Back to Bulgaria: after the grim days of Todor Zhivkov, Bulgaria is now an improbably cheerful venue of post-Communism.

A FEW months ago I was, for the first time since 1948, in Bulgaria, where I once lived for some years, and in whose language I am fluent.

The reason for this fluency lay even further in the past. In 1937 my friend John Blakeway and I were bumming around Europe for eight or ten weeks, including a few days in northeast Bulgaria. When we arrived in Paris I was met and whisked off by my then girlfriend. John, left alone, saw some students begging in the gutter in the Rue de la Sorbonne. Pretty broke himself, he joined them. They turned out to be Bulgarians, and we soon became very friendly with them, in particular with Ivan Ranchev (little guessing that this friendship would be renewed in Bulgaria, where John would eventually join us, and from which Ivan would eventually escape).

Some years later I was briefly acting as adjutant at my regiment's Infantry Training Center. A War Office circular asked for officers to learn certain languages. One was Bulgarian. I put in for this. A few weeks later my colonel roared: "What's all this about your going on a four-month course?"

"You remember, sir, you signed it."

The School of Slavonic Studies was a wonderful working holiday after years of service in an infantry battalion--cut short when they sent me and another good Bulgarian-absorber to Italy for Balkan operations.

I was flown into Bulgaria from Bari in a Dakota in the late summer of 1944. I recall considerable fright when our escort belatedly made rendezvous: they had told us that it would be Spitfires, but in fact it was Mustangs, and their square-cut wings looked Messerschmitt to us. However all went well; and I was based in Bulgaria for some three and a half years.

THIS TIME, I arrived by Lufthansa.

I had written to Ilya Kovachev, an old friend from that earlier period, but he hadn't received the letter. In my first television interview, I asked after him. At my main lecture (partly in Bulgarian) at the Palace of Culture, he turned up. For several days he and my wife and I went round together. Liddie photographed us in front of the statue of Tsar Alexander II--the Tsar Liberator--where we had been photographed together in 1944 (as reproduced in the U.S. Humanities magazine, May-June 1992).

Liddie also photographed me a few yards further on, pointing to a large poster advertising "Mis Toples-Shou 1993," with a subtitle to be translated as "new type monokini." This was outside a fine Victorian house formerly owned by the rich Yablanski-Panitza family. In 1945, they rented out most of it to the British Military and Political Mission, as a dormitory and clubhouse for us. I well remember "Dimi" Panitza, then 12 or 13 (I knew him years later as head of the Reader's Digest office in Paris, the family having long since escaped). The house was now the Chinese Embassy. Panitza, however, had come back and was applying for its return.

Nearby in the Alexander Nevsky Cathedral, I stood on the very spot where I had stood with the British ambassador ("minister" in those days) at the New Year's Mass in 1946. We had formed three-quarters of a hollow square (no seats): on the left the diplomatic corps, at the center the government, on the right the generals. The Exarch came to each group in turn and harangued them on their duties. My chief then turned to me and muttered: "Now they start cawing like crows." Not a bad description of the Orthodox chants, though I find them moving enough. I learned a useful parody: even in my voice it conjures up ancient rites:

Pop Stavrei pieshe ezhednevno

po edno bure bira priblizitelno--priblizitelno,

priblizitelno,

priblizitelno, pri-bli-zii-tel-nooo

(Priest Stavrei drank daily one barrel

of beer approx-i-mately--approximately,

approximately, etc.)

"Pop" of course carries a tone of overfamiliarity not to be found in "priest," for which there is also a more formal word.

Stefan I (Exarch, because the Bulgarian Orthodox Church was still then in schism) was a large, impressive figure, often met in Sofia. Indeed, a few hours later Liddie and I were standing on or near the spot in the reception room at the British Embassy where, nearly fifty years ago, I would say to the magnificent figure in his robes and his high white miter with a cross of pearls, "Martini or Manhattan, Your Beatitude?"

The veteran dragoman at the Embassy and I recognize each other and chat briefly. Then on to an editorial meeting at the leading literary weekly: a mass of tobacco smoke and good talk. One older member of the editorial board remembers from years ago and quotes a translation into Bulgarian that Ivan and I had made of "when I came home on Friday night as pissed as I could be"--one of half a dozen such projections of English culture, of which the most successful was a version of "They're digging up grandpa's grave."

