To the Lake

by Kapka Kassabova

  At the edge of Mavrovo National Park, sharplaninec, sheepdogs, lay in the middle of the road basking in the sun, and you drove around them – because this is their terrain, not yours. On the western side of the Park is the Debar region with its lake and a monastery that ‘cures’ addictions. The road continues north along a tributary of the great Vardar River. If you cross into Kosovo, you’ll see the whole length of the rocky Shar Mountains, almost nine thousand feet high and entering the border wedge where Macedonia, Kosovo and Albania meet. This triangle is Gora, the realm of the Slav Muslims known as Gorani, mountain people. Even if you glimpse them from a distance, you see why the Shar Mountains were known in the Middle Ages as Catena Mundi, Chain of the World.

  At Skopje, if you veer east towards Bulgaria, the alpine Osogovo Mountains come as a new surprise; from the highroad the rare villages look as if they’ve been tossed into the abyss. The mountain ridges, like the backs of prehistoric beasts on their glacial way somewhere, are a faded blue that seeps into you like weather, a Balkan blue.

  This road I travelled by bus, one day. I wanted to see it because Anastassia travelled it countless times: by train, bus, and later in my grandfather’s Skoda. The mountains are not welcoming. She liked nature, but in a romantic way, as a backdrop to personal drama. These mountains were also the wall between her Ohrid and her Sofia, between her sensual lake self and her intellectual metropolitan self.

  It took seven hours from Ohrid to the Bulgarian border. The potholed Skopje–Sofia motorway was unmended since the 1970s, when Yugoslavia had her back turned to the poor cousin in the east, as if in an attempt to prove that there was no reason to fix the road, that all roads led to Belgrade, that Yugoslavia was forever. But the only thing that is forever are the mountains.

  The mountains and relationships.

  All her life, Anastassia would not let others be alone. When I’d lock myself in the bathroom, she’d press the door handle. Because to be alive was to be in constant relationship. To struggle, demand, reject, seek release and not find it. I always thought this was the way we are conditioned to be women – invasive or invaded, ever-pressured or self-pressured. But the longer I spent here, the more I saw that this was more broadly the Eastern way. To be oppressed and oppressive was the norm. The men were just as needy. I met men who confided details of their private lives within hours. Friendships and alliances were quick. Intimacies were like an assault. Conspiratorial and paranoid thinking was the norm. Exuberant warmth and vicious gossip alternated. Everyone was enmeshed in everyone’s business, without being answerable for their own.

  It must be the way of societies where industrialisation came late and feudal paternalism continues to be the default style of governance. You never learn to stand on your own feet, you’re always leaning on loved ones, like a crutch. Poverty digs you deeper yet into dependency. In such a culture, there is nothing to challenge the supremacy of close relationship and clan loyalty – and the landscape only locked this further into place. Personal freedom had to be clawed back at great cost, almost against the grain of the land.

  The East–West axis was, of course, the Via Egnatia. A section of this road – Ohrid–Elbasan – I travelled with my cousin Tino, Tatjana’s son. I wanted to see it because three generations of our male ancestors had spent their lives on it.

  My first meeting with Tino was by the jetty. A slim guy with dark circles around his eyes got up from a bench and walked towards me unhurriedly, the way the locals walked.

  ‘I recognised you at once,’ he smiled, and we hugged. ‘You have something of the Gardeners about you.’

  So did he. He had been seven at the time of his mother’s death. I liked him instantly and within an hour had the feeling that we’d known each other since childhood. But without feeling put upon; Tino had a measured quality, something I’d come to recognise as a lacustrine quality. He was an urbane person of mild manners. His speech was gently self-deprecating and he was mentally agile, with a capacity for hard work and quick learning. But I also sensed a deep well of sorrow inside him, and he wore his insomnia on his face, like a distinction. Years ago, just as I was leaving New Zealand, he’d been ready to emigrate there for a new life. It would have been a strange unconscious swap between us, had he emigrated, but he didn’t.

  ‘That’s how it was meant to be. And soon after, I met Nate.’

