He put on his sunglasses and retrieved a crumpled copy of Die Presse that had been pushed under the seat in front. He was becoming exasperated with himself, his relentless self-concern, his fantasies of collapse, of finding himself looking up from the floor at the faces of strangers, someone – there was always someone – shouting ‘Don’t move him!’. Did he wish for it? The failure that would excuse all others. Poor László! What could he do? A sick man! Helpless!

At Hegyeshalom, an hour out of Vienna, customs officers boarded the train. The Austrians, with their snappy berets and blue-grey tunics, were almost dapper; by contrast, the Hungarian trio, in caps and rumpled khaki, had the hapless look of young military conscripts, though for László, uniforms of any description could still provoke in him the old fear that those who wore them were spiders who moved along the web of the law, and whose interest could snare him in a tangle he would never escape from. He unwound the strap from his wrist and took off his sunglasses.

‘French?’ asked one of the Hungarians, in English, as László passed over the passport, which in 1971, after the success of Sisyphus Rex, the French government had at last seen fit to grant him.

‘From Budapest,’ said László, replying in Hungarian.

‘Budapest?’

‘Forty years ago.’ He wondered if the other understood. How much would he know about ’56? People would not remember it forever. Another generation and it would be a paragraph in a textbook memorized by schoolchildren for the sake of an examination question.

‘You’ve been about,’ said the young man, scrutinizing the stamps in László’s passport.

‘For my work,’ said László, and he prepared himself to deliver an acceptable explanation of what his work was. He knew from experience that customs officials were often nervous about writers, a tendency at its worst in those places with a long tradition of locking them up, and where the habit, the reflex of persecution, was hard for them to break. But he then realised that the young man was only envious of those enticing little stamps, and was, in fact, not particularly interested who came into Hungary, or who left. Hungary would be in the Community soon, another branch of the great European department store. The world had moved on; the grey-faced men, those who had worn coats lined with frost, were lost in the very history they had thought themselves the masters of. The country was open now, though László did not think he would ever quite get used to that. It had come too late for his generation.