Europe in Autumn

by Dave Hutchinson

  In the family chronology, it was while he worked as a bus driver in Tallinn that Rudi’s father had met Rudi’s mother. Sometimes, when he was drunk, the old man would tell his two sons about the beautiful young woman he saw waiting every morning at the Pronski stop on Narvu maantee, just going home after her shift at the Hotell Viru, how she would fall asleep in her seat, threadbare coat covering her maid’s uniform. When he was very drunk, which was increasingly often when Rudi and his brother were growing up, he would wax lyrical about her hair, which was long and fine and the colour of polished mahogany, about her skin, which was the colour of milk and without any blemish, about her eyes, which had just the merest tilt at the edges to betray the Lapp heritage which lay far far back in her genes. Neither Rudi nor his brother could remember this extraordinary beauty, although they had once discovered in the back of their father’s wardrobe a series of photographs of a short, dark-haired, irritated-looking young woman in old-fashioned clothes. Surely, they reasoned, this must be some old girlfriend of their father’s.

  There were no photographs of the wedding – at least, none that Rudi ever saw. He had to make do with his father’s stories of the hundreds of guests who came to the ceremony, the big room at the Viru booked for the reception, his mother walking like a queen through the room she would return to after the honeymoon dressed in her cleaning clothes, pushing a floor-waxing machine.

  In many ways it was a miracle that his father had got married at all, even more so that he had consented to settle down in Tallinn and stay in his bus-driving job for longer than a year. There was the wedding to pay for – his parents and her parents were dead – and the flat to pay for, and after a year or so there was Rudi’s big brother Ivari, and when Ivari was a year old his father’s patience snapped and he moved the family to Tartu, where he had found a job as a train driver.

  Tartu was also where Rudi’s father’s long, uncomplicated love affair with the Baltic languages began, at the University’s Song Festival. He said that he had listened to the Estonian, Latvian and Lithuanian singers at the Festival with tears running down his cheeks. Ivari, who could remember attending that particular festival even though he had only been four years old, contended that the old man had been roaring drunk the whole time.

  Whatever. By the time Rudi was born, the family was living in a three-room flat in Pärnu, where the old man worked on building sites to fund his growing collection of language books. At some point during this period, Rudi came along – entirely unplanned, Ivari liked to taunt him – and the old man found himself once again nailed to the spot by a family he couldn’t afford to uproot.

  When he thought about it, which wasn’t so often these days, Rudi wondered why his mother hadn’t done something. He vaguely remembered a stoic woman, patiently enduring each family upheaval, each arbitrary change of job. Surely she could have done something, he thought. He was sorry he couldn’t remember her very well; he thought she must have been a remarkable woman, to stand it for so long.

  They stayed crammed in the flat in Pärnu for six and a half years, which was the longest his father had stayed in one place since he graduated, and then one fateful evening his father came home from his shift on the building site, ate his dinner, sat down in front of the television, opened the paper, and saw an advertisement for park rangers. And, Rudi presumed, the temptation had just been too much for him.

  IT WAS EASIER, these days, to get out to the National Park than it had been when Rudi was growing up. In those days the country was still a little punch-drunk from its years as a Soviet satellite and money was tight and you had to drive or take a number of buses from Tallinn, or get the train to Rakvere or Tapa and then get a bus.

  Nowadays there was a dedicated tram-line all the way from Tallinn to the visitor centre at Palmse. It was a two-hour journey, but at this time of the year the tram was almost empty apart from some locals on their way back from shopping trips and a couple of New Zealanders huddled together down at the front, identical in their cold-weather gear and hiking packs. Rudi sat at the back with an overnight bag stuffed under his seat, periodically wiping condensation from the window in order to look at the snowy landscape passing by outside.

  He couldn’t remember how long it was since he last saw this countryside. Four years. Five, maybe. He’d simply lost track. What had happened to him since then? He’d seen a lot of the Continent, moved a fair number of Packages, made a reasonably good living for himself. Cooked a lot of services at Restauracja Max. Found a severed head in a Berlin luggage locker. That would be a good one to drop into conversations.

