The Inuit reached what is now northern Quebec more than two thousand years ago. In winter they dwelt in igloos along the coast, skewering seals and walruses at breathing holes in the ice with ivory-tipped harpoons. In summer they tracked caribou into the interior, ambushing them at river crossings or chasing the animals toward hidden archers. Whales were corralled in shallow bays with kayaks made from sealskin stretched over bone. Polar bears were immobilized by dogs and then knifed. Still, famine was common. Elderly that slowed the group were left behind to die. Clans that settled near Kangiqsujuaq fared better than most. The large tides created caverns under the frozen sea that could be reached at low tide by chipping through the ice above. In times of hunger, hunters scavenged these caves for mussels and algae. "There are numerous indications that starvation and famines accompanied by infanticide and even cannibalism were not rare," writes Bernard Saladin D"Anglure, a twentieth-century anthropologist who spent time in Kangiqsujuaq.
By the late 1800s the Hudson Bay Company had built several trading posts in Nunavik, and in 1910 Revillon Freres, a French fur company, opened one in Kangiqsujuaq. Inuit hunters stopped traveling with game and began searching for fox, which they traded at posts for nets, guns, and metal needles. Inuit began camping around stores rather than by hunting spots. They developed tastes for foods they had never eaten-flour, biscuits, mola.s.ses, tea, coffee. From the posts also came disease and dependence. "About 15 families camped in the settlement," reads the 1928 log from a Hudson Bay store operator in the Central Arctic; "they have no inclination to hunt or exert themselves but are content to sit around in a state of dest.i.tution."
By the 1960s, the North had become such a black eye that the Canadian government took steps to recuperate the region. Teachers, health care workers, and police were sent north. Homes and hospitals were built. Dogs were corralled by the police and shot. Some Inuit youth were shipped to southern schools against their will. The government"s aim was to quell poverty and spur development, which to them meant providing Inuit with Western educations and eliminating sick dogs. But to many Inuit, these actions appeared to be part of a much more sinister agenda, the annihilation of their culture.
In 1975, the Inuit and their native neighbors to the south, the Cree, protested the Quebec government"s seizure of their land for a ma.s.sive hydroelectric project and received a settlement of nearly a quarter of a billion dollars in what was called the James Bay and Northern Quebec Agreement. The Inuit"s share went toward the creation of the Makivik Corporation, a development agency charged with promoting economic growth and fostering Inuit-run businesses. Makivik is presently invested in construction, shipping, fishing, tanning, and air travel. They recently started a cruise ship company.
Kangiqsujuaq was trying to get itself on the adventure travel map. Much of the town"s funding comes from a nearby nickel mine. Recent tourist-oriented projects have included an elder home, a community pool, a new hotel with a $400 suite, and a visitor center for a remote provincial park that protects a 2-million-year-old meteor crater said to contain the purest water on earth.
When I entered the office of Lukasi Pilurtuut, who manages the Nunaturlik Landholding Corporation, which oversees development in Kangiqsujuaq, I found him alone at the end of a long table with his laptop, wearing a cap, jeans, and sneakers. Sunlight streamed through large windows, and the hilltops surrounding the town gleamed with freshly fallen summer snow. He was an ace student in high school but dropped out of a Montreal college after just three semesters, homesick. "It wasn"t the problem of going to school," he said, "it was more the problem that I couldn"t go hunting."
Dependence has made some people lazy, said Pilurtuut. The Canadian and Quebec governments subsidize housing and health care, and many Inuit also receive welfare checks. In 2007, high nickel prices helped the mine turn record profits, and each Inuit resident of Kangiqsujuaq received a check for $4,700. Some families got checks for $30,000. They bought ATVs, SUVs, dirt bikes, snowmobiles, motorized canoes, computers, and flat-screen TVs.
Tourism money will be different, Pilurtuut said. Rather than destroying tradition, it could bring it back. In fact, this was already happening. As we spoke the phone rang several times. "Yes!" he cried during one call, and then turned to me. "We have good news, four single kayaks coming in today." The Inuit invented the kayak, but no one in Nunavik remembered how to operate one. Kangiqsujuaq had to order kayaks from southern Quebec and hire an outside guide to train locals.
