“So, when are you going back to Poland?” Toomas asked after Ivari had cleared up the plates and gone into the kitchen with them to make coffee.
“I don’t know if I will,” Rudi said. “I’ve been living in Berlin for the past year and a half.” And he regretted it the moment the name of the city left his mouth.
“Germany,” Toomas mused. The land of Estonia’s ancestral overlords. The ones before the Russians. The ones who built, among other things, Palmse Mois. He sat and stared at Rudi from under the brim of his baseball cap. The hologram logo made it look as if an Aeroflot airliner was emerging from his forehead.
“Oh, Paps,” Frances sighed. “Can’t you just be happy Rudi’s here?”
“When he’s been living with the sakslane?” Toomas asked with an old man’s insolent snap of the lips. “I think not.”
“He was doing it for work,” she said, and Rudi looked at her and tipped his head to one side, unsure whether she was just saying that to defuse an argument, or if she really knew why he’d been in Germany. Certainly, he hadn’t told her.
Toomas snorted. “Given the choice, a man would have refused.”
“Maybe he didn’t get a choice.”
“Excuse me?” said Rudi. “Let’s not forget that I’m here too, eh?”
Toomas snorted. “Never been able to fight his own battles, anyway.” He picked up his glass and waved it vaguely at Rudi. “Get me a drink, poiss.”
“Fuck you, vana mees. Get your own fucking drink.”
Frances glared at him and he waved a hand to say sorry.
“You two were the same at the wedding,” she said wonderingly, looking at them both from her seat at the end of the table. “You were only in each other’s company for five minutes before you were screaming at each other. What in God’s name is wrong with you?”
“Nothing wrong with me,” Rudi’s father said, sitting back and folding his arms across his chest and looking smug.
“That what your girlfriend says, eh?” Rudi snapped, and saw a little of the smugness drain away.
“Rudi!” Frances said. “That’s enough. You’re both guests in our house and I’ll never forgive either of you if you keep on behaving like this.”
Rudi and Toomas continued to stare at each other for a few more moments. Without breaking eye-contact, Rudi said, “I’m sorry, Frances. That was rude of me.”
Frances looked at Toomas. “Paps? Anything you want to say?”
Toomas pushed his chair back and got up from the table. “I have to piss.” As he left the dining room, he brushed past Ivari, who was returning from the kitchen with a tray laden with a cafetiére and cups and a sugar bowl and a milk jug. “Get me a drink, poiss,” Toomas muttered as he went by.
Ivari looked at Rudi and Frances. “So,” he said when Toomas was in the bathroom and safely out of earshot. “Scores?”
Frances looked at Rudi. “Seriously. What is wrong with you two?”
“He’s my father. I’m his son.” He shrugged. “What can I say?”
“Well you can stop being so fucking gnomic, for one thing,” she said in English.
“‘Gnomic’?” said Rudi, feeling the twitch of a grin.
Frances glowered at him. “And?”
“You’re not even using the word properly.”
“How do you know? You’re not even a native English speaker.”
“Neither are you.”
Frances hurled her napkin at him; it flapped open and landed in the middle of the table, but the three of them were smiling again. She shook her head. “I’m going to slap both of you if this carries on,” she said. “And when I slap people, it hurts.”
He had no trouble believing that. “You’d slap a little old man?”
“He’s not a little old man,” she said without thinking. “He’s a demon.” She stopped and looked at Ivari, who was putting the tray of coffee things on the table, and Rudi, who was grinning and pointing at her. She sighed. “Your family makes my fucking head hurt,” she told her husband.
“Mine too,” Ivari agreed.
“What’s he doing here anyway?” asked Rudi.
Frances looked at Ivari, who said, “He had a fight with Maret. That’s his–”
“Yes,” said Rudi.
Ivari shrugged. “He turned up the day before yesterday with a rucksack. Said he had some business with Aarvo and he needed to stay a couple of nights. And he did have some business with Aarvo, give him his due.”
