In Europe

It was all very emotional. The next day, on Friday, it was announced that the Ceauşsescus had fled. They were captured the next morning, and executed on 25 December. For years I had dreamed of being able to shoot that man, I hated him so much, but when it finally came down to it … On TV they looked like two homeless people who had been put up against the wall. You almost felt sorry for them, part of the videotape was edited out as well. It was very intense, they were in a huge panic, you could see that, they were also very much together in those last hours, they talked to each other very personally.
    ‘In hindsight, it was all a big mistake. That trial, those accusations, “genocide” – legally speaking, it was complete nonsense. No, I would have condemned them without wasting a bullet. I would have forced them to listen endlessly to classical music, to look at wonderful paintings, to drive around in today's colourful Bucharest. They would never have survived that.
    ‘What this country needs to do is to start believing in its own possibilities. After 1990, I was able to do a great many things that had been impossible for most of my life. I am fifty-eight now, and I'm still making up for lost time. I believe that one is obliged to do the things one is ableto do. I worked with students for thirty-five years, and they kept me young. Without my students, I am nothing. I love them, they support me, they stand around me like a fortress, and someday they will take my place. They are my life.’

    I dream of complete disaster. Passing through a railway bridge, a big dredging machine has collided with a high-tension electricity pylon. A train is coming, a blue train with an old-fashioned electric 1100 engine. It thunders right past the red signal, it just keeps barrelling along, I see it happening right in front of me. The train is falling off the bridge. ‘There we go, another carriage bites the dust!’ the people around me are cheering. The brakes shriek, everything goes skidding down the rails.
    The train from Kiev to Bucharest has stopped for a signal. It is 3 a.m., the carriage sighs and breathes, a snowplough approaches, then the engine starts up again. Outside I see a huge white figure on a pedestal, probably an overlooked Lenin. Then we creep on through a landscape lit by stars. The electricity is out almost everywhere at this time of day. Every once in a while a flickering yellowish light appears from behind a window, a sleeping village, almost unchanged since 1880, 1917, 1989.
    When I wake up later, it has begun to get light. We have stopped again. Barbed wire, watchtowers to the left and right, beside the train shivering soldiers with Kalashnikovs. Ukraine and Rumania are among the poorest countries in Europe, but their borders are guarded like gold. A female guard dutifully copies every syllable from my passport, up to and including the mysterious ‘Burg. van Amsterdam’. And there it comes: I am not in possession of the appropriate visa. She looks at me archly, but in her mind the proper order of things has been disturbed. She makes me unpack my bag. ‘Aha, computer, export!’ ‘Aha, antique, export!’ (this in respect of an old Russian banknote). ‘Aha, hundred dollar!’ The train is standing still, the delay is increasing. The day before yesterday I read in the
Kyjiv Post
that the flight of capital out of Russia currently totals $2.9 billion a month. It was from Ukraine that the former prime minister, Pavlo Lazarenko, supposedly siphoned away $700 million. ‘Aha, again hundred dollar!’
    Later we roll along the border with Subcarpathia, otherwise known asRuthenia, the latest addition to a whole row of countries in the making. The snow eases up. I see wooden houses, women in bright headscarves at a market, two horses wearing plumes and pulling a festively decorated cart. In a brown field beside a tin warehouse, twenty-two little boys are running after a soccer ball. Damn, that's right, this is just a normal Saturday afternoon.
    Bucharest is a city of more than 2 million inhabitants, with an estimated 300,000 stray dogs. You see dogs everywhere, alone or in packs: along the roads and in the back streets, around the few antique churches, in front of the former dictator Ceauşsescu's mad-hatter's palace and between the shrubs in Ghencea cemetery, where everyone arrives in the end. In the houses of prayer the incense wafts, the singing rises up, this Sunday is the day the food is blessed, with