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It had to be a flourishing civilisation to speak about women in that tone of mystery. With its tanned daughters, its fresh starched linen, its cows out to pasture and the neighbouring gypsies as leaven in the dough, peasant-Bogojevo had plenty to be pleased about. Around midday we went back to the cabin by the bridge, where two of the previous evening’s virtuosi were waiting to take us to the encampment. They were 18 A Scent of Melons sitting, fresh as daisies, beside an old Hungarian peasant to whom they were trying to flog a horse.

I had plenty of time to think about it at night, battling with the fleas. They devoured me. I saw them everywhere in town: the grocer leaned over to slice the cheese… a flea came out of his shirt, crawled over his chin without his flinching, travelled across his Adam’s apple and disappeared into the flannel. If I lost sight of it for a moment, I just had to be resigned: that flea was for me. In the evening, turning back the sheet, a red dust cloud flew towards my face; neither DDT nor lashings of water had any effect.

The pastor had studied in Zurich and seemed to have all his wits about him, or as many as necessary, but age, solitude and the exercise of a barely tolerated ministry had made him more fearful than a cockroach. He had several Methodist families in Prilep and half a dozen others scattered through Kosovo. We asked him about his parish, larger than a province, but couldn’t get anything out of him other than a weary allusion to Sodom and Gomorrah. I wondered whether his competitors fared any better in gathering souls: the Orthodox priest who prudently scrubbed his sermons and paid his Party dues; the Muslim imam who took snuff with the faithful on his doorstep in the evening, cultivating a faith thinned by exile; and the Marxists with their choir, youth group and the new swimming pool, who won recruits without too much difficulty.