To the Lake

by Kapka Kassabova

  Every family has its disease and sometimes, the symbolism is hard to miss: with us, it was as if a shard from some past wreckage kept getting stuck in the system, obstructing the flow.

  My aunts, the sweet husband and I lit candles for our dead under the clear gaze of Petka. We shared our dead, and that meant something.

  In some iconography, St Petka is depicted holding a pair of eyes on a plate, like fried eggs, to warn against wilful blindness. Blindness and blinding were a major lake motif. In The Great Water, one distressing scene involves an enraged physical-education teacher at the orphanage, who tries to blind a boy with a chisel after the boy defaces her bust of Stalin.

  ‘Petka is believed to cure ailments,’ the sweet husband said, and winked at us.

  ‘They say,’ Biljana said, ‘that when they first started building the monastery, it kept falling down at night.’

  ‘A small icon of Petka placed in the cave church kept disappearing every night,’ said Biljana.

  ‘And they’d find it in the same spot in the morning. Here,’ said Snezhana.

  ‘Until they realised Petka was guiding them. She wanted the church here,’ Biljana said.

  There was a tunnel between the cave church and the monastery, two kilometres long. Not only this – the tunnel continued downhill into Ohrid town, an underground road that was likely part of the ancient town, and popped out at Chelnitsa, the Front Church, next to the walled-up gate.

  Edith Durham’s formulation a hundred years ago – ‘the burden of the Balkans’ – still rings true. The past is a burden of multiplicities here, but only because reductive dogma has prevailed too often. The walled-up gate now struck me as symbolic of all dogma: in the attempt to shore up one’s own power for evermore, one blocks the natural flow of change. The walled-up gate was like the arrested clock.

  My grandmother held on to her multiple identity in a world that rewarded subscribers to a single one. She had also tried, fiercely, to hold on to everything she touched: her wartime romance, her daughter, her family, her youth. That was her burden, our burden. We could not let go of anything, especially not our idea of how things should be but are not, and our disappointment over time becomes a mournful distinction, to wear like a war medal or a black veil. Yet Zhivko Chingo was right: the only thing that is truly yours is that which you give away.

  We drove down the steep road, past the exuberant waterfall, past the trees heavy with fruit that no one was picking. The fecundity was oppressive.

  Vlado and Gotse Zhura’s great-grandmother Despina, the one who came from Crete in poverty, had told a story that strikes with its Tantalus motif, so symbolic of the Macedonian predicament:

  Once, Despina and her friend decided to come cherry picking up here. It’s an hour on foot from the old town. Despina awoke at dawn. She hurried to the Upper Gate where her friend was waiting. Her friend rushed ahead with unnatural speed, up to the cherry trees. Just as Despina reached out to pick the first cherry, cockerels crowed. Despina came round, and saw where she really was: not in the Village of Cherries, but on the Kaneo cliffs above the lake. One more step and she’d plummet and break her head on the rocks below. Drenched in sweat, she walked straight to the friend’s house. Sorry, the friend said, I overslept. Despina realised she’d been tricked by samovilas, those shape-shifters who operate at full moon and, if you can’t tell reality from illusion, the moon from the sun, trick you into an early grave.

  But how to tell reality from illusion here, where the statues of each regime were on the rubbish heap of the next? And then at the bottom of the lake.

  ‘It is a land made for the exhibition of mysteries, this Macedonia. Here is made manifest a chief element in human disappointment, the discrepancy between our lives and their framework,’ wrote Rebecca West in 1937. ‘The earth is a stage exquisitely set; too often destiny will not let us act on it, or forces us to perform a hideous melodrama.’

  In this land so giving it could birth a human, generation after generation have been forced to emigrate, to sit with empty plates and be homesick for ‘our places’, to be looked down upon as ‘others’ with names too difficult to pronounce and histories too complex to grasp, and carry their hunger on to the next generation, and the next. A hideous melodrama indeed.

  ‘See you next week,’ the twins said. I looked forward to it. I felt at home with them.

  ‘And put on some socks, you’ll catch your death,’ the twins said.

