Macedonia's Titanic Waltz

It is a well-noted phenomenon: Macedonians behave one way at home and in another, more civilized manner, when they are traveling abroad. Most egregiously, they spit in public and trash their environment. Why the stark differences in conduct?

Clearly, Macedonians feel that they are guests in their destinations and as such hold themselves to a higher standard. But this is merely scratching the surface.

Like the denizens of many other developing countries, Macedonians have no concepts of private vs. public spaces. It is all a blur, meshing and intertwined: the neighborhood and the city are merely an extension of one's living room. Public displays of spitting and trashing are statements. They reinforce the perpetrator's sense of contumacious personal autonomy, affirm his belonging to a collective with shared cultural values and traditions, and demonstrate his virility. The same applies to women who engage in these behaviors.

Nowhere is this more evident that in Skopje: an amalgamation of villages, still inhabited by first and second generation peasants.

Frozen at an early morning hour, the stony hands of the giant, cracked clock commemorate the horror. The earthquake that struck Skopje in 1963 has shattered not only its Byzantine decor, has demolished not merely the narrow passageways of its Ottoman past, has transformed not only its Habsburgian waterfront with its baroque National Theatre. The disastrous reconstruction, supervised by a Japanese architect, has robbed it of its soul. It has become a drab and sprawling socialist metropolis replete with monumentally vainglorious buildings, now falling into decrepitude and disrepair. The influx of destitute and simpleton villagers (which more than quintupled Skopje's population) was crammed by central planners with good intentions and avaricious nature into low-quality, hi-rise slums in newly constructed "settlements".

Skopje is a city of extremes. Its winter is harsh in shades of white and grey. Its summer is naked and steamy and effulgent. It pulses throughout the year in smoke-filled, foudroyant bars and dingy coffee-houses. Polydipsic youths in migratory skeins, eager to be noted by their peers, young women on the hunt, ageing man keen to be preyed upon, suburbanites in search of recognition, gold chained mobsters surrounded by flaxen voluptuousness - the cast of the watering holes of this potholed eruption of a city.

The trash seems never to be collected here, the streets are perilously punctured, policemen often substitute for dysfunctional traffic lights. The Macedonians drive like the Italians, gesture like the Jews, dream like the Russians, are obstinate like the Serbs, desirous like the French and hospitable like the Bedouins. It is a magical concoction, coated in the subversive patience and the aggressive passivity of the long oppressed. There is the wisdom of fear itself in the eyes of the 600,000 inhabitants of this landlocked, mountain-surrounded habitat. Never certain of their future, still grappling with their identity, an air of "carpe diem" with the most solemn religiosity of the devout.

The past lives on and flows into the present seamlessly. People recount the history of every stone, recite the antecedents of every man. They grieve together, rejoice in common and envy en masse. A single organism with many heads, it offers the comforts of assimilation and solidarity and the horrors of violated privacy and bigotry. The people of this conurbation may have left the village - but it never let them go. They are the opsimaths of urbanism. Their rural roots are everywhere: in the the division of the city into tight-knit, local-patriotic "settlements". In the traditional marriages and funerals. In the scarcity of divorces despite the desperate shortage in accommodation. In the asphyxiating but oddly reassuring familiarity of faces, places, behaviour and beliefs, superstitions, dreams and nightmares. Life in a distended tempo of birth and death and in between.

Skopje has it all - wide avenues with roaring traffic, the incommodious alleys of the Old Town, the proper castle ruins (the Kale). It has a Turkish Bridge, recently renovated out of its quaintness. It has a square with Art Nouveau building in sepia hues. An incongruent digital clock atop a regal edifice displayed the minutes to the millennium - and beyond. It has been violated by American commerce in the form of three McDonald restaurants which the locals proceeded cheerfully to transform into snug affairs. Stolid Greek supermarkets do not seem to disrupt the inveterate tranquility of neighbourhood small grocers and their coruscant congeries of variegated fruits and vegetables, spilling to the pavement.

