The Best American Travel Writing 2011

by Sloane Crosley

  "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 invitation
s 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.

  Our tires, after braking on gravel for fifteen downhill kilometers, are beginning to smoke. We leave the car and follow the sound of the river that rises from the trees below us, down a slippery footpath through the undergrowth and into the field at the bottom of the valley. The chapel, a squat white hut with shuttered windows, sits at the field's edge, gray granite cliffs looming up behind it. On the other side of the river at the bottom of the slope, we find what we've been looking for.

  Sava Savanović's water mill is a low wooden building that stands amid thickets of kopriva (nettles) with its back to the river, door yawning wide. We wade through the river and then the nettles, the leaves clinging to our pants, fluorescent grasshoppers diving into our faces. The lintel and sides of the water mill are covered in graffiti, evidence of decades of visitors who have beaten us to the vampire's lair. I am discouraged by the defacements: in Serbia, popular haunts tend to double as garbage heaps, and the more rancid the trash, the more legitimate and desirable the hangout.

  But the interior of Sava's water mill is pristine. The river whispers along the walls, and picturesque cobwebs hang from the rafters, thick and shining in the light that filters through the cracks in the roof. The milling implements are laid out neatly by the rusted mill wheel, and in the corner sits a small, tidy mound of ashes and sticks. Goran notes that the sticks have been sharpened into points. Someone has been here, and recently.

  On the highway at the top of the mountain, after our car has suffered the drive back up the gravel track, we come across a burnt-brown old man wearing a traditional šajkača cap and woolen vest, sitting at the roadside, keeping an eye on the flock grazing across the road.

  We pull up to him: "Pardon. Do you know anything about the vampire?" He peers into the car and says: "You mean from the water mill?"

  "Yes," we say.

  "Have you been to the water mill?"

  "Yes."

  "That's my water mill!"

  The man's name is Vladimir Jagodić, and his family has for many generations owned the land on which the water mill sits. Standing by the highway, his hands behind his back, he assures us that there's nothing to the stories about Sava Savanović. "There was a great famine in those days," he says. "And this man—a very clever man—would go into the water mill at night and throttle the millers a little and then steal their flour. You see?" His smile is full of satisfaction. "But nobody died, nobody was killed here. I had a grandmother of ninety years who would tell me these stories—but she knew, too, that nobody was killed."

  He tells us that when he was a little boy his father would make him spend the night in the water mill to make him brave, and that in all the years he slept there, all the nights he walked home in the darkness, he has never once seen anything.

  Then he says: "This isn't even the right water mill. There was a much, much older water mill not too far from here, a stone water mill, where those attacks happened. But there's nothing left of that one, only a ruin. So when they come to take pictures, they photograph mine." When we ask him why, in that event, his father forced him to spend the night in the wrong water mill, he changes the subject and tells us that these fears did not exist during the days of Tito.

  There is, he insists, no vampire in Zaroǽje. For the potential victims of the vampire who does not exist, Zaroǽans have built a lonely little chapel in a field below a goat-horned granite peak, kept within running distance of a water mill barricaded by thorns in case the stakes inside it fail. Pay no mind, the locals tell us, to those stories about Sava Savanović. But we leave feeling that we just missed him.

  The scholar Paul Barber offers a straightforward, anthropological explanation of vampirism, attributing the etiology of the Balkan vampire to ignorance regarding disease and the decay of bodies. He draws parallels between vampirism and medieval myths surrounding contagion. He reasons that peasants, evaluating the body of a suspected vampire in the grave, misinterpreted the effects of different soils and climates on decomposition rates; misunderstood the normal deterioration of skin and nails as new growth. The shriek of the vampire following a staking is easily understood if you know that the human body, after weeks in the grave, lets out a moan if the gases that have been building in the lungs are suddenly forced out.