“It’s one of his default settings, Ivari,” Rudi said in exasperation. “He has an appointment somewhere and then he engineers a row and storms out, but all he’s doing is going to his appointment. He’s been doing it all his life. Haven’t you worked it out yet?”
Frances scowled at him. “Don’t talk to my husband like that.”
Ivari said, “Coffee?”
Rudi shrugged.
“Anyway,” said Ivari, pouring coffee. “Maret phoned yesterday evening in tears. They’d had an argument and Paps had stormed out and she was scared he was going to do something stupid.”
Rudi snorted. “Another default setting.”
Ivari straightened up and gestured gently towards Rudi with the cafetiére. “You can be clever about it all you want. Some of us have to spend all our time with him.”
Rudi bugged his eyes out at his brother.
“I had to go up to Aasumetsa this morning and tell Maret in person that Paps was fit and well and staying with us. She really cares about him. You’d like her.”
“Not going to happen,” Rudi warned.
Frances sighed and looked at her watch. Then she looked at Ivari. “He’s done it again.”
“I DON’T KNOW when he started doing this,” said Ivari. “He just has too much to drink.”
“Which really is something new,” Rudi added.
Ivari had opened the lock on the bathroom door with a screwdriver kept handy for the purpose. They were standing in the doorway looking at Toomas, who was sitting on the toilet with his jeans and boxer-shorts around his ankles. His head was leaned against the wall and his eyes were closed and he was snoring gently.
Frances, who was standing behind them, said, “The first time, it was a little worrying. The second time, it was quaint. Now?” She shook her head. “I’m in unknown territory. I have no idea.”
Rudi said, “What do you usually do in these situations?” Hoping the answer would be, ‘We leave the old bastard here all night so the edge of the toilet seat cuts off his circulation and his legs die. Or he gets pneumonia, at the very least.’
“Well,” Ivari admitted, “if you recorded it and posted it online, I’m sure there would be a really big audience for it.”
Rudi pulled a face. “I was afraid you were going to say something like that.”
Frances landed a large and goodnatured hand on their shoulders. “And that’s where I leave the Sons of Toomas to work their magic. I’m shattered. ’Night, boys.”
When she had gone, Ivari said, “You think anyone will do this for us when we’re his age?”
“I don’t plan on getting into this state in the first place,” said Rudi. “You?”
Ivari shook his head. “Nah. We talked about it. First time I do this, Frances is off to find a better-behaved model.”
“You believe her?”
“Do you?”
Rudi thought about it. “Better not get in this state, then.”
“We’ve got Mama’s genes as well,” said Ivari. “It wouldn’t happen to us.”
“No,” agreed Rudi. “We’d run away first.”
“Did you ever find out where she went?”
Rudi shook his head. At one time, he’d really wanted to know, but by the time he was old enough to do anything about finding their mother he’d had enough of being disappointed by his parents.
“I looked,” said Ivari.
Rudi looked at him. “And?”
His brother shook his head. “Better you don’t know.”
“Ivari,”
Rudi said, quite seriously, “we’re standing here looking at our father sitting fast asleep on a toilet with his underwear around his ankles. How much worse can it be?”
Ivari shrugged. “Well, she went to England.”
“I beg your pardon?”
Ivari nodded. “After she left us, she went to England. Place called Doncaster. After that, I don’t know.”
“Are you sure it was her?”
“Oh yes. These political people who keep coming here to have their photographs taken with me? They keep saying, ‘Anything you want, Ivari, just name it.’ They don’t mean it, of course, because they think I’ll ask them for money, but now and again I ask them about Mother.”
“And they bother to look?”
“I’ve got no way of checking, of course. But, I mean, Doncaster. Either that’s real or someone fancies themselves as a writer of fiction.”
“Do we have any family in England?” Rudi asked, not because he was particularly interested but because every minute Toomas sat there unconscious with his skivvies around his ankles was another little victory over his father.
