To the Lake

by Kapka Kassabova

  Hoxha’s partisans became the best-armed movement in the country, and began murdering their way across villages and towns, taking brutal reprisals on the civilian population where ‘Ballists’ might have been sheltered. The Ballists did the same, but lost what had effectively become a civil war. At the end of the war, under the orders of Hoxha, all non-Communist resistance fighters and all fighters associated with the British mission were rounded up, tortured or executed – including the translators and other staff who had worked alongside the British mission for the liberation of Albania. Many fled the country. The Communist Sigurimi would end up torturing poets, intellectuals, ordinary people, anyone who was an individual.

  In the light of this history, it leaves a bitter taste to know that there are hundreds, perhaps thousands, of graves of young resistance fighters across the country, mixed with the bones of Italian soldiers abandoned by their own command, post-surrender, to starve to death by the roadside, be taken in by locals, or be executed by their own units. And it puts into context the fate of the Arapi family.

  Everybody’s fate was extreme in a time of extremes. But very few gambled their lives and the lives of their children for freedom.

  Hoxha had borrowed from the Kanun even as he outlawed the Kanun. The contempt for the individual, the crushing power of a faceless authority (Hoxha recorded his statements, to be played in halls packed with terrified people), the futility of resistance, the ritual bloodletting, the premature burials, doomed births and poisoned families – all of that was played out during the long decades of Enverizm.

  Fatos and his family stood up to the force that could issue sentences one thousand seven hundred years long, and simply said: No.

  It was late in Bashir’s bar. People kept coming up to greet him. It was a homely place, a hub for town parties, family gatherings, charity events. Fatos had died ten years ago of a heart attack, here in Pogradec, at the age of sixty. He never did get up to much, work-wise, either in Australia or back here once the family returned. As if once the mission of his life – freedom – was fulfilled, there was nothing left for him to do.

  ‘He said, I worked myself to death in jail. I’m done working,’ Bashir said. ‘His last words were How quickly a man dies!’ Bashir’s eyes filled with tears. ‘I miss him.’

  But at least Fatos had lived to see his country open up, raise itself from the ashes. Fatos had returned from Australia in 1991, the moment he’d heard that the Albanian border was opening.

  ‘He was first in the border queue at St Naum. But they didn’t let him in. Because he was still blacklisted. He had to wait for a year to get in.’

  Why did you return? I asked Bashir.

  ‘Yeah,’ he grinned. A familiar question. ‘Everybody wanted to leave, and we were coming back!’

  Seeing Pogradec again had shocked Bashir.

  ‘Everything was devastated. No trees on the hills. Empty shops. Even Korçë beer tasted vile. I ordered a truckload of Coke and good beer to be brought to Pogradec. For people to enjoy, for free.’

  Bashir struck me as a man obsessed with figures. He kept listing the global brands that his business represented, the areas in which ‘we are number one’. Modest in his personal habits, he was addicted to profit. I also wondered whether at the root of his admiration for his father was Fatos’s incorruptibility – his life had not been spent under the dollar sign but under the sign of freedom. A poor, harsh, admirable life.

  But there was something exceptional about Bashir too. He was a man who had started with nothing and built an empire. And he was a man who had returned to his eviscerated homeland when it would have been much easier to stay on and enjoy the sweet life at Bondi Beach.

  ‘You ask me why I came back,’ he said. ‘I was looking for a part of myself that I couldn’t find in Australia. I grew up without a dad. And Dad grew up without a dad. There was a part missing.’

  The night of their escape from Pogradec, Fatos had written on the wall of their living room: ‘I’m not leaving my country because I don’t love it, but because I can’t tolerate the system.’

  And Grandad, the one who’d done the first runner?

  ‘In 1992, when I decided to return to Albania and said to him Come with me, he said “I’m only going back to that country in a coffin.” He died two weeks later. That’s how we brought him home – in a coffin.’

  We said goodbye. I was due to travel to Prespa the next day and I slept fitfully, hearing the water splash as if under my boat-bed, though in the morning the lake was still as a mirror.

