Budapest faded behind me, Istanbul shimmered ahead, but I woke up fixed in the blinding white night around me, somewhere in between: Subotica. Outside, a man walked up the train banging the bogies with startling violence. I took childish refuge in the name of the train, was able to think, ‘I’m safe, on the Cross-Balkan Express.’

“I get this train always,” the man with the high forehead said, but only for practising his English in his high voice. I’d seen him working his way up to that shaky sentence all the way from Budapest Keleti, his lip trembling as he sent me glances I ignored. “It is the best,” he assured me.

I wanted to say what, you’ve been on all the trains? I said, “Sure.”

He missed my tone, nodded to himself, pleased. “I travel this way often,” he thought he ought to explain. That might have been the start of a long conversation that would take us all the way to Istanbul as acquaintances, culminate in a drink in a bar near the Eminönü ferry terminals as friends, the exchanging of addresses, visits, my admiration of his wife’s wonderful cooking, and of his flawless children. I didn’t like him, though – there was something about him – nor was I fond of children, and I had long decided that Balkan mamas’ oil-slathered cooking just gave me the blips and shits. And he really wouldn’t have liked me, not once I had a few glasses of raki and beer and wine and he got to see part of the way inside my head.

I turned back to the window, heard him say, “There is no life in Subotica,” and chuckle. “Only the railway. It’s a place people leave,” he called, tense with his bravado. I could feel the other passengers’ eyes on him in the mistrust levelled at linguists. Had he said anything more – and with no raki in me, nor beer, nor wine – shame alone would have made me reply with the banal answers demanded of me. I saw his reflection as he took refuge in his newspaper, which bore a headline in Greek. I saw him make an exaggerated yet graceful movement of the shoulders, as befitting one of the original denizens of Constantinople, home-bound.

People didn’t only leave Subotica, I knew. There was a war going on all over the region. Serbs from all over what had been Yugoslavia were flooding in to Subotica.

With no air circulating artificially now that we were at a stop, with my companions’ permission, I forced our narrow window open. In a station outbuilding, music started up. For a change, not the thumping Europop drone that had started to infest the whole continent; it had to be Serbian folk music, for of course no other folk music would be heard in Serbia, just as it was in any Balkan country. I heard an impatient accordion, an excited violin, a serious bass, squeaky pipes. As feet began to thump a floor, I realised that the music was being played right there in the station. I looked closely at the apertures of the windows but saw only shapes moving, ghosts that came close to curtains, moved away, flitted back.

I know nothing about folk music and dance, but I know it’s important east of Calais in a way Morris Dancing will never be at home in England. “It’s our way,” an Istanbul friend explained to me once, “of bringing the village with us. Here we are.” He’d waved dispiritedly across to the ragged jumble of the first hill of Constantine’s city, secondhand Arabian Nights. “In this ridiculous, anonymous place. How else can we remember where we come from?” I saw them then, sat as I was on the old Galata Bridge with a glass of beer in front of me, a startlingly clear picture of the Turks coming from Central Asia weighed down with their villages, their music, their dances, their sheep, their nose for a good scrap and the first stirrings of an empire that would flourish and grow and eventually outstay its welcome and wither and die.

I longed to be home in Istanbul among those contented villagers who had forgotten the wars and the world with its rifles trained on them, and had settled down with their music.

Out there, the music stopped, and voices rose briefly, in anger, I thought, or anxiety, but then peals of laughter came through. Hands were clapped and a schoolmam voice conjured up concentration and purpose, and restored order. A chord button buzzed, itching to stretch itself out and play, a violin was scratched cheerfully, and feet tapped lightly across the floor as positions were taken up again.

“You like the music?” I knew the question was pointed at me. I’d heard our door slide open. I looked back into the compartment at the border guard, resplendent as a Filipino Army general in his uniform, dark blue piped with copper thread, many-pocketed, belted across the middle and over one shoulder. His hand was out for passports and visas. He busied himself with them, muttering. He barely looked at me, and said, “We are a joyful people.” His mates grinned behind him, three stooges. We were all performers when we were travelling, even the officials – or else what were those silly uniforms all about? I guessed they’d urged him, Go on, then – speak some of this English you’re always boasting about. He treated them to some more, said, “Even with our problems.” He distracted himself from them and asked me again: did I like the music?

I said, “Uh… sure.” I misused that little word again, as not fucking much, no didn’t seem a wise option. Another one who missed my tone. He smiled, sort of.

Why me, I wondered. When it was my turn, I handed him my passport and he gave it a glance and said something at which his mates laughed. “There is an exposition,” he told me, as he marked the fact of my entry into his jurisdiction with ink. “The local orphanage. The children dance. It is important to our culture, to sing, to dance.”

I’m from England, I wanted to say, but he knew that. I guess what I really wanted to do was offer the two words, Morris Dancing. “Helps you bring the village with you,” I suggested instead.

As the guard chewed over that one the little Turkish academic opposite caught my eye. I avoided academics whenever I could, though my few words with him earlier had revealed him to be relatively inoffensive. “Burada dans ediyorlar,” he hissed at me now: here they’re dancing. As the guard stared him down with unruffled contempt, I knew he meant that there might have been dancing in Subotica, but there were bullets flying everywhere else in Yugoslavia. A lot of them were aimed at the Serbs, of course, who were too busy, in fact, for the music and dancing to be the main things on their minds. It was good that there was music to greet them, even if it sounded to me like Morris dancing. I don’t know why I understood that, but I did and still do.

“People have got to dance,” I told the little academic in his own language, one I love to this day, even if I couldn’t love him or his children or his wife’s food or his village music. “No matter what else they do.”

There would be more orphans, I knew, all over the region, dancing the last thing on their minds. They would return to it one day, so it was important that somebody knew the tunes and the steps, even if they were in a railway siding at a border between hurt nations and could only be found as the daylight faded at the end of a fraught and jagged train journey.