On a crisp summer evening, I raced into the strait to greet the bowhead hunters on a bright orange government speedboat. The sun sank through thin clouds and spilled across the horizon like paint. "This is so special for us," our navigator, a man named Tuumasi Pilurtuut, said to me, practically speechless with joy. "We"re back with our ancestors."
The hunters fired flares to mark their position. A tremendous cheer went up as we arrived, and strips of maktak were pa.s.sed aboard. "Better than beluga," Pilurtuut said between chews. Lines of turquoise fire billowed in the night sky-the northern lights, in their first appearance of the season.
The Nanuq, the boat to which the whale was secured, motored through the night and reached the cove near town where I had tailgated the week before shortly after dawn. The bowhead was moored to three orange buoys on the edge of the bay, where it bobbed, with a long knife called a tuuq stuck in its top, until early afternoon, when the tide lowered. Canoes ferried hungry onlookers to the site, and the slicing of maktak began. Naalak Nappaaluk, a revered elder and the only man alive who remembered stories about the bowhead hunts of yesteryear, sat on a rock with a pad of maktak nearby and tears in his eyes. Nappaaluk had a shot at a bowhead as a teen, but it escaped through a lead in the ice. "Today, I have seen people standing on the bowhead for the first time," he told me through a translator. "It"s overwhelming." A bulldozer that had been intended to flip the whale had trouble making it to the site, and the majority of the meat rotted. When I returned three days later, the stench was so potent that men were vomiting uncontrollably.
One tradition that had survived intact was the caribou hunt. Nearly a million caribou dwell in Nunavik, and when a herd nears towns, offices empty. By mid-August the chatter around Kangiqsujuaq was that the animals were close. One morning at the grocery store I ran into Tiivi, the man who had caught the char at the tailgate party. He invited me to go hunting with him the following day.
Tiivi killed his first caribou at age nine while looking for bird eggs with his five-year-old brother. Unable to cut the carca.s.s themselves, the boys rushed back to tell their mother. "She was so excited," Tiivi said, "she was like shouting of joy." In his teens he worked as a garbage man, and at twenty-one he took a job pulverizing rock at the nickel mine, earning a $2,500 paycheck twice a month.
Tiivi married a janitor from the mine and they moved in together, living in a town on the Hudson Strait called Salluit. The marriage was a nightmare. Fights were frequent; in one she bit him, leaving a knotty scar over his bicep. Another time she plunged a steak knife into his chest. He was medevaced to a hospital on the other side of Nunavik for a teta.n.u.s shot. "The next day I couldn"t lift my arm because all the muscles were cut," he said. One night, while she was asleep, he snuck out with just the clothes on his back. While visiting cousins in Puvirnituk, he met a second cousin named Elisapie. "A lot of different girls tried to be with me but I refused them all because I saw Elisapie and I wanted only her," said Tiivi. "She was so fine looking." They recently married.
I met Tiivi at his home just after 9 A.M. He wore muck boots, grease-stained pants, and a hunting cap. He carried a rifle for caribou and a shotgun for geese. We were joined by his aunt, Qialak, and his brother, Jimmy, who trailed us on a second ATV. On a ridge patterned with jackknifed rocks Tiivi signaled a shiny outcrop where carvers come for soapstone. c.u.mulus clouds splotched the sky and sunbursts lit mats of lichen red and orange. "There might be some gold particles," Tiivi said, as we crossed a stream. "Our land is full of minerals."
With mud splattering from the tires, we descended a spongy slope then looped around a lake where the week before Jimmy and Qialak had strung nets. Tiivi and Qialak reeled them in, half a dozen flapping Arctic char. "So fresh the heart is still beating," Tiivi said. Qialak sliced open the bellies of the females and wailed-two had eggs. I held a sandwich baggie open while she scooped in the long slimy packets.
We sat at the water"s edge and slurped the bright orange flesh from flaps of skin. The meat was sticky and chewy, like a fatty piece of steak. The fresh blood tasted sweet. We drank tea from a thermos and ate packaged biscuits. Tiivi smoked two cigarettes and then we left. A muddy track led above the lake to the next ridge. Arctic poppies bobbed in the breeze. Jimmy spotted snow geese.
