The Commission

They were at the bus shelter when the car came round the corner, about a dozen of them, in scarves and woollen hats, with their breath going up white under the street lamp.

They were not shouting. That was the first thing he noticed. He had seen crowds on the television in October, outside the Court and outside the Landtag, and they had shouted, and some of them had shouted his name. These were standing very still in a loose line along the railings opposite the school gate, where the banner had been, holding placards at chest height, square pieces of white board on sticks, all the same, as though somebody had made them on a kitchen table on Sunday night and handed them out at the bus stop. Every board said the same two words in black.

Mit fünfzehn.

At fifteen.

“Sir,” said Kessler, from the front. “I can ask him to use the other gate.”

“No.”

“It’s thirty seconds round.”

“No,” said Alexander. “Then they’ll put it on the other gate.”

Kessler did not argue. The car slowed for the gate as it always did, not faster and not slower, and Alexander sat in the back with his bag on his knees and looked at them through the glass, because it would have been worse not to. Most of them were older than him. University, he thought, or the last year of somebody’s Gymnasium. Two of them he thought he recognised from the year above. One was a boy his own age, perhaps, in a red hat, holding his board very straight and looking at the car with an expression of fierce, nervous seriousness, as though he were on parade.

At the end of the line there was a girl in a green coat.

She saw the car. She saw who was in it. And she lowered her board, slowly, until it was against her knees, face in, so that the words were to her legs and not to the car, and stood holding it like that while the car went past, and did not look away.

Alexander did not know why she had done it. He thought about it all morning and did not decide. He thought it was possible that she did not want to wave a sign at a person about the person. He thought it was possible she was ashamed. He thought it was possible she had simply done what he would have done, which was not to hold anything up at anybody who could see it, and he found that he liked her for it, whoever she was, and that he would never know her name, and that this was the correct arrangement.

---

Lukas was at the second pillar.

He was looking across the road at the bus shelter. He went on looking at it after the car had stopped and Alexander had got out and the protection at the gate had said good morning to both of them in the same voice, and Alexander stood beside him for a moment and looked too.

“Mit fünfzehn,” said Lukas.

“I can read.”

“They started yesterday. My mother saw them at the station. She said they had made them themselves, on a table, with a ruler, because the letters are too straight to be anything else.” Lukas looked at the boy in the red hat. “She said they asked her for a coffee and she gave them six, and wouldn’t take the money, and then she came home and was angry with herself and didn’t know which part she was angry about.”

“Which part was it?”

“Both,” said Lukas.

He went on looking at the placards. Alexander waited for him to say what he thought. Lukas always said what he thought; it was what he was for. He looked at the line of white boards for a long time with his scarf up to his nose and his hands in his pockets, and he did not say anything at all, and then he turned round and went in through the gate, and Alexander followed him, and understood, going up the steps, that Lukas had a view about the placards and had decided not to have it out loud at a quarter past eight in the morning, and that the not saying was itself a thing Lukas had said, and that it would come out later, when it came out, and not before.

---

The House sat at ten.

He knew because it had been in the newspaper on the seat of the car, and because Kessler’s earpiece had a small sound in it at three minutes past ten that made Kessler look, very briefly, at the ceiling of the corridor outside the French room, which was the ceiling he looked at when something had happened in Berlin. Alexander did not ask. Nobody at the school mentioned it. They did verbs.

At break the boy in the red hat was gone from the railings, and so was the girl in the green coat. The others were still there, fewer, colder. Somebody had brought them a flask. Jakub, who had been standing at the window of the second-floor corridor with his forehead on the glass, said in Polish that the one with the flask was his cousin’s friend from Babelsberg, and that his cousin’s friend was an idiot, and that Jakub agreed with her.

“Agreed with her about what?” said Amalie.

“About fifteen,” said Jakub.

There was a short silence in the corridor.

“Sorry,” said Jakub, to Alexander, in German. “I’m allowed to agree with things.”

“You are,” said Alexander.

“I’m not allowed to say so in front of you.”

“You’ve said it.”

“I know.” Jakub put his forehead back on the glass. “I’m a terrible companion. They’ll take my hat away.”

“You haven’t got a hat.”

“They’ll give me one specially,” said Jakub, “and then take it away,” and Amalie said Jakub in the voice from Wednesday, and Lukas, at the other window, said nothing at all, again.

---

Chemistry was the last lesson, and it was equilibrium.

Dr Morgenroth taught it with his sleeves rolled up and a piece of chalk in each hand, drawing arrows that went both ways on the board, and explaining that a reaction which could go in both directions would, if you left it alone in a closed vessel, settle at a point where it was going in both directions at once at the same rate, so that from the outside nothing appeared to be happening at all.

“Nothing is happening,” said Dr Morgenroth, to the class, tapping the arrows. “Everything is happening. Both. All the time. That is equilibrium. If you want to move it, you have to change the conditions. Pressure, temperature, concentration. You cannot ask it nicely.”

Lukas wrote you cannot ask it nicely in the margin of his notebook and underlined it twice and slid the notebook a little towards Alexander, and Alexander read it and slid it back, and did not smile, because Dr Morgenroth was looking.

At five to two Dr Morgenroth put the chalk down.

He went to the cupboard at the back of the laboratory, where there was a small black radio on the shelf among the bottles of indicator, which he used on Fridays for the results of the football and at no other time. He turned it on. He did not say anything about why. He stood beside the cupboard with his hands in the pockets of his lab coat and looked at the periodic table on the wall, and the news came on at two o’clock exactly, and the man reading it said, in the voice the man always used, that the Prussian House of Representatives had this morning confirmed Dr Johanna Falk as Minister-President, by two hundred and forty-three votes, and that at a quarter past twelve the Regent, Her Royal Highness Princess Charlotte, had reappointed her, and that the Minister-President had said that her government’s first business would be the budget.

