Nikolaus

His shoes were outside the door.

He had not put them there. He had not put his shoes outside a door on the fifth of December since he was eleven, when he had announced at dinner that he was too old for it, and his father had said, Of course you are, and gone on putting them out for him anyway, every year, at midnight, in his dressing gown, after everybody was in bed, and filling them himself. Everybody in the household had known. Nobody had ever said. It was the one thing in the Berlin palace that was done by the Emperor in person and not by anybody on his behalf, and Alexander had lain awake for it every year, listening for the slippers in the corridor, and pretended in the morning to be surprised.

He stood in the doorway in his socks and looked down at them.

Two black school shoes, side by side, polished. In the left one, a tangerine, wedged into the toe, and on top of it a chocolate Nikolaus in red foil. In the right one, walnuts, and a small bar of the chocolate with the hazelnuts that he had liked when he was eight and had stopped liking when he was ten, and which nobody had been told about.

The chocolate was on top. The tangerine was in the toe.

His father had always done it the other way. Chocolate in the toe, tangerine on top, every year, so that the tangerine rolled out onto the carpet when you picked the shoe up, and the chocolate was squashed flat by the time you found it. It was wrong. It had been wrong for fourteen years. Somebody in the household had done it properly this year, the way it was supposed to be done, the way it said in books, and had done it kindly, and at midnight, and the tangerine had not rolled anywhere.

He picked up the left shoe. He took the Nikolaus out and looked at it.

Under it, folded small and pushed down the side of the shoe, against the tangerine, there was a piece of paper that had not come from the household.

He unfolded it. It was squared paper, torn from a school exercise book, and the writing on it was Lukas’s, which leaned backwards as though it were trying to get away from what it said.

For the shoes. Neither of them Norwegian. L.

And under the paper, at the very bottom of the toe, where the tangerine had been holding it down, one more chocolate, wrapped in plain gold foil, the cheap kind from the bakery by the school gate, slightly melted, and set again, in the shape of somebody’s thumb.

Alexander stood in the doorway and held it.

At the end of the corridor, by the window, Kessler was looking at the ceiling.

“Kessler.”

“Majestät.”

“Did you put this in my shoe?”

Kessler considered the ceiling, which had a moulding round the edge of it that he had been studying for nine months and had not yet finished.

“I put nothing in anybody’s shoe, sir,” he said. “I was handed an envelope at the school gate yesterday afternoon by a boy who told me it was a matter of state. I gave it to the household. What the household did with it is not a protection matter.”

“Which boy?”

“I didn’t take his name, sir.” Kessler looked down from the ceiling at last. “He had a scarf. It was a Potsdam scarf. Most of them do.”

Alexander looked at the gold foil in his hand, and at the shoes, and at the tangerine in the toe, where it had no business being.

“Thank you,” he said.

“For nothing, sir,” said Kessler, and went back to the ceiling.

---

In the car Alexander ate the gold chocolate, which tasted of the bakery and of the inside of a school bag, and kept the foil.

They went out through the west of the city with one car in front and one behind, the way they always did, past the S-Bahn station where the trains to Potsdam went every ten minutes and he had never been on one, across the Havel in the grey, and through the Babelsberg side with the lamps still on at half past seven. He looked out at the railings opposite the school gate when they came round the corner. There was nothing on them. The banner had been gone since Monday, and nobody had put anything up in its place, and the bus shelter had the dentist in it again, smiling at nobody.

Lukas was at the gate.

He was always at the gate. He arrived on the bus from the other side of the town at twenty past and waited by the second pillar, with his bag on one shoulder and his scarf up to his nose, and when the car came he did not wave or look pleased or do anything at all, because he had worked out in the first week after February that a boy who looks pleased to see the King’s car is in a photograph by lunchtime. He simply stopped leaning on the pillar, which was how you knew.

Alexander got out. They went in together, past the protection at the gate, who said good morning to both of them in exactly the same voice, which was the school’s rule and which Alexander was more grateful for than he had ever said.

“You had a good Nikolaus,” said Lukas, not looking at him.

“I had a strange one.”

“Strange how?”

“The tangerine was in the toe.”

Lukas walked on a few steps.

“That’s where it goes,” he said.

“I know that’s where it goes.”

Lukas looked at him then, quickly, sideways, and understood something, Alexander could see him understand it, and decided not to say anything about it, which was the other thing about Lukas, and went up the stairs to the second floor two at a time, as though he had remembered a piece of homework.

At the top he stopped and waited.

“Was it melted?” said Lukas.

“Yes.”

“It was in my pocket on the bus. The heating on the 694 is either off or it is the surface of the sun.” He pushed open the door of the classroom. “It’s still a chocolate.”

“It was in the shape of a thumb.”

“It’s still a chocolate,” said Lukas, and went in.

---

The history lesson was the second of the day, and it was 1848.

