By Witold Szabłowski, from Dancing Bears, a book of reportage that will be published next month by Penguin Books. Szabłowski is a journalist. Translated from the Polish by Antonia Lloyd-Jones.

Gyorgy Marinov hides his face in his right hand, and with his left taps the ash from his cigarette onto the ground, which in the village of Dryanovets is a deep brown color that passes here and there into black. We’re sitting outside his house, which is coated in gray plaster. Marinov is a little over seventy, but he’s not bent double yet, although in Dryanovets, a village in…