. I took buses instead.
In Kurdzhali, a town not far from the border with Turkey, in a region of Bulgaria that was 80 percent ethnic Turkish, a statue of Georgi Dimitrov, the father of postwar Communist Bulgaria, dominated the park. Dimitrov, haggard and bent over, coat draped over his shoulder, was depicted as an avuncular servant of the people. Behind Dimitrov, as part of the same sculptural unit, stood a series of massive black granite blocks—one on top of the other—meant to signify the modern industrial state that emerged from Dimitrov’s labors. But what these ungainly blocks actually revealed was utter and profane contempt, as if to say: “We can crush you, and there is nothing you can do about it.”
The difference between Burchett and Dimitrov was this, I realized:
Burchett was a man with a rich and profound soul, but he was so driven in his search for heaven that he wound up serving hell, however innocently. Whatever bad there was in Burchett—or in Guillermo, for that matter—was bad only by accident. But with Dimitrov (and with Stalin, too, of course), what was good was good only by accident. Dimitrov’s defense of Communism at the Reichstag fire trial was moral to the extent that what the Nazis were offering was much worse.2 But for the rest of his life, especially as regards the subjugation of Bulgaria, Dimitrov served Stalin’s every wish and whim. Had Hitler not broken his nonaggression pact with Stalin, then Stalin (and his lieutenants such as Dimitrov) would just as readily have divided up Europe with Hitler as with the Western allies.
* * *
“I was going to school in Varna at the time,” a Bulgarian woman I met on that visit to Kurdzhali began telling me.3 “In late 1984, I arrived back in Kurdzhali for my Christmas holiday. Nobody had told me anything. The whole train station was filled with soldiers and militia, in groups of four. Everywhere there were soldiers. The Turkish area of town was completely sealed off. We imagined that terrible things were happening there. We kept quiet. We were afraid. It was the Turks’ problem. It was terrible what happened. But except for changing their names—which now can be changed back—what bad did we Bulgarians do?”
“What about the murders and rapes?” I asked her.
“Yes, there were murders and rapes. That was terrible. But now the Turks have more rights than we Bulgarians have. All you foreigners care about is the Turks. That is the only reason you come here. Now we fear that Turkey will take us over. They are larger than us and have a stronger economy.”
She was right. Turkey, with fifty-five million people, is over six times as populous as Bulgaria. By Western standards, Turkey has a weak economy, with a high inflation rate, and produces low-quality goods. But unlike Bulgaria, Turkey has had a free-market economy for decades. Considering what Bulgarian consumers have been used to under Communism, and what they can now afford, Turkish products—waiting just over the border—may do very well. At the beginning of the last decade of the twentieth century, Turkish businessmen were poised to overrun Bulgaria, and the Turkish economy was poised to engulf the smaller and weaker Bulgarian one. Turkish domination, which the Communists tried so brutally to prevent, was now coming to pass directly as a result of Communism. For decades, Bulgarian Communists played on the hatreds and obsessions of the past, hatching the most outlandish plots and conspiracies, for the sake of avoiding the very fate that they themselves unconsciously had prepared.
* * *
That October of 1990 I traveled through a mountainous land of willows, poplars, cypresses, Balkan firs, and apple trees. I saw scene after rustic scene of intimate tawny beauty. Bulgaria’s particular attraction was that it hovered between the cold and dark climate of Europe and the warmer Mediterranean one of Greece. Its flora was a luxurious combination of both.
I came to Batak: a name that once echoed around the world as My Lai later did. I had long ago promised Guillermo that I would go to Batak. But it wasn’t until late 1990, on my seventh visit to Bulgaria, that I went there.
Batak sat nestled in fog, amid pine, spruce, beech, and fir trees, a collection of houses with red-tiled roofs, high in the alpine grasslands of the Rhodopes, in southern Bulgaria not far from Greece. In April 1876, the Turks decided to set an example here. They unleashed the Bashibazouks—murderous bands of Bulgarians converted to Islam—who burned and hacked to death 5,000 Orthodox Christians, nearly the whole population of Batak. Much of the slaughter occurred inside St. Nedelya’s Church, where J. A. MacGahan of the London Daily News, one of the first observers on the scene, found naked and bloodstained corpses piled three feet deep.
In the museum at Batak, I noticed a clipping from an English newspaper. Because of the way the page was torn, it was impossible to discern either the paper’s, or the writer’s, identity. Dated August 30, 1876, the article attacked the British Prime Minister, Benjamin Disraeli, for stating that reports of Turkish atrocities in Bulgaria had been “grossly exaggerated.” Adopting a cynical tone, the writer says that, in Disraeli’s view, it was no great crime “to kill many thousands,” but it was a greater crime for a newspaper correspondent to say “thirty thousand were killed when in fact it was only twenty-five thousand, or to say that a sackful of human heads was carried and then rolled down the streets of Phillipopoulis (Plovdiv), when in fact the heads were rolled in front of the door of the Italian Consul at Burgas.” I sighed, thinking of countless similar arguments thrown back and forth over the decades across editorial pages, about killings and human rights violations in the Middle East and in other parts of the Third World. To think that, in modern times, it all began here.
I followed the silent, steady stream of visitors into the cold and wintry light of St. Nedelya’s, with its sunken roof and smoke-charred white walls, from which the blood stains of 114 years ago had never been washed away. Under glass, in a marble crypt, with stage lights shining in, lay a vast mountain of skulls and bones. The crowd kept coming: Bulgarians of all ages and walks of life; peasant women wearing kerchiefs, and city people in fancy clothes. No one said a word.
