FRONTLINE/World
 


Europe: The Re-Orient Express
by Marton Dunai

INTRODUCTION

Launched in 1883 and officially christened in 1891, the Orient Express became the world's most famous train, transporting passengers between Paris and Istanbul. In its heyday in the 1930s, the luxury train took three nights to cross Europe and arrive at the gateway to the Middle East -- a journey that inspired romance, intrigue and Agatha Christie's Murder on the Orient Express. Though some "nostalgia" trains still bear the fabled name, the original Orient Express stopped running in 1977. FRONTLINE/World Fellow Marton Dunai, a Hungarian, decided to retrace the route, from Turkey to France, on a series of modern trains, in search of the "new" Europe.

"I was born in Communist Europe," says the 28-year-old Dunai, "raised in post-Communist Hungary, and although I never emigrated, now I find myself living in the European Union."

The rapid changes in Europe have been invigorating, but also discombobulating. Some, like Donald Rumsfeld, have politicized the very terms "new Europe" and "old Europe" -- designating European nations that supported the U.S. war in Iraq as "new Europe" and those that did not as "old Europe." But in his journey, Dunai finds a Europe that is becoming an ever tighter community, independent of the United States, with surprising cross-currents and fault lines.

"There are no easy categories," says Dunai. "Come see it for yourself."


BUDAPEST, HUNGARY - The Train Pianist

There is no welcome like that of a customs officer. When I landed here, I was looking forward to the homecoming routine of hugging my parents and taking a long shower. After all, I'm from here. But my camera wasn't, which the customs officer interpreted as smuggling. He confiscated my camera, and in the end I had to pay a small fine.

Welcome home. I didn't even get to pass through the new "E.U. Citizens Only" corridor.

Hungary joined the European Union on May 1, 2004, a decade and a half after Communism fell. During those 15 years, eager anticipation had mixed with the pain of economic reform. A young and fast generation had grown up to challenge the values of the Cold War, which our parents were never really able to get out of their system, and by the time the country reached the home stretch, everyone had grown tired of it all.

"Negative energy is everywhere," said Ferenc Javori, the pianist I came here to see. A Hungarian Jew, he grew up in the Ukraine and moved to Budapest in 1980. "We [Hungarians] were unprepared for the E.U. after the 50 years spent mentally caged," he said. "Maybe our children or our grandchildren will look at it with virgin eyes."

Javori can't complain, though. He founded the Budapest Klezmer Band, a traditional Jewish ensemble that would entertain the world. He traveled freely before anyone else could, mingled with other musicians -- who need no language to understand each other -- and even played the piano for the Duke of Kent when he visited Hungary in 1992, aboard the nostalgia cars of the fabled Orient Express.

"We nearly fainted when the train rolled into the station in Vienna," he said of his first trip. "The wooden interiors, the mini-Steinway in the bar, the insanely elegant ladies and gentlemen. ... But it was all nothing compared to crossing the border without anyone checking our passports."

The duchess wanted to hear "Yesterday," and the duke requested the "Blue Danube Waltz." They had a great time until they got to Budapest, where "they caught their first glimpse of the Hungarian reality."

After the Orient spent a night in Budapest, Mario, the Italian waiter, was shocked to find the restaurant car completely looted of fine liquor, Javori recalled. Hungarian janitors had probably never seen decent whiskey, and they wanted to take it home.

A lot has changed since then. Hungary is richer than it has been in decades, and the people here are learning the ropes of democracy. But other countries don't always make sense the way they once did.

"Russians are building capitalism, Israel can't seem to put an end to war, and Germany seeks peace," said the Jewish musician, shaking his head.

And the Americans?

"They have become arrogant. There are so many sympathizers in the world, people that love the U.S., but then this Bush figure comes, with this Rumsfeld figure, and they give America a bad name. I have a dilemma. The Iraqi system had to end, because it would have been a mistake to appease Saddam the way Europe appeased Hitler, but --"

He didn't finish. He sat in worried silence for a while, then excused himself. I had to go too. I had to catch a flight to Istanbul, where I would board the first of many trains, retracing the old route of the famous Orient Express to Paris, across some of the countries that have changed the most since the Berlin Wall came down.


