To the Lake

by Kapka Kassabova

  ‘I was born in Pogradec in 1948,’ he said. ‘I lived in Albania until 1992. I have an Albanian pension.’

  Tanas was the son of Macedonians from different sides of the lake border. His mother Zorka was from a Struga family of textile merchants. In the 1930s, around the time of Kosta’s escape and for similar reasons, Zorka’s father escaped to Albania and hid with a family in the fishing village of Lin. After her father’s return home to Struga, the two families kept in touch, and ten years later, Zorka and the Lin family’s son, Sandro, married and made their home in Pogradec, Albania. Zorka brought a rich town-girl’s dowry: furs, heavy kilims, embroidered linens.

  In one black-and-white photograph Tanas had brought to show me, she wears high heels, lipstick, and a full-length fur coat made of small animals, a defiant look in her eyes. Her father had studied in Paris and had built a house in Struga for her and her future family. This house is for Zorka, he kept saying, long after he lost hope of ever seeing her again.

  The Albanian side’s in-laws were happy; the Macedonian less so, which was to do with social snobbery, not with the sides of the border, for the border was not yet hard. As word spread of its imminent closure by the Hoxha regime, Zorka ignored her parents’ pleas to return to Struga. By the time Tanas was born, Sandro was working for the Sigurimi (the Albanian Directorate of State Security, meaning the Secret Police), and already in trouble for criticising the dictums of Communist Chief Enver Hoxha. Word reached the couple that they were coming for him soon. In Albania, Bulgaria, Romania and Yugoslavia of the late 1940s, when you heard that they were coming for you, you knew your time was up. The decision was made overnight. Sandro urged his wife and his mother to come with him across the border, on a motorbike – but how could two women with a toddler and a baby cross the wild mountains on a motorbike?

  ‘You go, save yourself, we’ll manage here,’ Zorka said. Her words must have haunted her.

  ‘He escaped alone overnight, from Pogradec to Lin, and across into Radozhda,’ Tanas said. Radozhda was a Macedonian fishing village, a mirror image of Lin.

  ‘On the Yugoslav side, he handed himself in and they interrogated him,’ Tanas continued, over the roar of the engine. ‘In case he was a spy.’

  Quickly identified as a promising candidate, Sandro was recruited by Tito’s Secret Police and landed a job with the Yugoslav Ministry of Internal Affairs. The state gave him an apartment in Belgrade where he was trained, then an apartment in the elite neighbourhood of Skopje where my great-uncles also lived until the earthquake of 1963 destroyed their homes, and where Sandro would spend the next forty years in comfort – material comfort, at least. He got together with another woman, a Bulgarian who worked in Yugoslav television. She too was probably a spy. I know from my grandmother at Radio Sofia that many who worked in the media at the time were spies, for either the Yugoslavs or the Bulgarians, or both.

  ‘But they never married and she knew that, if his family ever turned up – that’s us!’ Tanas smiled – ‘Well, she would have to disappear.’

  Would she? Forty-two years is a long time.

  ‘It is,’ Tanas agreed. ‘But my dad kept his word. He never stopped thinking about us.’

  Something painful passed over his face: the possibility that his father had, in fact, stopped thinking about them, as he got on with his life.

  ‘I didn’t have a single photo of my dad. I didn’t know how he looked until I met him.’

  In a photograph Tanas showed me, it’s the 1980s. Sandro and his girlfriend are in an Ohrid restaurant with friends – glamorous in summer dresses and suits, drinking wine. He looks worldly and she has kind eyes. As an apparatchik and a television researcher, they would have travelled all over the world, and all of this is there on their faces.

  ‘She became my friend,’ Tanas said, and carefully put the photograph back in its plastic pouch. ‘A very fine woman.’

  Back in Pogradec in 1949, the Sigurimi arrived to search the family home in the wake of Sandro’s escape. Every item was to be confiscated by the state, along with the house. From now on Zorka, her mother-in-law and her two kids would be branded as ‘enemies of the people’. A friend of Sandro’s was in the search group. He secretly told Zorka to hide her kilims with friends and sell them later, which is what she did. The kilims of her Struga dowry weighed twenty kilograms each and went to local families, Tanas said. He was one year old at the time.

