A Bed for the Wretched – Chapter 2

A Bed for the Wretched – Chapter 2

A little to the side, under the steep hill where pebbles constantly dislodge and roll downhill, in the dilapidated barrack is where the wretched were settled. They brought them here from the hospitals in Korcha, Elbasan and Tirana, but mostly from Suk. Among them are also those who are afraid of returning to the battlefield. They learned from the patients how to pretend to be sick. One can see the fear in their eyes, a lot of fear. They hardly move and refuse to leave their cabin. They constantly lie on their straw mats and nurse their pain. Their sickness is strongest when the place is visited by someone from the administration. One can recognize those from the administration from the clean and tidy uniforms they wear. They constantly come here in their worn down jeeps as they drive from hospital to hospital, from camp to camp, from city to city, wherever refugees are gathered and children are placed. They take tours across Albania in their open jeeps and would rather swallow the white and reddish road dust than fight and die in Gramos or Vicho. To convince us of their importance, they often say: “We too are from the first line.” Their meetings with the wounded, the crippled, the healed, the old women in Prenies and the widowed women who care for children, are short, but filled with slogans. They don’t know how to talk to people; all they know is how to shout slogans, eat, lie in the shade and keep their military uniforms clean. Everyone in Prenies was afraid of the wretched. For as long as they were not in the grip of “madness” they were peaceful, lying around under the eaves, sharing cigarettes, joking and reminiscing. But when “madness” struck, some would “go crazy” and become dangerous. Those who were really sick, lying here and there, banged with their hands and feet, dug their heels, scratched their cheeks until they bled and when they turned over they foamed at their mouths. Those who were not stricken by madness ran around in all directions attempting to take the mad ones back to their quarters, to help them overcome their momentary doomsday experience. Unfortunately some never made it back and, according to some unwritten rule, were buried outside the cemetery, where the ground was rocky, reddish and hard. Pando, the gravedigger, dug the graves as he swore at everything that moved, cursing the mothers, the sisters, the fathers of the dead wretched, swinging his pick and hitting the hard ground. He dug the graves side by side in a straight line and by counting the piles of earth one could figure out how many were buried, but Pando alone knew who was buried in which grave. In the beginning he used to fashion a wooden cross and pencil mark the name of the deceased, but after one of those traveling administrators yelled at him in front of a crowd, telling him that it was an insult to the red flag and counterrevolutionary to use a cross, Pando put away his stolen pencil. Pando had stolen that pencil from the briefcase belonging to the administrator who yelled at him. One day the administrator happened to leave his briefcase in the jeep so Pando decided to free a pencil from its misery… Pando got more use from the pencil than did the administrator. Pando was known to the people as “Pando the gravedigger”. That’s what they called him and in response he used to say, “I dig and I bury, that’s what I do!” Some from the administration, those who were constantly “sprained” at the hip, neck, or in the spine and those sick with tuberculosis, coughed the most or were the sickest when the administrators mocked Pando because he cried the most at every funeral. They would say “he mourns dead strangers as if they were his closest relatives”. After crying at the funeral, Pando would distance himself from the people, hide somewhere behind the rocks, collect some herbs and roots, dry them in the sun, wrap them in a piece of newspaper and then smoke them. The smoke was yellow and spicy, soothing and pacifying. Pando sat there for hours; he lay in the shade of the dilapidated, old plum tree, looking up at the sky, the clouds and the flying falcons and, without blinking an eye, listened to the waling of the women mourning their loved ones.

Only he knew which herbs and roots to collect to obscure his mind, to bring some indifference to everything that happened around him, to move away from the worries of the people. His dream and the false tranquility he was in were suddenly interrupted by the ringing rail, the metallic triangle that invited the refugees to line up in front of the cauldrons. Like coming out of a deep sleep, Pando stretched his limbs and body, looked down and when he saw people queuing in front of the cauldrons, he went to his barrack, took the tin sardine can hanging from the beam and, while swinging it back and forth in his hand, joined the back of the line. Because his legs were shaky and his step unsure, he stood in line with his legs spread and his eyes lowered. He did not look at the people and he did not want to know if they were looking at him. With his sardine can half filled he returned to the barracks, where the wretched resided, and sat under the eaves beside Numo who was recently brought here from Suk. Numo took his pitted spoon out of his pocket, wiped it on his knee, tapped it on a rock and turned towards Pando. They sipped their soup from their sardine cans, broke their dry and stale cornbread, gathering all the crumbs in their palms and slowly ate in silence. Numo was not one those wretched ones. He had been brought here recently. They brought him here among the wretched to punish him. The man with the jeep who brought him here said to him: “Be careful and keep your tongue behind your teeth,” as he pointed at the hill where the cemetery was. And of what should he have been careful? Pando never asked. It seems that both men had an understanding in their silence. But sometimes during the evening when the women sat outside the barrack doors, Numo was heard saying:

