by James Lyon
We shall also award each man a generous monetary gift sufficient to establish himself in his new life. Upon the reading of this proclamation, the Fourth Imperial Grenadier Company shall be disbanded. You are free men. So declare We this 8th day of December in the year of our Lord 1732. Signed, Charles.’
The Captain looked at his men. The Grenadiers stood in stunned silence, steam issuing from their mouths in the cold evening air. ‘Your loyalty, devotion and service to God and the Emperor have been richly rewarded. As of this moment I am no longer your Captain, only your former comrade in arms. I would like to spend this last night with you as my comrades and treat you to a night on the town. We shall meet at the Sign of the Elephant, where I have asked Herr Siegel to prepare a farewell feast for us,’ he grinned. ‘There we shall drink to His Majesty’s health, and to our comradeship, and to your future lives in the North American colonies. Three cheers for His Imperial Majesty, Emperor Charles.’
CHAPTER THREE
IT’S ONLY FOLKLORE
Belgrade: Winter 1992
The Popovic apartment lay just up the road from Slavija Square, across the street from the concrete massif that was rapidly taking shape as a cathedral to Serbia’s patron, St. Sava. A labyrinth of musty rooms, the apartment’s high ceilings, elegant chandeliers, cut glass salon doors and parquet wood floors were relics of a bygone era, before a tidal wave of proletarian values had drowned bourgeois sensibilities. Now, three generations of family called it home. Steven’s bedroom was a large converted pantry off the kitchen, and he shared a bathroom with Dusan.
‘If anyone asks for me,’ Dusan had told Steven the first night at the train station, ‘tell them I’ve left the country. I don’t want to get sent to the front to fight.’
The family had taken Steven in as a favor to Professor Slatina – who knew Dusan’s father. His grandfather had placed a color portrait of Slobodan Milosevic on the wall of the living room, and Dusan told Steven it had replaced an earlier portrait of Tito. ‘They’re communists,’ he said, shrugging his shoulders.
Each evening Steven and the grandparents dutifully watched RTS, the state television evening news broadcast, which inevitably led with reports of Milosevic’s activities or the latest atrocities committed by Croats – the announcer always used the pejorative term Ustase – against Serbs. RTS told how victorious Serb forces were defending and liberating ancient Serbian lands from fascist aggressors, and how the Muslims in Bosnia were threatening to secede from Yugoslavia, create an Islamic fundamentalist state and drive the Serbs from their centuries’ old homes. And whenever the story was about shortages of heating fuel, food, electricity, gasoline or food, the announcer always began with the mantra: “because of the unprovoked and unjust sanctions against the Serbian people and state...” It was brainwashing at its best, and Steven marveled at its effectiveness. The television mesmerized Dusan’s grandparents as they helplessly watched the collapse of their world.
The winter was cold, and the government kept the central district heating at very low temperatures, claiming that sanctions were causing a shortage of heating fuel. Some days Steven could see his breath inside the apartment, and he constantly wore long underwear and woolen sweaters.
The archives, libraries and research institutes were closed until after Serbian Orthodox New Year on 13 January, so he read ethnography books, puzzled over his meetings with Professor Nagy, the Order of the Dragon, and wondered why Professor Slatina had wanted Steven to learn of it in such detail. He also spent considerable time walking around the icy sidewalks, getting acquainted with the city.
His impression of Belgrade was one of dirty decay. He choked on the coal smoke, leaded automobile exhaust, cigarettes and diesel fumes, yet admired the awkward mix of graceful neglected old buildings and concrete communist kitsch. Street-corner black market currency dealers buzzed about like swarming bees as they chanted endlessly the Serbian word for hard currency, ‘devize, devize, devize.’ He was almost run over several times by new black Audis, BMWs and Mercedes with tinted windows, whose drivers braked for no one and rarely observed traffic lights, while the police stood by. And no one smiled.
One night before bed he re-read the letter Katarina had given him at the airport. The envelope contained a single sheet of paper and her photograph. It was simple and written in Serbo-Croatian.
