33.

29 June, 7:30 PM, Czernograd, the Old City

After she arrived at his room, she gave him a critical look over. Head to feet and then back up.

“You’re not wearing that,” was the verdict.

“I’m sorry,” Jake said, “but I only come here to scatter my grandfather’s mortal remains. I didn’t quite prepare for a longer stay. Or for that matter for seeing the Czernograd that not many other tourists get to see, to quote you.”

She screwed up her lips and pondered on it a while.

“You’re right,” she finally said with the air of resignation, “and it’s too late to take you shopping for something more appropriate. This will have to do.”

Jake was wearing a pair of jeans – a nice pair, he thought, and a T-shirt underneath a stripy Ralph Laurent shirt he intended to wear to the ceremony, when that time finally came. Decent American casual, Czernograd under-dressed. His attire was more the “drink till you puke and pass out” frat house parties-style of his misspent youth – God, it was only a few years ago, he suddenly realised, so recently and so long ago – rather than the more sophisticated “pop or snort till you have sex with a complete stranger and wake up in somebody’s Tribeca penthouse” parties that he seemed to be invited to most often these days. What do they do for fun in Ruthenia and Galicia? Besides trying to explain their existence to the outside world, attempting to run down tourists, and spooking visitors with a mix of Gypsy lore and local superstitions? And what should you wear when they do it at night?

Her attire gave some clues. She was wearing of a tight-fitting piece of black fabric covering the section of her body roughly from somewhere halfway down the bulge of her breasts to an inch or two down her thighs below underwear, if there was underwear. This modest piece of dark cling wrap was complemented by black stocking, high heels that added around three inches to her height and made them see eye to eye, and some simple and not very ostentatious silver jewelry, a thin bracelet, an equally thin chain around her neck and rather large hoop earrings, half lost among the storm of her curls.

So he was dressed for an informal funeral, and she was dressed for a party. The local beauty and the foreign beast. This will have to do.

They started the evening at dusk, in one of the small wine bars that have sprung up in their dozens over the past couple of decades in the renovated cellars of the Old Town. The signage was minimalist and unobtrusive, probably to accord with municipal ordinances, but neither the locals nor the visitors, distinguished by their louder tones and a dozen mostly European languages, seemed to have any problems finding and filling up these places.

This one was full of locals; Jake only heard the low murmur of what he now recognised as Ruthenian against the background of unobtrusive chilled-out house beats. The soundtrack seemed somewhat out of sync with the decor, which was the late nineteenth century Austro-Hungarian Empire, as re-imagined by the early twenty-first century Ruthenian and Galician interior design grads. Portraits of elderly uniformed men with bald heads and handlebar moustaches stared down disapprovingly at the patrons from exposed brick walls. Old books, probably bought per running metre, lined the unreachable shelves close to the ceiling.

“Do you actually believe in werewolves?” Jake said. The protective pentagram of wooden crosses has been playing on his mind more than the alleged attempt on his life or the attention given to him by the persons unknown.

“It’s not a question of believing in them, Jake,” she said, sipping from her glass. She was a white wine woman. Why were the glasses so much bigger than the measure of wine that waiters always poured into them? Jake wondered. “They exist. I’ve met a few over the years.”

“This is bizarre,” he shook his head.

“This is Ruthenia and Galicia,” she jumped in, raising her glass. “Cheers.”

They clinked.

“As in a man who turns into wolf?” he asked, turning his glass in his hand. He was a red wine man.

“Yes. There are still some, though not as many as in the past. They were quite common in the rest of Europe until the eighteenth century, you know. It’s a sad genetic curse.”

“But they’re still around only... here?”

“Why do you think Ruthenia and Galicia is the only member of the European Union whose citizens still require visas to travel to any other fellow member state?” she said with a touch of bitterness in her voice. “Because no one in France or Belgium wants a werewolf – or worse – just waltzing into their country.”

“And yet you are an EU member and Turkey is not. Hardly seems fair.”

“That’s because Turkey is 99.8 per cent Muslim, whereas Ruthenia and Galicia is only 0.0015 per cent werewolf.”

“Touché,” he smiled.

“The rest of the continent has had some bad experiences with RiG nationals,” she said. “For example, a few years ago there was this famous case of a rusalka in Germany, actually a half-rusalka, on her mother’s side, not sure whether you might have read about it at the time? It was quite a big story.”

“No, I haven’t. We don’t have a lot of news from Europe unless there’s a plane crash or one of your leaders is rude to our President. And what’s a rus... rusalka?”