  We were back by the jetty where I’d met the suitor.

  I walked by the water. The lake had gone choppy and splashed onto the promenade, as if grown in volume. The previous day, I’d heard a story from a lonely old man in another village above the lake that had touched a raw nerve, and I couldn’t stop thinking about it. He’d invited me into his garden for a tipple of home brew and told me that his old neighbours, the few that remained in the village, were still Bulgarian-identifying.

  ‘But not me,’ he said. ‘I’m Macedonian. You know what I can’t stand? When someone tries to tell me what I am.’

  He spat on the ground. We drank to that and he said:

  ‘Since you’re interested in family stories, here’s one.’ He didn’t specify whether it was his own family.

  It was the eve of the First World War. A young man was due to be drafted and sent to the Macedonian Front. His mother was undone by the prospect. She had already lost a child in the recent Balkan Wars. In the night, she dragged a massive anvil to where her son slept on the floor, and with inhuman strength lifted it up and dropped it on his foot. Drafting was avoided, he remained by his mother’s side, and dragged his crushed foot around for the rest of his life.

  ‘This was the grandfather,’ said the man, and poured himself another glass. ‘But here’s the thing. All the children in the family were born with defects of the legs.’

  When he rose to see me off, I saw that he had a hobble himself, as if one foot was heavier than the other. I had heard a similar family story from a woman my age in Sofia. Mothers were maiming their sons all over the Balkans, to stop them being maimed in the Balkan Wars.

  A hundred years ago, Henry Brailsford made the observation that in Macedonia ‘fear is more than an emotion. It is a physical disease, the malady of the country, the ailment that comes of tyranny … Looking back upon my wanderings among them,’ he writes of the people, ‘a procession of ruined minds comes before the memory – a woman who had barked like a dog since the day her village was burnt; a maiden who became an imbecile because her mother buried her in a hole under the floor to save her from the soldiers’.

  During the Ottoman centuries a regular ‘blood tax’, or devshirme, was exacted from Balkan Christian families – in the form of taking boys from their families – but though the Ottomans were gone, the blood tax had continued, forcing people into a form of insanity.

  What struck a nerve was that the violence had over time become turned inwards at loved ones. At the self. Some Christian girls had their faces cut up by relatives – crosses slashed into their cheeks or foreheads – to stop them being taken by Muslim beys. Never mind that life in a harem might have been preferable to that of domestic slave with a disfigured face. I also heard of Aromanian women who, in a subsequent era when such abductions were no longer a threat, tattooed their own foreheads with crosses – out of loyalty to their mothers and grandmothers.

  This is how, over time, love becomes indistinguishable from darkness.

  The happiest photographs of Anastassia were taken here on the lake: swimming, boating. In one, she is by the jetty with her younger brother Slavejko, both peaky-faced and skinny-legged, children of hunger. She wears an elegant coat that looks threadbare, and he wears a Bulgarian cadet uniform (a fact that would soon become unmentionable in the new Yugoslavia), the too-short trousers flapping around his legs. But they smile with their sharp Levantine features as if to reassure us, the unborn, that everything will come to pass. She missed the bustle and anonymity of Sofia. Working as a council clerk, then a schoolteacher in
nearby villages, while trying not to walk down the same street twice, was underwhelming after her dream of studying Law. She kept writing letters to the tall lanky guy in Sofia. Next to local men with whom life was a chronicle foretold – one of scrutinous mothers-in-law just like her own mother, Ohrid torta served with those doll’s-house spoons, and fantasies of rowing to Albania and Italy – next to that, a distant romance had an edge.

  Meanwhile, everybody hid under the table when explosions were heard in the hills, or warplanes thundered over the lake, sometimes dropping their cargo. It was said that Clement and Naum sent flashes of light to frighten the German pilots, and apparently it worked. By 1944, the family were back in their creaky old house by the hammam. When the war tide was turning and Yugoslav partisans came calling on Ohrid households, the family volunteered their elder son. He came through the war in one piece; they all did – physically.

