Book Seven: Feierabend Part Four: The Day After Characters
Chapter Thirty
The Bag
Alexander I. Berlin, in the Kingdom of Prussia. Thursday, 12 April 2029.
Alexander has continued attending school on an almost normal schedule.
Amalie asked at break.
She asked it the way she asked everything, sideways, as though the question had occurred to somebody else and she was only passing it on, standing by the radiator in the corridor outside the chemistry room with her bag on one shoulder and an apple she was not eating.
“What is an American like at breakfast?”
Alexander looked at her.
“Which one?”
“Either. Both. You had two.” She turned the apple over. “My mother wants to know. She heard from somebody’s mother that there were two Americans at the house in the Neuer Garten all week and that one of them was the King of England and the other one was a bus driver.”
“Neither of those is true.”
“I told her. She didn’t believe me. She never believes me about you. She thinks I’m protecting you.” Amalie looked down the corridor, at nothing. “I am, a bit. But not about breakfast. So?”
He thought about it. He had not expected to have to think about it, and he found that he wanted to answer properly, and that the proper answer was not the obvious one.
“Frederick reads the timetable,” he said. “At breakfast. Not a newspaper. The railway timetable, for the day, the whole country, so that he knows what is running. He reads it the way other people read the weather. He told my mother on the first morning which trains would be late because of the bridge at Spandau, and she said she had not known there was a bridge at Spandau, and he said there are four.”
“And the other one?”
“Theo eats everything,” said Alexander, “and says thank you to the person who brought it. Every time. By name. He found out the name of the woman who brings the coffee on the first morning, and he said thank you to her by it every time she put anything down, all week, and by the middle of the week she had started bringing him things nobody had asked for, to hear him say it.”
Amalie considered this.
“That’s not what an American is like,” she said. “That’s what Theo is like.”
“Yes.”
“So what’s an American like?”
“I don’t know,” said Alexander. “I’ve only met two.”
Amalie bit the apple, finally, and chewed, and looked at him with the expression she had worn since they were six, of somebody who had known him longer than anybody else at school and had decided early on not to let it give her any rights.
“Lukas says you had a fight.”
“Lukas says a great many things.”
“Lukas says one thing an evening,” said Amalie. “This was in the morning. On the bus to the swimming baths, on Tuesday, when you weren’t there. He said you had a fight with the King of England and then you looked at a galaxy and it was all right.” She shifted the bag on her shoulder. “I’m only telling you so you know what he’s saying on buses.”
“He isn’t the King of England.”
“I know he isn’t. My mother thinks he is.” The bell went. Amalie dropped the apple core into the bin by the radiator without looking at it, which she had been able to do since she was nine and which Alexander had never once managed. “I’m glad it was all right,” she said, and went in to chemistry.
The bag came on Thursdays now.
It had come on all sorts of days in the winter, Tuesdays and Fridays and once, in January, on a Thursday, because somebody at the Embassy in New Westminster had been told that a letter for the Emperor’s birthday must arrive on the Emperor’s birthday and had taken it personally. But since Easter there had been a timetable. Frederick had arranged it. Alexander did not know how, and did not ask, and suspected that it had been done at a kitchen table, in English, in a sentence that began For civics, and had been answered in Swedish.
It was on the desk in his room in Berlin when he came in at half past five. On its own. The household had learned in November that letters from that hand came up by themselves and were put down square, in the middle of the blotter, with nothing on top of them, and they had gone on doing it all winter without anybody telling them to, and they had gone on doing it in March, after, which was the part he had not expected.
He did not open it at once.
He took off his blazer and hung it on the back of the chair. He went to the window, which looked down into the courtyard, where Kessler was standing by the car talking to the driver and looking, every so often, up at the eaves, at the gutters, at the sky, at anything that was above him and not likely to be a person. He went back to the desk.
He opened the second drawer. The box was there, where it had always been. He took off the lid and looked at the ribbon, which was tied his own way, with the knot underneath, the way he had tied it on the Sunday the car came back from the airport, and he looked at it for a while and did not untie it.
Then he sat down and opened the letter.
It began on an aeroplane.
He could see that it had begun on an aeroplane before he had read a word of it, because the first two pages were on the thin card of an airline’s menu, folded once, written on the back in blue ink that had skipped, and gone over again where it skipped. The rest was on the ordinary paper, the cream paper with nothing printed on it that Frederick had used since October, as though he had not yet found out he was allowed paper with a crown.
