Home now from the two Berlins, Budapest, Belgrade, Bucharest, from the smaller cities of Ljubljana and Sarajevo in Yugoslavia, Timisoara, Cluj, and Sibiu in Romania—and from meeting a procession of novelists, poets, intellectuals of other disciplines, students, professors, and cultural commissars along the way—why am I finding the writers’ faces the hardest to remember?

I can summon at once the high-collared head man at the Institute of Literary Sciences in Budapest, saying the name of their patron “Lukács?” at me, like an alchemist testing me on a gold I mightn’t know. Or the acolyte face of the woman professor in Cluj, asking me for the names of new British novels as if asking for bread. Or the chilly smile of that university Rector: “The Fulbright professor here, also a woman. Why does your country keep sending us women?” Or the flushed young professor running up to me clutching a worn paperback of one of my books, saying “Did you write this? You did? I can’t believe you’re here” (meaning—how did they let you in?). Which face, when I asked where it had obtained the book, closed softly, “Oh, somewhere. Maybe, from a friend.” Dozens of other faces I can still see plainly, all the clearer for the unremitting winter light. Or in a patch of sunlight in Ljubljana, or in the acrid, yellow soft-coal air of Sarajevo. Each with its anecdote safely attached.

But the writers of Eastern Europe? Barring a few known to the world or