As the changing names of the countries suggest, the uprootings in this family, as in numberless others, were triggered by cataclysmic historical forces: the fall of the Ottoman and Austro-Hungarian Empires, decolonisation, and the rise of Balkan nation-states; the Balkan Wars (1912–13) and the two world wars; the Cold War, its end, and globalisation.
In a more personal sense, this pattern of serial flight reminds me that the desire to travel, explore and indeed escape, has been with me since early childhood. Or even before – in the womb, I revolved ceaselessly, and emerged from my mother nearly suffocated by the umbilical cord which I had tied into a knot. Drawn early on to stories of adventure and the high seas, I longed for some place that would set me free – from the pressure cooker that was our small flat, from school with its compulsory patriotic parades, from the low-level oppressiveness that was indistinguishable from home and homeland. I longed for freedom before I knew what freedom meant, or who I was.
My maternal grandmother Anastassia longed for it too, or she longed for something at any rate. She was in my life for thirteen years, the last five of which she was ill with breast cancer. I loved her fiercely. She was in her fifties when she sickened. Although she wore a wig and put on lipstick, terrible things were happening under her clothes. She was also losing her sight. I sometimes read to her, as she had read to me. It was in my grandparents’ flat in Sofia that I read my first book, aged five, with the blue outline of a mountain framed in the window.
My grandmother had an iconic book containing the lyrics of hundreds of folk songs. It was the work of two folklorists and linguists known as the Miladinov Brothers who had travelled across the Macedonian and Bulgarian lands – that is, the southern Balkans – in the mid-nineteenth century and gathered an epic collection of folk songs. The brothers were from Struga, a lake town not far from my grandmother’s town of Ohrid, eponymous with the Lake. She told me their story, and I noticed that like all ‘our’ stories, it ended with brutal injustice but was retrospectively redeemed by the power of its ideal – freedom through learning and education. But the main point here was that the younger brother, a lyrical poet, wrote a poem called ‘Longing for the South’, T’ga za yug. It was inspired by his native lake while he was studying in cold, faraway Moscow.
Does the sun rise darkly there
As it rises darkly here?
To subsequent generations, this poem became symbolic of the Lake, of exile and loss, of some indefinable sorrow that was to do with Macedonia, with ‘our places’, with the Balkans and the South. It sat deep in our bones, like weather. Significantly, the word t’ga means simultaneously ‘longing’ and ‘sorrow’.
Its last lines are:
There [by the lake] I’d sit, I’d play my flute a while.
The sun would set, I’d sweetly die.
To sweetly die. This was one of my first contacts with poetry. Already I felt the presence of something heavy and tangled in the atmosphere around me, something emanating from my mother who was an extension of my grandmother who had come from the Lake. How did she come to be here (urban and incomplete), yet often talked of there (watery and complete), where her family remained and where they spoke slightly differently from us, as if speaking an old dialect, but looked the same as us. There was a hard border between us. I’d often become absorbed in a heavy Soviet atlas of the world, where our Soviet world appeared in pink, and where you could see the geodesic features of faraway lands. On the main centrefold page, Europe appeared as a messy tangle of interbleeding colours, cramped and weighed down with multiple meanings.
Official history said that our southern neighbours were not the same as us, they were other – historically, they were agents of perfidy (the Greeks) and tyranny (the Turks). We, on the other hand, were long-suffering martyrs, passionate, poetic, unjustly wronged. But my grandparents’ neighbours across the landing, the Vassilopoulovs, were not at all other. The mother, who was Bulgarian, beat her daughters and locked them out on the landing, and the father, who was Greek, tried to intercede. He was connected with what was mysteriously called ‘the events in Greece’. My father, a university professor, had a Greek student I fancied. As to the Turks – my grandmother’s years with a Turkish landlady in Ohrid were fondly remembered, and my father had grown up with much-loved Turkish neighbours. Besides, the poem mentioned Istanbul as one of ‘our places’. Moscow, on the other hand, and contrary to what we were told officially, was not one of our places. True, the poem was over a century old and things had changed, but its heavy mood of separation and yearning resonated strongly, as if untouched by time.
