To the Lake

by Kapka Kassabova

  Some historians dispute the scale of the blinding, arguing that this tableau of mass mutilation was painted later as Byzantine propaganda to terrorise enemies, long after the miserable Basil II was dead. According to them, the memory of Samuil’s blinded army may be partially fictionalised, to serve the wars of later eras, which were none the wiser. But this is an argument about scale rather than actuality. However many of the blinded had reached the shores of Prespa, thousands would have spent the remainder of their lives by the lakes. Soldier camps were set up here, in Asamati of the Bodiless Ones and the Village of the Gouged Ones. In the light of Samuil’s annihilation of his own brother’s family and the family vendetta, the soldiers’ blinding by an external enemy takes on a more complex meaning akin to that of the evil bird that cursed Hallmi. An eye for an eye for an eye, until the one-eyed lead the blind. Some call this politics, others call it karma. Prespans don’t call it anything. They just watch the rise and fall of their lake with a fatalism much older than them.

  It is in fact the dramatic fall of the water levels – seven metres in sixty years – that is the real threat, ecologically and existentially. But in the collective imagination, as in my recurring dream, it is rising water that heralds trouble. In the twentieth century it rose to unprecedented levels three times: in 1903 (the Ilinden Uprising), 1917 (the First World War) and 1942 (Second World War).

  At the end of a steep road that veered into the hills were two linked mountain villages I wanted to see. Above them were the Beautiful Oaks where a forest church high up occasionally rang its bell – in celebration or doom, I couldn’t tell.

  The cafe-bar in the square by the cemetery was full of red-faced men, and one mature woman in a pretty floral dress and with blonde plaits, who sat on the knee of one of them. The gathering had an unstable, fairy-tale feel. American English and broken Macedonian were being spoken. Alex from California told me that this was his first visit. His father, a lad from this village, had sailed to Detroit aged sixteen.

  What do you make of the old country? I asked, and he seemed lost for words.

  ‘It’s not like America,’ he said eventually.

  ‘There are no luxuries,’ piped his friend. ‘There’s power cuts, water cuts.’ He was a construction worker from California, with the same story.

  These were the children of the Village of Immigrants. The doctors, architects and economists who had studied abroad in the earlier twentieth century had stayed abroad too, and there had never been an economic incentive to return, only an emotional one. Every summer, on the day of the Ilinden Uprising, diaspora reunions took place here with folk singers, and hundreds came from all over the world to dance, drink, invoke the blinded soldiers of Samuil, be Macedonian – and go home.

  ‘Some folks from the States, they don’t even know where Europe is, let alone Macedonia,’ Alex said. ‘Then they come to Prespa and have all these emotions.’

  ‘We don’t even know where these emotions come from,’ said his friend.

  Out of nine hundred houses, eighty residents were left in the Village of Immigrants. ‘Those of us who haven’t died and the apple-pickers, that’s it,’ said a man from another table, and smiled amiably. He was a retired television producer who, after a lifetime in Skopje, had returned to try and breathe some life into his mother’s village.

  ‘Unsuccessfully,’ he said. ‘Nostalgia brings people back but no one invests.’

  His name was Meto, from Methody. He asked me to come back the next day, because he had been drinking. ‘I’m OK sitting down, but if I try to get up, you’ll lose all respect for me,’ he said. The next morning, I met him at the same place.

  As Meto and I walked the lanes, he showed me the masons’ marks on the stones of the old houses – a pentagon, a cross, or a crescent. These tower-like buildings with their generous balconies were typical of Aegean Macedonia.

  ‘You’ll see them in German too. I have cousins there. Before the Greeks closed the checkpoint in 1966, we used to cycle across and visit each other.’ Agios Germanos was the first village on the other side of the border. German was its original name.

  We walked up a forest track, a tunnel of foliage, to the remote St Petka Monastery. The only person we met was a beautiful old woman in black, gathering rosehips in a cloth sack, chewing something, time’s eternal crone. She and Meto kissed on the cheeks.

  ‘The woman I should’ve married,’ he said, and she smiled girlishly. ‘I’m like her son,’ he added, but as he chatted she said nothing and seemed to suddenly vanish with her sack. This woman had known him since he was a toddler and she was the village beauty, but she never married.

