Europe in Autumn

by Dave Hutchinson

  Ivari looked at him and sighed. He ground his cigarette out in the ashtray. “Paps.”

  “Well, yes,” said Rudi.

  Ivari shook his head. “He’s... he wants the park to declare independence.”

  “I beg your pardon?”

  “He wants the park to secede. Become an independent nation. A... what do you call it?”

  “Polity,” Rudi said, feeling numb.

  Ivari made a half-hearted gotcha gesture. “Polity. Yes.”

  “You talked him out of it, though?” said Rudi. He saw the look on his brother’s face and put his hands up. “Sorry. Pretend I didn’t ask that.”

  Ivari lit another cigarette. “A park in Lithuania did it a couple of years ago, I don’t remember the name.”

  Rudi nodded, though he couldn’t remember the name either. But it included part of the great primeval forest he had been telling Frances about earlier. “It didn’t last long,” he said.

  “Yes, well, the old man says they were a bunch of amateurs. He says he’s got it all thought out.”

  Well, at least that would be true enough. Rudi rubbed his face. “He can’t possibly make it work. He needs a big percentage of the population to agree to his proposal in the first place, before he goes anywhere with it.”

  “There aren’t more than seven hundred people living in the park these days, Rudi,” said Ivari. “Most of them are as pissed-off as he is that the Government keeps all our tourism revenue.”

  “And gives it back,” said Rudi. “Upkeep of the Manor and the visitor centre. The tram-line. Maintenance of the roads.”

  Ivari shook his head. “He’s right about that, at least. We only ever see a fraction of it. We get the absolute minimum that we need. We’re having to cannibalise one of the Humvees just to keep the others going. The rest of it?” He shrugged.

  “It wasn’t always like that,” said Rudi, thinking back to when he was young and they moved here for the first time. “The Government used to hurl cash at us. You remember President Laar? ‘Estonia’s most precious natural resource. We will never neglect it.’”

  “Laar was a long time ago. We were just kids, Rudi. Back then Paps could go to the Ministry and ask for anything his black little heart desired, and they’d give it him. Not any more. Now we’re a big tourist cash-cow, and most of the cash goes into someone else’s pockets.”

  “It sounds as if the old man’s got you convinced.”

  “He’s got a point about the money,” Ivari insisted. “When I took over from Paps as head ranger, we got on all right with the Government. They didn’t let us bathe in asses’ milk, but they granted us funds for a lot of projects. Nowadays I spend half my time in Tallinn with my cap in my hands.” He poured himself another drink and looked at the glass. “Oh, sure, the President comes up here a lot. The Prime Minister, as well. Lots of ministers. And what do we get?” He knocked back the drink in one swallow. “Flowers. Fruit. Fluffy toys.”

  “Governments change, Ivari.”

  “Nah,” Ivari said, pouring another drink. He held up the bottle. “You want?”

  “Yes,” said Rudi, taking the bottle from his brother. He topped up his drink, put the bottle on the floor by his feet, out of Ivari’s reach.

  “Nah,” Ivari said again. “It’s institutionalised now. This arsehole, he’s made everyone realise just how much we can help them feather their own nests.”

  Rudi shook his head. “It can’t work. The park can’t possibly earn enough from tourism to be self-supporting.”

  “Paps is talking about getting the Laulupidu moved out here.”

  “The song festival? That’s never going to happen.”

  Ivari looked at him. “Why not? It wasn’t in Tallinn originally; it was in Tartu.”

  “But the Festival Grounds are there, the Lauluväljak. It’s where the Singing Revolution happened. Nobody’s going to move the festival from there.”

  Ivari looked sourly at him. “With Paps’s contacts in the folk-song community? All it takes is his pals to decide to boycott the festival and come here and have a rival one of their own.” He shook his head. “Not even difficult. Those old guys love him, Rudi. They’d walk into hell if he asked them to. Nah.” He shook his head again. “All he has to do is say the word, and the Laulupidu happens right here. Let Tallinn keep the Lauluväljak for heavy metal concerts.”