Frau Dr Seidel taught it standing at the window with her back to the radiator and her hands behind her, a small fierce woman who had been at the school for twenty years and who had decided, in the week of his accession, that she would teach the history of the Kingdom of Prussia exactly as she had always taught it, in the order the syllabus gave, and that if the syllabus arrived at the Kings while one of them was sitting in the third row by the door, that was the syllabus’s affair and not hers. She had told the class so on the first day of term, in those words, and nobody had laughed, and nobody had looked at him, and he had liked her ever since.

It was the eighteenth of March. She read it to them from the textbook, then put the textbook down and told it again, better. The crisis over the United Diet. Paris. The crowds in front of the palace. The two shots that nobody ever agreed who fired. The barricades going up across the city that night, and the fighting, until morning, and several hundred people dead in the streets, most of them artisans and journeymen and labourers, people who made things with their hands.

“And on the nineteenth?” said Frau Dr Seidel, to the window. “What did the King do?”

Nobody answered. It was the kind of silence that is not about not knowing. Twenty-six people in a classroom in Potsdam all knew, and all of them were waiting for somebody else to say it, because of who was sitting by the door.

Frau Dr Seidel turned round from the window.

“Alexander,” she said, in exactly the voice she would have used for anybody, “what did the King do on the nineteenth of March?”

He had not been asked a question in a history lesson since September. They had asked him about rivers in geography and about verbs in French and about the Pythagorean theorem, and nobody had asked him about a King. He felt the room go still around him, the whole of it, and he felt Lukas beside him go stiller than the rest, and Jakub, on his other side, put his pen down very quietly on the desk.

“He ordered the troops out of the city,” said Alexander. “And when they carried the bodies of the dead past the palace, he went out, and took his hat off, and saluted them.”

“Why?”

“Because they were made to.” He thought about it. “The crowd made him come out. But he did it.”

“Is that the same thing?”

“No.”

Frau Dr Seidel looked at him for a moment longer, quite steadily, as though he were any boy in the third row who had given a better answer than she had expected and a worse one than she had hoped for, and then she turned back to the window.

“No,” she agreed. “It is not the same thing. Write it down. Then on the fifth of December, eight months later, almost to the day, the same King dissolved the Assembly that had been elected to agree a constitution with him, and gave the country one of his own instead. On his own authority. Without asking anybody.” She looked at the date on the board, which said 6.12. in her own square hand. “A hundred and eighty years ago yesterday. The constitution we are still governed by grew out of that one. It was revised in 1850 and it has been mended ever since. So when you go home tonight and somebody tells you that Prussia is an old country, you can tell them that its constitution began as a present.”

Somebody at the back laughed, and stopped.

Jakub picked his pen up again and wrote something at the top of his page, small, in Polish, and turned the page slightly towards Alexander so that he could read it. It said a word that Alexander had learned from Jakub in September and that was not in any of his Polish books. Under it Jakub had written, in German, about the constitution, not you.

Alexander wrote, under that, I know, and Jakub nodded and turned the page back, and they wrote down the fifth of December, and the dissolution, and the three-class franchise that came after it, and the risings in Baden, and Alexander did not look up again until the bell.

---

Amalie found them at break.

She was in the other Klasse 8, across the corridor, and had been his friend for longer than either of the others, since they were small enough to be put in the same room at Christmas parties and told to play nicely. She had been a friend of the family before she had been a friend of his. She was the only one of the three who knew how to stand at a ceremony without being told, and the only one who never, in any circumstances, said anything about the household in front of anybody who was not in it. She came across the yard in her good coat with her hands in her pockets and stopped in front of the three of them by the wall.

“Lukas told everybody about the shoes,” she said.

Alexander looked at Lukas.

“I told nobody about the shoes,” said Lukas.

“You told Jakub and me on Monday that the King was going to find out at breakfast on Wednesday what a real Nikolaus was,” said Amalie. “That’s everybody. There isn’t anybody else.”

Lukas thought about that.

“That’s a fact,” he said. “Facts don’t count.”

“They do in my family,” said Amalie, and took a hand out of her pocket and gave Alexander a small paper bag, of the kind the bakery used, folded over at the top. “From me. Not from the household. Not from my mother. Mine.” She put her hand back in her pocket. “It’s not melted. I had it in my locker.”

He looked in the bag. A gingerbread heart, the small hard kind with white writing on it in icing that said nothing at all, only a line of white dots round the edge, because she had chosen one with no words on it, which was the most careful thing anybody had given him all year.

“Thank you,” he said.

“It’s Nikolaus,” said Amalie, as though that settled it, and it did.

Jakub, beside him, held out his hand flat, palm up, without a word, and Alexander broke off a piece of the gingerbread and put it on Jakub’s palm, and Jakub ate it and said, in Polish, the word from the history lesson, very quietly, approvingly, about the gingerbread, and Amalie said Jakub in the voice of somebody whose family did count facts, and for about a minute, by the wall, in the cold, with the bell about to go, the four of them were simply four people at a school, and nobody was looking.

---

The letter came at seven, in the bag.

It came up on a tray, by itself, the way the household had brought the first one in November, after he had told them that any envelope in that hand was to come to him and to nobody else and was not to be logged. He took it at the door. He shut the door. He sat down at the desk with it in front of him and looked at it for some time without opening it, because it was the first one since the Eleventh, and because he had not written, and because he knew, before he opened it, that it was going to say so.

