To the Lake

by Kapka Kassabova

  That’s why, on this first evening, everything felt too rich and full of hidden meanings to process with the conscious mind. Darkness fell. The lake had gone hard as obsidian and looked like the surface of a vast catacomb. Not at all like that blue lake of the 3-D card that had winked at me in my grandparents’ flat. Not at all inviting. For a moment, I was daunted by the enormity of the journey ahead.

  Just across the water twinkled the lights of mountain villages. A giant neon-lit cross sat so high up in the hills, it floated in the darkness like an apparition. Smaller lit-up crosses sat atop the old churches in town. This fluorescence was new, a territorial response to the building of new mosques in the area. It made little sense in practical terms, because neither Christianity nor Islam was on the rise here, but I guessed it made sense in terms of culture wars and money-laundering. Here, as everywhere in the Balkans now, and across the world, the new church and the new mosque were part of the newly resuscitated ethno-nationalism, that brisk progenitor of new ruins, new medieval kings, new antiquities, and new age-old hatreds.

  From under the cherry tree in my garden, I could make out the jetty and the lit-up lake promenade. It looked small, yet in my childhood it had been majestic.

  At the jetty, a high totemic pole dominated the harbour with its outsized flag of the Macedon sunburst, yellow on red. The sixteen-ray sunburst, initially used by the breakaway republic, had been trimmed down to eight, but too late. In its short life as a national flag since 1995, the sunburst had ignited conflict with Greece. Flagpoles like this had been planted in every town (except those with an Albanian majority) by the outgoing nationalist government. Like the neon crosses, the flag was a territorial marker in a small, vulnerable country whose identity was still a work in progress – as far as its neighbours were concerned. But the neighbours had serious blind spots.

  The Bulgarians still didn’t recognise Macedonian as a language separate from theirs, and nationalists still called it, patronisingly, a western Bulgarian dialect. Standard Macedonian was in fact only formalised in 1945, and in some ways official Macedonian literature begins on that date, making it the youngest European literary canon – though of course authors had been writing for generations in various regional dialects. Either way, a literary language it is, now, and a national one too. The Bulgarian denial is due to a historical trauma involving repeated border (and population) surgeries without anaesthetic, and whose resonance is akin to phantom-limb pain. Though the body has changed forever on the map, a sensation remains. At the same time, Bulgaria had been the first country to recognise the newly independent republic, back when Yugoslavia was breaking up and giving birth to small nation-states the world was yet to get used to.

  The Greeks, by contrast, objected to the very existence of the country under its current name. This is how the trouble concerning the flag was most forcefully manifested in the ‘name quarrel’ that Greece had developed with the little republic. In the modern Greek-nationalist view, the heraldic sunburst of the House of Macedon belonged exclusively to Greece, because the royal seat of Philip of Macedon had been in what is now the village of Vergina, Greece, and the ‘original’ Macedonia was forever and exclusively Hellenic. Meaning Greek.

  In this, as in many carefully constructed national narratives, one dug a long way down to excavate the precious evidence of historic precedence, but had to be careful to stop before deeper layers yet complicated the argument. Not so long before Philip and Alexander and their imperialism, the Greeks proper looked down on their northern neighbours, the Makednoi, as drunken barbarians. In the early fifth century BC the royal house of Macedon was recognised as Greek at the Olympic Games, but it remained on the remote northern fringes. The Macedons spoke a now lost language incomprehensible to the Greeks, and their political system was more similar to that of their immediate neighbours, the Illyrians in the west and the Thracians in the east, than to the Greek city-states to the south.

  Looking at the giant sunburst flapping peacefully in the breeze, I wondered: what is Macedonia? A question that really asks: what is nation, what is geography? Meaning: what is history? Herodotus spent his life trying to answer this, but his long-view approach signalled that he had a deep understanding of why ‘man is entirely a creature of chance’. He vowed to tell ‘the story as I go along of small cities of men no less than of great. For most of those which were great once are small today; and those which used to be small were great in my own time. Knowing, therefore, that human prosperity never abides long in the same place, I shall pay attention to both alike.’

