by Rebecca West
Before we left Constantine told us that the pious peasant women of the district gave the monastery garments which they had worked to be sold to visitors from other parts of the country, who found the regional designs a novelty; and I asked, ‘May we buy some?’ ‘That I am sure you can do,’ answered Constantine, ‘but I think he will charge you a great deal.’ When the Abbot heard what we wanted he opened a large cupboard, which was stuffed with these offerings, picked from here and from there, and spread what he had taken on the floor. This choice betrayed his characteristic dualism. It was made with an infallible taste, with the most profound wisdom about beauty; as I satisfied myself later, he had brought us out the best of his store. But his movements showed a certain contempt for the garments he handled and for us. It was evident that with his intellect he despised beauty, perhaps because of the incalculability which makes it useless to ambition. He watched us with real and radiant charm as well as a sneer while we put by a pair of woollen stockings knitted in a brilliant flower pattern, an apron woven in crimsons and purples, and a Debar head-dress of fine white linen embroidered in colours with crosses inscribed within circles.
As we turned over the heap to make some other purchases Dragutin put his head round the door and said, ‘I have come to see what all of you are doing, for it is time we were on our way to Ochrid, if we are to get there before dark.’ It could be seen from the greeting the Abbot gave him that they were on terms which were familiar but not good. As Dragutin was a strong pro-Yugoslav and had taken part in the guerrilla war against I.M.R.O. in this very district, he had probably often visited this monastery; and in the discontent there was between them one saw the sag of the Führerprinzip, the tendency of all leaders to sit about between performances among their followers, accepting their praise until the weaker of them become sycophants and sending them on inglorious errands until the more villainous of them become parasites, hardening against the nobler of them because of their unamenability, and sometimes reacting in fury against the basely amenable because of the treachery to the first high hopes of the cause. There had evidently been a matter of favours rescinded, or of services withheld, and perhaps a combination of both. ‘You have chosen well,’ said Dragutin, looking at the garments on the floor. Without the slightest self-consciousness, since he was a manly young Serb, he coiffed his head with the Debar kerchief and tied the apron round his waist, and looked as much like a beautiful young girl as he could. ‘Do not our women dress themselves handsomely?’ he asked in pride.
The Abbot watched him closely. He was pleased because young Yugoslavs were so upstanding and so decent, displeased because of the recollection of some offence against authority, which half of him admitted to have been justified. Moved by the desire to be friends again with this brave and honest young man, he turned back to the cupboard, groped for a minute or two, and took out a long linen sash, dyed red. ‘For you,’ he said to Dragutin; but his duplicity, which as always was quite transparent, revealed that in his heart there passed the words, ‘I must make this young man feel liking for me again, it is not safe to have him as an enemy.’ ‘Ha, ha, I’m in luck!’ cried Dragutin, stripping off his kerchief and the apron, and winding the sash round and round his slim waist in bullfighter fashion. But he did not really forgive, and I had an impulse to be carping and resentful. The Abbot had made us as dualist as himself. For while we were criticizing him our sense of his superiority overarched us like a sort of fatherhood. Dragutin and I alike would have been amazed if his courage or his cunning had failed, and in time of danger we would run into the palm of his hand. We knew quite well that he cared for nothing but an idea, and that his heart regarded his own ambition without approval. If his ways were tortuous, those of nature are not less so, as the geneticist and the chemist know them. To reject this man was to reject life, though to accept him wholly would have been to doom life to be what it is for ever.
