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

***

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. Continue reading →