Dear Alexander,
This is the first letter under the terms. I’ve written the terms at the top of the page, on the back of the menu, so that I can see them while I write:
Write to each other about anything. Advise each other about nothing that has a vote in it.
He read the terms. He knew them. He had been in the room when they were made, on the Tuesday, with the door shut, and he had heard them said aloud, and said yes to them. He had not seen them written down. They looked smaller written down. They looked like something a person could keep.
I’ve been looking at them for twenty minutes. I’ve started this four times. Every time I start, the second sentence has a vote in it.
He read on. He read about Theo asleep against the window since Germany, and Castellanos across the aisle looking at the ceiling of the aeroplane out of loyalty to the profession, and his aunt on the other aeroplane an hour ahead, because of the rule, not turning the pages of a Swedish novel. He read that his aunt had said at the airport, in Swedish, that she would never read another page that was not hers, and that she never lied in Swedish, because it was too small a language to get away with anything in. He had heard her say it, at the door, a short run of soft words that he had not understood one of, and had watched Frederick say Ja. Now he knew what he had heard. Afterwards he had stood on the other side of the barrier with his mother, watching his aunt go through alone, to the first of the two aeroplanes, and then the backs of three heads go through after her, to the second. He believed it.
He read about the blisters on the heels of Frederick’s thumbs, which he had been shown in the skiff, palms up, in the last of the light, and had forgotten, and which Frederick had not forgotten, and had written down for him to read. That was the difference between them, on paper and off it, and he had always known it, and it still surprised him.
He read about the bus, and the brake. He read Theo says that he is undefeated in the German Empire and that he would like it recorded, and made a sound in his room in Berlin that nobody heard.
Then he read the part about the crossings-out.
There are three sentences on the back of the menu that I have crossed out, very thoroughly, with the airline’s pen, which doesn’t work well, so I’ve had to go over them twice.
He turned the menu card over.
They were there. Three sentences, near the bottom of the second side, gone over twice in blue, so thoroughly that the card had furred under the pen and nearly torn. He could not read a word of any of them. He did not try. He held the card up to the window, once, without meaning to, the way you hold up a banknote, and saw only the blue, and put it down again, and was ashamed for about a second, and then was not, because Frederick had told him they were there precisely so that he would hold it up to the window, and find nothing, and know.
That is a loophole, and I know it is a loophole, and I’m using it once, and then never again.
“Yes,” said Alexander, to the card.
He read the next part three times.
I’m not going to say anything about the date you told me on the lake. It hasn’t been voted on yet. It has a vote in it. So I’ll only say the other thing, which hasn’t.
Nobody has ever let me go first at anything because I should. Only because I was older. I’ve gone first all my life, at everything, by eight months, and it was always the calendar. This is the first time it was somebody. I noticed. That’s all. There’s no vote in noticing.
He got up.
He walked round the room twice, the long way, past the window and the bookcase and the door and the bed and the window again, which was what he did instead of saying anything, and had done since he was small, and which Frederick had once, in a letter, called your lap of honour, and which Lukas called the patrol. On the second lap he stopped at the window. Kessler had gone in. The car was in the courtyard on its own with the driver asleep in it, his cap over his eyes.
He had not thought, on the lake, that Frederick would write it down. He had thought that it would be one of the things that was said once and then kept by both of them and never handled again, like the other thing, the thing in the study, which Frederick had promised in the dome never to write and had kept his promise about two pages further on. He had thought that Because you go first was a thing a person said in a boat, at half past six, with the light going, to somebody rowing badly, and that it would stay in the boat.
Frederick had brought it out of the boat and put it on paper, and had not said anything about it, except that he had noticed.
He sat down again. He found he did not mind. He found, which was worse, that he was glad.
The second part was dated two days later, at the kitchen table, on a Tuesday.
This is where it would have gone.
There was nothing after that line but white, a hand’s breadth of it, before the letter went on. Alexander looked at the white for some time. It was the second loophole. It was a better one than the first. Frederick had not crossed anything out. He had simply left the space where it would have gone, so that the space would be read.
She knows I’m writing to you. She looked at the envelope when I got it out and said, “Anything?” and I said, “Anything,” and she said, “Good,” and went back to her folder.
He read about Mr Abernathy and the corridor and Marcus, the boy who bowed, asking whether Germany was all right as though it were a person. He read about Uncle Ernest. He had them read to him while I was away by the nurse who likes him, who read them in the wrong order, he said. He said it in two words. “Wrong order.” He read that Frederick had told his father he had stood where Uncle Heinrich is, and that his father had said Heinrich, not as a question, and then nothing for a long time, and then Good.
