I left these gay, intelligent and hospitable people with regret. Their gaiety concealed the apprehension in their lives; their cynicism was the mask of courage. Though many of them are pestered and working themselves to death under bad conditions, they brighten at the growing signs of a better life, and they know how to live. I promised to return and it is one of the countries I would like very much to go back to. But it is always with a feeling of relief that the traveller leaves these places, picks up his first Western paper on the international plane and knows he does not have to worry about what he says and about getting people into trouble with the police. One is excited once more to see the brilliant lights of Austria, Germany, Belgium and Holland come up under the wings of the plane. The trim red roofs of the Austrian cities, the green Danube coiling, look reassuring when one has left the land of anxiety.
5
Bulgaria
In the last afternoon hours of the flight from Vienna eastward over the rusting Austrian forests, Europe looked emptier. Even a large town on the Danube—was it Nis?—seemed tiny. High mountain ranges rose about us and this gives the illusion that the plane is trudging a lonely course over them and is going slower. We passed into darkness, then the moon rose, and when the lights of Sofia appeared after a couple of hours they suggested a scattered city of deserted countrified streets. Again delusion: Sofia is small, modern and compact.
We were on the last flight of the day and when we arrived we sat freezing in the airport bus for an hour while they closed the airport and the staff got aboard. Some flighty Arab traveller tried a few jokes with the stout Bulgarian women of the airport but was soon silenced by these ladies. It was very late when I got into my hotel, the Balkan. The autumn air was hard and frosty. This hotel was vast and sumptuous and almost empty. It took me some time to understand that when a Bulgarian shakes his head in a negative movement he means “Yes” and the up and down nod means “No”. There was nothing to read but official booklets. No one came into the bar except an occasional pair of Lufthansa pilots, who played the juke-box and drank caraway-flavoured gin.
Another oddity of life in Bulgaria is linguistic. A large number of people have a smattering of German, a hang-over from the war and from pre-war contacts with Germany; a few speak French; very young employees sometimes speak excellent English. The oddity is that quite a few of them speak Spanish. I am not sure why. In the dining-room at The Balkan, two men at the next table, a Bulgarian and a very polished Spaniard, were discussing in Castilian how thoroughly well the Communists were now organised in the Spanish vineyards.
These dining-room scenes in the satellite countries are always interesting. At the Balkan there was an English engineer who was putting in the equipment for the new television station and who complained that he was always followed by spies and had angrily made a fuss with the authorities. They denied that he was followed. There was a Fernandel-like Bulgarian who gave lavish dinner parties. His gaiety vanished when he saw the bill and his face went through every expression of anxiety, impatience, disclaimer, self-satisfaction, until, with inexpressible relief, he got the receipt he could show to the accounts department at his office. Many people ordered tea, which came in pretty little pots. I ordered a glass of wine and was asked if I wanted 200 grammes.
There was a pestiferous Romanian who worked the hotels, drawing portraits. “They are great art,” he said. Two terrible pictures of moonlight over the Black Sea saddened the dining-room. In a cafeteria nearby people wrapped up in jerseys or leather jackets listened to old-fashioned French tunes on the wireless. Haunting the hotel for several days was an elegant American woman who was collecting folk music: she was excited by the fine choral singing in the country.
In the autumn mornings there is a freezing white fog which creeps over Sofia until eleven o’clock. I used to watch the scene from the hotel. On one side of the square was the Greek Orthodox Church, its bells very noisy at sundown ; on the other a Turkish Mosque and the baths ; near them the new big store called Zoum, a crowded low-class emporium of shoddy goods. I had to join a queue to buy a notebook. The shirts and socks were poor; all textiles were scarce; shoes for children had not existed for a fortnight. The press was very angry about this.