  Why did Anastassia go for a man she hadn’t seen for years, and against all the odds? It wasn’t only the man she chose. She chose a metropolis over a province, her own home over the perfection-or-death home of her mother Ljubitsa. She chose the closest to freedom she could choose, and I would have done the same. She strove for the boundless imagination, not for the mundane reality, and I inherited some of that creative capacity from her. It may come at a cost, but I am grateful.

  My grandfather’s last letter across the border dates from September 1947. I can’t imagine how she felt when she opened it, maybe sitting here, with the lake before her. And how, after reading the typewritten text – he had handwritten all his previous letters, but he typed this one – she folded it, put it back in the envelope, in the pocket of her elegant but threadbare coat, and looked towards the distant mountains of Albania. The cormorants called. She walked up the charshia, past the beautiful mosque that would soon be blown up. The town knew of her liaison that had gone on for years, and she wasn’t even engaged to him yet! Like father, like daughter. There was something vagabondish about the Gardeners, they couldn’t settle down, their hawkish eyes were always scanning the horizon.

  My mother would be born less than a year later.

  And so we have had permission from the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and the Directorate of the Militia for your visa. In two days, we will also have the decision of the Balkan Commission [my future grandfather wrote, with characteristic pedantry]. I received your two letters and the photo, full of hope and love. You remain an idealist, unwilling to consider the ugly side of our decision.

  Your arrival won’t be greeted by anything pleasant. You will find me completely unprepared for marital life, morally and materially. There is love, but will love be enough to shelter us from the dark forces of dire need and privation? I think not.

  It would be up to your feminine artfulness, perseverance and selfless love, strengthened by the legal bounds of matrimony, to make our marriage bearable, to shelter me inside it. It is a heavy chore, but once you have taken it upon yourself you must bear it without complaint and regret. I must take this final opportunity to present myself in my true colours. I do not wish to inflict more suffering on you. You have suffered enough already from your own family. I am writing this in all honesty, as I do not wish to be accused, one day, of being the coward who dragged you into the abyss of his own life. Think carefully before you take the fatal step.

  The abyss. When Anastassia’s departure was imminent, the former landlady Nadzie gave her a pair of silk quilts in Arabian blue. To remind her of the lake.

  During the harsh Stalinist years, when everything in Sofia was bought with coupons, the spectre of hunger re-entered Anastassia’s life. Proud like her mother, like her mother she had married a man who required sacrifices: crossing a border, exile, privation, isolation. For long months, her husband was recalled as an army reservist in some border drill, because Cold War tensions were high and the border between Yugoslavia and Bulgaria had unexpectedly hardened after a freeze-out between Tito and Stalin. Working but irregularly paid and alone with her daughter, facing the possibility of never seeing her loved ones and the lake again, Anastassia cut up one of the blue quilts. Out of it she made a dress for her daughter, who was in and out of hospital. Those were the last days of tubercular Europe. The girl was the apple of her mother’s eye; in photographs she is wan, unsmiling, her face strangely old, a fragile blossom in the shadow of the mother-tree.

  That blue dress was a flag of hope fluttering amid the grey Soviet days that stretched ahead, not at all the view Anastassia had imagined. Of course he had warned her, she could never blame him for being the coward who …

  My mother remembers wearing the blue silk dress, past gaping bombed-out buildings. She remembers when old Sofia, wrecked by British and American bombers, was levelled by the Communists, and foundations were laid for the new ceremonial squares and avenues where people would parade, waving small frightened flags at balconies where men in dark coats stood motionless like Roman emperors.

  She remembers wearing the blue dress and looking up at the faces of frowning men, faces flapping on banners, faces painted on the walls of buildings (Tito was a grimacing villain holding the bloodied hatchet of Capitalism in one hand and a bottle of Coke in the other), so that you always felt their eyes on you – looking up at them as she held her mother’s hand. And through that hand, she felt her mother’s hunger and her mother’s fear. All they had now was each other.