On my grandparents’ round living-room table covered by a fringed velvet cloth was a jar with pebbles from the Lake. They were smooth pebbles like any others, pink and white, but they were also talismanic objects that brought with them the breeze of a lighter, more spacious world.
Anastassia is a Greek name meaning Resurrection. With a girl’s instinct, I could tell that my grandmother had been a great spirit as well as a beauty, a combination that had visited this family only twice in living memory: in Anastassia and in her beloved niece Tatjana who had just died of a brain tumour in Ohrid, aged thirty-six.
In the last years of her life, it was difficult to be around my grandmother. In Communist Bulgaria there were no hospices, and you relied on the mercy of family. Demanding by nature, my grandmother became downright tyrannical towards her husband and her daughter, who couldn’t do enough even as she was doing too much: sewing clothes that had to be just so, organising birthday gatherings, because Anastassia had always been a proud hostess. In her suffering, my grandmother seemed to want life to be spoiled for her loved ones too, a favourite expression for the women in the family.
Meanwhile, the little pleasures still available to my mother, she denied herself. My mother couldn’t eat in the terrible last few months of my grandmother’s life, and became hollowed out by infections, a shadow ready to join her mother in the underworld. And if my mother died, I’d have to die too, because we were the same person. We had the same feelings and the same views. I mirrored her every move, sensed her every mood, mopped up every overspill of emotion, anxious to see her smile. By age ten, I spoke in my mother’s grave voice and had her drawn face. I blamed our unhappiness on my father, twisting my natural love for him out of shape. Like my grandfather, he was outnumbered, held to account daily, and trying to atone for some unspecified failure. The emotional accounts were perpetually out of balance.
There is an abiding memory from those years. My mother and I sat on the bus home, after a visit to my grandparents at the foot of the blue mountain. From the bus window, we waved to them up on their seventh-floor balcony, tiny figures. But my grandmother was turned in the wrong direction because she couldn’t see – and my grandfather gently redirected her wave. I waved and smiled. My mother was crying and I started crying with her.
She had done her best to protect me, I had done my best to protect her, but there it was – the loss couldn’t be stopped. We were holding on to each other, keeping our heads above water, like those frescoes in Orthodox churches where the damned are drowning in a fiery soup, only their heads showing. And though we lived in a strictly atheist culture and I had never learned the word Damnation, I felt it bodily. By the age of ten, I was writing poems full of wrenching departures at train stations, doomed longings and nevermores. As if someone else was writing them through me.
It was not so much my grandmother dying – I could accept extinction, children do – it was the intolerable pain of parting I sensed in my mother. My mother said that she’d always lived in fear of something happening to her parents. I lived with the same fear. In the late Sofia summer in the year of the Chernobyl explosion, we bid goodbye to Anastassia. Among the red-gold leaves blown by the wind is my mother, a shadow dressed in diaphanous purple-black. A strong gust could sweep her away, like a leaf. She always felt to me precariously attached to life, as if born rootless, as if needing an external force to earth her.
T
he following summer I came down with an autoimmune disease, and spent weeks in a run-down hospital with blocked toilets where I wrote poetry, translated Baudelaire’s Les Fleurs du Mal, and Longed for the South. My father was away on a fellowship, and my mother came every day, through dusty public traffic, after work as a data analyst, to bring me food she’d cooked at home and take me for slow walks in the hospital grounds. Although there was a Roma boy in the hospital I fancied, when I looked at the poems recently I was startled to see that they were addressed to my mother. Startling too was my discovery of love letters written by Grandmother Anastassia – beautifully worded, full of yearning to merge with the beloved, of seeing the beloved’s green eyes and silken hair in the sea, in the sky. The sun would set, I’d sweetly die. They are addressed to her teenaged daughter.
