To the Lake

by Kapka Kassabova

  ‘When my parents crossed the mountain, they had just the clothes on their backs. Skinny, hungry. Things were so bad in Albania, there wasn’t enough to eat.’ His mother had been heavily pregnant. As soon as they arrived in Macedonia, his father was sent to prison for border trespass, and his mother to hospital where she gave birth to Danny.

  We stood among the weeds in the Queenly Court grounds, which looked derelict but weren’t. A few families still lived here and a dog came up, overjoyed to see Danny. The flimsy buildings were like a one-storey motel, all the rooms lined up and opening onto a communal corridor, with car ports below. Pinewoods led to the lake. Danny picked up a key from under a mat and unlocked the door. It was one room with a balcony view of the lake. This is where he had grown up with his parents. Queenly Court had been made up of several houses like this, fourteen families in each.

  ‘There was a stigma about us, “the Albanians”. Ironic when you think that my parents kneeled down when they crossed the border and kissed the ground,’ Danny said. The ground from which they had been severed by the border for half a century.

  ‘So I’d lie to my schoolmates about where I lived. A made-up identity. I grew up determined to make something of myself. To make enough for my parents too. So we are never ashamed again.’

  One thing they did have as kids was freedom. In summer, they were out on the lake all day, and in winter they played in the communal corridor. The room was claustrophobically small and the sofas doubled up as beds. The kitchenette was on the balcony. On the wall was a photograph of a man, with black ribbon in the corner.

  ‘My uncle. He went to Greece to work. But he lived rough for too long, caught pneumonia and because he was illegal couldn’t get treatment. My auntie’s still in black, fourteen years on. Prespan women grieve too much, you know?’

  I know.

  He locked the door of his childhood.

  ‘And down the road is Hotel Yugoslavia where we’d go and hang out in the lobby and pretend to be kids of rich families staying there. Until the waiters shooed us away.’

  There was one waiter who never shooed them away: Tsape.

  ‘I can’t bear to go there since it burnt down.’

  Here, no one is too young to see the ruins of their youth.

  Danny still went back to his parents’ village in Albania, to see his grandmother. ‘I haven’t forgotten where I come from but I have a hunger for the world. I’ve seen misery close up. So I know how to appreciate life. Some people don’t.’

  Danny had found a job for his mother: she cooked for his groups and he paid her out of his own wages. He spoke of her with deep love. And soon, he said, he’d have a job for his dad too, because he was getting too old for packing apples in winter. Danny did have flings with tourists, it’s true, he said, but that was just for experience. He wanted to marry by thirty, if he found ‘the one’.

  ‘Penguins are monogamous. The female remains in Africa while the male travels. Or is it the other way round? Anyway, I want to find my penguin. Wish me luck.’

  I did.

  ‘Remember to look out for Zaver!’ he said when we parted. I waved him off and he drove up the mountain road to Lake Ohrid, built by political prisoners.

  Zaver was the largest of the Prespa sinkholes, where water was sucked into the karst mountain and made its way sixteen kilometres through the limestone of Galicica, to rush out at three main spots on Lake Ohrid: Drilon, St Naum and Biljana’s Springs. Zaver means vortex.

  The hilly road into Albania was like the border checkpoint: deserted. I drove on. Nezmi wasn’t working today, his colleagues told me, he was tending his apple groves. Vegetation decreased and an arid landscape emerged. There was something stripped, bone-poor, about the hills. I stopped to ask a man with a mule loaded with twigs where Zaver was, but he was mistrustful of strangers and shooed his mule away without a word.

  Place names were signposted in Albanian and Macedonian, and posters of Macedonian politicians smiled insincerely from abandoned roadside shop-fronts. The Macedonian minority in Albania had two passports now. Many worked across the border and no wonder – jobs were non-existent here. There were no trees for logging or apples for picking, not even fish to sell by the roadside.

  Pustec, or Dry Village, was where I was headed, because from there you could take a boat to Mali Grad island. I’d come before, in May, on a blustery day when lake crossings were impossible.

  Women in rubber galoshes and carrying hoes and spades over their shoulders made their way up the village lanes. Hoes, mules, mud. There was nothing to indicate the decade. Their fair-skinned faces were sunburnt, some wore floral kerchiefs to protect their hair, their ages were impossible to tell because the harshness of life was etched into them like a birthmark. A man in an incongruous theatrical velvet coat was stacking logs against a wall, talking to himself in what sounded like verse, like some rural Hamlet.

