The Best American Travel Writing 2011 (28 page)

We strike out for Kisiljevo in the early morning. At the wheel: Goran Vuković, our driver, who moonlights as a fountain builder. In the back seat: Maša Kovačević—seventh-year medical student at the University of Belgrade; lifelong friend and token skeptic—who has requested that we wrap her in a bloody shawl and turn her loose in the village to inspire the locals if things start off too slowly.

We take dusty one-lane roads through wheat fields and sprawling vineyards yellowing in the sun. Beside the chicken-wire fences and staved-in roofs of derelict farms, the vacation homes of Belgrade families are slowly coming together, their yards littered with bricks, coils of wire, chunks of Doric columns, marble lions, upended flowerpots. We almost miss the Kisiljevo turnoff, indicated by an unspectacular arrow affixed to a lamppost; I am a bit surprised, having expected to find the village name chiseled into a roadside boulder by a quivering hand, or a beflowered shrine of the Virgin to turn back evil spirits, or perhaps a little blood smeared across a sign as a warning to us. Instead, the road tapers past bright white houses and window boxes of red carnations brimming with such welcoming Riviera charm that I find myself wishing the town would invest in a fog machine.

The village square is empty except for three shirtless old men sitting on a low wall in the shade; but here, at last, we catch a hint of something otherworldly: opposite the community center—where the death certificates of recently deceased villagers hang in the window—stands a blood-red house. We sit in the car staring at it, the silence around us—which has, until this moment, felt disappointingly like the silence of a lazy day in the hot countryside rather than the silence of a haunted village—tightening. The paint looks newly applied, thick and shining, and to the left of the door, above a shuttered window in shivers of black, hangs an enormous, spread-winged bat, its profile sharp and maniacal. I am raising my camera to document it when Maša explains, "That's the Bacardi bat. This must be the bar."

We obtain the cell phone number of Mirko Bogičić, the town's headman, from the convenience store on the corner, and Mirko, without being forewarned of our arrival, drives down to accommodate our quest, abandoning preparations for the summer fair in nearby Požarevac. He is a potbellied, strong-jawed man, and he takes us to his house, where his wife serves us homemade
zova
juice, made from elderberries, in flowered cups. The walls are adorned with pictures of spaniels—Mirko, in addition to being a village headman and full-time farmer, is employed as a dog-show consultant.

He is also working on a book about Petar Blagojević. In 1725, at the height of Kisiljevan hysteria, when the Austrian officials supervised the exhumation of Petar Blagojević's body, it was acknowledged by everyone present that it was entirely un-decomposed. His hair, beard, and nails had continued to grow, and a new layer of skin was emerging from beneath the old one. "Mind you, this was forty days after the burial," says Mirko. "And when they ran the stake through his heart, fresh blood rushed from his ears and nostrils."

Mirko has clearly rehearsed this story; but he does not laugh it off, and the authenticity of the vampire is a point about which he is adamant: Petar Blagojević is the genuine article, the first vampire to be officially certified by the Austrian government. "Here, just across the Danube, is Transylvania and the Romanian Dracula," Mirko says, gesturing toward the river. "But we know him to be merely a legend. They made of him a profitable business."

Kisiljevo has had less success with the salability of its ghoul, but this has not kept the town off the radar of true vampire aficionados. The previous year, two German students came to interview Mirko; that same summer, a paranormal researcher came to sweep the graveyard above town with a detector that led him to an "enhanced energy field" around one of the oldest headstones. In fact, Mirko gets so many visitors asking the same questions that he has the whole itinerary preplanned: he gives me a photocopied page from the legendary Serbian almanac of all things supernatural, which I have been unable to find in Belgrade, and takes us to see Deda Vlastimir, who is said to have encountered an actual vampire.

"Not Petar Blagojević," Mirko says, assuring us that once disposed of, a Kisiljevan vampire stays dead.

 

Vlastimir Djordjević—affectionately known as Deda Vlastimir—is a ninety-two-year-old Kisiljevan with whiskered cheeks and kind, sleepy eyes, who greets us delightedly in the garden. While we arrange ourselves around the patio table, his white-haired daughter fusses over us, bringing our day's second round of homemade
zova
juice. A great-great-grandson hovers in the kitchen doorway in his pajamas.