ISTANBUL, TURKEY - Uneasy Partners

I got here two weeks before George Bush did, long enough to savor a half-dozen tiny fincan cups of tea in one of the narrow, cobblestone alleyways without having to stare at a machine gun. But that was about to change. As the NATO summit neared, machine guns sprouted everywhere.

The walls were already plastered with posters bearing instructions to send Mr. Bush back where he came from. "NATO, Bush, Defol!" "Get outta here!" The city, or at least a significant part of it, wasn't going to welcome the American president and his allies.

I slept on a rooftop, and it overlooked the Aya Sofia mosque. An imam woke me at 5:30 a.m., singing from what seemed to be the deepest corners of his soul. It was time to do things before the weather got too hot.

I was told to start in Taksim, the neighborhood with some of the busiest and nicest shopping areas and cafés. Also in Taksim was the British Consulate, sitting in scaffolding behind walls of concrete-filled barrels and more machine guns. It was quieter than elsewhere, as if people were afraid that someone was going to bomb it again.

"Every window you see here is new," said my guide, Dylan, a New Zealander, who had done what many tourists do: He had come here for a week -- a year ago. He instantly fell in love with the city and its people and never left. When explosions ripped apart a British-based bank and part of the consulate in November 2003, killing 26 and wounding hundreds, he felt the same shock the locals felt.

That same week, a pair of bombs had exploded at two synagogues here, killing another 23 people. By the time I got to Istanbul, dozens of Turkish militants, allegedly funded by al Qaeda, were already being tried for their suspected role in the attacks.

We hiked up to one of the neighboring office buildings. Celûl Aksoy, a tanner with a studio overlooking the Embassy, invited us in with the usual hospitality of Turks.

"There, where you see that crater, was where the bomb went off," he explained, leaning out of the sixth-floor window. "My windows broke into smithereens, and I was smashed against the wall. I needed two months to recover. I lost 78 fully finished bags, and three full sheets of fine leather."

Aksoy was lucky to be alive, said Onur Akinci, a 20-year-old artist who had been nearby as well. "It was like an earthquake," he said, pantomiming. By the time we met, the balmy Mediterranean night had descended on Istanbul, and the young crowded the terraces of Nevezade, where we sat, by far the most popular hangout in town. The Nevezade was covered in glass last November.

"Terrorism is like a wild animal. Aimless." said Akinci. "Terrorists were born blind, and they will die blind. They don't achieve anything."

But Americans are also blind, he said. "They don't see other points of view."

When Turkey refused to let the United States attack Iraq from within the country, people here were jubilant. America wanted Turkey to risk setting the roof ablaze over its own head, Akinci said, and the parliament in Ankara had the guts to say no.

I walked back to my rooftop bed, and almost felt reassured when the imam woke me up again the next day. This is not the West, I thought, as I sat looking into the dawn over Istanbul. These people may be generally sympathetic to the West, but only as long as we remain sympathetic to them.

"We know that integrating westward is the only way to reach economic and political stability," said Alber Nahum, a political philosopher at Galatasaray University, "but we can't forget that our Eastern neighbors are, to say the least, suspicious of our Western friends."

Seen from Turkey, he added, Europe is a small peninsula on the Asian continent -- and America is very far away. To have these powers dictate what Turkey should do infuriates people here.

We were sitting on a university terrace overlooking the Bosporus Strait. Nahum pointed to a large building a few hundred yards down the strait. "Bush will come and stay in that hotel. Thousands will protest."

In the distance, the Istanbul Bridge stretched between Europe and Asia like a grey version of San Francisco's Golden Gate Bridge. It reminded me of San Francisco and all the marches there against the war in Iraq. But now it was time to move on. I headed to Sirkeci Station, where I would board a train, the modern-day heir to the Orient Express.


TURKEY TO BULGARIA - The Orient

Sirkeci Station was nearly empty when I arrived late in the evening. An embossment of Ataturk, the founding father of the modern Turkish republic, guarded the tracks. My train was waiting nearby, a decrepit series of blue sleeping cars that did nothing to evoke the illusion of the old Orient Express. I chucked my bags in my compartment and made my bed.

