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EUROPE'S FUSS-FREE FRONTIERS

FORMERLY KNOWN AS THE IRON CURTAIN | January 9th 2008

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Adam LeBor drives casually from Hungary into Austria for a skiing holiday, and remembers when the borders between East and West were places of drama, skullduggery, even danger ...

Special to MORE INTELLIGENT LIFE

"You cannot leave Germany," the passport officer at Berlin airport told me, in a brisk, stern voice. I asked why not. "Because your passport is dirty," he answered, holding it delicately, like a policeman at a crime scene with an unpleasant piece of evidence. It was a grimy and battered document, one of the old style black ones. Even as he spoke, the cover began to unpeel, further diminishing my legitimacy and boosting his. Still, he eventually let me board my plane.

Nowadays, in the post-Schengen Europe, there are no passport controls at all, at least for land travellers. Part of me misses that strange sense of limbo on international borders, passing from one state to another, across some invisible but profoundly significant line.

We recently drove from Budapest to Vienna for a skiing holiday. The border between Hungary and Austria was once the barrier between dictatorship and freedom, guarded by uniformed men with sub-machine guns, dogs and minefields. It was here, at Hegyeshalom and the nearby fields, where perhaps 200,000 Hungarians fled to the west after the 1956 uprising. South, at the Hungarian city of Sopron, in the summer of 1989, the Hungarian foreign minister Gyula Horn and his Austrian counterpart Alois Mock cut open the border fence--thus triggering the opening of the Berlin Wall and the eventual collapse of communism.

Our trip was also historic, although not very dramatic. In fact, it was the very lack of drama that made the journey historic. We crossed the frontier just a few days after Hungary joined the Schengen zone. The booths where I had waited so many times to present my passport were empty, the customs posts abandoned. The frontier between the two states was now, it seemed, only theoretical.

I couldn't help feeling a pang of nostalgia for the bad old days at the border. For those of us raised in the West, crossing into communist Europe or trying to leave it always had a kind of extra thrill. There was the sense that this part of the continent was somehow the "other", with different values. The "normal" rules did not apply, because eastern and central Europe were dictatorships.

What if we had unknowingly met with a subversive person during our trip, who was being watched by the secret police? Or someone had planted some secret information in our luggage without our knowing? It might sound like fantasies from a James Bond film. But every now and then innocent westerners were arrested in the Eastern Bloc, caught up in events beyond their control, or used as innocent pawns in some darker political battle, especially in the Balkans.

Crossing from Bulgaria to Serbia in the dark days of the 1990s, we zipped through the Bulgarian side. Our border guard was a jolly fellow, who asked us laughingly, "Have you got any heroin? Here in Bulgaria we have excellent heroin?" We assured him that we did not. We drove a hundred yards into Serbia. It was a crisp autumn day with a clear blue sky, but somehow the very air seemed different. The country was under sanctions, surly and suspicious of Westerners. The Serbian border guards, dressed like paramilitaries, holding AK-47s, brusquely ordered us out of the car. The commander checked our passports: four scruffy Westerners, driving from Istanbul. He nodded sagely. And then the fun (for them) began.

I was ordered to drive the car to a nearby garage and was not allowed to leave. The car was hoisted on a giant jack and the guards began to dismantle it, the commander poking long wires into its innards. As his wire approached the non-existent drugs stash, he would suddenly wheel around and stare into my eyes, to see if I was feeling nervous. Not surprisingly, held at gunpoint in a rogue state while my car was being taken to pieces, I did feel somewhat nervous. My imagination went into overdrive. What if we did have some heroin, only we didn't know? We had parked in the street in Sofia the previous evening. What if we were unwitting mules carrying a Balkan Mr Big's consignment? What if the jolly Bulgarian border guard was not that jolly at all, but part of the plot?

Eventually, after several hours, the commander tired of the game, and looked almost disappointed. The atmosphere shifted, subtly, but inexorably. Our bags were lined up on the table, and I knew this was the moment: either we would be back in our car in a couple of minutes, or our bags would be emptied out and we would be asking to telephone the British embassy. The commander looked at me, and I looked at him. Our eyes met. He had the faintest glimmer of a smile. Pack your bags and go, he said. And we did, trying hard not to break the speed limit.

(Adam LeBor is a journalist based in Budapest and the author, most recently, of "City of Oranges")