To the Lake

by Kapka Kassabova

  Seen from above, Ohrid and Prespa are a topographical image of the psyche – the light self and the shadow self, the conscious and the unconscious, linked through underground channels. Each contains the other without denying it, like a perfect yin and yang symbol. This is how they have survived as a self-renewing system for a million years.

  Psyche is a Greek word meaning soul.

  On a high road above Prespa, Nick and I had stopped to refill our bottles at a roadside water tap. We held a bottle to the spout but nothing came. It had dried up. I was reminded of the following story, told by a Greek man in Children of the Greek Civil War. He was eight years old, it was during the war, and he’d gone into the hills to fetch water from the spring. But by the spring, the body of a soldier had just been dug up by wolves. Three women appeared by the body and began to intone a lament. The wolves howled in the hills.

  The narrator was eventually evacuated to a paedopolis, in a journey that began at a crossroads above his village. Such crossroads were commonly called anathema, or damnation, because it was at crossroads that men left for twenty years and children were torn from their mothers. Those who stayed behind donned black and cursed through their tears: Anathema se xeniteia! Curses on you, foreign lands! He was well educated in the camp, but for the next forty years he’d have the same nightmare: he goes to a mountain spring but as soon as he bends down to drink, the atmosphere darkens and he wakes up. He can never slake his thirst.

  Until one year, he returned to the childhood spring, and the full memory came flooding back. He had repressed it – the spring, the body, the wolves, the three lamenting Furies. He held a small ritual there, for the victims on both sides. The nightmare ceased.

  A man was tormented by darkness. In his waking hours, he’d think dark thoughts, and in his dreams he’d be attacked by beasts and torturers, he’d struggle trying to push huge rocks uphill and be overwhelmed by tidal waves. He was full of foreboding and sorrow, and sometimes, against his will, a dreadful voice would come through his mouth, not his own.

  He was told to volunteer as a builder at Naum Monastery during the construction of the new quarters. Months passed, then one day while his fellow workmen were having lunch, he was seen running to the top of the cliffs and jumping in the lake. People rushed to help, thinking he was finally committing suicide, but he swam back to shore and came out, beaming. ‘I feel good,’ he said, ‘I feel different.’

  He was a changed man thereafter, and when people asked what had cured him, he said Naum. Naum had compelled him to run and jump from the cliffs, and as he fell in, all the darkness came through his mouth and dissolved in the water.

  from The Miracles of Naum of Ohrid

  HOW TO HEAL THE INSANE AND THE MELANCHOLY

  The arc of the sun and the cries of peacocks were the only things that marked time at St Naum Monastery. That, and the bells of evening and morning vespers. Every noise was muffled by the mountain above. Footsteps were gobbled up by the courtyard cobblestones as if by felt.

  Each evening under the cypresses which turned black at sunset, when the last busload departed and souvenir-sellers went home, the grounds returned to their silence. Now you could hear the natural soundtrack: the rushing springs of Naum, which formed a large translucent pond and emptied their icy blue waters into the warm lake – and had done so for how many hundreds of millennia, I don’t know – but our species arrived in Europe only forty-six thousand years ago. From this perspective, the monastery’s earliest church huddled in the inner courtyard, and the few surviving original artefacts, seemed quite new at only a thousand years of age.

  The hotel and restaurant buildings, by contrast, felt old, as old as my childhood. The two main wings of the hotel were called Konak I and Konak II – Turkish for quarters. They were called this in remembrance of the monastery’s original medieval konaks, which had burnt down. The cavernous red-plushed Yugo-nostalgia, the residual Orientalism, the shy receptionist with an old-fashioned expression, the wool rugs that covered everything but didn’t quite fit the corners – all this was redolent of the brown-beige holidays of the 1970s when the children sensed that all was not well and the adults smoked, their ash sprinkling the world. There were still heavy glass ashtrays in the rooms.

