Fabio snorted. “What do you care, chef?”
They looked at each other over the roof of the car. “Maybe I can get some sleep,” Rudi said.
“Maybe I’d like that better.” Fabio unlocked the driver’s door. “Get in.”
THEY CHANGED CARS again at a deserted-looking farm outside town. This time it was a battered-looking hydrogen-cell Simca. Fabio waited for a long time before driving back to the main road, and he waited again before driving back into Częstochowa and then driving around town for another forty minutes or so. Rudi dozed off, and when he opened his eyes they were out on the open road again and he had no idea which direction they were heading in.
They drove for hours. The roads were in an appalling state, many of them laid by the conquering Germans in the 1940s and inadequately repaired ever since, kilometre after kilometre of dips and bumps and potholes. Poland had never had enough money for public works, certainly not enough for the scale of public works needed to bring the country up to the level of, say, Greater Germany, which had roads of a lascivious smoothness. Hindenberg, which had only been in existence for a decade or so, was in comparison a Western European nation.
A lot of it had to do with Poland’s stubborn membership of the EU. They had waited so long to be admitted, Rudi thought, that they had decided nothing was going to dislodge them. The only way Poland was going to leave the Union was feet first, and so the country was continually being stung for subsidies and tariffs and finding itself dragged along with the EU’s seeming determination to pick trade wars with anything that had a head of state.
“Poles,” Fabio muttered when Rudi mentioned this in an attempt to make conversation. “Who knows?”
“A wise view, Obi-Wan,” Rudi said.
Fabio glanced briefly at him. “What?”
Rudi dozed. Fabio refused to tell him where they were going, so it was pointless offering to share the driving. Towns and villages went by, pools of light in a great darkness. Half the road signs he saw were featureless pink rectangles in the Simca’s headlights, the grass and asphalt beneath them spattered with pink paint.
“Armia Różowych Pilotów,” Rudi said when Fabio complained about the pink signs.
“What the fuck’s that?” Fabio did not admit to speaking much Polish, so they spoke English.
“The Army of the Pink Pilot. I thought it was just a Warsaw thing.”
“Some kind of homosexual rights organisation.”
Rudi laughed. The Pink Pilot was a bona fide homegrown Polish legend, occupying a territory somewhere between Sikorski and Jan Sobieski.
“It’s the Palace of Culture,” he said. When Fabio frowned across at him he said, “In Warsaw. The Palace of Culture. A gift from Stalin and the Workers of the Soviet Union to the Workers of Poland. One of the ugliest buildings in Europe.”
Fabio snorted, as if to say that Europe was teeming with buildings that offended his aesthetic sensibilities.
It was said that the only good thing about the Palace of Culture was that it was visible from everywhere in Warsaw. Of course, that was the worst thing about it as well, but at least it meant you could never get lost. After the Fall, there had been much debate about what to do with this offensively Stalinist monolith, and, as with most things Polish, in the end nothing much had been done.
And then one night there was the sound of engines in the sky, a miasma of paint fumes over central Warsaw, and when the city awoke the next morning it found that the Palace of Culture had been given a makeover.
Meanwhile, over on the southern edge of the city, in the middle of a field, sat a MiL helicopter retrofitted with a crop-spraying rig, from which hot-pink paint was still sizzling onto the grass, and leading from it out across the field a line of pink bootprints growing fainter and fainter as the Pink Pilot walked away into myth.
In time-honoured fashion there were angry recriminations in Parliament. There were resignations, mostly among air traffic controllers who had failed to notice the flight of the Pink Pilot.
Varsovians, on the other hand, loved the Palace’s paint-job. They claimed it made the thing so fucking obvious that they didn’t notice it any more, and when a few weeks later the Government attempted to have it cleaned there was a small riot.
This had all happened a year or so before Rudi arrived in Kraków, and he hadn’t visited Warsaw yet, but he’d seen it from time to time on various items in the news, and no matter where in the city the pictures came from the Pink Palace had seemed to lean into the background like one of those obnoxiously-drunken guests at a wedding party. Rudi thought it looked uncomfortably carnal.
