The Crossway

by Guy Stagg

  Outside, the passeggiata had begun. Groups of boys and groups of girls flocked from one end of the high street to the other, from a fast-food restaurant with ketchup-red booths to a pizzeria with a purple floor. They were teenagers mostly, the girls wearing fluorescent eyeshadow and perfume scented like sweets, the boys wearing squeaky trainers and T-shirts decorated in album covers.

  Aleks’s friends were waiting for him at the top of the street. For the next half-hour we strode around, strolled around, stood around, and finally sat in a terrace cafe with lighted globes strung from each corner. My host told a confused story from last summer about crossing into Greece illegally, finding work at a holiday resort, falling for a local girl, and getting banned from the country for the next three years. But, when I requested more details, he rushed off to find his cousins.

  Forty-five minutes later he had not returned. I asked the friends whether he was coming back, but they simply shrugged. Otherwise they ignored me, except to play-punch my arm and ask for a passport or a job. When I tried to answer they laughed and told me it was a joke, only a joke.

  One of the friends wanted to know how long I had been walking. Three months, three weeks, and sixteen days, I answered. And how many women had I slept with in that time? None? Surely not. ‘Man, if I was travelling that long,’ he said, ‘it would be all the countries.’ ‘I tell you,’ said another, ‘I can’t sleep if I don’t have sex.’ Soon everyone was talking at once. ‘You have a girlfriend?’ ‘You have a wife?’ ‘Who makes your food?’ ‘Who cleans your clothes?’ ‘You don’t like women?’ ‘You like men?’ ‘Like boys?’ ‘Want to be a monk?’

  I explained that I stayed most nights in churches and monasteries, which made meeting young women a bit tricky. And that, if I had been in a relationship, I might never have left home. But no matter what I said, I could see they were disappointed. In Italy, spending time with pilgrims and priests, I had forgotten how strange my journey might seem. Now I struggled to justify the walk, and after mumbling a few phrases about the crises in Christianity, I turned away to search for my host, cheeks hot with humiliation.

  Eventually Aleks returned to the cafe looking glazed. ‘I met my cousins,’ he told me, as we hurried back to the house. ‘They buy me shots.’

  ‘It’s no problem,’ he went on, his voice slack, his feet stumbling. ‘My parents never notice. They never drink.’

  Aleks’s mother had made stuffed peppers and pilaf. She was a quick, nervous woman, serving the food with quaking wrists. When we held hands to say grace, it was like holding a sparrow.

  I spent the meal asking questions about their church, which Aleks translated. With each question his father grew more and more quiet – a stiff, furious quiet. He said: ‘No Protestants in Albania before communism.’ He said: ‘In the nineties the missionaries arrive from America.’ He said: ‘The churches, the mosques, every year their numbers are smaller, except for the Protestants . . .’

  Silence. The pastor stood, his cutlery clattering to the floor. Then he walked from the room, slamming the door behind him.

  Aleks’s mother was still sitting beside me, her eyes squeezed shut. She was trying to swallow a mouthful of rice, but her throat had stopped working. I watched her jaw jut, watched her cheeks bulge, until finally she gulped it down and the tears ran from her eyes. Then she got up and shuffled through the door. Aleks went crashing after her.

  I stayed at the table, eating alone. Although I heard muffled sounds of argument behind the door, I could not guess what they were about. Streetlights blared through the window, but the streets were quiet now.

  When Aleks came back his eyes were red-rimmed. He scoffed the remains of the rice and began to tidy the table. Once it was clear he set up a backgammon board. Halfway into our first game, he said: ‘I know my father wanted to talk to you. Truly he wanted to tell you about our church. He founded it from nothing. He built it with his hands.’

  We kept playing. Aleks kept winning.

  ‘My father is my hero. It makes him angry when I smoke.’ He blinked hard, his voice unsteady. ‘But this is the last time, I swear.’

  I was confused. Aleks had been smoking all evening without ever trying to hide it. There was a cigarette lodged behind his left ear and an ashtray on the balcony outside. Then I remembered his stumbling steps home and the reckless way he finished the leftover food. Of course. He did not mean cigarettes.

