Literary Flaneurs: William Lychack

A guest series curated by Jeffrey Condran. Project intro here.

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East of Vienna: No Small Journey

by William Lychack

As a kind of prologue, I want to say that this story has absolutely nothing to do with my present-day life and work. I want to see this all as just a little detour my twenty-year-old self took to go find Dracula. I need to tell you how this little episode has no practical bearing on who I am today. And yet still, in some ways, I feel those days in Romania have everything to do with my life and work. In many ways, going to that castle defines who I have come to be.

It’s Winter, Vienna, 1986, my junior year abroad, and somehow Reed Thompson and I have gotten it into our heads to visit Dracula’s Castle. A lark, of course, a caper, a forbidden little spree for us, the adventure of Reed and I journeying behind the Iron Curtain, two of us taking the slow train east to Budapest, to Bucharest, to Bra?ov, tracing switchbacks high through the Transylvanian Alps, deep into the green heart of Ceau?escu’s Romania. We grow weary with travel, eat nothing but grim black bread, the constant rocking of the train carrying in our bodies after we step onto the small station platform in the middle of the night in the tiny village of Bran at last.

We have no place to stay and wander in a kind of delirium toward what we assume is the town. I remember a riderless horse walking along the tracks in the dark. I remember this creature passing so noiselessly close we could taste its humid yeasty breath. The darkness is stunning and cold, and Reed and I eventually knock on the lighted door of an inn. We’re turned away–shunned is another good word–and we wander lost through the midnight cold of the town, wind howling, lamps going dark as we pass, moon rising over the mountains.

The two of us end up in a hayloft on the outskirts of the village. He huddle together against the cold–try to sleep–shivering with each other, burying ourselves with hay, breathing into our clothes for warmth, the movement of the train in our bodies. We’ll wake before dawn and find a hotel near the castle at Bran. The castle had once been home to Vlad ?epe?, the real-life model for Bram Stoker’s Dracula,  Vlad the Impaler. In the hotel we’ll sleep like dead men. We’ll sleep for days, for weeks, for years we rest right there–Reed and I are still sleeping in that pale yellow room–go to that hallway and open the door and you’ll find the two of us asleep in our beds, but then you’ll also see us waking in the late afternoon as well. You’ll follow us to the dining room downstairs. You’ll watch us pointing to whatever those people are eating at the next table–some feast of meat and vegetables and bread, hard sausage, soft cheese, pitchers of clouded wine–and as we wait for our order to arrive you’ll hear Reed say, “As long as it’s not liver!”

My God, though, we eat every bloody bit of that liver. We clean our plates with pieces of bread and make our way to the castle. It’s closed, we learn, and no one’s there to tell us how long or why. We hate Romania by now–detest everything about this ridiculous idea of our, taunt ourselves with Dracula’s Castle, kick at the cream-stone walls–and we circle the entire hillside,  trying in our desperation to break in. Castles, just for the record, are designed against such trespassers. There are wild pigs in the woods, steam rising off their backs in the last dregs of sunlight, garbage strewn all along the rock-slide hills. I don’t think I will ever feel as lonely and purposeless as this, Reed and I throwing stones at the castle wall. I can still conjure this pull of failure. It’s a dropping of the stomach, a rollercoaster’s fall, and the feel of it returns at the slightest tang of coal smoke in the air.

This is all before the Internet, long before cell phones and credit cards and computers really, 1986 being before so many things in life, the whole world still so foreign and far away and lonesome. In Vienna, I’d dial my girlfriend’s house in the United States, let the phone ring once over the grainy distance, and then hang up and walk under the heavy architecture until I’d scattered my loneliness on the ringed streets of the city behind me. I’d take trolleys to their farthest stops and walk the tracks home. I’d fill aerograms tight with the music and churches and river of the city, send the letters away, wait weeks for an answer to arrive back to me. You know, I miss being alone like this. I miss stewing in that unrelievable solitude. I miss feeling open and raw and sticky to the world.

But back to me and Reed, two of us trying to chip footholds into the crenelated walls, when suddenly a pair of workers open a gate and invite us in. They give us flannel boots to wear along the wooden floors. We hush through all the halls and keeps of Dracula’s castle. The cool dim of the place still haunts me.

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William Lychack is the author of a novel, The Wasp Eater, and a collection of stories, The Architect of Flowers. His work has appeared in The Best American Short Stories, The Pushcart Prize, and on public radio’s This American Life.