In winter, the light in Skopje is diaphanous and lambent. In summer, tis strong and all-pervasive. Like some coquettish woman, the city changes mantles of orange autumn leaves and the green foliage of summer. Its pure white heart of snow often is hardened into grey and traitorous sleet. It is a fickle mistress, now pouring rain, now drizzle, now simmering sun. The snowy mountain caps watch patiently her vicissitudes. Her inhabitants drive out to ski on slopes, to bathe in lakes, to climb to sacred sites. It gives them nothing but congestion and foul atmosphere and yet they love her dearly. The Macedonian is the peripatetic patriot - forever shuttling between his residence abroad and his true and only home. Between him and his land is an incestuous relationship, a love affair unbroken, a covenant handed down the generations. Landscapes of infancy imprinted that provoke an almost Pavolvian reaction of return.

Skopje has known many molesters. It has been traversed by every major army in European history and then by some. Occupying a vital crossroad, it is a layer cake of cultures and ethnicities. To the Macedonians, the future is always portentous, ringing with the ominousness of the past. The tension is great and palpable, a pressure cooker close to bursting. The river Vardar divides increasingly Albanian neighbourhoods (Butel, Cair, Shuto Orizari) from Macedonian (non-Muslim) ones. Albanians have also moved from the villages in the periphery encircling Skopje into hitherto "Macedonian" neighbourhoods (like Karpos and the Centre). The Romas have their own ghetto called "Shutka" (in Shuto Orizari), rumoured to be the biggest such community in Europe. The city has been also "invaded" (as its Macedonian citizens experience it) by Bosnian Muslims.

Gradually, as friction mounts, segregation increases. Macedonians move out of apartment blocks and neighbourhoods populated by Albanians. This inner migration bodes ill for future integration. There is no inter-marriage to speak of, educational facilities are ethnically-pure and the conflict in Kosovo with its attendant "Great Albania" rumblings has only exacerbated a stressed and anxious history.

It is here, above ground, that the next earthquake awaits, along the inter-ethnic fault lines. Strained to the point of snapping by a KFOR-induced culture shock, by the vituperative animosity between the coalition and opposition parties, by European-record unemployment and poverty (Albania is the poorest, by official measures) - the scene is set for an eruption. Peaceful by long and harsh conditioning, the Macedonians withdraw and nurture a siege mentality. The city is boisterous, its natives felicitously facetious, its commerce flourishing. It is transmogrified by Greek and Bulgarian investors into a Balkan business hub. But under this shimmering facade, a great furnace of resentment and frustration spews out the venom of intolerance. One impolitic move, one unkind remark, one wrong motion - and it will boil over to the detriment of one and all.

Dame Rebecca West was here, in Skopje (Skoplje, as she spelt it) about 60 years ago. She wrote:

"This (Macedonian) woman (in the Orthodox church) had suffered more than most other human beings, she and her forebears. A competent observer of this countryside has said that every single person born in it before the Great War (and quite a number who were born after it) has faced the prospect of violent death at least once in his or her life. She had been born during the calamitous end of Turkish maladministration, with its cycles of insurrection and massacre and its social chaos. If her own village had not been murdered, she had, certainly, heard of many that had and had never had any guarantee that hers would not some day share the same fate... and there was always extreme poverty. She had had far less of anything, of personal possessions, of security, of care in childbirth than any Western woman can imagine. But she had two possessions that any Western woman might envy. She had strength, the terrible stony strength of Macedonia; she was begotten and born of stocks who could mock all bullets save those which went through the heart, who could outlive the winters when they were driven into the mountains, who could survive malaria and plague, who could reach old age on a diet of bread and paprika. And cupped in her destitution as in the hollow of a boulder there are the last drops of the Byzantine tradition."

Macedonia's Titanic Waltz

Every year, the Austrian Embassy holds a "Viennese Ball" in Skopje.

