And so, very early the next morning, Ildiko and I were to be found, on one of the railway stations at Budapest, with our light load of luggage. Alas, it was not Gustave Eiffel’s splendid creation, but the plastic-tiled cavern at which I had arrived a couple of days earlier. Soon we were aboard the international train that was going to take us south and west toward the great Barolo Congress. We went through places with names like Szekesfehervar and Balatonszentgyorgy, past great long lakes and mountains that shone with snow and ice. We crossed Hungary into Yugoslavia, passed through the mountains, came to Zagreb, quiet as a mouse then, though terrible times came since. Waiters flitted in dining car, bottles of wine rattled against the windows. Meanwhile Ildiko and I stood in the second-class corridor of the crowded train, and ate crusty ham baguettes grabbed through the train window from platform vendors. It was, as things turned out, the last modest meal we were to consume for quite a few more days.

And then, suddenly, our train emerged from the shadow of the Alps, and we found we had crossed not just one but several frontiers. We had moved from north to south, from east to west, from shadow into a world of brighter light and Mediterranean noise. At Villa Opicina we crossed the Italian frontier, where immigration checked our papers and the armed financial police examined our currency; after all, we were now entering the great new world of European Monetary Union. We stopped again in Trieste, where James Joyce and Italo Svevo wrote (and God bless both of them). Then slowly, as if uncertain of its destination, our train dragged across the plains of the Udine, of Friuli, of Lombardy, passing through or around ancient cities, capitals of old independent states, and crossed through ricefields, oilfields, battlefields. At one point we changed, and came, a little ahead of time, into the great central railway station in Milan, where we were hoping that someone or other was waiting to meet us.

And indeed someone was. Even before our train had come to a total halt, there were men in dark suits running down the plat­form, waving signs outside the train windows that said on them, in fine printing, ‘Barolo Congress’. As soon as we stepped down, frankly a little shamefacedly, from the second-class coach, they took our graceless baggage – Ildiko’s bright-coloured student backpack, my carry-on bag from Heathrow, an absurdly modest offering – and put it on great luggage carts, before directing us to a conference desk in the station concourse, where we could see a great banner waving, announcing ‘Barolo Congress’. ‘Tell them I am your secretary or something,’ murmured Ildiko, as we got closer. ‘Of course,’ I said.

Then suddenly, as we came nearer, a battery of photographers came forward, and started flashing cameras at us. A uniformed band in the background rallied, and began blaring brassy music towards us. When we reached the decorated desk, a small neat near-bald man, in his middle years, stood there, arms out. For some reason he wore a dark-blue blazer and a British regimental tie. He listened to my name, then greeted me effusively. ‘Ah, bene, bene, bene,’ he said, tucking his arm in mine, ‘The British press are here. We are truly honoured. You are the firsta, by the way. Oh, I am Professor Massimo Monza.’ ‘Ah, Professor Monza,’ I said, ‘I’d like to introduce my companion, Miss Ildiko Hazy.’ Monza took one long look and then seized and kissed several of her fingers. ‘What a beauty,’ he said, ‘And if you like beauties, please meeta my excellent assistants, Miss Belli and Miss Uccello. It is their taska to satisfy you in everything.’

Miss Belli and Miss Uccello were also standing behind the desk, behind piles of wallets and papers. They were brilliant dark-haired girls who both wore very bright smiles and very expensive designer dresses. Gucci scarves were tucked into their extremely open cleavages; rich gold bangles clanked on their well-tanned forearms; their dark hair fell over their dark eyes. ‘Ecco, press pack!’ cried Miss Belli, handing me a wallet. ‘Prego, lapel badge!’ cried Miss Uccello, coming forward to pin plastic labels to our breasts. ‘Now if you don’t mind to wait only ten minute,’ said Miss Belli. The main party will be arriving from the West on the blasted Euro-train,’ said Miss Uccello. Then after we will go in limos to the lago,’ said Miss Belli. ‘And you will see the great Villa Barolo, which always through history was the great home of poets,’ said Miss Uccello. ‘I think it must be very nice there,’ said Ildiko. ‘Ah, si, si,’ cried Miss Uccello, ‘Bella, bella, molto bella.’ ‘Si, si, si, bellissima,’ added Miss Belli.

Exactly ten minutes later, a vast transcontinental express, pulled by a magnificent streamlined, snubnosed electrical mon­ster, one of those great trains that tie the vast European Community ever and ever more closely together, slid slowly down the platform of Milan Central station. Milan immedi­ately responded. The men in the dark suits bustled down the platform, holding up their signs to the compartment windows. The press photographers ran forward, jostling and fighting to capture the perfect picture. The brass band began marching down the platform, playing a rousing tune. Then, slowly, the great writers of the world, the literary diplomats and the serious critics, the select members of the Barolo Congress that in later years would be considered so memorable and so seminal, began to debouch onto the platform. Their great valises and folded clothes-bags were piled onto great carts and hurried away. While cameras flashed, they streamed towards us. ‘Keep a watch for Criminale Bazlo,’ said Ildiko.

We watched them come. First came a group of American Postmodernists, not so young-looking these days; one of them was very nearly bald, another had his spectacles bricolaged together with sticking plaster, and looked far more like a Dirty Realist, another, in a dark-blue Lacoste sport shirt and white trousers, carried a set of golf-clubs and waved copies of his books at the cameras. Behind them followed a more youthful group of American feminists, with very short bristle haircuts, designer dungarees, and very upfront and affirmative expressions; by the time they reached the end of the platform, they were ahead. Then there was a very hesitant group of young writers from Britain, wearing extremely thick coats and woollen winter scarves. All of them were peculiarly tiny, and several of them came from the new multi-ethnic generation; when their lapel-badges were affixed, they proved to have names like Mukerji, Fadoo and Ho. The French were there in force: there were distinguished elderly Academicians, wearing small honours sewn into their lapels, and then younger authors of both sexes decked out in dark sunglasses and enormous baggy four-breasted suits. There were German writers from either side of the border that had just come down, still not comfortable with each other, though to the external eye they appeared entirely alike, all carrying small handbags dangling from their wrists and wearing black leather jackets.

Then from various countries of Eastern Europe there were several formerly dissident writers, in little forage caps, looking extremely confused about exactly what, these days, they were dissenting from. From Russia came a great hulk of a writer, six foot six tall at the very least, named Davidoff. He was accompanied by a flamboyant, yellow-haired woman, as vast, generous and capacious as the Russian steppes, as red-cheeked, bright-lipped and multi-layered as a Russian matrioshka doll, and dressed in an extraordinary electric purple, named Tatyana Tulipova. There was a lady Japanese writer in a pink kimono. There were black African writers in multi-coloured tribal robes, who laughed a lot, and a tall thin writer from Somalia who walked as over sand-dunes with the aid of a long cleft stick. There were tanned and muscular young academics from Southern California, carrying their tennis rackets; there were mean-looking dark-clad theoretical critics from Yale, carrying grey laptop computers and looking about nervously from side to side. There was, in fact, everything in the modern writing game except for Bazlo Criminale. Of him there was no sign. ‘Maybe he has his own train,’ said Ildiko.