“What do the women think about?” And immediately after that he said: “About their husbands and sons of course! So many of them were left to guard Gramos and Vicho, or were lying crippled in some hospital in a foreign country.” Slurping their soup, the men sat in silence while watching the wretched women, with their heads covered by their black head kerchiefs, pass by. After a long silence Numo began with his too familiar, old story which by now Pando knew by heart: “Hey, woman-wife, don’t wash my shirt. Let it be dirty, soaked with the sour smell of a soldier’s sweat and the aroma of a young woman’s breasts. Don’t toss my coat in a pile of rags. Open it up, air it out like a fluttering flag, let the dust collected from the battlegrounds of Gramos and Vicho and from the mountains in Macedonia, come out on its own. Let the dust fall on dust and don’t wipe it off, leave its footprint un-erased, because it leads to nowhere...” At this point Numo would stop talking, cough and look up high with his gaze lost somewhere in space. He was waiting, contemplating, perhaps to be reminded of where the footprint led… After being silent for a while he continued: “Our homeland, our footprint, always, us, it always guided us to our death or to our crippling... As you can see I too am a cripple… I look at you and ask myself… Where did I leave it?... I only have one now!” said Numo, tapping his wooden leg with his knuckles. “But I can still walk, even with a wooden leg, and one day you will see I will walk down there…” “Where did I leave it? At Kamna. At Kamna they shot me, at Kamna they crippled me. At the summit, at the peak, naked, like a shaven head. Someone here said that they will have us in their sights, we will be clear targets for them, but our commander wanted to go to the top of the hill so that he could look around with his binoculars, so he ordered us to ‘Dig Here’! My helper Vasil and I, machinegun gunners, only God knows where Vasil is now, dug as much as we could but it was not even enough to cover our heads. We threw some stones around and leaned our machine gun on them. We waited. We smoked a few cigarettes. We inhaled the smelly cigarette smoke from the cigarettes we made with tobacco stems mixed with flowers from the Ianovo plant, which gave them a narcotic scent. I have been, you can say Pando, all over our mountains, but so many Ianovo flowers I have never seen anywhere else. There were bees buzzing everywhere, flying from flower to flower, their legs swollen with yellow pollen. The sunset behind Lipovets began to cast a shadow over Kamna. There was silence as night began to fall. Only the dry stalks of tall grass hissed in the wind and the aroma of the Ianovo flowers became even more intoxicating. When darkness fell, down beneath Kamna, there were small flickering lights. I turned my head towards Vasil and asked: - ‘What are those down there?’ And he, without thinking much, replied: ‘It looks like the women have come out to light a candle for their relatives... Today, I believe, is the anniversary...’ he said and then stopped talking. We kept watching from above, but in the dark we could only see the flickering lights and nothing else. Behind us we heard steps and we turned our heads. It was our commander, approaching with a long stride. ‘Okay you two, go down there and check out those lights. Find out what they are. If it is the enemy then fire a burst of gunfire,’ he said. We left. I took the lead with my machine gun on my shoulder and Vasil followed. About fifteen minutes later Vasil said: ‘Don’t go straight. We need to circle around. A little longer and we will be on top of the rock’..‘How do you know?’ I asked, and he said ‘I have been here many times…’ He then began to explain...” Numo paused, adjusted his wooden leg, spit in the ashtray, lit the cigarette he was holding behind his ear and began to talk again. “And here, as you can see Pando, we again returned from there.” Numo nodded his head pointing in the direction of the mountains from where the evening sun was shining directly in their eyes.

