“I can.”

“Good.” I gripped the top stake on my side of the fence and put all my weight on it. “Now go ahead,” I said.

One of his feet left my shoulders and moved over the wire to the stake. I used all my strength to keep the stake balanced, and then his other foot left my shoulder and cleared the barbed wire.

“Evan?”

“What?”

“Where do I put the other foot?”

“I don’t know,” I said foolishly. “Can you jump the rest of the way?”

“Perhaps,” he said. And, abruptly, he did just that. As soon as his weight left the stake I was leaning on, I rather foolishly sprawled forward against the fence.

Butec landed on the other side in a catlike crouch. His cap dropped off in the course of his descent, and his wig, the adhesive tape loosened by perspiration, was flapping a bit oddly. But he spun around to face me, a triumphant smile on his round white face. “Are you all right, Evan?” he asked.

“Yes, of course,” I said. It was I who should have been asking the question – after all, he was the one who had just jumped seven feet to the ground. “And you?”

“Quite well. But now how will you scale the fence?”

I showed him how. It was his turn to lean his weight upon each of the stakes in turn while I climbed them one by one to the top of the fence. When I reached the top, I swung my right leg over and stood with one foot on either side of the highest stake. It was an odd feeling, like that which a child experiences when manipulating a teeter-totter all by himself. I poised to jump, then sprang with both feet at once, just clearing the topmost strand of barbed wire with my left foot. My landing was not precisely catlike. My feet hit the ground, then my hands, and then I did a neat, if unplanned, little somersault and wound up standing on my own two feet. If I’d tried to do just that, I couldn’t have managed it in a thousand years, but in spite of myself I’d done a bit of tumbling that Sofija and her band of Latvian gymnasts might have been proud of.

Milan congratulated me warmly. “One can see you have had much practice at this sort of thing, Evan.”

“A bit,” I said. I had in fact fallen out of a tree in crossing from Italy into Yugoslavia and another time I fell off a train in Czechoslovakia, but this was the first time I’d ever acquitted myself so acrobatically.

“And now?”

“We move the stakes,” I said, “and play the same game again to get into Hungary.”

Some of the stakes didn’t want to move. They were wedged quite tightly into the steel mesh and seemed content to remain there forever. Milan and I wrestled them out one by one and scurried across the wide gravel path with them. On the Hungarian side was another vineyard that looked startlingly like the one we had just passed through except that the vines were set a bit farther apart. It is always jarring to discover that crossing a border does not entail a great change of terrain. One almost expects the ground itself to change color, as on a map, and one has to remind oneself that the ground was there long before there were countries and long before the various portions of the ground had been awarded names and dimensions.

We wedged our stakes into the Hungarian fence. I dropped to my knees, and once again Milan mounted my shoulders. Either he had gained weight in the past few minutes or I was growing weaker; whatever the case, it was not so easy to straighten up this time. But I did, and used one hand to support a stake from beneath, and Butec, cap and wig once again fixed neatly in place, took a little leap and flapped like a bird and landed again like a cat, spinning around at once to beam at me with triumph.

“And now you, Evan!”

I readied myself for the climb. This fence was a shade higher than the other, and I wasn’t sure whether Butec would be able to reach the higher stakes. I told him to climb with me, he on his side and I on mine, so that our weights would balance one another off. We both stepped onto the bottom stake, and as we stood there I heard in the west the unmistakable sound of an approaching patrol car.

I dropped to the ground so abruptly that Milan was sent sprawling on the other side. “Border patrol,” I said. “Get back and out of sight. I’ll try to bluff my way through. If I don’t manage it, work your way through to Budapest. Go to a man named Ferenc Mihalyi. Mention my name, tell him as much as you have to. He can arrange passage to the West. He-”

“But my manuscript, Evan!”

“I’ll try to get it through. If I fail, you can recreate it in London or America. But hurry!”

The patrol vehicle was already in sight. It resembled a jeep of World War II vintage. One man bent over the wheel. The other knelt on the seat with the barrel of his rifle resting on the top of the windshield. The rifle was pointed at me.

I stepped quickly away from the fence and moved toward the middle of the road. I threw my arms high in the air and began waving them about frantically in a sort of hectic semaphore. The jeep approached and pulled to a stop a few yards from me. The rifle remained trained upon me. The driver swung his lean body out of the jeep and advanced, pistol drawn. The rifleman hesitated for a moment, then got out of the jeep himself.

They began shouting things like What are you doing here? Do you not know that it is forbidden? How did you scale the fence? Even if I had had any intelligent answers for these questions, it would have been impossible to give them; as soon as one asked a question the other chimed in with yet another question, and no one waited for me to say anything.

They were badgering me in Hungarian, so I jabbered back at them in Slovenian. Hungarian border guards would be apt to understand Serbo-Croat, but Slovenian, spoken only in the westernmost province of Yugoslavia, was likely to be outside their ken. They would recognize it, I guessed, but would be unable to follow it. They were certainly unable to follow what I gave them, which was a rough approximation in Slovenian of the 1916 Proclamation of the Irish Republic. They listened to a few moments of this and then began putting the same questions to me in horribly accented Serbo-Croat.

I stuck with Slovenian and gave them a few more sentences of Padraic Pearse’s magnificent speech. It sounds quite marvelous in Slovenian. I swung my arms more wildly than ever, giving what I hoped was a fairly convincing imitation of a lunatic. If I could succeed in assuring them I was a harmless madman, they might not bother to turn me over to their Yugoslav counterparts but might be content to tuck me back into Yugoslavia on their own account, thus saving themselves some red tape.

In which case I could scoot around through the Rumanian border, then hop into Hungary, and with luck rejoin Milan Butec in Hungary. Evidently he had made good his escape. The two Hungarians were paying all their attention to me and hadn’t so much as glanced through the fence.

I kept talking, feverishly, earnestly, arms high in the air. The one who had been driving sighed heavily and holstered his pistol. The other lowered his rifle.

And, a few yards to my right, Hungarian words rang in the air.

“Drop your guns, fools! Hands in the air or you die like dogs! You are covered. Quickly!”

The driver’s arms shot over his head as if yanked by invisible wires. The rifle slipped from the other guard’s hands and clattered upon the gravel. He too held his hands high overhead.

“Get their guns, Evan.” This in Slovenian, incredibly.

I scooped up the rifle, then snatched the pistol from the driver’s holster. I backed off a few paces and turned to see the shining round face of Milan Butec. He was crouching at the side of the fence, bravely covering two terrified guards with one of our wooden stakes.

“Turn around,” I told the pair in Hungarian. They did, and I marched them back to their jeep. I gripped the pistol by the barrel and tapped them each in turn, not too hard, at the base of the skull. They went out like snuffed candles.