To the Lake

by Kapka Kassabova

  ‘Now it’s back to business, thank God,’ the uncle at St Tropez said. ‘Our village has been here a long time. The lake even longer. And nationalities are recent. There was no distinction between us and the Albanians or Bulgarians, for most of the lake’s history. We’re the same people.’

  Surprised by this statement of solidarity, I nearly hugged him. His straw-fair hair and light eyes were a feature of the people of Trpejca, which they joked about themselves. I knew this because Nate had told me. With her copper hair and freckly skin, she looked Celtic.

  ‘It might be the Italians left some seed behind,’ she’d said with her Gioconda-like smile, ‘We always say there’s something in the mix that isn’t from here.’

  In the nineteenth century, Trpejca was known for its women who rowed like men: an older woman would sit at the prow of the ancient boat, and two younger women rowed.

  Seeing the traditional lake boats, chuns, in a museum, was a shock – they look prehistoric but were in use well into the 1950s. With its coffin-like squareness and high sides, the chun was the very likeness of Charon’s boat that takes your soul across the Styx. It made the same ancient impression on writers over the centuries: the chun had remained unchanged since Roman times, and its prototype came from the Illyrians. Which makes the Ohrid chun seriously old. It was in these vessels that the women of Trpejca took logs to Ohrid town, to supplement their fishing income.

  For centuries, fishing had been the livelihood in lakeside villages like this one. The pastrmka, the famed trout of Ohrid, was carted all the way to Istanbul.

  ‘There used to be twenty fishermen here,’ the uncle said. ‘Now there’s one.’ Trout had dwindled as a result of overfishing, resulting in a ban, while the other famous Ohrid species, the eel, had dwindled as a result of damming. Its story is unbelievable.

  ‘But true,’ said the dad. We were back on the noisy-engined boat.

  The young eels travel east, all the way from the Sargasso Sea in the Atlantic, via rivers and underground streams, to this lake and none other. When they reach maturity, they travel back to the Atlantic to mate. Nobody knows just how they make this epic journey, and the place in the Sargasso where they drop their eggs hasn’t been located. The damming of the River Drim in the late 1950s put an end to this mysterious pilgrimage. For the first twenty or so years, the eels remembered the ancestral migration route, and faithfully tried to retrace it – they’d throw themselves en masse into the maw of the hydroelectric beast, resulting in massacres, time after time. But a few individuals would make it across and continue the laborious cycle. Ancestral habits die hard.

  An ecologist told me that the eels have all but disappeared; but nobody cares, since it is the trout that fetch a good price on their way to restaurant plates. Attempts were made to bring in some baby eels from Greece to rejuvenate the population, but EU regulations about livestock got in the way, since Ohrid is not part of the EU.

  Suddenly, the rocky inlet of Zaum appeared. We had reached the deepest part of the lake and now disembarked at the small beach. There was a church encased in scaffolding. Extensive living quarters had been recently built in place of the long-ruined monastery.

  ‘For the needs of the church,’ said the caretaker neutrally, but it was clear: church officials had fenced off this inlet – which was public ground – and claimed it as their own. So that clerics could come to eat, drink, and cool their gout-swollen feet at the beach. Or the building would be turned into a hotel, the revenues of which would fill the pockets of the Church. We had to pay to use the grounds. Feudal behaviour was a recurring motif.

  ‘We planted these trees in the 1970s when we camped here,’ said the dad. Willows and chestnuts spread their thick shades over the courtyard. The public improvements were all made by locals.

  A karst peak called Big Shadow rose vertically above the monastery to over three thousand feet. The water in the shallows was so clear it was almost illusory, but only thirty metres out, the shoreline suddenly dropped into an underwater abyss with a depth of 280 metres.

  ‘The mountain is reflected in the lake,’ said the dad. ‘The higher the mountain, the deeper the water.’