“There, we sat at the edge of the cliff and as we watched the flickering flames under Kamna, I intently listened to Vasil tell his story: ‘Thirty seven,’ he said, ‘it was March 24, 1937 when our teacher and unit leader ordered all students to come to school dressed in their rotten EON (National Youth Organization) uniforms. I had no uniform because my father had no money to buy me one. I cried... I was embraced to go without a uniform... The day before the holiday, my uncle took me by the hand and said, ‘Come with me…’ He took me to the clearing under Kamna. ‘Do you see that gaping hole in the rock?’ he asked. ‘I see it,’ I said. ‘Well, now listen to me,’ he said. ‘In the year 1903 after our uprising, the people belonging to our village fighting band hid there. One day the Ottomans found them and went on a pursuit after them but they did not want to surrender. Then one of them attempted to escape... Do you see the top of the mountain? A little further from there is a recess, a hole, something like a chimney leading from the cave to the top of the mountain... The Ottomans saw him from Lipovets and began to shoot at him. It was harvest time so they took bundles of straw from the fields, lit them and dropped them down the recess. Our people hiding inside the cave began to suffocate from the smoke and then decided to come out, but not to surrender. The first person that came out shot one of the Ottomans and they shot back at him and knifed him with their bayonets. This is how they all died one by one to the last one’…” Numo puffed a deep puff of smoke from his cigarette and released it through his nose. He then scratched behind his ear and while staring somewhere into the distance, he continued: “Not to prolong the story Pando…, as Vasil was telling me, his uncle told him all about the Uprising, who was involved in it, when and why. I had to interrupt him to remind him that we had to get going. I said, ‘Vasil let’s go back, if this is the work of the women, there is nothing for us to do down there.’ We went back and told the commander that we thought the flames were lit candles carried by the village women and asked him for permission to go back there at dawn the next day. He said okay... We waited until dawn and descended down again. The landscape was beautiful, plush green and resting on a gentle hillside. We could smell burned wax, baked bread, incense and Ianovo flowers... ‘Here,’ said Vasil, ‘lies Giorgi Digalovski. His grandson, also named Giorgi, was a DAG fighter, he was killed in Mechovo. Under this pile here lies Kolio Dremovski, there lies Dicho Karameshovski, over there lie three of his relatives Kolio, Tsvetko and Dono Krstovski, and on this side lies Kolio Kamburovski. His grandson Kolio is a DAG captain. Over there lies Trpo Kichevski. Trpo’s son was born twenty days after Trpo was killed. On the other side lies Naum Lafazanovski and beside him lies Risto Markovski. Risto’s grandson, also named Risto, is a DAG fighter. And over there beside Risto Markovski, lies Iani Nanchevski. His son Iani, who is now in DAG, was born two months after his father’s death! Here lies Sotir Purovski. Sotir’s grandson was also a DAG fighter but was killed in Aliavitsa. And there, lie Dono Potskov, Naum Panovski, Trpo Somovski and Lazo Somovski. Giorgi Tserian lost his ear but survived the ordeal and remained alive for many years. He was heavily wounded, presumed dead. The Ottomans cut off one ear from each of the dead as proof that they had killed them. So Giorgi Tserian was left with one ear to wander the world. He died somewhere in Bulgaria…’ Seventeen men, Pando, I counted them! Vasil continued: ‘The graves were overgrown with grass as they are now. My uncle put his hand on my shoulder and said ‘listen and listen well to the whisper of the grasses, listen to the whorl of the wind in the trees, listen to the trickle of the water as it breaks between the rocks, listen to the hum of the bees hovering over the flowers and you will hear much more here than you will hear elsewhere, and you will not only hear but you will also learn the truth...’ My uncle came closer and said ‘here, beside this grave”, and then pulled the grass out of the way to reveal a white stone with letters written on it.