It said so in the first line.

You haven’t written since the Eleventh. I’m not complaining. I’m putting it on the record, with a date, the way you taught me, so that later nobody can say I didn’t notice.

He put the letter down on the desk and got up and walked round the room twice.

Then he sat down again and turned to the last page, because there was a line on the first page that said the question was at the end and that Frederick had put it last so that he would have to read the rest first, and Alexander had known Frederick for fourteen years, and read the last page first.

So that’s the question. Not what it was like. I know what it was like for me, coming in, seeing you at the sink in an apron with a lighthouse on it, and Papa’s hand. I want to know what the hour was like. The one before. The one I didn’t see. And then what?

He read it twice. Then he went back to the beginning, as he had been asked, and read the rest.

He read the part about Lukas and Theo exchanging telephone numbers on the Eleventh, which nobody had authorised and nobody’s detail had noticed, and looked across the room at nothing for some time. He read the part about the radio on the tray table at the hospital, and the man on the ABC saying that the King of Prussia could not be reached for comment, and Frederick laughing out loud in a hospital because he could see Alexander not being reached for comment from there, and he found that his own mouth had moved, at one corner, the way his uncle’s did now.

Then the two lines by themselves in the middle of the page.

So she needs nobody.

Does that include you?

He did not get up this time. He sat very still at the desk and read the paragraph after it, which said that it was not meant unkindly, and that it was meant exactly as Alexander would have meant it, which was true, and that it was going to feel like being left out of a room he had asked to be left out of. He read it twice. He did not know whether it was true. He put a pencil line in the margin beside it, very faint, which was a thing he did not do to letters, and then rubbed it out with his thumb, and the mark stayed, grey, the shape of his thumb.

Mamma said yes.

He read that part slowly. Solliden, for Christmas and the New Year. Four rooms opened and the stoves lit. Elsa and the ice. And then the paragraph about the clocks, which he read three times, and which he would, he knew, as he read it, be able to say by heart before the week was out without having tried to learn it.

Wherever you are at midnight, I’ll be there, on the jetty, at the same minute as you. It will be the first time since the wedding we’ve been in the same minute without being in the same country. I don’t know why that matters. It does.

He put the letter down again.

He thought about the roof of the palace. He had been up there once, when he was ten, with his father, to look at a lunar eclipse that everybody else in Berlin had been watching from the street, and his father had said that the roof was the only place in the city where nobody could see the Emperor and the Emperor could see everybody, and that it was therefore the most dangerous place in Germany and they were not to tell Kessler’s predecessor. He thought about the three people whose permission he would need to go up there at midnight on New Year’s Eve, and that none of the three of them was himself.

He went on.

The kitchen table. Antecknat. The green book with nine entries. The trains, two minutes earlier from Sunday, and Halethorpe, which nobody got off at, and which Frederick was sorry for, and which Alexander found that he was sorry for too.

And then the part about his uncle.

On the Monday after the Eleventh, at about a quarter to five, when I’d finished the trains and was putting the timetable away, he said your name.

Just that. “Alexander.” Quite clearly, to the window. Then he looked at me, and said, “Good.”

I don’t know what he meant. I’ve decided he meant the potatoes. I wanted you to have it, because it was yours, and because you’d have wanted it more than I’d want to keep it.

Alexander sat at the desk for a long time.

Outside in the corridor the guard went past, and did not stop, because it was not yet ten. He heard the steps go away towards the stairs. He looked at the two words on the page, one of them his own name, and he did not read them again, because he did not need to, and because he found that he could not, quite, and he folded the letter along its folds and put it back in its envelope and put the envelope in the box in the left-hand drawer of the desk with the two from before, and tied the ribbon round them, with the knot on the right, the way he always tied it.

Then he took a sheet of the squared paper from the drawer, the kind they used at school, and a pencil, and wrote at the top of it, in the square hand:

6 December.

And under it, very small:

Alexander. Good.

He did not write anything else. He folded the sheet twice and put it in the inside pocket of his school blazer, for Saturday, for the log on the shelf in the dome at Potsdam, which was where things went that he wanted to keep and did not want anybody to see, and which did not have a page for the sixth of December, because he had not been there, and which would have one now.

---

His telephone was on the desk. He picked it up and wrote one line to Lukas, which he had never done at this hour on a school night.

You gave Theo your number.

The answer came in under a minute.

He gave me his. It was mutual. Is this about the shoes.

It’s about the potatoes. He told Frederick I’ve been trying to write about them.

There was a longer pause, long enough for the guard to come back along the corridor and pass the door again, and stop, and go on.

That’s a fact, wrote Lukas. Facts don’t count. Go to bed, Alex.

He put the telephone face down on the desk, the way Lukas had put his on the boards in the dome on Sunday, and turned off the lamp, and sat in the dark for a while with the gingerbread heart in its paper bag on the desk beside the box, and the gold foil smoothed flat under it, and the tangerine, which he had carried up from the hall in his pocket all day without knowing why, and which he now did know, and did not eat.