  A place of perfect echoes. I swam out. Diving in, I could see long soft reeds, ten, twenty metres down, attached to the sandy bottom. They reached for my legs and wrapped themselves around me like long hair. I wriggled out of their slimy grip, and losing my nerve, quickly swam back to the shore. A legend was told about a woman who decided to measure the depth of the lake here at Zaum. She spent years weaving a long rope from silk, and one day came here by boat and dropped it over the side. But the weather suddenly turned. She barely managed to row herself back to the inlet, vowing to build a church here if only the lake would let her go. Humans had no business in the deepest part of the lake.

  The church, built in a cross-shape, was just metres from the water. Its valuable frescoes were badly damaged; it was in an abandoned state of renovation, full of bird droppings.

  ‘It’s been a hiding-place forever,’ said the caretaker behind me, in the dank darkness, as if reading my thoughts about Kosta. ‘’Cause of the difficult access. It was abandoned for years.’

  The Ohridian nobleman who commissioned it was of Herzegovinan descent, and named the church Virgin Mary of Zaum, after his birthplace near a lake. Zaum’s was supposedly a sister monastery to Naum’s down the coast – even their names rhymed. Here was the earliest surviving image of the monk Naum, healer of the insane.

  The frescoes were painted sixty years after the building’s construction, and the faces had that heart-stopping, expressive liveliness characteristic of the humanism of Balkan Byzantine art in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. Anna in a vestment of deep red was shown breastfeeding Mary, displaying the only naked breast on show in the whole of Eastern Orthodoxy, said the caretaker. Generations of graffiti scratchers had left the frescoes in a state of devastation.

  ‘The graffiti are in five languages,’ he said. ‘Macedonian, Bulgarian, Serbian, Albanian and Greek.’

  The symbolism was deeply Macedonian: all the self-proclaimed lovers of this lake had taken turns at vandalising it. The locals were the worst. One had used some blunt instrument to scratch his sorry existence in huge letters, scraping the rich blue pigment between Anna and another saint, stopping just short of the naked breast.

  Many of the saints had been blinded. Traditionally, this was blamed on ‘the Turks’, but the truth is more varied. Aside from plain vandalism by both Christians and Muslims, there was also superstition. Balkan peasants believed that by scraping the eyes off the miracle-making saints and applying or even ingesting the paste made from the scrapings, their ailments would be cured. The feet too were dug out, for healing disability. The paste was often made and sold by the Orthodox clergy, never ones to miss a business opportunity. The result: blind and hobbled saints all around the lakes’ shores. It was an unsettling sight.

  Surprisingly, the hermit cave in the Big Shadow above was inhabited until as late as 1937. The resident monk was called Kalist. It is not known when he left or died. I pictured Kosta hiding in the bat-infested church with his mate, with nothing but the shirts on their backs and these faces looking down at them with no eyes. Had Kalist come down his rope ladder to say hello to the fugitives or to give them a dish of berries?

  Back in the boat, we set off into the deep, to where the woman with the silk rope had sought forbidden knowledge.

  ‘It’s here!’ the dad shouted.

  You could see the line where it went from light blue to impenetrable darkness. Beneath us were nearly three hundred metres of black water.

  ‘See, it’s water like any other,’ the dad said.

  Water like any other, but nobody ever swam here. It was to do with the winds.

  There were two types of strong wind here, the dad said, aside from the obvious directional ones like northerly and southerly: the mokra or wet one, and the strmets or steep one. There was also the treacherous underwater wind, the podvalnit
sa, product of the lake’s internal weather and which was activated at random. And finally, there was the Sahara wind that blew in from Africa and covered cars and boats in a gritty, moist layer, like fine mud.

  There were many stories of people drowning at Zaum. The most dramatic was about a party of Serb officers who’d visited Naum Monastery and, in a drunken brawl, arguing over the existence of ‘miracles’, shot at an icon of St Naum. On the way back to Ohrid, the weather suddenly changed at Zaum. All drowned except the boatman. Ohrid town mourned them, even though they were ‘the Serbs’. The moral of the story seemed to be that you disrespect St Naum at your peril.

  On the other side of the Zaum cliffs, we pulled in to see one more cave church that could have served as an overnight hiding-place.

  ‘St Nicholas,’ said the dad. ‘Protector of fishermen.’

