The Best American Travel Writing 2011

by Sloane Crosley

  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 massive 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 carcass. 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 passed. "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 massive forest, there are a people who still remember how to do the things their ancestors did and there are still shamans and nobody has ever heard of God. 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

  Téa 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 Tepeş 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 Assistant. 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 sexytime.

  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 classes 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 butterfly. These manifestations are not to be confused with vampires that were never human in the first place, which may even assume 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 assisted 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 quantity 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 Požarevac in 1718. Austrian accounts of the case, detailed in the newspaper Wienerisches Diarium, tell the story of Petar Blagojević, 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 Blagojević strangling them, and later died of what witnesses called a twenty-four-hour illness. Blagojević'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 Vuković, our driver, who moonlights as a fountain builder. In the back seat: Maša Kovačević—seventh-year medical student at the University of Belgrade; lifelong friend and token skeptic—who has requested that we wrap her in a bloody shawl and turn her loose in the village to inspire the locals if things start off too slowly.

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

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

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

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

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

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