Barbarian in the garden of memory

On the occasion of five years since Vera Mutafchieva's death

She was conceived in the mountains, under the open sky. She likes to be outside, near the sea, to be blown by the wind. When the weather is nice – it’s time to walk on air. If she finds herself in an unknown city, she looks for the highest place, climbs, watches from a bird’s eye view. She can’t stand a garment on herself at all, especially if it’s woolen. She remembers that as a child she ran naked on the streets of the Opalchenski quarter [the soldiers, opalchentsi, of the Bulgarian voluntary army units, who took part in the Russo-Turkish War of 1877–1878, were granted plots in the suburbs of Sofia to build there their homes; one of them was Mutafchieva’s grandfather – translator’s note]. The first time – an unseen attraction, the second – someone catches the child and tries to talk to her. However, she pursed her lips, stood speechless. Her forehead is horned, her posture – of a tough guy, from her eyes flows a serene sullenness. “God, why did I gave birth to a savage!” her mother shouted every time before beating her up. The naked child, born in 1929, is called Vera. More often, however, it is called Bochka - abbreviated from ‘Zhabochka’, the diminutive of Frog. The nickname was invented by her father, the historian Petar Mutafchiev. In the home of this strict professor, however, tender emotions were not the norm. Education was the norm. Music lessons, drawing lessons, and most of all foreign language lessons, of course, with foreign educators – the wild child must become a tame citizen of the world. Only the tongues did go well, though in fits and starts. The elderly Vera will write that on the threshold of puberty, when the OF [popular abbreviation for Fatherland Front] authorities liquidated foreign language teaching in the country, she was a ‘multilingual illiterate’. In what pedagogy fails, history often succeeds. However, it chamfers roughly. In May 1943 Petar Mutafchiev died. In January 1944, the Allies dropped thousands of bombs on Sofia. Vera set for northern Bulgaria with her mother and younger brother Boyan. In those years, however, the village did not provoke in the urban people a thought of pleasant rest and wildness. Here they mostly survive, in a hostile environment. While her mother sews and introduces the villagers to the miracle of the bra, Vera tries to teach French. The lessons are a complete failure, and to make up for it she shows reasonable success in manual labor, which she summarizes with the word ‘dig’ (henceforth she will refer to every hard work – physical and mental – as digging). In the countryside, she gradually became an ex-townsgirl. When she returned to Sofia after September 9, 1944, she would find that she had fallen into the category of the so-called ‘Former people’. Completely submissive to the Red Army, the new communist government imposed on Bulgaria a climate of national nihilism. Everything Bulgarian must be viewed unfavourably on – as if being decelerated Soviet. The Bulgarians who remained in Macedonia were officially called Macedonians, and those in northern Dobrudja – Romanians. Because Petar Mutafchiev defended the ideal of state unity of all Bulgarians, he was declared a ‘panbulgarian chauvinist’. Although he fought for his country in three wars, he was declared an ‘enemy of the people’. His books were banned, some of his students started an open war against his views – in order to make a career, they debunk the ‘mutafchievshchina’. What the historian has struggled with all his life heaped up on his memory: damnatio memoriae. He must be disgraced and forgotten. In such circumstances, whether due to jinx or out of a sense of duty to her father, Vera dedicates her future to memory. She enrolled to study history – at the Faculty of History of Sofia University, that not long before had been headed by Peter Mutafchiev. Thus, the training of her social memory will long become a test of her personal memory. She will endure the insults of her father’s work on a daily basis. She will swallow the untruths about her father every day. She will learn on her back every day that objectivity and betrayal of the past sometimes go hand in hand. On the field of wild historical revanchism, however, her sullenness helps more than Mutafchiev’s patrician dignity. In 1951, Vera graduated with honors in history. She will follow her father’s mighty shadow with small and measured steps. People like her – in the political jargon of the time called the ‘non-partisan bastard’ – did not have easy access to government work, let alone state historiography. However, their access is not completely forbidden, the condition is to remain invisible while working in favor of party careerists. After a dream, Vera is as if enchanted by the beauty of Arabic writing. So she decided to venture into Ottoman studies – both almost invisible because in the 1950s few were interested in the history of the Ottoman period, and almost free because party historians made careers elsewhere. Intuition did not mislead her. Only four years after graduating as a historian, Vera became a PhD student in Ottoman