Dear Steven,
As you set out on your journey I wish you luck and good fortune. I will also pray to the Lord to protect you every day. Please keep yourself safe. This is a strange time when men are doing horrible things. The fabric of society and the hearts of men are failing and evil is everywhere. Please guard yourself against this evil.
I know that you are a good person, that you like truth and light. Please remember what you know is right and do not turn from it. You do not yet know it but you have a great task ahead of you. The work you do will be valuable and necessary and will help many people. Please use wisdom and good judgment in all you do and protect yourself from the adversary. And never fear to pray for help.
Thank you for listening to me when I was having a hard time. You are a good friend.
Kisses,
Katarina
P.S. Don’t forget the pine cone.
‘What does she mean, a “great task”? Does she know something I don’t?’ he asked as he thought back to Slatina’s impromptu lecture on knowledge of good and evil and the serpent.
‘Do I love her?’ he wondered, looking at her picture on his nightstand. ‘Does she like me? Am I ready for this again?’ he asked, as he opened his journal and removed a smudged, white silky card. He ran his finger-tips over the richly embossed floral edges. As he opened it his eyes caught the words inside, words he knew by heart.
Harold and Margene Woodruff-Kimball
Are Pleased to Announce
The Wedding of their Daughter
Julie
to
Steven Preston Roberts
On Friday, the Twenty-Second of December, Nineteen Eighty-Nine
His blurry eyes looked at the photograph of a happy couple, posed against a mountain stream, gazing intently at each other as though nothing else existed.
He thought back to the day that had marked the end of an old year and the start of a new life…a day that just wouldn’t seem to let go of him, any more so than he could let go of her. Maybe life in Serbia would help him let go of the past. Or maybe it wouldn’t. He slipped the invitation back among the pages of his diary and looked at Katarina’s photograph once more before turning off the light and closing his eyes. ‘But if she’s in California, what am I doing here?’ he thought as he drifted off to sleep.
* * *
For Serbian New Year, an aunt, uncle and cousins came over and the family celebrated, the television glowing in the background. Food constantly arrived from the kitchen: sarma – filled cabbage leaves, roast pig, different types of cheese, corn bread, pickled vegetables, cold cuts, roast chicken, grilled meat, homemade baklava, homemade cakes, and lots of high octane rakija. Around 10:30 p.m. a heated argument erupted over the war, with the grandmother telling Dusan he was a coward for evading the draft and Dusan’s mother getting angry and calling the grandmother a fascist for supporting Milosevic. ‘He’ll save the Serbian nation,’ the grandmother retorted. ‘He’ll do things for Serbia no one else has ever done. Just you wait and see.’
‘If we wait long enough he’ll turn all of Serbia into another Vukovar,’ the mother answered derisively, referring to the Baroque city in Croatia that Serb forces had just razed to the ground during a three month artillery bombardment. ‘And my own son and your only grandson will be killed. Is that what you want?’
A crescendo of automatic weapons fire signaled the approach of midnight. ‘Srecna nova godina’ – ‘Happy New Year’ they all shouted, clinking glasses together, hugging and kissing each other and momentarily forgetting the war next door in Croatia, the gathering storm clouds over Bosnia and all their misery.
* * *
The
next week Steven set off to meet Professor Miroslav Ljubovic at the Philosophy Faculty building, a brick, glass and concrete monstrosity defiling the heart of Belgrade’s old pedestrian district, where a suspicious doorman interrogated him before letting him enter. The doorman said the professor’s office was located on the fifth floor, but the elevators were out of order, so Steven took the stairs, which were lined with smoking students whose cigarette smoke funneled upward, turning the stairwell into a chimney. By the fifth floor Steven was barely able to breathe. He found Professor Ljubovic’s office in a darkened corridor and knocked.
‘Come in,’ he heard a voice call loudly.
A grey-haired man in his late 50s stretched up to return a book to its shelf. He smoothed his threadbare suit coat over a woolen sweater and equally threadbare trousers. ‘Yes?’ he asked.