“Poles, you see?” Fabio said when Rudi had explained it to him. “You absolutely cannot fucking predict what they will do. And now there is an army of them.”
“Well, nobody’s saying it’s the Pink Pilot painting the road signs,” Rudi said. “Just some people following his example.”
“And nobody’s ever caught the pink fucker.”
“No,” Rudi admitted, “nobody’s ever caught the pink fucker.”
“Well there you are then,” Fabio said, wagging a finger.
“Where am I then?” Rudi asked, puzzled.
“It must be him painting the road signs. Any person who is prepared to paint one building pink will almost certainly do so again.”
Rudi stared at him.
Whoever the ARP were, and wherever they came from, it was obvious that they had been particularly busy on this stretch of road. Most of the signs the car passed seemed to have been painted. This might have posed problems for drivers looking for directions, but Fabio never faltered.
Eventually, the sun came up. Rudi, who had been dozing again, opened his eyes to misty dawn light and without thinking about it oriented himself north-south, east-west.
“Where are we?” he said, struggling stiffly upright.
“I don’t know,” Fabio said. “I just know where we’re going.”
“That’s great,” Rudi muttered. “Thank you, Fabio.”
As it turned out, sometime in the wee small hours they had outpaced the ARP’s handiwork and were back in an area of unmolested road signs. It didn’t take Rudi too long to work out where they were going, and an hour or so after that they arrived in Poznań.
“You could have told me where we were going,” Rudi said as they drove towards the city centre.
“I could have,” Fabio agreed. “But we are fated to go through life with too little information anyway. The sooner you learn that the better.”
Rudi looked at him. “Was that supposed to be a joke?”
“After two and a half months of your cooking,” Fabio said, “one develops a certain wry sense of humour.”
RUDI HAD NEVER been to Poznań before, but Michał, Max’s maitre d’, had been born in a village not too far outside the city, and on slow homesick evenings he had regaled the restaurant’s captive audience of Cracovians and Silesians and Kurds and Kosovars and Estonians with tales of his home town, so Rudi knew that Poznań had a Market Square second only to Kraków’s and had, for quite a long time, been a Prussian city named Posen. He knew that Mieszko I, conqueror of Silesia and Małopolska and the first historical ruler of Poland, was buried there, along with some other early kings and queens. He knew the oldest cathedral in Poland was there – and he knew some people in Kraków for whom that still rankled. He knew that the name of the city might have come from a person – ‘Poznań’s town’ – or it might be a corruption of the Polish verb poznać – ‘to recognise’ or ‘to get to know.’ He knew it had had a lot of odd names down the years. He knew the Line ran past the city. He had never really given the place a second thought.
Fabio parked the Simca in an office carpark just outside the city centre, and they walked to a little hotel not far from the Market Square. Adjoining rooms had been reserved for them. Rudi spent roughly thirty seconds looking around his, and then collapsed full-length on the bed.
3.
AT SEVEN O’CLOCK that evening, Fabio knocked on his door to su
mmon him to dinner in the hotel’s little restaurant. A long time ago, it had been customary for the restaurant’s category to be listed at the top of the menu. Kat 1 or kat 2 were the most luxurious, with kat 4 the cheapest – usually somewhere a tourist would be advised to avoid unless they were feeling lucky.
Two generations of Western food writers had wrought something of a change, though. Poland these days was scattered with Michelin stars and recommendations from Les Routiers and the AA. So it was with a rather sinking heart that Rudi saw the words kat 3 printed on the top of the menu. He ordered kotlet schabowy with placki ziemniaczane, in a spirit of experiment, and found to his pleasant surprise that the food was competently cooked and attractively presented. Maybe the kat 3 was a gimmick.
“Why don’t you cook stuff like this?” Fabio asked, tucking enthusiastically into his gołąbki.
“If I knew you liked stuffed cabbage leaves, I would,” Rudi told him.
