Repetitive overwhelming states don’t always need a current object, it transpires: in transgenerational psychology, this is seen as a result of unprocessed trauma and is known as ‘time collapse’, which is how it feels. Time collapses. My mother stands in ruins – again – and I run to her. I’d listen to her bitter lament and weep with her as if we were freshly bereaved. Sigmund Freud called the masochistic compulsion to re-enact painful experiences ‘diabolical’, because it takes us away from life, and that’s how it is: in such moments, you are just surviving. This draining cycle was repeated long enough so that eventually I stopped playing my part and began to draw boundaries for self-preservation. My mother and I grew apart. The no-woman’s-land between us lay barren. Time after time, as in a nightmare, I looked into her eyes and saw not my mother but a mask out of an ancient tragedy.
Thirty years after my grandmother’s death, and shortly before I embarked on this journey, I was grappling with a health crisis featuring mysterious widespread pain and fatigue. Like the dream of rising water, it felt oddly impersonal. As if I had tapped into a pool of negative energy and it was transmitting its waves to me for reasons I couldn’t fathom. I felt the presence of universal death. But I slowly healed myself. Looking back, I am certain that had I not experienced this waterlogged night of the soul, I might not have had the courage of desperation which took me to the Lake.
Around the same time, my mother was struck down with an incurable disease. One of the symptoms was a severe neuralgia, which she called the pain, and soon it was The Pain. Overnight, my parents’ lives were subsumed by it. It became the only thing there was. Yes, something was rising like a dark wave, time after time, trying to make itself known beyond any doubt, a shape-shifting presence that felt ancient. It had never been properly challenged, and with my mother’s diagnosis it was promoted to legitimate member of the family. But by now, I was so sick of it all – the expression suddenly made sense – I could take no more. I just wanted it all to cease.
On my last visit to my parents in Auckland, I found it more suffocating than usual to be in the house with my mother. No doctors or healers could relieve The Pain, it was resilient and narcissistic, and had taken over her whole being. I had the same oppressive sensation I’d had around my grandmother: of subversive subterranean forces disfiguring a landscape. It brought to mind James Hutton’s geological insight, in the mid-1700s, into how erosion, sedimentation and deposition had occurred over vast aeons beyond human comprehension: with ‘no vestige of a beginning, no prospect of an end’. A chilling thought.
Not for the first time, I had the urge to just walk away. But I knew I couldn’t do that, and anyway walking away wouldn’t be enough. Under the Antipodean sun which my mother avoided, as ever, behind closed shutters, I saw it starkly: unless I understood why the two women I had loved and who’d had so much going for them (including caring husbands) had become tragic Furies, why we were martyrs to an unknown cause – I was next in line. The mask lurked behind my own face.
When I wave goodbye to my parents at the departure gates in Auckland and they stand there, still together after fifty years – my spectral mother folded in on The Pain, my stocky father propping her up – I wave and smile. My mother’s face is collapsed, my father’s eyes bright with tears but he is smiling for courage: two people who mean more to me than can be put into words because it precedes language. Soon we’ll be oceans apart. Wave and smile. It is only once I pass through the gates that I cry.
I have travelled to distant lands. I have made my bid for freedom. Yet here I am, by the Lake, looking for answers.
PART ONE
SPRING
Ochrida [sic] hangs on a hillside, and trails along the shores of a lake that half Europe would flock to see were it not in this distressful country – a lake of surpassing beauty, second to none for wild splendour. The purple-and-silver glory of its snow-capped mountains fades into a mauve haze beyond the dazzle of its crystal waters. Its awful magnificence grips the imagination, and in mad moments awakes a thrill of sympathy for the unknown men who painfully hewed out tiny chapels in its flanking cliffs, and lived and died alone above its magic waters. There were times when I should not have been surprised to hear the white Vila of the ballads shriek from the mountains.