Before we left the Abbot thanked me again for the gift I had brought him, which was a signed photograph of Mr Lloyd George, a statesman for whom he felt a passionate devotion, and who had sent it with sympathetic good-will. Dragutin could not stop talking about him for long after we had driven away. ‘Did you have enough of him?’ he asked. ‘A good priest he is not. Bad priests there are in our Church, and good priests, and I know which he is. Once I went up to that monastery and I said, “Father, I am hungry. What have you got to give me to eat?” and he said, “Nothing.” But I knew where to look, and there I found a most beautiful little chicken, and I ate it all up. The Abbot came in as I was finishing it, and he was very angry. He said, “Dragutin, you are a bad man,” and I said, “No, I am not a bad man, but I was a hungry man.” ’ It is not easy to imagine this exchange taking place between a rural dean and a chauffeur in England. But in Orthodox Yugoslavia a monastery is still what it was in primitive times and under the Turks, a church where a Christian can pray, a place where he can picnic with his friends, a refuge where he can ask for a meal and a bed. Anybody can go to a monastery and sleep and eat there for three days. Not only in theory but in a considerable measure of fact the Church is a socialist institution.
‘I bet,’ said Dragutin, as the road wound along between two walls covered with the spilling greenness of limewoods, on which villages rested like white birds with spread wings, ‘that the Abbot did not give you his best wine. That he keeps for the good of his own soul.’ ‘But we did not want his best wine,’ said Constantine. Dragutin thought for a long time and said, ‘That’s not the point. A priest should want to give you his best wine, whether you want it or not.’ Now we came out on a rougher valley, where the river ran strongly, into a smell of sulphur that became a reek and, at a point where hot springs fell to it over a cliff, a suffocation. ‘They’re fine baths,’ said Dragutin, ‘and you can stay at the hotel beside the falls for ten dinars a day.’ ‘Tenpence a day! How can that be?’ asked Constantine. ‘Oh, easy enough,’ said Dragutin, ‘here a hotel-keeper can buy a lamb for twenty dinars, feed his guests, and sell the skin for ten dinars. Yai! The ways I could make money if I had nine lives!’
The valley broadened to wide Biblical plains, stretching to distant mountains that were of no colour and all colours. The ground we looked on was sodden with blood and tears, for we were drawing near the Albanian frontier, and there are few parts of the world that have known more politically induced sorrow. Here the Turks fostered disorder, lest their subjects unite against them, and here after the war Albanians and Bulgarians fought against incorporation in Yugoslavia and had to be subdued by force. There was no help for it, since the Yugoslavs had to hold this district if they were to defend themselves against Italy. But to say that the conflict was inevitable is not to deny that it was hideous. This land, by a familiar irony, is astonishing in its beauty. Not even Greece is lovelier than this corner of Macedonia. Now a violet storm massed low on the far Albanian mountains, and on the green plains at their feet walked light, light that was pouring through a hole in the dark sky, but not as a ray, as a cloud, not bounded yet definite, a formless being which was very present, as like God as anything we may see. 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. 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. Our amazement is set forth here in Macedonia in these tragically sculptured mountains and forests, in the white village called the Sorrowing Women, in the maintained light that walked as God on the fields where hatreds are like poppies among the corn.
Constantine cried as we took a road to the right, ‘Where are you taking us, Dragutin? This is not the way to Ochrid.’ ‘No,’ answered Dragutin, ‘but it is the road to Debar, and they must see Debar, of which it was said, “If Constantinople is burned down Debar can build it up again,” Debar which is now in Yugoslavia.’ ‘Perhaps you are right,’ said Constantine, ‘also it seems to me that I once drank wine in Debar, and
that it was good. We may perhaps find a bottle.’ ‘I think you must have been young and happy when you drank it,’ said Dragutin, ‘for the wine here is not very good. But we can try it.’ Low on the hillside facing the plains and the Albanian mountains, lay our Debar: a double town, its white houses collected in an upper pool and a lower one, its minarets and its poplars placed so that the heart contracted, and it became an anguish to think that one would not be able to recollect perfectly its perfection. Within the town we found an elegance that made the luxury of Tetovo and Gostivar seem mere fumbling, and we perceived that this place had been the subject of a miracle for which all artists would pray, though they might be much relieved if their prayers were not answered. In the early Middle Ages it was famous for its craftsmen, for its goldsmiths and its silversmiths, its woodcarvers and weavers and embroiderers; and when the Turks came against them they were lost only to be saved, for they were immured with their tradition at its height. They were thus protected for five centuries from the grossness which infected their fellow-workmen in the West when life became commercial and ideas confused. I could not find out whether metal-work of the highest order was still carried on in Debar, but up till the Balkan wars it had craftsmen who could work gold and silver in the Byzantine manner. All over the Balkans there are to be found on altars Debar crosses, which enclose minute and living sculptures of the life of Christ in filigree which is not trivial, which has the playful vital purpose of tendrils. Some of the men who made these have been dead since the fourteenth century, others still live.