  The church nestled in the rock face at one end of a long sandy beach. An old camping ground was nearby, and a giant dump of plastic bottles uncollected since last summer. I climbed the broken steps into the exposed niche. The smoke of a thousand fires had blackened the frescoes here, and the rain of six centuries had washed away most of them, but the pigments had preserved something of their saturated richness – dark red and blue – and the figures appeared ghostly on the rock face. The heads of the two myrrh-bearing women were gone, only the wine-red and aubergine of their gowns was left, like a stain of memory. The two central scenes could only just be made out: The Angel at the Empty Tomb and Jesus’s Harrowing of Hell. Bumblebees and crickets buzzed in the foliage behind. The earth had been dug up by something.

  ‘Wild pigs,’ said Ivanka.

  We walked along the waterline while her dad rested in the boat. A thick tideline of detritus had washed up – shampoo bottles, shoes, broken toys, plastic wire for fishing rods, the waste of the human world that didn’t belong here.

  ‘They send us this from the Albanian side,’ said a man who suddenly popped out of the bushes with a fishing rod and a joint.

  His name was Angelo and Ivanka knew him. He had deep lines down his cheeks, tattoos on his arms, and restless eyes.

  ‘I’m from the village up here.’ He gestured to the hills above the beach. It was the last before St Naum Monastery. ‘A village of mean people. Though there’s hardly anyone left.’

  He offered the joint around.

  ‘You from the old country then,’ he said sarcastically. ‘Oh yeah, I got a Bulgarian passport. All I had to do was answer the question Do you feel Bulgarian?’ He cackled.

  The three of us walked back to the boat. I looked at the labels on the plastic bottles and tins washed up on the lake shore: they were all in Cyrillic. They were not from the Albanian side after all.

  It is easier that the shadow rest with the other, not with the self.

  At the mouth of a small tributary that snaked into the thick overgrowth beyond the shore, the carcass of a cow lay tangled in shrubs, black with flies.

  ‘This cow is all ours, mind you,’ Angelo said, and disappeared back into the bushes.

  It was not possible to go all the way to Pogradec in Albania, because of the water border. I knew this already, but the sting of it surprised me. By the time we were at the mouth of the mighty springs of Naum that rushed icily into the lake, the monastery rising above, we were only a few hundred metres from Albanian territory.

  ‘We can’t.’ The dad shook his head.

  ‘There have been attempts to open the water border,’ Ivanka said.

  The water border didn’t need opening, because it wasn’t there. That’s what stung about it. Music from a beach restaurant on the Albanian side carried across the water. The checkpoint was only five hundred metres up the road. But I hadn’t brought my passport.

  Deciding on the spot to walk back to Ohrid, I reassured Ivanka and her dad that I’d be fine, and we said goodbye. From the springs of Naum I watched their boat dissolve into the sunshine.

  Walking back to Ohrid took me seven hours. No other walkers crossed my path, only the odd car and some Dutch cyclists. The road was so steep in places, they had to push their bikes uphill.

  Kosta had escaped across the lake, but returned to Ohrid by road many years later. I too would return to Ohrid by road, even if I couldn’t retrace his whole journey across the lake. To do that, I’d have to do it clandestinely, at night. Like him. Once he’d reached the Albanian side, Kosta made his way to the Adriatic coast, and from there to Italy. From Italy, he followed an eastern route through Austria, Hungary, Romania, to his final destination across the Danube: Sofia. It took him two years. He didn’t see his wife and children for four.

  The last people left who’d known Kosta were my aunts – Tatjana’s twin sisters. They were his granddaughters, and I resolved to talk to them. A pattern was emerging – of absent men and women left behind, unbending women who dislocated themselves and their loved ones out of shape trying to right what had gone wrong with the family, the world, life itself. We hold in our energy system people we have never met. Kosta’s restless rebellion runs hot in my blood, and the prideful, furious sorrow of Ljubitsa weighs down my bones at times. I have carried these people all my life.