  For a modest price, the monastery hotel provided a time lapse into eternal end-of-season holidays. Your summer clothes are suddenly too small, more time has passed than you thought, and you are now the person with white threads in your hair, just like the adults of your childhood. Many of them are dead or dying, and there is nothing you can do about it.

  I was given a heavy wooden key to Konak I. Large and creaky, fit for a Party official or a corrupt cleric, my room was full of heavy dark furniture and overlooked both the lake ahead and the stone mountain behind. The extra blankets were needed in the chilly nights.

  In the evenings, it was just me, the odd couple from Western Europe, the kiosk keeper Nomche whose beard reached his belt, the elusive resident monk Father Ambrosius, or perhaps Nectarius; a tiny gardener with a mullet, a mute Quasimodo-like man whose task was to scoop up the melted candle wax from the water of the candle boxes; and two slow-moving waiters in the terraced restaurant with folkloric table cloths, gloomy oil paintings and leather-bound menus. One waiter lived here, in a room below mine. He was a benign soul, a soul of the lake.

  ‘I’ve got my Bulgarian passport and could work in Europe for five times the pay, but I just can’t leave the lake,’ he said.

  Waiters earned two hundred euros a month.

  The terraced restaurant had such a breath-stopping view of the whole lake that it didn’t matter what you ate; bread, olives and water would be enough. To reach the restaurant, you walked past the pearl boutique which sold ‘pearls’ from the lake – not actual pearls but crafted ones, an Ohridian ‘recipe’ that was first introduced by an émigré from Lake Baikal. A heavily made-up girl sat chewing gum. She was new, the waiter told me. On his nights off, he made his way slowly to the small shop on the premises, bought a bag of crisps, and lay in his room munching. The previous pearl girl had been the love of his life, he said. But she had emigrated to America.

  ‘I couldn’t stop her. There’s no opportunities here.’

  He was grateful to have known true love, because some people don’t get to experience it. To heal himself after her departure, he’d written a book of love poems and printed two copies, one for her in America.

  ‘The other thing about this place is,’ he said, ‘three hours of sleep here are like thirteen. You have lucid dreams too.’

  By the time he told me this, I had discovered it already. From the moment I arrived at the monastery and checked in for the week, I felt different, as if I’d drunk a potion. The mountains opposite looked fleshless and the air was lighter. There was space.

  The monastery grounds and generally this southern bit of shore had a different atmosphere from the rest of the lake. Here you were stilled, as if by a hand. You were compelled to tune in to the beat of the waves on the sandy beach below the monastery cliffs, where nobody went because it was still a no-go border zone. Although there was no more border army, the wooded area between the monastery grounds and the checkpoint was still patrolled by a lone soldier. He swept the cobbles by his kiosk – fallen cypress cones and peacock feathers – there was nothing else to do. I looked into his eyes and saw that he had not seen the world yet. He was a child. If tomorrow there was another war, he would be the first to be cut down.

  Each evening the sun cast its beam on the monastery, setting its windows on fire, then on the dilapidated checkpoint house in the hills, then onto Pogradec which, sunset-gilded, briefly looked like a mythical city.

  In my room, the curtains to the many windows were of white satin, aquiver with draughts, so I could not only hear but see the unearthly light of the lake, even from my bed, even at night, magnified by the moon. The lake entered the room. On my first night, I had the distinct sense that some entity was moving towards me across the water as I slept. It kne
w me well. But I was not afraid, and the entity was eventually all around me, or I was part of it – not as myself, but as what remained of me once my dying self was out of the way. This was the exact antidote to my nightmare of rising water.

  I experienced this subliminal presence without fail every night, until I began to feel that I was being dreamt by the lake. Always in motion even when still and still even when stormy, the lake was full of memories and symbols that were not wholly mine. We the creatures of the Earth are up to ninety per cent water. Anastassia loved this monastery and its then wild beach. Anastassia: a woman who, like so many others, had never felt properly held – except by the Lake. All women have an elemental desire for depth and connection; without it, we can become full of metal and war. That’s why Persephone goes off with Pluto, or imagines she does: the Underworld provides depth. But in the Underworld, Persephone knows to sustain herself and all life with sunny pomegranate seeds, while her mother Demeter gives up on life and plunges the Earth into mourning. I thought of my mother behind closed shutters, curled around The Pain, and finally let her go. Some greater force not unlike this lake would take care of her, of all of us.

