Black Lamb and Grey Falcon

by Rebecca West

  Sveti Naum

  Sveti naum lies an hour’s drive from Ochrid, at the opposite end of the lake. On clear days you may see it across the waters, shining white on a small Gibraltar of dark rock. The road runs to it along the lakeside, over mountains covered with sweet-scented scrub and golden broom, and down to a fishing village with its bronze nets drying on high poles by the shore. When we passed, the young people were sitting about in the late afternoon glow, in particularly exotic peasant costumes which took the mind to Persia, with an air of being very pleasant with one another; and Dragutin said that the village was noted not only for its violent political life but for the tender consideration the men showed towards the women. ‘Some of the people have been to America,’ he explained, ‘and they come back like that.’ Then the mountains become fierce again, and as Biblical as the plains round Debar. A naked range as black as night, its high ridge starred with snow, lay to the left, and on the right, across the lapis-blue lake, the Albanian mountains were a darker blue veiled with white clouds, all in forms stern as justice. Then the road dropped to the mercy of the flatlands round Sveti Naum, and the traveller must be conscious thereafter that he has come to a place which is remarkable in a much simpler, more fundamental way than we are accustomed to note in the modern world.

  The road to the monastery runs between steep meadows and becomes an avenue of tall poplars on the landward side and stout willows on the lakeward side, growing from smooth and springy turf. There is water on both sides of this avenue. The lake is always near at hand on the right, shining between the trees, and at the end of the avenue we crossed a bridge over a river which flows from a lake on the left, a small and more light-minded lake, prettily reflecting an island hung with willows. When one first comes to Sveti Naum one simply thinks, ‘Why, there is water everywhere.’ But the situation is more unusual than that, for in many parts of the world dry land is only a figure of speech. Here one finds oneself saying, ‘But the trees and the flowers and the grass in this place have never been thirsty, and the air has never been dusty,’ and there is a eupeptic air about the scene, as if the earth had here attained a physiological balance in this matter of moisture rarely to be found elsewhere. And this is no illusion. Beyond the range of black rock on the left lies the Lake of Prespa, which covers about a hundred and twenty square miles, lies five hundred feet higher than Lake Ochrid, and has no visible outlet. Its waters percolate through the base of this range and arrive at these flatlands in a spread network that forms a perfect natural irrigation system, so that it emits refreshment to the eye, the nostril, the skin.

  Crouching on the massive black rock, of which one face drops down to the great lake, the monastery is curiously deformed by a concrete tower livid in colour and vile in design. It was put up to commemorate the thousandth year of the foundation. It was Bishop Nikolai who let it be built thus, and he has been bitterly criticized for it. His defence is that the monks and the congregation wanted it to be so, and that it was no business of his to earn the approval of the museums. A pier runs out into the lake, and the road turns away and mounts a steep stone causeway, and under an arch enters the paddock that nearly always surrounds a monastery. This is larger than most, for it covers five or six acres of grassy hillside. Round it are some extremely beautiful farm buildings, probably some hundred years old, with wide tiled roofs propped up by wooden pillars, and loggias undercut by arches, which have about them a distant memory of Greek architecture. Swine, and some horses, an imperial and poppy-wattled turkey, and two peacocks crop the grass, and there are some tall and spreading trees. This paddock has its history. Under the Turks fairs were held here, and the Christian merchants and peasants from different parts of the country would meet, the worn threads of Byzantine culture held a little longer, and sometimes insurrection was plotted.

  We passed under an arch and were in the small square formed by the monastery buildings. They are a mixed lot, put up at various times since the fourteenth century, which are painted different colours, some white, some grey, some red, for no other reason than that the monks happened to be given these paints. At one point there are no buildings, and a terrace looks down on the wide face of the lake. The air up here is cooled by the breath of the water. In the centre of this square is the tenth-century Church of Sveti Naum. It is dark and low, its stone walls are brown save where they are plastered white, and its two cupolas, one of which is taller than the other, are of red and white brick, very old, very dim in colour; and it is roofed with red-brown tiles. In shape it is like a locomotive. It stands above the cobbles of the square on a platform of earth, walled up with stone. On one side of the church there grows a lilac tree, which bears very large purple flowers, on the other a fig tree. By the fig tree are some poles on which they dry the monastery fishingnets.

