Europe in Autumn

by Dave Hutchinson

  “We were discussing geopolitics,” Dariusz told him. “Do you think much about geopolitics?”

  “I’m a cook,” Rudi said. “Not a politician.”

  “But you must have an opinion. Everyone has an opinion.”

  Rudi shook his head.

  Dariusz looked disbelievingly at him. He picked up his glass and took a sip of vodka. “I saw on the news last week that so far this year twelve new nations and sovereign states have come into being in Europe alone.”

  “And most of them won’t be here this time next year,” said Rudi.

  “You see?” Dariusz pointed triumphantly at him. “You do have an opinion! I knew you would!”

  Rudi sighed. “I only know what I see on the news.”

  “I see Europe as a glacier,” Max murmured, “calving icebergs.” He took a mouthful of his steak tartare and chewed happily.

  Rudi and Dariusz looked at him for a long time. Then Dariusz looked at Rudi again. “Not a bad analogy,” he said. “Europe is calving itself into progressively smaller and smaller nations.”

  “Quasi-national entities,” Rudi corrected. “Polities.”

  Dariusz snorted. “Sanjaks. Margravates. Principalities. Länder. Europe sinks back into the eighteenth century.”

  “More territory for you,” Rudi observed.

  “The same territory,” Dariusz said. “More frontiers. More red tape. More borders. More border police.”

  Rudi shrugged.

  “Consider Hindenberg, for example,” said Dariusz. “What must that have been like? You go to bed in Wrocław, and you wake up in Breslau. What must that have been like?”

  Except that it hadn’t happened overnight. What had happened to Wrocław and Opole and the little towns and villages inbetween had taken a long, bitter time, and if you followed the news it was obvious that for the Poles the matter wasn’t settled yet.

  “Consider the days after World War Two,” Rudi said. “Churchill, Roosevelt and Stalin meet at Yalta. You go to bed in Breslau and wake up the next morning in Wrocław.”

  Dariusz smiled and pointed his fork at him, conceding the point.

  There was a brief lull in the conversation.

  “I have a cousin in Hindenberg,” Max mused.

  Dariusz looked at him. “For that matter,” he said, “why don’t you live there yourself? You’re Silesian.”

  Max grunted.

  “Do you see much of your cousin?” Dariusz asked.

  Max shrugged. “Travel is difficult. Visas and so forth. I have a Polish passport, he is a citizen of Hindenberg.”

  “But he telephones you, yes? Emails you?”

  Max shook his head. “Polish Government policy,” he rumbled.

  Dariusz pointed at Rudi. “You see? You see the heartache such things can cause?”

  Rudi poured himself another drink, thinking that this discussion had become awfully specific all of a sudden.

  “So,” Dariusz said to Max. “How long is it since you were in contact with your cousin?”

  “Some time,” Max agreed thoughtfully, as if the subject had not occurred to him for a while. “Even the post is uncertain, these days.”

  “A scandal,” Dariusz muttered. “A scandal.”

  Rudi drank his drink and stood up to go, just to see what would happen.

  What happened was that Dariusz and Max continued to stare off into their respective distances, considering the unfairness of Hindenberg and Poland’s attitude towards it. Rudi sat down again and looked at them.

  “So here we are,” he said finally. “Two men with Polish passports who would find it difficult to get a visa to enter Hindenberg. And one Estonian who can practically walk across the border unmolested.”

  Dariusz seemed to regain consciousness. His expression brightened. “Of course,” he said. “You’re Estonian, aren’t you.”

  Rudi sucked his teeth and poured another drink.

  “Rudi’s an Estonian, Max,” Dariusz said.

  Rudi rubbed his eyes. “Is it,” he asked, “drugs?”

  Dariusz looked at him, and for a moment Rudi thought that, under the correct circumstances, the little mafioso might be quite a scary person. “No,” said Dariusz.

  “Fissile material?”

  Dariusz shook his head.

  “Espionage?”

  “Best you don’t know,” said Max.