Sleeping on trains is the best -- until you reach a border station. At 3 a.m., a woman with the frontier police slammed the door open and shouted at me, demanding something in Turkish. Desperately trying not to faint, I saw that the other passengers were disembarking.

Apparently, they wanted us to line up at the control office, some five platforms away, and present our papers. They didn't rush it; the officer studied my passport like it was a magazine, and a very interesting one at that. The line behind me grew to some 20 people -- and I grew very unpopular.

We got going again in an hour or so, and already I hated border stations.

Next stop: Bulgaria, another country that looks to the West but comes from the East.


VELIKO TARNOVO, BULGARIA - Free the Bulgarian Medics!

"Hello, my name is Yordan," said the man, and shook my hand. I was in no mood to make friends. The station looked nothing like the Bulgarian Switzerland my guidebook had promised. A young female assistant of a local politician was supposed to pick me up, and Yordan was neither young nor female.

But helpful he was.

"Come, I take you to town," he said. "I know a family, and you can stay with them. Very nice family." Having no better offer, I followed him onto a desperately old bus, which took us to the outskirts of a town that looked more like Swaziland than Switzerland. Every building wanted to fall apart, and there were craters on the road that were large enough to swallow a Land Rover.

Will the European Union change all this once Bulgaria joins as planned in 2007? "I don't know," Yordan shrugged. "I don't trust E.U. They will come here and buy everything, and we will be no job."

"Here," Yordan said, "this is house." He summoned me into the home of a quiet Gypsy lady, who sat on a leather sofa watching a Brazilian soap opera in Bulgarian. She stood up and took my passport. "She will give it back to you when you pay her," Yordan said, pocketing the euro I gave him, and walked away.

Veliko Tarnovo is not huge, and my room was apparently not far from the town center. I went to the municipal building and found Ivan Krastev, the town's public relations chief, who apologized and said he had sent his assistant to another railway station, thinking international trains don't stop here.

Many people still idealize the European Union, he said. Yordan must be an exception, because two-thirds of the country want to join the alliance and are convinced that everything will get better once they start to get their paychecks in euros.

"That's actually what's difficult," he explained. "We have three years to prepare them that the E.U. will mean obligations as well as opportunity, and it won't be a hen that lays golden eggs."

There are some 90,000 pages of E.U. rules that Bulgaria will have to play by. But membership does promise locals very tangible benefits, such as the Union's generous agricultural subsidy system and the regional development funds, each of which can potentially inject billions of euros per year into the Bulgarian economy.

Krastev, tired and sweating in the midday heat, showed me a local restaurant where he said they made the best shopska, the famous Bulgarian salad of vegetables and white cheese. It was a nice terrace, with traditional carved wood decorations and red tablecloths. But what really struck me was the server's T-shirt.

"Free the Bulgarian Medics in Libya," it said. Almost every server in town, I would learn, wore that slogan. And it wasn't only on servers' T-shirts -- it was everywhere, from bills posted on lampposts to giant posters affixed to walls. The five medics were being held hostage on the bizarre charge that they intentionally infected people with AIDS -- an obvious lie, people said here, to cover up failures in Libya's own health care system.

Bulgaria, a fresh member of NATO, was also learning fast that being allied with the West is not always a happy experience. Bulgarian soldiers were getting killed in Iraq, six since December 2003.

That evening, wandering around Veliko Tarnovo, I understood the comparison with Switzerland. A large royal fortress from the 13th century sat on a nearby hilltop, and the streets that covered the steep slopes and descended into the gorges exuded the air of an Alpine community, though one that hasn't been painted in a few decades.

"Maybe things will be better," said Yordan, who appeared at the station the next day. He was waiting for the Istanbul-Bucharest train, apparently a lucrative source of tourists to lure into unregistered guesthouses. "If we have to suffer a little bit, that's OK. Europe will come here and give us money, but we have to work hard first. And the Americans -- they are our new friends now, and if they want help, we have to help them, no?"


BULGARIA TO ROMANIA - Something Cool

Traveling on Bulgarian and Romanian trains, especially when you have to cross a border station, requires patience.

