To the Lake

by Kapka Kassabova

  ‘He gave them clothes and money and smuggled them out of the camp.’

  They walked over the mountains, through starving villages without men.

  ‘When my great-grandmother saw an apparition in filthy rags approaching the house, she bolted the door.’

  It had taken his great-grandfather eighteen months to walk home.

  Angelo had seen ‘Algerians’ and ‘Moroccans’, presumably descendants of the African soldiers from the Armée d’Orient, looking for buried money here.

  ‘They thought I didn’t know what they were up to.’

  Soldiers from the colonies, Senegalese and North Africans, had been stationed here for up to two years, so they buried gold napoleons that apparently still turn up among the rocks. Many were killed or died of exposure or malaria, and those who survived didn’t have time to dig up the money, or couldn’t find it in the snow.

  ‘And then there’s the people of the mountain villages, friends of mine, with Arab features. Guess why.’

  In between shelling the enemy and getting sick in trenches like these, the soldiers on both sides raided the local villages without men. Some were friendly, others violent. Animals were ‘requisitioned’. Children were born. An underground French field hospital was believed to be hidden somewhere on the Prespa side of this mountain, complete with a stash of gold rods, used at the time by military surgeons to replace shattered bones. Two shepherds in the 1960s found a Bulgarian underground warehouse, but nothing valuable in it, just cooking utensils. Afterwards, they had both developed a strange ailment, linked to the poison leaking from unexploded grenades in the warehouse.

  Stebbing served as transport officer to the Scottish Women’s Hospitals, stationed at the foot of the Baba-Pelister Mountains, and movingly describes their stoical work, and death, in his memoir. He was sympathetic to his own side exclusively, especially the Serbs who spoke to him eloquently of Macedonia as their ‘ancestral land’. Stebbing couldn’t know that many Macedonian men were forcibly conscripted by the Serb high command, to bulk out their ranks – or rather, he could have, had he bothered to talk to the soldiers. Those Macedonians who died on the Serbian side had already had their names changed and were buried as ‘Serbs’. Although many Macedonians joined the Bulgarian army enthusiastically, like Kosta and other lake men, many were conscripted by force too. Two hundred thousand men from Macedonia fought in this apocalyptic war, sometimes not even certain which side they were fighting on, or why.

  Another thing Stebbing didn’t find out was that in the Macedonian territories gained by them – at the cost of utter human bankruptcy – the Serb army moved from village to village, making lists of ethnic Turks due for expulsion; their property was seized and divided among locals and settlers. As soon as the war was over, those ‘Turks’, some of whom were in fact Albanians, found themselves on the road to exile. Their families had lived in Macedonia for centuries. If you go to the towns and villages of European Turkey, you will meet their grandchildren and great-grandchildren; some still know Slavic words. Some are not even descended from Turks or Albanians, but from Slav Muslims swept up in the purge; they even look Slavic. Some had fled atrocities committed by the Bulgarian army too.

  ‘Up here, it was the Bulgarians against the French Oriental Army,’ Angelo said. ‘But in Kaimakchalan, brother fought against brother, father against son. Literally, not figuratively. These border mountains are full of bones.’

  We climbed in silence.

  Many Macedonian émigrés had sailed back from America, hearing that Macedonia was going to be finally ‘free’, and elatedly joining in the effort.

  In addition to soldier violence, civilians like Angelo’s Village of Mean People suffered famine, cholera, malaria and dysentery. Women lost children to hunger and disease. Even the goats and the bees started to die off because every inch of land was seized by armies. The only civilians who travelled safely from village to village, because they had nothing worth stealing, were the mechkari – travelling Gypsies with bears on chains (mechka is bear). The bears ‘danced’, treading on the bodies of the ill, which was believed to bring relief. Ursine therapy was better than nothing.

  In those Armageddon years, people said that with all the heavy fighting – the Balkan Wars, the First World War, seven years of assaulting the land – this land would eventually cave in, with its mountains and rivers, lakes and valleys; and floods would erupt from under the core of the earth, taking everybody down, soldier and civilian, human and animal.