  He closed his eyes and leaned back in his seat. Maybe he’d been a Coureur for too long; all the Situations were starting to blur together. He couldn’t remember what he had done after leaving here last time. Back to Max’s kitchen, certainly, but then what? Where? Andorra? Padania? Ulster? Maybe he could ask Bradley; Central would have his records somewhere. He could tell them he wanted to write his memoirs.

  Christ. He wasn’t thirty yet and he felt ready for retirement.

  Wet snow was settling on Palmse as the tram pulled into the terminus. On the pavement, Rudi stood for a few moments. The old manor house, with its salmon-pink walls and red slate roofs, seemed not to have changed at all. It occurred to him that it had been at least four years since he had heard another voice speak a single word of his own language.

  He went around to the side entrance of the visitor centre and typed the code into the door. He smiled and shook his head; they hadn’t changed the number in ten years.

  The door to Ivari’s office upstairs was wide open. His brother was sitting at his desk, concentrating on a document he was writing on a very large and out-of-date word processor. He was not very tall, but he was very solid, like an oak table. He was wearing his ranger’s blue uniform jumpsuit, its collar open, and he was squinting at the WP’s screen as he typed, two-fingered and painfully slowly, picking each letter deliberately. Rudi cleared his throat and Ivari looked up, and for a few moments neither of them spoke, although Rudi shrugged awkwardly.

  “Come on in,” Ivari said, turning back to the keyboard. “I’ve got to finish this.” He waved a hand towards a corner of the room. “Have some coffee.”

  Rudi put his bag down by the door and went over to the coffeemaker and poured himself a mug. Ivari began typing again. Rudi wandered around the office. On the walls were framed posters advertising the park, printouts of articles about the park, photographs of Ivari with various celebrities and worthies. The photos were interesting, because in most of them Ivari was striking the same pose. In one photo he was standing beside the President and Prime Minister somewhere out in the wilds of the park, pointing at something off in the distance. In another he was standing very close to Emma Corcoran, the English actress, and pointing at something off in the distance. In a third he was with Witold Grabiański, the Polish fifteen hundred metre Olympic champion, and pointing at something off in the distance.

  “What are you pointing at in all these photos?” Rudi asked.

  Ivari’s shoulders hunched as he applied himself to the task of typing. “Anything. Nothing. The cameramen just tell me to point into the distance and look intrepid.” He snorted. “Intrepid. I ask you.”

  “What’s Grabiański like?”

  Ivari shrugged. “Seemed all right. I don’t think we said more than five words to each other.”

  “What about the President?”

  Ivari snorted again and kept typing, one letter at a time, squinting alternately at the screen and the keyboard.

  “You’ve had the place painted,” Rudi said, looking around the office.

  Ivari nodded, choosing a key and putting his fingertip down on it. “Three years ago.”

  Point taken. Rudi sat down in one of the comfortable visitors’ chairs and looked at his brother. Ivari had their father’s bland, blond good looks, and he filled the uniform much better than the old man ever had.

  “How’s Frances?”

  “Very well,
thanks.”

  The last time Rudi had been here was for Ivari’s wedding. He’d stayed five days, and then a vague conviction that someone, somewhere, needed his help had taken him back to what he had thought of in those days as the Real World. He had, he considered, thought of it that way until very recently. Until the door of that luggage locker in Berlin had swung open, in fact.

  He got up and went to the window. The snowfall had grown heavier; he couldn’t see the street for a whirl of drifting flakes.

  “How’s Kraków?” Ivari asked, selecting another key.

  “Waist-deep in English tourists.”

  “I heard about the riot.”

  Rudi had to think about that one, then he realised that Ivari meant the England-Poland football match two years ago.

  “That was over the other side of town,” he said. “I don’t think we had one English person in the restaurant that week.”

  “It looked bad on the news.”

  It had been bad. One policeman had died and almost seven hundred fans had been arrested, both English and Polish. Rudi had been involved in a Situation in Alsace that week, and had returned to Balice in time to see groups of English fans being escorted out of the country by riot-suited platoons of police. He’d almost forgotten about it.