  There was nobody about when we arrived but one of the more mystical monks, an old man like a long white-pointed flame, to whom we were nothing, who was probably not sure whether we were among the living or the dead. So we went straight into the church, which is the supreme example of the Serbo-Byzantine architecture that burrows to find its God. It is small, it might be the lair of a few great beasts. There are a few narrow windows and most of them are slits in the cupolas. If it were not for the candles burning in front of the icons the dark outer church and the darker inner church would be hardly more distinguishable than the walls of dungeons. The gilded iconostasis here shines only with a dim coppery gleam. There is a curious smell here, strong yet clean; the two squat columns which divide the churches are based on the living rocks. A low door leads from this darkness to a small darker place, where there is the tomb of Sveti Naum. A tin lamp with red and blue glass shows the great marble box, its top covered by a piece of striped white and gold cloth, poorish in quality, and greasy where too many of the faithful have rested their heads; the Scriptures lie on it too, a pair of thick volumes in artless silver bindings, and a common wooden cross, and a collection-box sealed with pink wax; propped against the wall are four icons, all veiled with machine-made lace and one festooned with cotton roses; there are several bundles of clothes, gifts to the monastery which are laid up for a time and then sold; and cast face down among this precious rubbish, in an attitude of despair, was a man in the cap and apron of a scullion.

  On a fresco above the tomb was a portrait of Sveti Naum, almost certainly painted by someone who knew him. He was the successor to Sveti Kliment, the first Christian missionary to be sent by Cyril and Methodius into these parts, and he had to bring not peace but a sword, since none of the persons involved had yet heard of peace. He looks a warrior. Throughout these thousand years nobody has ever dared to touch the stern eyes of his portrait, and this means much; for it is near the ground, and it was the unpious habit of Turks to shoot out the eyes of Christian saints in frescoes, and the pious habit of peasants to scratch them out and soak the plaster to make a lotion for failing sight. His sternness, and the black strength of the church, have been claimed as a refuge by the Macedonian peasant from his ultimate terror; and it illuminates the horror of history in these parts that this is not failure of courage but loss of sanity. Travellers who visited the country in the old days were astonished at the amount of madness, often directly traceable to some act of war such as the burning of a village, and sometimes to the severity of peasant life. This monastery is a hospital for the miraculous treatment of such cases. They are brought here and fed and housed and prayed over by this tomb for forty days. No doubt this scullion was one of the melancholics.

  We left the monastery and went down the hill to the bridge over the river between the two lakes, for I wanted my husband to see the wonder of it. This river, the Drin, is clear like no other river, it is visible only to the point that it can give pleasure to the eye. It is, in fact, the same river that we had seen at Struga. It has its source in certain springs that flow unmixed into the lesser, willow-hung lake, which is mere water like any other lake; it declares its peculiar shining rapture as it runs under the bridge; it dives in
to Lake Ochrid like a person, and like a person is not confused with that in which it swims; and twenty miles away it leaves the lake still itself, to be clearly identified, absolutely unlike any other river. As the sun set behind the range of black rock the air became as remarkable as this water in its transparence, its cleanliness, its fluidity. We put our elbows on the parapet and looked out towards the lake, and found our knees were touching something sculptured. It was a slab carved with a ram and a ewe copulating, obviously the relic of some fertility cult. When the first Christian Slavs built their churches they often incorporated into the buildings such remnants of the pagan faiths that had been cultivated on the sites. This was remarkable for its prosaic quality: the ram looked like a rate-payer, the ewe had an air of routine modesty. A fertility cult, in the hands of dull people, must have been duller than any modern form of religion. We heard from the palely glowing land the baaing of sheep, the sweet cracked beat of their bells, and, finally, the sound of a voice, darkened by a saintly shadow, of invitation calling a name again and again. In an orchard that itself looked spectral in the twilight by reason of the whitewash on the tree-trunks, there walked the delicate old Abbot, his red sash as strange as a bright colour worn by a phantom; and presently his call was heard and there ran to him a peasant in a sheepskin coat. The Abbot pointed up to the branches of a tree, and the peasant registered surprise and distress. Then a handsome boy galloped by on a pony, saddled with wood and bridled with rope, and they cried out that he must stop. He rode to them among the fruit trees, and they pointed out to him whatever it was that had distressed them in the tree-top. He stared up, blurted out an answer that apparently proved their distress to be the result of a comical mistake, and they all broke into laughter. The pale glow over the land grew golden.

