Europe in Autumn Read Online Free Page B

take any time off my boss has to employ an agency chef.”
    The Hindenberger shook his head again. He unslotted Rudi’s passport and held it out. “You need to get another job, mate.”
    “I know,” Rudi said, taking his passport. He walked down the corridor and emerged on another platform, where a train was waiting to leave for Breslau.
     
     
    3.
     
    I N THE LATTER years of the twentieth century, Europe had echoed with the sound of doors opening as the borderless continent of the Schengen Agreement had, with some national caveats, come into being.
    It hadn’t lasted. The early years of the twenty-first century brought a symphony of slamming doors. Economic collapse, paranoia about asylum seekers – and, of course, GWOT, the ongoing Global War On Terror – had brought back passport and immigration checks of varying stringency, depending on whose frontiers you were crossing. Then the Xian Flu had brought back quarantine checks and national borders as a means of controlling the spread of the disease; it had killed, depending on whose figures you believed, somewhere between twenty and forty million people in Europe alone. It had also effectively killed Schengen and kicked the already somewhat rickety floor out from under the EU.
    The Union had struggled into the twenty-first century and managed to survive in some style for a few more years of bitching and infighting and cronyism. Then it had spontaneously begun to throw off progressively smaller and crazier nation-states, like a sunburned holidaymaker shedding curls of skin.
    Nobody really understood why this had happened.
    What was unexpected was that the Union had continued to flake away, bit by bit, even after the Xian Flu. Officially, it still existed, but it existed in scattered bits and pieces, like Burger King franchises, mainly in England and Poland and Spain and Belgium, and it spent most of its time making loud noises in the United Nations. The big thing in Europe these days was countries , and there were more and more of them every year.
    The Continent was alive with Romanov heirs and Habsburg heirs and Grimaldi heirs and Saxe-Coburg Gotha heirs and heirs of families nobody had ever heard of who had been dispossessed sometime back in the fifteenth century, all of them seeking to set up their own pocket nations. They found they had to compete with thousands of microethnic groups who suddenly wanted European homelands as well, and religious groups, and Communists, and Fascists, and U2 fans. There had even been, very briefly, a city-state – or more accurately a village-state – run by devotees of the works of Günther Grass. Rudi was vaguely sorry that Grassheim had been reabsorbed by the Pomeranian Republic - itself a polity of only ten or fifteen years’ standing. He really liked The Tin Drum .
     
     
    T HE I NDEPENDENT S ILESIAN State of Hindenberg – formerly the Polish cities of Opole and Wrocław (formerly the German cities of Opeln and Breslau – formerly the Prussian towns of... etc, etc) and the areas around them – existed as a kind of Teuton island in a Slavic sea. Poland, having been forced by the EU, UN and NATO to accede to an ethnic Silesian homeland, had refused to cede more territory to give the young state a land-bridge to Greater Germany. Hindenberg had responded by imposing draconian visa requirements for Poles, to which Poland had responded by pegging the exchange rate of the złoty and the Hindenberg mark artificially low.
    There had been border disputes, frontier actions, Polish war games within yards of Hindenberg’s border fence. Hindenberg unofficially offered its services as a haven for some of Poland’s wealthier and more powerful mafia bosses, and refused to sign an extradition treaty with its Slavic neighbour.
    The latest tit-for-tat involved Hindenberg’s railway authority changing the state’s track gauge. The Polish response had been to embargo postal deliveries to the Silesian state.
    Eventually, accepted wisdom