Such events have been put in hand by Alex Alexiev, the Bulgarian-American scholar, and the actual arrangements are in the competent hands of Velislava Grutkova, in part on behalf of the New University, a small but booming alternative to other higher education. Our car and driver (also totally reliable and calmly friendly) are provided by the legendary Soros Foundation, launched by the West's most understanding and successful operator in Eastern Europe.

A woman who worked as a translator in our 1940s press office gives a splendid dinner for us--professors, the Agrarian leader, others. She herself has been years in jail: once for trying to escape, once as a "parasite"--that is, being unable to get anyone to risk giving her a job on her release.

It is with such experiences in mind that I later read Julian Barnes's novel The Porcupine. It is set in an unnamed Balkan country, but in fact--with only a few gestures to other backgrounds--in Bulgaria, where Barnes was on a visit during the crisis of the regime.

Barnes handles some of the local color, and much else, rather well. But the main theme of the novel is the trial of the former Communist dictator, Petkanov, and especially his defense that it was all done in the higher interests of the Party, and that the prosecutor had himself been a privileged beneficiary of the regime. The latter, moreover, finds it difficult to prove the accusations in strict accordance with the legal system, and falls back on emotional harangues.

It is in the nature of things that few of those who went through the totalitarian phase survived wholly unsullied. Our admiration for the true dissidents must be unstinted. But few are capable (is Barnes? am I?) of such supreme commitment. Moreover, in the absence of a free atmosphere, independent thinking often came only gradually. Charges of taking benefits from the Communists have been leveled against Vaclav Havel himself.

More striking yet, although "Petkanov" is bitter and contemptuous about Gorbachev, Honecker, Ceausescu, and the rest for their disloyalty to the Communist idea, the actual Bulgarian leader was no exception. Indeed Zhivkov, after his fall, said clearly that for years he and his colleagues had lost all real belief in the system. I know that Barnes's book is, in effect, a morality play, and want mainly to insist that its Bulgarian accoutrements fit badly. But more generally, too, the defense "I did it in what I feel to be a good cause" is of psychological or dramatic but not essential significance: as another novelist, Vasily Grossman, has written, Nazis defended Auschwitz on the same grounds.

One of Zhivkov's not so far "proven" crimes was the celebrated case of the writer Georgi Markov, killed in London with poison implanted by the stab of an umbrella. I had spoken with Markov, who had earlier been the white hope of Communist literature, a year or two before his death, and he told me that he knew himself to be in particularly bad odor because of his firsthand accounts of Zhivkov over the BBC. These included his telling how Zhivkov, his host at the former royal chalet at Cham-koria, had said to him in awed tones, "Tonight you will sleep in the bed of a king!"

On this trip, my wife and I stayed a couple of days in Zhivkov's former hunting lodge near the Macedonian border. It is a fine example of Communist bad taste: massive chandeliers, marble, huge oak tables, ill-fitting doors. The long lily ponds doubled as carefully deployed emergency trenches in case of trouble.

We also had Zhivkov's ex-royal box at the opera in Sofia. Our hotel, the Sheraton-Balkan, is expensive. However, we got opera tickets there for twenty dollars, which included limousine and an attendant who served champagne and caviar between scenes, in the little salon behind, also pointing out the special escape hatch Zhivkov had built. Bulgarian opera has always had a high reputation. I used to meet its singers in London at the house of my escaped friend Pashanko Dimitrov. (Pashanko, himself a musician, had actually committed the offense the secret police had arrested him for--an attempt to blow up a statue of Stalin. Working in the swamps in the notorious labor camp at Belene eventually led to his losing the use of his legs.)

As to the Sheraton--Balkan: I have stayed in five hotels in St. Petersburg and five in Moscow, others in East Berlin, in Tbilisi, and so on, and even the best of them does not compare with this Bulgarian effort. The staff are incomparably more cooperative and efficient, in a relaxed way, than any of their equivalents. Like other Slavs, the Bulgarians have the expression "Angliska tochnost," "English punctuality," meaning merely "punctuality." But, generally speaking, these and others we encountered were, in this sense, pretty Anglicized.

Outside there are still the exotic, well-remembered scenes--gypsy beggars, groups of Pomak strummers and singers. The Pomak are ethnically and linguistically Bulgarian Moslems (equivalent to the Bosnians in ex-Yugoslavia). I recall a Bulgar song in which a young man tells his mother how he longs to go "beyond Etropole," to see the beautiful "white Pomakini, the pale Boshnakini."

