Dave Hutchinson - Europe in Autumn

“Why do you do it?” he asked.

“I like to think that I am keeping alive the spirit of Schengen.” Dariusz tapped his cigarette against the crystal ashtray that was doubling as a paperweight to keep all the maps from rolling up. “Everyone, and everything, has the right of free access across national borders.”

“Everything? Drugs? Weapons? White slaves?”

Dariusz grinned at him. “ Particularly drugs, weapons and white slaves.”

Whatever. Rudi found himself in agreement with Dariusz. He had started out for the harmless adventure , but the more he saw of them the more he’d begun to think that he really really hated borders and all the stupid bureaucratic paraphernalia that went with them.

Rudi took each of the filters out of the machine and banged them against the side of the sink to shake loose the debris that had been trapped at the bottom. It was amazing what happened to food after it had been through the machine. It was reduced to a lumpy pinkish-grey scum that eventually built up in the trays and blocked them, hindering the recirculation of hot water. In his early days, he had found items of cutlery in the trays – and more than once a cup or a glass – but he had learned how to arrange the cutlery in its baskets so the machine’s jets wouldn’t blast knives and forks off the conveyor to fall into the Hobart’s innards.

He had also learned that you could wedge items of crockery and cutlery between the tines of the conveyor so that the jets wouldn’t knock them loose. You could do that if there were just a few items to put through and the waiters were in a hurry for more clean cutlery, which sometimes happened when the restaurant was very busy and the guests were taking their time eating their meals.

After rinsing the trays, he left them beside the sink and went back to the machine and lifted the side panels. A cloud of hot, humid detergent-scented air billowed out. He reached inside and unhooked the spray nozzles and rinsed them in the sink as well.

Finally, he hooked a hose to the tap, took a squeegee from under the sink, and washed down the inside of the machine, which quickly grew a film of mucilaginous gunk if you didn’t hose it down every day. That done, he replaced the nozzles and filters, refilled the tanks with clean water, closed the machine up, and made a last tidying-up tour of the kitchen before putting on his parka and going out into the little loading bay for a cigar.

It was very cold and incredibly clear. Rudi had lived almost all his life in cities, where only the brightest stars managed to fight their way through the orange-yellow haze of streetlight pollution. Here, though, the sky was a depthless black, full of hard, untwinkling stars, the Milky Way a magnificent cloudy ribbon.

Beyond the little road that led up to the loading bay, the mountain tipped steeply down towards the tiny little constellations of towns winking down in the valleys beneath a filmy layer of pollution. Rudi saw these lights every evening when he came out for his last cigar of the day, but he had no idea what most of the towns were called. Jan had once pointed each one out and named it for him, but Rudi had forgotten the names.

Jan had also pointed a long, bony finger out into the far misty murky distance, and said, “Poland,” as if it was of great significance. Rudi had merely shrugged and thanked the Czech for showing him where everything was. There was something a little disquieting about Jan’s insistence that he had something to do with Poland, and he didn’t know quite what to make of it.

Up above him, someone opened a window and shouted, “Fucking Czechs! Fucking Czechs!” in Polish. Something – Rudi thought it might have been a chair – came flying down out of the night, hit the piled-up snow at the edge of the road, and bounced off down the slope.

“Happy New Year,” he said, and ground the cigar out on the concrete with his toe.

RUDI’S ROOM WAS on the ground floor, off the lobby and down a side corridor lined with cupboards and tiny offices. It had the appearance of having once been a cupboard itself; there were marks on the walls where shelves might have once hung. There was a tiny little rectangular window of frosted glass high up on the back wall, and a narrow bed that was a fraction too short to sleep on comfortably. A line of clotheshooks along one wall comprised his wardrobe, and a low cupboard beside the bed held his toilet things. There was enough floor-space to move from the bed to the door without having to walk heel-to-toe, but only just. The room was always comfortably warm because it was directly over the hotel’s boiler, but Rudi didn’t want to be here in the summer, when it would probably be unbearable.

He grabbed a towel, soap, shampoo and a change of clothes and went down the corridor to the little staff shower-room. No matter how careful he was, he always ended the day as gunky and greasy as the machine he used, and it took a determined effort to get himself clean.

After his shower, he usually liked to have a couple of drinks in the downstairs bar before turning in for the night, but as he walked across the lobby he heard lots of shouting coming from the bar, and noticed a couple of policemen heading towards the source of the noise. He peeled off and went back to his room and sat down to read.

LATER, MARTA KNOCKED softly on the door and let herself in.

“The Poles smashed up the bar,” she said, taking off her housecoat and hanging it on the hook behind the door. “The police arrested six of them.” Ever since the coach parties began to arrive, she had been referring to her countrymen with a fine disdain, as if trying to distance herself from them.

Stretched out, as much as he could on the bed, Rudi looked over the top of his book and said, “Mm.”

Marta undid her black uniform dress and stepped out of it, hung it with the housecoat on the hook. Underneath she was wearing tights and a worn-out black bra. She was a plump, happy girl with long mousy brown hair that she dyed auburn.

“I thought you’d be hiding in here,” she said.

“We mustn’t speak Polish in public any more,” said Rudi. “Jan heard us the other day.”

Unhooking her bra, she stopped and looked at him. “We’d never say anything to each other in public if we did that.” She actually spoke pretty good English, but for some reason she felt embarrassed to use it. She rolled off her tights and panties and left them on the floor. “Move over.”

Rudi put his book on the cupboard and squashed himself up against the wall to let Marta slide under the covers beside him. Officially, Jan frowned mightily on personal relationships between members of staff, but unofficially he tended to turn a selectively blind eye, so long as the hotel’s routine wasn’t unduly disturbed.

“Why can’t we speak Polish?” Marta asked.

Rudi put an arm round her and sighed. “I didn’t say we couldn’t speak Polish. Just that we shouldn’t do it in public.”

“But why?”

There was no easy way to handle this. For Marta, every answer only sparked off another question; they had once spent nearly the whole night on a single question-and-answer string. Rudi had eventually forgotten what the original question had been, and in the end he had totally lost track of the conversation.

“I won’t lie to you, Marta,” he said.

“That’s what people usually say when they’re getting ready to lie,” she said, snuggling her head into the curve of his neck and shoulder.

Well, that was true enough. He had to give her that. “I can’t tell you why, Marta.”

She shrugged.

“I can’t tell you why because I don’t want you to get involved in it,” he said, which as it happened was the pure and simple truth.