Riding in the Passenger Seat
On the trail of a serial killer
By Dimiter Kenarov*
In the summer of 2008, just as I was starting out as a journalist, I traveled from Sofia to a small, sleepy town in western Macedonia called Kičevo to investigate the story of a serial killer. I could hardly contain my exhilaration, like a young beagle taken out on its first important hunt. Stories of serial killers have always inspired terror and lurid curiosity, from Jack the Ripper to the Zodiac Killer, but this one seemed to push the limits. It featured a bizarre protagonist and a mind-boggling plot. Over a period of several years, three women — perhaps four — had been viciously raped and strangled in the exact same manner, their half-naked bodies discarded in secluded locations on the outskirts of Kičevo. All of them were of similar age, in their late fifties or early sixties; they had all worked as janitors; and they had all lived in the same section of town.
The Macedonian police were initially baffled by the crimes. They had the murderer’s DNA (extracted from the semen he had left behind) but lacked enough evidence to pursue concrete leads. They held the key but couldn’t find the lock.
The lucky break, and the unraveling of the sordid mystery, came about only with the help of a renowned, award-winning local journalist, Vlado Tanseki, who was covering the murders for the national press. Searching for answers, Taneski did some serious legwork, interviewing various people, including friends, colleagues, and family members. He talked to officials working on the case and then published extensive newspaper accounts. In fact, his stories were at times so detailed that they caught the eye of the detectives. How did Taneski know so much? Was he given to invention or did he have an inside source? Nobody quite knew what to make of it, but every new corpse provided additional clues, until one day, completely out of the blue, the police rounded up four suspects. Among them was Vlado Taneski.
There was initially a feeling of disbelief among Kičevo residents, who couldn’t accept that one of the most illustrious members of their community — a famed journalist, a respected neighbor, a gentle husband, and a loving father of two — could commit such beastly, unconscionable acts. If surfaces were so deceptive, if ordinary things were not what they appeared to be, how could one read and comprehend the world at all? How could Taneski rape and kill elderly women — who, it was afterwards revealed, resembled his own late mother — and then calmly don his reporter’s hat to investigate the crimes he had himself committed, going as far as interviewing the son of one of the victims? It beggared belief. Yet DNA test results, when they came in, were incontrovertible: Taneski the journalist was also the murderer.
This was not the end of the ordeal: three days after Taneski’s arrest, he was found dead in the lavatory of his jail cell, on his knees, drowned in a water bucket used for flushing the toilet. There was a farewell note under his pillow proclaiming his innocence. All kinds of conspiracy theories immediately sprang up: he was murdered by the police, which was trying to hide something; he was a victim of a botched waterboarding procedure; he was killed so his organs could be harvested. Most of the evidence, however, pointed to an uncanny suicide. In a desperate attempt to escape the infamy that awaited him, dreading to face his neighbors and family in a public trial that would have almost certainly resulted in a guilty verdict in light of the evidence amassed against him, he had done the impossible, making his death as strange as his life. He had not only taken his secrets and shame into the grave, but had also assumed control of the epilogue of his tragic tale, denying others the satisfaction of writing it for him. The author had decided to kill his protagonist at the most opportune moment. Or had the protagonist killed the author?
*
It’s very hard to sympathize with a sick monster like Vlado Taneski — but as a journalist I do. There is something terrifying about the abyss of having nothing to write about. The empty days, the boring town, the people who don’t speak much, the dust. The fact of the matter is that I would have never visited the western Macedonian town of Kičevo (population 27,076) had Taneski not gone nuts and committed all these crimes. We probably would have never heard of the village of Holcomb either, standing “on the high wheat plains of western Kansas,” had a reporter named Truman Capote not taken an intense interest in the murder of a certain family there. Nor would have so many reporters flocked to Iraq or Syria if there were no wars. The cynical media slogan “if it bleeds, it leads” may sound cold-blooded, but it winds up the creative mechanism. It is not that journalists are vultures, as they are so often portrayed, drifting on the warm air currents in search of a warm corpse, but like all writers they do enjoy stories, and tragedy usually makes for a pretty good one. Unlike novelists, they are not supposed to invent either the plot or the characters, nor should they throw Anna Karenina under the train or slaughter an old pawnbroker with an axe.