Edith Durham, 1903
MACEDONIAN GIRL
Over the Alps we flew, over Adriatic islands of all sizes and shapes, and over the highlands of Albania which rose quickly from the river-flats of the coast – mountain upon mountain, the hide of the land like hard-worn velvet. Rivers thickened and thinned into canyons and the roads ribboned between ridges lost in snow and cloud. The sun set over the blackening folds, a mythical landscape. Then suddenly, the blue light of the Lake.
Lake Ohrid is one of those places of the earth that make you feel as if something fateful awaits you. As if you were always meant to come and you can’t believe it’s taken you so long. When the lake appeared below, the whole plane went quiet.
It was not the tourist season yet, and aside from the wife of the British ambassador to Skopje and a few visitors, most passengers were chatty Macedonian and Albanian expats on a visit home. At the time, the former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia was on the brink of civil meltdown. The newly elected prime minister and his cabinet had been attacked and injured in Parliament by rioters, some of whom were members of the outgoing government. The country had been in a political deadlock for two years, and everything had ground to a halt. The Pope was ‘praying for Macedonia’, and when the Pope starts praying for someone or something, you know it’s bad.
I looked at the faces on the flight – the women’s warm complexions, the men’s homely round features. Is this how civil meltdown begins? One moment you’re chatting and snacking, the next moment you’re attacking the person beside you with a plastic knife. The person beside me was an Albanian hydro-engineer who had lived in London for twenty years. He was travelling with his elderly parents; they would take a taxi from Ohrid to the border crossing, where their car was waiting, and then on to Tirana. He too was worried, not about conflict but about the ‘bottomless’ corruption in Albanian and Macedonian politics that sabotaged progress.
‘Politics is supposed to make life better,’ he said. ‘In the Balkans, it makes life worse. It’s a tradition. Otherwise, we’re rich,’ he said. ‘Look at this water!’
At the small airport, men with tanned faces pressed at the exit hustling for business, not a woman in sight. You could be arriving in the Middle East. I was dunked in a genotype soup: all the men looked like my cousins.
I picked a driver with a nice smile and we pulled away from the terminal. This former military airport was named after the apostle Paul, the first reminder that we had landed right on the Via Egnatia – Paul had been one of the travellers on the antique road. And along the potholed road into town, which closely shadowed the Egnatia, we passed the St Erasmus cave church – a memento of another traveller from the Jordanian desert with a message.
Then mile after mile of orchards that were wild, effulgent. And it was only May.
‘Bavchas,’ the taxi driver said, gardens. Yes, I remembered them.
The lakeside flatlands on the outskirts of Ohrid looked the same as they had in the 1980s to me, and in the 1860s to a German writer: ‘a giant abandoned garden’.
We entered the new town at the foot of the hill – though nothing was ‘new’ here. The first interesting thing I noticed was the thin white minaret of a small neighbourhood mosque from the Middle Ages. There was the scent of wood smoke. The evening call to prayer began: ‘Allahu Akbaaar’, a dusty, nasal Oriental chant of piercing melancholy. Half an hour later, the musical ringing of church bells carried down from the gated town on the hill. It was an Ohridian tradition, the taxi driver said. The mosque and the church took turns, they never clashed.
‘Because we live in peace. If only politicians stopped hounding us.’
We climbed the winding road to the Upper Gate of the old town dominated by the rebu
ilt fortress of Tsar Samuil, also known as the kalé, Turkish for fort. For centuries following Samuil’s dramatic end in the early eleventh century, rulers speaking diverse languages and wearing different headdresses had their residences up here.
We entered the inner town and its steep cobbled lanes ill suited to cars. Half-Levant with its blue lake views and shuttered windows, half-Balkan with its jutting wood-clad upper storeys and lush gardens, the gated town’s spirit had endured. It was a spirit of stoicism and stubborn self-regard. The inner town was known as varosh, as opposed to the outer town, mesokastro, and the varosh looked down its nose at the mesokastro – to this day.
For a time, Greek was the official language here because the Greek Episcopalian Church dominated Ottoman Macedonia from 1767 until the mid-nineteenth century, pushing out the Ohrid archbishopric; but the millennial Slavonic influence kept asserting itself until it prevailed again, in a culture war a thousand years old. Confusingly, mesokastro didn’t actually mean ‘outer’, but ‘inner’ – which suggests that whoever coined it was either dyslexic or not fluent in Greek. But then again, one man’s inner town is another’s outer.
