Kingdom Day

His mother gave him a scarf at breakfast.

It was grey, and soft, and long enough to go twice round, and it was in a box from a shop in Hanover with tissue paper inside that she had folded back herself, because the girl in the shop had folded it wrong. She put it beside his plate before he sat down, and stood behind his chair while he opened it, which she had done every birthday of his life, and which he had never once told her made it impossible to open anything properly.

“For the ones you lose,” said his mother.

“I haven’t lost one.”

“You lost one in New Westminster. Kessler told me. You came back without it.”

“I gave it to Theo’s sister.”

There was a pause behind his chair.

“You gave a scarf,” said his mother, “to a girl in America.”

“She was going out to the bins. It was cold. She didn’t have one.” He folded the tissue paper back over the scarf. “It wasn’t a gesture. It was a scarf.”

His mother said nothing for a moment. Then she put her hand on his head, briefly, the way she had when he was small and she was checking for a temperature, and took it away, and went round the table and sat down opposite him and poured her own coffee.

“Happy birthday,” she said. “The car is at half past nine. Charlotte is coming straight from the hospital and will be late, and will say she is not late. You will stand on her left. You will not speak. When the officer brings you the wreath you will take it with both hands, by the frame, and you will not look at the photographers, because they will be on the right, and you look to the right when you are nervous.”

“I don’t look to the right.”

“You looked to the right at the coronation for an hour and twenty minutes,” said his mother. “There was a clock.”

He looked at her. She drank her coffee and did not look back, and he understood, slowly, across a breakfast table, that she had known about the clock for ten months and never said so, and that this was her present as well, and that he was not going to be allowed to thank her for it.

“It was over the west door,” he said.

“I know where it was,” said his mother. “I spent an hour and twenty minutes watching you look at it.”

---

The car went the long way round, by the lake, because the short way went past the gate of the Neuer Garten, and the gate was open today, as it was every year on the eighteenth, and there were people in the gardens already in their coats, walking on the paths where on any other day of the year nobody walked but the family and the gardeners. Some of them had small black-and-white flags. Some of them had dogs. One old man had both, and was standing by the water with the flag in one hand and the lead in the other, looking at the house as though he had been told it would do something.

“It’s a public day,” said Kessler, from the front, to nobody, in the voice he used when he had been asked a question that nobody had asked. “They’re allowed.”

“I know.”

“Sir.”

Alexander looked out of the window at the old man with the dog. Last year he had looked out of this window at the same gate and the same paths and the same people, at the age of fourteen, on his birthday, from the back seat of a different car, beside his father, who had been reading his speech for the third time and saying the difficult sentence under his breath, the one about the eastern provinces, which the historical office had written and which his father had said was true and had to be said and was very hard to say in front of a regiment. He had said it. Alexander had stood one pace behind him and to the left and watched the back of his father’s neck go red above his collar when he said it, and had not understood until afterwards why.

That had been the eighteenth of January. Twenty-five days later his father had gone out of his study into the corridor at twenty past six in the morning and not come back.

He did not think about the corridor. He thought about the speech. It would be the same sentence, or nearly. The historical office did not change a sentence because the person reading it had changed.

“Sir,” said Kessler again, as they turned in.

“I know,” said Alexander. “Both hands. By the frame.”

---

Charlotte was late, and said she was not.

She came in at four minutes to ten by the side, with her officer, in a black coat over what Alexander could see at the collar was the top of a hospital tunic, pale blue, which she had not had time to take off, and she stood beside him on the steps without looking at him and took a folded paper out of her coat pocket and unfolded it and looked at it and folded it again.

“I’m not late,” she said.

“No.”

“I was on at six. There was a man with a chest.” She put the paper back in her pocket. “Happy birthday.”

“Thank you.”

“Mama gave you a scarf.”

“How do you know?”

“She asked me in December whether you’d like a scarf, and I said you’d lost yours in America, and she said she knew, Kessler had told her.” Charlotte looked straight ahead, at the regiment drawn up on the square in the cold, and at the memorial behind them, a grey stone thing with names on it and a bronze figure at the top that had been there since 1922 and that nobody in the family had ever liked, and which nobody in the family was allowed to say they did not like. “Did you lose it?”

“I gave it to Theo’s sister.”

Charlotte turned her head and looked at him for the first time.

“Did you,” she said.

She looked at him for perhaps two seconds longer than was usual for her, which with Charlotte was a long time, and then she looked back at the regiment, and something happened at the corner of her mouth that Alexander had not seen there since before February, and was gone.

“You’ll stand on my left,” she said.

“Mama said.”