history at the Bulgarian Academy of Sciences. For more than 40 years she will work in various institutes of the Academy. Vera’s ability to adapt seems amazing. But even more astonishing is her ability to sabotage her conformism. This applies to both her personal and professional life. If she got married, she would divorce soon after. If she embarked on a historical thesis, she would soon deviate from it, because she had already embarked on another. In the early 1960s, for example, she tried to reconcile the facts of the Ottoman tax system with what Marx and Engels had said about feudalism. The result of this attempt was not sound in her eyes but awakened a desire to stray from order into disorder. Her next topic was the period of anarchy that occurred in the Balkans in the late eighteenth century – the ‘Kirdzhali time’. But while collecting documents for the Kirdzhalis, a desire came to her to peek into their souls as well. Thus, in 1965, her first novel was born – the first volume of the Chronicle of the Troubled Time. The novel became an event: the Bulgarians which were immersed in the stagnant waters of the Soviet swamp were won over by those human whirlwind that had overthrown the mighty Ottoman state. Two years after the publication of the Chronicle, Vera has already created a new novel. The Cem Case (1967) became a favorite book of many. Readers in Bulgaria and the socialist countries where the novel has been translated easily recognized as their own Cem’s desire to connect the East with the West, some of them sniffing the Orient for the first time to travel then through Europe accompanying the sorrowful Ottoman prince. As for Vera’s longings, she seemed to describe the wandering fate of Cem Sultan out of grief for her brother, who emigrated to the West. The only way to follow him and watch over him was through Cem’s faithful friend, the poet Saadi. In the care of memory, the love of life seems to have spoken quite naturally, and in the dead facts of the past – the today’s desires and fears. The trained chronicler, who shakes his head skeptically and usually does not believe when change is talked about, has tried to believe in change, to think and act as if he does not know the past and lives only in the present. “The barbarian can make history, but he can’t write it”, says Constantine Pogonatos in the novel Predicted by Paganne (1980). Vera Mutafchieva, it turns out, has found a way to be wiser than her wise hero. The barbarian who lives with her has somehow become an assistant to the historian. But if a barbarian can become a historian’s assistant, can a historian also become a barbarian’s assistant? In 2008, the Dossier Disclosure Commission announced that in January 1969, Vera Mutafchieva had been recruited as a DS agent and had cooperated with the services for almost twenty years. After 1989, her file was destroyed for unknown reasons. She herself does not talk about the case in her autobiography, she does not give answers in 2008. The only statement I know about her relations with the State Security is in a memoir of the writer Georgi Grozdev, published on the Internet. “They just came”, she would tell him. It is clear what “they just came” means: non-partisan, divorced with two children, daughter of an enemy of the people, sister of a ‘non-returnee’, talented writer who wants to see her books published, a person with gushing vitality, Vera is an ideal object for socialist policy to induce people through fear and temptation. However, it is not clear why, after 1989, she, who will organize the publication of documents on communist repression of memory, remained silent about the greatest repression of her own memory. Maybe out of a desire to save her age the anxiety of a confession, maybe out of shame. And perhaps, in spite of her long existence in historiography, she believed that inside any person a special being has always lived, who is untouchable by historical circumstances and therefore elusive to the memory and pen of the historian. In my opinion, Vera saw this non-historical creature in herself one morning in 1949 in Ruse. Here is what she says in the second volume of NonFables (Bivalitsi): She was arrested for being in a hotel with a man she was not married with. She is accused of being a prostitute, and spent the whole night in the militia. She was rescued by one of the policemen on duty, a good-natured former student of her father. So at dawn she walks around the city garden. A ragged old man was standing in one place, a falcon was tied to the man’s arm with a thick rope, and a crowd had gathered around the falcon. The man pestered the falcon, hoping the crowd would drop a penny into his hat. Disgusted by the people, Vera stares at the bird. The falcon is young, bluish steel in color, polished and smooth. His eyes are bright, not blinking. His inwardness radiates austere inviolability and freedom. What is happening around him does not affect him. “I have never met a creature so instructive with its dignity” concludes Vera. Georgi Gochev * The text was published in Dnevnik newspaper on June 10, 2014: http://www.dnevnik.bg/analizi/2014/06/10/2319395_varvarin_v_gradinata_na_pametta/