Outside was a model of a new “People’s Car”, not for sale, which was admired by groups of men all day. By now perhaps the motor age has arrived, but when I was there Sofia was almost without cars and, but for the crowded old-fashioned trams which start running at about five in the morning, the city was beautifully quiet. Ponies and mules trotted by, drawing rubber-tyred carts with loads of bricks and timber. Outside the block of flats, wood was being sawn up against the winter. Men were hammering away in the coopers’ yards; peppers were hanging to dry on the walls. One often sees the sheepskin jacket and the thonged leather slippers with pointed toes, worn (I believe) in Macedonia.
But modern life intervenes in the peasant mixture: pedestrian crossings had been marked out and the police were in force obliging the people to use them—an abstract exercise. Old peasant women were experts at feigning deafness at the sound of the police whistles. Communist countries are like schools: the population is trained and like schoolchildren have their own ways of getting round authority. There was a meat shortage in Sofia when I was there, due (it was said) to the export of meat to Turkey, but the better-off Bulgarians got their meat by tipping the butcher—in short, the British rationing system. Some of the windows of Zoum were painted over in white: this indicates a store-room for cloth, and the gossip was that cloth costing 200 leva in the shops could be had at 60 by members of the Party.
Life for the mass of people was an ingenious battle for things and some private trade is still permitted in the country markets. A quick-thinking professor I was with one day bought lemons off a private dealer in the market at Plovdiv to resell at a very high price in Sofia! At the Palace of Justice there is always a crowd of people, many of them peasants, who have gone there to settle the disputes that arise from the bonus system on which wages are paid on the collective farms.
A large amount of time is spent by the population in finding their way, legally, illegally or semi-legally in a system which is difficult enough for the planners, but often mysterious for the planned. A British Communist who had settled in Bulgaria said that sixty per cent or even more of the population were opposed to the system, but they were learning to live with it. Why not? Human beings are ingenious and the conditions of life were improving. In Western Europe there is general ignorance of Bulgaria. The only knowledgeable people I found in London before I went were a few British Communists who had discovered the attractions of the country, its wild landscape, its charming towns and its good red wine.
There is an underlying elation in Bulgarian life even though the mass of the people may be merely acquiescent in Communism. The elation goes back to the nineteenth century. Bulgaria is only eighty-eight years old—all the Balkan states are “young”. The regard for Russia is rooted in history, for the Russians liberated Bulgaria from the Turks in the ’70s, though complete legal freedom dates only from 1908. So the break with the past which Communist countries insist on really occurred long before the last war, indeed in the nineteenth century and, since the Turkish hegemony was long, the Bulgarians still feel the exhilaration of national freedom.
As in Poland and Hungary the strongest feeling is national, and to the Bulgarians there is the additional stimulus of having obtained religious freedom—though oddly they are not a religious people. The general temperament has been sceptical for centuries. The Moslems were oppressors and the Greek Orthodox Church, which has always been the custodian of national culture in Greece, was hostile to the cultural revival of Bulgaria, which indeed prospered because it was anti-Greek. There were never any great feudal estates outside of a few owned by the monasteries; the peasants have lived for generations on eighteen-acre holdings. It was common in some parts of the country to find the Zadruga, or house community, in which several dozen people lived in family groups
and worked together on one farm.
When the white fog lifts and the morning sparkles one aealises that Sofia is a mountain city. It is 1700 feet sbove sea-level. Thickly wooded mountains and flashing snow peaks look down on it. The heat is violent in the rummer, there is a very vivid, long, warm autumn and the winter is severe. Sofia is an exhilarating and pretty place of dozens of parks and gardens. There are fine avenues of poplars, the tallest I have seen in Europe. At the beginning of the century it was a very provincial place of 80,000 inhabitants; now it has 600,000. One comes across many middle-aged people who can remember when the centre of the city was a warren of unpaved lanes with horses neighing and cattle lowing in them. The war caused great damage, but that has been repaired. One has the impression of a place built of stone. Some of the main streets are paved with a pleasant yellowish and glazed cobblestone that seems to bring the sunlight to one’s feet. The main roads that run out of the city are planted with mile after mile of roses—for this is the country of the attar of roses. They grow in beds under the acacias in the towns.