  “A favour,” Dariusz told him earnestly. “You do us a favour, we owe you a favour.” He smiled. “That can’t be entirely bad, can it?”

  It could be bad in any number of unforeseen ways. Rudi silently cursed himself. He should have just served the food and gone home.

  “How do I make the delivery?”

  “Well,” Dariusz said, scratching his head, “that’s more or less up to you. And it’s not a delivery.”

  LATER THAT NIGHT, stepping out of the shower, Rudi caught sight of himself in the mirror over the sink. He took a towel off the rail and stood looking at his reflection.

  Well, there he was. A little shorter than average. Slim. Short mousy brown hair. Bland, inoffensive face; not Slavic, not Aryan, not anything, really. No sign of the Lapp heritage his father had always claimed for the family. Hazel eyes. The odd nick here and there, medals of his life as a chef. That scar on his forearm from an overturned wok in Vilnius, the one just above it from the time he slipped in the Turk’s kitchen in Riga and the paring knife he was carrying got turned around somehow and went straight through his uniform sleeve and the skin and muscle beneath.

  “Don’t run in my kitchen!” the Turk had shouted at him. Then he had bandaged Rudi’s arm and called for an ambulance.

  Rudi lifted his right hand above his head and turned so he could see the long curving scar that started just above his hipbone and ended beside his right nipple. Not a kitchen accident, this one. Skinheads, the day he tried to find work in Warnemünde. He still didn’t know whether they had meant to kill him or just scare him, and he thought that even they had not been sure. He had taken it as an omen that his wanderings along the Baltic coast were over, and he headed inland, first to Warsaw, then Kraków.

  The first thing Max did after concluding his job interview was hold out a mop.

  “I’ve done all that,” Rudi protested, pointing to the envelope containing his references which Max was holding in his other hand. “Riga, Tallinn...”

  “You want to work in my kitchen, first you clean it,” Max told him. “Then we’ll see.”

  Rudi really considered walking out of Restauracja Max right there and then, considered going out onto Floriańska and walking back down to the station and catching a train away from this polluted little city, but he was low on cash and the job came with a cramped little room up ten flights of stairs above the restaurant and he was just tired of travelling for the moment, so he took the mop, telling himself that this was only temporary, that as soon as he had adequate funds he’d be off again in search of a kitchen that appreciated him.

  He pushed that mop for eight months before Pani Stasia, Max’s fearsome chef, even allowed him to approach food. By then he was locked into a battle of wills with the wizened little woman, and the only way he was going to leave Max’s kitchen was feet first.

  Looking back, it seemed astounding to him that he had stood so much. He’d done this for Sergei in Tallinn, and for the Turk, and for Big Ron in that appalling kitchen in Wilno, but for Pani Stasia there was something gratingly personal about it, as if she had made it her life’s work to break him. She yelled constantly at him. “Bring this, bring that. Clean this, clean that. So you call this clean, Baltic prick? Hurry, hurry. Don’t run in my kitchen! Faster! Faster!”

  He was by no means the only member of the crew to catch Pani Stasia’s wrath. She treated everyone equally. One of her hip joints was deformed, and she walked with the aid of a black lacquered carbon fibre cane as thin as a pencil and as strong as a girder. Everyone, even Max, had heard the whistle of Pani Stasia’s cane at some time or other as it described a swift arc towa
rds the backs of their legs.

  It was understood in the business that great chefs could be violently temperamental, and if one wanted to study under them one had to endure all kinds of invective and physical violence. The Turk, who was an outstanding chef, had once knocked Rudi unconscious with a single punch for overcooking a portion of asparagus. Pani Stasia was not an outstanding chef. She was a competent chef working in a little Polish restaurant. But something about her fury lit a slumbering resistance in him which told him that this nasty little old woman was not going to drive him from her kitchen, was not going to wear him down.

  So he mopped and cleaned and washed up and the skin on his hands reddened and cracked and bled and his legs hurt so much that some nights he could barely climb up to his cubbyhole in the attic. He kept going, refused to give in.