  My mother, a gifted seamstress, in our childhood stayed up late nights after work to sew clothes for us and herself. Just as her grandmother had done, and her mother. In my childhood, the shops were more than half-empty, and anyway with her exquisite taste and personal pride my mother didn’t like factory-made clothes.

  In times of poverty and tyranny, she and my grandmother had passed on extraordinary gifts to me: a love of language and literature, people and places, emotion and expression, independent thought and anti-conformity (neither of them joined the Communist Party or paid lip-service to its ubiquitous propaganda, although it would have brought benefits). They had sewn together, bit by precious bit, the wings on which I would fly. Even if they had tried to hobble me in the end by holding on with inhuman strength, heavy as anvils.

  Here by the Lake, I finally understood why. The hunger and the fear had been too great. There wasn’t enough to go round. With the partitioning of Macedonia, with the Cold War, with the cleaving of one people into mutually hostile national and ideological tribes, with each turn of the political merry-go-round and its correct diktat of reality, the psyche of the people had taken a hit. I was still reeling from it. The cumulative loss ran so deep that the prospect of any further loss, no matter how small, had become intolerable. And almost every change felt like loss – hence the frozen clock. Repeated emigration, like a magnifying glass, had made that loss look even bigger.

  This is why for the women in our family, as in many others with similar histories, letting go feels worse than disfigurement. Letting go is like death.

  The cormorants called. I sat on the low stone wall where the bouquiniste Elijah was setting up his stall for the afternoon. He was from the Village of Cherries and carried his books in a cart that he pushed along the street because he had no car. He always had a book or two to interest me.

  For a man of books, he was very unchatty. When he finished, Elijah sat with me, and we watched the waves break over the promenade, the Arabian-blue lake and the distant mountains spread out before us like a silent poem.

  We are the remnants of another age.

  Like wolves tracked by the sights

  of ancient guilt, we steal into

  the land’s forgiving solitude.

  Nikola Madzirov, 2013

  BESA

  The crossroads of the lake led four ways. North to Kosovo, Serbia and Bulgaria. South to Epirus and Greece. West to Elbasan and the Adriatic. And east to Pelagonia and the Aegean.

  If you head north and keep going upstream of the second major river after the Drim that empties into the lake, you glimpse a dark topogra
phy. A closed world of black-green forests casts a shadow over you for days after.

  What looks like a gigantic unbroken chain of mountains unfolds – but it is several distinct ranges, just as the villages huddled within them are distinct cultures. The Christian villages are sparsely populated and unremarkable in appearance, with ruined houses in the hills. And every village harbours a secret. During the First World War when a road was built by the Bulgarian army, extraordinary necropolises full of golden masks and artefacts were found, dating from the seventh century BC (the Trebenishta gold), and locals are certain that there’s more where that came from. In a village scattered over several hills as it crept down the mountain over time, the hilltop monastery holds Celtic stone crosses possibly a thousand years old, of unknown provenance. Here too is Belchista Wetland: a geological remnant from the great Dessaret basin of the Pliocene era five to three million years ago, whose other surviving descendants are Lakes Ohrid and Prespa. It has what is considered by conservationists Europe’s cleanest water.

  Then come the villages where a sombre flag flaps – black double-headed eagle on red. The further north you go, the more thin white minarets pierce the skyline. This is Muslim-Albanian-majority country. But nothing here is quite what it seems. I visited villages that identify as Albanian but speak Macedonian. In the outlying Struga villages, I saw families where the parents speak Macedonian and the kids Albanian – after local politicians had bribed the poor parents to send their kids to local Albanian-language schools. Many of these people were and still are Slavic-speaking Muslims, or Torbesh, who over time and under pressure (poverty, the contempt of the Macedonian state) took an Albanian identity. This process of cultural assimilation is not new. It is called ‘Albanisation’ by both Christian and Muslim Macedonians, and is seen by them as an existential threat. With around a hundred thousand Albanian Kosovar refugees housed in Macedonia during and after the Kosovo War, Kosovo-Albanian ethno-nationalism is feared for potentially driving a wedge into the Republic, which could not withstand fragmentation.