The man spat on the ground. He pointed down the road, then walked two fingers across his left palm. I nodded, thanked him and started walking. The dogs jumped against the fence as I passed, another cacophony of barks and growls.
The road was straight for about a mile and then curved around the hill. By the time I reached the curve, I regretted wearing my jeans; the denim felt like thermal long johns in the summer heat. I walked faster, anxious to get to the town, a building, water, someplace out of the sun. I berated myself for not being prepared for the hike, not researching more thoroughly how to get to the village from the station. But Maria had promised we’d go together, she’d be my guide, that she’d been there “of course, many times before.” I wondered exactly how many times she’d trekked along a rural Slovakian road for miles in thirty-degree heat.
I pushed on, bombarded by grasshoppers each time I stepped on the thick tufts of grass that rimmed the edge of the ditch. Most of the hoppers pinged off my jeans, but some leapt higher, the barbs of their legs and beady heads rough against my bare arms, my face. I was ready to cry from the heat, from the frustration, when I finally reached the end of the curve and saw there was only another mile at the most before the road turned to asphalt. The road passed through a graveyard, then into a town ahead. I hoped it was Čachtice.
I slowed down when I reached the graveyard. The hardtop road split the field of graves in two. Rows of graves nearest the road were simple slabs of stone, weathered black, a lace of moss inhabiting the cracks. About a third of the stones had bright flowers on them, or white candles, unlit, encased in clear glass globes. A raven landed on one of the slabs and cawed repeatedly.
I was almost through the graves and at the edge of town when a loud, tinny voice came from a speaker that was strapped to the top of a telephone pole in the ditch. The voice spoke urgently, almost a yell, in Slovak. It was repeating the same phrase over and over. I looked around for any security cameras, any watchmen. Was the voice talking to me? My throat was dry and I gripped my purse strap, my hand soaked with sweat. I walked back a ways, looked, turned, looked. Thought about going back to the station. Then the voice stopped and the speaker started broadcasting accordion polka music. I was disoriented, and had to take a minute to calm down and get my bearings among the graves.
I was nearer to the town than the station, so I continued through the graveyard, under a stone archway and into the village proper while the music kept blaring through the speakers. A large white delivery truck sped towards me and kicked up stones. I scurried up the steps of the building beside me, a church, to escape the spray of pebbles. The church cast a shadow, so I sat on the shaded steps, wiped the sweat from my face with the bottom of my T-shirt and spied on the truck. The polka music played on.
The truck parked in the town square. People emerged from all directions and congregated at the back of the vehicle, then the rear door slid up. Each person carried a cotton or burlap sack; the man at the back of the truck was taking people’s money and handing them vegetables. The polka music stopped for a minute, another broadcast in Slovak rang out, then more music. Danica, you are ridiculous, I told myself, scared by a produce truck and a polka recording.
As I headed to the square, I passed people who were carrying sacks of vegetables; they stepped far out of my path, whispered to their friends. I was as conspicuous as if I’d been walking through town in a gold lamé prom dress. I averted my eyes when I passed by them, felt like I was intruding.
The town museum was just off the square. I climbed the crumbling concrete stairs to the entrance and pulled on the hot, wrought-iron handles of the wooden double doors. Locked. A small paper note was taped to the pale stone wall beside the door. A few words in Slovak, and a time: 13:00. It was 12:30.
I went back down the stairs to the street and stood in the mottled shade of a poplar tree, trying to decide what to do. I fished my compact out of my purse and popped it open. My hair was sticky and wet along the hairline, and my cheeks were bright pink. I tried to dab some powder on my nose, but my face kept perspiring, turning the powder into a wet beige film. My thin T-shirt was damp and stuck to me like papier mâché. I gave up on the compact and decided to look for a place to get a soda.
I found a pub in the square, just a few yards down from the museum. Over the entrance gate was a wooden cut-out of a woman’s head, with what was supposed to be, I guessed, Báthory’s picture painted on it. Below the head, a sign read
Alžbeta B
á
thory.
Her name in Slovak. Dense vines, green with small white flowers, twined around the tall gate. The place was tacky, but lush. Cooler than standing under the half shade of a tree. I pushed the gate door open a little; several plastic tables and chairs were set up on a cobblestone courtyard.
