Europe in Winter (The Fractured Europe Sequence)(40)
The latter was never going to happen, not unless his mates wanted to bury him in secret at midnight. There was a surprising amount of paperwork involved with interring bodies, and the moment the authorities got the merest sniff that Toomas wanted to be buried in the Park they dusted down their rage at his abortive attempt at Independence and turned the application down flat. This man committed treason and you want to bury him in the Park? Stick him in a bag and drop him in the Gulf of Finland instead. Fuck him.
The folk song guys had cast around for alternate venues and come up with St Catherine’s, it seemed, simply because the Lutheran pastor here had proven less resistant to a Humanist ceremony than anyone else they had approached.
Down at the front of the church, the wicker coffin containing the remains of his father – what remains had finally washed up some distance along the coast, anyway – stood on two trestles. The celebrant was standing beside it, talking about Toomas’s invaluable contributions to the Estonian folk song community. Rudi tuned him out and looked around the church. Some of the folk singers were in national costume. Kustav was sitting a couple of rows behind them in his uniform, head bowed. Juhan was in a pew on the other side of the aisle. There was no one else there that Rudi recognised, even slightly.
It occurred to him that the last time he had visited the land of his birth had been for a funeral, too. Sergei Fedorovich, the chef who had first introduced him to restaurant cooking, had finally succumbed to an aneurysm in the middle of a spectacular rant at one of his waitresses. That funeral had been enormous fun; the food had been fantastic, there was a colossal amount of alcohol, chefs from kitchens up and down the Baltic had come to pay their respects, ethnic Estonians and Russians had put aside their differences for a while. Everyone called him ‘Ruudi,’ the proper form of his name, and it sounded strange to him. He’d long ago stopped trying to correct everyone else in Europe who mispronounced it. Anyway, in Estonian rudi meant to bruise, which he had found, down the years, that he rather liked. The wake had lasted for two days, his hangover for three. He suspected that wasn’t going to be the case here; Toomas and his pals had an unnatural capacity for booze, but money was tight. He had no interest in seeing what the funeral meal was like. It was going to offend him professionally and he was going to wind up talking to strangers he couldn’t care less about. He checked his watch, considering getting the next available ferry back to the mainland.
Some of the costumed figures at the front of the church began to shuffle along their pew into the aisle, and for a moment Rudi thought the service was already over, but the singers gathered around the coffin and composed themselves and Rudi stared in horror. Oh, gods, they’re actually going to sing.
And after a moment or so, they did, these old men and women who looked as if they had stepped out of a kitsch tourist postcard, and it was beautiful. Rudi didn’t know the song, didn’t even think it was Estonian – he caught a few words that sounded Lithuanian, which had been one of his father’s obsessions – but the old folk sang their hearts out, and Rudi suspected that, had he any feelings left for his father, it might have brought him to tears.
The song finished, the celebrant delivered one last homily, then the old chaps took up the coffin again and began to carry it down the aisle to the door. None of them was under seventy, but even in life Toomas had been virtually weightless, a figure composed mostly of gristle and sinew and spite, and they bore him easily. As the mourners in the church turned and started to follow the coffin, Rudi noticed a number of curious glances cast his way.
When everyone had gone outside, Rudi left the church and followed them along the path around the building to a little graveyard. A group of people was already standing around an open grave. Rudi stood at the back again while the celebrant said something the wind blew away, the coffin was lowered into the grave, and then everyone just spontaneously started to wander off.
As the other mourners were leaving, he saw a woman he thought he recognised, although he couldn’t work out where from. She was very short and quite stout and rather beautiful, and moved with the rolling gait of someone with hip problems who was wearing a powered exoskeleton under her clothes to help her walk. He thought she must be in her seventies, her grey hair cut collar-length and her clothes sensible but not cheap, and she had on her face an expression of acute irritation.
She seemed to be unaccompanied, standing to one side of a small group of people, and as Rudi looked at her she turned her head slightly and their eyes met and with a single lurch of his heart he suddenly knew who she was.
He took a step towards her, stopped, and she turned away from the grave and walked back towards the trees at the edge of the church’s property, and a moment later she had vanished from sight in the direction of the little line of parked vehicles on the road.
Rudi blinked and took a long, unsteady breath.
“Are you all right?” asked Juhan.
“Yes,” said Rudi. “Yes, I am.”
“DID YOUR FATHER ever tell you how we lost the Frenchmen?” Juhan asked.
“No,” said Rudi.
They were sitting in Rudi’s cottage back at the farm, Juhan having tagged along with him without being asked, a paper-wrapped package tucked under his arm. He had then produced from an inside pocket of his leather jacket a full bottle of a rather good whisky, put it on the table in the little living room, and found a couple of glasses in the kitchen. Rudi suddenly couldn’t be bothered to argue.