Men line-fished along the riverside promenade, shaded by lime trees. Groups of teenagers circulated by the beach – Clemé could tell the Muslim Albanians from the Macedonians through subtle differences in dress and mannerism, but I couldn’t.
With its line of minaret-studded villages stretching along the western shore and overlooked by the hills of Kara Orman, or Black Forest, Struga carried a Balkan-Oriental feel. But vestiges of its cultural aspirations were everywhere. At first, the bronze busts along the river puzzled me.
‘Poets,’ Clemé said, ‘like you.’
Here was the Russian poet Sergei Esenin, who had been first enthused then bitterly disillusioned with the Bolshevik Revolution, and wrote his farewell poem in his own blood before committing suicide. Next to him was the Polish Romantic poet Adam Mickiewicz, who died of cholera in Istanbul while preparing to join a Polish–Russian army of volunteers against Turkey in the second Crimean War. The two poets kept company with fez-wearing literary and public figures from the national revival movements: Dervish Hima Ibrahim, a thinker, publisher and politician and one of the founders of the Albanian movement for independence, exiled from the lake; and Ibrahim Temo, an Albanian supporter of the Young Turk Revolution, who died in exile in Romania.
Equally typical of the times was that a person of literary genius like the younger Miladinov brother, Konstantin, born and raised here, would pen his best-loved poem in faraway Moscow and die in a typhus-riddled Istanbul jail – betrayed to the Ottoman authorities by a Greek Orthodox clergyman and accused of being an ‘enemy of the sultan’. Like the Russian poets in the first half of the twentieth century, he and his brother were literally killed for poetry. It was a time when advocating, writing and publishing in a language or an identity other than the prescribed one landed you with exile or death. What these exceptional Eastern men shared is that their youth coincided with the death throes of an old colonial order before a new one could be born. They were looking to Europe – to the West – with hope and faith.
We visited the house of Konstantin and Dimitar Miladinov in the old town, where I saw the original cover of the book from my childhood: Bulgarian Folk Songs.
Give me wings and I shall soar
back to our lands, our shores
Strolling in Struga’s shabby East-meets-West streets with Clemé, I understood that the poem ‘Longing for the South’ strikes an archetypal note not only in its conjuring of the essence of place, but in its invocation of place as a state of mind. Here, the South was equated with the Lake, with the original home, and with the true self.
There is a recurring motif of el sur in Argentine literature and music – and Argentine culture, like the culture of the Balkans, is one of fusions and tensions. One of tango’s earliest songs is ‘Vuelvo al Sur’, ‘I Return to the South’. The South is the indigenous American continent before it was colonised by Europe. In his story ‘The South’, Jorge Luis Borges tells of a conservative Buenos Aires man of European ancestry who fantasises all his life about a hacienda in the South – the spaciousness of the untamed, native, precolonial Pampa appeals to him through the pages of books – but when he finally makes the long train journey there, the untamed South greets him in the form of hostile, drunken gauchos in a grubby pub who challenge him to a knife fight he will instantly lose. He is surprised that he is ready to meet his own ironic, Borgesian, modernist death in ‘the South’. It is the price he must pay for his romantic delusions, for the part he has played in colonising the South, and for being self-colonised.
In the Romantic longing I have inherited, the South is paradise lost, the missing link which, once regained, will make us whole. This South runs in my veins, its salty-sweet blood pumps through my heart. But run-down, regressive Struga and Clemé with his missing front teeth reminded me that the South is also riddled with oppression and unfulfilled potential. That’s why its native thinkers and revolutionaries were looking to the West with such hope, before they died young.
‘Me, I don’t think of here as south or north, west or east. It’s just where I’ve always been and where I’ll die,’ Clemé said.
We walked by the river. It was afternoon, and elderly Albanian men with worry-beads and white keches on their heads came out to promenade; the few who’d been to Mecca wore black keches. Married Albanian women in headscarves and sometimes the long mantles of Islam walked separately from the men, like gaggles of chatty crows.
