Learning To Live Off The Land

 

New Albanian vocabulary: fshat (village), mulli (mill)

 

 

We were being offered a piece of Kosovo. Dardan owns land in the north east, not far from Adem, and said he would give some to Rob and me in exchange for us building a house on it. He told us the land was in his ‘village’ when he talked to us in English, though he’d warned us, too, that there was ‘nothing there’. It’s not connected to the water mains, nor to mains electricity, and until last year, had no asphalted roads. He was open about his motivation for his offer of land – the more houses there are, the more case there is for demanding the services he wants there.

The idea of longer-term home-making here had caught my imagination. We were already in the habit of leaving Pristina most week- ends to see the bees, Adem and Xhezide, so building a house on Dardan’s land would be a natural next step. This could be our vikendica – the English word used by Albanians with a Serbian ending was the perfect way to describe the place where some Brits might hole up in Kosovo. I loved the idea of creating our own oda mattresses on the floor around the edge of a room, scattered with cushions. We would have a wood-burning stove like Adem and Xhezide, and we could invite friends down for vikend house parties, serve honey raki, and play multilingual forfeit Scrabble late into the night. The friends we had made who were artists could come and paint; I would sit and write, and bake, and tend my bees.

Dardan suggested that Rob and I should go with him and visit this ‘village’ that has ‘nothing there’ early one Sunday morning before we went to see the bees. We drove off, and I tried to imagine what might be waiting for us – the land which I, like some nineteenth-century indentured servant, was being invited to colonise with my labour. My parents live in a ‘village’ in the Oxfordshire Cotswolds. It is a clustering of low stone houses, with a pub and a church. There is a noticeboard where people offer baby-sitting and book groups. In their village, too, people complain about lack of services – there is no post office any more, and for a while there was no internet coverage, and still occasionally no mobile phone reception. I tried to scale down their settlement in my head, and make it speak Albanian and have less disposable income or employment, and wondered whether this was what Dardan’s village might be like.

 

 

Dardan showed us where to pull off the main road and we headed down the kind of track you need a good bra for – we bounced and bumped and lurched over deep ruts. When we couldn’t drive any further, we got out and started walking. The grass and the nettles – and, I thought to myself, probably the snakes – were knee-high. There were young trees everywhere, and a stream, and no path except what I thrashed myself with bare legs. We found tiny wild raspberries – it was the first time I’d ever seen them – which stained our hands and mouths red. Dardan had a plastic bag in his pocket and we filled it with rasp- berries. Then we found small sweet strawberries too, and added those to the bag and to the murderous mess under our fingernails.

Further on, and as the day heated up, there was the smell of thyme. Crouching down, I found where it was growing and added sprigs of it to the fruit salad in our bag. Later we came across mint, too, and wrapped it round the strawberries like smart little canapés of fresh summer flavours.

I was still not clear where the village was, though, as we wandered in this fecund little paradise.

‘How far is it from here to your village, Dardan?’ I asked, and he turned to me with half a smile on his face.

‘This is my village,’ he explained. ‘I told you there was nothing here.’ I couldn’t decide whether he was laughing at my surprise, or laughing with me at how ludicrous it was to call this a village. That’s always the problem with foreign-educated Kosovars, and probably with British expats too. They delight in playing it both ways.

‘So were there houses here in the past?’ I asked, disorientated.

‘Yes, thirty years ago there were.’ They have all been abandoned now (no mains water, no electricity, no road) although as we walked on down the stream we did see the first sign that anyone had ever lived there once – a broken down waterwheel. That, Dardan said, was on the land belonging to one of his uncles; the stream marks the boundary.

Rob and he started to talk about the possibilities for building a house here, but I couldn’t see it. My imagination was too limited to cut down those saplings, level the bank, install the chemical toilet, and work out where the noticeboard to advertise my book group would go. Dardan saw me frowning.

‘OK, would you like to go mushroom hunting while we’re here?’ Of course we would! I loved the combination of faint frisson of danger (I thought of all those people who die after a tasty omelette made with the wrong kind of fungus), pastoral idyll and free vegetarian food. So we returned to the car with our fruit bag, and Dardan directed us down the road and into a more established, dark, damp patch of oak wood.

