Europe in Winter (The Fractured Europe Sequence)(62)
“Doesn’t matter,” Forsyth said, knuckles popping as he gripped the sissy bar bolted onto the dash. “You missed her anyway.”
“Music.” Leon punched at the music centre. The van began to thud as if someone was hitting it very hard and very rapidly with a huge rubber mallet. Leon had a directness of spirit that was unusual in contemporary Poles. He loved movies, acceleration, alcohol, loud music, and women, preferably all at once.
Leon liked to introduce himself to people as a political film-maker, but he and his partner made bloodbath movies and hardcore porno remakes of classics. They had one proper Hollywood structure, a late-period Bogart programmed from home-ciné footage taken near the end of the actor’s life. Leon had to code everything else himself, from the Lucille Ball they’d used in Drink My Blood, Vampire Motherf*cker, to the Pola Negri who had appeared in everything from The Erotic Life of Catherine the Great, to Jan Sobieski, the one straight historical drama they had ever attempted, which had been a resounding flop.
“Post office!” he announced, and stood on the brake. The van left two long stripes of rubber on the asphalt and bounced to a halt.
“Keep the motor running,” Forsyth advised, opening the door and jumping out.
Leon gunned the engine. “Never take me alive, old boy,” he said in heavily-accented English.
Entering the post office was like coming to a complete stop after travelling at the speed of light. Long queues at all the counters. Marble on the walls. Long dusty slants of sunlight from the windows. Old people everywhere. Only old people ever seemed to use the post office. Old people and him.
As he stood there waiting he began to think that all those old people were watching him. He hadn’t done any drugs this morning... well, maybe a spliff or two after breakfast, but that was the only way to survive being driven anywhere by Leon... but it was like these old people all knew, like it was tattooed on his face or something, like he was incandescing from all that poor Belarusian grass. Shit. A minor paranoid episode and he hadn’t even picked up his parcel yet.
He felt the stares all the way to the poste restante window. The girl behind the counter stared at him too. He handed over his ID and she went away to the big room at the back with all the shelves, and came back with the familiar fat yellow padded envelope. This time, there were also two flimsy blue email forms. Forsyth signed for everything, paid for the emails, and almost ran back out into the sunshine.
“They were all watching me,” he said, climbing back into the van.
“Hardly surprising,” Leon said. “You’re not wearing shoes.”
“Bollocks.” Forsyth looked down into the footwell and wiggled his toes. “Bollocks. I’ve been living with you too long.” In Autumn, too. You could maybe understand it at the height of Summer, when the city baked in a kind of relentless dusty heat, but in Autumn…?
“I didn’t make you come out without them,” Leon said, affronted. “English bastard.”
“Scottish bastard,” Forsyth corrected absently, tugging at the envelope’s tear-strip.
Leon thumped his foot onto the accelerator and the van leaped out into the traffic to a fanfare of horns. “So. What has Big Sister sent this month?”
The strip finally came off and the envelope everted two packages into his lap. One was a kilo-bag of pear drops. Decades of Democracy, and you still couldn’t get pear drops anywhere in Poland. Forsyth used to get his monthly ration sent to the block where he lived, but then some lunatic started coming in and setting the communal post-boxes alight, and one morning he came down to find nothing in his box but a fist-sized lump of burnt sugar and charred packaging that stank of lighter fluid, and he’d got his sister to send any future mail poste restante.
The second item was enclosed in that new packaging he’d been reading about, a sort of plastic bag with hollow ribs crisscrossing the outside. You put your fragiles inside, sealed the mouth of the bag with some heat-sealing gadget, and then used a little hand-pump to evacuate the air. As you squeezed the handle some of the air was diverted to inflate the hollow ribs, and what you wound up with was a vacuum-sealed package as rigid as a brick. Forsyth had seen it on a German satellite channel. They’d packed a crystal vase in the stuff and driven a bus over it with no ill-effects.
He held the package up. Inside were six sausage rolls. He smiled. You couldn’t get proper sausage rolls in Poland, either; if you could get them at all they were made with frankfurters and short-crust pastry, which wasn’t right. He turned the package over. There was supposed to be a little button you pressed to release the vacuum, but you had to be careful because...
There was a pop and the sensation of hundreds of tiny things falling on his head and shoulders.
“Jesus Maria!” Leon yelled, and almost crashed the van into a tram.
FORSYTH AND LEON shared a flat in the block that Kieslowski had made famous in Dekalog. It had been fashionable, back in the days when Poland was a Slavic Tiger, but it had slowly gone downhill ever since, just like everything else. The lifts never worked and the corridors were covered with derivative graffiti in half a dozen Continental and two African languages. A Ukrainian ragga band calling themselves the Enzyme Kings had taken over the flat next door. Leon loved ragga. The Enzyme Kings’ amplifiers didn’t have enough volume stops to suit him.
Entering the lobby, Forsyth could hear The Enzyme Kings rehearsing, ten floors above him. The vibrations grew worse as he made his way slowly up the stairs, clutching his bag of pear drops and the remains of the envelope; there was usually a letter inside but he didn’t like to read it until he’d had at least one drink.