  Since then he had pursued different jobs and businesses, moved to Malta, then returned to the lake and together with family ran Ohrid’s iconic jazz club and an international jazz festival – until they had to close the festival for financial reasons. The town’s former authorities had promised support but instead ended up filling their own pockets.

  Tino was outwardly calm, but internally restless. Sometimes he stayed up all night working, or listening to jazz – anything so long as he wouldn’t be left alone with the past, he said.

  ‘I have spent my life running, forty years running from something,’ he said. ‘Yet here I am, by the lake.’

  He and Nate, a social worker, lived in a flat with mountain views, in a tower block on the edge of town. I asked if they followed political events in the country.

  ‘We’ve stopped,’ she said. ‘It was affecting our health.’

  ‘I only watch sport and Nate reads books,’ Tino said.

  Internal emigration, a mass practice during Communism, had been revived here: you live in your country but only up to a point. In your mind, you are someplace else, more just, more emancipated, the way your country should be.

  Tino shrugged, not wishing to dramatise. ‘Isn’t it like that everywhere? It’s the times we live in.’ During Macedonia’s war up north, he had stayed here and followed events from a distance. He had no aggression, his anger had a tendency to turn inwards.

  Tino had no memory of my family’s visit in the oppressive summer of 1989. His childhood and youth had passed in a dark place. The more sensitive of the boys, he had been bullied at home after his mother’s death, and had taken refuge with relatives. He’d moved out at fourteen to live in an abandoned house. His father had remarried immediately (he meant well, he wanted to have a woman to look after us, Tino said). The second wife destroyed the family albums before she tried to destroy what Tatjana had loved the most, her boys, so that Tatjana would not continue to eclipse her from beyond the grave. But she did. The town talked of Tatjana as if she died yesterday. The town loved its beautiful dead women.

  ‘Yes,’ Tino said. ‘Everybody knew her except me. I’ve missed her all my life. Yet I carry so much of her. The restlessness is from her, and the creativity.’

  Perhaps staying in Ohrid was for Tino an act of loyalty towards his mother who had loved the Lake, and him, as no one would love him again.

  Loyalty carries especially heavy undertones in these parts. In northern Albania, the Kanun of Lekë Dukagjini was a feudal law laid down in the mid-1400s by the chieftain of the Dukagjini clan, though its practice dated to earlier times. In the Kanun, a besa is a pact, a bond, a word of honour, an oath that can’t be broken (though in reality, it often is). The Kanun included rules about hospitality to strangers and, more importantly, a set of loyalty rules – to the family and the clan. If you break it, you pay with your life, or with the life of another of your blood. There may be a period of grace, during which the feud goes dormant, but once that period is over, there is no place in the land where the marked can hide. The Kanun was at the root of long-lasting blood feuds that stripped families of their sons. It was outlawed in the 1930s, but continues to this day in parts of Albania and Kosovo.

  Although I was about to visit Albania for the first time, I already knew the besa and the Kanun. I think we all do. The Kanun is Cronos devouring his children.

  ‘I think I’ve been running from things too,’ I said to Tino in the car once we left Ohrid behind. ‘But some things follow you. Like Furies.’

  Tino smiled his accepting smile.

  ‘Tell me about Furies!’

  Tino got on with everyone. I would
have found it difficult to see faces from my past all around me, and to stay loyal to my town, especially after that experience with the town authorities.

  ‘Ohrid is beyond that,’ he said. ‘This lake is older than any authority.’

  ‘And I’m not loyal to any place,’ I said.

  ‘You are loyal to intangible things,’ Tino said. ‘That’s why you’re here.’

  We’d reached the last lakeside village before the border, past the Black Madonna monastery. The houses looked out towards the lake, like old people remembering. Behind them rose white cliffs, and a steep stairwell to the top.

  ‘We built it ourselves,’ said the owner of the fish restaurant on the water. ‘And now people come to see the cave church from all over Europe.’ He was tall and fair – another ‘Celt’. Once a worker in the textile factory in Struga, he’d found himself jobless when the factory closed, and opened this restaurant. Business was good but, he nodded darkly at the establishment next door, his cousin was jealous.

