In Europe

one pothole after the other, below us lie the metal rooftops of an old prison complex, a herd of sheep blocks the way, a Gypsy family has set up camp along the road with two wooden caravans, a child comes trotting by with a horse and wagon. Finally we reach Bucharest's rubbish dump. The tip covers an immense plot, an endless series of grey, smoking mounds marked by the occasional orange fire, an inferno of soot, rotting food, bottles, cans, car tyres and old plastic. Through the clouds of smoke you can see figures poking around everywhere, rummaging, bent over, every day.
    Rumania is probably the poorest country in Europe, according to the Human Development Index (2000). It is even worse off than, say, Cuba. Average annual inflation hovers around sixty per cent. The population is decreasing, less than half have access to good drinking water, only one in every five households has a telephone. Thirty to forty per cent of the voters choose ultra-right wing, nationalistic parties.
    At this moment, some 4,000 homeless children wander the streets of Bucharest. You see them everywhere: they beg, sell cigarettes and matches, wash windscreens at traffic lights. I even saw one diminutive beggar, with big, pleading eyes, kissing the front of a car. They have run away from home, or have simply been sent out to live in the street. At the House of the Smart Boys, Tonio, his balaclava pulled down to just above his eyes, is acting as doorman. He lived in the city's tunnels for more than five years. He looks seven, but he is twelve. Nicu is smoking a cigarette. He looks eight, but he is fourteen. Alexandru welcomes me and shows me his new white jacket, and beneath it his little dog. He looks nine, but he is thirteen. All of them, however, radiate an extraordinary energy and self-sufficiency.
    ‘Living on the street ensures that two things become well developed: your ability to fend for yourself, and your social skills,’ says Adriana Constantinescu, supervisor of this children's home. ‘Some of them can't give you the time of day, they sniff glue, but if for any reason they get into trouble they know immediately how to react. The only thing is, they've never known any form of human affection. This leaves them completely disoriented in life. We're a kind of substitute family for them, a stopping-off place between the street and a new family, or a life ontheir own. We give them a bed, food and they go back to school. And that works well.’
    This project reaches about 300 children a year. The clothes worn by newcomers are burned behind the house. The pile of rags smokes and stinks. Sometimes a foreign television crew will show up at the door: where are the children of Ceauşsescu? Adriana: ‘Those journalists want to show the television images from the 1980s all over again, with emaciated, sick children. They don't realise that those children have already grown up, they're in the army, or in prison, or they're working as bodyguards for the new rich.’
    She knows all about the crowded orphanages of the Ceauşsescu era, because she worked in them herself. But today's street children are of a different ilk. ‘Under Ceauşsescu there was a shortage of everything, but in that time many families still lived just above the subsistence level. It wasn't until after the 1989 revolution that they sank beneath the absolute poverty line. Then there was no way for them to get by. These days you sometimes find entire families living on the street, sometimes you also have very young children who grow up as transients.’ These are, as she repeats again and again, the children of 1989, of the post-communist era, of the West's shock therapy, of the promised land that never arrived.

Chapter SIXTY-FOUR
Novi Sad
    FIRST YOU FLY TO BUDAPEST, THEN YOU SPEND FIVE HOURS BOUNCING along in a minibus; that is how you finally arrive in the world of Slobodan Miložsević. Serbia has been boycotted by the West since 1991, the airport at Belgrade has been closed for years, and this is one of the few means of getting there. Many of the passengers wear tracksuits – the standard former Soviet Bloc outfit of the 1990s – or black leather jackets. Behind me, a man's voice drones away like a dentist's drill. Occasionally I am able to make out a word: Davidoff, Volkswagen, America, Ben-Gurion airport.
    This part of the country is called Pannonia. The wooden derricks above the wells stand out like gallows on the marshes. ‘Welcome to the black hole of Europe,’