  In another photo, Zorka stands against a background of lake reeds, her two small sons in front of her, all three looking hungry and hunted, wearing the garb of poor peasants. The boys are wearing rags on their feet instead of shoes. The two women and two children were loaded onto an open-backed lorry and driven west in the shadow of what was once the Via Egnatia, via Elbasan, then south, over the frozen white mountains of central Albania.

  ‘It was January,’ Tanas said.

  Once they arrived in Berat, where ‘enemies of the people’, all of them women and children, were brought from around the country, they were sent further south and lodged in a former Italian army camp. Though ‘lodged’ is not the word; they were shoved into the stables.

  ‘Like horses,’ Tanas said.

  The women’s task was to go up the frozen mountain to fetch wood for the town’s stoves. Not for themselves – they had no heating in the stables. Many kids died of hunger and exposure. In the communal cauldrons, there was never meat, sometimes vegetables, but there were always worms. And the kids ate the worms.

  ‘You know the worst thing?’ Tanas glanced over the water, which had become choppy. ‘When a child died, the family hid the corpse, to get its rations.’

  What astonishes me, though, is that the Sigurimi hadn’t given up on the ‘traitors’ in their ranks. They came up with a plan to lure Sandro back across the border: Tanas and his brother and grandmother were packed off to Pogradec, back to the lake. For two years, Zorka was separated from her children. For two years, Granny Persephone, whose mythical name is incongruous amid this blighted landscape, laboured on a construction site by the lake, while the two boys grew stunted with hunger. The malnourished child is present in Tanas’s short stature.

  ‘We had no bread. There was a Young Pioneers’ summer camp on the lake. When the kids were gone, my brother and I would sweep the building, looking for leftovers. If we found old bread, Granny sun-dried it for winter.’

  Sometimes, old friends of their father’s would secretly bring them sugar, but it was risky to help enemies of the people. Sandro, now working for the Yugoslav Secret Police, got word that his children were near the border, but didn’t take the bait; knowing that the Sigurimi would be waiting for him, he sent three others instead in a wooden boat, a chun, to reconnoitre. One of them was a young cousin from Lin, and later, his bullet-riddled body was displayed in Lin’s main square as a lesson to potential traitors and infiltrators. The second man was an Albanian spy; his fate is unknown. The third jumped into the coastal reeds and swam back to Yugoslav waters to tell the tale. Sandro didn’t get to see his children or his mother.

  Eventually, Zorka was reunited with Persephone and the boys. They were resettled in a well-organised concentration camp for enemies of the people in the outskirts of the fertile district of Lushnjë, only a mountain range away from their beloved lake, and only miles from the beach lagoons of the Adriatic, from where you could see the coast of Italy.

  ‘They did give her a chance,’ Tanas said of his mother. ‘They kept urging her to divorce my father, sign a statement that condemned him, and remarry. But she couldn’t. To you, he might be an enemy, but to me he was a good man, she said, and that was that.’

  Tanas and his brother grew up in the camp.

  ‘They had a grading system. They somehow worked out the degree to which you were an enemy of the people. We were high up. Once marked, that was it. Not like in a prison, where you can shorten your sentence with good behaviour. In Lushnjë, it was already too late.’

  Granny Persephone would never see the lake or her son agai
n.

  Back in Lin, freshly cut off from its mirror image Radozhda, Sandro’s remaining family didn’t cope well with the new order. Tanas showed me a photo of Sandro’s uncle Boris, the village priest, in a robe and wearing a long beard, beside a church. This is the last photograph before they (the Sigurimi) arrived, Tanas said. They cut off his beard and burnt down the church. Border villages like this were treated with particular harshness.

  ‘And Uncle Boris – they called him Bise – Bise shut himself in his bedroom and never left the house again. That’s where he died. Two years ago, I went to Lushnjë and dug up Granny Persephone’s bones, and brought them back to Lin. Next to her brother. That was her wish, to return to the lake.’