Though I wanted to read the whole box of mother–daughter letters, I couldn’t bear to go on. These romantic sentiments, the lover-like intensity that consumed her, were very familiar to me: they had travelled down to me undiluted, as had the need to express them through language. My grandmother wrote poems for the birthdays of family and friends and I still have a poem she wrote for my tenth birthday, five lines for the five letters of my name, even though by then she could not type and could barely see; she had dictated it to my grandfather. A journalist and scriptwriter for the Programme for Bulgarians Abroad – something like the BBC World Service but in a Communist context – her voice carried on the waves like a spell.
‘Dear compatriots,’ her seductive alto would begin. ‘This song is for you.’
And some wrenching tune would reach for the heart-strings of the Bulgarian diaspora around the world. Of course, many of them could not return because they were blacklisted political émigrés. On occasion, I visited her in Radio Sofia’s Bauhaus building. I’d wait at the security guard’s kiosk in the main hall and look at the wall mosaic. It was in the shape of a proletarian sunburst, or perhaps a map of Bulgaria, but it also looked like Marx and Engels in profile, and Lenin, because they often appeared as a threesome. Then she would burst out of the elevator like the first day of summer. She occupied all the available space and had an uninhibited laugh that spread out in waves. Surrounded by the mediocrity, conformity and mendacity that a totalitarian system thrives on, Anastassia lived with zest, speaking her mind in a society where half the population didn’t have a mind and the other half were careful to keep it to themselves.
Before she became her illness, she was like Demeter the goddess of harvests, the source of all things bountiful and delicious: shelves filled with books, a wardrobe of leather and fur coats which my grandfather procured for her from the state industry where he worked as head accountant. But then she got too sick to wear them. I brought one with me to Scotland though I’ve never worn it. It looks like the skin of a selkie, the mythical Northern creature who sheds her seal skin to assume human form on land and marry, but is destined to return to her watery home.
I have tried to reproduce my grandmother’s recipes. The stuffed spinach filo with hand-pulled pastry, the baked lamb with yogurt called Elbasan tava; the imam bayaldi, aubergine roasts. You know what it means in Turkish? It means ‘the imam has overeaten’. And like the imam, we overate together. Sometimes we slept together too, my grandfather abandoned next door. She ate to excess, smoked heavily, felt deeply, and what she found pleasurable was driven to a point of exquisite pain. Neutrality was not an option. Her health, like her emotions, was unstable long before the cancer, and my mother’s has been labile too. I followed suit: as I became a woman, an all-pervasive malaise took hold of me. I didn’t know how to feel good. In late adolescence, as we started a new life in New Zealand, I spiralled into anxiety, bringing every experience to a low point. If my parents went away, I imagined them in a fatal crash and drove myself into pre-emptive distress. I harshly judged myself and everyone else for perceived imperfections. Literature saved me from total self-destruction. Then my mother was dragged down by a raging depression that she projected onto her loved ones. After all, it was up to us to make her happy. When I look back, I see that my grandmother, my mother and I were taking turns in a pre-scripted drama. Though we tried to protect ourselves and each other from some unnamed menace, the protection didn’t work. If anything, it seemed to attract the very thing it professed to ward off. Something pulled us down and compelled us to be unwell. The patients alternated, but the illness remained.
In childhood photographs with my grandmother, we have our hands on each other, proprietorially. The same in photos of her with my mother, a generation earlier, and with her nieces in Ohrid, the Lake behind them: you are an extension of me. But also: don’t ever let me go.
Who do you love more, Mum or Dad? went the treacherous question adults asked you. Grandma or Grandad? Grandma or Mum? Secretly, I loved boys. Before I was ten, sensing my interest, Grandmother Anastassia warned me: never go with a boy who has the feet of a peasant or – I forget the rest, but there was a list which signalled that she didn’t want me to enjoy boys at all. Not without her, for I was the apple of her eye. To be the apple of her eye felt like being irradiated. It made you glow, and it also made you tired. You wanted to close the door. But she had the key to the door.
Somewhere inside her was an abyss that could not be filled. It seemed to have its origins in Macedonia and the Lake. It’s as if she was more than one person, a whole nation of souls, a clamorous hinterland of back-story. She carried some original matrix where the land masses were still moving, the fault lines stirred under the surface, the water level rose and fell, something was out of sync and could not be reconciled.