There he pointed out the mushrooms we were hunting – enormous bulging boletus tumours. They had an intense musty smell like old laundry, which made my stomach lurch, and I couldn’t decide whether I was still hungry or slightly revolted. Between us we filled a bag with them – Dardan found the biggest, which he gave to us because it was our first time. I remembered the landlord of our house in Pristina, and his pitch to us when we were looking round the place, deciding whether to rent it. He tried in Albanian, in English, and in neither language made any sense to us, other than communicating his enthusiasm and willingness to please. Rob and I had clearly been interested in the house at that point, but what clinched the deal was the portly man leaping down from the steps to a large bush in the garden, and ripping off a rose to present to me. Dardan proffered that luxurious bloom of a mushroom to me with the same panache. But for this property I still wasn’t convinced.

It’s not far from this village to Adem’s house, and the bees. I thought of that other parcel of land (the Albanian phrase translates as a ‘mouthful of land’ – a phrase that came naturally when I thought about the little grassy patch where my honey was produced) that I had colonised more successfully, and I suggested we might go.

We drove off through the low hills, up slopes covered in beech scrub, and down the other side, with a hazy vista of strip fields and dotted houses laid out for miles ahead of us. Through villages where men walked slowly, with faces showing the gentle contented smugness it’s impossible not to feel when you are on your way home to your family with a weight of deep green watermelon in your arms. I fingered the plastic bag filled with our own small harvest.

When we arrived, Adem and Xhezide insisted on tea before I could have a look at the hives. We sat in their kitchen with our small glasses of tea (with honey). I asked how the bees were, how the family was. They asked about our week.

I was itching to get out to the hives. It was a perfect day to be a beekeeper – or, indeed, a bee, I thought. I wanted to sit quietly near the hive and watch the creatures coming and going, trying to guess the flowers they had been visiting from the colour of the pollen in the so- called ‘baskets’ on their legs where the collected protein-rich powder bulges to the size of perhaps a matchstick head. I wanted to learn some- thing about their rhythms, their work, the organism that is a hive.

Finally, everyone had finished their tea and I put on my gear and went out with Adem. He brought the smoker and the tool for opening the hive. ‘I’ll do it,’ I suggested. No, no, he assured me, it was fine for him to do it. Maybe he considered that I didn’t know enough to be able to do the job properly, I thought. And of course I didn’t want to get the process of opening up the hive wrong – insufficient smoke would mean the bees would attack us, which was bad for the temperament of the hive, as well as bringing risks for us, despite our suits. And opening up the hive incorrectly with the metal lever might damage bees that got trapped as the frames came out.

Maybe he was right but I still had a mild sense of frustration as I stood beside Adem opening up the hive. I thought about Dardan laughing at me at not understanding what a Kosovan village was, and about our dashed hopes on building a house here. With the language, the culture, and now with the beekeeping, I was repeatedly reminded by this place of how little I knew, how ill-equipped I was to navigate it successfully. I stood with my big rubber gloves holding Adem’s tools and watched through the black mesh of my veil as Adem checked the hives. As he reordered the frames (those at the edges always have less honey- comb built in them because they are the coolest; by rotating the outside frames with those further in, the bees could be persuaded to build and fill more comb) I wondered whether I would ever feel I had touched Kosovo, my own beehives, directly, or whether I would always be relegated to the role of detached observer.

When got home we brought our hunter-gatherer booty to the table on the verandah. I fried the spongy mushroom steaks (a mistake, I think, because they would have kept their flavour better if they’d been grilled) and poured out yoghurt for us to eat with the herbs and fruit that remained.

The bowls of white yoghurt scattered with red fruits and green leaves looked beautiful. I drizzled some of my honey artfully, and felt like William Morris designing a new curtain fabric rather than someone sitting down to eat. I mused that maybe my vision was better for focused interior design than for larger projects building homes and colonising new countries.

 

A scavenger menu

 

Ingredients

 

Bowls of plain yoghurt

A handful of strawberries (wild if possible)

A handful of raspberries (also picked wild if you know where to find them)

A handful of fresh mint (torn) Fresh thyme, crushed

Honey

Boletus mushrooms, sliced and grilled

Buttered toast

 

Eat the mushrooms on the toast.

Then combine the fruit and the herbs and the honey as you see best. In my opinion, yoghurt with thyme and honey is a fabulous combination.

Strawberries and mint are also wonderfully fresh together, and the mint sets off raspberries very well too. To my taste, thyme doesn’t really combine well with the fruit or with the mint, but of course the honey goes well with everything.