Europe in Autumn Read Online Free Page A

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