"They"re going to land because of the wind," said Tiivi. We abandoned the ATVs and crouched low. Jimmy and I followed Tiivi along a sliver of wet land behind a low rock ridge. We crawled close on our bellies. When the geese took flight the men bolted upright and fired. Two birds fell. One goose lay sprawled in the tundra with wings still beating. Its handsome white coat was ruined by a single red smear. Tiivi pinned its chest with his arms. The long neck slowly lifted and the head c.o.c.ked sideways and gasped. "Now it"s dying because I"m holding the lungs," he said.
With a soft thud the head dropped. "Hurray!" Tiivi said and peeled a Clementine. He tossed the squiggled rind aside and gave me half. Qialak looked at me beaming. "You"re probably getting the experience of a lifetime."
On a ridge above a river, under a sunset the color of skinned knees, Qialak spotted a large buck. Tiivi slowly extended his arms above his head, bent his elbows out, and pointed his fingers skyward, imitating antlers. The buck stared at us intently then resumed foraging. A smaller buck beside him followed suit. We splashed across the river and sped, sheltered by the ridge, toward the buck. Its impressive rack was just visible above the hill"s crest in the grainy light.
"Stay low," Tiivi said. He crept up the ridge, rested on a rock, and fired several shots. The buck rushed forward frantically then halted. It seemed not to know where to step next. Tiivi fired again and it swayed. Its ma.s.sive head lowered to the ground, eyes still open. The body slumped. Labored, spastic breaths rose from the ground. The younger buck remained for a moment then darted.
Everyone produced knives; Tiivi held one in each hand. The buck lay on its side, its chest heaving. Tiivi approached from behind, and it kicked the air violently. He jabbed a knife into its neck, then jostled the blade back and forth. As darkness fell the three Inuit dismembered the carca.s.s. Everything was taken but the head and intestines. Tiivi tied his parts in a bundle-heart, hindquarters, filet, stomach, ribs. Recrossing the river we washed our hands and drank cold river water from our palms. "I"m all clean," Tiivi said.
During my last week in Kangiqsujuaq, I met with Father Dion, a Catholic priest originally from Belgium who had been in Nunavik for nearly five decades. He was a tiny, puckered man whose congregation was dwindling, but he was a bull. He laughed loudly, spoke with a thick French accent, and commanded respect from everyone in town, young and old, Inuit and non-. His church was a pint-sized building in the center of town, and he lived inside. When I knocked one drizzly day, he didn"t hear me. I entered. He was on the couch, in leather sandals with socks and a sky-blue sweater, watching CNN.
He shook my hand with a strong grip and heated a cup of tea in an old microwave, then served it to me with the last two of a package of biscuits. He handed me a pair of ivory binoculars wider than they were long and suggested I view the Hudson Strait, which he had a clear shot of. When he was nineteen, the Germans invaded Belgium. Father Dion was in the seminary and went to war. When it ended he was given the choice of working in a hospital in his home country or being sent as a missionary to the Congo. He chose Congo, a dreadful two years. "It was hot," he said. "A lot of animals, a lot of sickness." Afterward, he requested to be sent to the Arctic, where Belgium had some missionaries stationed. He arrived in Nunavik in 1964, and spent his first nine years in a community of three hundred called Quaqtaq. He survived a famine and a fall through the ice on a snowmobile. "I have a very strong esteem for these people and how they survived in such harsh conditions," he said. "I appreciate them very, very much."
Father Dion addressed some misconceptions. The dogs were shot because they were starving and had been eating Inuit babies. The schooling the government imposed on the Inuit helped create a generation of bright leaders. A change he wasn"t fond of concerned the church. Newer community members were now following the Pentecostal church, whose loud hectic services made some think the group was a revival of shamanism. Inuit once depended on shamans to bring good results in a hunt or lift them out of famine, but shamans could also bring death. "It was a kind of liberation when they disappeared," said Father Dion. Shamans were replaced by the Catholic Church.
I asked Father Dion if the Inuit would be better off as Nunavik modernized. He chewed his cheek and looked out the window at the gray town. The tide was going out, leaving black pools of water between the rocks. A septic truck pa.s.sed. "When I arrived, this land was empty," he said. "Nothing. No houses, nothing. People were living in tents in the summer and igloos in the winter. Now, they have enough to eat, warm houses, transportation, communication. They don"t fight for survival."