  ‘Typical,’ Tino said during our breathless ascent to the cave church. The cousin had given us the heavy key. ‘Envy, pride.’

  If you had any breath left by the time you reached the top, the view took it away. The lake unfolded with careless magnificence, as if to say: there is enough for everyone, stop bickering. There is enough sky, enough water, enough air, enough earth, even enough trout. The rocky platform of the cave was plastered with guano, and someone had left a rolled-up kilim of the kind used in Muslim prayer, unexpected at the Church of the Archangel Michael. Inside were some of the last surviving frescoes of the days of artistic flowering on the lake, before the Ottomans. Those saints around the archangel whose faces hadn’t been scratched out had their eyes closed, something I’d never seen before. The blinded and the wilfully blind.

  ‘Maybe they didn’t want to see what was coming,’ Tino said.

  But when we looked again, their eyes were open. It was disconcerting. We laughed it away, but the uncanny impression remained.

  Above the village was the Via Egnatia, a small section of cobblestones still visible in the forest. We walked the white stones smoothed by two thousand years of feet and hooves.

  ‘There were more,’ said an old man who materialised from the forest, loaded with herbs. ‘But folks used them for walls and barns. Blessings to you.’ And he disappeared round the bend, a figure out of time.

  This is how history looks on the ground – not a parade of great events but a quiet chain of recycling.

  We drove on. Because the lake was already 2,500 feet above sea level, the road had to climb only another thousand, through a tunnel of leafy forest, to reach the mountain pass of Qafë Thanë (Chafassan) where a border checkpoint had opened twenty years ago. I was about to cross into Albania for the first time.

  Today Chafassan was sleepy, but this pass had an eventful history. Since antiquity, it has been the boundary between Illyria and Macedonia. Chafassan is mentioned in most lake journeys over the centuries. It was involved in every siege, invasion and military movement in the vicinity of the lake. Qafë means neck in Albanian. There was a legend about a travelling monk from Mount Athos who claimed to have special powers. To verify his claims but also rob him of the precious icons he carried, brigands cut off his head here, at the neck of the mountain. It is not said whether the head miraculously reconnected with the neck.

  A fine drizzle started. This was not Tino’s first time in Albania. He’d even commuted to Tirana for work at one point, though you’d never associate the landscape ahead with commuting. Not unless you were a drover or a brigand.

  The first thing I saw on Albanian soil was beehives. Bunkers and goats scattered over the crags. A shepherd propped on his stick, a woman gathering herbs. A statue of the Skoje-born Albanian Mother Teresa, stark against the scrubland, her hands in prayer. Here a spectacular crossroads opened up – one leg ran west to the Adriatic, over a switchback road and in the plains a patchwork of tilled land; another ran south, snaking downhill back to the lake.

  We took the road west. Once we’d passed the clusters of fields and houses in the valley, and the fruit- and nut-selling roadside stalls, we started climbing again. We entered a landscape of brooding starkness. The road was overlooked by white cliffs and dark glades. Several times, the sight of vertiginously high aqueducts bridging gorges made me brake and pull over. We got out of the car and stood under the gigantic structures, these ghosts of feudal Communism built by political prisoners for the railway that would pass through this impassable landscape – and which had been out of use since the late 1990s.

  The odd lone figure could be glimpsed walking along the disused railway bridge some two hundred metres above, crossing from one tunnel to another over the chasm, on some obscure errand, because if you were on foot the disused railway was a shortcut. But to where, it was not clear.

  The landscape was like one of Escher’s riddle drawings, asking: is this possible, or is it in your mind? You looked at it from all angles and still you had no answer.

  Trees sprouted from the roofs of abandoned factories in the hillside – brick factories, cement factories, gaping quarries – scenes of neo-Gothic desolation. The soil was a clay-red, and everywhere there was water. As if the earth had opened its flanks after a tremor, and was churning out its subterranean humours. Lavazhes, stations for washing your car, attempted to harness the water to profit, and skinny young men tinkering with mobile phones stood by hoses attached to taps as the mineral water flowed freely down the road, but traffic was sparse.