Taneski defied these restrictions. For him, the humdrum world of Kičevo was simply not sufficient for making a good story: something needed to happen; some new ingredient had to be added to the bland, meaningless stew of the everyday. He had to dip reality into the acid of his imagination. He took authorial control of the plot, shaping it as he saw fit. The only problem was that he couldn’t keep the characters confined to his sick head.
Whereas fiction writers are more like deities, selecting from the physical world only what suits them best and inventing the rest, disassembling and reconstructing the universe at will so that each rough element is polished and fits some greater narrative vision or theme, their non-fiction brethren enjoy no such awesome powers. We are allowed to have style; we can use long, rambling sentences with multiple semi-colons; we are free to experiment with framing, pacing, and sometimes even with point of view. Perhaps we really do write fictions, but for a single difference: we can’t make our characters say what they haven’t said; we can’t stop the rain when it rains; we can’t crash the aircraft to complicate the plot; we can’t kill Hitler to save the heroine. We write fiction on a chain.
Perception of the world may be an illusion of the mind, yet it contains some hard objects we cannot ignore. In a passage in one of my favorite biographies, James Boswell’s uninhibited, hilarious The Life of Samuel Johnson, Dr. Johnson, the eighteenth-century British literati, is attempting to disprove the idealistic philosophy of George Berkeley. “After we came out of the church,” Boswell remembers, “we stood talking for some time together of Bishop Berkeley’s ingenious sophistry to prove the nonexistence of matter, and that every thing in the universe is merely ideal. I observed, that though we are satisfied his doctrine is not true, it is impossible to refute it. I never shall forget the alacrity with which Johnson answered, striking his foot with mighty force against a large stone, till he rebounded from it — ‘I refute it thus.’” Non-fiction, I think, is kicking that large stone.
Although it may seem obvious, I believe that here lies the heart of the matter. Non-fiction has to contend with the imperfections and jagged edges of our visible world much more so than fiction; it has to accept without complaint the often arbitrary and unfinished nature of events and people, and reconcile itself to empty spaces one cannot fill. “Truth is stranger than fiction, but it is because fiction is obliged to stick to possibilities. Truth isn’t,” Mark Twain wrote in his travelogue Following the Equator: A Journey around the World, and he is indeed telling the truth. To put it another way: non-fiction is fiction from the passenger-seat with no road map or idea of a destination, a fiction with somebody else — or maybe nobody — at the wheel. Being driven to a new place rarely turns out as expected, and every day the story is constantly in danger of collapse.
What do you do when you’re reporting a magazine feature about snowboarding but there is almost no snow on the ground, as it happened to me once in Sarajevo? How do you write a story about tractor production in Belarus when they refuse to let you into the tractor factory or speak to anyone, although you’ve been promised on the phone unimpeded access by the factory manager? Nothing quite makes sense, and everything is much too complex, contradictory, and inconsistent. And the hardest part is that you’re not allowed to make it all fit — you can’t invent the snow, or fling open the doors of the tractor factory. Precisely because of this, I think the genre — whether fact-based journalism or the so-called “creative non-fiction” — requires, paradoxically, greater craft and imagination from its author: for it is quite difficult to build, say, a space rocket, when you’ve only been given some plastic, a piece of string, and bubblegum. As it is harder to draw an accurate painting with only two or three colors instead of a full palette. Yet, to me, this is the braver, more honest type of literature: while novels appeal chiefly to our desire for narrative order and meaning, eliding the odd and the illogical whenever deemed necessary, non-fiction seems more keenly aware of the deficiency of perception and the gaps in our knowledge, of the randomness and opacity of the universe we live in. Without a doubt, documentary writing is still mediated experience, a linguistic construct, just as everything else in our human domain, and should not therefore be confused with some objective reality, yet it holds fewer trappings between the world and us. It is like the original folk version of “Red Riding Hood,” in which the woodsman never arrives to disembowel the wolf to save Red Riding Hood and her grandmother. Often there is no resolution, no saving grace. The story could feel unsatisfactory and frustrating, as if it has been abandoned mid-way through without rhyme or reason. A fiction editor may write in the margins, “Readers would want to know happens next. It may be a good idea to add another chapter,” but the non-fiction author can only shrug it off and add his own comment underneath: “Nothing happens next. This is life.”