A medieval-looking gate was still attached to the Upper Gate, and the taxi drove through it: a massive wooden slab panelled in wrought iron and studded with links like chain mail. In the olden days, the Upper Gate was open only on Mondays, market day still. In times of plague, the gate would be closed and movement discontinued till further notice. The wealthier Muslim families in the lower town would pack up their households and go to sit out the plague at the houses of Christian friends inside the gates.
Meanwhile, at the Lower Gate by the lake, travellers and returnees from long journeys were stopped and quarantined in two small interlinked churches: Virgin Mary Bolnichka and St Nicholas Bolnichki had been medical stations in the shape of churches. Hence their names – Virgin Mary and St Nicholas of the Ailing. When later I looked at the lifelike medieval faces in the sepulchral frescoes, they gazed back with expressions that can only be described as healing. Dozens of secret-holding churches dotted the lanes of the old town, tucked away in gardens, camouflaged as small houses. The Church of the Holy Virgin Perivlepta, ‘Most Glorious’, with a magnificent panorama over the lake, has been the single continuously functioning church of the Ohrid diocese for a thousand years. It used to have residential quarters for those suffering from ‘melancholy’.
The plague was anthropomorphised as the female Panukla (Greek for plague), who knocked on doors with deathly knuckles. The Panukla entered the house of such and such, people would say, and shudder. When things got really bad and the Panukla wouldn’t leave, the old-town residents would conduct a procession down to the lake.
‘St Clement, our golden one!’ went the plea, ‘Deliver us from the Panukla.’
The priests carried large, long-handled icons of Clement, Naum (pronounced Nah-oom) and the Virgin Mary, typically double-sided so that a saint always faced the plague. The earliest-surviving processional icon, kept in the gallery of the Holy Virgin Perivlepta, dates from 1045 and depicts an Asiatic-eyed Basil the Great of Cappadocia on one side and St Nicholas the protector of fishermen on the other, the latter much needed by the people of the lake. The Muslims took part in these processions too, over the centuries, for the medieval monks Clement and Naum had less to do with monotheism than with talismanic protection.
Ailing and healing was clearly a motif of the lake.
The owners of Villa Ohrid where I’d booked a ground-floor flat with a garden looked familiar – but then everybody looked familiar here. After a brief exchange with my hosts, it turned out that we were in fact related. This was the nature of the town.
A man in the garden below was hacking off the branches of a plum tree with a vindictiveness out of place on such a peaceful evening, until almost nothing was left except the trunk, because – he said – it cast a shadow.
It cast a shadow.
My hosts’ daughter was working in Dubai, her mother sighed. Because the young go wherever they can get a visa, she said, and the rest of us stay here and rent out our houses to visitors. Tourism had become the main livelihood.
The outskirts of Ohrid once buzzed with some of Yugoslavia’s biggest industries – the iconic Zastava Automobiles among them – and overall, manufacturing employed tens of thousands. All of that collapsed in the 1990s when the era of shady privatisation and mafia barons arrived, furthered by war profiteering for some and war embargoes for the rest, as Yugoslavia combusted. A brain-drain that had begun in the 1980s intensified at the turn of the century as the Kosovo conflict spilled across the border, and has been accelerated in the last decade by a cynical, corrosive culture of extreme party politics. In one generation, Ohrid has lost fifty per cent of its population. One of my cousins, a doctor, recently moved to Germany after being dismissed from his hospital job here for failing to turn up for the obligatory ruling-party parades. Party loyalty was what made or unmade you.
Time after time, I heard people say ‘it’s worse than Tito’. The general state of morale and culture was worn thin by years of ruthless nepotism, kleptocracy, and grandiose ethno-nationalistic propaganda. The outgoing government had bankrupted the small country. Instead of renovating the waterworks of Ohrid, which were badly in need of investment, they had built gilded statues of Alexander the Great and turned the centre of Skopje into an internationally derided monument to gangster baroque. Some locals were so ashamed of what had been done, they stopped visiting the capital.