Just before I left, Tiivi began a job managing the new elder home. I stopped in to stay good-bye. A hefty woman in a pink nightgown was working on a puzzle of a snowy European forest. The place smelled of new furniture and cleaning agents. Tiivi led me into his office. The walls were bare, and he had taped a black trash bag over the window to keep the sun out. On his desk was a flat-screen computer; the screensaver was a shot of his son taken during the bowhead whale hunt. "So," said Tiivi, indicating his office items, "I have a good job."
Summer ended, and I returned to Kuujjuaq days before the first blizzard hit. In mid-September, I flew to Montreal and boarded a Greyhound bound for the border. My bus crossed into the U.S. at midnight and by dawn I was in New York City. The day was warm and breezy, the city still smelled of summer. I began an internship at Audubon magazine, but without enough money to get an apartment, I moved back in with my parents, in the suburbs. Unable to sleep in my teenage room, still lined with posters of conspiracy and aliens, I set up the tent in a wooded spot near where my childhood dog was buried.
I imagine that in a far-off land, harbored by the heartwood of a ma.s.sive forest, there are a people who still remember how to do the things their ancestors did and there are still shamans and n.o.body has ever heard of G.o.d. I don"t know how long that place will last or even if it deserves to, but surely it will soon enough be gone.
The leaves turned crisp yellows and oranges and fell to make large colored mats on the forest floor. Holes formed in the tent and spiders moved in. It got cold and I moved out. I had saved enough money from the internship for a cheap spot in Brooklyn.
Twilight of the Vampires.
Tea Obreht.
FROM Harper"s Magazine.
THREE DAYS BEFORE MY FLIGHT to Serbia, the Devil intervenes: my mother, who is supposed to meet me in Belgrade, falls into a chasm on a Moscow sidewalk and shatters her ankle. That she has gone through life without ever having broken a bone before makes her, according to her own mother, a casualty of my intentions. It is a bad sign. My grandmother, waiting for me in Belgrade, advises me to cancel my trip; her fears are reinforced the following morning by a phone call from one of my Serbian contacts-a journalist who was supposed to meet with me has gotten wind of my mother"s accident and pulled out of her agreement to help. "What now?" my grandmother asks, and fumes when she hears that I am determined to press on.
It may seem strange that I have returned to the Balkans to hunt for vampires when I get so many of them in my adoptive homeland. Since immigrating to the States in 1997, I have formed an uneasy acquaintance with the legion undead peopling the American imagination: Anne Rice"s beautiful, tortured ghouls; Buffy"s ridge-faced villains and morally confused male leads; countless cinematic and literary variations on Bram Stoker"s nightwalker, from Elizabeth Kostova"s historical reinterpretation of Vlad Tepe to Francis Ford Coppola"s shape-shifting, costume-changing warrior-beast. But the power of the newest trend is incredible: vampires of all shapes, sizes, convictions, and denominations are swelling the national bestiary. My undergraduate students at Cornell deny reading Stephenie Meyer, but whenever I ask them to compose lists of their favorite books, it seems like fully half include Darren Shan"s The Vampire"s a.s.sistant. My office window looks over the Commons and into the living room of a young woman from whose walls Twilight"s Robert Pattinson leers up, his smile signaling with indecently little ambiguity that it is s.e.xytime.
Two days later, when I call to tell my grandmother I"ve missed my connecting flight in Paris, she answers the news with silence. This latest cosmic setback has turned her worst fears-heretofore an unpleasant possibility-into something inevitable. When I finally arrive in Belgrade, I discover that she has placed an open pair of scissors under my bed, blades turned doorward, to keep the Devil at bay.
Despite my immigrant"s success in acclimating to many things American-I too now buy fruit based on its appearance-I have never been able to reconcile myself to the domestic breed of vampire. Where is the figure of terror, the taloned monster, the walking corpse, the possessed animal? How are they vampires at all when they are so busy righting humanity"s wrongs and bewailing their ethical conundrums instead of mischieving and murdering like my grandmother seems to think they should?