A few hundred yards away, there is a school opposite my old, not at all fashionable, flat. Liddie notes how much healthier the children look than in Russia; and says the same about the quality of shoes seen round town. Even so, the Communists have run the economy, and the ecology, into the ground. Talleyrand's remark, "It is worse than a crime, it is a mistake," might in a sense apply to the Stalinist regimes: but, as Boris Pasternak noted, the immensity of the crimes was in part due to the need to cover up the immensity of the mistakes.

Bulgaria has learned from these mistakes, as it did earlier from its three disastrous efforts to gain an ostensibly justifiable ethnic frontier. This cumulative defeat has left almost all Bulgarians accepting the reasonably fair status quo. There is little more wish to regain territories once occupied, or even the strip of Bulgarian villages to the north of the White Sea (as the Aegean is called in these languages), than there is in France for the Channel Islands.

Macedonia is another question. As Bulgarian leaders said to me, the last thing they want is trouble, but if the fighting spreads it would be hard to let that country go under. Meanwhile, in foreign affairs Bulgaria is an island of sanity in the Balkans.

IN A RECENT column Richard Reeves spoke of millions of people from Poland to Bulgaria who hate capitalism. This is based on the current electoral successes of ex-Communist politicians. Its particle of truth is that many people do resent the new rich, as they did the old priviligentsia. Its fallacy is that this implies anticapitalism as such. In Bulgaria, as in Poland, Lithuania, and elsewhere, the ex-Communist parties have long since purged their ideologues and have shed Marxism. However reluctantly, they all accept reform and the market system. They differ in principle from the more democratic parties only on questions of method and--in particular--timing: they want a slower tempo, and a large measure of state cushioning of the impact on employment: measures which are temporarily, but only temporarily, more "socialist" than bigbang programs; and (more vaguely) they want, some for know-nothing rather than socialist reasons, to maintain some state ownership.

As interest groups, the ex-Communist parties now represent established management, old bureaucrats, and the heads of non-viable industries. All the same, the government has gone ahead with privatization comparatively quickly. There are still great tensions in the Bulgarian political leadership, but so far at least they have not been as virulent as might be expected in a country emerging "from under the rubble." And for every person who "hates capitalism" there are a thousand who hate socialism.

One Bulgarian deputy laments to me: "We do not have experienced politicians": I answer that experience is not the whole solution, if one looks at the Bush, Major, and other Western administrations of recent years.

The Bulgarian political scene is not all that edifying. All the same, it is vastly superior to the position in Rumania or Serbia.

AT THE OLD Kliment Okhrid University, we just miss the presentation of an honorary doctorate to George Soros. As in most universities, there are narrow corridors with endless notice boards and reams of announcements. It comes as a slight shock to see among them the meeting time and place of a student branch of IMRO, the Internal Macedonian Revolutionary Organization, which was the most feared terrorist organization in the world sixty years ago. Now IMRO, or a section of it, is the leading political party in Macedonia.

Macedonian is far closer to Bulgarian than to any other tongue. The Macedonian "od nashiot ubav krai" ("from our beautiful region") would in Bulgarian be "ot nashiya hubav krai." Indeed Bulgarian dialects are about as deviant, as with the Shopski (Sofia basin) "Stani tizi yaz da sednem" (Stand up so that I can sit down), which in pure Bulgarian would be "Stani ti az da sedna"--a great psychological distillation too.

MY BULGARIAN remains good. Out in the mountains, our driver refers to a "taralezh," evidently some kind of animal. After ten minutes it all comes back--it means "hedgehog," "Kato ezh, ama po-maluk" ("like a porcupine only smaller"), I say.

"Tochno" ("exactly").

Not bad after four decades with a word I had probably never used.

We pass through villages of a type seen everywhere from Bosnia all along the mountain stretch through Turkey and the Caucasus to Afghanistan. Red-tiled houses on little torrents, peppers drying on the terraces, an air of self-reliance.

This is as we turn off from the Struma valley into the wilder country; ahead of us is the highest peak in the Balkans, for a time called Mount Stalin but now again Musala--the Kiss of God. It slips out of sight as we head into the ravines and valleys which lead to the Rila Monastery--the isolated and well-bastioned center which did much to keep Bulgarian culture alive under the Turks. The paintings outside its central church continue to show "the terrifying crudities of Hell." Inside the only surprise and novelty is the as yet incomplete tomb already inscribed for Tsar Boris III, who died "mysteriously" not long after disobeying Hitler in 1943.

THERE is now a major Boris III Avenue in Sofia. The former Georgi Dimitrov Avenue (named for the "father of Bulgarian Communism") is now once more named for Boris's sister, Princess Maria Luisa.