  I could count no less than five historic Macedonias. Seen on the map, they move like live mercury around the lakes and between the Aegean, Adriatic and Pontic coasts.

  The ancient kingdom of Macedon (ninth to second century BC) started off small – from the gulf of Thessaloniki to Lake Prespa – and ended up as a vast and influential civilisation. Its original contours overlap with today’s north-western Greece and the southern part of the Republic of Macedonia. Alexander ‘took’ the Macedonian Empire all the way to India, changing the face of Eurasian culture forever. His father Philip built great towns all over the Balkan peninsula, often called after himself. The original name of Bulgaria’s second city Plovdiv was Philipopolis. Bitola in the east had an impressive town complete with an arena, built by Philip and called Heraclea Lyncestis, after Hercules.

  The Roman province of Macedonia (second century BC to seventh century AD) was extensive: from the three-pronged Halkidiki peninsula to the Adriatic in the west, and covering much of modern Albania, mainland Greece and the Republic. It came to an end with the decline of the Western Roman Empire.

  The Byzantine theme, or province, of Macedonia (seventh to fourteenth century) took over, but it turns up in a bewilderingly different place: much further east, not even overlapping with the preceding Macedonias. It looks like an administrative error made by some clerk who never left Constantinople.

  The Ottoman region of Macedonia (fourteenth to twentieth century) shaped what became known as geographic Macedonia today: a large and extraordinarily varied territory with an Aegean outlet, whose main watercourse is the Vardar River. This territory is now divided among four countries (a sliver of it is inside Albania). But only one of these, Greece, has made exclusive claims to the name.

  Yugoslav Macedonia (1944–91) was the briefest and smallest, and the one I knew as a child. Its boundaries have remained the same since it declared independence but its evolution was stunted by the quarrel with Greece. On the face of it, at least, the quarrel seemed to stem from an over-identification with an antique empire, and a symbol of this over-identification was the flag at the jetty.

  Which results in a sixth Macedonia – an imaginary one, one that does not exist anywhere except in the desperate collective desire for a great past that is required to infuse the diminished present with meaning and value.

  I’d brought with me a handful of photographs of my grandmother by the lake. In a 1943 photo on the jetty, she wears a rather thin coat and smiles. In her papers in Sofia, I’d found a couple of cards from admirers, written during parties in Ohrid where men wrote messages to the ladies they hoped to dance with. One was from an Albanian aristocrat from the family of King Zog who sent her Christmas cards even after she married another. Another card was inscribed: ‘To the most beautiful Gypsy’. There was also a small photo of my grandfather, who was not present at those dance parties. I found many sensually posed photographs of her, with poetic inscriptions and always the lake in the background – often so full of light that the water was invisible. But this was the only photograph of him sent to her: a fair young man with a look of constitutional sadness.

  The jetty featured in my own past too. I’d had an encounter here in the late 1990s. The war in Kosovo had just ended. I had travelled from New Zealand back to Europe for the first time since our emigration to the new world in the early part of the decade. It was my first solo visit to Ohrid. An aged man in a Panama hat was throwing bread to the swans.
He wiped his hands needlessly with a handkerchief.

  ‘Forgive me for asking, but whose are you, young lady?’ he said.

  Whose are you? The Ohridian question. I said my grandmother’s name and maiden surname. For a moment, I thought he hadn’t heard. Then he said:

  ‘I knew her. I heard that she passed away, too young.’

  He asked if I would meet him later in the evening, at the same spot. His words became rushed. He was taken by surprise. As was I – I didn’t know anyone here, outside the family, who had known my grandmother. In Sofia, she was remembered among the intelligentsia of her generation from her radio days. But a long time had passed since she’d left Ohrid. Fifty years.

  We met at the appointed time. He wore a cravat and for a moment it felt like a date. We walked by the water. He was a retired doctor and had that cared-for look of affluent middle-class Yugoslavia, a country that no longer existed.

  ‘I was in love with her and I wasn’t the only one,’ he said without preamble. ‘More than that, I admired her.’