The Romanian border police started off by taking our passports, so complaining too loudly was out of the question. But when Vasile Nistor, a chubby 22-year-old Romanian college student, helped himself to the compartment I had occupied by myself, I was ready to scream. I was wrong about him, though. Vasile took some time to get used to, but in the end he made the three-hour wait more tolerable. He was an in-person talk radio program.

I learned his whole story. In search of opportunity, he had moved to Bucharest from a small Romanian village. Now, he said, he was ready to leave Romania as well. He worked as an office assistant for the American Peace Corps, and all of his international connections reinforced his desire to "make it big," bigger than would be possible in Romania.

"I just applied to this air traffic controller training in Amsterdam," he said in one of the few noncompound sentences he uttered. "I may end up doing that, although I'm an English major, but you know, anything that will get me out of here is good enough. I also have some friends in Brussels, and they told me I could stay with them for a while, but until I do that, I travel. You know, traveling is my life. I'm just coming from Sofia; I went there while I'm on my summer break -- I took off a few days from work and went there, and you won't believe who I met there."

I readied myself for a Matt Damon sighting, but instead he told me of an 80-year-old Australian man who had been traveling the world for 20 years straight, writing about beer. Not so very surprising for an Aussie, I said, but Vasile didn't hear me.

"That's kind of what I wanna do too," he sped on. "You know? Travel the world and do something cool. There's very little opportunity to do cool things in Romania."


BUCHAREST, ROMANIA - Peace? Prosperity?

Vasile was still talking when we rolled around the Bucharest shantytowns and into the train station. My friends Kevin and Alina were waiting for me at the train station. I was more than an hour late.

Kevin and Alina live in one of the few places Bucharest can still boast about after decades of degradation: the leafy Bulvardul Aviatorilor, which is not so much a boulevard as an avenue. But its age-old villas made up for the misnomer, and I quickly shed my travel stress at a nearby restaurant, where we sat down for dinner.

My comfort ended the next day, in an early-morning traffic jam. I was to meet a state secretary of the Ministry of Defense and ask him about Iraq, where Romania had sent the largest contingent of troops of any former Communist country. The Defense Ministry building had been constructed to intimidate, and intimidated I was. It looked as though Stalin and Julius Caesar had designed it together: huge, immensely powerful and extremely ugly.

Instead of the state secretary, I saw Mihaela Matei, the head of Euro-Atlantic strategy in Romania. Integration into Europe was proceeding unevenly: The European Union promised membership to Romania but not until 2007 at the earliest, whereas NATO had admitted the country in 2002. Romanians decorated Bucharest with about a million blue NATO flags -- which are still up -- and enthusiastically sent hundreds of soldiers to Iraq on top of the hundreds they'd already sent to Afghanistan. But antiwar France -- Romania's old friend -- may no longer back Romania's E.U. bid.

"We have tried as much as possible not to engage in [the Iraq] debate," Matei said. Military participation helped Romania assert its role in the international community, and she said the country had also promised active participation in a future joint E.U. military corps. Meanwhile, "We are trying to run business as usual and avoid the political quarrel."

Out of necessity, Romania had always put a lot of emphasis on its military might, she reminded me. The country's location on the Black Sea, an obvious and hard-to-control east-west route, and its relative proximity to unstable areas like the Balkans called for military muscle.

As we rode in a rusting Romanian-made jeep to the headquarters of the military police, I began to doubt her cocky assertion of Romanian might. But then First Lieutenant Ivan Eduard appeared at our vehicle, and my doubts evaporated. He was well over six feet tall and sported shoulders that made me shrivel.

The 26-year-old Eduard had served in both Afghanistan and Iraq, but he didn't say much about his experiences. "We were trying to block smugglers," he muttered, walking along a decrepit corridor. "Drugs and weapons. We had a lot of responsibility." He opened a door to a tiny room. Two women were waiting there, wives of soldiers whose husbands were serving in Iraq, somewhere near Najaf.

The wives were nervous. "Except for the heat and dust, which is killing them, they are OK, they say," said one of the women, Claudia Nistor. "They write when they can, and they often call, but they can't really talk about what they do."