  Inside a concrete shop, an old woman sat at a table, counting coins. I sat with her. She had apple cheeks and laughing eyes that took me by surprise – here was the antidote to the black-crow widow.

  ‘There are good things and bad things in every time,’ she said in response to my question, whether now was better than during Hoxha’s regime.

  ‘The Hoxha didn’t let us move. We were poor and the border separated us from loved ones. Now it’s emigration that separates us from loved ones. And we’re still poor.’

  She seemed to find this amusing, and it was – ‘the Hoxha’ was her wordplay on the meaning of the word hodja, or religious cleric.

  She had two daughters in Italy and Greece.

  ‘And one here,’ the old woman said with a wicked glint in her eye, ‘to look after me.’

  In the empty square, next to the outsized new Orthodox church built by the Macedonian government in place of the old House of Culture, and where the old church had been demolished by Hoxha’s commissars, was a cafe. Here the remaining young men gathered from morning till night and scrolled down their mobile phones, with their jacket collars pulled up to make them look tough.

  To my surprise, the boatman remembered me from May and even smiled, in his reserved way. Bojko was a man of few words. Weather’s fine, he said, we can go. I sat in the cafe while he fetched his boat engine from home, and his timid friends looked at me out of the corners of their eyes. There was no work and no prospects in Dry Village. To get access to the Internet, you climbed to the top of the nearest hill.

  To get to Bojko’s boat, we drove past an open rubbish dump. People simply brought their rubbish and tipped it by the lakeside. A donkey mounted another donkey. Plastic bottles floated among giant reeds.

  He installed the engine and pulled it into spluttering action, and the wind slapped into us without preamble. The island looked close, but it was three kilometres away, and the engine kept cutting out. Each time, Bojko restarted it with great effort, and I eyed up the oars and the waves, making contingency plans while trying to look relaxed. A dark cloud cast a shadow over the stony mountain of Dry Village. It was a forbidding fortress of stone and weather. A faint ribbon climbed up and into the hill and was lost from view: the road to the hinterland. There was one more village on the lake, then nothing. Dry Village was vulnerable, cut off, alone into eternity.

  Though the boat shook as it hit the short choppy waves, Bojko stood steady at the helm, smoking in an off-hand way. His stance said: I can bear anything. When I’d first met him in May, I’d been put off by his wild face, but he was just unworldly. His expression mirrored the landscape: stoic and desolate. Though born the same year as Danny, he looked old, as if he’d never been young.

  Bojko made a sort of living by fishing, he told me on the island. Him and a few friends.

  ‘Mainly carp,’ he said. ‘In summer.’

  And in winter? He looked away awkwardly.

  The big waterhole where carp lurked in winter was in Greek territorial waters. If caught by Greek police patrols they’d go to jail, have their boats and licences confiscated, and get a
five-year ban from visiting EU countries. In short, they’d lose the little they had.

  ‘There’s a cave church across there.’ He pointed to the opposite shore, while giving me a handful of small figs from a tree in an unexpected gentlemanly gesture.

  ‘There’s a hundred and seventy steps hacked in the stone. Monks lived there once.’

  I could see the dark hole in the karst across the water, it wasn’t far at all.

  ‘Where’s the border?’ I asked.

  ‘Over there,’ he pointed at the water. He could see something that I couldn’t.

  The way he spoke was clipped and matter-of-fact, like his father. I met his parents afterwards. We sat in their garden full of grapevines. His mother cut some bunches and put them on a plate: the small, sweet taljanka and the slightly larger bolgarka. Their house had a sweeping view of the lake.

  ‘A whole lake at our feet.’ She grabbed my wrist – ‘But we have no water. Tell me, does that make sense?’

  It was the communal pumps, they were too small, but the subsidies given for larger pumps had disappeared into someone’s pockets.

  ‘I have a bathroom, but no water,’ she said. She was a small voluble woman. The father was quiet, his face packed with hard living. Before Hoxha’s time, he said, all the men had been fishermen. But Hoxha decreed that only twenty men should fish, and their catch be handed over to the local Party functionaries.