  At last the evening’s stifled collapse made sense to me, and the smothered frustration between father and son was explained. Yet the jagged atmosphere in the house remained, as if nobody had been forgiven.

  ‘I know that I am blessed,’ Aleks said again. ‘But sometimes it’s hard. Truly it’s hard.’

  Next morning we went to church. The Antiokia Evangelical Church was a pair of low rooms with plaster walls and a polystyrene ceiling. There was no altar, pulpit or pews, but six rows of six chairs facing towards a stage. By ten o’clock the chairs were full of women in colourful skirts and men in baggy jackets. Children sat on the floor or crowded round the stage, shouting one another quiet. Aleks’s father stood at the front, his arms crossed, his head bowed.

  To begin with we sang hymns, the words projected onto the wall. Four teenage girls stood on the stage to lead the singing, their clothes copied from a music video. During the chorus they would swing their hips and raise their arms into the air, and when the oldest girl stepped forwards for the descant, the one on her left burst into pantomime tears. I tried to join in the singing, but felt so out of place that my voice choked and I could only mouth the lyrics.

  Between each hymn one of the children gave a reading, racing through a passage from the Gospels. Then Aleks’s father improvised a prayer, his pauses punctuated with the words: Hallelujah and Amen. These words were echoed back by the congregation, becoming louder at every response. The pastor also delivered the sermon, and though it lasted almost an hour, I was never bored. As he spoke he knelt to the floor, or stood on tiptoe crying, ‘Amen, Amen!’ Meanwhile the congregation clapped and cheered and broke out in spontaneous prayer, their faces thrown back, their palms turned skywards. His sermon was in Albanian, but one section was made up of English loanwords, and these I could recognize. No more computers – Amen! – No more internet – Amen! – No more show business – Hallelujah! – No more rap music – Hallelujah! Amen! While the pastor spoke, Aleks lurched from side to side. Hallelujah! Amen! His mother was babbling, her tongue spilling loose from her mouth. Hallelujah! Hallelujah! Every hand was raised, the whole church swaying. Amen! Amen! Amen!

  Noise – there was so much noise in that little room.

  After the service I helped stack chairs at the back of the church. Photographs were pinned to the walls, showing the pastor waist deep in the River Shkumbin. The rest of the congregation were watching from the shore, dressed in robes and waiting to be baptized. I recognized some of the younger members: the tearful girl from the choir and two of the friends from last night, gasping as they were lifted out of the water, sunlight splashing on their faces.

  One of the photographs featured an older woman rising from the river. Her eyes were open, her mouth wide open, and sunshine seeped through her pale clothes, her papery skin – the whole body made bright by the sodden light. It was a frail body, the edges blurred as if quaking in fear. It was Aleks’s mother. I kept looking at the photograph, pierced by a sudden sense of recognition, for I realized that the babbling noise she made during the service was tongues. She was speaking the language of Pentecost.

  Half an hour later pastor and son escorted me from Librazhd. As we marched past the fast-food restaurant with ketchup-coloured booths and the pizzeria with a purple floor, Aleks began to translate.

  ‘My father says: Jesus has taught us to love strangers. Truly, it makes us glad to help you, because that is what Jesus has taught. But my father does not understand why you are walking. He says that Jesus suffered on the cross so we do not have to suffer. Also he says that in every country there are Christians, the
re are Muslims, and there are people who do not believe. In every country there are proud men and wicked men, injustice and sin. Everywhere the same. So why walk?’

  I gave no answer. After a while Aleks added: ‘But that is only his opinion. If I could, I would walk like you. If I could quit this town, I would do it.’

  Come with me, I wanted to say. Leave Albania and walk with me to Jerusalem! But I did not speak, because I knew that Aleks would remain here, and so we went the rest of the way in silence.

  The high street swung out of Librazhd, crossing the River Shkumbin and rejoining the road. I stopped to thank my hosts, before they turned towards the town, father leading son, back to the house he had built with his hands.