In my time there were receptions at the palace, with ballet at which one was seated at a table with wine and snacks--marvelous. We were once presented to King Simeon, a babe in arms, just before the declaration of a republic. Recently I found my name as one of two honorary members of the board of the Bulgarian-American Cultural Association. The other (quite unexpectedly) was "Simeon Saks-Koburg-Gotski--businessman": this latter description apparently a concession to republican emigres, though I am told that he has now withdrawn.

There were no titles in Bulgaria, apart from members of the royal family. Under the Turks the leading figures, comparatively rich merchants, were known as chorbadzhii--soupers (i.e., givers of soup to the poor). The word is Turkish in both parts--chorba is soup; and the "dzhi" ending is common in Turkish. The oddest usage, from a century and more ago, is the word "comitadji," as it is usually spelt in English, a guerrilla operating in unliberated territory: meaning simply committeeman--i.e., of the revolutionary committee.

In the first decade of the century, young men would spend their summer holidays crossing the Turkish border as comitadji. When I lived there, friends would not seldom have an old photograph of their father with such a group of his student colleagues, looking just like properly posed Western rowing or cricket teams of the period except that, instead of oars or bats, they held old-fashioned rifles.

It might be expected that the Bulgarians would harbor hostile feelings to their former imperialist oppressor. But this is hardly to be found; and any xenophobia is more often directed at Greeks, or Serbs.

Bulgaria does not now have bad ethnic problems. The Turks are numerous in the northeast, but there was little animus toward them or from them until, a decade or so ago, the Zhivkov government suddenly introduced anti-Turkish measures, abolishing their names, confiscating property, and so on--and created a hitherto nonexistent problem. This was quite nasty for a time, but has now calmed down. In fact Turkish deputies often hold the balance in the Sobranye (parliament), not always with ideal results.

Besides, most Bulgarians regard as a special spice to their language the many Turkish words which have drifted in. The commonest imprecations are Turkish, including the universal "ay siktir" and its variants, which would mean (to a Bulgar) "f---you," or "f--- off."

In general, Bulgarian history has seen a fair amount of political fanaticism, but little of the racial or religious varieties. The country's refusal to deport its Jews was unique in Nazi-dominated Europe, and in part due to the strong intervention of the Exarch. Senator Moynihan has rightly pointed out in his Pandaemonium that in the old pre-totalitarian days minorities lived all over Eastern Europe, often persecuted but not extirpated or expelled. The new Nazi-Stalinist type of ethnic cleansing was never to take hold in an already comparatively tolerant Bulgaria.

Opposite the old palace is the tomb of Georgi Dimitrov, an ugly concrete half-cube, which was the Bulgarian equivalent of the Lenin mausoleum in Moscow. Now it is abandoned--no use could be found for it, since the interior proved too cramped for a proposed cultural center. Its outer walls were covered with spray-painted graffiti of two types: obscene remarks and advertisements for rock bands.

I had met Georgi Dimitrov occasionally at diplomatic receptions, and we once had a conversation with no one else present. Quite late at night Dimitrov, then prime minister but also temporarily in charge of foreign affairs, received me, heard my complaints about an article slandering a British officer killed in action with the partisans, and ordered an apology, which appeared the next day: a rare moment to set against much villainy.

CLOSED down by the pro-German regime, the old "American College" (in fact high school) at Simeonovo just outside Sofia is reopening. It was alma mater to a large number of Bulgaria's best, including Ivan and Ilya--who was arrested in what would have been an American College Alumni Trial, though this was abandoned after Stalin's death.

Now an American University proper has opened in Blagoevgrad, some hours to the southwest. I speak to a student audience--in English, since this is the place's official language. The trustees have taken over a huge and ornate palace, with patios, fountains, and columns, the former Party headquarters for a small province. A Bulgarian writer I had previously met in New York gives us dinner at the nicest place in the town, with a beautiful outlook over the Struma and toward the Pirin mountains. The hospitality is splendid, the room low-ceilinged and wooden-walled, the food very tolerable, the pop music (as ever) pretty intolerable. Liddie suggests, as the title for a rather sinister short story, "The Best Restaurant in Blagoevgrad."

THE BULGARIANS, as a nation, have no "identity problem." They spend little time seeking legitimation from others. They can joke about their communal self-centeredness: "There is nothing higher than Vitosha, there is nothing deeper than the Isker, there is nowhere further than Sofia"--and do remember to pronounce it SO-fia, not So-FEE-ya.