All the city breathes of instruction by a gifted past. At least one out of every three women wears the Debar head-dress, and of these white veils spotted with scarlet or crimson circles inscribed with crosses in purple or some other shade of red, almost none fails to be a masterpiece of abstract design. It is not written that men or groups should achieve such perfection by the first efforts of their eyes and hands; it is the fruit of more failures than are within the scope of one generation. And this tradition is visible not only in the special talents of the town but in its general air of urbanity. It lies on the wild frontiers of Albania, and through the streets run the cold torrents shed by the snows of the peaks above, where generation after generation of men whom tyranny had turned to wolves lurked and raided, yet here the people moved as the citizens of great cities should but do not, treading neatly on fine narrow feet, carrying their heads neither too high nor too low, not staring at the stranger and coldly lowering their eyes should he stare. They walked between houses worthy of them, which spoke of good living as proudly as any Georgian mansion, but with the voice of ghosts, for the roofs were buckling and the windows broken and boarded, and the wild grasses grew long in their gardens: There lay on this lovely town the shadow of ruin which must deepen, which could never pass. It was not conceivable that history could take any turn which should restore Debar to prosperity. Its beauty was the spilled sweetness from a cup that had been overturned, utterly emptied, and shattered. On the plains the light walked no more, and the green hills round the town, pricked askew with the white tombs of the careless Moslem dead, seemed to be saying a final word. In a country where death devoured that which most deserved to live, the Abbot’s lechery for life, his determination to defend it by cunning could be seen as precious.
Ochrid I
Ochrid is a very long way from London. One gets into a train in London at two o‘clock in the afternoon and all the next day one crosses Italy or Austria, and on the morning of the second day one is in Belgrade. Even if one stays in the Athens Express one cannot be in Skoplje before five that afternoon. There one must spend the night, and start early in the morning to reach Ochrid in the late afternoon. It is also a fact that not one in a million Englishmen has been to Ochrid. What happened when we arrived at the hotel on Lake Ochrid, therefore, was unfair. We found Gerda talking to a manageress, one of those strange polyglots who seem to have been brought up in some alley where several civilizations put out their ash-cans, since only bits and pieces have come their way, never the real meat. She showed some interest when she heard we were English. An Englishman had come to the hotel only the other day. Did we know Professor So-and-so? Yes, we knew that ornament of the British academic world. He had liked Ochrid trout, all the world like Ochrid trout, we would like Ochrid trout, but first would we like a risotto of crayfish, such as the Professor had also liked? Yes, we thought we would. And were we really married, or did we want two rooms with a communicating door, like Professor So-and-so and his young secretary? ’My God,‘ said my husband, with deep emotion, ’if I had a son I would tell him this story several times a year.‘
I had remembered this hotel at Ochrid, so strange, like the word ‘hotel’ acted by children in a charade, and this year it seemed stranger. We were the only guests, and the restaurant was not open nor the electric light connected, so Constantine and Gerda and my husband and I ate a dinner which was superb by any standards, which was as good as the filet de sole in Brussels, in a bedroom where four beds were made up, lit by a profligacy of candles stuck in bottles, with the wine cooling in the wash-basin. When Dragutin came for next morning’s orders the sight enchanted him and he stood gripping the door-posts and shouting with laughter. ’Thus well lived the Turks!‘ he said.