  Why was she wearing black, then?

  ‘Because Prespan women are in eternal mourning,’ he said simply.

  Later at his house, he showed me a photograph of his grandmother with her three children. She is in her thirties, and although her husband is alive in America, she is dressed in black – black headscarf, black woollen dress, black leather shoes, black stockings. Meto’s mother is a young girl with cropped hair and an old, old face. Sorrow permeates the scene like weather – a cold, waterlogged weather, like the lake in winter.

  ‘Yes,’ Meto said, ‘my mother took on her mother’s sadness. I don’t know where it comes from. It’s a Prespan thing or an Aegean thing, or both.’ Prespa sat on the fringe of Aegean Macedonia where women traditionally wore black.

  Some sixty thousand Bulgarian-speaking Aegeans were expelled into Bulgaria by the Greek state after the Treaty of Neuilly at the end of the First World War, and replaced with Greek refugees from Asia Minor and Bulgaria. Many Bulgarians have great-grandparents or grandparents from Aegean Macedonia. Others emigrated further afield. To have Aegean ancestors is to carry loss in your bones, one way or another.

  No sooner had her husband returned from twenty years of gurbet than Meto’s grandmother died of a heart attack, aged forty. There was something going on here, with the presence and absence of men. I thought of the distressed letters Grandmother Anastassia had written to her husband while he was away; yet she was no less distressed with him around. And I thought of the two first years of my life, which my father spent on compulsory military service; my mother’s yearning for him seeped into me, along with her dissatisfaction later, when he returned. The yearning can never be matched by reality. It was not just the men’s absence, alternating with their unsatisfactory presence, that made these women don black. What was it? I could not name it yet. It was something we carried within, long after its expiry date.

  St Petka Monastery was built as a school for young monks in the fifteenth century. A chorus of birds greeted us in the courtyard, and we drank from the stone fountain where a tin cup was attached with a chain. It hadn’t been a functioning monastery since the end of the Second World War, when the Yugoslav border army moved in. One morning when Meto was doing a spot of yoga, rising from his mat, he’d seen a bear on the path, looking at him. Then it had turned round and disappeared into the Beautiful Oaks. For half a century, only soldiers and bears roamed here.

  St Petka looked strikingly like my grandmother in her forties. Which were the years I was in now, a powerful decade when you come to own your face along with your life. This is you, from now on.

  The full oval, the heavy lines from straight nose to full mouth, the deep-set eyes and forcefully arched brows – it was the essential Levantine face. But the expression in the eyes made all the difference. Petka had the expression of one who had seen and transcended. Anastassia’s obsidian eyes cut you up. She dreaded, then hated, losing her youth, as if there was nothing to take its place, as if she’d been robbed.

  ‘It’s a pity that this place isn’t enjoyed by people,’ Meto said in the dinge of the church. The smell of centuries was inside it, undisturbed. ‘But maybe it’s for the better. That way, it’s preserved for those after us who may appreciate it more.’

  What are a few generations to St Petka and the bears?

  ‘See the top of the hill. That’s the Fre
nch Road, from World War One.’

  It was also the route guerrillas and refugees took during the Greek Civil War. By the time we’d made it down the path to the village, a cold white fog had wrapped itself around the hills.

  Back at his house, Meto prepared lunch with courgettes and tomatoes from his garden.

  ‘This was the barn.’ He pointed at the high beams. ‘Here, my mother and grandmother sheltered the detsa begalci who made it over the French Road. They’d dress them, undress them, feed them, bath them and send them on. Eat up. I can’t eat these courgettes by myself.’

  The detsa begalci were the refugee children of the Greek Civil War. Some didn’t make it. In 1949 when Meto was born, a group of refugee kids got lost in a fog and fell into the lake. Their bodies were retrieved and buried by people here. When I think of Meto in winter’s snowdrifts and howling wind, in the house where children were dressed and undressed by the black-clad mother and daughter, I also think of his courgettes and tomatoes and how he wears his inheritance lightly, the way I’d like to wear mine.