* * *
My last stop in Bulgaria was at the Rila Monastery.4 From the grave site of the late British journalist J. D. Bourchier, the monastery appeared as the archetypal vision of Shangri-la: a rhapsody of warm and sensuous colors, topped by domes, roofs, and a medieval tower, clashing perfectly with the austere, sylvan tones of the landscape. The sunlight shone through dark and towering pine trees as Nadia led me up the hillside. Bands of mist, which made me think of high ideals, floated between the peaks. Everywhere I heard the scream of mountain torrents.
It was Nadia who first made me aware of Bourchier. I met her at the Rila Monastery. She was a scholar of Bulgarian medieval history, living and doing research at the monastery while acting as a guide. “I am not religious,” she told me. “For me, Christ, Mohammed, it makes no difference. But I came here in search of some higher moral authority—a vision—that Communism never offered us in Bulgaria.”
Bourchier’s tomb, an impressive granite slab all alone in a clearing, overlooked the main entrance to the monastery. “I come here every day,” said Nadia. “It is the most beautiful and peaceful place in the area. On a visit here with King Ferdinand, Bourchier fell in love with this spot. He mentioned that this was where he would like to be buried. When Bourchier died [in 1920], King Boris, who was the new king, granted Bourchier his wish. It is called Vallee Bourchier.” The flowers on the tomb were Nadia’s.
Sensing my interest, Nadia led me to her room in the monastery compound, where she had a book about Bourchier’s life.
She took me up steep wooden stairs and down a long gallery, the floorboards creaking beneath me. Then she turned over a large key that opened onto a cold and whitewashed cell: here, I thought, I could blissfully live out my old age, and die.
Sunlight poured through the dusty window onto a wooden table holding an old Cyrillic typewriter. On the floor was a striped Oriental carpet. A colorful peasant cloth covered Nadia’s bed. The room’s two rows of shelves included a handful of illustrated books about iconography and the Orthodox Church. Nadia’s two-month-old kitten crouched inside the bar of sunlight.
It was late autumn at an altitude of 5,000 feet. The room was freezing. Nadia brought me a steaming cup of herbal tea and placed a book with a handsome black binding on my lap. The inside cover bore a stamp that read PROPERTY OF THE AMERICAN COLLEGE OF SOFIA. I looked at the due dates. The last time someone had checked out the book was June 10, 1941. Nadia explained that, when the Communists closed the American College in 1946, many of the books from the college library were brought to the monastery for the monks to protect.
The book was The Life of J. D. Bourchier by Lady Grogan, published in London in 1932. “Bourchier [Nadia pronounced it BOW-cher] was a great friend of Bulgaria. He loved our country as a second home. I can’t believe you don’t know about him.” Nadia smiled and left the big, heavy key on the wooden table. “I must go back to the courtyard now, in case there are any tourists. You can stay here as long as you like to read.”
She closed the door behind her. I glanced out through the window at the lines of spruce and holm oak trees on the steep mountainside. Then I began to read.
James David Bourchier was born in 1850 of an Anglo-Norman-Irish background. He was educated, and later taught, at Eton, where he was plagued by shyness and a realization that he was going deaf. His deafness, noted the biographer, is what saved Bourchier from a life of mediocrity as an unsuccessful schoolmaster. At the age of thirty-eight, unmarried and with few friends, he left for Europe with the notion of becoming a writer. A series of coincidences saw him go to Bucharest in 1888 to write a report for The Times on a peasant rebellion threatening the rule of King Carol I. Bourchier then became The Times’s stringer in the Balkans. At this point his whole personality seems to have undergone a transformation. In new and exotic surroundings, where nobody knew him as Bourchier the shy schoolmaster, and with a new job that forced him into contact with important and interesting people, Bourchier’s shyness was turned inside out: he developed an intense sociability and an empathy for the various ethnic groups he had to report on. “He identified himself in turn with the Cretans or with the Bulgars of Macedonia, or with Greeks or Rumanian peasants,” writes Lady Grogan. The Greek Prime Minister, Eleftherios Venizelos, would later refer to Bourchier as “the friend of Greece,” while King Ferdinand would call him “the friend of Bulgaria.” In 1892, The Times made Bourchier its staff correspondent for the Balkans, a job he held for more than two decades, covering the two Balkan wars and World War I. During that time, Bourchier also wrote the sections on Greece, Bulgaria, and Romania for several editions of the Encyclopedia Britannica. At the end of World War I, Bourchier showed up at various peace conferences as the British champion of Bulgaria’s claim to Macedonia—the same role that Lawrence of Arabia was then performing for the Arabs, but a hopeless task because Bulgaria had sided with the Germans, who had lost the war.
As someone who has always considered himself a late bloomer, I warmed to Bourchier’s recollections of his first journeys through the Balkans, when he was nearly forty: “Ah! the freshness of youth!” he wrote. Bourchier also liked staying at Balkan monasteries, as I did. In Athens, where Bourchier was once the dean of the press corps, I was sure that none of the current journalists had ever heard of him. It had all happened so long ago: the Macedonian guerrilla struggle, the Balkan wars. Yet here in this forest, an attractive, intelligent woman, who could have been doing other things, was keeping alive Bourchier’s flame. If there is such a thing as being in communion with the dead, I felt something akin to it then, after closing the last page of Bourchier’s life story. If anyone could ever have appreciated my feelings toward this lovely little country, I was sure it was he.