She turned away. The other woman, Valerica Tatuta, saved the situation and said she would take her husband to the mountains when he came back. "Nothing of that flatness, heat and sand," she smiled. "We'll be there for a week, just the two of us, and then take our daughter to the beach. She's 11 and can't wait to see her father back. But he's mine first."

The soldiers bring back more than their fatherly presence. They make US $50 a day in Iraq, which adds up to a bounty when they return from their six-month rotations. Nine thousand dollars is equal to some five years' average salary here. Many of them buy cars or take on a mortgage. But, said Tatuta, "I don't think money will change too much. My husband considers this his mission."

The communication officers smiled reassuringly. Then Tatuta let out a deep sigh. "This is the last month they have there, and it's by far the most difficult period for us."

As the jeep squeaked and bounced its way back to the ministry, the words of these two women stayed with me. The end of the Cold War was supposed to bring peace and prosperity; instead, their husbands were serving in a remote war. Prosperity, too, was relative. The stores in Bucharest were now full, the buildings were decorated with glitzy billboards, but most people would never be able to give up the penny-pinching that had become second nature.

Kevin and Alina took me to a Middle Eastern bar that afternoon, complete with a hookah and exotic tea. My mind was racing as I went to bed. In the morning, I would say goodbye to the East and head for France in a 28-hour train marathon.


ROMANIA TO FRANCE - The New World Order

As the train left at dawn from Bucharest North Station, I sank into a zombie-like state. I wouldn't fully wake up until Brasov, the easternmost city of Transylvania, where my solitude ended as an elderly couple settled in my compartment.

"Do you mind if I take my shoes off?" the woman asked in Romanian. I didn't understand, so she repeated the question in German. We tried a few languages we might share, until she gave up, letting out an exasperated sigh in Hungarian. "Hat, Istenkem." "My goodness." She found it extremely funny that I, too, was Hungarian and erupted into conversation. It would last all the way to Budapest.

"My name is Magdalena, and this is my husband, Sterian Bernea," she said. Sterian was a jovial Romanian mathematician and retired army colonel. They were going to visit their children, both of whom had fled to Hungary during the harshest days of Ceausescu's dictatorship.

Those were hard times. "We had money, but we couldn't just buy food; there were monthly portions. One family could only get 10 eggs per month, for instance, and half of those were broken or had an embryo inside."

Now, she said, it was the exact opposite. There are enough eggs to buy a dozen a day, but they couldn't afford it. Together, they got a monthly pension of some 9 million lei (US $275), barely enough to scrape by on.

The Romanian-Hungarian border is an entrance to the European Union and relative prosperity. In Budapest, I changed trains, boarding the night train to Munich, Germany. An attendant took my breakfast order and handed me sheets, towels and bottled water. Finally, this was starting to resemble the legendary Orient Express.

From Munich, on yet another train, I headed to Nancy (pronounced nohn-SEE), which is not a woman but a French city not far from the German-French border.


NANCY, FRANCE - A European Family

I fell in love in Nancy. She was a blonde, with blue eyes and a captivating smile. Her name was Hanna, and she was 11 months old when we met.

Hanna is the child of Said Labidi, a 34-year-old French-Algerian journalist, and Katalin Lukacs, a 28-year-old Hungarian travel writer. They had recently moved into a beautiful house in the Nancy suburbs, and their months of total baby priority were about to end. Hanna was now almost able to walk on her own, eat on her own and play on her own. It was about time: Both Said and Katalin had months of sleep to catch up on.

The couple had met five years earlier, when both were on a business trip to Turkey. A framed photo of them dressed as the sultan and his queen, shot in Istanbul, adorns the bookshelf in the living room. Katalin moved to France about three years ago and took an intensive one-year course in French to be able to talk to Said comfortably. For him to learn the hellishly difficult Hungarian language was all but out of the question.

I couldn't help but look at this couple as a symbol of European unification. Hungary, a small and weak Eastern European nation, made a major effort to unite with Western Europe. Hungary strove for years to make it happen, its efforts ultimately resulting in a celebratory admission. France, meanwhile, did a lot to smooth transition in the West. On May 1, 2004, when Eastern Europe officially became part of the political Europe to which its geography and history were tied, events had only caught up with the reality of these two people and many others.

