Chasing Dracula through Transylvania

black wine, grief, and the Carpathian Mountains

I am weeks away from trailing ‘Dracula’s’ ghost through Romania’s Carpathian Mountains when my father calls to tell me he’d been diagnosed with polycythemia vera (PV), a blood cancer marked by the overproduction of red blood cells.

My father must be bloodletted regularly, he says; his oncologist siphons the cells from his body in a procedure meant to keep his very life force from killing him. PV is rare; the cause is unknown, although it’s believed to stem from a malignant transformation in the DNA itself.

The word Cancer—like a slap to the face. The dark hovering thing. As a poet, I made the obvious connections: The blood is the life. And the death.

I ask my father if he will be ok. He says he has so much more living he wants to do. He craves aliveness; even over the phone from Kentucky I can hear that. I spent so much of my time being awful, he says. Now that I’m finally doing the right things, I don’t want to be cheated of that time. I want as much time as I can get.

My father has carried a darkness in him since he was born—and he passed that darkness to me. I wield it like a trophy when it isn’t ruining me.

I remember him telling me at his father’s funeral—a stained glass-drenched, New Jersey Italian affair—that he just couldn’t understand death. It’s not that I’m afraid to die, he says. It’s that I’m afraid of not being here. I am his daughter, and this, of course, translates perfectly.

I wish we could live forever, I tell him over the phone. And I mean it. I want it with a viciousness. I’d kill for it. I would. I would circumvent the natural world for it.

Oh, perilous, wild, heady Bucharest! I fly to Romania with N, my friend who is equally as obsessed with vampirism. This first night is a fever dream of palinka and hookah. We explore the nightlife first, finding ourselves moving through alleyways of roving bodies and clinking glasses as if we are being pulled forward by an unseen force.

I am in a black dress. I see myself being watched. I see N being watched. I am aware of our presence, of the presence of others, of all of us in this strange city on the edge of the continent. It’s easy to let yourself be a body, a desirous thing, in this sort of city. Its chthonic tendency is palpable: beautiful people, grit and delirium, music and madness, the old wounds still showing in the edifice, in the hungriness of culture.

The echoes of time fold over me as wings. The buildings breathe us in and out, with golden light flung onto Byzantine structures. And then, here I am, smoking a cigarette outside some Communist monstrosity—a whole city block blanked out by ugly block buildings, windows like eyes.

All of this, enveloped between the Black Sea and the rest of Europe. I am disoriented. Everything, everything, everything could make you cry—standing inside of time, inside this very moment, in this very city, wondering how infinity stretches on, and how it will stretch on without you.

I think of the years between my father and I, how he might be sitting in his Kentucky backyard playing acoustic guitar right now, the porch light swinging behind him, his dogs and cats and pigs settled in for the evening. Him leaning into softness after a wild, hard life.

And then there’s me, across the world, sitting inside my aliveness, feeling my lips curl around the pipe, with my goblets of black maiden wine. The already-oppressive heat of early Romanian summer is caught in the ribbons of my hair. Yes, I am here, pulsing through the oceans of time, chasing death.

I think of how Jonathan Harker’s trip is always depicted in the films—how he reaches a place that suddenly undoes him, assaults his senses, frightens his heart. But unlike Jonathan, I welcome it. I don’t grip my crosses.

The next day, leaving the city is a blood rush—a crush of cars all speeding toward one another. The side mirror was struck three times as we whirled past the towering monuments like the oddly emotionless Memorial of Rebirth, which represents the 1989 toppling of communism.

As we get further away from Bucharest’s center, the long straight roads unfurl under an overcast sky. Stretches go on without much of anything, save the odd car rental shop or vacant buildings—relics of time. As N drives us further from Bucharest, we move through abandoned villages. We slow the car down. I count house upon house, whose closed shutters keep out any light. Silence warbles around us. Home after home of stillness peers back at us. Are they home? I ask N. Where did they all go? The sun was so bright and so high. Maybe it was just too hot to open the windows?

I think of the Italian concept of La Controra—the feverish, high noon hour during which malicious long shadows creep out. Everyone goes home for food and to sleep through the crush of heat. It’s heavy and melancholy.

Our Romanian guide, Mioara, would later tell us that there simply are no people left in these semi-remote villages, only the ghosts of what once was. Everyone was forced to leave their homes over the years: Dictatorship, no work, no access, no food, no hope. We passed so many of these villages.