‘Read’, he said. Some letters looked like they belonged to the Greek alphabet, while others did not. I did not recognize them… ‘Oh, my boy!’ my uncle said, ‘these letters, written on the stone, are Cyrillic letters which belong to the Macedonian alphabet, and here on the stone written are the words “Дицо Карамечковски” (Ditso Karamechkovski).’ My uncle spoke to me for a long time; about the Cyrillic letters, about Kiril and about the dead people resting here in the open... he explained to me our Macedonian situation well and why I had to study in a Greek school and not a Macedonian... Ever since then, I never wanted to wear the EON uniform again… Ever since then I was never angry or made fun of my mother who could not speak Greek. I knew from before that people came here to this place every year. I knew they came here to light candles, to eat bits of bread, to drink rakia and wine, to eat some boiled wheat decorated with dried fruits and sprinkled with sugar and to remember things… I also knew they never spoke about it and returned home quietly. I had never seen sheep or cattle graze on this spot. No one, not even our shepherds or herdsman spent time with their sheep and cattle here. But I did not know why… Every man who passed by here looked strange… But I did not know why… My peers and the younger children, meanwhile, sang songs about the Great Hellas and about Metaxas and we laughed and made fun of those who sang ‘our’ (Macedonian) songs. So, with the help of our ignorance the Greeks sowed the seeds of Hellenism in us, but they did not sprout, they did not develop roots... I told people my age what I had learned, they in turn told other people their age and even younger ones and we all started to realize what was going on here. I did not have to be ashamed any more or to wonder why things were the way they were. In fact after that I was proud of my mother speaking Macedonian. I was proud to have seen the candles flicker in the dark under Kamna. This was our spirit shining in the dark… It was shining when we harvested our grain, when we harvested our grapes, and during quite moments when we were out in our fields and in the mountains alone where we could sing our Macedonian songs away from the prying eyes and snooping ears of Metaxas’s policemen lurking outside our homes and listening from outside our windows… But 1939 was the year when the mountains became filled with troops. One day policemen from the city came to our village, searched the open territory and found our secret. They wasted no time in unearthing the tomb stones and shattering the Cyrillic letters with the names of our fallen, which were there for generations. When the Italians came the Greeks left and the living once again placed tombstones on the graves of the dead. Pop (priest) Risto Lafazanovski blessed the stones. In 1945 the Greeks returned and wasted no time in again smashing the tombstones. They looked for Pop Risto but he was not there, he hid in Vrbnik. Here Albanians, because of his and their faith, convinced him to shave his beard. And as an ordinary man he went to work as a bricklayer in Bilishta. In 1946 the mountains and forests were filled with partisans, this time they were our people. The Greek soldiers were forced to stay in the cities, and there, under Kamna, the people cut new tombstones, wrote the names of the fallen and placed them on the heads of the dead...’ Well, Pando, that’s what Vasil told me. Afterwards we return back up to our original post and later that afternoon we were attacked. I fired my machinegun at the soldiers wearing English helmets and brandishing American machine guns. And all this while I couldn’t help myself but think of the burning candles down at Kamna valley. The candles were burning for years, Pando, for years, secretly in the open, secretly from alien eyes and openly when the strangers were gone. And that’s how my dear Pando the Macedonian boy learned what and who he is, not from some thick book or some educated person but from the leftover tombstones that escaped destruction.

From the markings made on stone and from the knife carvings made on century old beach tree, oak and pine tree trunks high up in the mountains, hidden from the view of strangers. These were the only signs, symbols and marking left from our historic existence since our country’s invasion, occupation and partition. Since then evil has befallen us and brought us nothing but misery and bloodshed... I kept shooting my dear Pando, refusing to obey the order to disengage and withdraw; I felt it was my duty to defend our heritage at Kamna, the meadows, the tombstones, the Cyrillic letters, the candle flames… I did not want the candle flames to go out... Then I suddenly felt as if I was under ground, I could not see the sun and felt excruciating pain in my leg. After that I remember being wrapped in a blanket and carried up and then down for a long time. Sometimes I could hear the rushing water of a stream but it was like in a dream… I kept dreaming of springs, streams, rivers ... and I cried because their water flowed away being wasted while inside me I burned of thirst... cool and crystal clear water flowed before my eyes but I could do noting to quench my thirst. Every time I tried to touch it, it ran away from me, it tormented me, it made me cry in anguish... But still I ran after it until it disappeared… And then I dreamt of dew and of tears and wished that I could shed at least one tear on my lips... A fire was burning inside of me… When I was able to focus, think and feel, all I could see was darkness. I could hear people talking but I could not see them. I could see no trees and no stones. I couldn’t see the moon or the stars. I could not even see the people carrying me. I wondered how long this night and this darkness was going to last? They walked, stopped and someone spoke. Sometimes they waited a long time. Finally, from the way they were carrying me I sensed they were walking on flat and level ground. I heard the noise of trucks, some voices and I suddenly felt lifted and lowered on a hard surface. It was not soil. No matter how hard the soil was, you can still feel it when you are lying, or when you are sleeping, on it. Then something began to hum and shook my body causing me severe pain. I shouted, cursed and opened my eyes. Beside me I saw wounded lying side by side like bullets in a clip. A little further over there was a young woman quietly weeping, whimpering and moaning. I wanted to touch he head, but something was gripping my throat. The truck kept rolling non stop along the cobblestone road, jumping on every bump, taking sharp turns and jolting us and causing us sharp pains. The wounded kept calling for water and spitting blood. Something was gripping my throat and tightening. I was burning with thirst. Occasionally I saw a flash of light come through the cracks in the tarp covering the back of the truck. We were tossed up, down, left, right, as we traveled on the dusty roads on our way… finally we arrived in Korcha...”