Black Lamb and Grey Falcon

by Rebecca West

  It might be thought that none of these considerations could apply to a shrine, where the cure offered is miraculous, and therefore ought to be conceived to be as simple as a poultice, cold and in reverse action, the patient being clapped on a marble tomb and the supernatural left to take its course. But the cure is in fact far more complicated. It depends on bringing the patients, in as receptive a state of mind as possible, under the influence of Sveti Naum himself, that is to say under the influence of a personality which has been perpetuated by word-of-mouth tradition and by the style of a building. And here too Western influence might be disastrous, for that personality has an exquisite appropriateness to Macedonia as well as to sanity. A grim man, Sveti Naum was not vanquished when he fought among these rocks with the wild men who would be heathen; he passed thereby a Macedonian test. He knew that nothing was too abominable to happen on this earth, but that probably all could be borne if one fought a soldierly campaign, numbering the enemy and recognizing their kind, and drawing on all available forces, of which the mightiest was magical. It would have been a pity if the perpetuation of this message had been left to a Western sentimentalist, who would have represented Sveti Naum as a kind man who kissed the place and made it well, or a Western euphorist who would falsely claim that events were never horrible if properly regarded.

  The character of Sveti Naum, or of the tradition that has formed round his name, is so definite that each time I have slept in the monastery it has affected my dreams, making them bleak yet not at all distressful presentations of what was not to be altered for the better in my life, from which I woke refreshed. But the next day my wakening was late. I heard the clanging of the great bell, which announced the last phase of the long morning service, washed in cold water, looking across the lake at a shining world, dressed, ran across the courtyard, where a peacock was preening its tail in a pool of sunlight, and went in, or, as it seemed, down, into the dark church. There in the candlelight were my husband and Gerda and Constantine and Dragutin, two old nuns and a hunchback young one, the two lunatics we had met in the courtyard, and a third, a young peasant girl, who was accompanied by her mother.

  The Doctor, with an acolyte standing by him, a lad in a torn coat with his socks in folds above his ankles, was reading the lesson; and when he had finished the royal door in the iconostasis opened and there came out a priest dressed in crimson and gold, who stood waiting, in the space that is left between the congregation and the iconostasis, where there is a circle of white stone with a black star inscribed in it. One of the old nuns led forward the girl in the cloth coat, and she dropped on all fours in front of him. Opening his bearded mouth to make way for a deep-lunged prayer, he swung a censer backwards and forwards over her. Her crouching body made a pitiful hieroglyphic of which the interpretation was very plain. Had the conception of sex been revised in the human mind, so that men are kind to those who give them pleasure, she would not have been mad. But the dark vault and massive pillars of the church about us, the stern and ornate iconostasis, announced the unlikelihood of such a change, and the inveterate inharmoniousness of life. In her place the bearded man crouched down and was censed. He flung himself at the priest’s feet with the greatest eagerness, but once he knelt he would have nothing of the rite, he shifted from knee to knee, raised and lowered his head. Here was the source of life’s disharmony, of such conceptions as had driven the girl mad. Here was the two-headed calf again, that would drink the milk with one head and spit it out with the other and so must die. Last came the peasant girl, who swung round as she got to the priest and turned her back on him, showing a pretty face, prettily tied up in a white kerchief. She was an idiot, and laughter shook her even when she crouched before the priest. Her mother, who was not old but was dried up by excessive grief as if she had been smoked like a ham, was by her side when she rose, and slewed her round to face the altar. Whispering, she pushed up the girl’s hand towards her forehead, and there was achieved a clumsy sign of the cross. The mother must have laboured for years to teach her such a complicated movement.

  The priest went back through the royal door, and the Doctor sang another passage from the Mass. The idiot wearied and strayed from her mother, who was standing with her eyes shut in prayer, and spent a little time feeling the fluffy texture of my angora dress. Then she lost interest and stared ahead of her, and saw the back of her mother’s head, round under a black kerchief. She put out her hand and began to finger it with an embryonic kind of love; the mother turned a patient face and drew her daughter back to her. Then the priest came out again from the iconostasis and stood holding a bowl full of the sacramental bread, the small flat loaves. The nuns took theirs avidly and happily, the girl in the cloth coat took hers as if it might perhaps be what she really wanted, the bearded man went up eagerly and then turned aside and began to straighten the tangled fringe of the shelf on the iconostasis where the icons stand, the idiot girl came back laughing, with crumbs on her mouth, which her mother brushed away. There was a prayer of thanksgiving, and suddenly the magic was over. The nuns and the priests hurried out of the church about their business, the lunatics sauntered out as if for them all clocks had stopped.