“Not that I could find out,” Ivari admitted, himself not conspicuously eager to rescue Toomas. “Wasn’t there somebody who went to Plymouth?”
Rudi shook his head. “He came back. Almost immediately.”
“I thought so.” Ivari looked at his father. “Have we waited long enough?”
“Do you have a camera?”
“I do, but is that going to make you feel any better?”
“I’ve had moments, these past few years, when it might have,” Rudi admitted.
“Me too.”
They stood there, side by side, looking at their father as he snored and snuffled on the toilet, for quite a long time without moving.
Finally, Ivari said, “Oh, sod it,” and stepped forward, and Rudi stepped forward with him.
AFTERWARDS, THEY RETIRED to Ivari’s study, where Ivari had a bottle of Johnny Walker Blue Label and an extractor fan powerful enough to tow a car, Frances being opposed to smoking in the house. Ivari paused in the kitchen long enough to collect two glasses and a carafe of water, then he closed the door of the study behind them, switched on the extractor, and put bottle, glasses, carafe and a small ceramic ashtray down on his desk. He took his battered Aeron chair at the desk; Rudi got the comfy armchair in the corner beside the bookshelves.
“Well,” said Rudi eventually. “That went better than I expected.”
“It does help, having an extra pair of hands,” Ivari admitted, opening a drawer of his desk and taking out a packet of Marlboros and a Zippo. He waved the packet of cigarettes at Rudi, but Rudi shook his head and showed his brother a tin of small cigars. “Frances won’t help me.”
“I don’t blame her,” Rudi said, lighting a cigar.
Ivari poured measures of whisky into the glasses, handed one to Rudi. “Help yourself to water.”
“Thanks. Where did you get Blue Label from?”
“Oh, Christ.” Ivari sat back in the Aeron and crossed ankle over thigh as he took a cigarette from its packet. “You wouldn’t believe the stuff some of these people bring.”
“These people?”
Ivari nodded as he lit the cigarette. “The celebrities,” he said in a cloud of smoke. “Grabiański. The President. They don’t feel able to visit the Park without bringing gifts. Flowers. Fruit. Fluffy toys. Flash keys full of their native folk music. Chocolates.” He picked up his glass and waggled it. “Alcohol.” He took a sip. “Much the most useful gift of all.”
Rudi added some water to his drink, sipped it, added a little more.
“We divide most of it up among ourselves,” Ivari went on. “Kaisa and Jaan have a couple of kids, so they get all the fluffy animals. Mikhel’s really keen on world music, so he usually gets that. The flowers go into the Manor. Brighten the place up for a while.” He took a drag on his cigarette, exhaled through his nostrils. “The Americans gave us a car.”
“Americans?”
“The President gave us a car. One of those little fuel-cell things. Humptys? Humbles?”
“Humboldts.”
Ivari shrugged. “Fat lot of good it would have been here. A good strong wind would have blown it into the Gulf. Either that or it would have vanished forever into a bog. We gave it to a hospital in Tallinn.”
“I don’t remember seeing a photograph of you with the President of the United States,” said Rudi.
“We weren’t allowed to take any.” Ivari raised his glass in mock salute. “Nobody was allowed to know he was here. Security. Officially, he never travels outside the United States because there’s always a chance some crazed foreigner might blow themselves up next to him.”
“Whereas in the United States that chance is just vanishingly small,” Rudi added.
Ivari shook his head. “That was an experience, let me tell you. We never got any warning he was coming, but afterwards I thought about it and for the six months or so before he arrived we had a big spike in visitor numbers. Some Americans, but quite a few Brits too. Germans. Poles, lots of Poles.”
“Security,” said Rudi. “Scoping you out.”
“That’s what I thought, afterwards. And after he’d gone, three rangers who’d been working here for almost a year handed their notice in. No explanation, no reason. Just gone. Good people, too. Not easy to replace. We missed them.”