  “It always looks worse on the news,” he said.

  Ivari nodded, looked for the save key, and tapped it. The screen cleared, and he turned and looked at his brother. “Hungry?”

  “Starving,” Rudi agreed.

  IVARI AND HIS wife lived in one of the outbuildings on the Palmse estate – once the home of the von Pahlens, a merchant family who had departed Estonia for Germany after the First World War but left behind Palmse Mois – the Baltic Baroque manor house itself – and the distillery which now housed an hotel, and the old stables which housed the park’s visitor centre. Rudi remembered his father telling him that one of the von Pahlens – he couldn’t remember which one it was – had been an astronomer, and had a crater on the Moon named after him. His father had thought that was wonderful, having a crater on the Moon named after you. Rudi recalled being less than impressed, although thinking about it now, it wasn’t such a bad achievement, really. More of a lasting monument than a good meal, anyway.

  When Frances saw him – as he was taking off his parka and his boots in the hallway and thus preoccupied – she shouted, “Rudi, you bastard!” She pronounced it barstard. Frances was large and lusty and Australian, and she favoured kaftans in a variety of hallucinatory patterns, and when she hugged Rudi to her considerable bosom he felt as though he was being crushed to death by a rather vigorous migraine.

  She grasped him by the upper arms and propelled him out as far as her arms could reach – which was a distance – so she could tilt her head from side to side and look judiciously at him. “How long’s it been now?” she asked in good Estonian.

  “It’s been a while, Frankie,” he admitted in English. He tried to shrug, but her hands held his upper body motionless. “Sorry.”

  “You’d better be, sunshine,” she said. Then she smiled the radiant smile Ivari had once admitted to Rudi had stolen his heart and she tugged him gently back to her. “It’s good to see you, kid.”

  “Good to be here,” Rudi said. He had a suspicion that Frances knew somehow about his work as a Coureur. She’d always been huggy and tactile, but after he started working for Central the quality of the hugs changed in some way he couldn’t quite define, as if she was afraid for his safety. Or maybe he was imagining it.

  “So,” she said, finally releasing him so he could take off his other boot and search through the wooden box by the door for a pair of slippers, “how long will we be having the pleasure of you this time?”

  She had never quite forgiven him for taking off after the wedding. “I’m here for the foreseeable future, actually, Frankie,” he said, finally finding his favourite pair of slippers and putting them on. He stood in the hall smiling at her, flatfooted after his boots but happy. “I’m on holiday. A sabbatical, really.”

  Frances smiled and nodded as if she knew exactly what he was talking about. “Well, that’s great, because I’m sick of cooking for these two.”

  Rudi felt a hitch in his chest. “Two?”

  “Who’s that?” called a querulous voice from the living room, and with a shuffle of slippers a little old man wearing jeans, a sweatshirt two sizes too large for him, and a baseball cap with a hologram advertisement for Aeroflot on the front came out into the hallway. He was holding a tumbler half-full of an amber liquid which was almost certainly Chivas Regal, his signature drink. “Oh,” he said when he saw Rudi.

  Rudi’s heart sank smoothly, like a recently-serviced lift. “Hello, Toomas,” he said to his father.

  FRANCES ASKED RUDI to cook, and he didn’t have it in his heart to refuse, so he spent ten minutes rummaging in the fridge and the freezer and came up with some rolled pork loin he could slice up thickly and beat out into escalopes, and a couple of stale bread rolls for breadcrumbs. It wasn’t exactly cordon bleu, and it was a long way from being Estonian cuisine (and anyway, in his heart he could never have argued that Estonian cuisine had set the world alight) but he was tired and escalopes were something he could do with his mind in neutral.

  “How long’s he been here?” he asked as he used a meat hammer on the pork.

  Frances, peeling potatoes at the sink, glanced towards the door. “The old man? Couple of days.”

  “Still living in Muike?”

  She shook her head. “He moved to the special management zone at Aasumetsa a couple of years ago. Got himself a nice house there. Got himself a nice hausfrau to look after him, though I haven’t met her.”