In the morning I woke late and found my husband standing beside me and the room full of the smell of new bread. It is one of the peculiarities of Ochrid that, though it is a very poor town, all day long little boys run about with trays of delicious rolls made from fine white flour. We went out and ate them with our coffee, sitting under a tree on the lakeside promenade outside the hotel. But it was bleak. It was with politeness that my husband looked across the bay at the old town, which lies tortoise-wise on a cape, under a hill crowned with a ruined fortress, built by Byzantines and Slavs and Normans and Turks on a Roman foundation. I had told him that it was one of the most interesting towns in Europe, a city which could, like Assisi, claim to be not wholly built by hands. It was a huddle of discoloured houses under a low sky that seemed to have sunk so low that it had been muddied. The hills, which I had remembered as austere sculptures, were now earth that, when earth’s capacity for loutishness became exhausted, became scrub-covered rock. The opposite coast of the lake, which is Albania, could not be seen at all, and the water was dead as a pond in a public park.
I said, ‘We can see nothing of the place today; this is the sort of thing that Mrs Eddy, probably quite correctly, ascribed to “malicious animal magnetism,” but it will be all right when we get to the church where Bishop Nikolai is preaching. Then we will see the genius of the people. He stirs them and they betray what they are. I dare say that those who know them would laugh at me and tell me that the inhabitants are as mean and stupid as people are everywhere, but the truth is that when they are together in a church they show a power to accept life as it is and to glory in it which I have never seen equalled. I hope we start soon to find him.’ For I knew, indeed we had timed our journey by reason of our knowledge, that the Bishop Nikolai, who was Bishop of Zhitcha and of Ochrid, was now visiting his second diocese for a week.
But we did not start. Now that Constantine was with Gerda he had lost his innate personality, even down to the simplest and most instinctive ways of dealing with practical matters. She interrupted his exuberant stories, she pruned every expression of what was probably himself, and he submitted; and presently he timidly offered her something he hoped she would find more acceptable, which was an impersonation of what a German would conceive that a Jew who was a Slav by adoption and a poet would be. He was by nature a shouter and a snatcher, who would smash peace into a thousand fragments and then laugh at what he had shouted and give back what he had snatched, but as I had first known him he carried himself precisely enough from point to point of his life. He could rise early if need be, he was punctual, he never lost anything. Now he ran about like a Jewish comedian, yelling questions and not waiting for the answer, losing things, being too late, being too early. He had also
developed an embarrassing habit of telling endless stories of himself in the character of a buffoon, a fool who had torn up valuable share certificates in a rage at the dishonesty of the company’s directors, who had lost the chance of a valuable appointment through making some tactless remark. This pleased Gerda, and so it pleased him.
It was their kind of happiness, and we would ordinarily have had no objection to it; it was something that Molière might have invented. But it made our morning’s search for Bishop Nikolai into a painful fugue, which was reminiscent of a nightmare or the hallucinations of a persecution mania, or sometimes even a miracle play in which our party was playing the roles of the less admirable abstractions. The old town of Ochrid on its hill is stuck as thickly with churches as a pomander with cloves, and there are several churches in the new town that lies flat on the lake shore. The Bishop was going from church to church celebrating services all the morning, and we followed, but we never arrived in time. Every time we were told which church the Bishop was visiting at that moment we were delayed by some buffoonery on the part of Constantine, an insistence on checking the information by making inquiries from some startled person who knew nothing relevant, a sudden desire to buy tooth-paste or a book on fortune-telling, and we got to the church only to meet a crowd walking away from it quickly and with glowing faces, not as if they were in a hurry to reach anywhere, but rather as if some excitement had sent the blood rushing through their veins. There was nothing for us to do except to return to a café in the central square and drink more coffee until the time came for the re-enactment of this scene, which as the morning went on became more and more certainly to our fatigued minds a proof of superior displeasure, of our own unworthiness. It was a great relief to my husband and me when, about lunch-time, it was learned that the Bishop had left the town for a monastery twenty miles distant, and would not be back until the next day.