Then the weather. Then Dr Morgenroth turned the radio off.

“Pages ninety-four to ninety-seven,” he said. “Questions three, five and eight. Le Chatelier. For Thursday.”

Nobody looked at him.

Twenty-six people put their books in their bags at exactly the speed they always did, and talked to each other about questions three, five and eight, and about the football on Friday, and about whether Dr Morgenroth’s tie was the same tie as last week or a different tie of the same colour, and not one of them looked at Alexander, not once, not even Jakub, and it was so complete and so careful and so kind that he had to stay sitting down for a moment after the bell, with his bag on his knees, until it passed.

Lukas waited by the door.

“Two hundred and forty-three,” said Lukas, when they were on the stairs.

“I heard.”

“The same number. Exactly. Every one of them.” Lukas went down two steps. “That’s discipline. My father says the Social Democrats can’t agree what to have for lunch. He’ll be very surprised.”

“Your father votes for them.”

“That’s why he’ll be surprised,” said Lukas.

---

The car went the long way back, through the town, because of the placards at the gate, and Kessler said at the second set of lights, without turning round:

“We’re stopping at the Ministry, sir. Her Royal Highness is joining us as far as the hospital.”

Alexander looked at the back of Kessler’s head.

“Since when?”

“Since about four minutes ago, sir. Her own car has gone back to the palace with the papers. She asked whether there was room in yours.”

“There’s always room in mine.”

“That’s what I told her,” said Kessler.

The Ministry was a long grey building on a long grey street with the flag on it, and lights in every window, as though it had been switched on for the first time in two months, which, Alexander thought, it had. The car stopped at the side door. A woman officer he did not know opened it, and his sister came out of the building and down the steps in her long dark coat with a canvas bag over her shoulder that was so heavy with books it pulled the coat crooked, and got into the back of the car beside him, and put the bag on the floor between her feet, and the door was shut, and they went.

She did not say hello.

She did not say anything. She sat back against the seat with her eyes shut and her hands folded on her knees, and Alexander looked at her hands, which were red at the knuckles, the way they always were in winter, from the washing, from the alcohol they used on the ward, and at her face, which was tired in a way he had not seen it tired before, not the ward’s way, a different way. She had her hair tied back with a pencil through it. He did not think she knew it was there.

The car went down the long grey street and turned towards the river.

He wanted to ask her about the room, and who had been in it, and whether there had been an oath or only a signature, and whether Falk had looked at the chair that would have been his if he had been allowed to be in it, and what the room had smelt of, and whether it was the same room. He wanted to ask whether she had minded. He wanted to ask whether, standing in that room this morning, reappointing a woman to an office that the woman had already been reappointed to by a Court, his sister had thought for one second about the other thing, the thing he had said to her once in a corridor and that she had not answered, and that he had told Frederick he would not discuss. He did not ask any of it. He sat with his bag on his knees and looked at her hands.

They were on the bridge, over the black water, when she spoke.

She did not open her eyes. She said it to the roof of the car, quite quietly, as though she were reporting a finding on a ward round to somebody who would write it down:

“She has very cold hands.”

Then nothing.

Alexander waited. She did not say anything else. The car came off the bridge and went on through the streets towards the hospital, past the lit windows of flats where people were cooking, past a tram with nobody in it, past a Christmas market with its lights on and its stalls shut, and his sister sat beside him with her eyes closed and her hands on her knees and said nothing else at all, and he understood after a while that she was not going to, and that she had said exactly what she meant to say, and that it was not about Falk’s hands.

He thought about it. He thought about a woman who had been dismissed in somebody else’s name in April, and had gone to a court, and won, and gone to the country, and won, and walked into a room this morning to be given back, for the second time, a thing that was hers, by a student of twenty-three in a coat with a pencil in her hair, and had held out her hand, and had had cold hands. He thought that Charlotte had held her hand for perhaps two seconds and had known, as a doctor would know, what the cold meant, and that she had told him, and only him, and in five words, so that it would not be gossip and would not be a report and would not be anything except a thing he now also knew.

The car stopped at the side entrance of the Charité, under a light, by a bin.

Charlotte opened her eyes. She picked up the bag of books by its strap and put it on her shoulder, and the coat went crooked again, and the woman officer, who had come behind them in the second car the whole way and had not said a word either, was already at the door, and opened it.

His sister got out. She did not look back at him. She walked across the wet pavement to the side door of the hospital, in the coat, with the bag, under the light, the way she walked in every morning at seven, and as she reached the door she raised her right hand without turning round, flat, at shoulder height, for one second, and put it down, and went in.

---

He did not do the chemistry that night.

He sat at the desk in the Berlin palace with the textbook open at page ninety-four and the arrows going both ways, and did not read them. He thought about the girl in the green coat with her board turned to her knees. He thought about the boy in the red hat looking at the car as though he were on parade. He thought about twenty-six people not looking at him, and Lukas not saying what he thought, and Jakub agreeing with his cousin’s friend from Babelsberg and apologising for it, and two hundred and forty-three people in a room in Berlin all voting the same way, every one, for a woman with cold hands.

He thought that nothing was happening. He thought that everything was. Both. All the time.

At ten the guard went past the door, and paused, and went on.

He wrote one line on the squared paper, under the line from Wednesday, which was still folded in his blazer pocket waiting for Saturday and the log. He wrote:

11 December. Cold hands.

Then he put the pencil down, and did questions three, five and eight, quickly, badly, because they were for Thursday and Thursday was a long way off, and went to bed.