‘Good day. I am Steven Roberts.’ He handed Ljubovic an envelope and looked about the office, yellowed with age and central planning. ‘Professor Marko Slatina asked me to present his compliments and to give you this letter.’
Ljubovic smiled and shook his hand. ‘Yes, I’ve been expecting you. It’s so pleasant to meet you. Please have a seat.’ He took the envelope, read the letter and then looked up. ‘It’s so pleasant to hear from Marko again. He’s been unable to return because of problems with the authorities. I’m glad he’s still teaching. His knowledge is valuable and should be passed on to new generations.’
‘Indeed,’ agreed Steven.
‘Marko tells me that I’m to direct your research on monsters and mythical creatures in our rich South Slavic folklore. As you know we have many of them...witches, fairies, vampires, werewolves, the wild man and others. Some are old Slavic creatures that were brought here in the 5th and 6th centuries when the Slavs migrated from the north-east. Others appear to have already been here when they arrived, so I guess you can say that some of the creatures you will meet are local, while others are imported.’ He laughed at what he considered a joke.
‘We’ll start you off here in the Ethnographic Library and History Library, and then when you’re ready we’ll send you across the street to the archive of the Serbian Academy of Arts and Sciences. There you’ll find many living monsters. However, I’m afraid that they are primarily old communist academicians who bear a greater resemblance to political dinosaurs than to anything you’ll find in the literature.’ Once again he laughed, as if at an inside joke. ‘When we have given you a good grounding in the folklore we’ll send you to Novi Sad to work in the Matica Srpska archive.’
‘In his letter Marko asked that you start with vampires,’ Ljubovic continued. ‘He always took an interest in them. So, here is a list of books to start with.’ Ljubovic smiled broadly, revealing uneven teeth. ‘Actually, the list is Marko’s. He left it with me some years ago, urging me to look at it, but I never had the time. When you’ve finished with the books, you’ll start in the archives.’
He handed Steven ten typewritten single-spaced pages. ‘I think you’ll have great fun.’
Steven looked at the list: there wasn’t a single book in English. The winter would be long.
* * *
The following day Steven fought his way onto a battered and overcrowded electric trolleybus that somehow managed to take him to the heart of the city. In the Philosophy Faculty’s sixth floor History reading room he ordered a book and began to work.
He quickly entered into a routine: a morning run, the reading room until closing time at 2:00 PM, a solitary cup of hot chocolate at the Aristotle café, then the trolleybus to the National Library where he perused back issues of newspapers in the cavernous reading room. He repeated this pattern, alternating between the Ethnography and History reading rooms in the morning and the National Library in the afternoon.
His social life…well, he had none, so for the first time in his life he grew a beard against the cold. He thought often of Katarina and wondered what she was doing, whether or not she liked him, and whether she had a boyfriend. Weekends he took refuge in Belgrade’s unheated movie theaters to watch outdated films. Often the lights came on in the middle of a screening as Military Police swept the theater for draft dodgers. They never left empty-handed.
Rough men in camouflage uniforms sporting paramilitary insignias seemed omnipresent, and he avoided them, as did most Belgraders, terrified by their appearance and wild behavior. Students at the Philosophy Faculty whispered about horribly mutilated bodies floating down the Sava River. None of these stories appeared on state television, although RTS carried stories of horrible atrocities against Serbs by Croats, showing grotesquely disfigured bodies that were sometimes unrecognizable as human beings – limbs torn apart, ears, eyes and noses missing. Steven watched one news clip in disgust at it showed what had once been a person, but now resembled little more than a large mass of red meat. He was witnessing firsthand the collapse of an entire society and all its norms, and he felt darkness press him from all sides, a darkness that grew with each passing day.
As he read, Steven came across a case of vampirism on the Dalmatian island of Pasman, near Zadar, in 1403. Steven wanted to visit the Zadar archives in Croatia, but at the moment Zadar was besieged by Serbian forces, so he asked Professor Ljubovic if he knew of a facsimile that existed in Serbia. The professor said he’d look around, but a week later, Ljubovic told Steven that no one had heard of it. Then Steven came across an account of vampire trials held in Dubrovnik between 1736 and 1744. But Dubrovnik too was inaccessible, under siege by Serbian and Montenegrin forces, cut off by a blockade of steel and hatred.
