The Land Of Blood And Honey

 

New Albanian vocabulary: rrugë të mbarë (Have a good trip)

 

 

I had been keeping notes and odd little diaries since the beginning of our time in Kosovo. Leafing back through them, I realised how quickly things pass; some of the notes meant nothing any more. Others were cryptic, but powerful – in my notebook for my first, foreign month in Pristina I had scraps of Albanian written – for practice or to look up later. On one page there were five words in a line – ‘I understand’, ‘I think’, ‘I am’, ‘I have’, ‘I speak’.

If this was how memories could fragment and decompose after only 17 months, I needed to do something to stop the rot. I have been told that honey is a preservative. Apocryphally, Alexander the Great was buried in a honey coffin, and it was apparently common practice for the ancient Babylonians to be buried in honey. Honey is hygroscopic, absorbing water, and leaving none for the bacteria necessary for decomposition, and when it comes into contact with animal tissue, it produces hydrogen peroxide, which stops putrefaction.

So I took my photographs, my notes and scraps of writing and decided to begin embalming my love story so far in a book of honey. To start me off I decided that I was going to buy a ticket to the place where I do my best writing – a train carriage. In the UK with a train journey as part of my daily commute, I had found a way to safeguard writing time, free from interruptions. Having come to Kosovo to live in a city with everything in walking distance, and a country mainly accessible only by road rather than rail, my writing routines had been broken. So I planned a trip along Kosovo’s longest piece of track, not in order to get to its terminal in Skopje, Macedonia, but to start to write down some of the bees and some of the impressions that had been buzzing round my head for the past year. It’s better to travel than to arrive.

I was standing on the frozen platform at 6am when an old man approached me. In answer to his question I confirmed there was no- one in the ticket office. The train was due in twenty minutes I believed. No, I couldn’t say if the train we wanted was the one standing in the station. We stood close to each other in companionable silence, and waited. The closeness was a choice. That he had used me as his source of information wasn’t: we had the whole station to ourselves. This was the morning train, one of only two a day, which link Pristina to the national capital nearest to it – Skopje in Macedonia. The equivalent in Britain would be waiting for the Eurostar. But we were the only people on the station. It was sad – and maybe suspicious... All my fears and prejudices began to surface. Bloody railway staff – bloody typical. And had I misunderstood something? Bloody Albanian language. Bloody stupid me. Bloody Balkan timekeeping. If this was England...And indeed, how different from England. From the other side of the train which was sitting in frosty silence opposite us, someone in uniform descended. I ventured a ‘mirëmëngjes’ and the uniform responded politely.

Was this the train for Skopje? Yes, yes, but we shouldn’t get on it yet. Why didn’t we come inside and warm up in his office.

Once inside and without further discussion, he got out four glasses (a colleague soon joined us) and some teabags, and we sat sleepily over our hot drinks, slurping without inhibitions and thawing pleasantly. I asked about the age of the station building, which is an elegant low structure with a beautiful old clock. Betjeman probably wouldn’t have got excited about it – but if Betjeman had lived in Pristina he would have done. If you used only fingers and toes you could count the city’s buildings that date from before the Second World War. If current attitudes to preservation continue, you soon won’t even need your toes. The station manager answered with the precision of someone used to replying to timetable queries: the building dates from 1930.

As we drank our tea, the hands of the attractive clock seemed not to move. The petty adrenaline rush of organising this trip (passport? money? dictionary?) subsided, and I concentrated, as our host had encouraged us, on making myself rahat – comfortable, relaxed. Looking up, I admired the clock again and suddenly realised that the hands really hadn’t moved. Glancing down I saw that my watch hands, however, had raced ahead – we had only two minutes before the train was due to leave. Adrenaline, bloody Balkan timekeeping, bloody Albanian language, stupid me. Etc.

In an uptight British way I asked about the train. Reassuring smiles– the colleague who’d joined us for tea was the driver. But yes, why didn’t I buy a ticket.

