To the Lake

by Kapka Kassabova

  Kosta was keen for his children to relearn standard Bulgarian, so they wouldn’t be mocked at school for speaking their Ohrid dialect. So they sat with the empty plates in front of them, with nothing but the books on the shelves – of course, there were always books – and recited poems to cover up the rumbling of their stomachs.

  Give me wings …

  Hunger stays with you, they say. Those months, possibly years, of hunger when all they had for breakfast was sunflower seeds may be the reason why Grandmother Anastassia and her younger brother – who during one family reunion made a hundred pancakes for us before dawn – became compulsive overeaters and ruined their health. Their hunger could not be sated: for food, for beautiful things, for attention, for love.

  The Banishora neighbourhood is still there, and though the handsome town houses are replaced by apartment buildings, the leafy streets have kept their names: Ohrid, Struga, and Skopje, Strumitsa and Salonica, Kukush (Kilkis), Kostur (Kastoria) and Voden (Edessa), Prilep and Bitola. The ghost of geographic Macedonia was here, with its huddled towns partitioned among three countries, its rivers and mountains, its unearthly lakes and fevered dreams.

  Ljubitsa had brought her sewing machine to Sofia and started making clothes to order. As a Macedonian refugee, she felt shunned by the Bulgarians proper, but she was also so aware of her diminished standing that she wouldn’t socialise with better-off fellow Macedonians either. One self-permitted comfort was to visit the two St Petka churches in Sofia – until one day, she threw an icon at the wall in rage. Again.

  Kosta drank on an empty stomach. A speculative investment he had made in some copper mines had failed. He tried to set up a tailoring business again. With hindsight, Anastassia said, even then she could see her father’s fundamental problem: he was longsighted, never comfortable with the small-scale world of stitching and pattern-cutting. And restless as ever. Across Europe and the Balkans, markets were unstable, governments repressive, and in the streets of Sofia urban warfare raged between the two main factions of the Organisation (the federalists and the autonomists) and the smaller factions. One generation and several wars after its ‘constructive’ inception, plagued by internal splits and external power games, the Organisation had lost any vestige of youthful idealism and had turned into a hydra of terror. A mafia-like state-within-the-state.

  Kosta was an urban Socialist, opposed to the repressive royalist regime which forced the left underground and routinely murdered opponents. As a Bulgarian nationalist, he must have supported the federalist faction of the VMRO, though I don’t know how involved he became and when he stopped feeling sympathetic – but stop he did. Later in life, he voiced outrage at their infamous execution ‘methods’, which they carried out on enemies and on each other, in revenge for some perceived failure of loyalty.

  The children, meanwhile, had to help make ends meet, and Anastassia and her brothers worked folding and stacking newspapers at a large printing press – which doesn’t sound so bad to me, but to her it was mortifying. Or rather, it was mortifying to her mother. They were now officially poor – so much so that they received social welfare in the form of free fabric for clothes. Aside from her school uniform, Anastassia had just one dress, of navy-blue wool. When the time came for her graduation ball, her girlfriends were excited about their outfits. She kept quiet. Aren’t you going to the ball? Ljubitsa asked one evening.

  No, said Anastassia, I don’t feel like it. The truth was, she had no dress. You will have a dress, said her mother, and transformed the navy-blue dress into a ball gown by cutting up a yellow silk blouse and sewing bits of the yellow silk onto the plain dress. Anastassia had an outfit for the graduation ball. For all the drama it represented to mother and daughter, her sartorial deficiency was no barrier to male attention. One day, wearing her one and only navy-blue dress before it was turned into a gown, Anastassia jumped over a puddle while out in the streets of the Banished. A tall lanky guy with blue eyes watched her from the other side with a smile. A smile I’d get to know as his granddaughter: evasive not seductive, sarcastic not chivalrous, a non-committal smile.

  ‘You’ll ruin your dress,’ my future grandfather said, not looking at the dress.

  Alexander lived nearby, also in rented lodgings, and was studying accounting. He came from a farming family in the north, where the people were pragmatic, unromantic, not at all like the tormented Macedonians. Soon, he was called up.