  Pani Stasia, sensing the one-man resistance movement which had sprung up in her kitchen, focused her attention on Rudi. This made him popular with the other staff, who no longer had to suffer quite so much.

  One day, for some imagined slight, she chased him from the kitchen in an access of rage extraordinary even by her standards, limping after him surprisingly quickly and belabouring him about the head and shoulders with her cane. One whistling blow split his left earlobe and left him deaf in that ear for hours. One of the cooks ran out into the restaurant and told Max that Pani Stasia was killing Rudi, and when Max did nothing the cook went to the phone in the entranceway and called the police, who decided that their assets were best deployed elsewhere that evening and didn’t bother to respond to the call.

  Max found Rudi some time later squatting down in the alley beside the restaurant, the shoulder and arm of his whites spotted with blood.

  “You’d be better off leaving,” Max told him.

  Rudi looked up at the owner and shook his head.

  Max watched him for a few moments, then nodded and reached down a hand to help him up.

  It went on and on, until one night after closing time he was mopping the floor and she came up behind him almost soundlessly and raised her cane and he turned and caught it as it whistled towards him and for almost a minute she squeaked and struggled and swore and tried to pull the cane from his grasp. Finally, she stopped struggling and swearing and looked up at him with hot, angry eyes.

  He let go of the cane and she snatched it back and stood looking at him for a few moments longer. Then she turned and stomped across the kitchen towards the exit.

  The next morning, Max greeted him with the news of a pay rise and a promotion.

  Not that this made much material difference. He still had to mop and clean and fetch and carry, and he still had to suffer Pani Stasia’s fury. Now, however, she expected him to learn to cook as well.

  She punished every mistake, no matter how small. Once, half conscious with exhaustion, he put a fresh batch of salad into a bowl with some which had been standing already prepared for some minutes, and she almost beat him black and blue.

  But he did learn. The first thing he learned was that, if he wanted to remain in Pani Stasia’s kitchen, he was going to have to forget his four-year drift along the Baltic coast. The things he had learned from the Turk and the other chefs he’d worked under meant nothing to the little old woman.

  Fractionally, month after month, her periods of displeasure grew further and further apart, until one day, almost eighteen months after he first set foot in Restauracja Max, she allowed him to prepare one cover.

  She wouldn’t allow it to be served, however. She prepared a duplicate cover herself and sent it out into the restaurant instead, and then set about tasting Rudi’s attempt.

  As Rudi watched her he became aware that the whole kitchen had fallen silent. He looked around and found himself overwhelmed by what he thought of as a movie moment. Everyone in the kitchen was watching Pani Stasia. Even Max, standing just inside the swing door that led into the restaurant. It was, Rudi, thought, that moment in a film where the callow greenhorn finally gains the grudging respect of his mentor. He also knew that life wasn’t like the movies, and that Pani Stasia would spit the food out onto the tiled floor and then beat him senseless.

  In the event, life and the movies converged just enough for Pani Stasia to turn and lean on her cane and look at her audience. She would, she told them finally, perhaps consider feeding Rudi’s service to her dog.

  All the crew applauded. Rudi never heard them. He thought later that he was the only one of all of them to notice just how old Pani Stasia suddenly seemed.

  She died that summer, and Rudi simply took over. There was no formal announcement from Max, no new contract, nothing at all. Not even a pay rise. He simply inherited the kitchen. He and Max were the only mourners at the funeral.

  “I never found out anything about her,” he said as they watched the coffin being lowered into the ground.

  “She was,” Max said, “my mother.”

  2.

  IT WAS SNOWING in Gliwice, fat white flakes settling gently out of a sky boiling with jaundiced clouds. He had to wait two hours for the local train to Strzelce Opolskie.

  The rattling little local was full of Silesians speaking German-accented Polish and Polish-accented German. The passengers sharing his compartment were curious as to why he had chosen to visit Hindenberg, but he spoke German with a strong Estonian accent and there seemed to be a common assumption – at least among his fellow travellers – that the Baltic peoples were a law unto themselves.