The Gladiator Restaurant in my street, above the antique theatre, had just opened for the season. When night fell, out came the dog walkers and the drunken philosophers, and after their dogs had pissed on the giant stone steps, they sat under the lime trees dripping with blossom and the still-green fig trees, and opened beers.
I ordered imam bayaldi and a Macedonian salad, although with the emotion of actually being here I could barely swallow. Seeing my notebook, the waiter asked if I was a writer.
‘It’s unusual to meet writers nowadays,’ he said gravely. He looked about twenty. ‘Regretfully, young people in this country don’t read.’
He wrote poetry, and we agreed that whoever had literature in their lives would be fine (though clearly it wasn’t true). I was the only customer, apart from a Dutch trio. There was something going on with the Dutch – great numbers of them visited the Lake, year after year. It turned out that they were drawn here by a cult Dutch novella set in 1930s Ohrid, The Wedding of the Seven Gypsies by A. den Doolaard, a writer and journalist who fell deeply in love with Macedonia and spent long periods here.
‘I hope you’ll find inspiration in our town,’ said the waiter, with a respectfulness normally reserved for officials and the elderly.
And I did suddenly feel greatly aged at my white-napkined table, with my glass of Macedonian red and my memories, like a time traveller. When I looked at the wine label, I saw that it was called ‘Longing for the South’, after the poem. A quiet welcoming.
Ohrid made you feel the weight of time, even on a peaceful evening like this, with only the screech of cicadas and the shuffle of old women in slippers. Below me was a reminder that gladiators had fought here only two thousand years ago. The amphitheatre had been built by Philip II for dramatic use by the Macedons, converted to a gladiatorial arena by the Romans, and was now used for summer concerts. The theatre was only discovered in the last few decades. As a child, I used to scramble over the partially excavated hill with its houses on top yet to be demolished.
But what a civilised place, where waiters like literature, taxi drivers want peace, and wines are named after poems! The stillness was complete, as if the lake absorbed not only noise, but time itself. It was like the stillness of a deep forest, of something untouched by humans – an odd impression, considering humans had lived here for eight thousand years. The oldest-known inhabitants of the lake shores were the people of two tribes: the Dessaretae and the Illyrian Enchelei. In deep antiquity there had been five towns on the l
ake, and of those only one made it into the present day, albeit buried under subsequent layers: Lychnidos. Memorialised by a lapidary inscription from the third century BC that reads LYCHNEIDION HE POLIS, ‘the place of light’ in Greek, it was influential enough to be its own polis.
The creation myth resonates with a symbolism that has not gone away. The Phoenician Cadmus, king of Thebes and brother of kidnapped Europa, founded Lychnidos after he fled from Thebes and his misfortunes there, for the lands of the Illyrians and the Macedons. He established a town here that went on to prosper, though there were interruptions from around the sixth century onwards – long epidemics like Justinian’s Plague, which killed half the population of the Roman Empire; invasions by Goths, Huns, Avars and Slavs who stayed and renamed the lake Oh-rid, ‘on the hill’; and massive earthquakes caused by the same sulphurous fault lines in nearby Kosel that would cause thousands of tremors weeks after my arrival.
But misfortune continued to pursue Cadmus and his Samothracian wife Harmonia. They lost all their children and grandchildren, and eventually grew scales and were turned into serpents by the gods, the better to escape their human suffering. As it happens, the two lakes are full of water snakes which I often saw in the shallows, in writhing knots, and shuddered.
The white houses and flesh-coloured medieval churches spilled down the steep lanes towards the lake, a thousand windows glinting in the sunset. There was something archetypal about the hilly old town above the lake, something you had seen a hundred times before, yet it was unrepeatably Ohrid. What I had come to seek was as simple as it was elusive – continuity of being through continuity of place. My grandmother had known every single lane, every hidden chapel. I wanted to rekindle some of that intimacy.
To the Lake Page 3