I have no idea how many East-West couples there are, but I do know that they feel right. Kevin and Alina, my friends in Bucharest, are in much the same shoes: Kevin is French, Alina is Romanian, and they are as happy as any couple I know.

Said and Katalin could be the living proof that Old Europe and New Europe are only entries in the Rumsfeldian dictionary. But when we started to disrupt the tranquility of the afternoon by talking about politics, Said's words made me realize that France doesn't share the gratitude Eastern Europe feels toward the United States. Neither does it share the humility.

Said was fuming with anger when he talked about the Iraq campaign, for example. "This is not a problem of terrorism; it's a problem of colonialism," he argued. The United States does exactly what Europeans did during colonialist times. Americans go around the world and treat it as theirs, caring even less about locals than Europeans did. The United States spreads democracy and believes everyone wants its freedoms, he said, but do they really?

Of course, many of today's problems are the result of the previous colonialist powers, we concluded. The Middle East is a powder keg because of the way the British left it after World War II -- drawing borders that guaranteed conflicts. In two obvious but far from isolated examples, they deprived Palestinians and Kurds of a homeland. Americans arrived on top of that gunpowder barrel and didn't -- and don't -- exactly watch their steps.

Said, as an Arab Frenchman, is infuriated by what he sees as America's tendency to lump all Arabs together.

"I have about as much to do with Bin Laden as Katalin has to do with Hitler," Said said.

"If I'm this angry, imagine the millions who live in the Arab countries, how angry they are," he continued. "America is creating a breeding ground for terrorists. Before, Iraq wasn't a particularly anti-American country. Look at it now."

He was raging. If it hadn't been for Hanna's blue eyes, it would have taken him hours to calm down, it seemed. But seconds after his baby walked into the room, Said melted. He picked up his guitar and started to play Bob Marley's "Redemption Song" to her. "Won't you help to sing / These songs of freedom?"

He was a proud and happy father -- in a new Europe.


VIENNA, AUSTRIA - A Nuclear Diplomat

Fully awake for a change, I zipped through the German countryside on my way to Austria. I spent hours staring out the window, lost in the infinite greenness of forests, fields and mountains. Germans maintain their country like the terrain of a model train set.

Upon arriving in Vienna, I checked into a youth hostel downtown and went searching for a kebab place -- only Turks seemed to keep their restaurants open past midnight here. I found myself on Mariahilfer Strasse, or Hail Mary Street. Despite its name, it's not so much a religious center as a legendary shopping area. Legendary for Hungarians at least: This was where my compatriots flocked to buy their first VCRs, CD players and freezers in the late 1980s, when Hungarians were more or less free to go places, but couldn't get any of those products at home. These merchants made a killing on us back then, I thought.

The next morning I went to see Ken Brockman, a senior official at the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), the United Nation's nuclear watchdog.

Brockman's ancestors were Germans, but he was born in Louisville, Kentucky -- what he calls "a heartland of America type of place." He graduated from West Point and in the 1970s served in the U.S. Army in Germany, patrolling the border between East and West, and occasionally guarding the Czech frontier as well.

"If they saw something suspicious, their prefab guard towers went up in three days," he said of the Czechs. "But we did trade cigarettes with them occasionally."

After demobilization, "Ken and his VW Beetle took off for 35 days to do Europe," Brockman recalled. That was when he saw Vienna for the first time. He would be back some 25 years later, as chief of Nuclear Reactor Safety at the IAEA. He was to start in March 2003, just as the United Nation's nuclear inspectors were doing their final pre-invasion laps in Iraq.

"My friends were telling me, 'What are you, crazy?'" he said. "'You want to be a target?'"

Mainly responsible for reactor safety, he wasn't among the inspectors sent to the Middle East, but his experience in Vienna sheds some light on why the IAEA had to walk away from Iraq empty-handed, with the job half-finished. Americans, he said, tend to want things yesterday -- an attitude hardly workable in the Muslim world.