“What was his security like?” Rudi asked, out of professional interest.
“There wasn’t any.”
“You’re joking.”
Ivari raised his hand. “No lie. Just him and three other people. They drove up to the Manor one morning in a people carrier, got out, wandered around a bit, came into the centre and introduced themselves. I didn’t believe them. I mean, I’d seen him on the news and everything, but you see people out of context and they don’t look like themselves, you know?”
“I know.”
“So they showed me a whole lot of documents – and to be honest with you they could have mocked them all up with a laptop and a printer. Stuff from the Foreign Ministry. Stuff signed by the President – our President.” Ivari shook his head again. “What a farce.”
“Didn’t he have any identification?”
“The President of the United States doesn’t carry any.” Ivari saw his brother’s face and nodded. “Yes. But if you think about it, why would he need any? He’s driven everywhere, so he doesn’t need a driving licence. He doesn’t need a passport because everywhere he goes is American territory, however temporarily. He doesn’t need an identification card because, let’s be frank about it, when is anyone ever going to question his identity?”
“You did.”
“One of the other men with him was the American Ambassador. He had identification. Enough identification to choke a gorilla. Which, incidentally, the third man resembled. Big bloke with a big briefcase chained to his wrist.”
“Launch codes.”
“Well, yes, I figured that out. Tell me this, Rudi, what kind of world is it where the President of the United States has to go about like a thief in the night?”
Rudi shrugged. It was the world of GWOT, which had so far not shown any sign of a victory for either side. The Americans’ low-key tactics were interesting, but he was willing to bet there had been backup not more than a few seconds away, had the need arisen.
“Turns out he’s Estonian,” Ivari said. “Well, his great-great grandfather was. Wanted to see the ancestral homeland. He had a really strange accent. When I asked him about it he said he was from Minneapolis.”
“Oh, him,” said Rudi.
“Him. Long streak of piss.” Ivari took a drink. “Ach, he seemed all right. Asked a lot of good questions – seemed to have done his homework. Most of them don’t bother. We went up to the coast and the Ambassador took our photograph with me pointing towards Finland and looking intrepid. Then we all shook hands and they went away. About four minutes later this really beautiful woman turns up with a briefc
ase full of documents she wants us to sign. I mean, you’ve never seen a woman like her, Rudi. That line in Chandler about making a bishop want to kick in a stained-glass window? That was her. Jaan was standing there with his tongue hanging out; if Kaisa had been on duty that day and not visiting her mother in Rakevere, she’d have divorced him on the spot. So all these documents were non-disclosure agreements. If we told anyone, anyone at all, that the President had been here...oh, I can’t remember. They’d kill us and all our families and our pets and all our friends and burn our homes to the ground and salt the earth so nothing would ever grow there again. Something like that.”
“You’re telling me about it.”
“He lost the next election. Fuck him.” Ivari drained his glass. “Another?”
“I haven’t finished mine yet.”
“Anyway.” Ivari poured himself another drink. “A month or so later this big container lorry drives up and the driver and his mate unload this Humbly. Humboldt. Got me to sign for it. Gift from the President of the United States.” He shrugged. “We drove it around the estate for a while, but it was no use to us, so Liisu – her brother’s a surgeon – drove it to Tallinn and gave it to him for the hospital to use. I think they ferry old folks to and from day clinics with it.”
“But no photographs.”
“Ah.” Ivari gestured with his glass. “This is a good one. After he lost the election – about a year after he lost the election – I got an email. A huge email. From the US Embassy. All the photographs the Ambassador took of us. And a little note saying, it’s okay for you to display these now and the President would be proud if you did.” Ivari took a drink of Scotch. “As I said, fuck him. If he comes back now, when he’s not in power, maybe I’ll display them.”
Rudi looked at his brother and tipped his head to one side. “Are you all right?”
Europe in Autumn Page 15