  I left Albania on a clean and cloudless Monday. A wall of rock ran south from Mt Jablanica, and for the first hour of the day I hiked up its side. The sun was rising behind the mountain, tipping peak-shaped shadows over the valley floor. As it lifted higher, the peaks folded in on themselves, a sweep of shadow racing me onto the ridgeline.

  A winding road tacked towards the border. Garages edged the road, each one with a hose in front. Their spouts were fixed at an angle and set to full strength, the water arcing out to catch the bright rim of the morning, before splashing to the ground with a sound like dropped coins.

  By eleven o’clock I was on top of the ridgeline. The guard at the crossing wanted to know where I was going, so I took out my map and explained.

  My route started from Lake Ohrid, near the Albanian border, and led to the Pelagonia Plain, on the border with Greece. The plain was divided from the lake by a narrow mountain range draped in black pine: Mt Galičica. A single road skirted the range, ending some seventy-three kilometres later in the city of Bitola. Few settlements lay between, so I had decided to cover the whole distance in a two-day trek.

  The guard grew bored as I explained my route, waving me on without another word. I kept to the ridge for the next hour, rounding soft-headed summits of fern. Macedonia was below me, the whole country covered in cloud. Whenever the clouds parted I saw splayed hills with great scoops of grass at their base. Lake Ohrid lay beneath the hills, the sunlight spread on its surface like sequins sewn into the water. Each time I glimpsed the lake, I felt a surging sense of achievement. Despite the warnings in Bari, I had crossed Albania without trouble, and felt now as if I could hike through a war zone.

  Eventually the road dipped below the cloudline, past orchards of apple trees, timber-framed houses and meadows flecked with alpine flowers. By lunchtime I had reached the lake. It was thirty kilometres long, with forested slopes enclosing a clear palette of sky. The water was lucid blue that day, and flawless as if sealed beneath enamel. Six or seven fishing boats winked on the far side.

  All afternoon I circled the shore, approaching a fortified city on the eastern edge. The old town stretched halfway up the headland, its houses white boxes topped with terracotta tiles. This was Ohrid – once the holiest city in the Balkans.

  It was evening when I arrived in the city and dark by the time I found somewhere to stay. Later that night I left my room and went down to the lake.

  Guesthouses were gathered near the port, with restaurants and bars opening onto the waterfront. Russian tourists strutted between them, wearing backless dresses and high-heeled boots. More Russians smoked on the quayside, flicking their cigarettes into the water. They were late twenties, early thirties, paired off in gorgeous couples. Listening to the laughter in their voices, I was reminded of Aleks’s friends and their mocking questions, of Aleks’s father and his polite disapproval. I began to feel embarrassed by my journey, for its hardships seemed pointless, its motives confused. Then I remembered Elbasan, remembered Esme and Arjana, and the nuns’ dinner party, and the limoncello thick as honey. Absurd drink. My first in two years. With that my embarrassment became something else: a sudden desire to get drunk. I felt it rush my thoughts, quicken my pulse, felt my cheeks pinch and my lips quiver – until I turned away from the lake and went up into the old town.

  Cobbled streets rose through tiers of Ottoman houses. The upper storeys of each house jutted over the ones below, their wooden cumbas and projecting eaves closing out the stars.

  Eventually I came to a grand church near the top of the hill. It was built from uneven squares of stone and inlaid with arches of patterned brick. The corners were spotlit, giving every surface a dim, dimpled, orange-peel shine. Approaching the gates, I could see gilded icons above the doorway and ceramic tracery in the windows, their designs made molten by the light.

  Behind the church lay a set of upright columns and sunken foundations. A sign by the gates announced that these were the remains of the Ohrid Literary School. St Clement, patron saint of Macedonia, was buried inside.

  Had I returned the following day, the tour guide would have told me the rest. He would have explained that Clement was a Bulgarian missionary who started the famous school in the ninth century. The school taught theology in local languages, rather than the Greek used by clerics, and according to some scholars it was the first university in Europe. Its students, the guide might have added, established monasteries all round Lake Ohrid, turning this city into the spiritual centre of the western Bulgarian Empire. But one thing the guide would not have mentioned: within a century of the saint’s death, the whole region was a nursery of heretics. Because the mountains east of Ohrid were the heartland of the Bogomil Church.

