JUST ACROSS THE BORDER LINE – A MEMOIR OF FAULT LINES (Pass Protected)

Borders are scratched across the hearts of men
By strangers with a calm, judicial pen,
And when the borders bleed, we watch with dread
The lines of ink across the map turn red.

Marya Mannes, Subverse: Rhymes for Our Times (1959)

Some journeys only reveal their meaning decades later —

There were borders that announced themselves with barbed wire, watchtowers and armed guards. Others were only visible years later. In the late 1980s and 1990s, I travelled through a world balanced uneasily between collapse and rewriting itself: Yugoslavia before war, Berlin before the Wall came down, Eastern Europe as Communism loosened its grip, and cities and frontiers beyond this where history was still unfinished.

Just Across the Border Line combines travel memoir, political reflection and deeply personal recollection into a journey through the physical and psychological fault lines of a changing era. Moving from Cold War Europe to the Middle East, Morocco, Canada and India; and then returning to Berlin, over a third of a century later, after the collapse of the Wall, to gauge how different it now felt. It is a book about crossings — between countries, between generations, and between the person we were then and the one looking back now.

Damian Rainford, 2026

I. Introduction

II. Twilight on the Adriatic (Yugoslavia)

III. Touching the Wall – In the Shadows of Wars (Berlin 1989):

– Towards West Berlin – The War and the Wall

– Crossing to the East

– Back Home – The Fall of the Wall

IV. A Revolution From the Sofa (Romania)

V. Rainy Day Taxi Crash (Barcelona)

VI. Cairo and Couriering

VII. Between Minarets and Missiles (Turkey)

VIII. Into the Lonely Heart of Darkness (Morocco)