Unlike his Western relation-that handsome, aristocratic, mirror-wary antihero-the Balkan vampire is typically confined to living and hunting among the laboring cla.s.ses and is most accurately categorized as an evil spirit or demonically possessed corpse that frequents graveyards, crossroads, and other areas devoid of the protective powers of domestic spirits. Also a Western conceit is the vampire"s pallor; whereas female vampires are beautiful and white-robed, most firsthand accounts indicate that male vampires are ruddy, corpulent peasants, whose affect-once unearthed-is that of a freshly gorged mosquito. In animal form, the vampire is not strictly limited to the bat but can appear to its victims as a cat, a dog, a rodent, or even a b.u.t.terfly. These manifestations are not to be confused with vampires that were never human in the first place, which may even a.s.sume a vegetal guise (among numerous indignities through history, the Roma suffered the obscure nuisance of vampire watermelons). To further complicate matters, and despite recent trends that have marketed the werewolf as his archenemy, the Balkan vampire is often conflated with his lycanthropic cousin, since both share more or less the same agenda; in Croatia, both vampires and werewolves are known by the term vukodlak.
Vampir is probably the only Serbian word used the whole world over, and its significance in the lexicon of former Yugoslavian nations is evidenced by its derivatives, among them vampirisati: to engage in vampire-like behavior, an accusation directed at drunk husbands returning home at dawn, teenagers hovering over drug deals in doorways, or anyone caught stealing leftover cake from the fridge at 2 A.M. This is not to be confused with the more specialized povampirisati se: to turn oneself into or become a vampire, a process that is unnervingly easy, and that does not require a sanguinary exchange with another vampire. If a man"s life ends abruptly, unexpectedly-if he is murdered or accidentally killed, if he commits suicide, if he falls victim to a sudden illness, if his last rites or burial are improperly conducted-he becomes more susceptible to the influences of demons that can possess and reanimate him. That is not to say that evil spirits in southern Europe have nothing better to do than float disembodied through fields, waiting for a cat to jump over a newly buried corpse so that they can dart into it. Whether a spirit will revisit the living is above all influenced by the dead man"s own character and by how he was regarded in society: if a man is known to be a sinner, an alcoholic, unneighborly in any way; if his life is marked by conflict or degeneracy, then he is, in those villages where public perception and gossip are as good as truth, predisposed to vampirism.
Once risen, the vampire makes his way to the nearest village-this is sometimes his hometown, or the place of his death, and almost always a community sufficiently isolated so as to demand the combined effort of all residents in order to stake him. His mission is to visit sundry misfortunes upon the locals. This rarely involves the consumption of blood; he prefers to enter villagers" homes and asphyxiate them by sitting on their chests while they sleep. A less malevolent spirit will indulge in simple mischief-flinging dinnerware, inducing uncharacteristic behavior in domestic animals.
Whereas garlic, holy water, and crucifixes are commonly accepted apotropaics across the Balkans, scissors under the bed are also popular, as is the black-handled knife buried in the doorstep to cleave incoming evil in half. None of these methods cause the vampire"s flesh to burst into flame; nor is there any indication that direct sunlight poses a lethal threat to vampires, although vampires do tend to be nocturnal and recoil from the crowing of roosters. Methods for destroying vampires are many-some, such as the boiling and disposal of vampire vegetables, are fairly simple, while others necessitate complex, clerically a.s.sisted rituals-but the most reliable weapon against vampires has always been glogov kolac, the blackthorn stake. The vigilant vampire hunter must find the vampire"s grave, open it, and, having determined that the body shows the appropriate signs-the absence of rank odor and rigor mortis, a vibrant flush to the cheeks, the growth of "new" hair or fingernails, a quant.i.ty of fresh blood welling in the mouth-plunge the blackthorn stake through the heart, at which point the corpse lets out a blood-curdling shriek. Afterward, depending on the region, the head or limbs may be severed, the body turned over, the mouth filled with garlic. In some instances, the entire corpse is burned and the ashes scattered in the nearest body of water to carry whatever may be left of the spirit on its way.
