The Bus

The mothers did not come to Berlin.

“We have things to talk about,” his mother said at breakfast, buttering toast, and his aunt, at the other end of the table, said nothing at all and went on reading a Swedish newspaper that had come in the bag with somebody’s post. It was the first time in his life Alexander had heard his mother say that she had things to talk about without saying what they were. He looked at her. She went on buttering the toast. It was the most thoroughly buttered piece of toast he had ever seen.

So it was the four of them in the car, and Kessler in the front, and Castellanos in the car behind, and Berlin coming up out of the forest at the end of the motorway in the grey Easter Monday light, half empty, with its shops shut.

“Is it far?” said Theo.

“Forty minutes.”

“From the palace to the bus?”

“From here to the palace,” said Alexander. “The bus is outside the palace. Nearly.”

Theo considered this.

“You’ve got a bus outside your house,” he said, “and you’ve never been on it.”

“No.”

“Not once.”

“No.”

Theo looked at him for a long moment with an expression of real distress, as though he had been told that somebody had a lake in their garden and had never once put their feet in it.

“That’s the saddest thing I’ve ever heard,” said Theo, and looked out of the window, and did not say anything else until Berlin.

---

The Imperial Palace stood where it had always stood, on the island in the river at the end of Unter den Linden: a great square block of grey-brown stone, baroque, four sides round courtyards, with the dome of the chapel on the west front and the flag on the roof and the Lustgarten in front of it, flat and empty and wet.

They stood on the pavement at the edge of the Lustgarten, the three of them, while Alexander spoke to the man at the gate, and looked up.

“It looks like a library,” said Frederick.

“It looks like a bank,” said Theo.

“It was shelled,” said Lukas, who had been inside it more often than any of them except Alexander. “In the siege. In the war. It burned, part of it. They put it all back afterwards exactly as it was, every window, except one place on the river side, round the back. There’s a mark where a shell hit. Nobody’s allowed to fill it in.” He looked up at the long rows of windows. “It’s enormous outside and it’s small inside. Alex lives in about four rooms of it. The rest is offices. Two governments’ offices. It looks like a bank because most of it is one.”

Frederick looked at the windows for a while longer.

“A mark nobody’s allowed to fill in,” he said.

“Yes.”

“Like the crack.”

Alexander had thought of it the moment Lukas said it, and had not wanted to be the one to say it. He looked at Frederick.

“Yes,” he said. “Like the crack.”

“I like it,” said Frederick, to the palace. “Columbia Palace looks like a wedding cake. People come and take photographs of the gate on Sundays. This looks like somewhere people work.”

“They do,” said Alexander. “That’s the point of it.”

“I know,” said Frederick. “That’s why I like it.”

---

He took them up to his rooms, because Frederick asked, and because he found that he wanted Frederick to see them.

They were on the second floor, on the corner over the river, two rooms and a bathroom and a small kitchen nobody used, modern inside the old walls, with tall windows looking down at the water on one side and, on the other, along the whole length of the Linden to the Gate and, beyond it, the grey mass of the Tiergarten. They were not large. There was a bed, and a wardrobe, and a shelf of books, mostly astronomy and the Hanseatic League, and a star chart pinned to the wall with the constellations drawn on it in his own hand, at nine, very badly. And at the window that looked towards the park, the desk.

It was his father’s old desk from the study at Potsdam, oak, with a green leather top gone pale where the elbows went, and four drawers down the right-hand side. On it there was a lamp and a cup of pencils and the log he kept in Berlin, which was not the dome’s log but a smaller one, for the sky from the roof. And in the second drawer on the right, which was the drawer that locked, there was a box.

Frederick did not go to the desk. He stood in the middle of the room and looked at it from there, the way he had looked at the dome from the car.

“Is that where you write them?”

“Some of them. The ones that aren’t from the dome.”

Frederick looked at the four drawers down the side.

“Is that where you keep them?”

