The Best American Travel Writing 2011 (29 page)

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 discriminate 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."

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 Tito'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.

"Nobody 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, Zaroǽje, 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 Otrić-Seoci lives živko, 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 assures me, I will acquire the esoteric knowledge I seek.

We call on Živko 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 Živko 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, shaggy and slitpupiled, clustering 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.