  The only other activity along the road was the odd figure selling whole fresh walnuts out of sacks – an act so dwarfed by the mountains that at once I grasped why Albania is called Shqipëria, which is sometimes (incorrectly but memorably) translated as Land of Eagles. Because this was no place for humans. The humans had absorbed the qualities of the mountain – a stone-like endurance, a stealth, and a stubbornness that has ensured survival against impossible odds.

  Bone-white Communist-era monuments, recently repainted in an attempt to rescue them from post-Communist contempt, perched atop rocky outcrops. They commemorated the resistance fighters who had sporadically fought first the Italians, then the Germans, and most viciously each other. Once the Albanian Communist Party assumed power, and under the leadership of Enver Hoxha who’d already entrenched himself as secretary of the Central Committee of the Party before the Second World War, they began a merciless purge. Thousands of non-Communist partisans who had spent years fighting the occupiers were imprisoned, tortured and executed for having ‘collaborated with the British’ during the war. Which of course they had, as had the Communist partisans; without the help of British commandos flown in from Cairo, the resistance mightn’t have succeeded.

  The other kind of commemoration was the small gravestones along the road, where young men had died. We saw why, as drivers overtook in dangerous bends, heading blindly into the oncoming traffic. It was a Russian roulette that for some was exhilarating and for us a nerve-shredder.

  ‘This is why I quit the Tirana commute,’ Tino smiled.

  Bunkers, car lavazhes and Communist-era ruins aside, this must be exactly what Edward Lear saw in 1848, when he rode with his dragoman Giorgio to Elbasan. His descriptions and sketches match what I saw one hundred and seventy years later:

  ‘A most desolate and wild country does this part of Albania seem, with scarcely a single habitation visible in so great a space.’ After the first crossing of the River Shkumbin, ‘the landscape began to assume a character of grand melancholy not to be easily forgotten’.

  He drew some of it. Lear did not follow the Via Egnatia, or not all the way, as it was almost completely destroyed by then. He used a combination of rough tracks and no tracks at all, really a mad scramble up and down muddy valleys, his horses laden with his drawings and frequently tumbling with their cargo. It was September. They forded rivers either by braving currents and getting sodden or using Ottoman and Roman bridges. At times he and Giorgio, like all
travellers, used the ‘government post-road’, an unevenly paved causeway two or three feet above the ground, from which you could easily be dislodged by oncoming caravans and horsemen, down into the mud – or worse, into a ravine.

  The terrain was so hard to pave or even shore up against floods that by 1900 the Ottoman authorities had given up. ‘It was just as Nature and the Romans left it,’ wrote another traveller. Foreign visitors were discouraged from journeying by land altogether.

  The most gripping description of this roadless road is by the Scot John Foster Fraser in his Pictures from the Balkans (1906). He travelled with a dragoman and Turkish soldiers as escorts against brigands in the dangerous years after the Ilinden Uprising, when kidnappings and killings by komitas of all stripes were an everyday occurrence in Macedonia. The Ottoman administration gave escorts free of charge to Western visitors, to prevent expensive kidnap.

  Once past Chafassan, Fraser’s party started encountering ‘tall, fearless-eyed Albanians’, and became anxious. In Albania you were unlikely to be kidnapped or robbed, but more likely to be shot for no reason. In Byronic spirit, Fraser compares the Highlands of Albania with the Scottish Highlands: the view from Chafassan was ‘like a Scotch moorland – humped, and for miles covered with bracken’.

  They overnighted in Kukës, once a Roman station called Tres Tabernas and now a quiet scenic town with its back turned to the visitor. Its name had stuck in my mind after learning that a few of the twenty thousand girls and women of Kosovo who were raped during the Yugoslav Wars had come here, where nobody knew them, for abortions or to give birth to babies who were often abandoned. These survivors of horrific violence continue to live in silence, stigmatised by a culture of cognitive dissonance where cause and effect are conflated so that guilt and its enabler, shame, are collectively projected onto the victim, who must carry that burden alone so as not to ‘dishonour’ the collective. Together with her physical and psychic wounds.