Alexander hesitated. Then he went to the desk and unlocked the second drawer with the small key on his own key ring, and opened it, and took out the box, and put it on the green leather.

It was his father’s walnut pen box, long and shallow, with four grooves in the green baize where the pens had been, and inside it, when he lifted the lid, the letters: Frederick’s, in order, every one he had sent since November, each in its envelope with the Embassy’s mark in the corner, and round the whole stack the dark blue ribbon from the coronation programme.

The knot was underneath, where he always put it.

He had retied it himself, on the Tuesday before, at this desk, after he had opened the drawer and found it on top. He had stood here with the box open in front of him for a long time. He had thought about the Ambassador’s car. He had thought about his mother at breakfast. He had untied it and tied it again, his own way, with the knot underneath, and put the box back, and locked the drawer, and said nothing to anybody, and he was not going to say anything now.

Frederick looked at the box. He did not touch it.

“You keep them in a box,” he said.

“Where do you keep mine?”

Frederick went slightly pink.

“In my civics folder,” he said. “Don’t laugh. It’s got a pocket at the back, and nobody ever looks in a civics folder, not even me. I keep it in my bag. I take it to school and bring it home and put it on the kitchen table on Tuesdays with everything else.” He looked at the box again. “I thought about getting a box. Then I thought somebody would ask what was in the box. Nobody asks what’s in a civics folder.”

Alexander looked at the ribbon.

He thought about telling him. He thought about saying, Somebody opened this, and tied it again, and put it back, and I know because the knot was on the wrong side, and watching Frederick’s face. He thought about the Ambassador’s car in the forecourt, and his mother’s toast, and two Queens standing very close together at a window on the first floor last night with the light behind them.

He put the lid back on the box.

“Nobody asks,” he said, and put it back in the drawer, and locked it.

Frederick was looking out of the other window, the one towards the park.

“Is that the Tiergarten?”

“Yes.”

Frederick looked at it for a while: the bare trees, very many of them, a long grey-brown mass going away towards the Victory Column with its gold figure on top, catching what light there was.

“Is that where he walked you?”

“Yes.”

Frederick did not ask anything else. He stood at the window with his hands, Alexander saw, behind his back, and looked at the park where his father had once walked another boy in the rain for an hour and said three things, and Alexander stood at the desk and looked at him looking, and neither of them said anything, and in the doorway Theo and Lukas stood side by side and looked at the backs of their heads and waited, and did not mind waiting.

“Bus,” said Theo at last, gently, from the doorway, the way you would remind somebody that their train was in.

---

Kessler would only allow it from the beginning of the route, at the Zoo, where the buses stood empty for a minute before they set off and you could choose where you sat. So the cars took them there first, back down the Linden and through the park, and the stop was by a newspaper kiosk shut for Easter.

Kessler had not liked it. Kessler had said so on the stairs, in German, at some length and in a low voice, and Alexander had said, also in German, that it was a public bus on a public holiday on a public street and that the King of Great Britain and the United Kingdom of America and his other realms was going to ride on it, and so was the German Emperor, and so was a Page of the Prussian court and a bus driver’s son from Milwaukee, and that Kessler was welcome to come too, downstairs, and look at the ceiling. Kessler had looked at Castellanos. Castellanos had looked at Kessler. Something had gone between them on the stairs, the way something had gone between Castellanos and Herr Schade in the hall on Sunday, a professional understanding that did not need either of their languages, and Kessler had said, “Downstairs, sir. The whole way. And you sit at the front, where I can see the back of your head in the mirror.”

“I always sit where you can see the back of my head,” said Alexander.

“Yes, sir,” said Kessler. “That is why I am still employed.”

The bus came at eleven minutes past. It was yellow, and double, and nearly empty, and the doors opened with a sigh, and Theo got on first, because he had been born to it, and showed the driver the four day tickets that Lukas had bought at a machine with his own money, and said “Danke” in his Wisconsin German, and the driver looked at him and said, “Bitte,” in a Berlin voice that had never been surprised by anything, and did not look at the three boys who came on behind him, or at the two very large men in dark coats who came on behind them and went to stand in the middle of the lower deck looking at different parts of the roof.