  Dry Village had fishermen who couldn’t fish, lake women who had no water, men in the flower of their youth who were celibate and jobless.

  ‘One cow was allowed per family. And a small garden,’ his father said. ‘Eight hundred grams of bread per person, but often there wasn’t even that. We walked or took the collective bus to Korçë to buy bread.’ Korçë was an hour’s drive from here. Some cycled, but there was a shortage of bicycles too. Now the family had twenty cows and some goats. Older people in these ethnic Macedonian villages on the fringe still didn’t speak much Albanian – because we hardly need it, Bojko’s mother said.

  There were families in the village, his father said, whose men had emigrated to Argentina at the time of the Balkan Wars and never returned. During Hoxha, an electrified fence ran around Albania, which the father called the klyon. Its remains could be seen running up the hill, like a scar. They had cousins over the hill in Stenje, where my nameless hotel was, but they never met because of the border.

  Bojko’s uncle had been high up in the Albanian Communist Party because of his partisan past, and once in 1949, while travelling to the border area with a colleague, his colleague confided his plans to cross into Yugoslavia. The uncle handed him over to the authorities. Bojko’s father told this without pride and without shame. And the man ended up doing twenty years’ hard labour.

  Why, I asked, why did your uncle betray his colleague?

  ‘Because otherwise it would have been him doing twenty years,’ Bojko said. He’d not spoken till now. ‘It could have been a provocation, to test his loyalty.’ Bojko understood the logic of that era because his whole life so far was its aftermath. He’d been born between two eras, two countries, two folds of the Prespa mountains.

  ‘Tell me’ – the mother gripped my arm – ‘how’s life in The Countries?’

  I’d never heard this expression before. It designated places in the world where the rule of law operated and your son didn’t have to risk his life on the lake, in temperatures of −20° centigrade.

  Before I could say anything, I saw the tears streaking her face, even as she smiled.

  ‘Take him,’ she said fiercely, ‘he’s a good soul. Marry him. Or take him as your lover, take him to The Countries. For God’s sake. There’s nothing here.’

  Bojko and his father sat looking at the ground. I opened my mouth but nothing came out.

  I drove back to the nameless hotel. Over the mountain pass, past silent men and women returning with mules and hoes, and a well-spoken villager with the aura of a nobleman told me where to look for Zaver. But not before he’d offered me water from his house, seeing I was parched. There wasn’t a single road fountain on the Albanian side of Prespa. He told me how, in his childhood, he’d jump in the water straight from the road and you could see the fish in the water as you walked along.

  Where the lake had been, there were now allotments with toiling women and men.

  The sinkholes of Zaver were dry too. The reclamation of water by the land was permanent. It was caused by orchard pesticides from the 1950s onwards, climate change, and some other, yet unknown, reason. Oddly, the amount of water coming out at the springs of Lake Ohrid had not gone down.

  Even dry, Zaver remained the most symbolic sinkhole. The connection between the lakes had been formally verified in 1925 by a team who poured red paint in Zaver, and two days later, red water ran out at St Naum. The stories I’d heard of lambs and other gifts being pushed into a Prespa sinkhole, to appear at Ohrid, were inspired by Zaver.

  The sunset made the lake look as if gold paint was being poured over the horizon. The lake was open, boundless. It was impossible to tell where each of the three countries began or ended, or why for pity’s sake it had been necessary to partition one lake into three nationalities, to separate Golem (Big) Grad from its sibling Mali (Little) Grad. Pelicans, ducks and geese bobbed on the water. Only the humans were self-imprisoned behind invisible lines. Now the day was over, the pain of Bojko’s parents caught up with me. I had swallowed it with the grapes. His mother’s tear-streaked smile would stay with me, and Bojko too, sitting by the lake, waiting for the natal matrix to reabsorb him. His paralysis was not entirely personal – something of this land’s fatalistic legacy had remained in the energy field of its people.

  Although I was meeting more men than women, the Lake women felt more present. Dead or alive, they embodied the lacustrine element, the generative depths where desire and grief ceaselessly churned. I sat on the parched grass above Zaver. I imagined a procession: the women of the Lakes. Women washing linens, children on their backs, mending fishing nets, rowing against big waves in those coffin-like chuns, with loaded mules; and town women in high heels, with books and notebooks, and dreams of true love, great achievement – perfection, no less.