  Ironically, the dictator Enver Hoxha was from a religious family that at some point had had a hodja, or Muslim preacher, in its ranks; hence the family name.

  ‘I don’t know about Hoxha,’ Tanas said, ‘but the whole nation was secretly praying. My mother prayed to St Petka, for us and for the whole nation.’

  Which nation?

  ‘Albania,’ he said. ‘Where the worst suffering was.’

  He had pointed the boat inland, and we were approaching a monastery complex built into the rugged karst hills, full of hermits’ niches.

  ‘People come for the Black Madonna,’ Tanas said, ‘and the curative spring.’

  A skinny, odd-looking man approached the bay at the foot of the tiled monastery terrace where we hovered with the engine silenced, and waved his arms in the air, beckoning us. We waved back. Something was wrong with him.

  ‘Oh, him,’ Tanas said, looking at the man. ‘I didn’t expect to see him here.’

  The man had a souvenir stall in Struga, and a reputation.

  ‘He isn’t a religious type,’ Tanas said. ‘But people change. He’s looking much skinnier these days.’

  A female Orthodox chant rose from the monastery grounds just then, deeply Oriental, and we sat for a moment, listening. The skinny man had put it on especially for us. I wanted to climb to the tiled terrace and see the Black Madonna, but the weather was turning.

  ‘Things can change in minutes on this lake.’ Tanas started the engine again, heading on towards the border, and resumed his story. ‘There were many others in the same boat. We made friends. There were displaced families from all over. In Lushnjë town itself, there were normal people. Hardcore Communists too, exemplary cadres.’ He said it without sarcasm, matter-of-factly, the way he said everything.

  In an ironic mix of savage politics and gentle geography, the district of Lushnjë became known as the concentration camp capital of Albania, but for centuries it had been known as the country’s garden and bread-basket: orchards continued to thrive, even as factories were being built by slave labour. The inmates, like Tanas’s family, were allowed to move within a radius of ten kilometres of the camp.

  ‘I started working in construction. I helped build the plastics factory. I remember the Chinese engineer … The textile factory was also Chinese-owned,’ Tanas said. The Chinese laughed when Tanas and his mates used the communal water fountain to wash and drink. The Chinese didn’t drink water, he said, only tea. And everybody was on Chinese bicycles. By the time Tanas was an adult with a bicycle, Mao’s China was the only country with which Albania had close relations.

  ‘Lots of young Albanians came to work in the new factories voluntarily. And also lots of deportees. Intellectuals were interned with their families. There was an engineer who was a plumber. An agronomist who was a labourer.’

  Tanas was allowed to finish high school but was denied his diploma – that way, he would remain officially uneducated, and only eligible as a labourer. He became a mason.

  All adults were required to report to the police twice a day. Like criminals.

  ‘The worst time was when I got toothache. I asked for written permission to visit the dentist in town. But the dentist wasn’t there. I couldn’t sleep from the pain. When I asked the Party commissar for another permission to leave the camp, he exploded. If that dentist still isn’t there today, I’ll order him to pull out all your teeth! he shouted. So you stop creeping about like a spy! I begged him not to do it. I was terrified.’

  For the first time since the morning, Tanas looked upset – here, in the boat, was the sixteen-year-old boy.

  ‘That’s how it was. They could do anything to you. And two out of three were spies.’

  A joke was doing the rounds. Three men are walking in single file to the factory. The middle one breaks the silence: ‘You know, the guy behind me is here for me, and I’m here for you.’

  ‘It’s not that they were bad people, the stooges, it’s just that under pressure, people change,’ Tanas said.

  There were monthly film screenings in the town cinema. Attendance was compulsory. After the screening, the ceremonial pillorying would begin. Party functionaries would pick on young people, at random, and pull them up onto the stage for ‘ideological criticism’ – in other words, public humiliation, Maoist style. They had to repent for imaginary transgressions.

  ‘One day, they picked on my friend. We grew up together. We worked on the same construction projects. But when the Party commissar started shouting at him, he answered back.’

  Tanas looked away and cleared his throat.