  This direct route from coffin to creature leaves out one element crucial to understanding the regional pervasion of vampirism: Balkan religion rests on tradition rather than belief, superstition rather than faith, and despite the propagation of Islam and two branches of Christianity, the influence of the occupying religions was never particularly deep; scratch the surface, and you find a reservoir of shared pagan influence, which all comes down to the same thing: faith in God, whether shrined by a cathedral, basilica, or mosque, takes a back seat to fear of the Devil. (My grandmother, a Bosnian Muslim, would rather protect me from him with an icon of Saint George than with nothing at all.)

  This is not the Devil as Antichrist or distant source of temptation or maître d' of a posthumous fire pit. The Balkan Devil is a walking pestilence, an organic household entity, and his hands are on everything that is dear or fragile; so we spit on newborns and call them ugly; we avoid staking a claim to good health or publicly discussing the pleasures we most look forward to in our lives; we shroud even our suffering, for fear he will enhance it. He sits at the shoulders of all our most certain plans, ready to upend them, a full-time Olympian troublemaker. The saints protect us from him, but only if we embrace a prescribed etiquette of daily rituals and protective tchotchkes, and then only maybe. "God willing," we say, but God is just a buffer.

  Indeed, God's absence from the mindset of Communist Yugoslavia seems to have been one of the key reasons why the reign of Josip Broz Tito, however corrupt and iron-fisted, has retained its widespread reputation as a golden age. It is no surprise, then, that when God made his trifurcating comeback following the dissolution of Tito's regime, the Devil—appearing, as always, in a hundred guises: some vampiric, some idolized, some despotic, and some more newsworthy than others—followed him back into the region's life, and remained there.

  The resurgent vampires secured a particularly firm bite on Serbian political theater. In 1987, a pivotal moment for the Socialist Party's increasingly destabilizing post-Tito government came in its unexpectedly fierce denunciation of the editors of Student magazine at Belgrade University, who had mocked the national observance of the Marshal's birthday as "The Vampire's Ball." During the war years that soon followed, one of the more histrionic talking heads on national television repeatedly promised viewers that vampires would arise from their graves to vanquish enemies of the state (lest the undead minions fail to d
iscriminate between friend and foe, the prognosticator went so far as to advise keeping on hand plenty of garlic). As for Slobodan Milošević—who had sat at the helm as Tito's age of gold fell apart; who died in 2006 while on trial in The Hague; and who is buried in the vampire-rich locale of Poǽarevac—in advance of the one-year anniversary of his death a media-savvy local artist, later claiming to have acted in an abundance of caution, hammered a four-foot blackthorn stake into his coffin.

  For a week after Zarožje, Maša makes a show of piling garlic onto everything I eat, and then packs me off to Croatia. Her bloodletting, brain-sampling duties at the University of Belgrade preclude her from joining me, but Veljko, a painter who lives in the Dalmatian fishing village of Zaostrog, agrees to act as guide, provided his name is changed in order to prevent any supernatural retribution for his involvement.* He is a lanky, loose-limbed man with a ponytail of gray hair who has cultivated the art of living simply, and who fills me in on an important local vukodlak while his little car clings to the tight curves of the coastal highway that will lead us to Potomje, the beast's lair. Two hundred years ago, he tells me, a sailor from Zaostrog, having left the mainland to seek seasonal work at the vineyards across the bay, arrived in Potomje to find the villagers there in a state of great distress. For several months, the village had been marauded by a sinister vukodlak, who would knock on people's doors at night and strangle those who answered. It is unclear why the villagers did not think to stop answering their doors after dark. At any rate, the village priest said to the sailor, "Your house is next, beware tonight." So the brave sailor resolved to stay up, hiding behind the door, and when the vukodlak came knocking, the sailor chased him through the vineyards and across the fields, where he disappeared into a blackberry thicket. The sailor hurled his knife after the ghoul, and the following morning returned with a priest and some villagers to burn down the brambles. The fire revealed a stone mound, which the sailor struck with his knife, in turn revealing a tomb inside of which the vukodlak was sitting. He looked up at his pursuers and said: "As I could not kill you, now you must kill me."