To the Lake

by Kapka Kassabova

  That family emigrated to Australia and returned after the fall of the regime. They bought a tobacco factory and owned hotels now, on the lakeside. Tanas’s face looked pained. He turned off the engine.

  ‘This is the border zone,’ he said.

  There was nothing to show there was a border here – just water for as far as you could see. And the houses of a pretty village on a rocky outcrop of the shore, swaddled in vineyards, a swimmable distance across. Lin, his father’s village. We were five hundred metres from the water border. Tanas told me this was as far as we could go. If I wanted to see Albania, I’d have to go by road – over the forested mountain, through the Chafassan checkpoint.

  I was sorely disappointed. I’d thought that we would visit Lin, drop in and see the rebuilt church where his uncle Boris-Bise used to preach, and Granny Persephone’s old house. I thought the border was only a token, a nod to the past, not an actively policed zone.

  ‘How would anyone know if we just keep going to Lin?’ I asked. ‘How does anybody know where the border is anyway?’

  ‘Oh, they know,’ he pointed to a building on the shore. ‘I’d be fined and lose my licence.’

  They were the Macedonian border police. There used to be no police here, just forest, Tanas said, but then the border trafficking started. During the Kosovo War in the late 1990s, Kosovars were smuggled from Lin to Struga, and then on to Skopje. Weapons too. And women were sold as prostitutes. Big bucks, Tanas said, big crimes. So they built the border patrol house.

  ‘Now it’s mostly drugs. And boats. You see lots of stolen boats in Pogradec,’ he said, and stroked the side of the boat. ‘It needs a lick of paint.’

  Red and black are the colours of the Albanian national flag, it only struck me now. But also of VMRO, the Internal Macedonian Revolutionary Organisation, which is still the name of a political party here, and another one in Bulgaria too. I didn’t know how to ask which of the two Tanas had in mind, with his choice of colours. But I asked him about his parents’ reunion in 1991. The border had been partially opened, and Zorka had obtained permission to visit what would soon cease to be Yugoslavia, to see her sister and her husband Sandro. Her parents were dead. Her sister had been writing to her all these decades, in coded language, so as not to excite the Albanian censors, who studied all correspondence from abroad.

  A crossing point was then partially open on the other side of the lake, at St Naum. Zorka walked from Pogradec, alone, with a small overnight bag. There were others in similar circumstances: this was a day on which people would be let through, for twenty-four hours, to be reunited with long-lost family.

  Zorka’s welcoming party on this side consisted of her sister and Sandro, now in his seventies. The sister had brought a bunch of flowers, which she put in Sandro’s hands. But Sandro was uneasy. When the crowd from Albania crossed into Macedonian territory, he did not recognise Zorka. Which one is it, which one do I give the flowers to? he kept asking his sister-in-law. Perhaps he was looking for a younger woman, the woman he remembered.

  She recognised him, though. The man good enough for her. The man she wouldn’t divorce. I think of that woman, a quiet heroine, who in the bloom of her life had become a prisoner but remained loyal to her own truth. The sisters recognised each other instantly.

  ‘There were many women in her situation, in Albania,’ Tanas said. ‘Who’d had to become mother and father, woman and man in one.’

  It was an awkward reunion for Zorka and Sandro. She quickly returned to Albania; and two years later, Tanas, his brother and their families all arrived in Skopje and moved into Sandro’s flat.

  ‘Thirteen of us,’ Tanas grinned. Thirteen people who turned up from Enver Hoxha’s Gulag hinterlands, after decades of physical and psychological hardship. Sandro’s Bulgarian girlfriend made herself scarce, and so did Sandro, who joined her in the countryside. That’s when Tanas knew it was time for them to find their own feet. They returned here, to the lake, where they had been born.

  ‘Where we belong,’ he said.

  The Struga house that had been built for Zorka by her father had been occupied by relatives after the father’s death. Tanas and his family started from scratch, found jobs, built a house, learned the language, and tried to blend in. Tanas, then in his forties, continued to do the only thing he knew – masonry. But back pain eventually stopped him.

  ‘The lake’s in my blood. I bought a boat and here I am. I enjoy myself now. To make up for lost time.’