The research was tedious, and his eyes grew tired easily because of the poor lighting. Sometimes he felt he could read no more. Gradually, he uncovered small pieces of what increasingly seemed to be a much larger puzzle. Some came from historical documents, while others came from collections of folk tales recorded by ethnographers… Ducic, Novak, Zovko, Klaic, Liepopili, Karadzic…the names blurred together. Everywhere he turned he found Serbian newspaper accounts of people who were arrested and tried for opening up graves and driving stakes through the hearts of suspected vampires. He had particular problems with one 15th century document written in the Glagolitic alphabet, a precursor to Cyrillic that resembled mangled bicycles, trapezoids and triangles. It took him the better part of three days to read a two page document.
Steven had become the favorite of Gordana, the librarian at the Ethnography reading room, who had a son his age serving in the army in Croatia and a brother in Chicago. ‘If I’d been smart I would’ve gone to America with him, but my parents weren’t healthy so I stayed here to help them. Now they’re dead and I’m too old to leave. But my brother has a big house and two cars and a swimming pool and an American wife, and his children are at the university.’ She showed Steven photographs of her brother’s family in suburbia. Once, when the military police came to the Ethnography reading room seeking draft dodgers, Gordana sprang to his defense and sent them packing.
As he read it became apparent that all the accounts had common elements, no matter whether they came from the furthest of the Dalmatian islands, the flat lands of the Pannonian Plain and Slavonija, or the wild mountains of Herzegovina, Bosnia, Pirot or Macedonia. But these vampires were unlike anything he had ever heard of and bore scant resemblance to film versions of Dracula.
* * *
One March morning, just when spring seemed to lurk around one of Belgrade’s grimy street corners, Steven stood up from the table in the Ethnography reading room, stretched his arms, returned a book to Gordana, walked down the hall to Professor Ljubovic’s office and knocked.
‘Ah, Steven, how are you?’ Ljubovic asked distractedly, staring out the window into space. ‘I didn’t recognize you with that beard. And you’ve let your hair grow. You look like Che Guevara.’
‘My hand’s cramped from writing, my eyes hurt from reading and I can’t wait for spring,’ Steven replied.
‘Well, it could be worse…at least you’re not in Sarajevo…it looks as though these fool
s will carry their nationalist madness into Bosnia…it’s starting all over again…but this time it’ll be much worse…Croatia was only a warm-up,’ Ljubovic spoke as if drained of all emotion. ‘But tell me what you’ve been up to.’
‘I finished the list you gave me.’
‘Really,’ Ljubovic turned and looked at Steven. ‘You have been diligent. Would you care to share some of your findings with me? I’ve always wanted to know what Marko found so fascinating about that list and how it all fits together.’
‘Well, I need some time to put it all together.’
‘Come to my apartment tomorrow. I’m having a group of students over for dinner. Perhaps you could present your findings.’
When Steven arrived home he found a letter from Professor Slatina that had taken a month and a half to arrive and appeared to have been opened several times. As he opened it he sensed a faint scent of leather and mildew that somehow transported him halfway across the world to La Jolla. In his mind’s eye he imagined Slatina, sitting upright at his desk, surrounded by old books and portraits, writing the letter. At once a sense of melancholy set in.
My Dear Steven,
By now I am certain that you have arrived safely and have settled into your research. I wish you great success in all you do and feel confident you will find the necessary materials and arrive at the appropriate conclusions. I hope Professor Ljubovic is helping you.
I suspect that the direction your research is taking is somewhat different than what you expected.
Steven stopped reading and looked across the narrow room at his puzzled expression in the faded wall mirror. How did Slatina know what direction the research would take him? Did the professor know how much time he was spending reading about vampires? He continued with the letter.