‘Here, I feel at home,’ Clemé went on. ‘You know how many job offers I’ve had abroad? But I love it here, by the lake.’
Struga had become more Islamised in the past twenty years. This was a result of the Kosovo War. Prostitution, drugs-, arms- and people-smuggling had enriched some Albanian men from conservative outlying villages. ‘Peace-keeping soldiers came across the border into Struga for the weekend,’ Clemé said, ‘and you can guess the rest.’
Old Strugan families, by contrast, had become impoverished and forced to sell their properties to drug-rich Albanians from the villages. The face of the town was changing: from cultural hub to backwater, from a majority Christian Macedonian town to majority Muslim Albanian. The current mayor was Albanian. Albanian taxis and Macedonian taxis had separate stands. The Albanian ones were cheaper.
The Albanians and the Macedonians, the Turks and the Roma, had lived together yet apart for centuries here, symbolically divided by the river – the Muslims on the eastern side. Respectful cohabitation had been the norm. This is why I was surprised to see a massive new double-minareted mosque at the edge of town, placed with territorial aggression right beside the Christian cemetery and its small church – ‘out of sheer bloody-mindedness’, Clemé said, laughing. The mosque had been built recently in the ostentatious Wahabi style; it struck a dissonant note against the local domestic, everyday Islam of single-minaret mosques, markets and mercy. These new symbols of autocratic Arabic Islam were no friends of the older, humanist, Balkan Islam. Repeatedly, I heard worried words to this effect from locals, both Muslims and Christians.
‘But the thing is,’ Clemé said. ‘Hardly anyone goes to that mosque. People don’t love it. It’s empty. And the other funny thing? When there’s a Christian funeral, it’s always timed at midday, to clash with the call to prayer. So the church bells collide with the muezzin. Out of sheer bloody-mindedness.’
We laughed, but I knew and he knew that this is how wars begin.
During Macedonia’s ‘insurgency’, in effect a brief civil war, Clemé had joined a paramilitary group. They camped near Tetovo in the north where the conflict had been most inflamed. Forty-eight young men like him camped in a house, each telling of ‘a house burnt by Albanians or some other crime committed against them, each with a mind for revenge’, he said; and out of that band thirteen were killed.
‘They were good guys.’ His face darkened. ‘My friends.’
‘But you have Albanian friends too!’
‘’Course I do! But my friends here are not like those guys up north. Those guys were from Kosovo. Not our own Albanians. And anyway it was war. Let’s talk about happier things,’ he said.
I wondered what he really did ‘up north’.
We visited the largest mosque in town, where Albanian men in keches sat in the courtyard, smoking. The mufti, a small man with unhappy grey eyes, led us inside to show us the space – a rare honour for a woman, Clemé said. A man and a young boy were praying. The mufti warmed to my questions, told me eagerly that ‘us Muslims and you Christians’ have much in common and it is only bad politics that divide us; and ended up delivering a monologue – Clemé sneaked outside, but I was stuck – on the dangers of sexual perversion, and how the end of civilisation would be brought about by homosexuals.
‘Even the Bible says so!’ he concluded, his face flushed with the passion of one who would like some sex but none was on offer, ever, and let me out of the door reluctantly. Clemé saw the expression on my face and laughed with his single tooth.
‘I’ll tell you why I joined the war,’ Clemé
said suddenly as we walked by the river.
Two men waded in, waist-deep, with nets, to collect the algae that had come in from the lake.
‘I had an uncle,’ Clemé said. ‘When my mother got pregnant out of wedlock, the man who got her pregnant – my father – disappeared and her parents disowned her. But my uncle, he always helped her.’
In 2000, the uncle, who was a social worker, was shot dead with a hunting rifle by a local who didn’t want social workers visiting the family. Clemé’s mother was devastated.
‘You could say that was the first killing of our war,’ he said. That’s why he’d joined. Because his blood was boiling. He wanted revenge for his mother’s loss. The killer had been an Albanian.
‘First I wanted to kill him, then I wanted to kill Albanians, then I didn’t care.’
And did you, did you kill? I asked him.
He looked at the river.