They went up the stairs. Theo went straight to the front, to the two seats at the very front of the upper deck with the big window in front of them and nothing between you and the street, and sat in one, and Lukas sat in the other, and Alexander and Frederick sat in the two behind, and the bus pulled away from the kerb with a lurch and swung out into the road.

Alexander had never seen Berlin from this high.

He had seen it from cars, at the height of a car, through tinted glass. He had seen it from the roof of the palace, at night, at the height of five storeys, at a distance, in the dark. He had never seen it from here, eight feet up, moving, through a big clean window, in daylight, with the street coming at him and the tops of the trees going past at the side close enough to touch. The bus went along the edge of the Tiergarten and then into it, down the long straight road through the middle of the park, with the bare trees on both sides very close and very tall and the paths going off among them, and somewhere down one of those paths, he did not know which, there was a bench where a man had stood with his hands behind his back in the rain.

Frederick was looking at the trees too. He did not say anything.

The bus stopped at the Victory Column, and three people got off, and the bus pulled away.

“He’s late on the brake,” said Theo.

Lukas turned his head.

“He’s what?”

“The driver. He’s late on the brake. Every stop. He leaves it too long and then he has to stand on it. Did you feel that? That’s not how you stop a bus. You start braking at the lamp post before the stop, and you come in on it soft, and nobody’s coffee goes over. My dad would never come into a stop like that. He’d be written up.” Theo looked at the road ahead with professional disapproval. “There’s a lady downstairs with a shopping bag. It went over at the last stop. I heard it.”

“It’s Berlin,” said Lukas. “Berlin drivers stop like that. It’s a style.”

“It’s not a style. It’s late on the brake.”

“It’s a Berlin style. They’re famous for it. People come from all over the Empire to have their coffee spilled by a Berlin bus driver. It’s in the guidebooks.”

“It’s in the guidebooks,” said Theo, “because it’s bad.”

The bus came round past the great grey bulk of the Reichstag, with its flags, and the people standing about in front of it on the grass in their Easter coats, and Alexander looked at it from eight feet up, through the big window, and thought that a little over three weeks ago, on the eighth of March, the people inside it had voted three-fifths for a thing about him, and that he had watched it on a laptop in a school library, and that he was now riding past it on the top deck of a bus, and that nobody inside it or outside it had any idea, and that it was the most ordinary thing he had done in a year, and that he could not stop looking at it.

Then the Brandenburg Gate, the bus going round it, the chariot on top black against the grey sky, and then Unter den Linden, the long wide avenue with the lime trees down the middle not yet in leaf, and the old buildings on both sides, the university and the opera and the library, going past at the height of their first-floor windows.

“He’s late on the brake,” said Theo, at the next stop, with satisfaction, as the bus stood on it and everybody upstairs went forward an inch.

“It’s the style,” said Lukas.

Frederick leaned forward between the two front seats.

“Theo would know what to do with a bus,” he said.

He said it quietly, to Lukas, as though it were an observation about Theo. Alexander heard it. It was his own line, from the third letter, from the dome in November, the joke about the succession that he had said was all he would ever say about that, ever. He had written it. He had not known Frederick would bring it here, to the top of a bus on Unter den Linden, and say it out loud, gently, to somebody else.

“That was a joke,” said Alexander.

“I know,” said Frederick, without turning round. “It’s a good one. It’s true as well.”

Lukas looked from one of them to the other, with his eyes narrowed, and decided, Alexander saw, not to ask.

Theo had not heard any of it. Theo was watching the driver’s hands in the big mirror at the front of the upper deck, which showed the cab below, and shaking his head slowly.

---

At the Lustgarten, with his own windows going past on the right, well above the top deck, on the second floor, the corner over the river, a woman got on with a shopping bag, an old woman in a headscarf and a good wool coat, and came up the stairs slowly, one at a time, and sat down across the aisle from Alexander with the bag on her knees, and looked out of the window.

