In Europe

used to be. Right after the war there were 1,600 people in the village, at least a hundred farmers, every patch of ground was cultivated, but they still died of poverty. Today there are fiftyfamilies and only one real farmer, the mayor. In 1956, they tell me, it did not take long for people here to hear about the revolt in Budapest, and all the farmers withdrew their cattle from the collective right away. ‘But that didn't last long!’ Lajos shouted. In another village the farmers had fought, but here things had remained peaceful. Communism, that was other people's business. ‘Here we just tried to survive and make our own lives a little better, year by year, and that was all. There was one man in the café who was always talking politics, he had a big mouth; after 1956 he left for Germany.’
    The village did have one minor source of diversion: the local cinema. Lajos: ‘A man lived here, you still see him in the café now and then, he was the postman for thirty years. Every week he brought the film here from the city, on foot, summer and winter, for thirty years.’
    The collective remained intact until summer 1999. ‘All the ground has been given back now. But the young people have left and the older people can't start all over again. There's a big landowner who's buying everything up now. That man is going to be filthy rich. It's too late.’
    And all the Dutch people and the Swedes who buy houses here? Red Jósef approved: ‘They're not Gypsies, and they help to fix up the village.’ Lajos said: ‘Just sell the whole thing. Today is today, that's life. The cemetery is patient, it will wait for all of us.’
    A Gypsy woman came in to ask if she could call the vet. Her pig was sick. We went with her to have a look. The woman stood beside the pig – her entire capital for the winter – she scratched and petted the animal, whispered in its ear, begged it to live on for just a little while. A couple of men stood off to one side. ‘You mustn't feed it any more,’ one of them said, and she clumsily swept the leftover feed out of the trough. She had tears in her eyes, she wiped her fingers on a dirty cloth, and then on the bristly pig itself.
    Later we went to visit Maria, the church organist. Every Sunday she sat at her harmonium and played a series of notes, higgledy-piggledy, and sang along loudly. Now she was sitting on the bench beside her house, clutching two flowers, while her daughter sewed a pair of leather gloves with neat little stitches. A lot of women in the village did that, for a glove factory in Pécs, to earn a little pocket money.
    Maria was, as she put it, ‘forty-seven years old, but then the other wayaround,’ and she lived in a constant state of infatuation. She caressed my friend, grabbed his hand, hinted at wild and promising events from a misty past. She served us the first wine of the year from a plastic cola bottle, it was still murky, little more than grape juice. ‘
Trink, trink, Brüderlein trink!
’ Maria sang, rocking back and forth with her glass. She was one of the last few of the elderly here who still understood a few words of Swabian, a German dialect brought here by immigrants 200 years ago and pretty much ground back into silence in the last century by Hungarian nationalists. She did not actually speak the language any more, but there were still a couple of German songs living in her head, ones she had learned on her father's lap, a long time ago. The air in the village was autumnal, smoky, sour and pungent.
    Two days later I drove on, heading for the Austrian border. Along the way I picked up a hitchhiker, Iris, a little woman with lively eyes and a thin face. She spoke German and English fluently, she had once been a civil engineer, she said, but the state-owned company she worked for had shut down. After that she and her husband had started an advertising agency, then her husband died, and now she helped out at a stable. Her bicycle had been stolen a month ago, she did not have enough money to buy a new one, so now she had to walk three hours to work each day. ‘They're good creatures, horses are,’ she said. ‘They comfort you.’
    On 19 August, 1989 she had taken part in the Pan-European Picnic, a bizarre event held on the border close to Sopronpuszta, where Hungarians, Austrians and East Germans demonstratively broke open the Iron Curtain for the first time. ‘When it came right down to it, the notorious border was only a wooden gate with a sliding