The village of Kisiljevo lies some seventy-five kilometers east of Belgrade, where the Danube borders western Romania. Its name did not appear on any map of Serbia I had been able to find, nor does it hold an impressive position in the country"s political or religious history; but three hundred years ago, its fields and streets were the stage for a vampire drama of unprecedented international significance. The attacks at Kisiljevo probably would not have warranted a mention had the village and its troubles not fallen under the watchful, disbelieving eye of Austria following the Peace of Poarevac in 1718. Austrian accounts of the case, detailed in the newspaper Wienerisches Diarium, tell the story of Petar Blagojevi, a peasant who began appearing to Kisiljevans in their sleep ten weeks after his death in the summer of 1725. Those he visited-a total of nine villagers in seven days-reported that they awoke to find Blagojevi strangling them, and later died of what witnesses called a twenty-four-hour illness. Blagojevi"s widow, who fled Kisiljevo in the aftermath of these tragedies, claimed to have encountered her dead husband in their home, where he demanded his shoes. In an attempt to regulate mounting hysteria in the region, Austrian authorities intervened, sending a delegation of priests to investigate.
We strike out for Kisiljevo in the early morning. At the wheel: Goran Vukovi, our driver, who moonlights as a fountain builder. In the back seat: Maa Kovaevi-seventh-year medical student at the University of Belgrade; lifelong friend and token skeptic-who has requested that we wrap her in a b.l.o.o.d.y 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 br.i.m.m.i.n.g 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 doc.u.ment it when Maa explains, "That"s the Bacardi bat. This must be the bar."
We obtain the cell phone number of Mirko Bogii, 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 Poarevac. 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 Blagojevi. In 1725, at the height of Kisiljevan hysteria, when the Austrian officials supervised the exhumation of Petar Blagojevi"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 rehea.r.s.ed this story; but he does not laugh it off, and the authenticity of the vampire is a point about which he is adamant: Petar Blagojevi 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 Blagojevi," Mirko says, a.s.suring us that once disposed of, a Kisiljevan vampire stays dead.
Vlastimir Djordjevi-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 Blagojevi -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 Rua, 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 Rua 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 Kadijevi"s legendary 1973 film, Leptirica. The film is based on a short story by the celebrated Serbian writer Milovan Glii, 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-b.u.t.terfly) is a love story. Its plot follows Strahinja, a young shepherd from Zaroje, 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 Savanovi 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 b.u.t.terfly carrying Sava Savanovi"s spirit, changes before the viewer"s eyes from a delicate-featured ingenue 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 s.e.xual 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 sh.o.r.es 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 Sh.e.l.ley, 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 bloodl.u.s.t, recast as a figure of n.o.bility 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 Savanovi, there is no desire for redemption, nor evidence of his having been slain; at the end of the film, his b.u.t.terfly-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 Blagojevi, whose fate at the hands of all those stake-wielding Austrians was well doc.u.mented, 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.
Zaroje, like Kisiljevo, is of no particular importance to cartographers. But to properly explain the degree of its G.o.dforsakenness, I must fall back on an old Serbian idiom- vukojebina, which translates roughly as "wolf"s f.u.c.k," suggesting a location so isolated that its inhabitants, lacking even sheep for s.e.xual companionship, turn to comforts lupine.
Two and a half hours out of Belgrade, the road to Zaroje 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, Maa"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 Zaroje?"
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, Maa offers that Sava Savanovi 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 ma.s.sive pink hogs, we yell at a house whose TV we can hear through the screen door. "Pardon!" Maa 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 cl.u.s.ter 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 Savanovi"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 gra.s.shoppers 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 ajkaa 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 JaG.o.di, 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 a.s.sures us that there"s nothing to the stories about Sava Savanovi. "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 n.o.body died, n.o.body was killed here. I had a grandmother of ninety years who would tell me these stories-but she knew, too, that n.o.body 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 t.i.to.
There is, he insists, no vampire in Zaroje. For the potential victims of the vampire who does not exist, Zaroans 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 Savanovi. 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, superst.i.tion 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 G.o.d, 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 maitre d" of a posthumous fire pit. The Balkan Devil is a walking pestilence, an organic household ent.i.ty, 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. "G.o.d willing," we say, but G.o.d is just a buffer.
Indeed, G.o.d"s absence from the mindset of Communist Yugoslavia seems to have been one of the key reasons why the reign of Josip Broz t.i.to, however corrupt and iron-fisted, has retained its widespread reputation as a golden age. It is no surprise, then, that when G.o.d made his trifurcating comeback following the dissolution of t.i.to"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-t.i.to 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 discriminate between friend and foe, the prognosticator went so far as to advise keeping on hand plenty of garlic). As for Slobodan Miloevi-who had sat at the helm as t.i.to"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 Poarevac-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 Zaroje, Maa 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."
