Holy Saturday

The room at the airport had been built for waiting in, and it was very good at it.

It was long and low and carpeted in a grey that did not show anything, with a window along one side that looked out at the apron and the grey sky and the grey concrete, and armchairs in a row facing the window as though the aeroplanes were a performance, and a table at the end with coffee nobody had touched and a plate of biscuits arranged in a fan. Alexander had been in it for forty minutes. He had walked round it twice. He had sat in four of the armchairs. He had not touched the biscuits, because Kessler was at the door, looking at the ceiling, and Kessler would have seen.

“You could sit down,” said Kessler, to the ceiling.

“I have sat down.”

“In one of them, sir. For longer than a minute.”

Alexander sat down in the fifth armchair and put his hands on his knees.

It was Holy Saturday, and the airport was nearly empty, and the sky over it had not decided whether to rain. He had been told at breakfast that the aircraft from New Westminster would be on the ground at ten past one. It was eight minutes past. He had worked out, at some point in the forty minutes, that the last time he had waited for Frederick anywhere was nowhere: in seven years of weddings and funerals and one Eleventh, he had always been the one who arrived, and Frederick the one who was there.

The aircraft came out of the cloud at the far end of the runway, very small and then not, and he stood up before he had decided to.

---

They came in through a door at the far end of the room, the way people come into rooms they have been brought to: in an order somebody had arranged.

The Queen first, in a dark coat, with her handbag on her arm and her officer a pace behind, and her eyes going once round the room, the window, the biscuits, Kessler, him, the way his mother’s did, the way every woman in his family looked at a room before she would agree to be in it. Then Castellanos, who came through the door and stepped to one side of it and stopped, and looked at the ceiling, and became part of the wall. Then Theo, with a rucksack on one shoulder and his coat on the wrong way round at the collar and the expression of a person who has been woken up over the sea and not yet forgiven anybody for it.

Then Frederick.

He was taller. Five months, and he was taller; it was absurd, and Alexander noticed it and was annoyed by it in the same moment. He was in an ordinary coat over an ordinary jumper and he had his hands in his pockets, and he came down the long grey room past the armchairs at the pace you would walk to somebody’s door, and stopped in front of him, and took his hands out of his pockets, and did not know, for a moment, what to do with them.

Alexander had decided on the aeroplane, in November, coming home, what he would say the next time. He had decided it again in December and in January and every week since. He had decided it, last of all, on the fourteenth of March, in the dome, with the stove going, and then written something else entirely, one line, and sent it.

“Dear Frederick,” he said.

Frederick looked at him.

Then his mouth went at one corner, the way it did, the way his father’s did, and he said, quite gravely, as though he were signing something:

“Alexander.”

Neither of them laughed. Behind Frederick, Theo laughed, once, out loud, and then looked at the carpet and said, “Sorry. Sorry. It’s the plane,” and the Queen said, without turning round, “It is not the plane,” and Theo said, “No, ma’am,” and that was the first minute.

Nobody said anything about March.

---

There were three cars. The Queen went in the first, with her officer, because she had telephone calls to make, she said, in Swedish, and the second was theirs. Kessler sat in the front beside the driver. Castellanos sat in the front of the third, behind them, and Alexander could see him in the mirror whenever the road bent, looking at the roof of the car.

Theo was asleep within ten minutes.

He went the way Lukas went in the car on the way back from school, all at once, as though a switch had been turned, with his forehead against the window and his mouth slightly open and his rucksack in his arms like somebody holding on to a dog. The car went out through the airport gates and onto the motorway towards the city, and the city went past, grey, Saturday, a few people in coats, nobody looking at three dark cars, and Theo slept, and for the first time since November the two of them were in a room together with nobody listening.

They did not use it.

“The S7,” said Frederick, after a while, looking out of the window at a train that was running beside the motorway for a moment before it went off under a bridge. “From Ahrensfelde. Every ten minutes, all day. Every twenty after nine.”

“I know.”

“I know you know. You said you’d watched them. From the middle car.”

“Every Friday.”

“You’ve never been on one.”

“No.”

Frederick nodded, as though this were a fact he had needed to have confirmed before he could go on, and looked out of the window again. The train had gone. A second one came, the other way, very fast, and was gone.

“I learned them for your birthday,” said Frederick.

“I know. You told me. You said it was showing off.”

“It is showing off. I’m showing off now. That one was the regional. To Magdeburg.” He watched the place where it had been. “I’d like to go on one. While I’m here. If they’d let us.”

“They won’t.”

“No,” said Frederick. “I know. I just wanted to have said it.”

And that was all, for a long time. The car went round the edge of the city and out on the road to Potsdam, through the forest, the pines very straight and dark on both sides and the light coming down between them in long grey bars, and neither of them said the thing, or anything near it. Alexander had thought, in March, that when he saw Frederick again he would say it at once, in the first minute, to have it said: It is the thing they did in my name. Out loud, as he had written it. He found now, in the car, with Theo asleep against the window and Frederick’s knee eight inches from his, that he could not imagine the sentence in the air. It had been made for paper. It had been made to be read by somebody alone in a room, and to sit there in the room with him afterwards. It was not a sentence you could say to somebody’s face while a regional train to Magdeburg went past.