  One of the biggest song festivals along the Baltic. Tens of thousands of people. If they could turn it into an annual event, rather than every five years, it might generate enough revenue to make a difference. If they could build a suitable venue for it here.

  Rudi said, “He has to go to the UN with the proposal. Their fact-finding study alone could last ten years.”

  “He’s got a precedent.”

  Rudi felt his blood chill.

  “That place in Berlin. The one with the anarchists.”

  “New Potsdam,” Rudi said dully.

  Ivari nodded. “That was a spontaneous thing. Paps thinks that if it happens spontaneously enough here, the UN will concede to it, just like they did with New Potsdam.”

  “The government could keep him in a UN Special Court for the rest of his life, arguing about that,” Rudi said, grasping at straws.

  “True. But in the interim, the UN has no power to prevent a provisional government being set up here. We’d have to accept Peacekeepers, but let’s face it, they might come in handy.”

  Rudi put a hand to his face and rubbed it in a horrified, circular motion, as if trying to erase his features. “The old bastard,” he said, not without admiration. “He wants to hand the UN a fait accompli and let them sort it out.”

  “And by the time they do have it sorted out...”

  “...this is a functioning country and they have no right to abolish it. They have to recognise it.” Rudi blinked. “Fucking hell.” It was, he thought, either the work of a genius or a madman. With his father, it was usually impossible to tell which.

  “Of course, we’d have to prove that we were a functioning country, in the interim,” said Ivari. “But Paps has it all costed out. He’s got spreadsheets, he’s got presentations, he’s got the results of divinations from the entrails of chickens. God only knows what he has. He’s bent the figures so far out of shape they don’t even look like numbers any more. He’s got a Constitution and a Parliament. In an emergency he’s got a government that looks a lot like the Divine Right of Kings.” Ivari held his hand out flat, about a metre above the floor. “He’s got a stack of notes and proposals and suggestions this high.”

  “Could it work?”

  “I don’t know. I’ve seen all his paperwork. Half of it looks as though it was written by Aleister Crowley. On a costings level? We’d have a few tight years in the beginning, then we’d start to show a profit. We’d licence settlers, sell visas. Make the visas really arty so people would regard them as souvenirs. We should have a park mascot. Villem the Bear. Everyone loves bears. Especially if we design him right.” Ivari put his hand to the side of his head as though massaging away a pain.

  “There aren’t enough people here to defend the borders,” Rudi said.

  “Haven’t you been listening?” Ivari shouted, taking his hand from his head. “The United Nations will do that for us.”

  Rudi raised a hand. “Okay. My mistake.”

  Ivari sighed. “Can I have a drink, please?”

  Rudi looked at the bottle of Scotch. After a while he picked it up and passed it over. Then he sat back and lit another cigar.

  “Either he’s going to be the saviour of the park,” Ivari said, pouring a very large measure of whisky into his glass and carefully putting the bottle down where he could get at it when he needed it again, “or he’s going to destroy us.” He picked up his glass and took a big drink. “And I’ll be honest with you, I don’t know which it’s going to be.”

  Rudi looked at his brother, caught between a rock and a hard place. “We could always kill him,” he suggested.

  “You see?”
Ivari gestured with his glass, slopping whisky over his hand. “I knew you’d take this seriously!”

  Rudi sighed. “I’ll talk to him.”

  “That sounds like a rash promise.”

  “I know.”

  “And it won’t work anyway.”

  “You underestimate my powers of persuasion.”

  “You underestimate how stubborn Paps is.”

  Rudi shook his head. “No. No, I never did that.”

  THE ABSENCE OF his mother didn’t bother him at the time. His father told him that she’d had to go away for a little while, and she’d be joining them in Lahemaa when they got settled. That was fine by him. There was the excitement of the move, packing stuff up, saying solemn goodbyes to his few friends at school, promising to keep in touch. Then there was the day of the move itself. Their furniture and most of their possessions had gone ahead a day or so earlier, so they were sleeping in an empty apartment, using sleeping bags and eating takeaway pizzas. Rudi didn’t sleep at all the night before, too excited by the prospect of the great adventure ahead. He couldn’t work out why his father wasn’t excited too. Couldn’t work out why he actually seemed rather sad. Ivari too.