  From the living room, Rudi heard his father singing a Latvian folk song to Ivari. “That sounds about right,” he said.

  Frances looked at him. “No offence, kid, but this is stuff you should be asking him yourself.”

  Rudi shrugged. “We don’t talk about stuff like that.”

  Frances put down the potato she was peeling and crossed her arms across her chest. “Well maybe you should, no?”

  Rudi waved the meat hammer at her for emphasis, failed to come up with any words to go with the gesture, and went back to tenderising the slice of pork on the butcher-block chopping board in front of him.

  “You must have thought there was some chance you’d see him while you were here,” said Frances.

  “Every silver lining has a cloud,” Rudi muttered.

  “We keep asking him to retire, but he won’t,” Frances said. “He loves this place. He just goes out pottering around the bogs and in the forests. Aarvo – that’s the new director – says the old man should go, but he doesn’t dare fire him.”

  “Aarvo sounds like just the kind of balless wonder Toomas always took advantage of,” said Rudi.

  She stopped peeling potatoes again and waved her knife at him across the kitchen. “Hey, sweetheart, don’t you forget the number of years your Dad’s got under his belt here.”

  “My formative years, certainly,” Rudi said.

  “He knows this place like the back of his hand,” she said, wagging the knife some more. “They never had anyone like him here before, and when he does retire they’ll struggle to get someone else who loves it as much as he does.”

  “Every Estonian loves the rahvuspark, Frankie,” he said. “It’s part of our heritage. The Poles have the same thing with Białowieża.”

  “Come again?”

  “It’s a big forest on the border between Poland and Lithuania. The last stretch of ancient forest in Europe. The Poles love that place, Frankie. It’s got wild boar and bison and wild horses and beavers, and for all I know there are bears and magicians and little green men and Elvis and Madonna there too. It’s a symbol of national pride. Same with the Park.”

  “Ivari says it wasn’t always like that.”

  Rudi waved the hammer. “That was the Russians. Fuck ’em.” He looked at the piece of pork he was beating o
ut and suddenly thought of Jan doing the same, at the hotel in the Zone. He was still wearing Jan’s watch, although in the intervening years the moments when he remembered it was Jan’s watch had grown rarer and rarer. Thinking of Jan made him think of the Hungarians, which made him think of Restauracja Max.

  “Rudi?”

  He looked up. “Yes?”

  “You are okay, aren’t you?” asked Frances.

  “Just thinking about something.” He tossed the meat hammer into the air so it flipped end over end and caught it by the handle on the way back down. It was harder than it looked; the heavy head made the thing flip eccentrically and if you weren’t careful you could wind up smacking yourself on the forehead. He’d practised a lot, in various kitchens, down the years, but out of the corner of his eye he couldn’t discern that Frances was particularly impressed. “Let’s get this meal done.”

  HIS FATHER KEPT his baseball cap on through the whole meal. And he expected Ivari to keep topping up his glass with Chivas. He kept looking at Rudi as if watching an escaped convict who had burst into the house and demanded to be fed. He made a number of jokes about the Poles which, his age notwithstanding, would have got his legs broken in any bar in Kraków. To make some obscure point, he insisted on carrying on part of the dinnertable conversation in Lithuanian, a language Ivari and Frances did not speak and Rudi only had a rudimentary grasp of. He was rude about the food. Rudi didn’t tell him that Fabio had long ago inoculated him against people being rude about his cooking.

  Toomas had always been small and wiry, but now he seemed to be somehow lignifying. There was an indefinable sap-dry toughness about him these days, like a little old tree bent by decades of wind but still standing. His skin was wind-tanned and his eyes were narrow and squinty in a nest of wrinkles and the years had left him a thin, mean little mouth to grow his goatee around. Years ago, when Rudi was about ten, Toomas had told him someone had once described him as looking like ‘a Baltic knight.’ Rudi had been too young to know what the hell he was talking about, but now he thought the comparison wasn’t far out. A Baltic knight fallen on hard times and doomed to die in penury and madness, a Hanseatic Quixote.