Fabio gestured with his fork. “What’s that?”
Rudi looked down at his plate. “Pork cutlet and a potato pancake.”
“Any good?”
“Bit too much paprika in the sauce.”
“I hate chefs,” said Fabio, stuffing himself with gołąbki.
“I know.”
“Twitchy little prima-donnas.” Fabio tapped the table with the handle of his knife. “Any half-intelligent person can follow the directions in a cookbook and produce food at least as good as this.”
“But could they do it night after night for a restaurant with seventy tables?”
Fabio sipped his wine. “It’s all in the planning, right? Any fool can do it.”
Rudi poked his fork into his side-salad. “Am I allowed to know what this exercise is all about?” he asked.
“We’ll be jumping a Package out of the Line Consulate,” Fabio said without pausing in his love affair with the restaurant’s food. “How would you go about that?”
“I have no idea.”
“Well, fortunately this is one of those exercises where all the student is required to do is watch and learn. This wine is really good. What is it?”
Rudi consulted the menu. “House red.”
“Really? You should talk to the staff, you know, one catering worker to another. Maybe you can score us a couple of bottles to take back with us. It’s better than that piss you serve me.”
THE TRANSEUROPE RAIL Route was the last great civil engineering project of the European era, an unbroken rail link running from Lisbon to Chukotka in the far east of Siberia, with branches connecting all the capitals of Europe.
At least, that had been the plan. When it actually came to building the link the various national authorities involved fell to years of squabbling about finance, rolling stock, track gauges, staff uniforms. The TransEurope Rail Company became a microcosm of the increasingly fractious European Parliament, complete with votes, vetoes, lobbying, corruption and all the other things so beloved of democracies. The Company tottered on the brink of bankruptcy four times before a metre of track had been laid or a locomotive had been commissioned, and each time it came back. There were rumours of Mafia involvement, Facist involvement, Communist involvement, investigations, Commissions, inquiries, sackings, suicides, murders, kidnappings.
Eventually, and somewhat to the surprise of most observers, the Company began to lay track in Portugal. The plan had been to build the Rail Route from both ends, starting in Lisbon and Chukotka and working towards a meeting somewhere around the Ukrainian-Polish border, but unspecified problems stopped work in Siberia for an unspecified length of time which eventually became permanent.
So, year by year, the Line crept across the face of Europe, at about the same time that Europe was crumbling around it. The EU dissolved, and the Line went on. The European economy imploded, and the Line went on. The first polities came into being, and the Line went on, the Company negotiating transit rights where it passed through the new sovereign territories. It seemed indestructible. By the time it reached the Franco-German border it appeared to have picked up some bizarre kind of momentum that kept it rolling eastward through all adversity. By now, nobody knew where the money to build the Line was coming from; it arrived from a kind of braided river delta of offshore funds and companies and private investors, and even though various national branch lines were abandoned no one could quite make out how the thing didn’t just quietly go bust.
After nine years, the Line reached the Ukrainian border, where it had once been meant to connect with its westward-travelling cousin. There was a brief ceremony to mark the occasion, and then the Line rolled onward, patient, steady, unstoppable. It passed through wars and border disputes and droughts and police actions, by hill and by dale and through forests and over rivers and along the shores of lakes and under mountains. It rolled through the Xian Flu. It seemed inexplicable, pointless.
The Company went through seventy-two chairmen and three full changes of voting members. It generated a bureaucracy almost as large and unwieldy as that which had once administered the EU. Truly colossal sums of cash went missing, were found, were lost again.
The Line finally reached the Chukotka Peninsula in the middle of a blizzard of Biblical proportions. The more wry commentators suggested that the next obvious step was to start digging a tunnel towards Alaska.
Instead the Company ran a single forty-car TransEurope Express, an inaugural trip, from Portugal to Siberia and back again, for the benefit of the Press and leaders of the nations and polities the Line passed through and various inconspicuous men whose origin was never explained to anyone. Then it declared itself to be sovereign territory and granted all its workers citizenship.