  The next morning, of course, he was exhausted. Years later, he found he couldn’t actually remember leaving the apartment for the last time. Or the car journey to Lahemaa. He thought he may have slept through the whole thing, because his first concrete memory of Palmse wasn’t the Manor itself, or the forests, or the Gulf. It was his father balancing precariously on the roof of the little house they shared on the estate, trying to attach a satellite dish to the chimney.

  Toomas had previously never allowed television in any of the houses and flats they’d occupied, on the grounds that much of what was available on television was either unsuitable for children or just plain crap. Looking back, Rudi wondered whether the sudden appearance of television hadn’t been in response to some awkward questions about when, exactly, their mother was planning to join them in Palmse. A typical bit of Toomas misdirection. Anyway, both Rudi and Ivari were excited to finally be getting a glimpse of the forbidden fruit. Ivari, if anything, was more excited than Rudi – although, again with hindsight, Rudi thought that what Ivari was chiefly excited about was the prospect of Toomas losing his footing and plunging headfirst off the roof.

  That didn’t happen, though, and eventually Ivari and Rudi were allowed to sit down in the living room in front of the alien invader in their life and watch the screen fill with...

  The first television programme Rudi ever saw was a cookery programme. A large man speaking an unintelligible language was doing something inscrutable to a piece of meat.

  “Well we’re not watching this,” said Ivari, using the remote to flick through the channels until he found one that was showing an IndyCar race.

  Rudi had memorised the original channel.

  He came back to it later, when everyone was out, and sat waiting to find out what the large man had been doing with the piece of meat. He had to wait quite a while, as the old programmes repeated. He watched the large man make salads and desserts and prepare vegetables and truss various cuts of meat in various unlikely ways. He had little hands and fat fingers, but he was very dexterous, particularly when he was chopping vegetables. His name was Maciej Kuroń. Rudi googled him and discovered that he was Polish, the son of a famous union leader from the 1980s and 1990s. Rudi thought that was interesting, that the son of a famous union leader – although he didn’t quite understand then why he was so famous – would wind up cooking on television. By the time the channel repeated that first programme, it turned out that what Kuroń was cooking was actually quite mundane – something involving a joint of pork and a colossal amount of cream – but Rudi was hooked. He wrote Kuroń’s dialogue down phonetically, and downloaded Polish vocabularies to try and work out what he was saying. When that didn’t work, he downloaded a Polish language course and worked at it every spare minute he had. He downloaded audio files of Polish speakers, loaded them onto his tablet, listened to them all the time, and slowly individual words started to emerge from the endless stream of gibberish. And then the words started to make sense. And one day he was able to watch one of Kuroń’s programmes and understand it perfectly. He was ten years old.

  By then, he’d discovered a channel which showed nothing but old food programmes. Almost all of these were in English, so he started again the way he’d started with Polish, although by now he had a key in the form of the names of vegetables and cuts of meat and cooking techniques. He noted the names of the chefs and googled them. Ramsay, Oliver, Bourdain, Blumenthal, Keller, the list went on and on. He absorbed their biographies. He read their stories of life in the kitchen, found himself much taken with Bourdain. He read Bourdain’s novels. He watched Ramsay’s television series over and over again, all the time wondering at the rage in someone who had begun his career as a patissiere, but taking some of the clips out of context he detected a certain stageiness. He downloaded cookbooks, decoded them like Enigma transmissions.

  By the age of twelve he was fluent in English, Polish and French. He could have walked into any kitchen in Germany and Italy and got by. He was starting to experiment in the kitchen himself, finally (and with some difficulty finding the proper ingredients) treating his father and Ivari to a paella one evening.

  “So,” he said conversationally as he served the dish to his rather surprised father, “when’s Mama coming?”