  The king had goat ears but hid them under his crown. Barbers were killed to keep the secret. One day, a boy’s turn came. The king asked: do you have siblings? No, said the boy, I’m all my mother has. The king spared him but swore him to secrecy.

  The boy didn’t speak a word, but his mother saw he was unwell. She told him to go into the forest, dig a hole, speak his secret into it and cover it. A willow grew in the spot. Years later, shepherds cut whistles from the branches, and the whistles sang: The king has goat ears, the king has goat ears.

  Realising that the truth can’t be suppressed forever, the king was enlightened.

  Balkan folk tale

  OF MEN AND ISLANDS

  ‘We can’t go today,’ said the old boatman to Danny.

  ‘Yes we can,’ said Danny, ‘I’ve brought the group, I’m not turning back.’

  ‘I know this lake and I’m telling you, the easterly’s rising. It’s the return I’m worried about.’

  The boatman was gently spoken. The day was bright but the water turbulent.

  ‘I’ve made this crossing forty times this year and I’m telling you it’s fine,’ said Danny. He was the guide.

  The group was ten Dutch tourists and me. They had turned up at the nameless hotel and I’d joined them for the island crossing. The boatman agreed to take us but the concerned look stayed on his face. Water is always choppier than it looks from the shore, and already we were falling off our seats, laughing nervously, as the motorboat headed to Golem Grad island.

  ‘Don’t worry guys,’ Danny shouted over the engine, ‘you’re safe with me.’

  Pelicans bobbed on the waves.

  ‘Pelicans are disappearing,’ Danny shouted, ‘because of climate change in the last twenty years. Prespa is one of the few places you can see them. Conditions here are perfect because they’re perfect for the fish. Median water temperature is thirty-two degrees centigrade.’

  Surprisingly, Lake Ohrid was colder by a few crucial degrees centigrade, and only sixty-five per cent of fish eggs survived, while in Prespa the survival rate was one hundred per cent. The pelicans came in May from Africa, about two thousand of them, the same individuals every year.

  ‘In May, it’s like Planet Earth here!’ Danny said. ‘And when they start hunting, it’s like World War One!’

  The pelicans attack schools of fish from the air, like bombers. Pelicans don’t dive for fish – that’s the cormorants’ job, they dive up to twenty-five metres down, then the two share the catch. Which is lucky for the pelicans, especially in winter when fish sleep in the deep.

  ‘In just one May day, fifteen tons of fish can be consumed on Prespa,’ he said.

  Old pelicans stay on Golem Grad island, up to forty years of age. Now, in September, their young were beginning their migration to Africa.

  The island loomed closer – a high rocky outcrop with a petrified white forest on the top.

  ‘Guano,’ Danny said. ‘It kills the trees.’

  A wave hit the hull of the boat and drenched us. Handsome Danny took off his shirt so we could admire his lean, well-sculpted body. One of the girls blushed and looked away.

  ‘Right now,’ he said to me in Macedonian, ‘I’m not in good shape but in winter I practise kick-boxing. So I’ll be strong if there’s a conflict.’

  What do you mean, a conflict?

  ‘Oh, how do I know? With the crappy politics we’ve got. Mind you, war is madness. All nuclear weapons should be destroyed.’

  Another young Dutch woman was leaning overboard, retching, her friend holding her, with an accusatory look aimed at Danny.

  ‘Hold on tight,’ he shouted too cheerfully, ‘’cause the ride back will be worse!’

  Another woman snorted cynically. We were all wet now, water dripping from our hair and faces.

  Mali Grad came into view in the washed-out blue light, along with the arid Albanian coast. It was the smaller of the twin islands. The captain pointed out the burnt trees up on the hills of the mainland.

  ‘Drought,’ he said.

  ‘Prespa is a dangerous lake.’ Danny leaned over to me, switching to Macedonian, ‘I don’t want to freak them out but we’re gonna have to do a super-fast tour of the island if we’re to make it back. If we’re unlucky enough to get winds from both Galicica and Pelister – well, let’s not think about that.’ Once, caught out by a storm, he was stranded on the island with a group and spent the night in a cave, building a fire and counting the stars, before they were rescued by a helicopter sent by the Dutch embassy.