Consider Gherdeal, Romania, or St. Gertruda: As Abandoned America describes, “By 1926, Gherdeal’s inhabitants consisted of Romanians, Saxons, and Roma. The reason it was abandoned likely lies in Romanian President/dictator Nicolae Ceaușescu’s program in the 1980s to systematically destroy small towns and villages across Romania, forcing the inhabitants to move to apartments near state-run farms and factories in cities to ‘improve efficiency’. This was a period of immense suffering and much of the country’s history was destroyed.”

We pass forlorn hitchhikers without so much as a backpack, or women in neon pumps standing at scarily remote truck stops. Dark flowers of the country’s chaotic past pop up everywhere, abandoned this, vacant that. In every country, some people are simply forgotten, lost to the despair of it all.

We drive first to Snagov Monastery, which stands just beside the deep blue waters of Lake Snagov. The water is high enough to touch your toes as you stand on the monastery’s splintered wooden dock.

Vlad the Impaler—or Vlad Tepes—the 15th-century ruler of Wallachia, is said to rest here, somewhere behind the church in its green grassy meadow—although this maybe-truth is tangled up in history’s murky waters.

We feel we are crawling slowly toward something sacred, or at least something that has haunted (hunted?) humanity for hundreds of years. We first have to drive down a long dirt road. Dogs splay idly in the streets, breathing slow and languid in the wobbly heat. Some of them simply remain in the middle of the road so that we have to slow down to drive around them; kids run toward the windows with their palms out, their eyes widening toward us, our eyes widening toward them.

We park our car on the other end of a long, thin bridge leading toward Snagov; the sun is suddenly high and oppressive, white-blinding and dense. It is ominous, that’s the feeling. We cross the bridge by foot from the people-world to the otherworld: The Monastery islet. Being there happened suddenly; my body drops into place before my heart, which is struggling to catch up.

Many people call him by his literary sobriquet: Dracula. Really, he is named Vlad Țepeș—the second son of Vlad Dracul, a la Order of the Dragon, a society of powerful men fighting against the non-Christian world.

Like his father, Vlad was a prince of Wallachia, which he protected by bloody rule. Romanians, our guide told us, do not think of Vlad as a vampire; it is mostly Bram Stoker who collapsed history and the folk belief, ribboning the bloodshed of war with everlasting life.

In films, Vlad is depicted as something between an undead, blood-loving monstrosity and a tyrannical, bloodthirsty warrior who’d impale his enemies. In Bram Stoker’s 1897 novel, Dracula, he is a sort of desirable anti-hero. In all the other iterations, he’s almost good.

Yet, as Mioara said, Vlad is often seen as a national hero. His particular brutality, she says, may be terrifying—especially when used on his own people to send a message of obedience—but it was a testament to his love.

History says Vlad and his brother Radu were taken hostage by the Ottoman Empire in 1442, where Radu found a new home. He converted to Islam and got close to the sultan’s son, Mehmet II. Vlad was only more enraged by this experience, and he vowed to get back to where he came and protect his status and his land at all costs.

The 14th-century Orthodox monastery is decked in rich saffron. Saint Basil the Great, Saint Gregory and Saint Nicholas eye me from the walls. An old woman stands at the entrance and kindly but pointedly asks for money before you take photos. It’s hot and silent and there is a golden velvet curtain that I cannot see behind.

I return, in the cellular memory of my body, to the early 90s when I was a child. There is my father, my dark predecessor, reading to me in our little New Jersey apartment, all full of mid century wood and brown carpeting. This was well before foster care and all the sadness, when everything was bejeweled in the idea of permanence, when the kingdom of childhood seemed to reach out interminably. Immortal.

My father read Dracula to me, his voice deepening around the edges as he conjured The Count. I felt it then, probably for the first time—that itch, that quiet temptation toward the unknowable. A reluctant empathy toward characters who were bound by some blood-loving disease.

Could we live without sunlight? Can we really drink blood? Could I? Are there castles far away, full of men who never die?

For me, loving Dracula meant seeing myself in the other, the antagonist, the sinner; it meant knowing that grief can do horrific things to us. It is not having to say goodbye.

I never wanted to be the hunter. I never understood the impulse. I only wanted to be the vampire. Because the hunter is only led by fear, and the vampire is led by something else. What is it?