  ‘In the 1970s, a shepherd found a stash of French champagne in a cave,’ Angelo said, to lighten the mood. ‘He drank two bottles and got so drunk he smashed up the rest. Ever since then, treasure hunters have been rooting around caves for wine and cognac.’

  As we climbed the rocky face of the mountain like goats – all traces of the path gone now – I saw that Angelo was looking for stuff. Collecting the scrap of history was second nature to him.

  ‘I’m a scrap man, I look for scrap. You’re a writer, you look for stories. In a mountain like this, everyone finds what they need, right?’ He smiled with all the lines of his face, a vagabondish face. I was very happy to have him as a friend. But I was also very hungry.

  ‘No,’ Angelo said, and kept walking, ‘you can’t eat before we reach the top. And anyway, don’t you want to test yourself? See how it was for those soldiers?’

  No, I wanted lunch.

  He turned to me, changing the subject. ‘The lake reflects the mountain and vice versa.’ He never got out of breath, despite the pack and his disfigured back. ‘I’ve found as many treasures in the lake as up here. And I’ve barely scratched the surface.’ He’d found iron camel shoes from l’Armée d’Orient (they used camels?), and he’d fished out a complete Ottoman brass narghile set, inscribed in Arabic. Whatever, I thought. Hunger was making me irritable.

  ‘The lake has a memory,’ he said. ‘The mountain has a memory. They are a living organism.’

  Large snail shells were scattered over the crags – mountain snails, some as big as a child’s palm, the kind of thing you’d find on a beach. There were wild strawberries, alpine flowers, small orchids, fragrant herbs: marjoram, wild thyme, red gentian, and a prized green tea called mursalski chaj.

  ‘Did I mention that if you see a metal object on the ground you don’t recognise, for God’s sake don’t touch it. There are unexploded mines. They were killing and maiming shepherds and kids and there was a big clean-up before I was born, but I’ve seen the odd one still, though not close to the main paths.’

  He’s exaggerating for effect, I thought. There can’t be mines from the First World War here. Where did they discard the mines?

  ‘In the lake. Where everything ends up. Mines, warplanes, family treasures, church loot stolen by mean priests and mean villagers, antique jewellery, Neolithic ceramics, inconvenient people, weapon stashes, saints’ relics – you name it, it’s in the lake. It’s nature’s safe box.’

  Angelo picked up another dry animal turd. Rabbit, he said, you can tell from the herbs. When it’s dry, you can put it in a joint and get off your head.

  He picked up a piece of black rock. ‘What do you think this is?’

  ‘Basalt,’ I said.

  ‘Meteorite,’ he said. ‘I’ll show you the craters later.’

  I was so dizzy with hunger and sunshine, I didn’t know what was true any more.

  Then in a flood of light, we reached the top. A spacious plateau opened up. The blue of Lake Prespa glittered on the other side. We looked down towards Mean Valley, which was an impossibly long way down. There were craters in the hillside we’d just scaled.

  ‘See the meteorite holes?’ Angelo said. I nodded. But they were of course the scars of exploded mortar shells from a hundred years ago. Shell craters and trenches hacked in the rock – the mountain had not recovered completely.

  A disused observation station stood in the middle of the plateau. It had been abandoned in the early 1990s. The whole mountain had been a militarised z
one, and this observation point was one of the most strategic in Yugoslavia. The Yugoslavs and the Albanians across the border had faced each other off. Civilians had had no access here for forty years, but Angelo’s uncle had been in the army, and occasionally he’d bring him up here to visit the soldiers. Angelo had loved hanging out with them, touching their weapons, and looking through binoculars at Greece.

  You could see Greece without binoculars, on the other side of Lake Prespa. And you could see Albania, almost all the way to the Adriatic coast, mountain after mountain, an unfolding so beautiful, so immense and transcendent, it was hard to believe that was where the Italian-Albanian front had been only a generation later, in the 1940s.

  ‘I told you it was worth it,’ Angelo grinned.

  At my feet was a white flower that looked like the rare alpine edelweiss. I bent down and picked it.

  ‘What did you do that for?’ Angelo lashed out. I stepped back and nearly fell off a ridge into a trench.

  ‘Did you come all this way to pick this flower that has done nothing to you?’

