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.