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?”
“I needed a break,” Rudi said, deploying the legend effortlessly. “I’ve been opening a new restaurant in Berlin and things got a bit hectic. I was starting to shout at the kitchen crew.” He shrugged. “Time to take a few days off.”
“Your own restaurant?”
Rudi shook his head. “My employer’s. In Poland.”
“A Pole is opening a restaurant in Berlin?”
“Max thought it was time to repay the favour for 1939. He’s Silesian, anyway. That’s sort of German.”
Toomas rubbed his face. “You see, I can’t understand why you wound up there when there are perfectly adequate restaurants in Estonia.”
“Well, that’s the important phrase, isn’t it? ‘Perfectly adequate.’ Not ‘really excellent.’”
“Will you invite me to the grand opening?”
“Would you come?”
“To Germany?” Toomas made a spitting sound.
“Well then.”
Toomas looked out over the Gulf of Finland and took another deep breath. “I suppose Ivari told you.”
“Told me what, father?”
Toomas looked at him. “Don’t do that ‘told me what, father?’ You’re not a good liar.”
“I certainly didn’t inherit that from you.”
His father grinned. “I’ll bet you thought that would make me angry, eh?”
“I’ll bet it does, too. You’re just a better liar than me.”
The grin went away. “We’re fighting for our very existence here.”
“Oh, please.”
“Really. It’s not like things were when we first came here. Governments always loved the park, they gave us anything we wanted. They understood it’s the heart of every Estonian.”
Rudi snorted. “It’s a very large and picturesque area of otherwise not very useful land, father.”
Toomas thumped his chest. “The heart!” he cried.
Rudi looked out over the sea.
“But now we have this band of brigands in Tallinn,” Toomas went on. “All they see is an opportunity to suck us dry for their own benefit.”
“You’re just pissed off because they won’t give you everything you want, old man,” Rudi said. “I know how you work.”
His father shook his head. “We get a UN Heritage Grant. Or we should. I know how much that grant is, to the penny. It’s been two years since we saw any of it. And it hasn’t been for want of asking.”
Rudi glanced at him. “You’re sure?”
“Do me a favour. I trained as an accountant.”
“You trained as an architect.”
“And some time after that I trained as an accountant. Don’t look at me like that. I know how to read a balance sheet. I asked the UN Heritage Organisation for their disbursements and they emailed them back to me the same day. I asked the Ministry about them and I still haven’t heard back.” Toomas hard-landed a fist in his palm. “It’s graft on a colossal scale. It’s a national disgrace.”
“So go to court.”
“In this fucking country?” Toomas yelled. He waved the prospect away. “Please, don’t mention that again.”
“This fucking country being the country you love so much, and everything.”
Toomas drew himself up to his full height and adjusted the bill of his baseball cap. The Aeroflot logo protruded from his forehead like the horn of a mythical beast. “I know what you’re thinking,” he said.
“If you really knew what I was thinking, you’d already be running,” said Rudi.
Toomas ignored him. “You’re thinking this is the last act of a lonely, bitter old man, a last stab for immortality after a wasted life.”
Rudi shrugged. “Crossed my mind,” he admitted.
“And there’s some currency in that,” Toomas admitted. He spread his hands. “I mean, how much longer do I have, realistically?”
“Stop that,” Rudi snapped. “Just stop it. I’ve been listening to that bullshit since I was eight years old and I don’t have to listen to it any more.”
Toomas sighed. Then he sighed again, and for a long time he didn’t say anything and they stood side by side watching the Baltic lap unhurriedly at the edge of their homeland.
“I love it here,” Toomas said finally, and it was as though all the bullshit had been stripped from his voice. “I spent my entire life looking for somewhere to belong, and I found it here. And we had a lot of good years after that. And then the pirates moved in. They’ve been nibbling away at the edges of the park for the past two years. New towns, developments, sports arenas. Nothing I say does any good, the land just gets eaten up, year after year, hectare by hectare. One day there’ll be nothing but a line of hotels where we’re standing now. It’ll all be gone. Because greedy men came to power in Tallinn. They don’t care about our heritage. All they care about is their foreign partners, the ones who are coming in to build the sports arenas and the hotels. We’re just an irrelevance. Something to be swept aside in the name of progress.”
Rudi looked about him. “You’d have to be out of your mind to build an hotel here,” he said.
Toomas shook his head. “That’s not you talking,” he said. “That’s how you feel about me talking.”
Rudi thought about it. “Fair point,” he said finally. “So this is why you want to secede.”
Toomas pouted. “No one listens, boy.”
“I do wish you’d stop calling me boy, you know?”
“No one listens, Rudi,” Toomas said loudly. “So I’m going to take it away from them.”
Rudi scratched his head. “If what you say is true and so much money’s at stake here, they’ll try to stop you.”
“Oh, that’s started already.”
“Really?”
“Oh yes. We’ve had some vandalism in the park over the past few weeks. Nothing dreadful, certainly nothing we haven’t had before from drunken lads out on a dare, but this is different. It’s too careful, too well-executed. It’s not about to make me stop, and they know that. It isn’t supposed to make me stop; it’s just to open a conversation with me, let me know they’re ready and waiting.”
Rudi looked at him. “People are going to get hurt.”
“Is that supposed to deter me?”
“Well, it might make most normal people at least stop and think about what they were doing, but no, I was just stating a fact. People are going to get hurt if this thing goes any further.”
Toomas rammed his fists into the pockets of his parka hard enough for Rudi to hear stitching break. He walked away a few steps.