  The road followed the lower part of the Galicica Mountain, rising and falling. Past a wartime Italian bunker with a view, sprayed with graffiti. The buzz of bumblebees and the scent of wild herbs everywhere. Colours intensified in the afternoon heat and the lake took on a peacocky blue. The mountains across the lake were wrapped in white vapours, like Biljana’s linens.

  Wouldn’t it have been simpler all round if Kosta had ended up at the bottom of the lake? My grandparents wouldn’t have met. My mother, my sister and I wouldn’t exist, someone else would. The Pain wouldn’t be a member of the family, everything would be different.

  Or perhaps not at all different. It may be that we are simply the human form that particular forces assume, generation after generation. I looked at my dusty sandalled feet. Perhaps their road trips were epigenetically determined.

  It may be that the epic journey of the unborn is already written in the ciphers drawn by winds on the lake, as if by cosmic calligraphers. Drawn and ceaselessly redrawn, because the winds come from so many directions that they override each other in a polyglot conversation that will not end, not until the lake dries up and the wind no longer moans and laughs like the samovila of the ballads – with a human voice.

  Girl of the waves

  On a rock by the sea.

  Men come and go

  but he doesn’t appear.

  ‘Birds, you’re my hope.

  You travel over land and sea.

  Did you see him?

  Did you see him? Did you see him?’

  Albanian Tosk song

  ONE THOUSAND SEVEN HUNDRED YEARS

  Tanas Spassé had said to meet him by the Struga bridge where the boats are moored and the lake’s reeds reach four metres in height. In the breeze of early summer, the silky reeds whispered. Trout and carp squeeze themselves through the reeds to help release their eggs. I was taking another break from Ohrid town. I wanted to see the west coast and try, again, to cross into Albania by water.

  From the Struga bridge, you could see the Black Drim River rush out of the lake in a thick jet of champagne, to make its way northwards, carving canyons into several mountain ranges before it hit the coastal plains of the Adriatic.

  Rebecca West observed that nature worship is ‘the basic religion’ in Macedonia, ‘with its special preference for water’. Given all this water, it’s not surprising. Here is a river so determined to follow its own course once it springs out of the flank of the Galicica Mountain, at the southern tip of the lake, that if you draw a horizontal line to cut the lake in two halves, like a pear, you have Struga bridge at the northern tip and Drilon at the bottom tip, in Albania, where the river springs rush into the lake. People said you could see the river inside the lake from the air.

  It seems counter-intuitive for a river to run out of a lake, rather than into it, so much so that Ev
liya Çelebi noted excitedly, and wrongly, that ‘a water like a life potion pours down from the plain and discharges into the Ohrid Lake’. He had stood in the same spot as me. An ‘8000 step long road … paved with white cobblestones’ led to Ohrid town, passing through vineyards and orchards, he noted. He was walking the original Egnatian Way. The orchards are still here, though I didn’t count the steps.

  It was morning and the surface of the lake was still. Tanas Spassé was in his boat lacquered in red and black, though the choice of colours didn’t immediately strike me as symbolic. Tanas’s name was given to me by my cousin’s husband, a doctor. I’d mentioned that I wanted to meet people whose lives straddled both sides of the lake. Tanas was his patient, he had chronic back pain.

  Tanas made a living taking tourists on lake rides.

  ‘On the Struga side,’ he specified, meaning the west side. ‘I rarely go to the east side. Same with the boats in Ohrid, they keep to their side.’

  I stepped into the boat. I was beginning to grasp the ways of lake living: it was all about how close you are to a particular stretch of the shore. That’s your patch, that’s where your life will be. The rules were respected by all.

  ‘Except Albanian poachers coming to steal fishing nets,’ Tanas said.

  What, with the fish in them?

  ‘Komplet,’ he grinned briefly, and started the engine.

  He wasn’t a smiley guy. A stubby, weather-beaten man of seventy, at first glance he looked no different from the other leathery fishermen and boatmen – peaked hat, hands thickened from rope-pulling. But at second glance, something was different about him – he didn’t have the extrovert way of the others. His body language was that of someone who is not fully at home in this life of leisurely boat rides.