In Europe

the man beside me says. He works as a football coach in Oldenburg, and he is a product of the old Yugoslavia.‘I was born in Belgrade. My mother came from Montenegro, my father was born in Bosnia. My sister lives in Croatia, and I live in Germany. Work that one out!’ At the border, the Serb militiamen yank open the doors of the bus.
    For centuries, rich and fertile Vojvodina was a part of the Habsburg Empire. Today it is Serbian, but the area is still inhabited by Croatians, Germans, Bosnians, Jews and Hungarians. It is the land where ‘the Hungarian celebrates in tears’ and where, according to the author Aleksandr Tisma, the people hang themselves from the rafters ‘the way other people say goodnight’. The broad skies above this land will never offer anyone peace and safety.
    It was in the early 1990s that I first visited Novi Sad, the hub of Tisma's world. There was no writing going on then in this Serbian provincial capital: the Yugoslav wars were in full swing and everyone was too busyarranging for petrol, cigarettes and bread. The Western boycott had resulted in a devastating shortage of everything. New banknotes were being issued almost every week, in new denominations with eight zeroes or more, all bearing the portraits of serious-looking professors, generals and national poets.
    The streets were lined with cars with flat tyres. The petrol smuggled with great difficulty past the embargo was sold in two-litre soft-drink bottles. The road in from the border was dotted with burned-out wrecks, in which something had apparently gone wrong with the plastic jerry cans stuffed under the back seat. At a street market I saw an elderly woman trying to sell her best coat. She lowered her eyes in shame. It was a dark blue cloth coat with a light fur collar and elegant buttons, once purchased in a festive mood and proudly cherished, now worth no more than the price of a piece of bread and a few potatoes.
    In December 1999, however, Novi Sad comes as a relief after Bucharest. That is, at least at a first glance. My newspaper reports that the West still considers the economic boycott one of the most effective means of putting pressure on Miložsević's regime. Those government ministers should walk these streets. Everywhere in the city – officially almost devoid of energy – the lights are on, the traffic is heavy, the markets and shops are full of Western European goods. Heaven knows where it all comes from. The black market, it seems, has found thousands of leaks and loopholes, and some people are making a bundle off of all those Western European principles.
    I am welcomed to town in Novi Sad's newest restaurant, run by a former fashion model and opened only last Sunday. French wines, Dutch beer, fresh fish brought in daily from Greece. The restaurant is cheery and full.
    My table companion is an old acquaintance, Sarita Matijević, a onetime television journalist who now works for George Soros. As the evening proceeds she becomes increasingly melancholy, she talks about how once, long ago, she visited Amsterdam on the queen's birthday. ‘We travelled around the canals by boat, everyone was dancing and singing. But then it was as though all the sound had been switched off. Suddenly I realised, for the first time, that my life would never be normal again. I thought: from now on, we no longer belong, we're no longer a part of Europe.’
    I had met Sarita during that first visit to Novi Sad, in 1993. It tookplace during a few completely normal weeks in February: the children with their backpacks slipped and slid over the frozen piles of snow on their way to school, the shopkeepers opened their shutters, the girls applied their make-up, the teachers started their lessons with a grumpy cough, the trains blew their whistles, the factories churned out goods and the hissing of the espresso machine in Café Sax sounded like a promising start to the day.
    One might almost have thought that there was nothing wrong, back then in Novi Sad, had it not been for the blackouts at the strangest times of day, if only the hospital behind the dark red walls had not been full of wounded soldiers, of amputees, and if only the radio had not broadcast reports from the front all day. The city's favourite cafés and restaurants had fallen quiet, and it was that sudden dearth of laughter and conversation that frightened the people of Novi Sad more than all the fighting and inflation put together. Everyone was working and the muddy buses