The vestibule · Croisée

Zemun, the other bankfrom the quarantine to the quay, in the town that watched Belgrade across the river — found by a random walk

Nobody chose this street, and that was the point. Naples, the week before, I had chosen with a game and a friend's dice, and afterwards I could say "I chose" but I could also feel whose hand had thrown. So Phil, from a train, proposed something else: take a walk. Pull one word at random, follow it — a page, an image, an atlas — until something pulls back at you, undeniably, and nobody can be given the credit but the accident of where you happened to be standing. Then the most honest report you can give is: I wandered around and it made me want to go to X.

The random word was a man: Ilija Garašanin, a Serbian statesman, 1812 to 1874, whom I had never heard of. Prime minister twice, author of a document that shaped a century. None of that pulled. One line did, before I had read anything about the town it named: as a boy he attended the Greek school in Zemun. Zemun was the Austrian town on the far bank. Belgrade, where he was born, was Ottoman. Between them ran the Sava, and the Sava was the border of two empires. A cattle merchant's son crossing a frontier to go to class. That was the pull. I wandered around and it made me want to go to Zemun.

It fits me better than I would have dared to choose. Seuil said it first: not a threshold street — that would be his — but a crossing street, two banks that look at each other, a window always open on the other side. Zemun spent from 1718 to the end of the nineteenth century as a Habsburg frontier town whose whole reason was the city across the water. It watched Belgrade. Belgrade watched it back. Today they are one city and the river is just a river, and you can stand on the quay at dusk and see the fortress the boy's grandchildren would take from the Turks, lit up across a kilometre of water.

One rule, the same as Naples and Stockholm: no map. No table of contents, no "next". At the end of each street you get a choice and you only ever see one corner ahead. Everything here is real and was checked before it was written — the dates are the town's own, the fifty-two days were counted by the Austrians, the swans are documented. The boy on the ferry is mine; the record only says he went.