He put the letter down on the blotter, square, and put his hand flat on it, and sat like that, and did not read the end for a while.
He had stood there too. Every Easter, every birthday, every Sunday in the first month. He had stood there with his mother and with Charlotte and with the chaplain and with nobody, and he had never once heard anybody say Papa’s name in that place in a voice that was not lowered. He tried to imagine his uncle saying it, in the hospital, in the low rough voice from the kitchen table on the Eleventh, Heinrich, flat, a statement, the way you would say the name of a man you had walked behind at a funeral and then walked beside, in the rain, for two days longer than the programme said.
He could imagine it exactly. That was the trouble with his uncle’s voice now. Every word of it was the only word.
At the end Frederick had asked him three questions.
Write about anything. I want to know what you can see. I want to know whether you still light the stove in April. I want to know what Lukas spends his one thing on, the next clear Saturday. Those haven’t got votes in them. Tell me those.
He read the postscript, about the five-forty from Baltimore, cancelled on Monday because of the bridge, the first time since Frederick had taken it. I minded more than I expected to. I think you’d understand that better than anybody. He did understand it. He thought of the clock over the west door of the cathedral, and how he would feel if somebody stopped it, and found that he would mind very much, and that it would make no sense to anybody, and that Frederick was right, he was the person who would understand it best.
Then he took a sheet of the paper with the eagle on it, which he had used since October from habit, though there was a box of his mother’s plain cream paper from Christmas in the drawer below, and he had not yet decided what it was for, and uncapped his pen, and wrote Dear Frederick, and stopped.
He could answer the first question. He could see, from the window, the courtyard and the car and the driver asleep with his cap over his eyes, and above the roofs a sky that had been grey all day and was going yellow at the western edge, and he could see, if he leaned, the green dome of the cathedral, with the clock under it that he had watched go from seventeen minutes past to eighteen. That was what he could see. It was not much. It had no vote in it.
He could answer the second. Yes. He still lit the stove in April. He had lit it on the first clear night after they had gone, when the dome had been empty of everybody but himself for the first time in nine days and had been colder for it than the thermometer said. He had lit it for one person and sat beside it until the guard passed the ladder, and had written nothing in the log at all except the date and the word klar, and below it, very small, a thing he would not put in a letter, under any terms.
He could not answer the third.
It was Thursday. The next clear Saturday had not happened. He did not know what Lukas would spend his one thing on, the one he had been carrying since March and had not needed at Easter, because Lukas would not say until he said it, and the whole point of the one thing was that nobody else knew when it was coming. He could not write it down in advance. That would be making it up. Frederick would know.
He looked at Dear Frederick for a long time.
Then he capped the pen, and put the sheet of paper with the eagle on it into the drawer, under the box, with the two words on it and nothing else, and put Frederick’s letter into the box with the others, the menu card and the cream paper together, in the order they had come, and tied the ribbon, with the knot underneath.
He would write on Saturday night. From the dome. When he knew.
At supper his mother did not ask.
She did not ask so carefully that he could hear her not asking, all through the soup, in the small dining room in the private apartments, with the window open an inch because she liked the air and the noise of the city coming in, a long way off, like the sea. She asked about chemistry. She asked about Amalie’s mother, whom she had known for twenty years and found exhausting. She told him that the hospital had telephoned from New Westminster, as it did on Thursdays, and that his uncle had eaten well, and had said a word to the nurse, which the nurse had not understood, and had been content to leave it not understood, which was new.
“What was the word?” said Alexander.
“The nurse thought it was Potsdam.” His mother broke a piece of bread in half and did not eat either half. “She wasn’t sure. She said he said it and then smiled, the side that works, and then went to sleep.”
He looked at his plate.
“Frederick’s hands are blistered,” he said, after a while. “On the heels of his thumbs. From the skiff. He says it’s the wrong place for rowing blisters.”
His mother put the bread down.
She looked at him across the table, for a moment, with her face doing the thing it had done on the Tuesday in the sitting room, when she had told him that she had chosen to read them, and had not looked away while she said it. Then the face did something else, slowly, that he had not seen it do since February, and that he did not, for a moment, recognise.
“From rowing you,” said his mother.
“Yes.”
“Badly, I expect.”
“Yes,” said Alexander. “Very badly. For an hour.”
His mother picked up the bread again.
“Good,” she said, which was his uncle’s word, and which she did not often use; and she ate the bread, both halves, and asked him about chemistry again, as though she had not asked already, and he told her again, as though she had not.