Europe in Autumn Read Online Free

matter how small. Once, half conscious with exhaustion, he put a fresh batch of salad into a bowl with some which had been standing already prepared for some minutes, and she almost beat him black and blue.
    But he did learn. The first thing he learned was that, if he wanted to remain in Pani Stasia’s kitchen, he was going to have to forget his four-year drift along the Baltic coast. The things he had learned from the Turk and the other chefs he’d worked under meant nothing to the little old woman.
    Fractionally, month after month, her periods of displeasure grew further and further apart, until one day, almost eighteen months after he first set foot in Restauracja Max, she allowed him to prepare one cover.
    She wouldn’t allow it to be served, however. She prepared a duplicate cover herself and sent it out into the restaurant instead, and then set about tasting Rudi’s attempt.
    As Rudi watched her he became aware that the whole kitchen had fallen silent. He looked around and found himself overwhelmed by what he thought of as a movie moment . Everyone in the kitchen was watching Pani Stasia. Even Max, standing just inside the swing door that led into the restaurant. It was, Rudi, thought, that moment in a film where the callow greenhorn finally gains the grudging respect of his mentor. He also knew that life wasn’t like the movies, and that Pani Stasia would spit the food out onto the tiled floor and then beat him senseless.
    In the event, life and the movies converged just enough for Pani Stasia to turn and lean on her cane and look at her audience. She would, she told them finally, perhaps consider feeding Rudi’s service to her dog.
    All the crew applauded. Rudi never heard them. He thought later that he was the only one of all of them to notice just how old Pani Stasia suddenly seemed.
    She died that summer, and Rudi simply took over. There was no formal announcement from Max, no new contract, nothing at all. Not even a pay rise. He simply inherited the kitchen. He and Max were the only mourners at the funeral.
    “I never found out anything about her,” he said as they watched the coffin being lowered into the ground.
    “She was,” Max said, “my mother.”
     
     
    2.
     
    I T WAS SNOWING in Gliwice, fat white flakes settling gently out of a sky boiling with jaundiced clouds. He had to wait two hours for the local train to Strzelce Opolskie.
    The rattling little local was full of Silesians speaking German-accented Polish and Polish-accented German. The passengers sharing his compartment were curious as to why he had chosen to visit Hindenberg, but he spoke German with a strong Estonian accent and there seemed to be a common assumption – at least among his fellow travellers – that the Baltic peoples were a law unto themselves.
    “I’m on holiday,” he told them. “I want to see Hindenberg.” The idea of an Estonian wanting to see Hindenberg seemed such a novelty that it excused practically everything, which was what he was counting on.
    A couple of kilometres outside Gliwice, some Polish kids ran alongside the track and threw stones at the train. Nobody paid them much attention; it was unusual these days to travel by train in Poland and not have something thrown at you, or dropped on you from a bridge, or placed on the tracks in front of you. Rudi supposed it had something to do with Polish resentment about the Line, but Polish resentment about the Line was a complex thing, and Poles had so many other things to feel resentful about these days that it was hard to be sure. Perhaps it was just a fashion, one of those senseless neurotic fads that sometimes overtook cultures, like elevator surfing or out of town shopping malls or crush music.
    The train rocked and rolled slowly through grubby little industrial towns. The Fall of the Wall was just a distant misty memory now, but Eastern Europe still needed a good scrub and a lick of paint. Some of Poland’s most polluted towns had buildings of mediaeval