  Though he only went back to Albania once, to collect Granny Persephone’s bones, he kept a little bit of that country in his black-and-red boat.

  His wife Elena’s family had been forbidden to speak Greek, and Tanas’s mother and grandmother didn’t dare speak Macedonian to Tanas and his brother. Elena and Tanas speak Albanian to each other to this day – the language of their misfortune, and also of their fortune. The pettiness of the Greek–Macedonian dispute was revealed when you saw them together: a Greek and a Macedonian who spoke Albanian, who had married for love in a time of tyranny.

  I asked Tanas if his mother had regrets about that decision she made, back in 1947, to leave her family in Struga and settle with Sandro in Pogradec.

  ‘It was meant to be,’ he shrugged. What is the use of regret? he seemed to say.

  Perhaps his mother’s prayers to Petka had helped her.

  ‘What makes me really happy is that the kids travel,’ Tanas said. ‘When I was young, all I could do was learn the capitals of the world. Now my daughter goes there. And she calls me. Dad, guess where I am.’ His voice went hoarse and he popped another lozenge.

  His son and daughter were both living abroad.

  ‘That way, they’re free,’ Tanas said. ‘Here you can’t be free.’

  The southerly rushed in from Albania and the waves slammed into the boat, solid like concrete. Not another boat in sight. We were far from land. Why can’t we be free here, now? I wanted to yell at the great emptiness of water.

  But Tanas had made his peace, I was the agitated one. He started the engine.

  ‘Put your jacket on,’ he said, ‘it’ll be a rough ride.’ Then he smiled, though not with his eyes.

  ‘Don’t worry,’ he said, ‘We’ll make it.’

  I knew this rock well. I had lived under the shadow of it all my life. All our Western thought is founded on this repulsive pretence that pain is the proper price of any good thing.

  Here it could be seen how the meaning of the Crucifixion had been hidden from us, though it was written clear. A supremely good man was born on earth, a man who was without cruelty, who could have taught mankind to live in perpetual happiness; and because we are infatuated with this idea of sacrifice, of shedding innocent blood to secure innocent advantages, we found nothing better to do with this passport to deliverance than destroy him. There is that in the universe, half inside and half outside our minds, which is wholly adorable; and this it was that men killed when they crucified Jesus Christ. Our shame would be absolute, were it not that the crime we intended cannot in fact be committed.

  It is not possible to kill goodness. There is always more of it, it does not take flight from our accursed earth, it perpetually asks us to take what we need from it.

  Rebecca West, 1941

  THE KEEPER OF THE BLACK MADONNA

  ‘I’ll leave you alone with her,’ the keeper said, laughing away my protestations that I wasn’t here to ask for help, I just wanted to see the icon.

  ‘It doesn’t matter,’ he said. ‘She doesn’t discriminate.’

  The flagstoned terrace of the monastery was ablaze with morning sunshine. He’d been sweeping it with a long-handled broom. He was radiant – about the brilliance of the day, about being here. His tall, gaunt body was in perpetual motion – brushing blossoms from a bench, watering flower beds, unlocking the souvenir shop, waving his arms to point out parts of the monastery complex with its handsome mansions reserved for the clergy whenever they deigned to visit, showing me the ‘curative’ mineral s
pring in the rock that was especially good for the eyes; and leading me up the newly built staircase into the hermit niches where the Black Madonna had been painted, he said, by a monk who lived in darkness and so everything appeared dark to him.

  ‘But don’t take my word for it,’ he laughed, and the apple in his skinny neck moved. ‘I’m no expert. I’m just a fool glad to be alive.’

  I had returned to the monastic cells hewn into the rock, as curious about the Black Madonna as I was about the odd-looking keeper who had beckoned from the shore. His name was Clement, Clemé for short, after the protector-saint ‘our golden one’.

  ‘I knew you’d come back,’ he grinned, with his missing front teeth bar one, a grin so unselfconscious that you were won over. He had recognised me from Tanas’s boat some days before.

  ‘I look like an imbecile but I have a memory for faces.’

  His face was lopsided and one of his eyes was filled with blood – the effect of a stroke that had nearly killed him four months before, though he was only my age.