I wander the grounds and kneel down to pet a pack of small dogs who sleep lazily beneath a tank of holy water. The dogs are everywhere. Dozens of them live here, wandering through the tall grass of the meadow, living and dying and staying.

N and I stay at a kitschy, if rundown, hotel, Acasă la Dracula. It is high in the Carpathian Mountains. We have to stay here, I tell N back in New Jersey. It is full of sconces and lanterns and old red carpets and winding staircases and knives bolted to the wall.

At night when we get in, rarely is anyone ever there, and if someone is there, they’re asleep at the front desk. There are no other guests, so we tromp up the stairs alone, giggling, drunk, and scare ourselves in the echoing darkness of this hotel-on-the-brink. We watch Twilight on the sofa.

And we drink black wine on the balcony, looking out over the dense forest, where bats swoop in the dusk light and a white crucifix looms far in the distance. We want so badly to hear the wolves howl as the night cools down and we put our sweaters on. I feel the quiet, small sadness creep up—the desire, almost an obsession, to make everything last forever. Moments. Places. People.

That night, I sleep with the curtains parted so the moonlight pours in over me.

We wake early for Sighisoara, the birthplace of Vlad Tepes. But to get out the Carpathians we must wind ourselves down the mountain. N drives fast and free, and it’s exhilarating, but I’m afraid. I imagine my body dead in the lush green remoteness of this country — the girl who died in search of death. It’s the endless preoccupation that this could all end at any moment.

We play music off a system that perpetually stops working, so we have to keep plugging the cords back in, which cracks us up because it’s as perfectly weird as our trip has been. Sometimes we play cinematic and spooky classical music and become the main character.

Yet we are our own Jonathan Harker. We’re not on a journey to sell a castle to an immortal, but we are exploring the dark aspects that live within us.

As we wind down the mountain, I see a black dog wander out from the trees. He just stands there, looking, looking, unmoving. I make eye contact as we pass. I ask N if we should get out and give him water.

A few days later, I see the same black dog again, like a mirage, this time somewhere else on the mountain. I think he must know where a water source is. He must know these mountains well. He haunts me—even now, even years later as I write this. Where was he going? Where could he go?

We drive again through abandoned villages, and past hand-built settlements and tents. The land stretches out, and mountains and fog loom in the distance, even as the sun bears down.

When we get to Sighisoara, Vlad the Impaler’s birthplace, we are greeted with colorful buildings and bustling pubs and cobbled roads. We go to a Restaurant, Casa Vlad Dracul, Vlad’s actual birthplace, where we eat polenta and meat and order large goblets of wine. Sitting inside an enduring mythology eating lunch feels both surreal and perfect.

Upstairs, in the attic, is a claustrophobic room decked out in red strobe light, smoke machine, and creaking coffins. It’s pure and total camp, honestly, with goofy muah-ha-ha sound effects echoing as Dracula pops out of his coffin.

It’s about 120 degrees in there, and we are all, even Dracula, drenched in sweat. I can’t help but to enjoy the nonsense of it all—the fact that after all this time, a tyrant was turned into an economy, and where we can, together, indulge our enduring fear of death.

Eventually, after more wine, we wind up in the Saxon graveyard high above the village. We get there through an enclosed wooden staircase that would protect the village children from the elements. It’s laughably high, and tourists are resting on the landings. It is also hot enough to make you feel faint.

The graveyard is lush and green and full of birdsong. There are statues and winding alleys, and vines outstretched over the tombs. The graveyard’s church was built around 1345. I am here, I think. I’m alive right now. I am looking back on time and witnessing it. I am a girl from New Jersey, and now I’m standing in a graveyard in Transylvania.

In the coming days, we see Peleș Castle in medieval Transylvania, Brasov and its Black Church, and Bran Castle (widely billed as Vlad’s castle but isn’t).

What have I learned, I wonder? I want to wrap Romania up, to come to a writer’s bow-tie ending. I want to fly back to England on that bumpy little propeller jet and figure it all out as I stare out the window.

I want to say that I’ve come to accept death. I want to say that people I love are sick, and I’ve accepted this. And that I, too, am a fleeting thing.

But no. Instead, I say death is for everyone else. I’m exempt. That a creature will come to me and show me that nothing has to end. If I run away far enough to the mountains, to the graveyard, to the crumbling cities of old, won’t I find the proof?

Yet there are times when you peer right into the void, and it peers right back into you.