In my childhood, the family in Yugoslavia sent us a 3-D card of a blue lake and a town on a hill. Different aspects of the scene were revealed as you moved the card. It was compelling. I could do this for ages, enchanted by the blue of the lake – big as a sea – and the possibilities it represented. It was not clear why my grandmother had abandoned such a magical place. Why she had left behind her loved ones. But now you are my loved ones, she said. It was up to us loved ones to make her happy.
‘I live between two worlds,’ she said. ‘When I’m in Ohrid I long for Sofia. When I’m in Sofia, I long for Ohrid.’
She always longed for something, so did my mother, and so did I. To be a woman was to lament an absence, a fault, an imminent loss. In short, to be in pain. Early on, I was certain that I didn’t want to be anybody’s mother or wife. I wanted to travel to distant lands, not to the school gates again; to live and die in peace, not surrounded by family. But some things follow us wherever we go.
The water dream began visiting me in late adolescence, shortly after our family arrived in the Pacific and just as Yugoslavia began to break up. In the dream, I watch a vast body of water rise on the horizon. I need to run but something is holding me back. I must bear witness. Now the water engulfs the shore, then buildings, electricity pylons, and people. Extinct species float in it. The mountains are ancient like pyramids, but they too are sinking. These are the waters of the Earth, immemorially old – and disturbed. They engulf the known world. My heart pounding, I swim through the wreckage, looking for those still alive, trying to help.
In Jungian psychology, water is the collective unconscious, and the calamity presaged in this dream does feel impersonal. I don’t like this dream and want it to cease, but it has become only more frequent in the last years.
Three years after Grandmother Anastassia’s death, in the oppressive summer of 1989, we travelled to Lake Ohrid: my parents, my younger sister, me, and my grandfather dapper in his suit. There was a sense that something was unravelling. In retrospect, that thing was our two countries, though at the time, it felt as if it was our family. With Anastassia and her niece Tatjana gone, it would never be the same. There was an awkward visit to a man with two sons: Tatjana’s widower and boys, my second cousins. There were silences and Yugoslav chocolates wrapped in gold foil, melting in the heat. My fascination with Tatjana’s tragic trio felt like love. Fifteen and a vir
gin, I already understood the whole thing about sex and death. The Lake welled up with ripening figs and unbearable yearning. All my life, I’d be drawn to people and places that are damaged.
My grandmother’s family had owned orchards for as far back as was remembered. Her father’s family name was Bahchevandjiev, the Gardeners (from the Persian for garden, bahcha). Now my sister and I too were taken to see some peach orchards still owned by our uncles. That was the Lake – southern, bountiful, decadent, full of light, and also of a malaise that could not be named. A few years later, Yugoslavia lay in ruins. For the first time, Macedonia became the name of a fully independent nation-state. Of all the ex-Yugoslav republics, she escaped without a single shot being fired on her territory, though the war began with the mob murder of a Macedonian teenager whose ill fate had been to man a tank of the Yugoslav People’s Army (JNA) in Split. When recruiters for the JNA came calling at Ohrid homes to seek volunteers, a surprise lay in store: ‘Not here’ was the answer at every door. Seeing which way the wind was blowing, the families of Ohrid’s young men had dispatched their sons abroad, to relatives in other towns, or to the cellar. Fresh trouble came knocking on doors later, a year after the Kosovo War, when the violence spilled into Macedonia. And once again: ‘Not here’, came the answer.
Macedonia of the Lake had no taste for war. She had a way of surviving by the skin of her teeth.
Soon after that visit to the Lake, we emigrated to New Zealand. My parents put down firm roots there. My sister and I tried to do the same, but eventually I left New Zealand at the age of thirty to settle in Scotland and she did the same in Switzerland. But as life finally became easier for our family and the struggle of multiple emigration abated, of starting from zero over and over again in new places where they can’t spell your name, peace became perversely elusive. Whenever we got together, something was twisted out of shape, brought to a painful point, and all our energy went into fixing it. Reunions became a crisis to be survived.
To the Lake Page 2