No Man's Land
A day for celebration
I spent a whole day this week in the bitter cold of No Man’s Land, at Nadlac on the motorway crossing between Romania and Hungary. From 8 in the morning till 4 in the afternoon. The occasion was the announcement by EU Interior Ministers that from 1 January 2025, Romania and Bulgaria will be welcomed into full membership of the Schengen zone. Ursula von der Leyen called it ‘a day of joy’, and she wasn’t far off the mark.
No more endless waits on the border. No more border police waking me on the overnight trains to and from Transylvania.
At Nadlac, even the border guards seemed de-mob happy. That very soon they can leave this bleak outpost to the crows, and go home and get proper jobs. No longer players in the peculiar game of national sovereignty.
There’s something wretched about each No Man’s Land, especially those where motorways cross borders. It’s not the missing ‘Man’ - no absence of people. Such places teem with people, fighting each other for a place in the queue of cars, or to get to the front of a new line that opens. Or cursing the officials as the queue jams for another hour, during each change of shift. The truck drivers blast away like foghorns, or like the long, low death-cries of extinct beasts.
The ghosts of all the travellers and stray dogs that ever passed this way haunt No Man’s Land. Borderlands, by contrast, are vibrant places, rich with smugglers and tragedies and intrigue. But No Man’s Lands are vacuums, with all the juice sucked out of them. Even the national flags can’t be bothered to flutter on their frozen poles.
Memories of No-Man’s Land in summer. An English girl, dressed only in knickers and t-shirt, stumbling out of a Magic Bus from Athens to London, to throw up at the feet of Yugoslav customs officials, when all they wanted to see was her passport.
A quarrel with a Hungarian customs official when he didn’t want to let me back into a country I had lived in for more than 3 decades. Post-Brexit, he argued, I had already fulfilled my quota of 90 days. The July heat scorched the metal roof of my travelling oven. We had already waited 5 hours in the car, where the thermometer read 44 degrees Celsius. On the basis of my UK passport, we were ordered out of the EU customs line, despite our Hungarian registration plate, into a line with Ukrainians, perhaps because their country also began with the letters U and K. When all rational argument failed, I tried Hollywood. ‘Anyway, don’t you recognise me from television?’ I asked my nemesis, a young Hungarian border policeman who was only trying to follow the ludicrous letter of the law. This question appealed to something human in him. ‘Most people know me from my latest film series!’ I said casually. The name of the series didn’t ring a bell, but I had his interest now.
‘Which film stars have you met?’ he asked. I wanted to come up with some French actress, but my memory froze. ‘Marlon Brando!’ I blurted, untruthfully - I had an interview set up with him, many years ago, but he cancelled at the last minute. The policeman fixed me with his beady eye, sighed, then stamped my passport. We were in.
At Nadlac this week, the tailback of trucks, waiting to enter Hungary, was only 6 or 7 km long. Radu Dinescu, President of the Romanian Road Hauliers Association, told me the tailback here often reaches more than 15km. The record wait was 5 days. There are no toilets and no refreshments. Just a few men selling horrible Chinese toy cars and chess-sets. One of the trucks is called ‘Discordia’.
The misery at this border is not just the fault of Austria and the Netherlands, Radu explained, for keeping Romania and Bulgaria out in the cold for so long. Under an EU regulation from 2008, EU member countries undertook to move the weighing and measuring, the sanitary and environmental controls on trucks, away from national borders, to dedicated parking lots next to the highways, deep inside countries, where the process should be carried out efficiently, disentangled from passport controls. But the national authorities in Romania could never be bothered, he said. Whilst being stuck outside Schengen seemed eternal, it seemed easier to cluster all the bureaucratic procedures at the border, like flies.
In the passenger cars, everyone I spoke to at Nadlac was aware that the Schengen-exclusion misery is about to end. Vasile, from Sibiu in central Romania on his way to Germany, said he already waited ‘too long’. A young Norwegian man with deep brown eyes driving a red van from Sofia, the Bulgarian capital, said he got stopped at the Serbian border, and had to drive all the way through Romania, because Serbia is not in the EU. He only had 15 hours more to drive, he said, till he took the boat to Oslo. I didn’t quite understand the stuff about the Serbian border, but the queue suddenly started to move and we waved farewell.
‘I am very, very happy that Romania can join Schengen,’ another driver told me in French. He had just come from the Republic of Moldova, and was bound for Switzerland.
Border-crossings leave a flavour in the mouth, of emigration and exile, the journey away, more than the happy homecoming. The 4 million Romanians working in western Europe.
Now it is autumn and the falling fruit, and the long journey towards oblivion. (…)
The grim frost is at hand, when the apples will fall
thick, almost thundrous, on the hardened earth.
D.H. Lawrence.
Who among the decimated villages
will count the cost for us
of our decision to forget?
who will accept our offering?
autumn moves on to winter.
G. Seferis/ transl. G. Casey
So I said goodbye to the kind Romanian policewomen, in their warm portacabin. Soon they will only exist in legends.