I remember Ivan Ranchev telling me how, when he was at the American College, they had a pen-friend letter from the United States, asking about their life--did they have electricity, and so on. He and his friends dressed in loincloths, got the local blacksmith to act as teacher, and posed with him and a blackboard in a barn full of hay--sending this as a classroom picture to their correspondent. He also recalled how comically pleased they were when they heard a forgotten (at least by me) song of the Twenties: "Oh how I love Bulgarians. They can jump, they can jump very high."

On the other side of the coin, I got a surprised and happy burst of laughter when, in the peroration of my speech at the Palace of Culture, I quoted a Bulgarian song I'd known from the 1940s: "Az sum moma Anglichanka, izmamenna ot lyubov"--"I am an English maiden, who's been deceived by love"; my point being that, sympathize as we might in this case, there were other less innocent Westerners who had been deceived by Stalin, and merited no such sympathy.

Paul Johnson, after a visit this year, wrote warmly of the friendly and open ways of the Bulgarians--though since he or his editor at the Spectator subtitled the piece "Gay Bulgaria," I wrote him a spoof thank-you letter in Bulgarian allegedly from a Sofia homosexual organization, with the note "Have luck for M-R Conquest, speaks Bulgarian, to transpose to English." Bulgarians, incidentally, though their name is the etymological basis for our word "bugger," appear less so inclined than their neighbors to the south, though tolerant enough--the senior Regent was accepted as one in my days there.

BULGARIANS were long slandered in the West as the one, exceptional, pro-Soviet people in Eastern Europe. There was never anything in this, as one got weary of pointing out. The notion was based on supposed Bulgarian gratitude to Moscow for liberating the country. But first of all, they didn't liberate it--Bulgaria was already at war with Germany, and all German troops had gone, when the Soviets (till then not at war with Bulgaria) came in.

More significant, even after the original Russian liberation of the country in 1876, Bulgaria had within a decade become antipathetic to its liberator. Russia was accused of trying to set up a "Transdanubian Province." Russian military advisors were withdrawn, and the raw Bulgarian army left alone to face a Russian-initiated Serbian invasion--which they defeated at the Battle of Slivnitsa, the venue of Bernard Shaw's Arms and the Man.

It is true that Russian literature and culture were and are much valued. So were French literature and culture in Britain through the Napoleonic and other wars.

As to culture in the broadest sense, Bulgarians point out that the Cyrillic alphabet was invented in this area, and that Bulgarian is the more "advanced" language, the nouns being almost wholly devoid of cases--a good point especially for speakers of English. On the other hand the Bulgarian verbal system is more complex than the Russian, with a style of auxiliary verbs also rather like English.

The Bulgarian and Russian languages are close, but not all that close. A linguistically genuine story of the 1940s has a Russian soldier handing a Bulgarian shopkeeper money and saying (in Russian), "Give me bread"; in Bulgarian this means, "Give me your bride." The shopkeeper hands him back his money and says (in Bulgarian), "Put it in your pocket"; in Russian this means "Stuff it up your arse."

In any case, the Communization over 1944-48 was bitterly fought by the anti-fascist democratic opposition. The Agrarian leader and Vice Premier in the first pro-Allied cabinet, Nikolai Petkov, who had been in concentration camp under the pro-German regimes, was the one opposition leader in all Eastern Europe to be sentenced to death. Petkov, as strong-minded as he was thoroughly decent, is now rightly honored while his persecutors are disgraced.

As to Communist popularity, the only people to have been deceived, and to propagate that deception, were (as usual) cretinous Westerners. I remember the visit to Sofia of the "Red Dean"--Hewlett Johnson, Dean of Canterbury, author of perhaps the most degraded of all pre-war pro-Soviet books, The Socialist Sixth of the World, a best-seller both in Britain and in the United States. Overpowering vanity was his most obvious trait. (He was very annoyed when Ilya described him in a newspaper story as "Dean of Canterbridge University": English titles and appointments always confuse foreign writers.)

The contempt in which Westerners like the Dean are held in the Communist countries is of course extreme. Not yet wholly extinct, this sort of mental distortion is, one hopes, moribund. It was one of the minor horrors which the Soviet-bloc nations have survived, to face a long and troubled reconstruction of their economies, polities, ecologies--their very nationhood. Among them the Bulgarians are among the most praiseworthy both internally and on the international stage.

We'll be going back.