  The black dog and the white dog were running along the waterline and the first fishing boats were already vanishing from view. Mr Bimbli, writing something in his logbook, nodded at me from his table.

  On my way past the Drilon Springs, I spotted Eduard at his post along the main street. His van was festooned with the same bright rugs. Eduard and his wife wove them at home. After catching up over coffee, we got into an argument over the price of a large red one that I wanted to buy, pure wool. His special price for friends was so preposterously low that I refused to buy it, and eventually we settled on a price that was less of a give-away but still too cheap. Too much money, he said. This generosity explained, in part, why Eduard was selling carpets instead of running his own bar.

  Eduard’s story was revealing of the country Albania had become since the fall of the Hoxha regime. Like Fatos, he was forgiving of his homeland, though the reality was stamped on his face, and the reality was that if you insisted on doing honest business here, you were 99.9 per cent dead. Eduard had survived, but only just. He had in fact been the first person in the region to obtain a licence to start a private business, in 1990. He had been a grocer until then – by 1990, our shops were completely empty, he said. In 1991, as soon as the border opened, he crossed into Macedonia, paired up with a guy in Ohrid, and during harvest season they brought back a truckload of apples.

  ‘People in Pogradec were stunned. They couldn’t believe that something was actually coming into the country and being sold. That’s how I started.’

  Business was going well until ‘the catastrophe’ of 1997 – which is how people referred to the collapse of the financial pyramids in whose wake warehouses were robbed, including Eduard’s own store – he lost crates of wine, hundreds of kilos of coffee. Law and order was replaced by teenagers with machine-guns. Shooting could be heard day and night. Parents locked their children in at home for months.

  ‘Everything was destroyed. Hotels, restaurants and shops were gutted. Even the electricity wires were taken. Two boys in Pogradec electrocuted themselves while stealing wires. But we didn’t care about the money we’d lost. We just wanted to keep the kids alive. Those were bread and salt days.’

  An Albanian expression.

  It had been difficult to resume business in the wake of the catastrophe. It was like starting from ground zero. Again. And in the last few years, Eduard had turned to carpets. Clearly, the carpets weren’t selling. But apples were worse. There was a problem of overproduction, as imports from Macedonia, Greece and Italy displaced and devalued local produce. The fertile area between Korçë and here yields an overabundance of top-quality vegetables and fruit, everything from juicy onions to giant pumpkins, but because of greedy governmental policies on imports, tons of local produce are discarded every week. Simply thrown away. In this land of vines, grapes are imported from Italy.

  ‘In Albania, we are used to hoping. Hope is what we have,’ Eduard shrugged.

  His words were interrupted by a bad smoker’s cough.

  ‘Come back next year! Do you have a jumper for Prespa? Prespa and Ohrid have different climates. When we have sunshine, in Prespa they have blizzards.’

  Strange, how saying goodbye to Bashir who had an empire had been fine, but saying goodbye to Eduard who had only his carpets was a wrench. I was also slightly apprehensive of leaving the Lake of Light where I now had friends, and going to Prespa where I knew nobody.

  He bent down to my driver’s win
dow. ‘I don’t know if I’ll see you again. Life gets shorter every day. Be kind to people. Just be kind.’

  Something about Eduard’s smile broke your heart. It was a smile of the Lake, endlessly forgiving. Like Lazar and Liridon, Eduard was a decent person who bucked the trend by not selling out or giving up, in a land where ‘the system’ never quite ceased to work against you, one way or another. As each system stridently rejected its predecessor, it quietly borrowed its methods. Though you love your country, one day you may find that the system is your country.

  Albania was a land kinder to the dead than to the living, though I’d fallen in love with it in less than a week. There was something uncynical about the people I met, an old-fashioned quality. It’s easy to become a cynic, but what are we without kindness? Ninety-nine point nine per cent dead.

  An empty lakeside restaurant was playing the 1987 Italian pop hit ‘Libertà’. Like ‘Felicità’, it was forever linked in my mind to my teens when I’d sing along to it on the radio. Then the Berlin Wall fell.

  ‘Freedom, tears are cried in your name. Without you, we are so alone.’