  Here by the lake, it was clear: all that’s left after our material existence is light. Even if we live behind closed shutters, the darkness that we carry will disappear, making us see, in one last breath, just how we have used this precious life. This life so precious that I didn’t want to wait until my last breath to taste it.

  Normally a late sleeper, I awoke early, feather-like in the mountain air. Squirrels darted up cypresses. The peacocks cried. The question had long changed. The question had long stopped being Who do you love most? or Whose are you? The question was: Whose life are you living? No, really living.

  ‘I wake early here,’ I said to Nomche one morning.

  The courtyard was deserted except for the peacocks sweeping the cobbles with their tails, but Nomche was already in his kiosk, a giant inside a doll’s house.

  That’s where he lived. He only came out for dinner and to sleep. Thirty years of this had given him a hunched, sepulchral air, compounded by his hermit’s grey beard and waxy complexion, though his face was always relaxed. He looked like someone whose thoughts and emotions had been polished like pebbles on the shore. I could feel a similar effect. He sipped coffee and peered at me through the tiny kiosk window. Nomche was the diminutive of Naum. He was named after the saint, a common name here.

  ‘It’s the place,’ he said. ‘All you need is to be here, nothing more.’

  Nomche was a man of modest vocabulary. He looked at people as they entered the courtyard through the stone arch, past the wooden gates studded with the flat heads of giant nails and said to be the original gates from the tenth century. Nomche said nothing as he sold the candles, small icons, books and crucifix chains to the annoying, shrill foreign visitors who spoke loudly to make themselves understood – but Nomche didn’t speak languages and just gazed at them softly until they ceased and became quiet.

  ‘I just look,’ he said, and looked at me. ‘I’ve seen so many faces, I know just by looking. I’m talking to you openly because I’ve looked at you and I know.’

  ‘What do you know?’ I asked.

  ‘That you’re gonna be OK. Many people who come here aren’t gonna be OK.’

  He said I looked familiar, had I passed through before? Yes, I said, in the 1980s.

  ‘That’s it,’ he said. But I had been a child and he had seen a million faces.

  ‘True,’ he said, ‘I remember the impressions, not the faces. Everyone leaves an impression behind them.’

  A fortyish couple came through the stone arc – tall, gaunt, quiet, the woman in a floral skirt. I had heard the engine of their car outside the walls. Nomche nodded and handed them a typed-out prayer in Serbian, as they explained in hushed tones. But he seemed to already know their affliction. They went inside and she kneeled by Naum’s tomb, placing her arms on the velvet throw.

  The church was a modest but harmonious amalgam of tiny buildings from different eras. Naum was said to have built the original chapel – long absorbed by subsequent constructions – with his own hands in 893. Remains of the oldest of those constructions, incorporated into later ones, dated to the early tenth century. The overall monastery complex too was a compendium of aesthetic influences: Byzantine, Islamic, Armenian, Moravian.

  Both Christians and Muslims came for the tomb of St Naum, where his relics rested. His tomb was under a stone. It was believed that if you placed your head – or better yet, your whole body – on the tomb, you would be healed. The other belief was that you could hear the beating of Naum’s heart through the stone, and although I remember hearing it as a child and being awed, now I couldn’t. Either way, it was the rumbling of the underground springs you heard, the circulation system of the lake. Its acoustics were magnified by the layout of the monastery grounds with the chapel at its centre.