  ‘They sent him to a labour camp. For agitation against the state. Ten years.’ He popped a lozenge in his mouth. He had a cold. ‘And after that, just when he was due to be released, we heard they’d given him another ten years. I was married by then.’

  His friend had been sent to the notorious Spaç mountain prison in the north, described by its survivors as ‘a symbol of the Communist inferno’, and a ruin today. Inmates were worked literally to death in an old copper mine. As I write this, the surviving former inmates have finally won a long battle to receive pensions for their decades of forced labour at Spaç. Perversely, although records existed of their imprisonment there, no records of their labour were kept by the Communist state. For twenty-five years, the post-Communist state had exploited this to strip these men of their meagre pensions.

  But Tanas’s friend was not among the survivors.

  The water was an unearthly turquoise here because the north-west of the lake is much shallower than the rest of the rim. But it was difficult to enjoy the water’s colour while listening to what Tanas was telling me.

  Spaç was the worst of fifty prisons under Hoxha. Forty-three thousand people were imprisoned there, many of them on charges similar to those given to Tanas’s friend, or for joining a book club, making a private joke about the regime, or reading a book that was deemed either pro-Western or pro-Soviet – for the Hoxha regime had also fallen out with the USSR. In 1973, the year Tanas’s daughter and I were born, the inmates at Spaç staged a revolt. It was crushed, the leaders were executed, and an additional communal sentence was slapped on the rest: one thousand seven hundred years.

  One thousand seven hundred years.

  But one thousand seven hundred years was not a sentence. It was the regime’s message to its subjects, all of whom were in effect prisoners: Abandon all hope.

  ‘I was lucky,’ Tanas said. ‘You see, if you were in your mid-twenties or late twenties and still unmarried, you became suspicious. You became even more vulnerable to accusations of treason. They encouraged you to get married early, settle down.’ So that you had more to lose than just your own life. Tanas was fortunate to marry for love, he said, and the first real smile of the day lit up his face.

  Later, at the pier back in Struga, his wife would come to meet him, worried that he’d been out on the breezy lake with a sore throat; she brought him a jumper and took him home. She was a short woman with a warm Levantine face. Her name was Elena and she was from the Greek community in Albania who, like Tanas’s family, had found themselves locked behind the Iron Curtain overnight. Her family were butchers who for generations had traded with Corfu, which is where they had originally come from.

  Tanas showed me another pho
to from his plastic pouch. A young man in a soldier’s uniform, with an open, guileless face, sits on a rock by a sunny sea. Across the water in the very near distance – land.

  ‘Corfu,’ Tanas said. The young soldier is him, serving compulsory military service in Saranda, a small peninsula on the southern coast near the land border with Greece. Two years.

  ‘As a listed enemy of the people, I had no right to carry arms. There were lots of guys like me. So they came up with a job for us. The slogan was: Let’s turn the mountains into fields!’

  I didn’t understand.

  ‘Sure you don’t understand. Because it doesn’t make sense. We spent a year in the mountains, cutting down trees. Beautiful old forests. Then, out of the trees, we made steps, to go up the mountain. Vertical. The world’s longest mountain stairwell. And on the cleared flanks of the mountain, they made us plant citrus trees. To turn the mountain into an orange grove. But it wasn’t a success.’

  He said it in a slightly apologetic tone, as if it was somehow those young men’s fault that the stone mountain could not be turned into an orange grove, that they had perhaps believed they could do it – so that they could carry on with the senseless task. The Sisyphean stairwell was still there, I imagined. He shrugged. He hadn’t been back to check.

  But I kept looking at the photo of the young man. Once on holiday in Corfu, I had heard of Albanians who had swum or paddled across; many died of exposure or drowned. I’d heard of old women on floating tyres, fighting against the current.

  ‘Weren’t you tempted to swim across?’ I asked Tanas.

  There was a moment’s hesitation.

  ‘No, not me. I couldn’t do that to my mother.’

  Something about this caused him discomfort. What about here at the lake, weren’t there any successful escapes?

  ‘There was a case …’ He trailed off. ‘A family from Pogradec, friends of my father. Sixteen people in a boat. They made it to Naum Monastery.’