The pace of life is slow. The crowds in the street were solemn and well wrapped up against the cold; it was a homely peasant crowd. But I soon found myself among more interesting company. The country is not rich and the office worker often works in modest premises and the officials were, on the whole, shabby. They reminded me of the Portuguese—hairy people with heavy eyebrows and strong proud faces, obliging, lively, candid, sceptical men of considerable lazy dignity; the women plain, inelegant but spontaneous, good-natured and affectionate. The city dwellers are not highly paid and they have to work hard.
On my first Sunday I was alone. There was a tram station near the hotel where hundreds of people were queueing for the trams, fighting their way to the ticket window. I joined the fight. There we all were, soldiers, peasants, hikers, the Bulgarian crowd. I had been told to get the tram up to the pretty village of Boyana in the mountains and to visit a little church which had fine thirteenth-century murals. The Bulgarians love walking, camping, going to the mountains ; they love country life. They put on their rucksacks, pick up their sticks and start off. I got on to the tram. Later I had to change into one of those old mountain trams where you hang on to the step as best you can.
“Boyana? Boyana?” I shouted.
Immediately a strong arm pulled me and a heavy shoulder butted me aboard. We were all jammed chest to chest. The puller spoke a little German. When I said I came from London, several voices exclaimed with delight, “B.B.C.” The friendly memory of the wartime broadcasts of the B.B.C. is strong all over Europe. Another man struggled through the squash towards me and started kissing me and—when we had more room—hugging me too. In between kisses he shouted in German to the whole tram-load of us, “All men are brothers, all over the world.” It was his only German sentence. In ten minutes the two of them forced me off the tram, kissed and hugged me now freely in the street, and took me to their house. For the rest of the afternoon I was their miracle and show-piece, gazed at, even stroked. At one moment they danced round me. I am sixty years old, grey and very bald. I mention my age because I found myself venerated because of it.
Our talk was hardly conversation, but like a game of cards with nouns for trumps in French, German and English. One of the men was a printer, sharp and intense, the other a very thin emotional innocent, a lithographer, he said, “in six colours”. They lived in part of a patched-up villa, with broken railings. The poorly furnished sitting-room had two iron beds in it, also a stove and a sink. A very sick young man, a relation, was there eating a sad little mess of food in tomato sauce. In the entrance porch was another bed. The pretty wife of one of them stood stiff with astonishment, gazing, with her little girl hiding her head in her mother’s skirt. Presently the woman brought glasses of water for us on a tin tray and a little bowl of cherry preserve.
“Taste it. Drink it,” they both shouted. “The water of the Balkan. It is the best water in the world.”
For Balkan is the general name for mountain, as well as being the name of one of the great mountain ranges of this country. It was beautiful water. Afterwards, people in Sofia were always saying: “Have you drunk our water? What do you think of it?” I became an addict. I have never tasted water like it, except in Spain. Our palates have been corrupted by the chemically-treated and so-called “pure” water of our cities.
We sat stammering, knee to knee.
“How much does a printer earn in London?”
“Here,” they said, “800 leva a month.” (Say £30 at the tourist rate of exchange, but that has no real meaning.)
“It is very little,” the sharper one said. “But here we have a special system,” he said with a mixture of wonder and enthusiasm. “It is called the Communist system. Are you a capitalist?”
“Yes,” I said.
The simpler of the two listened painfully. He had a set of steel teeth which gave him an artificial and ferocious look. He had the flat face of a Byzantine saint. He didn’t understand a word we were saying: he uttered his chorus:
“All men are brothers. All over the world.”