Then she looked at him.

She looked at him for perhaps three seconds. She looked at his face, and then at Frederick’s, beside him, and then at his face again, and something happened in hers, very small, at the corners, and then she looked back out of the window, and did not look at him again.

At the Rotes Rathaus she got up to get off. She went past him to the stairs with her bag. At the top of the stairs she stopped, and turned, not all the way, and said, very quietly, to the window behind his head, in the Berlin voice:

“Frohe Ostern, Majestät.”

And went down the stairs before he could answer.

He sat with that for the rest of the way. Happy Easter, Majesty. To the window behind his head. As though it were the most ordinary thing in the world to find your King on the top of the 100 on Easter Monday, and the only proper thing to do about it was to wish him a happy Easter and get off at your stop.

“Did she just,” said Theo.

“Yes,” said Lukas.

“Does that happen?”

“No,” said Alexander.

“It happened,” said Frederick.

---

At Alexanderplatz they got off, all of them, upstairs and downstairs, under the great grey needle of the television tower with its silver ball, and stood on the pavement in the wind, and Theo looked back at the bus as it pulled away, with a hard, thoughtful expression.

“Same route back,” said Theo.

“Why?”

“Experiment,” said Theo. “Different bus. Different driver. If he’s late on the brake as well, it’s not the driver. It’s Berlin.”

“It’s a style,” said Lukas.

“We’ll see,” said Theo.

So they rode it back. A different bus, a different driver, a younger man with a ponytail who said “Moin” to Theo in a Hamburg accent and did not look at anybody behind him. They went up the stairs to the front, Theo and Lukas in front, Alexander and Frederick behind, the two large men in dark coats downstairs looking at the roof, and the bus went back along Unter den Linden the other way, past the opera and the university and through the Gate and past the Reichstag and into the long grey park, and at every stop the young man with the ponytail left it too late, and stood on the brake, and everybody upstairs went forward an inch.

Theo watched it all the way to the Victory Column in silence.

“Huh,” said Theo.

That was all. He did not say what it meant. He sat back in his seat and folded his arms and looked at the road with an expression of a man revising a theory he had held all his life, and Lukas, beside him, very kindly, said nothing at all.

---

They drove back to Potsdam at four. Theo was asleep before the motorway, with his forehead against the window, and Lukas was asleep twenty minutes later against Theo’s shoulder, which neither of them would have permitted awake. Frederick sat looking out of the window at the forest going past, the pines very straight and dark, with his hands on his knees.

“I liked your room,” he said, after a long time.

“It’s very small.”

“I know. I liked that it’s small. I liked the chart on the wall.” He paused. “I liked the box.”

Alexander looked out of his own window.

“Nobody asks what’s in a civics folder,” he said.

“No,” said Frederick. “Nobody does.”

At the house the mothers were in the hall when the cars came in, both of them, standing together at the foot of the stairs, as though they had been waiting there, or had come out together to meet the cars, or had been in the middle of something and had heard the gravel and stopped. His mother had her arms folded. His aunt had her hands in the pockets of her cardigan. They both looked at the two boys coming in through the door, at Frederick and then at him, and then at each other, very briefly, and he knew, from the way they looked, that whatever they had had to talk about all day had been talked about, and decided, and was going to be said, and that it was going to be said soon, and to both of them.

“Did you have a nice time?” said his mother.

“We went on a bus,” said Alexander.

“So I gather,” said his mother. “Kessler telephoned.” She unfolded her arms. “Tomorrow,” she said, “at eleven, I should like to see you both. In my sitting room. Just the two of you.” She looked at his aunt. “Just the four of us.”

“Yes, Mama.”

“Yes, Aunt Caroline,” said Frederick.

His aunt took her hands out of her pockets and looked at her son, and said something to him in Swedish, very short, which Alexander did not understand, and Frederick went white, very slightly, at the ears.