"Hear, now, how it was," Deda Vlastimir says, obliging us with high Balkan oratory. "In this village much was said about these vampires, and every once in a while there was something to be seen as well. It is three hundred years since that vampire, that Petar Blagojević —and thus he is practically a legend—three hundred years since they found him fresh in his grave and he caused much grief here. And some people believe, and some people do not believe—but there was another vampire, this Baba Ruǽa, whom I myself met one night. I had been visiting a friend and was returning home when suddenly before me appeared a woman, a tiny little woman, whose face I did not see. She appeared before me, and I said, 'Who is this?' and she turned to me and vanished."

I am disappointed that he does not say anything about pursuing Baba Ruǽa with a blackthorn stake, so I ask: "Did you believe?"

"Well, hear me," he says. "I was afraid. My friend's father had to take me home. And there is something in that belief, because three days later, in the house in front of which I saw her"—he taps the table with his knuckles as he says this—"there was a murder. A father killed his son-in-law. Three days later. And right away around the village it was said that these vampires were responsible."

"Evil forces," Mirko cuts in, "evil spirits. Things like that never happen on their own, we must accept that." Deda Vlastimir agrees. "These beliefs," he tells us, "are not written down—but this makes them stronger."

 

A few months before my expedition, I finally got around to watching Djordje Kadijević's legendary 1973 film,
Leptirica.
The film is based on a short story by the celebrated Serbian writer Milovan Glišić, and, due to the communal nature and rarity of film premieres in the former Yugoslavia, immediately became, upon its airing on national television, a cultural touchstone of my mother's generation. The film was something she used to tell me about when late-night conversations turned toward the horrific and the bizarre—which, in my family, happened on a weekly basis. In some regards,
Leptirica
(The She-Butterfly) is a love story. Its plot follows Strahinja, a young shepherd from Zaroǽje, who, in an effort to prove himself a worthy husband for the beautiful Radojka, volunteers to spend the night in the village water mill, where the vampire Sava Savanović has supposedly been strangling millers. Accustomed as I am to American vampire films—especially those that combine love stories with Gary Oldman dropping from the ceiling dressed as an oversized green bat or Hugh Jackman shooting Dracula's snake-jawed brides out of the air with an improbable crossbow—I scoffed at my mother's warning. How scary could it really be, this Serbian throwback to the campy Hollywood monster flicks of the 1950s?

As it turns out, the success of
Leptirica
—shot on a shoestring with a cast of ten actors who, combined, have a total of some ninety lines—hinges on the power of suggestion, palpable even from behind the sofa cushions, where I spent the majority of the film's runtime. Whether with the steady pulse of the mill wheel at night or the simple but unforgettably odious black hand in the flour,
Leptirica
paralyzes by holding forth the possibility of a glimpse, never completely revealing what the victims face. In what it does reveal, however, the film overcomes its budgetary and technological limitations by leaving absolutely no room for romantic notions of redemption: Radojka, corrupted by the butterfly carrying Sava Savanović's spirit, changes before the viewer's eyes from a delicate-featured ingénue into a gasping, razor-toothed creature with a hairy face, something much closer to a werewolf than a vampire. The result is both tragic and obscene; the viewer feels tainted simply by having witnessed her ghastly transformation.

Whereas such imagery evokes the southern European vampire's status as an ineradicable spiritual plague, capable of wiping out entire villages, the Western tradition has always, and especially recently, treated vampirism as a source of provocatively desirable sexual power and physical prowess, a force that, with the correct application of human affection, can be overcome. The model for this elegant revenant was perfected on the shores of Lake Geneva in 1816, during the Year Without a Summer, when persistent rain drove Lord Byron and his guests indoors, forcing them to amuse themselves by composing ghost stories: Byron wrote the apocalyptic "Darkness"; Mary Shelley,
Frankenstein;
and John Polidori, "The Vampyre"—which blazed the trail for Bram Stoker's more enduring
Dracula
(1897).