  While we were breakfasting in the gallery on coffee and milk and the sweet black bread they bake here from their own corn, I said to Constantine, ‘I wish you would ask the Doctor if they cure all kinds of madness alike.’ He answered, ‘No, he will not like you to ask that. And it is not necessary, for I can tell you what his answer will be. He will say that the mercy of God works on all people that seek it,’ and went on with his coffee. I said, ‘Please ask him,’ but he would not until I had tried to put the question in my stumbling Serbian. The Doctor gave a bright, furtive smile, like a hound thinking of the ways of the fox, and answered, ‘There are some cases of madness which can be cured by Sveti Naum, and some for which God apparently reserves another way. Neuroses we can cure. Many, many neurotics have I seen go from here sane men. And of psychotics I have seen some cured here, more, I think I can say, than are cured elsewhere, for I think that in the asylums they do not claim to cure dementia praecox, and that I have seen happen here several times. But where there is something organic, there we can do nothing. But I should not put it like that, for this condition may be altered tomorrow. Also I should be careful to point out that there must be a monastery somewhere where such things are cured. All I can really say is that here we cure other things.’ He said that he thought the girl in the cloth coat would probably be completely cured, but he was doubtful about the bearded man, and that he did not expect that they would be able to do anything for the girl with the white handkerchief.

  This ruling on the general types and the particular cases is very much the opinion that an alienist trained in modern Western methods would have passed, except for the optimistic prognosis concerning the psychotics; but the Doctor was speaking entirely according to his own experience and the tradition of the monastery, for his medical education had stopped short of any such advanced studies. In fact, there has somehow been worked out in this monastery a system of psychotherapy which is roughly comparable to that recommended by modern medical science, and which certainly achieves some degree of success. This is not unnatural. The patients come to the monastery for forty days, which is the length of a good holiday, and are given wholesome food, of a more varied kind than they have in their houses, which are in the poorest cases limited to bread and paprika, and they are housed with more privacy. For many of them it is the first break in a life of continuous overwork, and for quite a number of women it is an escape from male tyranny. They are also the exclusive objects of the attention of a number of priests, who are the most important kind of people they know, which must be restorative to their self-esteem; and the effect of the ceremony in church that we had just seen must be overwhelming. These people are used to the Mass, they have often stood in church and known that behind the iconostasis the priests are celebrating the holy mysteries. Sometimes the curtain above the door is drawn back and the
y see them in a blaze of light, like to the saints and kings of old time shown in the frescoes and icons with their gorgeous garments and their long hair; sometimes they come out to dispense the sacramental bread, the most holy of substances. And suddenly it appears that they can come out for no other purpose than to help one’s darkened brain.

  After breakfast we went to look at the springs which feed the lesser lake. On the way out we went into the church, to have another taste of its powerful and astringent quality. But we did not stop, for at the tomb of Sveti Naum a priest was reading some form of exorcism over a peasant girl, whose mother stood by with her hands folded across her apron front in an attitude of despair. The girl was sitting on the floor with some sort of embroidered liturgical cloth on her head, staring not at all sadly ahead of her with immense black eyes sunk in a white face. In the sickly slenderness of her wrists and ankles, in the jaunty perversity of her expression, she recalled some young ephebe of Paris in the nineteen-twenties, some idol with feet of cocaine, dear to Jean Cocteau and his circle. As we went out of the monastery a terrific avian hullabaloo broke out in the archway over our heads, and we saw that the rafters were thick with the family life of swallows, which was being threatened by a malign pigeon; but this disorder was speedily righted by a lean old monk who ran out of the kitchen with a long pole, making fierce movements while he uttered mild exhortations, appealing to its better side. Outside, the landscape was as under a special blessing because it was so well watered. Its grass and trees shone with the radiance of youth, of perfect health.

  We followed a path that ran round the lesser lake. Its centre was calm: across it a line of poplars were reflected exactly in their ash-white wood and gold-green leaf. But the edge trembles perpetually, for here the waters of Lake Prespa burst out from the imprisoning rock in two hundred separate springs, the sources of the river Drin. Each has its own rhythm; some are quick, some are slow, some beat like a pulse, all are clear as crystal. ‘How strange that they should both be at Sveti Naum,’ said my husband, ‘this little church which is the blackest and heaviest thing I have ever seen, this expanse of water which is the lightest, brightest thing I have ever seen.’ One spring bubbled up, transparent as air, in a stone basin set among long grass in a roofless chapel; at our coming huge bronze and emerald frogs dived from the grass into the basin. We found another in a basin set in the open, and sat there for a time. Above us, on a hillside stained magenta with wild stock, munched a herd of goats; one kid, grey and delicate, lay sleeping near us, shining and lax like a skein of silk. I put out my hand and it fell on the most poetical of wild flowers, the grape hyacinth. We saw Dragutin, whose religious attitude to water we had often noticed before, reverently walking along the path by the lake, keeping his eyes on it and often standing still.

