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.
I
VARI 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.
F
RANCES ASKED
R
UDI
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 out 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.”
H
IS 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.
“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.”