I’m dead wrong about fiction of course. There are plenty of novels which dramatize beautifully the misalignment between fiction and non-fiction, expectation and experience. It is, after all, the central theme in the first modern European novel, Cervantes’ Don Quixote, in which an old man obsessed by the ideas and literary images of chivalric romances tries to transpose them directly onto the harsh and rather unromantic realities of the everyday. That gap between the imagined and the actual is the source of both comedy and tragedy throughout the book. The physical world, with its vulgar and meaningless shape, constantly threatens to overwhelm illusion, yet illusion fights back tooth and nail and tries to stamp its own vision onto life.
Or consider my all-time favorite novelist, Laurence Sterne. In his A Sentimental Journey as well as his later masterpiece Tristram Shandy, Sterne tried to put aside all the neoclassical conventions of selection and order and balance, and create a new kind of free-wheeling, effervescent, digressive fiction, which incorporated all the random bits and pieces in front of the eyes of the protagonist, without caring to make them obey some bigger architectural plan. He pushed the concept of mimesis to its absolute extreme, holding a giant 360 degree mirror up to nature. “But I’m govern’d by circumstances — I cannot govern them,” Sterne’s narrator says, breathlessly, as his mind jumps from one subject to the next. His novels are in essence anti-novels, creating the sensation that there is no authorial intelligence in control of the plot, and the protagonist is just a victim of the situation — I guess the closest a novelist could get to writing non-fiction. Samuel Johnson, always the moralist, who believed that novels should imitate nature, but only “those parts of nature, which are most proper for imitation,” did not approve of Sterne, who seemed to collect indiscriminately all the stones he came across on the road, the little ones and the big ones, exercising no judgment or care in polishing them into proper pedagogic shape. “Nothing odd can do long,” Johnson said of Tristram Shandy. He was certainly mistaken.
But no matter how radically plotless or subjectless or digressive a novel professes to be, no matter how much its author pretends that he doesn’t exercise imaginative control over it and he is just reporting what happened, it is of course all simply a ruse, a narrative artifice. Sterne, as much as Cervantes, as much as Tolstoy, was a fiction writer par excellence, and had at his disposal the full novelist’s tool kit. He wasn’t governed by circumstance as much as he invisibly governed it. Though historical and psychological verisimilitude may produce the impression of non-fiction, it is never quite the same, for the novelist is always the agent making the final choice. However faithfully it may try to stick to historical facts, whatever hard-core naturalism it boasts, fiction’s true allegiance is never to the world itself as much as to an unfamiliar truth hidden under the morass of the familiar one, revealed only through the power of the artistic imagination. “A lie has short legs,” one popular proverb goes, “But it runs faster than the truth.” That, I think, pretty much sums up fiction. A lie with short legs that runs faster than the truth.
But what of us poor non-fiction writers who remain chained to facts and circumstance, walking on two human legs that are neither too short, nor too long, and never seem to run fast enough? Why do we keeping on writing what we do, when fiction seems to offer so much more power and possibilities and even truth, so much more freedom? Because of freedom, I say. For there is a strange sort of liberation in accepting to be just an observer and to have no power over the development of the story, to have no free will and be the plaything of fate, to sit in the passenger seat, even if nobody is really behind the wheel.
Vlado Taneski broke both the most basic human laws, as well as those of writing. He turned into a monster to report on his own monstrosity. He committed heinous crimes and later committed them on paper. What should have been a horror novel he willed into life; what should have been normal, everyday life he willed into horror. In a sense, he was a sinister double of Don Quixote — a Don Quixote reading Stephen King instead of chivalric romances. Unable to accept the mundane character of the small Macedonian town he lived in, he wanted to make it extraordinary. He wanted to be the driver and the passenger, yet he failed spectacularly at both. But it is also this very failure that makes for the best stories, which all writers — novelists and journalists alike — avidly pursue. It is there, in the story of the human inability to tell imagination from reality, that genre ceases to matter.
*Dimiter Kenarov is a freelance writer based in Sofia, Bulgaria. He has written for The Atlantic, The Nation, The New Yorker, The Virginia Quarterly Review, and several other venues. A version of this essay was originally delivered as a lecture at the Sozopol Seminars of the Elizabeth Kostova Foundation.