  I was aghast. I put the flower in my jacket pocket. He looked genuinely upset. The wind rose suddenly and filled our mouths. Angelo put up his hood.

  ‘I shouldn’t have done that,’ I said.

  The wind took my words and threw them away.

  ‘That’s right, you shouldn’t have. Typical of you Bulgars, claiming everything here as yours. And you have to use force. Even with a little flower!’

  I stared hard at him and he stared back. The wind tore at our jackets.

  ‘And you?’ I spat out. ‘Poor Macedonians, always someone else’s fault. Why don’t you look at the pile of fabrications you call your national history!’

  ‘Oh, and your history’s the correct one!’ he spat back.

  ‘You’ve no idea, have you, you’ve been so brainwashed!’ I said, not in my own voice any more. ‘Macedonia’s like a phantom limb to us!’

  He snorted cynically. I could have hit him.

  ‘Pass me the pack,’ I said, and tried to turn my back to the wind, but it was coming from everywhere. There was no shelter. ‘I need to eat.’

  ‘You’ll eat when we get down,’ he said.

  Now he truly looked like a native of the Village of Mean People.

  ‘I bought that food,’ I said with clenched jaws. ‘Don’t try to control me!’

  ‘Oh really! And did you know, Miss Feminism, that we’re two thousand metres above sea level and if you eat now, you’ll be sick and I’ll have to carry you down!’

  ‘You’re a bully!’ I shouted.

  Ignoring me, he headed for the disused observation station which looked fairly cursed, with its broken aerials and blown-off roof, debris strewn all around, as if after an explosion. The blood rushed from my head, making everything black for a moment. The emotions I was feeling were out of sync with the situation. It wasn’t just hunger, it was something else, and the higher you went, the brighter the sun shone, the more bleached the rocks, the more sparkling the lakes – the more desperate it felt.

  The ascent was also a descent. I stood on the plateau frozen, like that Albanian guy in the snow. I could go neither forwards nor back, and I couldn’t believe I’d just said those things to Angelo.

  How many frostbitten men had looked over these two lakes like eyes in an ancient face, and prayed for a truce? The mountains went on multiplying, majestic and empty like time itself. After the war, Kosta stayed in Sofia where he met Ljubitsa, and her sister Tsareva met Taki, who didn’t speak. He’d fought on the Macedonian Front.

  One of the finest Balkan lyrical poets of the twentieth century, Dimcho Debelyanov (who was a pacifist), was killed at the age of twenty-nine near the Macedonian Front – in a battle with an Irish division. The opening line of his war poem ‘One Dead’ came to me:

  ‘Now he’s an enemy no more.’

  Why do we humans have to experience death before we see the obvious?

  Stebbing had watched the French make their way uphill, with their heavy artillery and thousands of mules laden with ammunition boxes; and the wounded in all their agony being taken downhill in haste on improvised stretchers – all this against the backdrop of Macedonia’s majestic valleys and tranquil lakes. ‘How absolutely out of place,’ he wrote, ‘how incongruous it seemed amongst these great hills, these eternal mountains, that man should have the effrontery to bring his petty strifes into their great silent spaces.’ Yet here we were again, with our petty strifes. As if each lesson lasts a mere minute, then we forget.

  Angelo walked back towards me. With his hoodie up and carrying a heavy iron bar he’d found in the ruins, he looked like history’s tramp. He could kill me with a single blow of that bar. But he didn’t look mean, just tired and sad, and I didn’t hate him any more.

  ‘Let me see that flower,’ he said quietly. I took it out of my pocket. ‘It’s not edelweiss. It’s a common flower.’ I gave him the crumpled white flower and when he took it with his cold fingers, tears ran from my eyes and the wind blew them away.

  ‘We are one people, aren’t we?’ I said, and a terrible howl rose inside me. ‘Aren’t we one people?’

  Time collapsed and telescoped into a moment of irreversible loss.

  It had always been there, that howl, it was older than me. It wasn’t even mine. As if it came from the land itself. Angelo dropped the iron bar on the ground and hugged me.

  ‘’Course we are,’ he said at last and wiped his nose. ‘Isn’t that the whole point?’