’Where exactly are you planning to go, kismet,’ the station manager asked, using the Turkish for the will of fate, made famous in Nelson’s dying words. Like Hardy, I have to assume that this was what I heard, and not an improper suggestion. It would cost me four euros (£2.40) for this three-hour journey. The ticket I was given was numbered 00010; the railway network had recently been given a facelift but the new tickets didn’t seem to be very popular. It was good to see that there was room for expansion though. I wondered whether they would still be serving free tea for passenger 99,999.

The old man got a pensioner’s rate once he’d told the official what ’generation’ he was. A few days before, someone had asked me how old I was? Seventy-three? Since this had followed the standard ‘good day, are you tired?’, I had worried what on earth I must be looking like. But ‘73 was the year of my birth I was being asked about – and here the old man answered ‘1935’. He was only five years younger than the station. I tried to work out what this country was called when they were both born: I think it had just become Yugoslavia, the ‘Land of the South Slavs’, from being the Kingdom of Serbs, Croats and Slovenes; no mention of Albanians, or of the French, whose plans, I was told by the station master, were used for the station architecture.

We were hurried up a bit now – I didn’t finish my tea, though I had the sense that had I chosen to, the Kosovan code of hospitality would have prevented the driver from leaving until I was done, and the people at the first station down the line would just have had to wait. We were wished rrugë të mbarë. The man-as-old-as-the-station and I got into the same carriage, even though we were still the only passengers. I knew one significant reason for the low passenger numbers on Kosovan trains; it was on this line that Albanians were herded in March 1999 by the Serbian forces. They were kept at the station for 24 hours in the bitter cold (worse than today – there was snow that March). One woman gave birth during that time, and an old man died. No-one knew where they were being taken or what would be done to them when they got there, but everyone knew what had happened when the Jews had been bustled onto trains.

In fact, when these trains had been filled, they took the Albanians only as far as the border with Macedonia – the exact journey I was making. There, the families were dropped and left to the tender mercies of refugee camps. I had learnt about this from books, and I remember sitting in a Cornish holiday cottage in spring 1999, watching it on television. I had also been told about it by my friend who was transported on one of those trains.

Like most people I’d met in Kosovo, Elmaze’s experience in the war is something that came out gently and only after I’d known her some months. I can only guess at the psychological, social and political reasons for this. Like the nose of our train, Kosovo has its face firmly set towards the future. I only heard about Elmaze’s experience because when we were heading out for a drink together one evening, she greeted someone on the street. As we walked on she explained, ‘she was a teacher with me in the refugee camp.’ I hadn’t known Elmaze had been a teacher, and I hadn’t known she had been a refugee. I asked her to tell me about it while we had our drink. By the end of her story she was in tears, but she gave me some idea of the conditions in the place, of the educated people like herself who tried to simulate normality for the kids through impromptu classes. Elmaze had trained as an economist so she taught maths. Others contributed whatever skills they had. I still don’t have a very clear picture of these places in my mind – where they lay on the continuum between Darfur and a grim Brittany campsite. But Elmaze told me she wouldn’t ever travel by train again.

For me, of course, trains have a different meaning. They are Adlestrop and Auden’s Night Mail and Celia Johnson. So it was here, in the train’s huge comfy armchair-style seats, that I sat down to write my story set in Kosovo. I wanted to tell what I had learned about Kosovo, the war zone (‘is it very dangerous?’ was usually the first question people in the UK had asked me) where Dardan’s uncle was killed at the road- side and Milošević’s murders were still part of everyone’s emotional landscape; but also about Kosovo, the land of Adem and Xhezide, the land of strong tastes, farmer prime ministers, and Ana’s lush garden – the land of honey.

It was only later that I was told that I wasn’t alone in seeing this place as a land of such contradictions. In the artists’ bar we liked to go to for Bob Dylan and Kosovan wine, and a cocktail called ‘Green Stuff’, a big guy with a safety pin through his eyebrow and a smile like a baby’s came up to me to say he’d heard that I was interested in honey and its history here. Did I know that in Turkish, bal means ‘honey’ and kan means ‘blood’. The story, almost certainly untrue, goes that when the Turks arrived in the Balkans, they immediately saw the potential of a fertile land where you can be happy sipping sweet nectar. Only when they had discovered how hard they would have to fight to subdue, and eventually lose, the territory, did they understand its second syllable. And that is how the region got its full name, the land of blood and honey.