Dave Hutchinson - Europe in Autumn

Rudi looked at the clock. “It’s three o’clock in the morning.”

“You should have gone to bed earlier, then,” Fabio snapped.

Rudi, who had promised Max that he would make one of his increasingly-rare appearances at the restaurant today, said, “Can’t we do it tomorrow? Or Friday? Friday would be better.”

Fabio turned and headed for the door. “You want to go back to being a cook, fine,” he muttered. “I’ll pack and you can drive me to the airport and I can leave this stinky little town.”

Rudi felt a stirring of the spirit of resistance that Pani Stasia had lit within him. He got out of bed and pulled on a pair of jeans and a T-shirt. “I’m a chef , you ridiculous little bastard!” he shouted.

Fabio came back to the door and looked at Rudi. The bedroom was in darkness and the little Swiss was silhouetted by the hall lights, so Rudi couldn’t see his expression.

“And this is a city,” Rudi told him more quietly. “Not a town.”

Fabio turned away and went into the living room. “Town, city,” he said. “Whatever.”

THEY WALKED DOWN to the end of the street, where Fabio had the keys to a parked Lexus. He had his heavy carry-on case with him. He put it in the boot and told Rudi to drive to Częstochowa.

At Częstochowa, Fabio directed Rudi to park the Lexus outside the station. He retrieved his case, and they walked for about forty minutes, at which point Fabio stopped beside a parked Mercedes, produced a set of keys, and said, “Get in. I’ll drive.”

“Are we going far?” Rudi asked.

Fabio snorted. “What do you care, chef? ”

They looked at each other over the roof of the car. “Maybe I can get some sleep,” Rudi said.

“Maybe I’d like that better.” Fabio unlocked the driver’s door. “Get in.”

THEY CHANGED CARS again at a deserted-looking farm outside town. This time it was a battered-looking hydrogen-cell Simca. Fabio waited for a long time before driving back to the main road, and he waited again before driving back into Częstochowa and then driving around town for another forty minutes or so. Rudi dozed off, and when he opened his eyes they were out on the open road again and he had no idea which direction they were heading in.

They drove for hours. The roads were in an appalling state, many of them laid by the conquering Germans in the 1940s and inadequately repaired ever since, kilometre after kilometre of dips and bumps and potholes. Poland had never had enough money for public works, certainly not enough for the scale of public works needed to bring the country up to the level of, say, Greater Germany, which had roads of a lascivious smoothness. Hindenberg, which had only been in existence for a decade or so, was in comparison a Western European nation.

A lot of it had to do with Poland’s stubborn membership of the EU. They had waited so long to be admitted, Rudi thought, that they had decided nothing was going to dislodge them. The only way Poland was going to leave the Union was feet first, and so the country was continually being stung for subsidies and tariffs and finding itself dragged along with the EU’s seeming determination to pick trade wars with anything that had a head of state.

“Poles,” Fabio muttered when Rudi mentioned this in an attempt to make conversation. “Who knows?”

“A wise view, Obi-Wan,” Rudi said.

Fabio glanced briefly at him. “What?”

Rudi dozed. Fabio refused to tell him where they were going, so it was pointless offering to share the driving. Towns and villages went by, pools of light in a great darkness. Half the road signs he saw were featureless pink rectangles in the Simca’s headlights, the grass and asphalt beneath them spattered with pink paint.

“ Armia Różowych Pilotów ,” Rudi said when Fabio complained about the pink signs.

“What the fuck’s that?” Fabio did not admit to speaking much Polish, so they spoke English.

“The Army of the Pink Pilot. I thought it was just a Warsaw thing.”

“Some kind of homosexual rights organisation.”

Rudi laughed. The Pink Pilot was a bona fide homegrown Polish legend, occupying a territory somewhere between Sikorski and Jan Sobieski.

“It’s the Palace of Culture,” he said. When Fabio frowned across at him he said, “In Warsaw. The Palace of Culture. A gift from Stalin and the Workers of the Soviet Union to the Workers of Poland. One of the ugliest buildings in Europe.”

Fabio snorted, as if to say that Europe was teeming with buildings that offended his aesthetic sensibilities.

It was said that the only good thing about the Palace of Culture was that it was visible from everywhere in Warsaw. Of course, that was the worst thing about it as well, but at least it meant you could never get lost. After the Fall, there had been much debate about what to do with this offensively Stalinist monolith, and, as with most things Polish, in the end nothing much had been done.

And then one night there was the sound of engines in the sky, a miasma of paint fumes over central Warsaw, and when the city awoke the next morning it found that the Palace of Culture had been given a makeover.

Meanwhile, over on the southern edge of the city, in the middle of a field, sat a MiL helicopter retrofitted with a crop-spraying rig, from which hot-pink paint was still sizzling onto the grass, and leading from it out across the field a line of pink bootprints growing fainter and fainter as the Pink Pilot walked away into myth.

In time-honoured fashion there were angry recriminations in Parliament. There were resignations, mostly among air traffic controllers who had failed to notice the flight of the Pink Pilot.

Varsovians, on the other hand, loved the Palace’s paint-job. They claimed it made the thing so fucking obvious that they didn’t notice it any more, and when a few weeks later the Government attempted to have it cleaned there was a small riot.

This had all happened a year or so before Rudi arrived in Kraków, and he hadn’t visited Warsaw yet, but he’d seen it from time to time on various items in the news, and no matter where in the city the pictures came from the Pink Palace had seemed to lean into the background like one of those obnoxiously-drunken guests at a wedding party. Rudi thought it looked uncomfortably carnal .

“Poles, you see?” Fabio said when Rudi had explained it to him. “You absolutely cannot fucking predict what they will do. And now there is an army of them.”

“Well, nobody’s saying it’s the Pink Pilot painting the road signs,” Rudi said. “Just some people following his example.”

“And nobody’s ever caught the pink fucker.”

“No,” Rudi admitted, “nobody’s ever caught the pink fucker.”

“Well there you are then,” Fabio said, wagging a finger.

“Where am I then?” Rudi asked, puzzled.

“It must be him painting the road signs. Any person who is prepared to paint one building pink will almost certainly do so again.”

Rudi stared at him.

Whoever the ARP were, and wherever they came from, it was obvious that they had been particularly busy on this stretch of road. Most of the signs the car passed seemed to have been painted. This might have posed problems for drivers looking for directions, but Fabio never faltered.

Eventually, the sun came up. Rudi, who had been dozing again, opened his eyes to misty dawn light and without thinking about it oriented himself north-south, east-west.

“Where are we?” he said, struggling stiffly upright.

“ I don’t know,” Fabio said. “I just know where we’re going.”

“That’s great,” Rudi muttered. “Thank you, Fabio.”

As it turned out, sometime in the wee small hours they had outpaced the ARP’s handiwork and were back in an area of unmolested road signs. It didn’t take Rudi too long to work out where they were going, and an hour or so after that they arrived in Poznań.