Landscape: Memory (31 page)
Authors: Matthew Stadler,Columbia University. Writing Division
Tags: #Young men
Dear Robert,
We've started up through these barren hills, following the yellow torrent of the Vardar. We'll be the first back to Gievgieli since Colonel Hunter withdrew, bringing, I pray, some hope that the typhus might be contained and beaten.
The Serbians seem to regard the epidemic with morbid pride, a badge of honor that is distinctive, not among the incomprehensible modern afflictions that now ravage the rest of Europe. A plague is the proper, traditional path to annihilation and the Serbians regard vaccination as a sign of cowardice, a breaking with the past.
In this valley the air is hot and moist. Irregular, white, red-roofed villages meander along dry rocky slopes where squat little oxen and black water buffalo drag their creaking carts. The train took us as far as the frontier.
The frontier marks the end of cultivation, acres of arable land, gone fallow or planted thick with graves, run the river's course, high into the mountains. Occasionally one sees a single, broken beast, dragging a wooden plow crudely fashioned from the dark twisted oak, led by an old woman in bright, colorful rags, a soldier guiding the plow. There are not enough men left in Serbia to work the land. Four wars in three years and now typhus. "All the men in Serbia are in the army or dead," we're told. "And all the oxen have been taken by the government."
Gievgieli is in quarantine, hundreds of hungry people pressing against the fences, looking out into the barren valley. Chloride of lime had been spilled up and down every post, marking every empty wall and tree trunk. Black flags hang thick down the narrow streets, the sign of a death within the house.
Those that saw me offered embraces, regarding me as one would a foreign priest, wanting a particular cure, a blessing, a kiss, to see them through their sickness. Everyone in this town will likely die during my few months here. Gaia Matitch asked if I would grow orchids. We passed the afternoon playing cards, the postmaster and Gaia Matitch and I in a wordless, laughing round of some three-card game with no rules and no winner, where one would draw a card and show it and we'd all laugh and the next would do the same until the heat was too much and we slept.
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