  ‘You’ve come before the season, so you can have the place to yourself. But come September – well!’ The monastery’s festival day fell in September. People came from all over to ask the Black Madonna for help.

  ‘Every monastery specialises in something,’ he said. ‘Naum specialises in mental disorders. The Black Madonna is for infertility and illness. Jovan of Bigor up in Debar is for addictions. Drugs, gambling, sex. And believe me, I’ve covered the spectrum. Now, here you have to crawl, if you don’t mind losing your dignity.’

  I crawled inside the hermit’s niche. It was just wide enough for a person to lie down, but the ceiling was high, at least.

  The karst shore of this western side of the lake must have struck the monks of early medieval times as especially welcoming, with its natural niches, fertile hilly hinterland and proximity to water. Generation after generation had lived here in blissful silence, in the dim light of candles they made themselves, like everything else they needed. The niches had been plain for several centuries, until artists started painting them in the thirteenth century.

  Just up from the niches was a small chapel, richly frescoed with lifelike characters. Here was Clement with his teachers, the brothers Cyril and Methodius, holding a script of early Glagolitic – the alphabet that would be adopted by the entire Slavonic world and then vanish, to be replaced by Cyrillic. Here too was the pagan healer and seer Panteleimon who never took payment, holding the tools of his practice. He was converted to Christ’s ways by the defaced figure next to him, guessed to be Hermolus, which got them both killed in 304. This ‘church’ was cacophonous with epochs: from Jesus to the ninth-century Clement. The artists ranged from the sixteenth to nineteenth century. Two of them had left their names: Jovan and Angel. At the other end of the beach was another cave church, where the healers Cosma and Damian were depicted. Many of the monks themselves had been healers.

  ‘I don’t mind telling you,’ Clemé said when we went down the steps again, ‘’cause you’ll be wondering what a vagabond like me is doing in this place.’

  He’d been in a coma for a week after the stroke, and in that time he had a dream.

  ‘I saw many faces, painted-like, a sort of voiceless chorus. Among them was this familiar face, a woman’s face with a halo. She was looking at me with such understanding, I could have wept if I hadn’t been in a coma.’

  He knew this was his last chance. When he came round, ignoring the doctors’ advice he checked himself out of hospital and walked the few miles to the monastery.

  ‘I came to the Black Madonna and kissed her. Then I went straight to the abbot and said, I want to work as a volunteer. He took me on. After a month, he offered me a job. A monastery is always short of hands. You say you’re not a Christian, but it doesn’t matter what you are ’cause this is a place of wonder. I wasn’t a believer either, I was a cynic, a waster and a goner, oh yeah.’

  A few months before his stroke, his mother had been struck down too. She was paralysed down one side and bedridden. After his coma-induced dream, he begged her – she also wasn’t a believer – to come and visit the Black Madonna.

  ‘By then, she could move with crutches. And what happened? She stood before the icon, and when she went to go, the crutches fell out of her hands, as if wrenched by a force. I picked them up for her. But once again, they fell out of her hands. And she walked. Like a healthy person. Last week, I had a brain scan. The doctor didn’t believe his eyes – no trace of damage. Now go on, tell me that miracles don’t exist!’

  Just then two young unshaven men in leather jackets came through the monastery gates, one pushing the other in a wheelchair. They came to the spring. Clemé and I moved away, to give them privacy.

  ‘You asked who comes here. Those who suffer come here. And because there is suffering every minute of every day, the visitors never stop.’

  In the garden he tended were two graves: sister Efrossinja and sister Irina.

  ‘The last nuns,’ Clemé said. ‘I knew sister Irina. She was a tiny but great woman. She dug her own grave, right here, and knew when she would die, to the day.’

  Until after her death, in the monastic tradition, the complex had been self-sufficient for hundreds of years – with its own herds of goats, chickens, vegetable gardens and extensive vineyards. Wine, bread and honey were produced in a large farm building by the beach, fallen into disuse after the deaths of the last nuns.

  Beyond the farm building was a beach thick with giant reeds and overlooked by two hotels that appeared abandoned but weren’t. A row of milky-skinned Dutch lay inert in chaises longues, like patients in a sanatorium. In the courtyards of those hotels remnants of the Via Egnatia had been found by passing archaeologists, but when I went up to look for them later, I was told by a waiter who’d worked there for forty years despite his small wages – because he couldn’t live away from the lake – that the last of the Via had been dug up when a hospital was built. Though it was never used as a hospital.