It is as surrealistic as it gets: a Viennese Ball in a decaying Balkan city in a land of former communist thieves turned capitalist robbers. It is held in a hotel, a gleaming temple of kitsch and tackiness, an abode of golden brass and polished mirrors amidst urban waste and uncollected mounds of festering trash.

Hundreds of middle aged, burly diplomats and locals, all in ill fitting smokings, the women wearing sweaty, smeared make-up. A grotesque medley of decadence, a glimpse of zombie Habsburg schmaltz, the foreigners' deluded way of pretending they are in Europe, an outlet for smug Balkan swaggering braggarts.

Outside, fly-infested children beggars extend ulcerated soiled hands in silent plea. Others peddle rusted razor blades and leaking batteries to passers-by. Young men smile rotting teeth in the smoking humidity of dingy coffee-houses. The middle aged are bent, eyes sparkless, consumed by unemployment and disease, a confluence of wrinkled toothlessness and dwindling hair. The women are grey and flabby, wise, weary eyes in penumbral sockets. They glide, huddled, fending off the windy chill that ricochets from cracking, mouldy walls. Dark clouds weigh on denuded trees in littered boulevards.

Inside, the orchestra cast notes at heated chandeliers. Elastic TV cameramen engage in public pantomime of angles and photo-opportunities. Scarlet cheeked singers hurl their arias at the wooden eurythmics of the hop. Flushed waiters in perspiring attires hold trays of bubbling champagne aloft. Men in skewed bow ties smile genteelly at each other, leading the women in gauche steps across the wide arena. The lights are bright, the atmosphere excited.

Not far from there children are dying for want of medicine or excess drugs. Needled hookers solicit the haunted streets. Rat packs erupt from fermented rubbish, ignored by men and women poking through the piles. A red, polluted moon irradiates the drunkards in tattered, puky heaps near black Mercedeses in ostentatious parking.

The light - the darkness. The sybaritic fest - the dying populace. The glitter and decrepitude. The haves and those who don't. The growing abyss between the leaders and the led, the elite and the masses - the masses soon to turn into a mob. A writing on the crumbling walls, the distant thunder of reality denied, of social justice spurned.

As Ministers and mobsters (here, sometimes one and the same) cruise potholed streets in flashy cars, as mink clad mistresses expose indecently bejeweled necks in fancy restaurants, as former politicians throw hedonistic parties in sumptuous villas and marry off their off-spring in Roman style - so do they seal their fate, so they pronounce their verdict.

It had its faults but Communism did guarantee a modicum of common misery. Society was never polarized, theft was a national pursuit. The spoils were shared and so was the inane bureaucracy, the paranoia and the fear, the xenophobia, the immobility, the stilted speech.

Everyone had the same disintegrating residence, suffered the same maltreatment, enjoyed the same dilapidated services. The schools, the clinics, the gulag were all accessible in equal measure. These were societies maintained by zealous envy and lack of privacy and private property. There was no middle class, there were no social classes, only a nomenklatura to which one could voluntarily choose to belong.

And no middle class emerged in the capitalist upheaval that followed the spastic death of socialism. Malignant profiteering followed malignant abstinence. The social fabric torn, trust - meagre to begin with - was utterly eradicated. A jungle rules in which all forms of human animal prevail: the venal politician, the mafiosi, the drug dealer and the weapons smuggler, the petty thief and pimp, the whore. The haves have more, the luckless are shipwrecked on an isle of destitution. The former live with abandon, the latter lead an abandoned life. A yawning, lava spewing gap between them, a pit without bottom, a biblical damnation.

They who have no thing to lose shall make others lose all that they possess.

The Macedonian Language

The Macedonian language is rich and very interesting. It is multi-layered and nuanced. It captures perfectly the somewhat evil shrewdness of the villager together with the pretentious aspirations of the urban newcomer, the forced obsequiousness of the vanquished and the narcissistic compensatory delusions of omnipotence and omniscience. All in all, though, the language is not repulsive (like German) or self-important (like French) or (like Hebrew and Arabic) stodgy. Macedonian is HUMAN and vibrant and VERY FUNNY!