  ‘She missed Ohrid,’ I said.

  ‘She wasn’t made for small-town life,’ he went on. ‘She had met someone in Sofia, an officer in the cavalry. A wartime romance. I heard she had a daughter. But I never saw her again. And one marries, life goes on. Small-town life.’

  Nothing moved except the light. I was twenty-five, he was seventy-five, and we each embodied the past for the other.

  My grandparents were an odd match, temperamentally. She wrote poems and radio plays, he wrote accounts. She was full of appetite; he was a poor eater. He was resigned, she was turbulent. He suffered quietly, she was a drama queen. If there were a motto that sums up one’s chief request from life, hers might have been ‘Love me!’ whereas his might have been ‘Leave me alone.’ Then again, perhaps they were no more of an odd match than most. She didn’t seem fulfilled with him, that much I knew, and she felt entitled to fulfilment – all the women in this family do. We become enraged like elephants if we don’t feel fulfilled by our loved ones.

  But I couldn’t say this to the suitor. On family visits to Ohrid, Anastassia had instructed her young daughter to answer the question Whose are you? with ‘A child of love’. I picture my mother cringing as she said it to please her mother. You couldn’t displease your mother.

  ‘After the war, when she left, things changed,’ he went on. ‘The narrative changed, and with it, national identity. But these things remain inside you. We are the last generation to speak the old language and remember old Ohrid.’

  The mountains at the Albanian end of the lake had turned indigo.

  ‘We take these things to the grave with us,’ he said, and gave me his number, to look him up next time.

  Ten years later, when I returned to the lake, I called the number. A woman answered and told me that he had died. I hung up and a wave of loss washed over me. I had selfishly expected the suitor to live forever – because he held the memory of the young Anastassia before something had been twisted out of shape.

  My grandparents came to Ohrid every summer, to spend long days on the beach with her family. As I knew him, my grandfather was a slender man, easily upset, a poor sleeper who would cry out in the night. His stomach ulcer bled and he was deaf in one ear: mementos from the war. He was a low-key presence, in the shadow of my grandmother. I was very attached to him. One of our routines was to watch him peel and slice an apple, and pass it to me from the tip of the knife. I relished the peacefulness of it: he gave me the apple slices and asked for nothing in return.

  He had been a reluctant officer in the cavalry, and fought in Kosovo in 1944. For the previous three years, the Bulgarian army had been an occupying force, not a fighting one. Occupying and annexing a large part of geographic Macedonia, and helping the Nazi project by deporting thousands of Macedonian Jews who were never to return. The main reason Bulgaria had joined the Axis was its claim to Macedonia. Almost all of geographic Macedonia had been included in the territory of newly autonomous Bulgaria by the Treaty of San Stefano (1878), to be breezily revoked only three months later by the Treaty of Berlin – at the behest of Britain and France, alarmed by the size of this new Slavic (meaning pro-Russian) state in the Balkans – and resulting in dramatic shrinkage for Bulgaria and the re-plunging of Macedonia into late-Ottoman abuse, which in turn resulted in the epic Struggle for Macedonia. The consequences of this volte-face by the European powers have reverberated down the generations with some force. This heralded the onset of what would become a chronic Balkan border disorder.

  This is why, for the Balkan nations, the Second World War was about either reclaiming territorial losses or hanging onto territorial gains that harked back to war treaties. But when the Bulgarian monarchy saw the Red Army massing on the horizon, it declared war on Germany. Once Nazi allies, the Bulgarians now fought alongside the Yugoslav resistance. My grandfather’s 2nd Cavalry Squadron, until then stationed at home in the Balkan Mountains, won a historic battle at Kosovo against the Germans, even though Bulgaria lost Macedonia. Again. For the fourth time in sixty years.

  On their way out of Kosovo, knowing the battle was won but Macedonia was lost, my grandfather’s squadron looted abandoned houses. In one house, there was a piano. Some of his men, peasants from remote villages, had never seen a piano. They ripped the lid off and made something useful from it: a bench. I wouldn’t be amused if someone ripped off the lid of my piano, I said, and he said: It was war. War is stupid and ugly. It chilled me that someone as gentle as my grandfather could be a soldier in some stupid, ugly war.

