In Europe

Vilnius, Western vacuity has descended with a vengeance. The yellow walls are tidily plastered, the old ornaments look like new, and Adidas, Benetton and other familiar spirits smile down on you as you walk. Halfway down the street, a new wind is blowing: six boys, two girls and one guitar, short leather jackets covered in shiny studs, above them soft, blushing faces.
    The inner city here has been converted, with much European funding, into a showcase, a beacon of Western welfare. Last year, in their enthusiasm, the Lithuanians even adopted Western European time, so that now their winter evenings begin around 4 p.m. But the city's Western European image feels a bit brittle. Cross a bridge and you will find yourself in the old Užzupis district, the Latin Quarter of Vilnius, full of mud, flaking walls, scenes straight out of Victor Hugo and Émile Zola, right down to the rotting hay in the courtyards. Outside the city there are wooden houses everywhere, their roofs rusty corrugated iron, a few half-rotted balconies,smoking chimneys, a horse and wagon, and crows in the bare fields, lots of crows, this is crow country. In some of the villages there are boarded-up sheds, the remains of an old wooden synagogue.
    Meanwhile, the city's
jeunesse dorée
gather day after day at Café Afrika. They smoke in great earnest, drink coffee in silence, listen to French
chan-sons
. Lithuania has the highest suicide rate in Europe.
    The spring thaw has begun. On this March day, the sunlight on the nineteenth-century walls is merciless and clear as glass. There are not many cars on the street, the few people out walking cast sharp shadows on the pavements. I pass a mercantile house built in 1902, with striking grill-work around the roof. The house must once have had a Jewish owner. The front of the one next to it is decorated with stylised, seven-armed candlesticks. Around the corner is a centre for social work, formerly a
heder
, a Jewish school.
    Vilnius – ‘Wilna’ in both German and Yiddish – was once a thoroughly Jewish town, a centuries-old centre of Jewish learning and culture. There was a Jewish university, and the town had six Jewish daily newspapers. After 1945, the Jewish gravestones were used as steps for the new union hall. Today there is a little Jewish museum with two Torah scrolls, the skeleton of a lectern, a couple of portraits and a handful of commemorative plaques. That is pretty much all that remains.
    Close to my hotel is a sombre government building, a solid chunk of stone with huge doors, massive thresholds, stairs and galleries. The pillars at the front of the building remind me vaguely of a Greek temple. It could once have been a college, or a government ministry, or the offices of the district administration. It is one of those nineteenth-century government buildings of which there are hundreds all over Europe. The front is spotted with blank patches, the places where the eagles, shields, swastikas and hammers and sickles followed each other in rapid succession. Otherwise little has changed throughout the years.
    In 1899 it was built as a courthouse for Vilnius, as an administrative district of the Russian Empire. That was what it remained until 1915. Then it became a German courthouse: the inhabitants of Vilnius were subject to German martial law, and the Germans enjoyed all the privileges of the new coloniser. From January to April 1919, the building housed a Bolshevikrevolutionary tribunal. The Lithuanian flag flew above it for a while, then for more than fifteen years it was where justice was administered under the auspices of Poland. Between 1940–1, the courtrooms, halls and cells were used by the judges and executioners of the Soviet Union; more specifically, those of the secret police, the NKVD. In 1941 the building became the headquarters for the Gestapo, the
Sicherheitsdienst
and the notorious Lithuanian
Sonderkommandos
. After 1944 the NKVD, and later the KGB, resumed activities here. That lasted until August 1991. Today it is a museum.
    The old courthouse has witnessed the entire historical drama of the Baltic States throughout the twentieth century. At this moment, Lithuania has 3.5 million inhabitants, Latvia 2.5 million (one third of whom, by the way, are Russians), Estonia only 1.5 million (also almost one-third Russians). Just like the Benelux countries, the three Baltic States are where the fault lines between a number of European cultural regions come together. Lithuania is the last