On the anniversary of the burial of his wife, in the window of the master’s room there appears the ghost of his dead wife. The ghost is “a most beautiful face of a woman”, “a strange apparition, her hair is all of gold thread, with a wreath around her head, all dressed in a white wedding dress” (53). A similar description of extraterrestrial beauty is given in Venko Andonovski’s story “Svantovid”, where the fatal woman Lasica [meaning: weasel] is asleep on a bed all in white, she is covered with white silk, her breathing is like the wing spreading of a flock of white doves. The dead beloved wife is traditionally described with the white colour, for the white is the colour of the spiritual.
The wife’s ghost thanks the master for the attention paid to her husband: “the angels sent me to you (…), for you have been like a brother to my man (…) so that I may thank you”. (53) When the master opens the window, inviting the ghost to enter the room, the ghost disappears, vanishes.
It is excessive love that causes disturbance of the ontological norms, exchange between the spirit and the matter and revival of the dead. Such love is a “mistake” on ontological level, a “mistake” of the world. Still, it is a possible, motivated “mistake, for love’s nature can be understood the way Empedokle spoke of it in his “Of Nature”. Love is surontological, surnatural category, the power of conjoining, as contrary to the power of disjoining (hatred): those forced are known in physics under the names affinity and repulsiveness. The second attitude is that love is wasted through time, that it contains energy as anything else, and that its intensity weakens through time: this is particularly the subject of postromanticist literature, which poses the problem of the so-called realised love (marriage, relationship, etc.).
Although the master had met the ghost, he, nonetheless, claimed that “only humans do not return, only humans do not revive” (37). He attempted to keep the ghost, to materialise it, but in vain. The master opens the window and invites the ghost in, but in the same minute the ghost escapes, not stepping beyond the window’s frame (windows, together with doors, are symbols of the threshold and the transition of the matter in spirit and vice versa, from the inside into the outside and vice versa. Bahtin made an exceptional study about the role of the threshold in Dostoevsky’s novels, showing that all the crucial events happen here). The room cannot make the absent present, nor can it materialise the spirit, as the prolonged love cannot exist forever. The room in the story in fact functions as a tomb, in it lives the cat which is a symbol of the demoniac, and the room has the function to hide the master from the world: that is to say the master “absents” in the room, the way the dead person symbolically “absents” in the grave!
2.3. Two Utopias: Ceasing in Time, Redemption in Space
There is another character that appears in this short story, and that is the character –parable Jancule: he is a feebleminded employee in the village’s school. In him we find a reflection of the inherent (eastern) sin. His grandfather Serafim has killed his own brother because of land (a parabola of the biblical story of Cain and Abel), and Jancule as the child of Serafim’s child has sinful blood, he is feebleminded, so he is condemned not for his own, but for the hereditary sin.
There is an obsession maturing in him, an obsession to recreate the world, to make a new world without the old sins and without the concept of sin in the first place. “Oh, there is nothing else that I want (…) but a seven hours reign. Oh, would I, then, create the world” – he says (37). Jancule is the theoretician of the possible better unsinful world. He represents the religious, symbolic and metaphysical axes in the story.
He is the one who anchors the fantastic idea of the ghost’s visit because, according to the Christian religion, the spirit of the dead cannot easily be transmitted into matter. In the lonely world where the hunters accidentally arrive, in the wold where Jancule promotes his apocryphal idea about the recreation of the world, however, such a transition is possible and probable.
Thus, the theme of sin, closely related to the theme of love, exists in this story on several levels. In the first place, the idea that death is tragic for everyone, and especially for the one who loves, is emphasised. The opposite theory that Christ’s sacrifice takes away the tragic dimension from death, that death looses the “ontological honour” to the western Christians, for now each road leads us to God, and each tragedy is only an unrecognized necessity – is not a comforting theory. For the one who loves the spiritual consolation is complete only with material evidence.
In this forlorn village from the story, therefore, where quasiparabolic characters reside, there is an idea to recreate the world. The world must thus be created that the new one does not include the objective sin, the guilt which is not our own, but somebody else’s. Jancule suffers because of the inherited sin and his guilt in that world is objective. The fantastic story “The Lightenings In Front of Them Made Even the Dead Burn” by Slavko Janevski (1920) speaks of the love between two young Jews, the 16 year old Abraham and the nine months younger Stella who end up in a nazi gas chamber. Their sin, too, is objective, for they, at that age, have not sinned subjectively to deserve to be thus punished. The objective sin here is not spiritual, i.e. symbolic – as was the case with Jancule – but objective, historically determined.
In the story of love between the two Jews we come across two characters, the watchmaker Ham obsessed with time, and the antiquarian Emil, able to see in the future. Their presence, as well as the thesis that “Life and death are but a mosaic in the perennial devastation and revival…” show that the issue of time is closely related to the idea of love and sin.