  In 1943–4, Sofia was heavily bombed by the US and British Air Forces, as punitive action for the country’s role in giving Nazi Germany passage into Greece. No military targets were hit but three thousand civilians were maimed or killed. The bombings began in 1942, and so, as soon as Anastassia graduated from high school, the Gardeners packed up and returned to the lake.

  They returned to Ohrid in high spirits: the town council was under a Bulgarian flag; the mayor was from a well-known local Bulgarian family, and the new letters and words introduced by the Serbs were excised. Children went to Bulgarian schools again. Meanwhile, the creaky old house by the hammam had been occupied by tenants, and the family lodged with a Turkish landlady in a house on the lake front. Her name was Nadzie and she took a shine to Anastassia, who was given special privileges that she didn’t show her own sons. For example, while she allowed Anastassia to walk barefoot in the kilim-padded rooms, her sons moved around on their knees, a way of both protecting the carpets and showing respect for their elders. After years of privation, there was no more hunger, but a revolving roster of delicious cooking. Ljubitsa made sure to cover up any plates containing pork. And when there was a Turkish wedding in town, Nadzie would bring along Ljubitsa and her daughter as special guests. Once Kosta had given his permission, of course.

  It was during this time that some well-wisher reported to Kosta that his daughter had been seen walking down the charshia twice. That evening, there was a scene. Don’t ever shame our family like this again, he yelled, and hit her with the hot hair curler she was using. She was nineteen.

  You’d think that after what the family had been through, he might have adopted a broader perspective and forgiven his daughter’s mild rebelliousness, which she had inherited from him after all – but no. Returning to Ohrid, he fell back into the tribe. His daughter never forgave him. On his gravestone, the dedication is ‘from his grateful sons’. No daughter, no wife.

  It was around this time that Ljubitsa passed on to her daughter a family motto she had received from her own mother. The motto was ‘Perfection or death’. It was said to come from a great-uncle, the poet, polyglot and scholar Grigor Prlichev who had won Greece’s top poetry competition for an epic poem written in Greek. Rejecting the relative glamour of life in free Greece, he had returned to still-colonised Ohrid with the much-quoted words, ‘There is a great need for me to go home.’ His poem-requiem ‘Summer 1767’ became the first hymn of Ohrid – a lament for the crushing of the Ohrid archbishopric by the Greek Patriarchy.

  This was all well and good, but ‘Perfection or death’ are three words that freeze the heart. A self-curse, really. It was no doubt suited to the revivalist, revolutionary spirit of the times, but not to times of peace. Not to private life where perfection is elusive while death is certain. This doctrine, whose embodiment Ljubitsa was, is responsible for much generational struggle in this family.

  I had wanted to speak with my aunts about their grandmother Ljubitsa, but they only knew one side of her – the Ohridian side, and nothing of her Sofia side. It was the same with Kosta. By the time the twins knew him, he had been neutralised. He was burnt out by the struggle, the Bulgarian–Macedonian cause was lost, and he had to let his two sons and their children get on with being successful Yugoslavs.

  It is my mother alone who remembers Ljubitsa in her Sofia guise. After Kosta’s death, Ljubitsa would visit her daughter and granddaughter in Sofia. She brought along her other granddaughter Tatjana as her escort – and my mother felt that Ljubitsa was not her grandmother but Tatjana’s. Tatjana was confident and gathered
admirers everywhere, while my mother was made of more delicate stuff. In contrast to the glow that surrounded Tatjana, my mother was in the shadow. Literally – she has never liked the sun on her skin, she is not of the South.

  I met my great-grandmother Ljubitsa once: a petite woman with cold, intelligent eyes. She washed and cleaned obsessively. My one female cousin, a sunny neurologist in Ohrid, said that there was something going on with cleanliness as moral virtue in our family, extended into an unhappy scrutiny that was passed down to the girls: finding fault with everything, as if life was pre-soiled. Out, out, damned spot! There isn’t a single photograph of Ljubitsa smiling.

  Like many ambitious women in a patriarchy where they don’t have full expression in society but absolute power in the family, Ljubitsa inhabited the destructive shadow archetype of the mother-queen: needing everyone to remain small and needy, looking up to her and infusing her with importance (after all her sacrifices, it’s the least they could do). Like a poisoned mantle, this psychological imprint was taken on by my grandmother and then by my mother, and sometimes I feel it creeping up behind me too, ready to enshroud me and make me mean.