He looked at Frederick’s hands. They were on his knees. He had blisters starting on the insides of his fingers, the rowing kind, and one plaster, old, on the side of his thumb.

“Potatoes,” said Alexander, before he could stop himself.

Frederick looked at the plaster.

“Third one,” he said. “She said, He didn’t do that.”

“I know. You told me.”

“I know I told you. I’m telling you again.” Frederick turned his hand over and looked at it. “It’s from December. It healed. I keep putting a plaster on the place. I don’t know why.”

Alexander did know why, and did not say, and Frederick knew that he knew, and did not ask, and in the front seat Kessler looked at the roof of the car as though there were something written on it.

---

The house in the Neuer Garten was at the end of an avenue of limes that had not come into leaf, with the lake behind it, grey and flat and very large, and the dome in the trees off to one side, small and white, with its shutter closed.

Frederick saw the dome before he saw the house. Alexander watched him see it. He did not say anything. He looked at it through the window as the car came round the last bend, the way he had looked at the crack in the lid of the Tomb, the whole time, until the trees took it, and then he looked at his hands.

His mother was at the door.

She had come out onto the step in a cardigan, without a coat, which she never did, and she stood there with her arms folded against the cold while the first car stopped and the Queen got out of it. Alexander saw it through the windscreen of the second car, over Kessler’s shoulder, with the engine still running: the two of them meeting at the foot of the step, his mother coming down to the gravel instead of waiting at the top, and taking his aunt by both arms, and kissing her on both cheeks, and then not letting go.

It went on too long. It was perhaps three seconds longer than it should have been, and he would not have noticed it in anybody else, and he noticed it in them. His mother held his aunt by both arms on the gravel and looked at her, and his aunt looked back, and something went between them that was not in English or in Swedish or in German, and was not about the journey. Then his mother let go, and looked past the Queen at the second car, at him, through the windscreen, with the expression she wore at the Council table in the months when there had been a Council: the expression of a woman reading a paper she had already read once and did not like, to see whether it said the same thing the second time.

Then it was gone, and she was smiling, and coming across the gravel to open the car door herself, which she also never did.

Alexander sat very still for a moment with his hand on the door handle.

He thought about the box in the desk in Berlin, and a ribbon with the knot on the wrong side. He thought about the Ambassador’s car in the forecourt on a Tuesday with no reason for it. He thought that he had not asked, and that he was not going to ask now, on the gravel, in front of everybody, on Holy Saturday, with Theo still asleep against the window and Frederick beside him looking at his hands.

He opened the door.

“Frederick,” said his mother, and held out both hands, and Frederick got out of the car and took them, and she looked up at him, because he was taller than she was now as well, and said, “You’ve grown. You’re not allowed to grow. I’m your godmother and I didn’t give permission,” and Frederick said, “Sorry, Aunt Caroline,” and she laughed, and held on to his hands a moment too long as well.

---

Lukas came round the side of the house from the kitchen garden with his bag over his shoulder.

He had been there since Friday evening, when he came over from Berlin in the cars with them, and he had spent the morning, he said afterwards, in the kitchen, being given things to carry by the woman who made the cocoa, who had decided that a boy who was going to be in the house for nine days could be useful. He came round the corner of the house and stopped at the edge of the gravel, and looked at the cars, and at the Queen, and at the King of fourteen realms standing on the step with his hands in the hands of the Queen Mother of Prussia; and then past all of them at the second car, where Theo had woken up at last and was getting out of the back seat with his rucksack, blinking, with his coat collar still turned the wrong way.

The two of them looked at each other across the gravel.

They had met once, on the crest, in November, for perhaps three hours. They had since sent each other, by Frederick’s account and by Lukas’s, one line a week each, about planets and about a football team in Wisconsin, and had never once answered each other’s line. Alexander had read four of Lukas’s. They were very short and entirely about Saturn.

“The knees,” said Theo, across the gravel.

“The back of the head,” said Lukas.

Theo nodded, as if that settled something. He came across the gravel with his rucksack and stopped in front of Lukas, and they looked at each other, two boys of fourteen and fifteen in coats, one from a café in Potsdam and one from a fourth-floor flat by a bus depot in New Westminster, both of them standing a pace behind somebody for a living, and neither of them, Alexander saw, knew whether to shake hands.

They didn’t.

“And the ears,” said Theo.

Lukas looked at him for a long moment.

“Wednesday,” said Lukas.

“Why Wednesday?”

“It needs walking,” said Lukas. “You can’t do the ears standing still. We’re walking on Wednesday. Eleven kilometres. I’ll tell you at the gate.”

“Which gate?”

“There’s a gate,” said Lukas. “You’ll know it.”