“I know Mama said. I’m saying it so that I know.” She took the paper out again and did not unfold it this time, only held it. “I read. You don’t. When I finish they’ll bring you the wreath. You take it.”

“Both hands. By the frame.”

“Don’t look to the right.”

“Everybody,” said Alexander, “has been told about the clock.”

---

The speech was the Crown’s, and the Crown was not allowed to give it, so his sister gave it for him.

That was how it worked. It was in the regency law, in a clause he had read twice, which said that addresses of the Crown on fixed occasions would be read by the Regent in the sovereign’s presence, the sovereign’s presence being required and the sovereign’s voice not. He had asked Charlotte in December whether that meant he could read it if he wanted to, and Charlotte had said that it meant the opposite, that it meant he could be present and could not, and that whoever wrote it had been thinking of a king who was nine, and who would probably have been glad.

So she read it.

She read it in her ordinary voice, the one she used to present on the ward, she had told him once, at seven in the morning to a consultant who did not care who she was: plain, not slow, not loud, every word given exactly its weight and no more. She read the part about the dead. She read the part about service, and about families. And she came to the sentence about the eastern provinces, which was the same sentence, or nearly, which said that the regiments standing in front of her had once been used in the east against people who were Prussian subjects too, and against Prussian workers in their own towns, and that this was remembered on Kingdom Day as well, because a remembrance that kept only the parts that flattered the living was not a remembrance but a parade.

She did not go red. She read it exactly as she had read the rest, at the same speed, and went on to the end, and folded the paper.

Alexander stood on her left and did not look to the right.

He found that he was looking at the bronze figure on the memorial, the one nobody liked, which had a sword pointing down and a face that somebody in 1922 had thought was noble. He looked at the face. There was a streak on the bronze below one eye, green, where the rain had run for a hundred years, and he looked at that, and it held, and he understood that he had found it without looking for it, and that Frederick would have said that was the only way you ever found them.

The officer brought the wreath.

It was heavier than it looked. Frederick had written that about his, in November, and it was true of this one too, and Alexander thought that perhaps it was true of all of them and nobody ever said so beforehand on purpose. He took it in both hands, by the frame. He walked the paces to the foot of the memorial at the pace you would walk to somebody’s door. He laid it against the bottom step, where his father had laid it last year, and his grandfather before that, and stood, and bowed his head, and counted, and lifted it, and turned, and walked back to his sister’s left side, and stood.

Charlotte did not look at him. She put her hand, for one moment, against the back of his coat, between the shoulder blades, where nobody on the square could see it, and took it away.

---

There was a cake at four.

It was the cake from the kitchen at the house, the one the woman who made the cocoa had made for every birthday since he was four, a chocolate cake with a hard dark top and a sweetness underneath that made his teeth ache, and fifteen candles, which she had put on in a careful spiral and lit herself in the kitchen and carried in, with the flames going sideways, because she would not let anybody else carry it. His mother sat at the end of the table. Charlotte had gone back to the hospital. Lukas had come at three, in his school coat, with a parcel wrapped in a sheet of the Potsdamer Neueste Nachrichten, and was sitting on the other side of the table looking at the candles with an expression of deep scientific interest.

“Blow,” said his mother.

He blew. Fourteen went out. The fifteenth went out on its own a moment later, after thinking about it, and the woman from the kitchen said, “There,” as though she had arranged it, and cut the cake, and gave him the first piece, which was the largest, and stood and watched him eat it.

It was too sweet. It had always been too sweet. He ate all of it, and then he ate a second piece, because she was still standing there, and because she had not noticed him grow, and because Frederick had once written that she would not have, and he found that he did not want her to.

“Open it,” said Lukas, when she had gone.

He opened the newspaper.

It was a torch. A small black torch, rubber, the kind you clipped to a belt, with a lens that somebody had painted over, carefully, in three coats, with red enamel, so that when Lukas leaned across the table and switched it on in his hand it made a dull red circle on the tablecloth, like a coal.

“For the log,” said Lukas. “So your eyes stay dark when you write it. The lamp on the shelf is too far from the eyepiece. You go over to it and you come back and you’ve lost ten minutes of your eyes. I’ve watched you do it for six years. It’s been driving me mad.” He sat back. “I painted it myself. Three coats. The first one ran.”

Alexander turned it off and on again. The red circle came and went on the tablecloth.

“It’s very good,” he said.

“I know it’s very good.” Lukas took a third piece of cake, without being asked, the way nobody else at that table ever did. “It’s clear tonight. They said on the radio. Cold, and clear. Orion’s up by seven.” He looked at Alexander’s mother, at the end of the table, and said, quite politely, “If that’s all right, ma’am.”

His mother looked at Lukas for a moment, and then at the torch, and then at her son.