"To Americans, there's no time like the present," he said. "That got a lot worse after someone came and smacked us in the face on 9/11. We have a very short fuse now." But nuclear diplomacy doesn't work with jittery negotiators. "No wonder Europeans have had much more success trying to stop Iran's nuclear program," he added. Brockman, whose office is decorated with a version of the U.S. Constitution adorned by Native Americans, had a lot of explaining to do in Vienna about his government's actions in the Middle East.

"I still believe they [the Bush administration] did what they did based on information; they just haven't shared it with us," he said. "Of course, Western Europeans are upset about that, much more so than Eastern Europeans. America never acknowledged alternatives to its course of action."

But for Europeans, he said, Iraq was just a backdrop for much more important things. In terms of its Union, Europe is where the United States was in the 18th century. The old nationalistic model was by now mostly a thing of the past, and most nations were trying to figure out how they could make their new unit, the European Union, work.

"Historically, as the U.S. came together, each state was very unique for a long time," he said. "It took us a civil war to figure out what we were going to do. Some of the challenges, some of the dilemmas are the same in Europe today. ... It's amazing how many things I can correlate back to the U.S. and say, 'Been there, done that.'"

Brussels, the European capital, is on the right track, he said. The bureaucracy is a little oversized, the European military is a bit too small, but there are amazing improvements -- like the three-year-old single currency, the euro, which "to me is the best thing in the world."

Indeed, I thought, as I left the glitzy U.N. skyscraper and bought a subway ticket downtown for 1.50 euros.

Soon, the 10 new E.U. members, most of which are from the old Soviet bloc, will also share the common currency. That's a sure sign of arrival in a unified Europe, where we can go shopping anywhere, but we don't have to go far if we don't want to. I grabbed my bags at the hostel, went back to the train station and settled into the Orient Express. The last train still calling itself that would now take me all the way to Paris.


PARIS, FRANCE - Football in France Is Greek

I had done this before. As I got off the Orient Express at the famous Gare de l'Est (Eastern Station), I realized I had made the same mistake four years ago on this train when I decided not to pay for a sleeping birth. Once again, I had slept badly, contorted into an L-shape across four seats.

Hauling my luggage through the subway system, I cursed the inexplicable French distaste for escalators. It took a nap and a cup of iced coffee for me to regain the will to live.

My Greek friend Dimitris, who lives here and put me up, was eager for us to get going. Euro 2004, a soccer competition only I seemed not to have followed, was in its final matches. "Greece is whopping major a_ _," Dimitris said, and told me I would be watching the game against France with him and his friend that night, on a giant screen that had been set up downtown. We would be among 3,000 screaming French fans, and our faces would be painted with the Greek flag.

Europeans are about as crazy for football (the version you play with your feet) as Americans are crazy for football (the gladiator version), baseball and basketball combined. My friend's plan didn't sound safe. To hell with it, I thought. Greece would lose anyway. The French were the defending champions.

Of course, the Greeks won, knocking the French out of the tournament. The French fans were ready to mount barricades. By night's end, riot police had to be summoned. And incredibly, Greece kept winning until it captured the title.

After each victory, Dimitris and I -- and what seemed like every Greek in the city -- celebrated in a Greek tavern on the Right Bank. They all said it was the only real Greek place in the whole of Paris. We would dance and sing -- well, they would sing and I would pretend to sing -- Greek football chants into the wee hours of the night, then get a cab, go back home, drink some more and pass out. It's what Greeks do when they are happy, apparently.

I stayed in Paris for a few months after this trip. I hate to act like a tourist; but to act like a Greek immigrant was the next best thing to acting like a Parisian.

In the early 20th century, the Hungarian poet Endre Ady came to Paris eight times in as many years when he was my age. "My Eastern blood, the laggard, / Quenches its thirst in the West," he wrote in one of his poems. Ady never quit complaining about how horrible a place Hungary was back then. I've been to Paris five times now, and I like it, but these days I think Hungary is not so much worse.

Still, I felt at home here in ways few cities allowed me to. All I needed to do now is write some poems and drown myself in alcohol while breaking a few dozen hearts and I could be the next Endre Ady. But that would have to wait -- I had some business to take care of in Germany first.


