People often imagine escape as the end of a story.

You cross the border.

You are free.

The picture fades.

In reality, crossing the border solved one enormous problem and immediately created a dozen new ones.

I was twenty-three years old.

I was highly educated.

I considered myself highly intelligent.

I was also, as I later described myself, totally immature and totally lost.

I had succeeded in leaving Hungary.

Now I had to decide what to do with the rest of my life.

George and I spent some time in Austria.

Afterward we went to Paris because George had relatives there.

I loved Paris.

There was something about being there that made me feel connected to Europe while at the same time beginning to understand that my life could become much larger than the world I had known in Budapest.

Still, I began thinking that I did not want to remain in Europe.

I wanted to go to America for a while.

Eventually I decided on Canada.

I returned to Vienna and boarded one of those old airplanes that seemed, as I later joked, to stop at every big tree.

We stopped in Belgium.

Then Scotland.

Then Iceland.

Then Gander.

Finally, Montreal.