  Water is indestructible. Among all the elements, water is the one that outlives the rest: it extinguishes fire, flows into earth, rots wood, corrodes metal, evaporates in the air, to return as itself. Water, not fire, may have the last word on Earth, engulfing islands big and small. The true women and men of the Lakes possessed the qualities of water: mutability, silence and endurance. The Lakes are their truest chronicle.

  Water is also mercy. I imagined that the tears of all the women and men of the lake were sucked into these plugholes, drawn into the Earth’s memory and filtered of impurities before they came out in the lower kingdom, three days later, to continue the cycle afresh.

  I saw everything clearly now. It made sense to me that we had lost the war, that we had fed the fire, that our bodies had fertilized the cracks in the bedrock. It made sense that the enemy had triumphed. Better that way. Had we won, we’d be the enemy now.

  I could see clearly. It made sense to me now that we survived, that we refused to be reformed, and set out to learn ourselves and the workings of the world, observing the greater laws that keep the world going, wondering what makes it seem still. It made sparkling sense that the vanquished, not the victors, should learn these secrets.

  Stratis Haviaras, 1984

  THE HOWL

  The road to Pelagonia ran close to the ghostly Via Egnatia: from the apple town of Resen through the brooding massifs of Pelister. At the Gjavato Pass on the mountains’ saddle, a small detour onto the abandoned old road where the Via Egnatia had passed took me to a symbolic water fountain. I’d read about it: a drinking fountain that naturally bifurcates. Some of the water flows east towards the Aegean and the rest flows west, towards the Adriatic, but it was hard to appreciate the natural part of the phenomenon, since the fountain had been cemented into two separate
spouts. Like Janus twins, they faced opposite ways.

  Gjavato Pass had linked the Via Egnatia with the Epirus road to the south, and was marked on maps of the Graeco-Roman world as finis Macedoniae et Epiri, the end boundary of Macedonia and Epirus. This is where the Illyrian and Macedonian lands began to overlap with the Thracian, to the east. The ‘Jerusalem itinerary’ brought the armies of the various crusades through this pass, and the multilingual army of Samuil during the decades of war with Byzantium. Nearby were the remains of the castrum romanum, or Roman camp, that guarded Gjavato. Even the Apostle Paul had allegedly walked this road on his proselytising journey, carrying the tools of his leather trade on muleback (and in his heart, a deep, irrational fear of women, one suspects).

  I filled my bottle from the fountain and drove on, made uneasy by the spirit of dereliction that haunted the potholed road lined with plastic rubbish, and eventually bumped my way along a surviving cobblestoned road that retraced the original Via Egnatia. It linked a series of villages that looked as if they had been sacked by brigands. An oppressive pall hung over these once prosperous settlements with a millennial past and no present. Greenery engulfed the houses. Dogs with tumours hanging from their bellies lay in the street.

  An old woman with herbs in a bag sat inside a broken bus stop where no buses passed, and cheerfully told me that she’d walked from Gjavato village five kilometres away to meet up with a friend but he hadn’t come. Despite having no teeth, she wore lipstick and a nice dress. I was about to offer her a lift along the remaining cobbles of the ancient Via to her village, when three unshaven men in tracksuits got out of an old Zastava, lit cigarettes, then drove into the forest. Losing my nerve and with it my goodwill, I left the old woman and the cancerous dogs, turned round and rejoined the motorway.

  The Gjavato Pass is gateway to the Pelagonian plains. The warm wind blew the car along, in the ghostly hoof steps of praetorian detachments, medieval armies, crusaders in chain mail, caravans with turbaned riders and veiled women; Aromanian shepherds wrapped in felt yamurluks (capes) and commanding the immense flocks that fed the peninsula, ascetic missionaries from Syria in hand-cut sandals that blistered their feet, mute peasants on mules gathering herbs and hiding rifles under blankets for the next uprising, messengers with sealed letters, tax-collectors; komitadjas, postmen, and men pursued by blood feuds as if by Furies. And of course Sufi dervishes with carved staffs in their hands and the ecstatic chant la elaha ella’llah – and if you walked here through the alpine meadows, one breathless view opening after another like a book of secrets, you’d be singing too.