“They’re water nymphs. Beautiful and alluring, yes, but not delicate and fragile like in Greek myths; more like strong and quite dangerous, some say even a bit crazy. This particular one was working as a prostitute in Germany when she was charged and convicted of drowning four of her clients in a bathtub. But that’s what rusalkas have always done. In the old days travellers were told to beware of women they might encounter by the rivers or lakes for they might turn out to be rusalkas that would lure them into the depths and drown them. Doesn’t happen that much anymore, of course...”

“Always a few bad apples,” Jake laughed. He usually did when feeling somewhat uncomfortable. “Surely though there would be some Polish or Hungarian or Latvian criminals in Germany too, yet the EU hasn’t in effect instituted collective punishment by keeping up entry restrictions for all their citizens?”

“True, but we fear the alien a lot more than we fear the familiar, even if they’re really equally dangerous. No one wants a Polish car thief but he’s no different to a German car thief really; just one more car thief. But a werewolf or a rusalka from Ruthenia and Galicia... well, that’s a different story. They’re totally different, aren’t they?”

“Please tell me how people deal with this whole different thing,” he put the quotation marks in the air around the second last word. “I mean there’s a whole new country popping out from nowhere, full of people... things that shouldn’t exist...”

“How do you deal with it? I mean, true, for you in America it’s not next door like it is for the rest of Europe, but-“

“I-“

“You deal with it by ignoring it, by not trying to think about it too hard,” she said. “So it is incredible, and it turns everything upside down. But think about Copernicus when he discovered it’s the Earth that goes around the sun, or Columbus who discovered the new world, or Pasteur who discovered that bacteria cause disease. Yes, it was incredible and it turned everything upside down too, but what impact do you think it actually had on 99 per cent of people at the time? Nothing; zilch. Or virtually nothing; just some more wild stories to share around kitchen table maybe. But that’s it. So there now is a new country full of things that shouldn’t exist, as you say. So what? Life goes on,” she shrugged.

They had the second round.

“In any case,” she said, “it’s not like it used to be.”

“What do you mean?”

“Well, it all used to be stronger... a much bigger part of what Ruthenia and Galicia was. Even Rawnie Rina remembers those days-“

Jake shifted uncomfortably in his seat at the mention of the Gypsy matriarch and... a witch? Or a wise woman. Or perhaps merely senile.

“-when there were a lot more of these... creatures; vampires, werewolves, shape-shifters, little demons… when the powers were stronger. Now... it’s been dissipating for a long time, like the room eventually gets cooler after you switch off a heater.”

“So you mean that the RiG Tourism Agency lied to me and this isn’t a magic kingdom anymore?” Jake tried to inject some light-heartedness into the conversation which has all of a sudden turned very serious – his fault; the first person to mention werewolves loses the game – on this night which was supposed to be all about a different experience. Or was this the different experience?

“Oh, still true enough, I guess, particularly compared to the rest of this sorry world,” Marina did not pick up on the light-heartedness. “But it’s not what it used to. There are less of them with every generation, non-humans and half-humans, and those who are around are becoming more... normal. Like men – they’re mostly men, by the way - who just go into the forest during the full moon and howl instead of turning into an animal. Or wise women who can still make potions to cure cold, but not to attract love.” She leaned on the table, looking inside an almost empty glass in front of her, seeking own reflection in the light amber liquid at the bottom. “They are even talking about some cases of vampires actually dying. Dying of old age, you understand?” she raised her eyes and looked at him. “So much for immortality.”

He had skipped that section of his Lonely Planet guide.

“Why?” he asked. “Why is this happening, this change?”

“Ah,” she sighed, “the question. Many have asked, but no one really seems to know. There are dozens of theories, but which one is right? And does it matter?”

“Does it matter to you?”

She avoided answering directly. “You know, if you asked people out there in the street whether they miss the old times and old ways – not that they can remember them, except for the really old people, but just the idea of how it used to be – I think – I bet the majority would just shrug. Some would probably even say ‘good riddance’, particularly the younger ones. You have no idea what it’s like to live this life in a place like this, that’s so different to everything else out there. It takes a toll. Most people don’t want to live in a freak house and be a part of it, an entertainment for strangers who come in for a few days, point the fingers, take some photos and then leave. People want to be... normal. Well, most of them anyway.”

“Heavy stuff,” Jake said. “Another one?” he pointed at their empty glasses.

She shook her head.

“Let’s go somewhere else,” she said, a weak smile back on her face. “The night is still young, and we haven’t even started. Meanwhile I’m sitting here and depressing you – and depressing me – about the grand existential questions of the strangest little place on Earth.”

“It’s been informative,” he said, and he wasn’t lying, even though it wasn’t quite the start he imagined to the evening.

Photo by Osman Rana on Unsplash