Theo thought about this.

“Okay,” he said, and turned his collar the right way round, and that, Alexander understood, was the whole of the negotiation, and both of them had won it.

---

They had supper in the small dining room, the six of them, with the lamps on early because the afternoon had gone dark at four, and nobody said anything about March at supper either.

His mother asked Theo about Milwaukee, and Theo told her about the bus depot, and the stairs, and the light that gave you a minute and a half, and the chairs on the landings in November, and his mother listened to all of it with her chin on her hand, the way she listened to people at hospitals, and at the end she said, “I should like to meet your mother,” and Theo said, “She’d make you take your shoes off, ma’am,” and his mother said, “I know. Alexander told me. I have been practising.”

His aunt talked to Lukas in German, which Alexander had not known she spoke so well. She asked him about the café, and the loan on the fittings, and whether the coffee was any good, and Lukas told her the coffee was very good and the cake was better and the loan was terrible, and she laughed, and asked whether she might come, and Lukas looked at Alexander, and Alexander looked at his plate, because nobody had ever been allowed to go to the café, including him.

Frederick ate everything. Alexander noticed that, too.

And under all of it, under the talk and the lamps and the soup, there was the thing his mother and his aunt were not saying, which he could not hear and could feel, the way you can feel a draught in a room before you find the window. Twice his mother looked down the table at his aunt, quickly, over Theo’s head. Once his aunt did not look back. He did not know what it was. He thought he knew what it was. He ate his soup.

---

After supper the four of them went down the garden to the lake.

It was cold, and very nearly dark, and the grass was wet, and nobody had told them they could, which was the reason. The lawn went down in a long slope to the water, and at the bottom there was a strip of reeds and a low wall and the boathouse off to the left, dark, and beyond the wall the lake, flat and black, with the lights of the far shore in it.

On the far shore, a long way off, among the trees, there was a fire.

It was a large fire, orange, in an open space by the water, with small black shapes standing round it and moving in front of it, and the light of it came across the lake in a long wavering line almost to the wall where they stood.

“Is that on purpose?” said Theo.

“It’s Easter,” said Lukas.

“It’s on fire.”

“It’s an Easter fire. Osterfeuer. They do it on the Saturday. Every village. You pile up the Christmas trees and the hedge cuttings and the old fences and you burn them on Holy Saturday, and everybody stands round it and drinks beer and the children run about, and then it’s Easter.” Lukas considered. “It’s to drive out the winter. Or it’s pagan. Or it’s to get rid of the Christmas trees. Nobody knows. My father has a theory. It’s long.”

Theo looked at the fire for a while.

“In Milwaukee,” he said, “we’d call the fire department.”

“In Milwaukee,” said Lukas, “you call the fire department about everything. Alex told me. You have a fire department for cats.”

“That’s for trees. Cats in trees.”

“That’s what I said.”

They stood at the wall, the four of them, in a row, with their hands in their pockets, and watched somebody else’s fire burn the winter out across a lake. Behind them, up the long dark slope, the house had every window lit, and in one of them, on the first floor, the window of his mother’s sitting room, two shapes were standing very close together, not moving, the way people stand when they are saying something that cannot be said across a room.

Alexander looked at it for a moment and looked away, at the fire.

Beside him Frederick had his eyes on the trees off to the right, where the dome was, invisible now, a darker shape in the dark.

“Is that it?” said Frederick, very quietly.

“Yes.”

“Can we go up?”

Alexander looked at the dome, or at the place where it was.

“Not tonight,” he said. “It’s cloud. There’s nothing.” He paused. “When it’s clear.”

“When will it be clear?”

“I don’t know. I’ll know when it is.”

Frederick nodded. He did not ask and then what. Alexander had been waiting all day for him to ask it about something, anything, and he had not, and Alexander understood, standing at the wall with the fire across the water, that Frederick was not going to ask it about anything this week until somebody else said the thing about March first, and that the somebody was going to have to be him.

Not tonight.

“In Wisconsin,” said Theo, beside Lukas, still looking at the fire, “they’d put a fence round it.”

“In Wisconsin,” said Lukas, “you’d put a fence round the lake.”

They went back up the lawn at ten, because Castellanos had appeared at the top of the slope, against the lit windows, and stood there, and looked at the sky, which in Castellanos was a sentence. In the hall the two Queens’ voices were coming down the stairs from the sitting room, in German, low, and stopped when the door opened, and then went on again, about something else, a little too brightly.

Alexander went up to bed. In his room he stood at the window for a while. The fire across the lake had burned down to a red mark on the dark. The sitting-room light was still on at the far end of the house, on his own floor, throwing a long yellow shape out onto the lawn, and once, along the corridor, very faintly, he heard his own name, in his mother’s voice, and then the door of the sitting room closed, quite gently, the way his mother closed doors when she did not want anybody to know she was closing them.

He did not sleep for a long time. Across the corridor, under the door of the blue room, Frederick’s light did not go out either.