  On our return to the monastery courtyard we found a monk whom I had met on my previous visit, sitting with two of the lunatics and singing them airs from Madame Butterfly. This monk is a Serb from Novi Sad, who is called the Doctor because he had been a medical student for two or three years before he took his vows. It is said that he took them because he himself was cured of a mental disorder by Sveti Naum. He is a charming person, with a face that is at once extremely animal, as if he could find his way by scent, and extremely mild, as if he were purged of aggressiveness and all the baser instincts, and he has a beautiful baritone voice, rich with detached sensuousness. It is delightful to be with him, though it is not easy to get in touch with him, for the Austro-Hungarian Empire did not, as is often falsely alleged, open the Western world to its peoples by teaching them German; Novi Sad was in Hungary and its children were taught not German but Hungarian. He works very hard, for he sings at most of the services; he alone receives all guests who visit the monastery, and he takes his share of looking after the lunatics, but he has a skin as smooth as a child’s and the charm of an indolent man.

  The lunatics bore testimony to his power in dealing with them by sinking back into their woe as soon as he turned his attention from them. They kept on starting at the church where all their hopes were centred. This was the antithesis of the Byzantine practice of blinding people by making them look at a bright light; they were trying to get back their inner sight by keeping their eyes on the darkness. Both of them were so mad that nobody could have seen them without noticing their condition. One, a young girl in a cheap cloth coat with a goat-skin collar, was perhaps a shop-assistant from some small town; she was wearing bedroom slippers, and a hole in her stocking showed her bare heel. The other was a superbly handsome man in his thirties, with the long hair and the beard of a priest, who was dressed, like his companion, in Western clothes, but with an extreme carelessness; his socks were bright yellow, and he wore curious strap-shoes like a child’s. They were very different. Of the girl one could say quite simply, ‘She would not be mad if someone had not been so cruel to her,’ as simply as one might say, ‘That face would not be bruised if someone had not struck it.’ But in the man there worked an elemental distress, peculiar to himself, which might have vexed him had he never known any but himself, or only the loving. He was in the predicament of the two-headed calf, part of his soul was spitting out nourishment it needed.

  There was something shocking to a Western mind in the disorder of their dress. But when I looked back to the time of my life when I was most miserable I realized that it would have been a great relief to have let everything about me, including my clothes, express that misery; and it indicated no callousness on the part of their guardians, for some of the monks are so rapt in ecstasy that they notice nothing material, and the others had been brought up in Turkish Macedonia, where a ragged garment was more normal than a whole one in many Christian homes. It was not at all terrible to be with these people, and indeed their condition seemed far from being the worst that can be feared, when we were joined by a young man who was staying in the monastery, not as a lunatic but as a tourist. Small and whippy, wearing curious knickerbockers of Central European pattern, he sat whistling and trimming his nails with a penknife, and was none the more acceptable for having his wits about him. He seemed to find the time pass slowly, as indeed it must in an Orthodox monastery if one is not interested in Orthodox monasteries, and from his lack of response to the conversation it appeared that he was not.

  When it drew near the dinner hour the Doctor sent the two lunatics into their refectory, asked the four of us to come with him into the guest-house, and said good-night to the young man, who gave him a nod which was affable in an exceedingly unsuitable way, which would have looked more appropriate over the rim of a glass of beer. The Doctor answered with a smile that was not without reserves. The rest of us went with him up the stairs that led to the gallery, here walled in though it is open in most monasteries, where the visitors are given slatko, the ceremonial offering of sugar or jam and glasses of cold water, and where the guests who stay overnight are given their meals. We were given plum brandy, and then shown into our bare little rooms, with the narrow beds and the tin basins. The windows looked out on the lake, which was now silver under a horizon of black clouds. Over the black range on our right a Niagara of radiant white mist was pouring, and some light, of unimaginable provenance, crept low along the ground and turned the trees to a hard emerald green. On the left the Albanian mountains were a deep violet, and below them the lights of villages shone on the water’s edge. ‘Those lights that are quite near, that are almost at our feet,’ said the Doctor, ‘that too is an Albanian village. We are right on the frontier here. Indeed we were once actually in Albania, as a result of the first peace settlement. But this was a pilgrimage place for so many who lived in Yugoslavia that the frontier had to be corrected. Still, it will go hard with us if Italy ever strikes at Yugoslavia through Albania.’