‘I fired one hundred rounds from my Kalashnikov. Put it this way: if I killed someone, I didn’t see his face.’
That’s why he never married, he said. Because he’d been wedded to the idea of revenge. I met his mother. She was a blurry, slow-moving woman who was making preserves for winter, and gave me a jar of peppers. Clemé had been the apple of her eye.
‘She gave up everything to have me,’ Clemé said. ‘She could have aborted me. But she gave life to a good-for-nothing instead,’ he said.
I wondered how his mother felt about his part in the war. They seemed an accident-prone lot, as if violence had always been present among them. During the war, Clemé had fallen off a motorbike and sustained a head injury, and it was an aneurysm from the accident that led to the stroke.
And the man who killed the uncle with a hunting rifle?
‘He was killed too,’ Clemé said. ‘But by then I no longer wanted revenge.’
I returned to the monastery months later, on the designated night in September, to witness the procession of people who came with offerings. Some came with nothing but their wrinkles.
Dozens of long wax candles were lit on the monastery terrace, in sandpits, giving the scene an archaic feel. A village couple had brought their granddaughter who was unwell, and a live sacrificial lamb, trussed on the stony ground, its glassy eyes stunned with fright. The older people crossed themselves multiple times, from right to left in the Eastern Orthodox manner, and some bowed to the floor. Inside the church, the Black Madonna was kissed by hundreds of lips, so that if you hadn’t brought an illness with you, you were certain to pick one up.
The poverty of ordinary Macedonians was plain to see. Women from the surrounding villages brought a loaf of bread, apples from their garden, a few eggs, tied up in festive embroidered cloths. Women and men with rounded shoulders and children in nylon tracksuits filed respectfully past the splendidly robed, cold-eyed priests who had come down from Skopje. Later, they’d collect the gifts and the money with their bejewelled hands, distribute it among themselves, pile it up in their expensive cars and drive back to the capital. Like the feudal lords they were – worthy descendants of the patriarchs of Byzantium.
Meanwhile, childless couples came asking for children, couples with sick children came asking for health, couples with healthy children came asking for peace, the peace they’d had before the children – or had they? No, they hadn’t, they’d been frantically praying for children then. What we have is not enough: a fundamental human condition was summed up in the queue of supplicants.
Here were women with cigarette-ashen faces and men heavy with unemployment. The overindulged asked for moderation and the skinny for abundance. The youths in leather jackets and skinny jeans came on fairy-lit boats from Ohrid. A rock musician and his dreadlocked family in cowboy boots came as celebrity guests of the clergy. Women in blurry leopard prints and fake Gucci bags came, and diaspora Macedonians from Australia in angora sweaters and real Gucci bags brought the easy confidence of wealth. There were fake blondes with piled-up hair and platform shoes and dapper Roma guys in shiny suits and dazzling smiles. Muslim Albanian women in flower-printed headscarves bought worry-bead bracelets and mini-icons of the Black Madonna. People queued up for the rock spring with bottles. The musical Orthodox recitatives went on for four hours, in church Slavonic, and aromatic incense coiled around the inside of the crowded church, which nevertheless began to smell like a stable.
Gospodi pomiluy, gospodi pomiluy, gospodi pomiluy. God have mercy on us, intoned the hundreds of lips that had kissed the Black Madonna. Many of the women wore the familiar mask of ancient tragedy.
May your progeny be as countless as all the earth’s sands, pronounced the archbishop with greasy lips. A curse disguised as a blessing. ‘The fertility for which women were asking the gods everywhere in the dark night over Macedonia was not as simple a gift as they supposed,’ wrote Rebecca West in Black Lamb and Grey Falcon: A Journey through Yugoslavia, in 1941, after she witnessed the paganistic rites that Christian and Muslim women were performing on the night of St George. Here, Christian women were sleeping on top of a carved cross on the stone floor of a chapel, and Muslim women were hugging a seven-foot-tall phallic stone in a dervish tekke, their faces covered by black veils. ‘They were begging for the proper conduct of a period of nine months and a chance to ripen its fruits. They would obtain the bloodstained eternity of human history.’