  This female burden of bitterness is our collective patriarchal inheritance. It is described with uncanny perceptiveness by Rebecca West on a visit to a Bosnian friend’s house where she sees a photograph of her friend’s late mother: ‘This woman, sitting with a white cloth about her head, in a rigid armament of stuffs, exercised the enormous authority and suffered the enormous grief of the Madonnas. She was the officer of earth, she had brought her children into its broad prison, and her face showed how well she knew what bitter bread they would eat in captivity.’

  A famous literary character associated with the Lakes is the matriarch Sultana, portrayed in a quartet of classic novels set in the national revival period, by the Bulgarian writer Dimitar Talev (Ilinden, The Iron Oil Lamp, Bells of Prespa, I Hear Your Voices). In her claustrophobic domestic kingdom, the perfectionist Sultana reigns over her loved ones by means of power games and sheer force: ‘She was like a hammer beating the same anvil, year after year.’ Her husband, the stoic Stoyan, accuses her of being ‘like a whip behind my back, a studded whip that lashes me with each step.’ At one point, Sultana’s ‘sinfully beautiful’ daughter Katerina, having fallen in love with the wrong man, is induced by her mother into a forced abortion, which ends up killing her.

  Sultana tragically embodies the tyranny of the obsolete system from which her family, community and nation seek emancipation so desperately. Sultana is the private dimension of the political, patriarchy internalised.

  Ljubitsa was Sultana. From the day Kosta escaped across the lake, Ljubitsa wore black for the rest of her life. It was her power suit. She would sit at the head of family tables, cast a critical eye over the proceedings, and make the food stick in the throats of her loved ones. The food that she’d cooked to perfection but could not enjoy. When our lot began to be born in the 1970s – first Tatjana’s son, then me, then Tatjana’s second son Tino, my sister, and so on – Ljubitsa wrote letters to her daughter Anastassia in Sofia:

  ‘Now that everyone is busy with their own affairs and has abandoned me, I turn to you in my hour of need. Perhaps you and your husband can find a doctor in Sofia who can help me with my illness.’

  The letters go on eloquently about the illness, quoting from books and reflecting on the disappointing nature of people, especially loved ones:

  ‘My sister Tsareva may call me a “burden” if she wishes to. But of course she does not suffer from my terrible illness.’

  It is only once that the illness is named: loneliness. Having spent her life ensconced at the core of households, she felt devoid of purpose, perhaps depressed. Until the end she complained that Tatjana was ignoring her, that Tatjana wasn’t visiting her, clearly too busy with her own affairs.

  ‘I’m angry with her. I’ll go to my grave angry!’ Ljubitsa said to the twins.

  ‘And we couldn’t bear to tell her,’ Biljana said. ‘Tatjana was the apple of her eye.’

  ‘She went to her grave without knowing,’ Snezhana said. Luminous Tatjana died the same year as her grandmother. In ancient tragedies, it is the most beloved that must be sacrificed to appease some faceless, perpetually angry god.

  And what about her relationship with Kosta? I asked.

  ‘She didn’t want him. That’s what it was.’

  ‘And he wanted her,’ the twins said.

  ‘They were too different, temperamentally,’ the twins said.

  This made me wonder whether – when Anastassia said that deep down, her mother didn’t love her father, that he was hoping for a scrap of attention that never came – whether that was the result of those years of poetry on an empty stomach. Or had it been like this from the beginning? Whether Ljubitsa, duly married at twenty-three, never got over that officer whose ring she returned or threw in the lake, an unpaid self-debt of happiness. Thereafter, it was up to her loved ones to make her happy.

  And Kosta clearly couldn’t do it. I saw him differently now, getting into that boat and rowing to Albania, to wander hungry and disconsolate the streets of Europe, that Babylonian whore, with just the tailored suit on his back.

  Inside the St Petka Church, the inscriptions on the ceiling had been corrected: letters considered as Bulgarian had been whitewashed and replaced with Serbian ones – the я of the first had been replaced with the diphthong ja of the second. This kind of ‘correction’ distressed my grandmother on visits to the lake; she called it state-sponsored vandalism.