  The large stone slab at the threshold of the church had been worn down by millions of feet. Heavy cobwebs hung like curtains high in the vaults. The church was a small but dense repository of memory – each chamber with its frescoes was from a different century, showing a changing perspective on power and pigment. Every square inch was painted with an expressive emotionality, and even the moon and the sun had faces – in the scene depicted in The Two Brigands only one of the brigands repents and embraces Jesus (the sun), Nomche explained to me. But there is another interpretation: the moon represented East; the sun, West. Yin and yang, female and male, the subconscious and the conscious mind, water and fire.

  The church smelt of those long gone, of hope and long roads travelled, of something that would not die.

  Here was the bitter-faced St Marina holding the devil by the hair like a trussed goat. Here was Tsar Boris I who converted the people of the southern Balkans to Christianity at a time when the tension between Eastern and Western Christianity was deepening, to culminate in the Great Schism two centuries later. And here at the entrance to the tomb was Tsar Samuil, with a white beard. His eyes had been dug out with some force. These people all wore haloes, as if to say: with time, The Pain diminishes. All wars end. All schisms heal. All that is left is light.

  One portrait of Naum was slashed down the middle of his face, as if with a sabre. The icon above Naum’s tomb bore what I took to be bullet holes. His hand was of cast silver, as if coming out of the painting and into this world.

  Everything in the church was small, round, polished by time and by water, leading back to the centre. Up on the vaulted cupola, Mary held her narrow hands up in universal quietude. Her face was knowing and the ripples of her gold-edged red head shawl were a-flutter in the lake breeze – because inside and outside were alike. The lake was everywhere.

  In one scene, Jesus was shown in a spaceship-like capsule of light, which is how pure energy was represented in the East. He holds in his arms a swaddled, dark-faced child with an old expression: Jesus with His Mother’s Soul.

  Over time, Naum had become a byword for purity that rose above the perishable. But who was Naum, other than missionary-theologian, Renaissance man and viticulturist? His most distinctive personal characteristic seems to have been peacefulness and love of nature; his alleged ability to heal mental ailments in particular was second to none. It didn’t matter who you were, all you had to do was ‘pray sincerely’ and Naum would help you. Often, he appeared in people’s dreams to give instructions and counsel. There were books for sale detailing his miracles, and the subsequent miracles fullfilled in the monastery grounds for those who came seeking cures.

  The properties of the place clearly extended beyond the attributes of its founder, because the ‘miracles’ go on as I write. Just in the last twenty-five years, hundreds of sheep, lambs, rams and cattle have been donated to the monastery in gratitude for miracles rendered, and Naum continues to appear in people’s dreams. A large proportion of the supplicants and donors, historically, were Muslim Albanians and Turks. Curiously, although the
annals of Naum cover the entire period between his life and the present day, no chronology is offered, only themes: Naum helps the impoverished; Naum punishes sinners; Naum and the wild beasts; Naum heals the insane and melancholy.

  To read this repository of oral memory and folk narrative is to rummage through the kitchen of history. Over the last ten centuries, ‘miracles’ have been legion. The place seemed to specialise in mental and emotional disturbances, but that was only one of the rubrics. Another was: the monastery provides protection, justice, nourishment, and the gaze of the silent witness in times of assault and injustice. A major theme was natural justice, or balance – some would call these karmic tales – featuring humans, wild animals and the lake itself. A wolf who had come down from the hills and eaten the guard dogs had returned the following night and lain down in place of the dogs. Some have the instructive morality of their times. Remember the woman who wanted to measure the depth of the lake and is punished for wanting too much knowledge? – here Naum the stern patriarch channels the lake’s forbidding power.

  ‘I’ll show you something,’ Nomche said, and taking a huge key from a nail above his head, squeezed himself out of the kiosk. The monastery had rooms for the mentally ill as late as 1945. Adjacent to the church was a locked, cell-like stone room with a high vault, now used for storage. Naum’s tomb was just on the other side of the inner wall.

  ‘This is where they used to put the most disturbed patients,’ Nomche said. ‘Next to Naum. Remember, there was no electricity.’

  There were no windows, either. There was, however, a frescoed ceiling with a biblical scene. Perhaps the patient was expected to gaze up at it by candlelight.