Eighty years later, the invocation was the same. Nothing had changed. As if time had telescoped into a single moment. We, the living of today, are the answers to those women’s prayers of eighty years ago. Our birth did not bring them lasting happiness.
Trauma demands repetition, wrote the child psychoanalyst Selma Fraiberg. ‘Repetition, repetition, repetition.’ This was palpable here, tonight. Life without transcendence is a shuffling of ghosts, a wound ritually repeated. All of us duly born and named after ancestors, waiting for our turn to be processed. Sigmund Freud, who had named his own children after ancestors, observed that this act made the children into phantoms, or revenants. Re-venant: one who returns. I had returned to the lake for my grandmother, even though it was my sister who was named after her. My sister had children instead – that is her form of ancestral return.
Meanwhile, Clemé was in charge of the souvenir stalls all night, doing brisk business and chatting in Albanian with the women in headscarves. He was glad to see me and immediately appointed me as his sales assistant, and I found myself dodging questions about saints and counting out change for the banknotes people gave me in exchange for the bracelets, icons, ‘blessed’ water, and ‘monastery wine’ that wasn’t made at the monastery. By now, the trussed lamb had disappeared into the bowels of the complex.
When it was time to say goodbye to Clemé the next day, he gave me a print reproduction of the Black Madonna crafted by him into a small icon. And a crumpled photograph.
‘Will you keep this for me?’ he said casually. ‘It was part of my life but I’m ashamed of it. People say I’m touched now, but I was crazier then.’
Although the photo made me shudder, I took it. Later, I destroyed it. In the photo, a younger, beefier Clemé in camouflage gear stands in a room lined with mattresses and sleeping bags, posters of bare-breasted women on the walls. He holds a Kalashnikov and grins.
Clemé had been dumb as a child, he’d told me. Thinking he was retarded, the Yugoslav authorities took him away from his mother by force and placed him in a home. Living in that home made sure he didn’t say a word until he was eight.
Without meeting him, I wouldn’t have allowed for the possibility that the Black Madonna might be a conduit, if not for a ‘miracle’ then for personal transformation, which is the same. I also understood why those soldiers had thrown the icon in the lake, repeatedly.
In most Eastern depictions of the Virgin Mary, the child is stylised, separate from her and looking at the viewer, formal in the knowledge of his exalted destiny. In the Black Madonna of the Lake, the child’s face is pressed to hers, his hand clutching her robe; and both mother and child wear expres
sions of such stark premonition of what is to come, of the violent world of humans that can be avoided only in this moment of hope captured by an unknown hand – yet their gaze says ‘There is time yet, you can do things differently’ – that to keep looking, you have to confront something within yourself.
Swaying between joy and sorrow
you are the prey of the transient.
Love’s infinite garden holds other fruit
besides laughter and tears
forever fresh and green without
spring without autumn.
Rumi, thirteenth century
ROADS
‘My memory’s not what it was,’ said Slavche. ‘It’s all jumbled up, the weddings and the funerals.’
Slavche and I were sipping tea from tulip-shaped glasses in the family restaurant by the tekke. Her fine-boned face was drawn but she was as poised as ever. Observing Ohridians, Rebecca West wrote: ‘Here in Ochrid [sic] the conspicuous personages are slender old ladies with shapely heads, feline spines … fine hands and feet, and a composure that sharply rather than placidly repulses recognition of all in life that is not noble. A more aristocratic type can hardly be conceived.’
That was Slavche, and my great-grandmother Ljubitsa. In fact, Slavche reminded me of Ljubitsa. But Slavche, without physically going anywhere, had diverged from the life prescribed for her: she had converted to Islam. Through my afternoon teas with her, I began to discover an extraordinary mystical Sufi tradition. Although this particular tekke dated from the 1600s, I was surprised to learn that Sufism had entered the Balkans before the Ottomans. It emerged from the Islamic Golden Age during the eighth to fourteenth century, and has outlived it by many hundreds of years.
To the Lake Page 12