  ‘Because nothing finds its true purpose in this country, ideas and people get wasted. And I’m still here,’ the waiter smiled philosophically, ‘serving breakfast to the Dutch and watching them burn every summer.’

  Where the hillside hotels stood now, there had once been vineyards, and this is where a great-great-great-great-uncle of mine, a bibulous monk called Kiril, had spent his life tending the vines. When he ran out of string, he’d tie them up with threads from his hemp robe.

  Clemé had chores to do so he left me with the Black Madonna, which – the harried-looking abbot with his hair in a bun and long black robes told me – had not been painted in the rock niches above. Her origins were uncertain, but she had been brought to the lake by a monk from Mount Athos. The unknown artist had worked in the Russian iconographic tradition. She was one of several hundred ‘Black Madonnas’ in Europe. Most were painted during the early Renaissance in Italy. Some were associated with ‘miracles’. This one, the story went, had been thrown into the lake three times ‘in chains’ – by German or Italian soldiers. And each time, she freed herself of the chains and floated back to the same spot on the beach.

  There was something about this icon. I was drawn to it, but unable to say why. Against the white background inscribed in Greek, the figures were black in both skin and dress, except for the scarlet robe of Jesus and the white edge of the mother’s shawl. The abbot told me that the icon had darkened over time, after many dips in the lake and centuries of exposure to smoky votive candles. The glass over it was already smeared with the finger- and lip-prints of the morning’s visitors; it was Clemé’s task to wipe the glass clean at the end of each day. Later, I returned to the monastery and Clemé asked the abbot for a day off.

  Clemé had begun a degree in geodesy, but come the 1990s, an era of quick business opportunities, he ditched his studies and got into retail. Until his stroke this year, he’d travel to Sofia and Istanbul to buy clothes in bulk, and had a permanent stall by the Struga bridge
where the River Drim emerged ebulliently from the lake, cascading over the locks.

  ‘Welcome to the men’s beach. On the other side is the ladies’ beach,’ Clemé said.

  The cafes along the ladies’ beach were run by Macedonians and those on the men’s by Albanians, but with names like Vanilla Sky and Malibu you couldn’t tell which was which, and all were frequented by a mixed clientele.

  ‘Because business knows no ethnicity,’ said Clemé.

  We had coffee in a cafe run by an Albanian family, traditionally keepers of boza shops, the pan-Balkan drink of fermented millet, and from the way the podgy waiter shook hands with Clemé I could tell the extent of his change, post stroke. The same happened when we walked along the river stalls where he used to sell his imported clothes. The stall holders’ expressions, when they saw Clemé, ranged from protective on the faces of the women, to sadness on the men’s. A stall holder told me Clemé had had a beard, did weights, and had a night job as a bouncer. The women loved him – he winked at Clemé – didn’t they, eh? Clemé laughed it away. He didn’t seem to miss it.

  One Turkish craftsman hadn’t seen Clemé since before his stroke. His own father had been a farrier, and his grandfather a tobacconist selling ivory-inlaid tobacco boxes. Struga, like Ohrid, had an illustrious merchant and craftsman tradition, now reduced to trinkets. Evliya Çelebi wrote about the spectacular Struga fair, visited by ten thousand people from all over the Balkans, who bivouacked in the environs for days, resulting in massive parties.

  ‘The town houses of old Struga were a beauty to behold,’ said the craftsman. ‘The destruction began in Tito’s time, with these hotels along the lake. You have come sixty years too late, my dear.’

  Struga had natural beauty on its side, but was much reduced. Communist-era hotels in various stages of decrepitude lined the lake. One of them was still called Hotel Belgrade. Some of the beautiful town houses still stood in the narrow lanes of the old town, their dilapidated wood-clad upper storeys jutting out. The fin-de-siècle façades of public buildings recalled a once hopeful era. Clemé ran into an acquaintance – a Gypsy man who made hand-woven rope in the old style, for boats and livestock. He had a coil of it, a remnant of another age, around his chest.