  When the morning had worn on, we found a path back through the orchard where we had seen the Abbot and the peasants, and came back to the bridge over the Drin. Our knees against the ram and ewe, we leaned over and watched a mill-wheel turning under a grey tower that is said to be as old as the monastery, a thousand years or so, and is homely and majestic in the manner of its time. The brightness of the river was not to be believed. We saw Dragutin coming along the avenue of poplars and willows, and pausing for a gossip with the shepherd of a brown and white flock that was grazing on the cushiony turf under the trees. Presently he came up and, after pouring into my hand a stream of round white stones he had found somewhere, leaned over the bridge with us. As I played with the stones they reminded me of the sacramental loaves in the church, and there came back to me a poetic moment in the service I had witnessed on my previous visit to Sveti Naum. At a certain point in the afternoon service a nun went into the centre of the church, where there is a circle of white stone inscribed with a black star on the floor, and put there a rickety little table covered with a white crocheted mat, such as one might see in seaside lodgings. Then the priest in crimson and gold had come out carrying a plate of sacramental loaves and laid it on the table. Then he walked round the table, pointing towards the loaves a long cross with a lit candle fixed to the top of its upright arm, where Christ’s head must have rested, and halting at north and south and east and west to chant a spell. This rite strongly evoked the death of Christ, the radiance of goodness, the sin of murdering it, and the cancellation of this sin by the consent of goodness to live again, that those who ate the bread must have felt that they were swallowing a substance like Christ, that they were absorbing goodness.

  Here in Sveti Naum magic can be worked. The mind accepts it. That is to say, this is one of the places in the world which, by their material conformation emphasized by the results of the labours to which they have inspired their inhabitants, have a symbolic meaning. The existence of such places is one of the determining factors in history, and most of the great cities are among them. The shape of the earth around them, the mountains that uphold them or the plains that leave them open to their enemies, the rivers and seas or barrenness about them, recommend certain philosophies. These are never stated, but the people live or die by them: so do we sometimes go about all day depressed or exalted by a dream which we do not remember. The proof lies in the power of these places to imprint the same stamp on whatever inhabitants history brings them, even if conquest spills out one population and pours in another wholly different in race and philosophy. Whatever blood finds itself in Constantinople feels an obligation to cultivate an immensely elaborate magnificence under the weight of which it grows fatigued and slatternly; whatever faith finds itself in Rome becomes gluttonous of universal dominion; whether imperialism or communism is in Moscow it sits behind locked doors and balks at shadows.

  The argument here, in Sveti Naum, which has been recognized for a thousand years, is a persuasion towards sanity; a belief that life, painful as it is, is not too painful for the endurance of the mind, and is indeed essentially delightful. It presents that argument in a series of symbols. There is the circle of water, which is a natural substance like the rock of the mountains. There is the other lake, far less in size, which is also of common water, of rain that falls from dark clouds and runs down the hillsides, but which receives other water of a brighter sort, derived from the springs that flow from a distant mountain. This other water flows as a river through that lake and the great lake, immersed in them yet always distinct, and leaves them with its nature unchanged. There is, besides these lakes and these springs and this river, a circle of green earth, where the grass and the trees grow tall without experience of drought and the herds browse and are never hungry; and besides this circle of earth, which is the extreme of fertility, is a small circle of rock, the concentrated extreme of barrenness. On this rock there has been built a square of squat, dark, strong buildings. In the centre is the strongest, squattest, darkest of them all. This building is divided into two parts; in the one there are light and people who can by singing and ritual evoke the thoughts and feelings which are to human beings as water is to the grass and trees and turf, in the other there are darkness and people who need this refreshment.

  This is a picture of man’s life. The difference between the mountains and the lake is as the difference between nature and man. The difference between the lakes and the river which runs through them is as the difference between man’s bodily life, of the kind which he shares with the animals, and the life of his mind. There is the difference between the green earth and the barren rock, the difference between life when it goes well and when it goes ill. There is the monastery as example that man is not powerless when life goes ill, that he can assemble sounds and colours and actions into patterns which make spells and evocations, which persuade the universe to give up the antidote it holds against its poison. It is not pretended in any part of Sveti Naum that this revelation is made with facility. Even here truth does not grow on every bush. Bread does not become of like substance to goodness until it is laid on a little table in the centre of the church, over a circle of white stone inscribed by a black star, until it is enchanted
by songs from the four points of the compass, and indicated by flame. It is the character of art and thought never to be easy. Nor is it pretended in any part of Sveti Naum that the revelation is complete, that all is now known. If the place makes a claim it is only that here for a mile or two earth corresponds with reality, which this correspondence shows not to be disagreeable.