“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 splendour, but they were all crusted with centuries of soot. He had seen a documentary in which a Professor from the Jagiellonian University in Kraków had said that nobody dared clean the buildings because the dirt was the only thing standing between them and the acid rain.
Beyond the window, a snow-covered landscape of wastelands and forests and disused steelworks and rusting coking plants overlooked by monolithic Communist-era blocks of flats. A small car overturned in a ditch beside the track, its tires wearing caps of filthy ice. The sun sat low down in the sky, wan and chilly through the falling snow, too weak to cast shadows. Some of the Silesians further along the carriage started to sing. Rudi closed his eyes and dozed.
North of Strzelce Opolskie, the line ran into the border station between two ten-metre-high fences of close-woven metal mesh topped with extravagant spirals of razor ribbon. Looking through the mesh was like looking through fog. Rudi could see a bus station on the other side, people going home after work, cars orbiting a big roundabout, houses, blocks of flats, a factory chimney painted with orange and white hoops pouring purple smoke into the sky.
As the town thinned out, the train slowed down. The Silesians began to get out of their seats and put on their coats, gather their baggage from the overhead racks, settle their hats on their heads. Rudi sat where he was, looking out of the window. The borders along the Baltic were no more formal than lines on the map; this whole business was a brand new experience for him, and he was honestly interested in what the border arrangements were like here.
The train seemed to be approaching a world illuminated by a younger, bluer sun than the one that was now settling under the haze of pollution on the horizon. Lines of tall posts carried spotlights that were actually painful to look at directly. They washed out what remained of the natural daylight, and much of the natural colour outside as well. The whole frontier station sat in the middle of a great pool of this light. It was so well lit that Rudi found himself wondering if it was visible from orbit.
The border station was a compact collection of low brick buildings lining a platform patrolled by black-uniformed officers of the Polish Border Guard. More mesh and ribbon rose beyond the complex. Disembarking passengers were directed to one of the buildings, there to shuffle in four queues to passport and customs desks. When Rudi’s turn came, he put his rucksack through the scanner on the desk and watched the Polish official watching its progress on a monitor.
“Passport,” said the Pole.
Rudi handed over his passport, and the Pole slotted it into a reader built into the desk. He glanced at one of his screens, then at Rudi.
“Purpose of visit?”
“I’m on holiday,” said Rudi.
The Pole looked at him a moment longer, then he pulled the passport from its slot and held it out. “Pass.”
“Thank you,” said Rudi. He took his passport, stepped past the desk, and took his rucksack from the scanner.
On the other side of the building, down a short corridor, was an identical desk. Behind this desk sat an official wearing a field grey uniform.
“Passport,” the official said in German.
Rudi gave up his passport again and watched as the Hindenberger slotted it. He imagined the same farce going on in buildings on the other side of the track, where people were shuffling along an identical corridor to leave Hindenberg. Dariusz had told him that it sometimes took four hours to process each trainload, depending on how bloody-minded the respective governments were feeling that day.
“Purpose of visit?” asked the Hindenberger.
“I’m on holiday.”
The official looked at him with an expression of mild astonishment. He checked his screen again. “Estonian.”
“Yes.”
The Hindenberger shook his head slightly.
“I only get a week’s holiday a year,” Rudi told him. “I’m a chef. If I 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.
IN 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.