“Danica!” Maria stood up from a table. “You did come by yourself!” She hurried over to the gate and led me inside. “I called this morning, Dani, but there was no answer in your hotel room. You are not upset, are you?” She motioned towards the chair across from hers.
“What happened?” I said. I didn’t sit down.
“Oh, it was one of those things. You know. I got up this morning and Dedrick was in the lobby. He is an old friend of my ex-husband, he offered me his car for the day. I thought it would be so much nicer for us to drive here than take the train. Air conditioning, you know. But by the time I called, you were gone.”
The waiter came over, and Maria said a few words to him in Slovak. “I just ordered you a Topvar. You cannot drink anything else in this heat.” The table she had chosen was dead centre in the yard, no umbrella, no shade from the vine-covered gate. She took off her broad-brimmed sunhat and fanned me with it. “Sit, sit, Dani. Your face, it is so red. Rest.” The midday light made Maria’s hair look almost maroon.
“You made it sound so easy to get here by train,” I said. I sat down. She had tried to call, after all. “I was a bit worried when I saw that the station here was boarded up. And there was no town in sight.”
“Oh, that. I suppose it slipped my mind.” The waiter came back and set a very large bottle of beer in front of me. I attempted to thank him in Slovak. He smiled and gave me a nod.
“See,” Maria continued, “there are villagers only out here, no one who would hurt you. I knew you would find the town. I thought it might even be a bit of fun for you, an adventure, no?” She took off her dark sunglasses and arched her eyebrows. “And the weather, it is lovely. No rain to spoil a walk, yes?”
I drank a few sips from the cold Topvar. I could feel the flush fading from my cheeks. “I see the museum opens in half an hour,” I said.
“Yes, we will start there.”
“And the castle?”
“Dani, of course.” She smiled.
I smiled back. It was impossible not to forgive her.
After the beer, we headed to the museum. An Austrian tour group was ahead of us, and they had just started to filter out of the foyer into a large hall through a pair of arched wooden doors. As the crowd left, I noticed a display of several large photos, bride-and-groom couples standing in front of an old castle tower or a crumbling arch, wild bluebells and poppies springing up from the dusty grounds of the ruins. One of the larger photos was displayed on an easel, and there was a stack of business cards on the right-hand side of the easel’s ledge. “Maria,” I said, “are those wedding photos taken at this castle—Báthory’s castle?”
She swivelled around me, hand on my shoulder. “Ah, those photos. Yes. This display is larger than the last time I came. Everyone wants the fairy-tale background.”
“But why would they want their wedding pictures taken in a place where so many awful things happened?”
“That part, they do not have to mention,” said Maria. “Look at them. If you did not know, all you would see are wedding photos, brides and grooms in front of an old castle. They want a pretty picture, and they do not worry about the past.”
The first room of the museum smelled like mouldy boxes of newspaper. Immediately, I noticed Báthory’s portrait, hung prominently on one of the faded robin’s egg blue walls. I had seen reprints of it in books, but it was larger, more vibrantly coloured than I had pictured it. She was ornately dressed, with a very pale face. Her eyebrows were thin and highly arched over round, heavy-lidded eyes. She wore a stiff, almost platter-like white collar, which sloped high around the back of her head and extended into a straight edge over her breast. A thick rope of pearls encircled her neck, looped over her collar and down the centre of the turquoise corseted bodice of her dress. Her thin white arms were visible through the light gossamer sleeves, which were gathered tight at the wrists with a band of turquoise velvet studded with rubies. Her right hand rested delicately on a pillow-lined window ledge. But her left hand firmly clasped a red-and-white zigzagged shield. Her fingers curled over the front as if they were atrophied around the metal.
“Her portrait,” I said. The paint looked vibrant, as if it had been done relatively recently, but the portrait style was of a much earlier era.
“Ah, yes.” Maria stood straighter and stepped towards the painting. “But that is not original, of course. That is by a contemporary artist in Bratislava, a copy. The original portrait, it was stolen from this museum years ago.”
“Who took it?” I asked.