  Forty years after the Arapis’ escape, you still couldn’t legally cross the short stretch of water between here and Naum Monastery.

  I waved from my open window as I drove over the potholes up to the checkpoint, the carpet rolled up next to me, the Lake ablaze with light, and Eduard waved too – until both of us disappeared from view and only the Lake remained.

  Lake Prespa and Little Prespa

  Age: 1–3 million years

  Depth: maximum 55m (Prespa), 8.4m (Little Prespa); average 18m and 4.1m

  Altitude: 850m

  Highest peak in the area: Baba-Pelister Mountains, 2,601m

  Catchment area: 2,029 km2 (Prespa); 189 km2 (Little Prespa)

  Islands: Golem Grad (North Macedonia), Mali Grad (Albania), St Achillius and Vidronissi (Greece)

  First known name: Prespa (Vale of Snow)

  VALE OF GHOSTS

  Although the two lakes are only five kilometres apart as the pelican flies, it took an hour to drive over Galicica. As luminous Lake Ohrid waned, dark Prespa waxed.

  Prespa wore a necklace of mountains only visible in their full diamantine majesty from the air. I could glimpse it only from the top of the road. Leaving limestone Galicica behind, I faced Baba-Pelister peak at 2,601 metres. To the north was Petrina (Stone) Mountain at 1,663, a sister mountain to Galicica, where Edward Lear passed on his way west. At the mountain pass, he came across a solitary guard-house with two armed Albanians and ‘an irritable dog’, ostensibly there to make sure travellers weren’t attacked by bandits. Like me, he was travelling in September, and like everyone who passed through here and wrote about it he experienced a coup de foudre when he caught sight of Prespa, which appeared to him like a work of art – framed by forests in rich autumnal colours, a scene ‘difficult to leave’. He returned from his base in Ohrid to spend a day painting it. He sat up there, flooded with memories of earlier travels; his seemed to be an endless journey towards an unknown destination.

  Prespa, which means ‘snowdrift’ or ‘vale of snow’ in Slavic, felt to travellers far more remote than Ohrid, and still does.

  ‘Soothing and beautiful is that vision of the Lake of Peupli,’ Lear wrote, ‘so dreamy and delicately azure, as it lies below ranges of finely-formed mountains, all distinct, though lessening and becoming more faint.’

  There is a curious inaccuracy here: Peupli (today Lefkonas) is a village on Little Prespa through which he didn’t pass. His map shows Prespa and Little Prespa (‘Peupli’) as tiny droplets next to a large Ohrid, though their actual sizes are not dissimilar. Lear relied on his dragoman for orientation. This tells me that not only were there no maps of the lake region available, but that the few maps that existed were wildly off the mark. The Ottoman Empire was as laissez-faire about cartography as it was about roads, and the cartographically gifted British Empire had no special awareness of the Balkans, yet. One of the first maps to show Prespa is the Mercator of 1589, which bizarrely showed a non-existent Prespa River flowing from a nameless lake. The same errors were copied in a map a century later.

  Prespa had a way of remaining invisible, unknowable, almost unreal.

  Lear’s travelogue also tells a lot about Lear. He made little contact with locals except the occasional grandee – a basic exchange would have given him the name of the lake, for example. To him humans were merely an extension of the eternal landscape, and all his senses were occupied by the visual feast unfolding around him. Edith Durham, by contrast, had the advantage of speaking Albanian, and saw the landscape as layered with human narratives.

  ‘Ploughing was in full swing,’ Durham writes, between the two lakes, ‘and in some fields the young green corn was already sprouting and promising food for the hungry land, and the big lake’ – that’s Prespa – ‘was extraordinarily beautiful in the morning light. Ochrida [sic] is magnificent, but Presba [sic] is faery-like in its loveliness. My comrades held out hopes of a han’ – a han was a roadside inn – ‘and a possible fire, where we should rest and refresh at midday, but we arrived only to find it had been burnt down during the late insurrection, and a party of Albanian soldiers encamped in the ruins, as lonesome, melancholy, and comfortless as any Bulgarian refugees … No fire, no shelter, frozen ground, and a bitter wind.’

