“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.
“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.”