“That is still a mystery. Perhaps someone local, some teenagers looking for mischief.”
Apart from the portrait, the room contained an antique chair, a few pastoral paintings that resembled the surrounding landscape, and a glass display cabinet that housed a hollow vessel made from a lizard leg, with a wooden top placed askew across the opening.
“Are all of these things relics of the countess?”
“Well,” said Maria, “they are meant to be. At least, the way they are arranged here suggests this is true. But I do not believe they have the documentation to prove it is so.”
“Where are these things from, then?”
“Oh, they are quite possibly from the castle, or from Erszébet’s manor house, which used to stand in town. But other nobles, other generations, used those grounds also. Come,” she said, putting her arm around my shoulder, “the rest of the museum is more professional, more documentation. In another room, they have letters signed by Báthory.”
Maria hurried me through two more rooms. As we went farther into the museum, the rooms became smaller, the air mustier.
“Wait,” I said to Maria, trying not to give in to her constant tugging on my arm, “I want to look at these rooms, too.”
“Dani, these things are of no consequence,” she responded, pausing for just a moment. “These things may be from the castle, but I have been here before, I have talked to the curator, if you can call her that—they are all just knick-knacks. Some villagers found them in an old trunk and sold them here, it is likely. Dani, trust me.” She stepped to face me squarely. “I will show you the real things.”
I followed her into the last; room in the museum. “Now, this is authentic,” said Maria pointing to a block of stone. “They have it documented here, definitely from the ruins of Čachtice castle. And over here,” she gestures to a black-and-white framed print of a tall man with dark hair and a heavy beard, wearing a long black tunic. “Her husband, Ferenc. He was a very successful warrior—they called him Hungary’s Black Knight. Fought the Turks incessantly. Still, he took Elizabeth’s last name when they married, because her family was more illustrious.”
“I remember reading about that. I was surprised she kept her name.”
“Yes, yes, and her children, too; it was very common. Pass down the most powerful name,” said Maria, leading me along the wall. “And here, a letter from him to Elizabeth.”
It was written on a thick parchment paper. “It looks well-preserved,” I said. The paper was still almost white, and the only visible mark was a thick crease down the centre that the frame did not quite flatten out. I moved closer and tried to decipher the writing in the low light.
Maria laughed. “I am sure you will not get anywhere, squinting away at it like that. It is in Hungarian. It says nothing very interesting. He is away with the soldiers, he asks after what has been happening at the estate in Sárvár.”
Another framed print, a reproduction of a painting, hung beside Ferenc’s picture. It was a torture scene: winter, in a castle courtyard. At one end, Báthory was seated in a throne, dressed in layers of thick robes, and again wore a stiff white collar around her neck. In front of her, several women writhed, naked, in the snow. A crew of black-robed, white-hooded men were grabbing another naked girl, who dug her heels into the snow and resisted their attempts to throw her down. Several figures, all dressed in dark clothing, watched from the side of the courtyard, and an old, kerchiefed woman threw a wash-bucket of water over the supine bodies.
“This,” said Maria, “is important. It is by a Hungarian artist, nineteenth-century, István Csók.” She pointed to the signature in the corner. “It is a portrayal of the ice-torture I told you of. In winter, she had the girls stripped bare. They poured water over them until they froze, like statues.”
One of the women lying on the snow looked lifeless; another’s eyes were rolled back and she was straining her head upwards, gasping; another was sitting on her haunches, looking upward as well, seeking some salvation that presumably never came. The countess reclined leisurely, with a contented half smile.
“Now,” said Maria, briskly, “we go to the castle.”
Maria led me to the edge of the village and took me down a narrow paved road that led into thick deciduous forest. The canopy of leaves shaded the asphalt and cut the heat. After a couple of miles, the pavement stopped and the path turned into a steeper, ragged dirt trail that meandered among a more open area of brush and tall grasses. Dust and grass stains dirtied my sneakers.
“Are you sure this is the right road?” I asked.
“Just a little farther now,” said Maria.
The sun was still relentless, the mid-afternoon air heavy with the smell of tilled earth and sage. “Maria,” I said, “why did you start researching Báthory?”