  Although he never complained when his wife sickened, it broke his heart. Even before, I felt as if something in him was not strong. I was ever tuned into the undercurrents between him and my grandmother, as between my parents. Driving the hot dusty road to the Black Sea one summer, me sitting in the back, the song ‘Et Si Tu N’Existais Pas’ came on the radio; my grandmother sang along with Joe Dassin and translated for us:

  ‘If you didn’t exist, tell me, for whom would I exist?

  If you didn’t exist, I’d invent love itself.’

  My grandfather, who was driving, wiped a tear but said nothing. Even now, that song brings a lump to my throat.

  He accompanied her loyally to the gates of the underworld and returned bereft but also, perhaps, relieved that it was all over – the illness, the marriage, the struggle. She had wanted too much, what he’d offered hadn’t been enough, even though it was all he had. Many years later, living in self-imposed solitude in their apartment on the outskirts of Sofia with a view to the blue mountain, as if immured in a tower – with hundreds of books annotated with comments and dates in his neat accountant’s hand, and surrounded by photographs of his daughter and her two daughters far away in the Pacific – he must have felt that he could no longer resist the melancholy that had shadowed him all his life. He put his affairs in order, placed his old watch on the round table with the small jar of pebbles to which he’d added the two coins he’d placed on his wife’s eyelids when she died – and took his own life.

  Out of nowhere a breeze arose, and a shiver ran through the trees of the old town. The cherry tree stroked my head. The lake quivered, chord after chord played by the wind.

  When I lay in bed, I could hear the splash of waves on the shore as if they were outside the door. I dreamt of the lake rising in the night and engulfing the town, like an old prophecy.

  In the morning, the sound of music woke me. It came from the lake radiant with sunshine. The happy-sad song ‘Macedonian Girl’ blasted through the loudspeakers of an early tourist boat. It celebrated the women of cosmopolitan Macedonia:

  ‘Macedonian girl, you are a many-coloured blossom.’

  Then the refrain, with its undertones of loss foretold:

  ‘Will there ever, never ever be,

  a lovelier blossom

  than you, Macedonian girl.’

  Like the tune, the lyrics were more sad than happy, because the precious blossom is plucked from the mother-
tree and given away to some inferior garden–family that would never cherish it enough.

  The amphitheatrical town with its glinting windows picked up the melody and echoed it back, as if the houses themselves were humming.

  Biljana washed her linens

  in the Ohrid springs.

  A caravan of vintners passed,

  vintners from White Town.

  ‘Vintners from White Town,

  gently with your caravan

  or you’ll crush my linens,

  my linens for my dowry.’

  ‘Biljana, blossom-girl,

  we promise if we crush them

  we’ll pay for them in wine,

  wine and fiery spirits.’

  ‘I don’t want your wine,

  I want the young lad over there,

  who wears a tilted fez

  and looks at me just so.’

  ‘Biljana, blossom-girl,

  Our lad is finished,

  we’ll marry him on Sunday.

  That’s why we carry wine,

  wine and fiery spirits.’

  Ohridian folk song

  WHOSE ARE YOU?

  If you spend time in Ohrid, you’ll end up hearing ‘Biljana Platno Beleshe’ in a more-happy-than-sad D major, because it is the unofficial anthem of the town.

  Its first known performance was by the legendary troubadours of Ohrid. With their lutes and guitars, they were a blend of Venetian influence and possibly the medieval Bogomils – the much-persecuted Eastern Christian sect who rebelled against the tyranny of ecclesiastical and feudal landlords, lived in communes, and were famed for their minstrels. Many migrated to Bosnia to save themselves, where some later converted to Islam, and others moved to Western Europe, blending into the Cathars. My mother saw the last troubadours in 1956 when she first visited with her parents. The occasion called for a clan gathering, and the Sadilov Brothers were hired. They played all day and night as seventy members of Anastassia’s family sang and drank till dawn.