DRAGA’S ENTRANCE EXAMINATIONS
One evening Draga and her brother Dushan squatted on the kitchen floor, eating their supper of stewed peppers smothered in clabbered milk, while their mother prepared the thick, sweet Turkish coffee over a stone brazier. Above them spread the hearth-hood, dark and velvety as a bat’s wing. Wisps of blue smoke from their father’s pipe floated toward it.
Of late many exciting things had happened. Father had come back from America with new clothes, a new language, and new ideas. Now the family sat silent in the grip of a great decision.
Dushan and Draga were to go to the American school in Monastir to learn English and other things not taught in their village. Father had been to town to make arrangements, and, since Dushan and Draga could show good reports from their home school, they were to be admitted on trial, Dushan to live with friends and attend as a day pupil, Draga to live in the dormitory as a boarder. Mother acquiesced bewildered, but her dark eyes lingered on Draga, who was her baby. She listened with considerable distrust to the tales of American women who went where and when they liked—tales even of girls who went to and from school alone on street cars, carrying their books under their arms!
The preparations were finished. They were to start the next morning. It would be a three days’ journey in the ox-cart, and provisions stood ready in the shape of baskets of grapes and cheese, and a great loaf of brown bread, almost as big as a cart-wheel, wrapped in clean linen. The heavy white tunics with their flowered borders were folded between home-woven blankets.
After coffee, taking two baskets, Draga went to the stream which bounded down toward Lake Prespa, to gather succulent leaves and grass for the goats. The village houses were deep ochre in color, some with jutting windows faced with turquoise blue. Above the walls which shut the gardens from the street rose cypresses and matted vines and the wide tops of fig trees. Scarped blue mountains climbed behind the village, and below it lay Lake Prespa, holding in its bright waters a tiny island on which could be seen the ruins of a tower where long ago the Bulgarian Tsars had hidden their treasure from the Greek Emperors of Constantinople. That was before the time of the Serbian Tsars who conquered Macedonia, or the Turks who took it from the Serbs.
In this country Alexander the Great had lived as a boy, and since then it had known so many masters and was still claimed by so many nations that people continued to live in fortress-like houses whose doors were barred at night with heavy stanchions.
Draga’s home was one of these houses. All its doors and windows opened on the inner court. On the ground floor were stalled the oxen, the hens, and the goats. Above the stables projected a wide veranda hung with gay Serbian rugs and strings of tobacco and beans. Below, in the open space of the court, was piled husked corn, which glowed like a heap of gold when the sun struck it.
Draga’s thoughts rushed back to the familiar scene the next day, as the ox-cart creaked through the sere and dusty country, over a road that had once been a great Roman thoroughfare. It was really a continuation of the famous Appian Way from Rome to Brindisi. There it disappeared in the Adriatic, to emerge on the other side at Durazzo, in Albania, where it took another name, of Via Egnatia, and continued across country to Salonica. Monastir, where Draga and Dushan were to go to school, was the halfway station. The old Roman road was still the great highway, but the merchant caravans and the trampling legions had disappeared. Military trucks, white with dust, sometimes lumbered by, carrying stores to some outlying garrison, and the mail car was sure to be met sooner or later jacking up its wheels for new tires. For the most part, people went by on foot or on donkey-back, all burden-laden.
There were brigands back in the hills. Sometimes they disguised themselves as Turkish women, with long, black veils over their faces, and flowing garments, which concealed weapons; but persons traveling in an ox-cart driven by a barefooted boy had nothing to fear. Nevertheless, they spent the nights near some small village that looked like an outcrop of stones on the hillside, and after coffee and sour milk at the inn, stretched themselves out on the floor of the wagon and pulled the blankets over them.
On the third day they came to Monastir—to Draga and Dushan a bewildering, beautiful place. The next day was market day, and their mother could go back in company with friends. So, on the threshold of the school, with many hurried embraces, she left Draga, who felt small and alone in spite of the crowd of new faces around her.
A month went by and the first examinations were over.
Draga’s parents were to come that day to learn whether or not she had passed. Draga did not know and was afraid to ask. One moment she trembled with hope that she had not passed, so that she might travel back in the ox-cart with her parents to the golden-lighted court, the shadowy kitchen, and the sweet, musty smell of grapes. Then she shriveled with shame at the thought of failure. Besides, she was beginning to love the school life; the fresh clean dormitory, where they slept with open windows; the team work of study and play; and the evening hour, when they all sat on the floor and told stories before going to bed. Also, she had learned with surprise that Bulgarian girls are as kindly as Serbians. There were several in the school, and one of them, Boiana, had been her friend from the start. This seemed strange, for she had always heard that Bulgars were evil and hostile people.
Fearing that her mother might find her strange because of her bobbed hair and straight gingham dress, Draga put on her Macedonian garments. The embroidery on her tunic was of an ancient pattern called ‘Marko, the King’s Son,’ so named in honor of the Serbian prince, Marko, the national hero of chivalry and romance, who had lost a crown rather than tell a lie. His home had been in Macedonia over five hundred years before Draga’s time, but ‘Marko’s pattern’ had been handed down from one generation of Serbian women to another, each proud to wear it, as Draga was to-day. The sleeveless jacket which she wore over her tunic was of a clear red, like the peppers strung against the white walls of her home; and wound around her waist was a rope of black wool to keep her brilliant girdle in place.
Behind the school playground there was a high brick wall with a small green door. It led into a quiet, neglected garden like a scene from a book. There was a well in the center; gourds and spiked flowers, purple and white, grew in the rank grass, and crooked plum trees traced blue shadows on the walls which shut the garden away from the clatter of the streets. This was the paradise of a large family of rabbits, and when Draga felt homesick she slipped away to feed them with scraps of red peppers, which she begged from the cook; for all Macedonians down to the rabbits love peppers.
Draga had begun to feel the charm of order and cleanliness, but she missed the animals which were a part of the family at home, and which she had fed and cared for all her life. She was torn between a longing to go back to her home and a real love for the life in school. Her examination marks would decide which it was to be. Of her Serbian studies she felt fairly sure. It was the strange English language that staggered her—its incomprehensible verbs, its spelling without a clue. Some of the Serbian girls spoke it well, and from them she learned more than from her books. The queer names for food and clothes and the objects in the schoolroom she was beginning to master.
STRINGING PEPPERS
While the rabbits were nibbling their peppers someone came running to the green door. ‘Draga, your father and mother are here!’
Her mother bent over her, enveloped her in the soft white folds of her headdress, and smothered her with kisses. ‘Oh, what a clever girl to pass in everything, even the strange English!’ she whispered, and her father’s eyes shone proudly upon her.
Suddenly Draga knew how glad she was to stay, how proud that she could hold her place among the other girls; and she realized that her parents too, as much as they missed her, would rather leave her than take her back. Together they were all working for the future.