  About a hundred years after the establishment of the Ohrid Literary School, a new heresy arrived in Macedonia, founded by an enigmatic figure known as Bogomil. His followers practised total simplicity, refusing to eat meat or drink wine, and remaining celibate their whole lives. Most of their time was spent praying or begging for food, which to some people looked like piety. However, according to one influential sermon, they also worshipped the devil, calling him the creator of the sun, the sky, the earth and all mankind.

  This sermon was written by a Bulgarian priest named Cosmas. It portrayed the Bogomils as freakish figures with wasted bodies and colourless skin, who laughed at icons, barked at priests and muttered blasphemies at the Virgin Mary. In addition, the heretics rejected churches, sacraments and the entire Orthodox hierarchy, making them dangerous radicals: ‘They teach their people not to submit to the rulers,’ Cosmas claimed, ‘they blaspheme the wealthy, hate the king, ridicule the elders, reproach the nobles, regard as vile in the sight of God those who serve the king, and forbid servants to obey their masters.’

  Why Macedonia? Actually, it’s hard to imagine a better location. The country was protected on all sides by mountains, but the Via Egnatia brought merchants and missionaries through its south-east corner. Sheltered from Constantinople, unorthodox ideas could flourish.

  Thanks to the Ohrid Literary School, the region surrounding the lake was still a centre of monasticism. However, there was also a strong spirit of rebellion here. In the early eleventh century, once the Bulgarian Empire had come under the influence of Byzantium, the peasants were Slavic, the ruling classes Bulgar, and the priests Greek. Joining the Bogomil Church – a homegrown movement that spoke the local languages and adapted native rites – was a protest against colonial rule.

  Looking at Cosmas’s sermon a second time, it’s easy to guess the reasons for the heresy’s popularity. The Bogomils lived among the people, praying, fasting and doling out forgiveness. So why did Cosmas call them devil-worshippers?

  To make sense of that accusation, we need to go back another six centuries. Before Christianity was adopted by the Roman Empire and its fundamentals fixed in the Nicene Creed, the eastern edge of the Mediterranean was a spiritual Silicon Valley, crowded with mystics, hermits and start-up sects. Many of these sects followed a dualist offshoot of the faith known as Gnostic Christianity. They believed that the angry, jealous Yahweh of the Old Testament was a demiurge, or devil, and that the material world – full of anguish and grief – was the devil’s domain.

  Although the distinction may seem abstract, its consequences wer
e profound. Creation was no longer a gift to be enjoyed, but a purgatory to be endured. And, if flesh was wicked, the concrete side of Christianity – the churches and sacraments, the festivals and rites – no longer made sense. So they were replaced by endless rounds of mortification and prayer.

  What drew people to this bleak worldview? Well, for many, dualism helped make sense of suffering. The cruelty of this life cries out against a loving God, as an all-powerful deity is behind every hurt, every tear. Conventional theodicy struggles with the problem of evil, having to excuse the creator responsibility for his work. However, if this world has been hijacked by the devil, God is off the hook. Therefore, though dualist teaching seems bizarre, it avoids one of the central paradoxes of monotheism. For the charge still stands. The suffering remains.

  Among the most influential of these sects were the Manichaeans, who counted a young Augustine of Hippo among their members. But, once Nicene Christianity became dominant, they were hounded beyond the borders of Byzantium.

  Over the next few centuries dualist teaching was revived several times in remote corners of the empire. During the Early Middle Ages a sect known as the Paulicians appeared in Armenia, rejecting the Old Testament, the incarnation, icons, relics, crucifixes, and the whole structure of the Orthodox Church. Contemporary accounts linked their beliefs back to the Manichaeans, and also accused them of devil worship – the origin of Cosmas’s claim.

  In 871 the nascent Paulician kingdom was destroyed by the Byzantine Empire, and its priests went into exile. As a result, dualism moved west along the Via Egnatia, turning the Roman road into a highway for heterodox teaching.