  At dinner the Doctor sang a long grace in his beautiful and untroubled voice, and sat down to eat with us. We had little appetite, though the food was grown on the rich farmlands of the monastery and was well cooked by a lunatic who had been only uncertainly cured by Sveti Naum and had begged to be allowed to stay near the shrine so that he could resort to it at need; it was our fifth meal that day. But the Doctor ate well, for the day of an Orthodox monk is long and trying. The brothers rise between three and four and breakfast at eight, after the long service, and they have a midday meal at half-past twelve; but they do not have their supper until eight or later, though some of them have had another long service in the afternoon. As the Doctor sat drowsily over his coffee, Constantine said to him, ‘Who was the little one in knickerbockers who was sitting down in the courtyard with the lunatics?’ The Doctor answered, ‘We do not know, but he comes here now and then.’ Constantine asked, ‘Does he say why he comes?’ ‘He says he likes the monastery,’ said the Doctor, with no great conviction. ‘What does he say he is?’ asked Constantine. ‘He has a Yugoslav passport,’ said the Doctor. ‘But I think he talks a little like a Saxon, a Saxon perhaps not of Saxony, but of Transylvania,’ said Constantine.

  A pause fell, and we all drank mo
re wine. ‘I am sad,’ said the Doctor, ‘because I am very happy here, and I may have to leave. I could not be happier, for I like showing guests the monastery, since in a way it is the most wonderful place in the world, and I like working with the lunatics, for many of them are made sound. That is a great joy to me, for my only sorrow on becoming a monk was that I could not be a doctor, and here I find myself helping with cures such as no doctor could ever work. But Bishop Nikolai says that perhaps he will move me to Zhitcha.’ Zhitcha is the seat of Bishop Nikolai’s other diocese, it is the rose-red monastery where all the Serb kings are crowned, not a hundred miles south of Belgrade. ‘Why so?’ asked Constantine. ‘He says,’ replied the Doctor, ‘that in Zhitcha, which is an administrative centre, he has need of a modern man, as I am, but that here in Sveti Naum there is a living tradition which can safely be taken care of by the traditionalists. Besides he is making it a rule to have none but Macedonian monks in Macedonian monasteries, and there is no reason why I should be an exception.’ He sighed deeply, but added, ‘It is a wise rule, for many reasons, even for the sake of Sveti Naum itself. There might come those who did not understand the place and the peasants.’

  There was much in what he said, though the rule was probably first conceived as a sop to the Macedonian patriots. The Doctor was a unique personality, who moved in a world of essences and remarked little of the material except its simpler pleasantnesses, such as the feeling of cleanliness. But most men who had been brought up within the orbit of Belgrade and Zagreb would be infected with Western ideas regarding the importance of material possessions and a written culture. When the Abbot and the peasant and the boy had been talking in the orchard that evening they had been divided by differences of age and function, which summed up to considerable differences in authority; but there could be no idea of a fundamental inequality declared at birth, because the Abbot had probably come from a peasant home. There could be nothing more horrible than the idea of a priest coming to this place to treat lunatics and giving them, even if inadvertently, their first knowledge of a class system, thus betraying to them that they were at a disadvantage of which they were previously unaware. Its horror makes one realize that, however inevitable a class system may be in a complicated capitalist state, it must be a cruel burden on the human mind. It would also be horrible if, in a country where a certain proportion of the people must needs be ragged and dirty, those in mental distress should have to go for comfort to a priest who associated the idea of worth with whole and clean garments. There is a like therapeutic threat in the Western incapacity for appreciating a culture which is not dominated by literature, which makes Serb and Croat residents in Macedonia who have graduated in the universities of Berlin, Vienna, and Paris completely blind to the beauty of the peasants’ costumes and dances and rituals and certain that they are barbaric. This blindness is indeed a more serious therapeutic threat than the other. There was published some years ago a book by an English doctor about his life as a superintendent in a lunatic asylum for African natives, in which he described how his work had been profitless until he had laid hold on their culture, and had mastered their myths and basic ideas. If this were true in the case of a primitive race, it must be even more so in the case of a people governed by the phantom of a complex culture.