Which may have been the point of the exercise all along.
IT WAS SAID that the more Line stations a nation had, the more important it was. This was nonsense, of course, but it irked Poles that, though the Line crossed their country from west to east, there was only one station. Most nations had two or three; some polities had two.
The Polish government affected not to notice what was obviously a calculated snub. Of course, when the Polish government affected not to notice something it was marked by no-confidence motions, and if that didn’t make any difference it led to mass resignations. And if that didn’t work the entire government would implode. The Prime Minister would attempt to resign, the Sejm would refuse to accept his resignation, things would limp along for a while, then the Communists – sorry, the Social Democrats – would win the subsequent elections. It had been going on for decades. Poles had long since stopped being surprised by the process, though it always elicited astonished articles in magazines like Time/Stone.
There was also a certain perceived snub in the fact that the Line’s only Polish consulate wasn’t even in the capital. Poznań took a lot of pride in having the consulate. The city had for centuries been the main bastion of Poland’s western border, and the Paris-Berlin-Moscow rail line already ran through the city. To Poznanians, it was only sensible that the Line should visit as well, and they enthusiastically assented to the demolition of a large amount of property to allow access for a branch line.
It had so infuriated the Government that there had even been talk of Poznań seceding from the Polish Republic and becoming a polity, but at some point wiser heads had intervened and decided it was preferable for the Line to have a Consulate in a Poznań that was still Polish, the better to suck out the inevitable financial benefits for the greater good, and there had been a good deal of civic feather-smoothing done in the city by ministers from the central Government. But it had been a close-run thing, and you could still buy T-shirts and fridge magnets with an Independent Republic Of Poznań logo – dreamed up by an advertising company in Luxembourg – on them. Just a little reminder to Central Government of the stakes that were involved.
“WHAT DO YOU see?” asked Fabio.
Rudi looked about him. “Trees,” he said. He pointed. “Oh, look, and a lake.”
Fabio glanced at him and raised an eyebrow.
“What do you see?” he asked again.
Though it was impossible to tell just by looking at him, Rudi strongly suspected that Fabio was suffering from a hangover. He’d been so taken with the wine at last night’s meal that he had ordered another couple of bottles, and the last Rudi had seen him he was waddling towards the lift with one in each hand. He hadn’t shown up for breakfast this morning, and a discreet inquiry with the hotel’s receptionist elicited the information that the gentleman in Room 302 had left a tag on his door last night requesting a room service breakfast. Which he had barely touched.
Rudi was having lunch when Fabio finally surfaced, striding into the dining room, face glowing from a recent shave, hair combed, fresh shirt and suit and tie, shoes shined. He did not, however, sit down to eat. Instead he stood by the table and informed Rudi that they were going for a walk.
What they actually did was walk to the nearest stop and take a tram. They got off a dozen stops later, walked to a taxi rank, and hired a cab. The cab drove them a kilometre or so, then Fabio paid off the driver and they got out and caught a bus. By the time they got off the bus, at the gates to a park, Rudi was completely lost. They wandered around the park for about half an hour, and then Fabio started asking Rudi what he could see.
Rudi had pretty much had enough by now. “I was enjoying my lunch, by the way,” he said.
“What do you see?” Fabio asked for the third time.
Rudi sighed and looked around again. Trees, yes. Lake, yes. People out walking. He tipped his head to one side. On the other side of the little park, between the trees, he could see the matt-grey shine of closely-woven metal mesh.
“Fence,” he said.
Fabio snorted and set out towards the fence. “Come on.”
The fence was about ten metres high and defined the park’s boundary. In one direction it curved away out of sight; in the other it ran off, perfectly straight and apparently into infinity. Beyond it was an open space perhaps a hundred metres deep, and beyond that another fence. Looking through both sets of mesh, Rudi could only make out vague shapes, but above the second fence rose the stilt-legged forms of freight-handling machinery. A goods yard.
Europe in Autumn Page 5
