Chaiar Station is little more than a few cold rooms in the wing of a small clinic, lit by a tiny television with bad reception that everyone put in for. Few want to miss the Macedonian version of Wheel of Fortune known here as Wheel of Happiness. For those who know that money does not guarantee happiness, the game show is followed by an addictive Turkish soap opera. As we settle in to watch the next episode of Yabanci Damat, Drenousha helps us get into the spirit of things by serving Turkish coffee.
Ambulance stations of Macedonia become drop-in medical centres after hours and on the weekends. So an additional doctor is always on duty at night and has a separate consultation room. For the festival night of Saint Nicholas, Dr Save Bobonovski is on shift, his first name ensuring great popularity among his patients. At one time he also worked on the ambulances, but that was ten years ago and he quit after attending a nasty accident at Alexander the Great Airport. On 5 March 1993, eighty-three people died when flight crew forgot to de-ice a Macedonian Airlines Fokker prior to departure and it crashed seconds after take-off. Save was first on the scene. As he tells it, bodies and body parts were scattered as far as the eye could see. He decided soon after he was more suited to working indoors.
A second crew comes by on their way to a chest pain and picks up an ECG machine. At present there are not enough to go round and Chaiar ambulances have to share a single ancient Hellige box with its little rubber suckers and wide leather straps that bind to wrists and ankles and around the chest. It must hark from the 1960s or thereabouts and looks more KGB than ECG. We’ve used it plenty of times, and vintage though the Hellige may be, it is still a functional 12-lead cardiograph.
Dr Aquarius scoffs. ‘Our government doesn’t have money for new ECG machines, but they sure have it for bronze lions in public squares. Have you ever seen a bronze lion save a life?’
To boost morale, reinvigorate patriotism and attract tourists, the government of Macedonia has created a controversial building project known as Skopje 2014. By crossing the old stone bridge over the Vardar River in the direction of the central mosque, one can see where work on the multimillion denar project has begun. A highly fanciful preview of what the completed dream may look like is also available on YouTube as a musical montage. Ridiculous oversized monuments are superimposed on city intersections, including a sky-scraping Alexander atop his rearing horse in the main square. Imitation baroque buildings line the banks of the Vardar where a troupe of dancing fountains shoot from the murky rapids.
Continued Greek denial of Macedonian identity is certainly part of what has prompted Skopje 2014. But for unemployed and hungry Macedonians it is all too much.
‘Remember how Ceausescu died in Romania?’ says Dr Aquarius. ‘He built an Arc de Triomphe replica in Bucharest while his people were starving and was executed by firing squad.’
There is a patient with shortness of breath in Shutka, where we spend most of our time each shift. As in the films of Emir Kusturica and their endless parties of drunken gypsies firing pistols into the air, breaking bottles over each other’s heads and tripping over roaming geese, the maalo has an atmosphere of madness even in the absence of wedding receptions. Still, we are rarely called to trauma cases. There is surprisingly little violence in Shutka considering the quantity of the homebrew, rakija, the inhabitants consume. They are not a violent race. Never have the gypsies fought a war or occupied a land.
In contrast to the guarded personalities of many Macedonians, the gypsies are warmer and quicker to smile. Perhaps they feel secure and at peace here. Macedonia may be over-spending public money on bronze lions and flaming crucifixes, but the country has arguably the most compassionate policy towards the Roma anywhere in Europe. By comparison, Italy and France spent much of 2010 gypsy hunting. Although they weren’t shot, as happened under the Nazis in World War II, gypsies were rounded up like cattle and forced back to Romania and Bulgaria. Many were not from these countries in the first place. It’s hard to know what land, if any, a gypsy calls home. Since migrating from India a thousand years ago, they have spread to all corners of the earth and are regularly uprooted and chased away by governments.
Macedonia, however, has allowed gypsies the right to identify as Roma, to live in their own suburb and to have a representative in parliament. With its own mayor, permanent housing and radio stations, it is no wonder Shutka has become host to the largest number of gypsies anywhere.
Not everyone in Shutka is satisfied. Many are disappointed the government is not doing more to help them. Social security is only available to those Roma registered as residents of Macedonia and even then it is a paltry 50 euros a month. With some notable exceptions, including a handful of doctors and lawyers, the Roma are not much interested in education and few end up qualified for decent work. This forces many to rely on the garbage collection, the begging and the thievery for which they are known. Attending a school or a job to become a cog in society holds little appeal. More thrilling are horses and music and fire, all things wild and free, living each day as if it were the last.
Finding an address in Shutka can take a while. Some of the streets are cracked and deeply gouged with potholes and the eccentric little homes rendered in lurid colours have all kinds of madcap decorations hanging on their outside walls, from obscure coats-of-arms to enormous cuckoo clocks. But street numbers on letterboxes are scarce. We stop and ask a group of men sharing a foot-long salami and rakija if they know where our patient lives. After some lengthy argument they point toward the bazaar. Sometimes, even in serious emergencies, we drive around the maalo in dizzy confusion, following several opposing directions. Thankfully, the streets are easy to remember. Without a shred of irony the Roma have given them names like Washington Square Boulevard, John F Kennedy Parade and Disneyland. Shoddily constructed miniature palaces of concrete can be found here. Poorer homes, in many cases, shanty-style shacks are more likely found along Che Guevara Drive, Shakespeare Avenue and Garcia Lorca Lane. At the bottom of the hill there is a quarter of Shutka I have visited that looks no different to a Bombay slum, complete with muddy passages, huts constructed from junk and United Nations water pumps.
Past the smugglers’ bazaar where toothless old men sell lacy bras hanging in rows along rusty fences, where bootleg perfumes and pointless porcelain pigs go for a steal, we pull up at a partially collapsed building and enter a 2-metre-square room, home to a family of seven. Our patient is a forty-year-old woman with six children and a husband in jail. Only a gypsy can peel potatoes while suffering severe respiratory distress, I think to myself. Her mouth is snapping with every breath, as if biting for air.
Everyone seems to have breathing problems in Shutka. It’s either asthma or emphysema or bronchitis or all of these at once. Temperatures in winter can drop to minus 20 degrees. If there is rain the streets of Shutka become rivers of freezing mud and many of the children do not have boots. Chest infections are common. Adults sit all day and night in crowded rooms, chain-smoking the contraband Marlboro their children passively inhale.
Dr Aquarius and Snezhana Spazovska don’t mess about. They promptly administer an injection of Amyphyline and Dexamethasone during which the woman only momentarily ceases her potato peeling. It surprises me that oxygen is rarely given to patients the crew intends on leaving at home, especially those with breathing problems. On this occasion Dr Aquarius is feeling generous and runs the patient on a low rate through nasal prongs for several minutes, though staying on scene too long in the maalo is unwise. News of an ambulance entering the ghetto quickly gets around and it’s only a matter of time – often less than fifteen minutes – before every sick person with the slightest complaint surfaces for treatment. Suddenly the ambulance becomes a mobile clinic and is trapped indefinitely. Many gypsies are not registered citizens and have no entitlement to hospital treatment. For them, the only hope of getting medical help is to bail up ambulances whenever they see them and appeal to the compassion of the doctor on board to get a free consultation.
The sun has dropped below the snow-capped Shari Mountain Range when we pull up at a small house so crooked it could have been built by a child. It is dark as a cave inside and the floor is covered in the shapes of countless bodies wetly snoring under thick floral blankets. A woman who does not bother brushing the hair from her face rolls over and pulls down an edge of her grimy tracksuit pants, exposing a buttock.
Dr