In Europe

the space of three years, six more Dutch people have arrived and bought at least a dozen houses. Most of them are attracted by the low prices in Eastern Europe, several of them probably prompted in their exodus by a problem, the sort of people with a past one runs into everywhere at the continent's edge: back taxes, a disastrous divorce, a bankrupt business, trouble with the law.
    In one of the Dutch people's gardens stands a huge German eagle made of plaster, on a wall at one side of the house the owner has had his portrait painted, on horseback, waving a cowboy hat, ready to tame the Wild East. Another Dutchman spent more than 100,000 euros to have his home transformed into a little mansion, where he spends three weeks each year. The rest of the time the house stands empty. He has made one minor miscalculation, though: his nearest neighbour is the village's robber headman, who lives with his eight children in what is more or less a pigsty. This neighbour has carefully begun testing the locked shutters of the Dutchman's El Dorado. His children already cavort in the man's pool.
    In the café they asked my friend what it means, this ‘new Europe’. After the Gypsy on the shrieking accordion had been silenced, he explained that, in the course of history, this part of Europe had become increasingly poor, that everyone looked up to wealthy and powerful Western Europe, and that it was only natural that they should now want to be a part of it.
    But first, my wise friend told them, you will have to go through a deep valley of even greater poverty, so that in the ten years that follow you may perhaps be able to climb up to the subsistence level of the West. ‘And what's more, you're going to lose some very precious things: friendship, the ability to get by without a lot of money, the skills to repair things that are broken, the freedom to raise your own pigs and slaughter them as you see fit, the freedom to burn as much timber as you like … any number of other things.’
    ‘What?’ they asked him. ‘No more slaughtering our own pigs? No more burning wood?’ They looked at him in disbelief. At that time they did not know that, before long, they wouldn't be allowed to smoke in the café either. ‘The bell-ringer walked out during my story,’ my friend wrote to us. ‘I can hear him ringing the church bell right now, to mark the setting sun. There are some things that go on unchanged.’
    The world order of the twentieth century – in so far as one can speak of ‘order’ at all – seems to be gone for good. Save that: Berlin can never be understood without Versailles, nor London without Munich, Vichy without Verdun, Moscow without Stalingrad, Bonn without Dresden, Vásárosbéc without Yalta, Amsterdam without Auschwitz.
    The bell-ringer, Crazy Maria, Winrich Behr, Ira Klejner, the mayor, the toothless man, my old Aunt Maart, my wise friend – every one of us, whether we like it or not, carries with us the amazing twentieth century. The stories will continue to make the rounds in whispers, generation after generation, the countless experiences and dreams, the moments of courage and betrayal, the memories full of fear and pain, the images of joy.



Chapter One
Amsterdam
    WHEN I LEFT AMSTERDAM ON MONDAY MORNING , 4 JANUARY , 1999, a storm was rampaging through the town. The wind made ripples on the watery cobblestones, white horses on the River IJ, and whistled beneath the high iron roof of Central Station. For a moment I thought that God's hand had momentarily tilted up all that iron, then set it back in place.
    I was dragging my big, black suitcase. In it was a laptop, a mobile phone I could use to dispatch my daily columns, a few shirts, a sponge bag, a CD-ROM of the
Encyclopaedia Britannica
, and at least fifteen books to soothe my nerves. My plan was to begin with the baroque cities of 1900, with the lightness of the Paris World's Fair, with Queen Victoria's reign over an empire of certainties, with the upsurge of Berlin.
    The air was full of noises: the slapping of the waves, the crying of gulls on the wind, the roaring of the storm through the bare treetops, the trams, the traffic. There was very little light. The clouds chased across the sky from west to east, like dark-grey riders. For a moment they wafted a few notes along with them, the floating single strokes of a carillon. The newspapers reported that Morse code had now been phased out completely, and that the slipstreams of low-flying Ilyushins at