  She was here in the wake of the 1903 Ilinden Uprising. By contrast, Evliya Çelebi, that great seventeenth-century voluptuary, came swanning along at a time of peace, when the Prespa basin was one of the prosperous corners of the Balkans. So seduced was he by the views, the spring water, the huge gardens and the flocks of sheep that his party stopped, set up camp in the woods, and for a week gorged on cherries, honey, wine and milk. They were true Oriental decadents, just as Lear, Durham and Fraser were true to the British pioneering spirit, revelling in privation. Durham gnawed charred lambs’ heads and drank rough home brews, and Lear lived on rice and tea. Evliya would have been horrified.

  But these vividly distinct writers on the lakes had one thing in common: the knowledge that they were from the ruling race (‘race’ was a fashionable word in the days of Durham, Fraser and Brailsford), that their people ran half the world, that the governments in their great capitals called the shots even here, among these ‘savages’ – as Durham refers to the peasants of Macedonia and Albania, even as she dedicates herself to helping them. In moments of crippling rheumatic pain from sleeping rough, thoughts of the British Empire ‘cheered’ her (and why wouldn’t they?). And Evliya travelled across the Balkans as a favourite of a sultan who owned all the peoples of these lands, collectively called by Evliya gyiaurs, infidels. Each foreign traveller, furthermore, adopted a pet nation that they favoured disproportionately over the rest: Durham was a devoted Albanist and campaigned for their national cause. Rebecca West was passionate about the passionate Serbs. Fraser and Brailsford admired the Bulgarians as the most industrious, and on it went. A curiously irradiating effect that hasn’t worn off with time, and leaves few who pass through here unaffected. The landscape has something to do with this, I think.

  Until the Balkan Wars of 1912–13, Lake Prespa had never known borders. The members of the postwar Commission who rode around the lake in a carriage to determine the new borders would arrive in a village square and toss coins at the kids, then listen to what language they spoke as they fought over the coins. The overwhelming majority, including the Muslims, spoke a dialect closest to Bulgarian. Even so, a three-way border sliced up the lakes. In the 1920s, Greece ceded the western piece of its Prespa pie to Albania, but held on to Little (Mikri) Prespa and a corner of big Prespa with a lone fishing village called Nivitsi, renamed Psarades.

  To this day, straightforward circumnavigation of the lake is impossible: a quick look at the map told me that. Or rather the maps. I was wrestling with maps of bafflingly poor quality. No national map included the lake territory next door. The lakes appeared in blue slices, with only the national chunk offer
ing information, while the rest were blank, apparently gobbled up by their neighbours and featuring no place names – sometimes not even the rest of the lake! The hikers’ map of the Galicica and Pelister National Parks included nothing at all outside their topographic remit, and their glossy Greek Prespa National Park counterparts blanked out the rest of the lake, as if no people or even landscape existed beyond the national boundary. In recent years, vital trans-boundary projects for the preservation of the lakes’ biosphere have been started, and all of the Prespa basin is effectively a protected wetland of international importance because of bird migration routes and the very numerous endemic species.

  But whether as a traveller or a local, you still couldn’t get a map of the lake district as a complete realm. Maps tell stories, and the fact that in the twenty-first century no such maps are sold, while each local economy is desperate for visitors, told a story. A story of petty ignorance, of wilful blindness to the bigger picture so magnificently embodied by the lakes. Furthermore, although Prespa flowed into Ohrid in the most vital way, their people didn’t mix. The mountain was no barrier to underground rivers, but it was to humans. Even the two water-monitoring stations operated separately. Ohrid was a little afraid of Prespa because Prespa was high and wild. Its most numerous inhabitants were birds, its terrain was rough, its histories untold, its water opaque, its border checkpoints sensitive.

  I felt it before I reached the lake: there was something eerie about this vale. It was a cold, silvery world. Unlike Ohrid, Prespa was irregular-shaped, jagged with rocky peninsulas and islands, so that distant peaks appeared and vanished and reappeared as something else.