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.”