In summer it is hot and there is still light for a good long ways after Veles; in winter, the cabins might or might not have heat, and the darkness falls quicker too. Veles is a damned town but its people are kind. It is famous for the purity of its Macedonian, spoken without the interference of harmful dialects, and the pollution of its old lead smelter. High up, there is a beautiful old section of the town with an unusual church and steep streets small enough for old Yugos and Zastavas and not much else. But the railway traces the course of the Vardar far below, and you can see only the steel bridge over the river and the miniature church in the rock cleft on the right, as the train starts up again.

All the way south you follow the river, which eddies and twists around rocks and small trees in the froth. Fishermen with their pant legs pulled up to their knees wade in at different points, casting lines for the occasional fish or plastic bottle. Almost every summer one or two children will drown while swimming in this tricky part of the river, where the water swirls and there are plenty of roots and the banks have collapsed and there is nothing to hold on to.



Meanwhile there is the measured clicking of the rails and slow chug of the ancient motor. You become acquainted with the soft, sagging seats, of deep blue or red or even green, the colour always conveying a lost regality heavily soaked with the smoke and dirt and ash of its passengers and their memories, with the headrests made of some imitation leather and cool to the touch. The curtains of the high pull-down windows that take up the whole breadth of the cabin were originally off-white and are always filthy. Unless the sun is so bright and you are trying to sleep, you just try to push them behind the inside corner of the seat where they can be less malignant.

For all that, it isn’t really so bad. Your mobile loses reception for a few minutes as the small canyon walls come and go, but someone offers you a candy or a conversation and if you know the language it’s even better. And there are many things to hear. A swarthy fieldworker with a tracksuit and jug of firewater might tell you with feeling that his grandfather was Aleksander Makedonski (Alexander the Great) but that his cousin Goran lives in Detroit.

Then he might ask what the salaries are like in America, but you feel he already thinks he knows the answer. And an old man with carved wooden staff and sweater adds that everyone in America is rich. Except those poor black people, did you see how that Bush treated them in that hurricane? What kind of a country is that? And they think they are the best! For shame!



Still, Goran’s cousin would like to move there. This Macedonia is such a stupid country; the politicians are all corrupt. The elder’s wife, who has lived through much darker times than has the cousin of Goran, curtly reminds him to remember who his grandfather was and are not the Macedonians actually the best people in the Balkans, or at least the world? He agrees and they drink and the train chugs on.

It passes the small villages, stopping in some for twenty seconds or so though rarely does someone get on or off. At Vinicani, the Bregalnica River – a tangled ribbon dropped onto the map, winding from near the border with Bulgaria and then up and down – emerges, emptying itself into the Vardar.

At Gradsko there is almost nothing. But it is the beginning of the wine country, and the soil starts to change to the colour of rust, like the buildings and loading docks in this forsaken tiny town. If it is summer, and there is still light, there is a wonderful view of the undulant vineyards rolling south in staked rows through Negotino. This is the Macedonian heartland, where the water is rationed in summer but the heat is limitless, making the horizon shimmer and sharpening the buzz and croaking of giant crickets and bullfrogs. It is a place of magical storms; last year, a woman was struck by lightning and died while harvesting her fields during a brief frenzy of rain for which many were thankful.

The fields are heavy with the grapes that make the area famous. Numerous small wineries lie tucked away in the areas of Negotino, Rosoman and Kavadarci. The farms also produce glistening purple aubergines, plump tomatoes, knots of garlic and more; and the people here are friendlier, if slow, and all the more so if you consider the poverty and hard labour.



But there is a winter here, a real one, and it does not produce oranges or grapefruits. So on the train in December and January you might find men and even teenagers hoping to get a couple of months of work in warmer climes, on southerly Greek farms in Crete or the Peloponnese. Invariably they have opened a Skopje newspaper and dialled a number listed in a minuscule classified ad, next to the ones from alleged lonely twenty-five year old girls looking for friendship and, possibly, marriage. Both groups are locally organized but you won’t see anyone from the latter riding anything like a train.

As for the former, a Macedonian collaborator generally organises the trip for these aspiring illegals on behalf of the Greek landowner, by train or by car. They are picked up from Thessaloniki and taken to the farm. It draws all kinds. You might find a half-Croat, half-Serb injured in the latest wars and unable to make enough money to support his Macedonian wife and child, shepherding gently a teenaged Turkish Muslim from a mountain village where everyone else is working in Italy.

On the border, money alone discriminates. “You a tourist? What are you going to do in Saloniki with twenty-seven euros, boy?” scoffs the Greek guard. And he is put off the train to wait for the next one back to Skopje. But with still more than an hour to go, that is still only an unrealized fear.
But most of the passengers aren’t on a mission. Boisterous university kids going home for the weekend, or older people travelling between relatives, off-duty-policemen, mothers with their babies: these are the usual sorts. By the time you pass through the wine country and into the iron gates of the Demir Kapija Gorge, the most breathtaking part of the trip, it is no more than an hour to Gevgelija. Here, with these stripped canyons circled over by graceful hawks, is undeniable proof that territory has indeed been gained, though the hypnosis of the rails had compressed time to one weary instant.

And you are also now in the Mediterranean scrublands. In the tawny dusk of summer you can see the floating heat-baked rock outcroppings, a cowboy country once full of dust and bullets and undisturbed veins of marble, where one-hundred years ago scores of bandit gangs and saddle-bagged revolutionaries roamed the mountains in search of tribute and Turks to kill.

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