As we topped the hill the forests fell away in a final blitz of stumps, some of them smoothly cut, some ragged, and the final row of them blackened. I could see the entire length of the valley lying out before me like an arm that wasn’t completely outstretched with a stream shining in the sunlight at its center. I gasped and my brother grinned at me with his unnaturally smooth teeth and said, “I felt the same way when I first saw this place even though it was little more than a run-down farm house and barely tended fields.” The entire valley had been cleared except for a grove of hardwoods that sat astride the river just north of the village. A large yellow farmhouse faded from the sunlight sat on the other side of the stream with smoke puffing from its brick chimney and a ramshackle cloister of shacks and cabins constructed of logs, lumber and rusted tin sheets clustered around it. Downstream from the dwellings two large barns stood with their doors swung wide open. People milled about the buildings disappearing into the barns and winding their ways through the narrow pathways between the huts as children ran freely amongst them screaming wildly at one another.
We made our way down a trail that ran through a field of tall corn whose dark green stalks swayed slightly in the breeze. “This is mom’s fairy tale come to life,” my brother whispered to me and I just stopped myself from disagreeing. Mother had told us of cartoons on the TVs, cars in the streets, and men and women in suits riding elevators to the top floors of tall buildings. The hill on the other side of the river was pasture that had been trimmed short by sheep and cattle. The cows moved slowly their heads down as they walked across the pasture while the sheep skittered and turned back and forth, breaking from their grazing to dash across the grass at some disturbance that was insignificant to us. Barking dogs rustling through the stalks ran up to greet us. They were large black and tan dogs with floppy ears that approached us warily sniffing the air with their shiny noses, their enormous paws flexing and digging into the soil, until they saw the two brothers that trailed my brother and then they bounded forward happily to have their heads scratched. I walked as if in a dream. My body felt distant and my nostrils were permeated with the rich fibrous scent of the corn. When we emerged from the cornfield, we were much closer to the camp and I could see women in simple dresses of yellow and red tending small vegetable plots. Here one hoed and there another was crouched down amongst her crops doing what I did not know. A band of figures emerged from one of the bigger cabins near the farmhouse and walked quickly out of the camp, their rifles glinting in the fading light. Some of them moved with the sinuous grace of vampires.
After we crossed the wooden bridge and were walking among the houses on a dirt path that ran between the small ragtag buildings the group of children ran up behind us chattering among themselves as they pointed and stared at the ambassador’s bound hands and skin color. No one else in the group took any notice of these girls and boys but I stared right back at them. I had not seen a child in many years and now here was an entire pack of them rosy-cheeked in the chilly air wearing smiling and conniving faces. They did not seem to be afraid of the vampires that still chilled me to the bone, but they did show them a begrudging respect, like a child would show any adult whose temper was prone to sudden flare-ups. But the thing that shook me to my core filling me with a wave of emotion that I could scarcely stifle even more than their ease among the vampires was their cleanliness. They weren’t even completely dirt free, they had dirt on their hands, the ends of their pant legs and here and there on their faces but they lacked the grimy layer that covered me and every other human that I had ever met, the second skin that weighed our hair down with grease, and stained our skin. Without that layer these children’s skin seemed to shine like a river in the sunlight. There was hope in their bright curious eyes unafraid of the vampires, but there was even more hope in their clean skin and clean clothing, hope in the mothers who had deemed their tidiness worthwhile and who had taken the time to keep them clean. Walking with them fanned out around me I felt like an outcast, a relic, an ambassador from an uncouth land come to beg the wisdom of a more dignified civilization.
The small homes were constructed of plywood with frames consisting of two by fours or tree trunks and angular roofs that were often made of sheet metal and dotted with small metal chimneys capped with conical strips of metal. They were windowless and many of them had nothing more than blankets and skins hanging in the doorframes slung back now and letting out a steady stream of smoke. Dogs, cats, and chickens loitered between the buildings lying against the walls of the huts. We turned the corner on a hut from which emanated the screams of an infant and entered a muddy courtyard in front of the farmhouse where women were hanging clothes on lines strung between tall wooden poles. They wore rough yellow dresses that looked homemade. They did not stop their work for our arrival. Only one of them took any notice of us at all waving to my brother and smiling when he