Time is the capital problem in metaphysics. “If this problem were solved, all would be solved” – says Borges – “Fortunately, I believe that there is no danger of it ever being solved: instead, we continue to be restless. We will always be able to say as St. Augustines had said: What is time? If I am not asked, I know. If I am asked, then I do not know (Borges, 1990: 62).
In his essay on swallowed time, Peter Krasztev says that (post) symbolism in the East has offered an original concept, which has practically reversed the Christian thesis of salvation. The human soul, after its salvation moves into eternity, i.e. timelessness. The Modernists believed that if they manage to create eternity or, in other words, to halt time, “the salvation in this world” will automatically follow (Peter Krasztev, 1977).
Such halt in time is present in Čingo’s story as well. Master Cvetan encloses himself in the ‘shell’, the room in which time is halted. The room resembles a tomb, the cat living in it carries a demoniac symbolism. It is an enclosed space, in which the great idea of stopping time and achieving eternity is supposed to take place. That eternity, however, and the whole eastern concept of salvation during life are fake: it is a simulation. That is why the ghost of the beloved escapes from the room, would not reside in it, for it is untruthful, it is simulated.
Even more interesting is the attempt to abandon the idea of temporal salvation and search for the spatial exile. Čingo’s story ends with this commentary: “after these events people started moving to Australia” (55). It is well known that Australia, that ‘West Aust’ has always presented a spatial utopia to the Macedonians, a so-called ‘topos amoendi’, a possible paradise on Earth. When the chance to establish temporal utopia, with the escape of the spirit and the impossibility to materialize it, fails, a chance to establish a spatial utopia is being born. The redemption of the soul will take its place there, in the new space, not here, where there has been an attempt to annul time, for which it became clear that it could never be halted for the living or prolonged for the dead!
3. Second Story: Vampirism
The story “A Vampire” by Petre M. Andreevski (1934) was published in 1974.
In this story the ghost of the dead Najden wakes up and starts stealing in the village: candies, hay, objects and livestock. His wife Najdenica embarrassed because of her dead husband’s activities returns the stolen objects to the village people. They are upset and call the vampire hunter. The hunter shoots Najden’s ghost, but since the ghost is invisible to the ‘naked’ eye the people can only see his blood all over the property: but right afterwards they also see Najdenica lying dead. Their comments were that Najdenica had to die for she “allowed the ghost to hide in her heart” (236).
The heart is presented as the mediator between the two worlds: the material (fire in Najdenica’s heart) and the spiritual (a hiding place for Najden’s ghost). The symbol of the heart is common and usual for the world we live in, because “not all nations love with their heart”. Outside of the Christian model there are areas with different symbolism, where the soul, as a spiritual paradigm, is not hosted into the heart which – as an organ in the human body – presents a material paradigm, but in another material organ, for example, some native tribes in Africa “love” with their throat (the throat is the centre of the soul), the native Americans with their stomach, etc.
What love and what sin is there in this story which ends tragically and how does it happen that the spirit of one person can move into the heart of another?
3.1. Candies
In the story we encounter the element of candies. Najden’s ghost steals candies from the village store and gives them to his wife Najdenka. According to Tzvetan Todorov (132) the concept of devil’s candies is: “a transparent symbol, it is a matter of candies that incite sexual desire and which the devil willingly gives to the main character.” And again: “the devil’s present symbolises awakening of the desire that from that moment cannot be stopped.” (132) In the short story “The Night Coach” by Vlada Urošević (1934) there is a reverse perspective when a demonic woman gives candies to the hero of the story. The narrator gets in the coach in which Emilija sits (there is a series of stories by this author in which the character Emilija appears as his cousin) and eats candies. “I have some excellent candies” (52), she says and then: “she started feeding me with candies, to stuck their sticky shapes into my mouth. She was unwrapping the tin-foil skillfully, biting off a piece of the candy in order to taste it, then, saying the name of the fruit that was hidden in it, she would put it into my mouth” (53)1F
Since the story we are dealing with is a fantastic story, in it the hesitation – whether the ghost is real or not – remains. If we cast away hesitation and decide not to believe in vampires, then we should say that it was Najdenica stealing and that is a mistake, a socially motivated mistake. There is no love here, nor is there a sin. Then the story may be interpreted on a physical level and it may be said that Najdenica is stealing, and she is trying to justify herself in the eyes of the village people by saying that it was her dead husband. The mistake in that interpretation is legislative: the law says: “thou shalt not steal” and as such transfers from religious into legal norms. (In fact, graduation, marriage, legal norms – all of them have their origin in religion.) If, on the other hand, we allow a belief in vampires, then there is a love motive.
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1. The connection between the female principle and plants in a later version is seen in the film hit “Betman and Robin” where the character Poison Avy appears: she is a scientist concerned with protecting the nature, and after an accident in the labaratory she grows from the ground and becomes the Goddess of the flora. An earlier example of the mistical, demonic woman who takes the fatal, floric throne is found in Gotje who tells the story of Cleopatra “Cleopatra rised from her throne, threw away her royal hood, replaced her starry crown with a wreath of flowers…” (according to M. Prac, 173).