BACKNANG, GERMANY - Refugees at Home

Paris at dawn on a Sunday is a special thing. The leafy boulevards are empty, save for a few high-spirited drunks, and as the sun comes up, you start to dream you are walking inside an impressionist painting. To have a German train to catch at 6:15 a.m. is more than a mild annoyance.

But my spirits rose when I arrived in Backnang, a small town some 20 miles outside of Stuttgart, in southern Germany. I met Franz and Brunhilde Hegemann there, a couple in their 50s, with three daughters in their 20s. They had fled what was once East Germany.

It was January 1989. Each of the five previous years, in preparation for fleeing their homeland, Franz and Brunhilde had gone to West Germany to visit families. Unlike so many other East Germans, they had been allowed to go legally -- although legalities were unpredictable and could change on official whim. In 1988, Franz had started the official emigration process.

Just after the new year, Franz learned that they had gotten the permit, but he didn't know which day they would be allowed to go. "I went to the train station every single morning for two weeks and got five place reservations for the day. We had tickets, but without those reservations, we would have been kicked off the train."

Then, on January 15, the word came that they would be going the next day. They packed up the entire apartment -- a murky blockhouse flat that the government had allotted to them -- and cleaned it. With their three young girls in tow, they hauled everything they could carry to the train station. They had signed papers forfeiting their citizenship in the German Democratic Republic (GDR).

Franz got up from his sunlit porch and went into the house to fish out the documents. He showed me the passports that enabled them to go to the West. They were valid for one day: January 16, 1989.

"We had no future in the GDR," Brunhilde said. Of course, they didn't know at that point that the GDR had little future itself. The two Germanys would unite in less than 10 months, although "we sensed nothing of that in January. The state was as strong as ever."

Now, there were only a few signs that distinguished them from ordinary West Germans. They didn't own their house, but it was big and nice, and their country's wealth and success had clearly washed off on them. On the weekends, they drove their BMW around Germany and sometimes traveled to Switzerland, Holland or France. Still, they didn't take things for granted, they said, and they probably never would.

But their children had grown up in this new world. One worked in Scotland now, another had recently gotten married in a nearby town and the youngest lived the life of a college student. At 3 p.m., she was sleeping upstairs. "She came home in the morning," Brunhilde smiled. This peaceful existence, they said, had much to do with Germany's role as a powerhouse of Europe and a leader of the European Union.

"The E.U. guarantees freedom and peace," Brunhilde said. "It helps the next generation to a global thinking." She wanted to see Europe grow mightier than the United States, economically and politically. Americans could be taught a lesson of peace then, she insisted.

"We are big friends of America," Franz added. "I've been there five times, or six. Atlanta, Mississippi, New York. I love New York. I've been on top of the World Trade Center, back in 1996. It was amazing. It was beautiful."

They drove me back to Stuttgart, where the local summer festivities -- music, pork and beer, this being Germany -- were under way. We ate a pizzalike local delicacy, strolled around Schlossgarten Park a bit, then said goodbye. I settled on a nearby bench, determined to stay awake, but the sun, the summer breeze and the reggae streaming out of a nearby café proved to be stronger. I slept like a baby, and when I came to, I saw that dozens of people were stretched out on the lawn around me, sleeping. If I had ever thought Stuttgart was only interesting because of Porsche and Mercedes, I was wrong. Its reggae is world-class too.

It was time to leave. I had to catch a night train, which this time wasn't going to be a nightmare. I bought the sleeper berth (for a mere 10 euros), so that when I woke up in Paris the next morning, I would be rested -- ready to resume my life in this new hybrid Europe that is busy being born.


Marton Dunai is a Hungarian reporter who recently completed his studies at U.C. Berkeley's graduate school of journalism. He currently lives and works in his native Budapest, Hungary.

Part of the Web-exclusive FRONTLINE/World Fellowship program. FRONTLINE/World is exploring partnerships with some of the leading graduate schools of journalism around the United States with the goal of identifying and developing the best of an emerging generation of journalists. The FRONTLINE/World Fellowship program is supported by Carnegie Corporation of New York.


 
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