  “I’m on holiday,” he told them. “I want to see Hindenberg.” The idea of an Estonian wanting to see Hindenberg seemed such a novelty that it excused practically everything, which was what he was counting on.

  A couple of kilometres outside Gliwice, some Polish kids ran alongside the track and threw stones at the train. Nobody paid them much attention; it was unusual these days to travel by train in Poland and not have something thrown at you, or dropped on you from a bridge, or placed on the tracks in front of you. Rudi supposed it had something to do with Polish resentment about the Line, but Polish resentment about the Line was a complex thing, and Poles had so many other things to feel resentful about these days that it was hard to be sure. Perhaps it was just a fashion, one of those senseless neurotic fads that sometimes overtook cultures, like elevator surfing or out of town shopping malls or crush music.

  The train rocked and rolled slowly through grubby little industrial towns. The Fall of the Wall was just a distant misty memory now, but Eastern Europe still needed a good scrub and a lick of paint. Some of Poland’s most polluted towns had buildings of mediaeval splendour, but they were all crusted with centuries of soot. He had seen a documentary in which a Professor from the Jagiellonian University in Kraków had said that nobody dared clean the buildings because the dirt was the only thing standing between them and the acid rain.

  Beyond the window, a snow-covered landscape of wastelands and forests and disused steelworks and rusting coking plants overlooked by monolithic Communist-era blocks of flats. A small car overturned in a ditch beside the track, its tires wearing caps of filthy ice. The sun sat low down in the sky, wan and chilly through the falling snow, too weak to cast shadows. Some of the Silesians further along the carriage started to sing. Rudi closed his eyes and dozed.

  North of Strzelce Opolskie, the line ran into the border station between two ten-metre-high fences of close-woven metal mesh topped with extravagant spirals of razor ribbon. Looking through the mesh was like looking through fog. Rudi could see a bus station on the other side, people going home after work, cars orbiting a big roundabout, houses, blocks of flats, a factory chimney painted with orange and white hoops pouring purple smoke into the sky.

  As the town thinned out, the train slowed down. The Silesians began to get out of their seats and put on their coats, gather their baggage from the overhead racks, settle their hats on their heads. Rudi sat where he was, looking out of the window. The borders along the Baltic were no more formal than lines on the map; this whole business was a brand new experienc
e for him, and he was honestly interested in what the border arrangements were like here.

  The train seemed to be approaching a world illuminated by a younger, bluer sun than the one that was now settling under the haze of pollution on the horizon. Lines of tall posts carried spotlights that were actually painful to look at directly. They washed out what remained of the natural daylight, and much of the natural colour outside as well. The whole frontier station sat in the middle of a great pool of this light. It was so well lit that Rudi found himself wondering if it was visible from orbit.

  The border station was a compact collection of low brick buildings lining a platform patrolled by black-uniformed officers of the Polish Border Guard. More mesh and ribbon rose beyond the complex. Disembarking passengers were directed to one of the buildings, there to shuffle in four queues to passport and customs desks. When Rudi’s turn came, he put his rucksack through the scanner on the desk and watched the Polish official watching its progress on a monitor.

  “Passport,” said the Pole.

  Rudi handed over his passport, and the Pole slotted it into a reader built into the desk. He glanced at one of his screens, then at Rudi.

  “Purpose of visit?”

  “I’m on holiday,” said Rudi.

  The Pole looked at him a moment longer, then he pulled the passport from its slot and held it out. “Pass.”

  “Thank you,” said Rudi. He took his passport, stepped past the desk, and took his rucksack from the scanner.

  On the other side of the building, down a short corridor, was an identical desk. Behind this desk sat an official wearing a field grey uniform.

  “Passport,” the official said in German.

  Rudi gave up his passport again and watched as the Hindenberger slotted it. He imagined the same farce going on in buildings on the other side of the track, where people were shuffling along an identical corridor to leave Hindenberg. Dariusz had told him that it sometimes took four hours to process each trainload, depending on how bloody-minded the respective governments were feeling that day.