“Wear the scarf,” she said.

---

Kessler came at half past eight, from Berlin, with the bag.

He came round the side of the dome on the gravel and stood at the foot of the ladder and called up, quietly, “Sir,” and Alexander went down three rungs and Kessler held up an envelope, a long one, the paper of the Embassy in New Westminster with the date of the bag written on the back in the Foreign Office’s green ink. It had his name on the front in the hand he would have known anywhere now. Kessler held it up the way you would hold up something you had been told to deliver and had decided not to have an opinion about.

“It came in today’s bag, sir. The Ambassador’s office marked it for today.” He paused. “Happy birthday, sir.”

“Thank you, Kessler.”

Kessler looked at the underside of the dome, where the shutter met the ring, for a moment, as though there were something there, and went away round the gravel to the house.

---

It was clear, and very cold, and Orion was up in the south-east over the trees, as Lukas had said, the three stars of the belt in a line and the red one at the shoulder, and the dome was open to it, and the stove was going, and Lukas was on the boards against the pier with his flask and his hat.

Alexander sat on the stool by the eyepiece and opened the letter by the red torch.

It made the paper look as if it had been written in a darkroom. He read it slowly, the whole of it, the trains to Potsdam every ten minutes, That is showing off, and Mrs Pruitt and the similar triangles, and the rowing machine facing a wall, and his uncle saying Königsberg at four o’clock in a hospital in New Westminster and then Good, and he stopped there for a while, with the torch on the page, and then went on.

Here it is.

If they offer it to you, take it.

He read it twice. Then he read the rest of the paragraph, because it was there, and because he had known since the fourth of January that it was coming and had thought he was ready for it.

Not because you want it. I know you don’t, or you think you don’t, or you think you’re not allowed to, which with you is the same thing. Take it because you have been a King for eleven months with your hands tied, and in those eleven months the only thing you were allowed to do was say no and have it written down, and you did, and it was right, and a court said so.

You’re readier than I am.

And I’ve got till May. That’s the bit I can’t get past.

He switched off the torch.

He sat in the dark with the letter on his knee and Orion in the slit of the dome and the stove ticking, and he did not read the rest yet. He knew what the rest would say. He knew it would say that it was the wrong way round, that it was eight months the wrong way round, and that Frederick had written it in his green book with a date, and that he was not to tell his mother. He knew, because it was what he would have written, if it had been the other way round, and it was not.

He got up off the stool and walked round the dome.

Once. The boards creaked by the hatch, as they always did, and the cold came up through his shoes from the boards. Twice. He passed Lukas’s feet, and Lukas drew them in without opening his eyes, and let them out again when he had gone by.

He sat down again.

“Well?” said Lukas, from the floor.

“He says take it.”

“I know he says take it. I’ve been saying take it since New Year. Everybody in Klasse 8 says take it. Amalie’s grandmother says take it, and she votes for the people with your face on their posters.” Lukas did not open his eyes. “I meant, well, what are you going to say.”

Alexander looked at the letter on his knee in the dark.

“Nothing.”

“Nothing?”

“Not yet.” He folded the letter along its creases, carefully, back into three, and put it inside his coat, against his chest, where the scarf crossed over it. “He said I’d walk round twice and not write for a week. He wanted to be right. I’ll let him be right.”

Lukas thought about that for some time.

“That’s not a reason,” said Lukas. “That’s a manner.”

“It’s the reason I’ve got.”

“It’s a very good manner,” said Lukas. “I’ll give you that.” And he drank from the flask, and put it down on the boards, and said nothing else, and Alexander understood that that had been his one thing, and that Lukas had spent it on purpose, on the eighteenth, on him, and had known exactly what he was doing.

---

Before they closed the dome he took out the log and the red torch and wrote the night.

18 January. Clear. Very cold. Orion, the belt, Betelgeuse. Seeing good.

He held the pencil over the space below it, where he wrote what he had seen. He thought about writing Königsberg. He thought about writing take it. He did not write either. He wrote, in the square hand, very small:

Red torch. L.

And then he closed the log, and Lukas cranked the shutter, and it squealed at three-quarters as it always did, and Orion went from a slit to a line to nothing.

---

He wrote back on the Wednesday after, from the desk in Berlin, with the door shut.

He wrote about the wreath, and the green streak under the bronze eye that he had found without looking, and Charlotte’s hand between his shoulder blades. He wrote about the cake, and the second piece, and the woman who would not let anybody else carry it. He wrote about the scarf, and his mother, and the clock over the west door that she had known about for ten months.

He did not write about the other thing.

He sealed it, and gave it to Kessler for the bag, and went back to his room, and walked round it twice, and went to bed.