  She was right at the time, but we could have done with less righteousness in this family, and less distress. Craning my neck to look at the church’s ceiling, I suddenly saw that the distress was not personal, though it felt so. In reality, it belonged to this entire land. The righteousness and the distress were ever morphing, cunningly assuming different shapes within families and societies, the better to keep us dependent, not free to just be. Beneath the genuine warmth of rare family reunions by the lake – once every ten to twenty years – there was an undertow. The last time I saw my Great-uncle Slavejko, in the last year of the twentieth century, we sat in their apartment and while his wife served Bosnian pastry, Greek olives, Macedonian tomatoes and Bulgarian wine, he said to me:

  ‘Your grandmother Anastassia was an idealist. She remained a Bulgaroman. Just like our parents. But they were wrong. We are of pure Macedonian pedigree, an ancient race.’

  ‘Well, who cares?’ I said, keen not to enter petty disputes over patrimony. ‘We are family, you can’t draw a line like that.’

  But he could. With a straight face, Uncle explained the line to me: this most genial of men who had sobbed like a child for his lost sister, and made for us one hundred pancakes before dawn. ‘It’s like this,’ he said. ‘Bulgars are descended from Asiatics, and we are descendants of the Macedons. You’re children of Genghis Khan and we’re children of Alexander the Great. See the difference?’

  He was referring to the fact that the original semi-nomadic Bulgars had migrated into the Volga and Pontic (Black Sea) regions, and then west into the Balkans from central Asia. They were Asiatics: they spoke an Oghur-Turkic language, worshipped the god of thunder Tangra and practised shamanism, and established powerful khanates – the origins of the Bulgarian state. Uncle was a physicist, but he was interested in history and we both knew that since the Macedonian Empire had ended in the second century BC, a great deal had happened in these lands, a great many peoples had come and gone, been settled, displaced, resettled, purged, renamed, converted, deconverted, reconverted, married and divorced. In Who Are the Macedonians? Hugh Poulton tracks in some detail the workings of this nation’s ethnogenesis, a product of the dramatic ‘natural and unnatural demographic change’ in these lands in the past one hundred years, and of more recent nation-building policies during, and post, Tito.

  The twentieth century was about to close, and in the Balkans it closed under the sign of Sarajevo’s siege, the massacres, mass ra
pes and concentration camps of Bosnia and Kosovo, the American bombing of Belgrade, and millions of visible and invisible wounds that would take generations to heal. The healing had not even begun. And still Uncle wanted to keep shredding our Balkan tapestry into smaller, more pitiful pieces. We sat and ate baklava, although he was diabetic and I was on a diet (perfection or death). At least we agreed that baklava was Turkish. Mistaking my silence for self-doubt, he reassured me.

  ‘Don’t worry, dear child,’ he said. ‘You too are Macedonian, you take after your grandmother.’

  I really had no problem being Bulgarian and Macedonian, Balkan and European, and most recently Antipodean, I wanted to say to Uncle. But all this was draining me, and I bolstered myself with another piece of baklava.

  The Yugoslav Wars had obsessed me, even though I was living in the Antipodes and none of my relatives fought or died in it. I even planned to join a humanitarian organisation in Bosnia. At the time, I had a Croatian boyfriend in Auckland, an exile who’d left to avoid drafting. He was a gentle, dispossessed soul. I was drawn to his pain, of course. ‘Don’t go,’ he said, ‘this is war, not a movie.’ I heard him, but I was still compelled to read every book on the war that I could lay my hands on. The horror was unfathomable, yet the extreme passions behind it felt familiar.

  Why? Kiwi friends asked me. It has nothing to do with you. But it did – with me, and with them too, in a way. Because the Balkans, that’s us.

  In the end, Uncle and I laughed, spreading pastry flakes over the table. We had genuine affection, and this was a precious time together. It was the last time I saw him. He died of coronary congestion. The blood clot that had killed his mother Ljubitsa by travelling to her brain twice (with meaningful timing, she had her first stroke while visiting her loved ones in Sofia) travelled to his heart. His older brother died of cardiac arrest. Slavejko’s younger son, who lives in Portugal, nearly died of deep-vein thrombosis as a young man, and my mother’s illness is vascular. They all had extremely high blood pressure. My sister and I have severe circulation problems.