No two ways about how this story ends; however, before they killed the vukodlak, the villagers asked him whether he had accomplices. Unlike his Serbian counterparts, this Croatian vampire was not a solitary mischief-maker; nor was he particularly loyal to his fellow ghouls, because he divulged their hideouts without even leveraging the information to bargain for his un-life. The first of the two remaining vukodlaks is said to have been staked under a nonspecific oak tree on the island of Mljet; the other, also long forgotten, was dispatched in a potato field outside the fishing village of Trpanj.
Potomje"s current village priest, whom we accost outside the church, knows nothing about the vukodlak. The oldest man in town-whom we ambush as he is walking home from church with an armful of decapitated flowers-will not give us his name, and also claims to know nothing of the vukodlak; but he, too, declares that nothing would have come of our line of questioning in t.i.to"s day. And Barba Niko, at ninety-five an also-ran for oldest man, also professes ignorance of the village"s vampire son; but, he says as his wife and daughter usher us in for lunch, he does know something, something that suggests the vampire"s legend has survived only by undergoing an unusual transformation.
"For many years in this village," he tells us, "it"s been said that there is a curse. Carry anything into or out of the stable between Christmas and New Year"s, and vermin will come from the vineyards to pluck the eyes from your livestock." It happened to the two spinster sisters living across the road from him forty years ago, and it happened to Barba Niko himself. A neighbor once brought his family a gift of wheat, which they foolhardily stored in the stable on a day between Christmas and New Year"s. "We had a beautiful lamb back then," he says, "just one, a lovely thing. The next morning, my mother called me into the stable to see it fallen dead, with both eyes plucked out.
"n.o.body breaks the curse," he says.
The villagers all swear that the creature who gnaws on their livestock and keeps them out of their storehouses in early winter is unaffiliated with anything as laughable as a vukodlak, but this does not explain why the rodent with uncanny timing arises from the very fields in which the vukodlak met his end, or why many blackberry patches outside Potomje bear signs of recent scorchings. The fields are rife, too, with Iron Age Illyrian burial mounds, shining piles of white rock that dot the hills all the way to the mainland. These tombs are sacred, and even the Dalmatian people-in whose homes, gardens, and church foundations you will find enough Greek and Roman sarcophagary to rival the storerooms of the Vatican-will not touch the ancient graves.
Veljko"s father is Barba Nenad, a fisherman who, in addition to having lived on the Adriatic for more than five decades, also raises livestock and makes his own rakija and wine, the strongest in town. Over lunch late that afternoon he is amused, but not surprised, by my near misses in Kisiljevo, Zaroje, and Potomje, and is unconvinced that the rest of my journey will result in the desired encounter. He tells me about the evening he heard the guitar in his room play itself in the dead of night, how he sat up three times and three times it stopped, only to start up again once he"d turned off the light.
"Who knows what it would have meant to me if I hadn"t sat up and had a look at that guitar," he says. "Would you believe it? There was a mouse inside."
In the tiny Croatian village of Otri-Seoci lives ivko, a respected headman renowned for his fluency in regional lore. His threshold is the last stop on our vampire itinerary, his well of tales the final reservoir from which, Veljko a.s.sures me, I will acquire the esoteric knowledge I seek.
We call on ivko in the early evening, but he is not at home. His house sits at the far end of the village, in the shade of an ancient walnut tree, looking out over olive groves and vineyards. The spot is so close to the Bosnian border that my mobile telephone lights up every five minutes to alert me that my carrier and rates have changed, as some distant cell tower struggles to make the distinction between Croatia and its eastern neighbor. The two women sitting on the veranda in black dresses and slippers tell us that ivko has asked us to wait for him. As we linger through sundown, the goats come back from pasture-first we hear their bells tinkling on the hill above the house, and then they appear, s.h.a.ggy and slitpupiled, cl.u.s.tering together on the trail. The herd dog on their heels, a sleek black mongrel whose paralyzing stare means business, considers me from a distance as he drives the goats down the slope and into the stables below. He calls the stragglers, and when an uncooperative, blaze-faced buck shows defiance by making a determined charge at me, the dog intercepts it, urging it through the gate.
One of the women, who has seen my awkward dive out of the path of the oncoming goat, laughs knowingly. "No goats in the Nativity," she says.