In their brutally single-minded pursuit of sustenance and lack of remorse for their own monstrous compulsions, both Polidori's Lord Ruthven and Stoker's Count Dracula are faithful to their origins. But whereas the original vampire desires seclusion and anonymity to pursue his bloodlust, recast as a figure of nobility he ventures into society—suggesting loneliness, a desire to rejoin the living, a touch of self-reflection. Add to this various other liberties, and 150 years later vampires are sleeping in canopy beds, refrigerating sheep's blood, and breeding armies of little vampirelings to infiltrate the world's most exclusive guest lists.

As for old-school Sava Savanović, there is no desire for redemption, nor evidence of his having been slain; at the end of the film, his butterfly-guised spirit flutters away, presumably to generate more black-clawed bloodsuckers elsewhere. Moreover, research into his origins suggests that his water mill still exists. If Petar Blagojević, whose fate at the hands of all those stake-wielding Austrians was well documented, continues to haunt contemporary Kisiljevans beyond the grave—indeed,
beyond
beyond the grave—then surely, I reason, the presence of an undefeated vampire must be that much more palpable in the community he once terrorized.

 

Zarožje, like Kisiljevo, is of no particular importance to cartographers. But to properly explain the degree of its godforsakenness, I must fall back on an old Serbian idiom—
vukojebina
, which translates roughly as "wolf's fuck," suggesting a location so isolated that its inhabitants, lacking even sheep for sexual companionship, turn to comforts lupine.

Two and a half hours out of Belgrade, the road to Zaroǽje climbs into bright green hills dotted with farmhouses, their pastures ending in steeply sloping pine forests that gird the bare mountaintops. Just past the sign for a thirteenth-century monastery, a fogbank rolls onto us suddenly, clinging to the windows, smothering the sun as we slow to a crawl. From the back seat, Maša's voice is increasingly enthusiastic. "
Extra
," she says, using an Englishism that's become Serbian slang for "awesome."
Ambiance
at last.

The absence of road signs makes us nervous, so we stop the next person we see, a rail-thin man who materializes out of the fog in the vanguard of a flock of sheep. I roll down the window and Goran shouts: "Pardon, good shepherd, but is this the way to Zaroǽje?"

The man leans on the car and swings his head inside. He is middle-aged, but his face is furrowed with the lines of outdoor labor, and he smells heavily of lanolin. His three remaining teeth are yellow. "Are you looking for that vampire?" he asks us. When we say nothing, he tells us those are stories, just stories, then points us forward into the mist. "That way."

Once we've left him behind, Maša offers that Sava Savanović may be the only reason anyone comes up here; the road has been empty for miles, and we are winding past houses where the dead are buried in front yards, their marble headstones wreathed in roses and fenced off with chicken wire. These houses seem deserted, but then we see a woman bent over a tub of laundry on a cottage porch. I roll down the window to ask for directions. "Pardon!" I call to her. "Is this the way to the water mill?" She looks up, then lifts the tub and moves indoors.

"Pardon!" we shout to one household after another, but everything about the locals' demeanor indicates that we will not be earning any invitations for
zova
, that we are on our own. Standing ankle-deep in the runoff from a sty teeming with massive pink hogs, we yell at a house whose TV we can hear through the screen door. "Pardon!" Maša and I shout in unison, but when a man comes out, belly bulging beneath a white undershirt, shuffling across the porch in oversized and uneven green socks, he only grumbles at us unintelligibly and turns his back.

At the next cluster of houses, the residents have recently slaughtered some goats. The skins are stretched out, drying on a line in the sun. Goran says, "Let's not ask these people," and guns the engine.

Then there appears from around the next bend a figure who looks like someone to whom you would surrender your last biscuit if you were a character in a Hans Christian Andersen tale: he has a feathered cap and a walking stick and a suspiciously cheerful air for a white-haired man crutching his way up a fifty-degree incline. "About seven more kilometers, and you'll reach the big church," he says. "Go past it, and then keep going until you get to the trail that leads to the river. You'll find a chapel, and then the water mill is two hundred meters away." At the church we find, side by side on the doorstep, a fifty-dinar bill and a severed squirrel's tail. Goran, who was born in a small village, can explain the money—if worshipers are moved by fear or despair while the church is closed, they sometimes leave offerings on the threshold. He has no theories about the tail.