Every time our nouns and infinitives failed and we were reduced to the pathos of dumb animals, he started up ecstatically: “All men are brothers.” It was rather fine. Then he would give me another kiss and we were all laughing. We left the house and went, climbing and climbing, with the crowds of Sunday hikers into the golden trees. The printers shouted to passers-by about their capture. People stopped to talk to us. The Bulgarians are very gregarious.
“Walk between us,” they said. “You are older than we are and we wish to show you respect. How old are you?”
I told them.
“Do you know how old he is?” they shouted to passers-by. “He is an Englishman. He is sixty.”
“If you are as old as that,” the sharp one said, “do not walk so fast.”
“So you are really a capitalist!” the sharper one repeated.
“Yes,” I said. “I must be. I own a £1 share in a company.”
He explained again to his friend with the steel teeth, who hugged my shoulders and laughed into my eyes.
“All men are brothers!” he shouted. “All over the world.”
Travel soon turns one into a figure of ridicule.
From Boyana there is a superb view of the immense valley that opens in the clear air below the mountains of Vitosha. The distant city stands out hard pink and white rather like Madrid and at this time of the year the turning leaves of the trees were fiery. The little church at Boyana is hidden under trees. It is a tiny place of three chapels, the oldest part built in the eleventh century with a nave six yards long and a central cupola. Another chapel was added in the thirteenth century and yet another in the nineteenth. But the frescoes are the thing. They date from the thirteenth century. They anticipate the beginning of the Italian Renaissance by several decades. The chief portraits are of Kaloyan the feudal lord who built the middle chapel and his bride, and the artist has broken away from the austere canons of Byzantine art. Bulgaria is rich in religious painting.
The printers had often seen the frescoes and pointed out their beauties again and again. Presently an English-speaking couple joined us—and explained in detail to the printers who I was and what I did. It was a little sad to see they felt they had lost something of their miracle now it could be explained to them. We all walked back down the rough mountain road together. The last sunflowers were seeding, the maize stalks stood in the gardens and, lower down, the fields of strawberries began.
That night I went to the opera. There are four opera companies in Bulgaria and in this genre the Bulgarians excel, for they are fine singers. The best are trained in Italy and are known all over Europe. Unluckily the best singers were in Vienna at this time, but it was not the fault of the performers that I found War and Peace rather dull. It is a patriotic work and it ends with tremendous mass-singing by the Partisans of the Napoleonic campaign, for the theme of the Partisan—though wearing thin in t
he eyes of the younger generation in Bulgaria— was still popular. This opera is good picture-book stuff and rather more like a Spanish Zarzuela than grand opera.
I had fallen into intellectual company by now. I had made friends with a personable and cheerful young man who enjoyed life. He spoke excellent English and had just finished translating the whole of Shelley into Bulgarian—one line of Shelley, he said, took two lines of Bulgarian. I have often seen him in London since: he was considering translating Paradise Lostl He was not a Party member, but he was a strong Marxist. He reminded me of the English Marxists of the ’thirties. He was very emphatic about the Oriental character of Bulgarian life: Asia and Turkey cast their light on it. If he had been less loyal in his politics he would have had to admit that Greek influence had been strong.
“It is no joke being a writer under Communism,” he said when we first met. “One is always being ordered to entertain and educate some foreign visitor. You never get any time to yourself.”
At the Writers’ or Journalists’ Unions one talks over a glass or two of raspberry brandy. One talks, but feels embarrassed by meetings which can have no intimacy. One eminent historical novelist in an official position made a vehement propaganda speech reciting the increases in production in everything from fertilisers upwards and announced that whereas Calabrian recruits for the Italian army were all illiterate, in Bulgaria sixty per cent of the recruits had received secondary education. The sales of serious Bulgarian and foreign literature are, of course, very large indeed. He was a bulky man with a fine rugged head, bold nose and bushy eyebrows and sly humorous eyes, very much the old novelist with a trilogy behind him and admired (I found) because he was “a true Bulgarian type”, very sceptical under his domineering assurance.
Foreign Faces Page 8