  We went inside the ruined barracks. Gutted mattresses, broken windows, crates of empty beer bottles, insulation oozing from the walls. The frames of the iron bunk beds stood empty. Almost all of the recyclable scrap had been taken away. Angelo had seen men carting off metal doorframes, an iron stove, a fridge – on donkeys’ backs, on their own backs – all the way from here across Mean Valley to Albania. It was hard to comprehend. I could not carry anything on my back over these mountains; I could barely carry myself. But perhaps I would if I really had to.

  At our feet we found cartridge shells from the 1980s and 90s, and Yugoslav tin cans dated 1954.

  ‘They weren’t here before. There’s always something new,’ Angelo said.

  The mountain kept churning up memories.

  On the Prespa side of the plateau was a squat rusted toilet in the ground, the hole filled with stones. It had once been a cubicle but was now in the open.

  ‘A shitter with the world’s best view,’ Angelo summed up.

  From here you could see Baba-Pelister at 2,601 metres, and beyond it tragic Kaimakchalan, whose top was creamy with snow – in Turkish, kaimak is cream.

  ‘I’ve spent so long climbing this mountain, flying over it, diving in the lake,’ Angelo said, still rooting for objects of interest. The wind had abated and we didn’t have to shout. ‘It’s like I’m looking for myself. Does that make sense?’

  ‘Yes,’ I said. ‘It does.’

  ‘And I’m afraid I’ll be old and dead before I find myself,’ he said.

  The descent was subdued. My hunger had dulled. As we lost Prespa from view, the late afternoon sun moved towards the Adriatic. The mountain cast its stony shadow over Mean Valley. We walked downhill at a different angle, and passed scattered white bones that for a crazy moment I took to be human, but it was a wild goat. Two golden eagles circled above, looking for prey, or perhaps it was a mating dance.

  Back at the house in the Village of Mean People, Angelo put the food on the wood-fired stove and brewed some mountain tea. Stars were lighting up the dark sky and crickets screeched in the undergrowth.

  ‘You can sleep upstairs,’ he said. ‘In the room with the paragliders. With blankets from my great-grandmother, the one who didn’t recognise her husband.’

  He went to a chest and opened it. And there they were: shells from exploded mines and grenades from the First World War; the gorgeous ornate brass narghile inscribed in Arabic; the pair of camel shoes, manufactured in 1914. He added the newly sa
lvaged iron bar.

  ‘Everybody finds what they need, right?’ He closed the chest.

  Where was the rifle that had shot the bastard priest?

  ‘Over here.’ And so it was, its wooden handle shiny with use. ‘Not loaded.’

  Then he produced a Native American clay pipe and started filling it with grass.

  ‘You’re leaving,’ he said, ‘so we’d better smoke the pipe of peace.’

  We went outside. To the north flickered the lights of Ohrid, to the south the lights of Pogradec. We sat on a fallen cherry tree with the invisible lake below us, and above us – the mountain of bones.

  PART TWO

  AUTUMN

  In the village the creaking of a door.

  On the lake the silence of an oar.

  Over the Dry Mountain a distant eagle soars.

  Lasgush Poradeci, 1930s

  POETS OF POGRADEC

  It was early September when I returned, and the smell of roasting aubergines sweetened the air. In the village houses, strings of red peppers hung from balconies: it was the season for making preserves. This time, I wanted to spend no time in Ohrid town – something about it now felt too small and claustrophobic – so I headed straight for the Albanian side of Lake Ohrid.

  After the quiet St Naum checkpoint, the familiar faces of taxi drivers waiting for custom welcomed me on the Albanian side. The bunkers too, and the thick reeds in the shallows of the lake, so richly textured that they looked painted in oils. A spring called St Naum, inside a tiny whitewashed chapel built over it, bubbled from within the rocky shore and into the lake. Once inside the heavily militarised border zone, the spring was now a hub for Albanian youths on bikes who came to hang out in the evenings.

  This was the way of the Lake: everything had its double and everything was connected. Pogradec (meaning ‘on the rock’ in Slavic) was the mirror image of Ohrid (‘on the hill’); and there were two St Naum springs, now divided by a border but once a seamless system. A group of boys and girls in skinny jeans walked up the road towards the checkpoint, eating ice-creams.