  RUDI WOKE THE next morning with a headache and a faint suspicion that he wasn’t sure where he was, exactly. He opened his eyes unwillingly and looked at the bedroom and tried to jigsaw it into his memories. He lay there for a while as the bits clicked into place. Finally he groaned and clambered out of bed and availed himself of the room’s en suite facilities. Then he located his bag and put on some clean clothes and went downstairs.

  In the kitchen, Ivari and Frances were sitting on opposite sides of a pointed silence. Frances kept glaring. Ivari kept grimacing. Rudi walked through it and grabbed a mug from the draining board, filled it from the coffeemaker, and kept spooning sugar into it until he felt better. The remains of a loaf of rye bread sat on a board on the worktop. Rudi cut himself a slice.

  “So,” he said, “how are we all?”

  Frances made a snorting noise and, with a final glare at Ivari, got up and stormed out.

  “I detect negative waves,” Rudi said. He took a bite out of the slice of bread.

  Ivari looked at him and rubbed his eyes.

  “What time did we go to bed?” asked Rudi.

  Ivari shrugged.

  “Don’t blame me,” Rudi said. “You’re the one who brought out the whisky.” He took another bite of bread, washed it down with a mouthful of coffee. “Is the old man up?”

  “He’s been up for hours,” Ivari muttered. “He’s gone up to the coast.”

  “You’re kidding.”

  Ivari shook his head. “The old bastard isn’t human.”

  Rudi leaned back against the worktop and nibbled his slice of bread. “Do you know where he went?”

  “He took a Hummer and said he was going to have a look at the Gulf, that’s all,” Ivari said.

  Rudi nodded. That at least sounded familiar. He swigged some more coffee. “Do you have any spare Hummers?”

  Ivari turned to look at him. “They’re all out,” he said. “But a couple of the quad-bikes aren’t signed out today. You’re welcome to one of those.”

  Rudi drained his mug. “Yes, well,” he said. “You could try to be a bit more supportive, brother,” he said.

  Ivari gave a great hungover shrug.

  A QUAD-BIKE WAS basically a car without any creature comforts. Or a motorcycle without the ever-present fear of losing one’s balance. Rudi had been riding them since he was fifteen years old. He checked one out of the visitor centre’s garage and gunned it up the trails through the forest towards the coast.

  And there, at the end of the trail, on a promontory overlooking the Gulf of
Finland, stood his father, like a figurehead.

  “So, boy,” Toomas said in English.

  “So, father,” Rudi replied in kind.

  Toomas took a long deep breath, held it, and let it out. “Smell that?” he asked. His English was almost accentless. “No smell like the smell of the Baltic wind. Guaranteed to cure a hangover, every time.”

  “You must come out here quite a lot, then,” said Rudi.

  Toomas looked at him and smiled. “Very good,” he said. “You can do cynicism in English. Very hard to do cynicism well in a foreign language, you know.” He switched to French. “How about in French?”

  “In French, I find I’m more laconic than cynical,” Rudi said in French.

  “Of course, you’re a cook,” said Toomas. “You’d have to know French.”

  “Well, I never worked under any French chefs, but I take your point.”

  Toomas asked a nearly-unintelligible question in Lithuanian.

  “Paps,” Rudi said, “you know I don’t speak Lithuanian.”

  Toomas looked taken aback. “How am I supposed to know that?”

  “Because I told you last night when you were holding up your part of the conversation in Lithuanian.”

  “Ah. Okay.” Toomas went back to English. “But you’re good. You really are. You and I, we have an ear for languages. I’ll bet you speak pretty good German, too.”

  “I’ve been practising a lot, recently. Some people say I sound Berlinerische, but I wouldn’t know about that.”

  “You see? Ivari doesn’t have it. I love him like a son, but he’s hopeless with languages.”

  “Ivari is your son, father. Unless there’s something else you haven’t been telling us all these years.”

  Toomas waved it away. “A figure of speech.”

  “One would hope.”

  His father looked at him. “Why did you come back?”

  “I missed you.”

  Toomas nodded irritably. “Okay, okay, you can do cynicism in English. I got the point. Why did you come back?”