  ‘How are your survival skills?’ He winked at me.

  By the time we reached the island and the captain was looking for a safe mooring spot that didn’t go against the wind, another young woman was doubled over with stomach cramps. The older women were tougher. We began the brisk climb through the petrified forest. It was a kingdom of snakes and turtles; juniper trees hundreds of years old, rosehips, and some other plant with barbed branches that slashed you like razors. It smelt of guano and birds, a stench halfway between life and death.

  Bounding ahead, Danny looked for snakes and turtles to show us. This island used to be a herpetologist’s heaven, home to some ten thousand water snakes, hence its nickname – the Island of Snakes. One time, an experiment was conducted: two mongooses were placed on the island with the aim of exterminating the snakes, which were freaking visitors out. It didn’t work.

  ‘But some years ago, the snakes disappeared by themselves,’ Danny said. ‘Where did they go? Nobody knows.’

  ‘Maybe they moved to Mali Grad island,’ I said.

  The turtles too died en masse. Danny picked up the shell of a dead turtle.

  ‘It’s environmental,’ he said. ‘Climate change. The drought burns the grass and the turtles are reduced to eating dead snakes or even the insides of birds. Believe me, it’s heart-breaking to see a turtle eating viscera.’

  He picked up a young snake and let it slither up his arm towards his naked chest. There were gasps, which was the required effect.

  ‘It’s all right, it’s not venomous,’ Danny reassured us. ‘How to recognise a poisonous snake? It has split cat’s eyes. The non-poisonous ones have round eyes, like us.’

  He placed it on the path. Everything was white, scorched, thorny. White rocks covered in lichen were scattered like old gravestones. It was hard to imagine this island as a home. But it had been inhabited, on and off, since Neolithic times. Well into the mid-twentieth century it had been a monastic centre, and in the 1880s, during another of those freakish winters, Prespans had walked over the ice with their cattle, in the hope that they would survive in the warmer microclimate of the island. But a pack of hungry wolves had come down the mountains and across to the island too, and carnage followed, both of the cattle and of the wolves, which were shot by the Prespans. Or maybe by the monks – any hermit tough enough to live on this lake would have known how to deal with wolves.

  The stone ruins wher
e we now stood were from a basilica, but all Danny said was: ‘We found skeletons in here.’

  Skeletons of unknown origin, or unknown to him. They were the remains of monks.

  As an aside to me: ‘Some think Tsar Samuil buried his treasures here after his fall. That’s why it’s so dug up. But a proper gold detector costs ten thousand euros!’

  A large fourteenth-century church from the reign of King Dushan held the remains of stunning frescoes, badly damaged by graffiti and gougings.

  ‘Here’s St Peter.’ Danny turned to the group. ‘In Macedonia, we have lots of churches. People believe in God. But God doesn’t believe in people. That’s the problem.’

  And he bounded up the path because the lake now had white-crested waves and our captain was calling him to urge us on.

  The return crossing was shockingly rough, with an emergency landing miles away from the usual spot, and even those with guts of steel were shaken as we climbed out. But the kind old boatman kept reassuring us while the waves battered us that it was just one wind, not two, so we’d make it. Danny relished the whole thing.

  Danny’s grasp of the human history of his beloved Prespa may have been shaky, but he had perfected his routine of sexy-guide-in-safari-shirt, or without shirt.

  ‘Look, I grew up by the lake like Tarzan,’ he said to me the following day, when there was no group and he’d stopped acting. A different persona appeared, subdued and wearing glasses. ‘So I trust nature. But history – nah. It changes all the time. Even though it’s already happened. In just five years, with a change of government, history can be turned on its head. Imagine what can happen in two thousand years! That’s why I stay away from history and stick to the snakes.’

  I’d asked if I could see where he grew up. Danny now lived in Ohrid with his parents, but they’d spent twenty years in a prefabricated lakeside refugee camp. In 1991, before the Albanian border opened, several hundred people from the ethnic Macedonian villages in Albanian Prespa had walked over the mountain.