Book Seven: Feierabend Part Four: The Day After Characters
Chapter Thirty-four
The Declaration
Alexander I. Berlin, in the Kingdom of Prussia. Monday, 30 April 2029.
A section of monarchist opinion believes she wants the throne, and believes it precisely because she never says she does not.
There had been one sheet in the draft, and he had asked for three.
He had asked on Friday, in a note, through Charlotte, in the square hand on the ordinary paper, the first note he had ever written to the Ministry of State on any subject: that the declaration the amendments required be made not on one sheet but on three, one for each capacity, each in its own form, each sent by its own road, and signed one at a time. He had not given a reason. He had thought, writing it, that he would be asked for one, and had prepared it, and had not been asked. On Saturday the drafts had come back to the Neuer Garten in three folders, without comment, and Charlotte had written on the outside of the top one, in her quick upright hand, Of course.
Now they were on the desk in the small study in Berlin, side by side, in the order he had asked for.
The first folder was blue, with the imperial eagle on it. The second was black and white, with the Prussian one. The third was the dark green folder with the arms of Kamerun in faded gold that Dr Nkolo had carried in on the Tuesday, and Dr Nkolo was standing beside it now at the correct distance from the desk, with his hands folded, looking at the painting of the lake.
It was five o’clock. He had come straight from school. He had not changed. He was in his blazer still, with chalk on the cuff from Frau Dr Seidel’s board, and he had thought in the car about changing, and had decided not to, because it was a Monday afternoon and he had come from school and the paper did not care what he was wearing.
Charlotte stood at the window.
She had come from the hospital. She had not changed either. She was in the grey trousers and the dark jumper she wore under her white coat, with her hospital pass on its lanyard still round her neck, turned the wrong way, so that it showed the back of the card and not her face, and her hair tied up in the way that meant she had been on the ward since seven. She had said Hello when he came in, and nothing else. She was looking out of the window at the courtyard, where Kessler was talking to the driver of her car, and her arms were folded.
There was nobody else. He had asked for that as well.
He opened the blue folder first.
It was one page. He had read it on Saturday, and on Sunday, and in the car, and he read it again now, all of it, slowly, the way his uncle read a document, one clause at a time, from the top. It was short. The amendments had made it short. It said, in the old formal German that he had heard read over his father, that the German Emperor, the Constitution of the Empire as now amended permitting it, declared that from Thursday the third of May he would exercise in person the powers of his office, and that the declaration was made to the Presidents of the Reichstag and of the Bundesrat through the Regent, as the Constitution required.
There was a space at the bottom for his name, and a space below it, smaller, for hers.
He picked up the pen.
It was his father’s. He had not asked for it. It had been on the desk when he came in, beside the blotter, a heavy black pen with a gold band that his father had used for everything, and that his mother had put away in February in a drawer in this desk, and that somebody had taken out of the drawer this afternoon and put by the blotter, square, without being asked. He did not know who. He thought he could guess. He did not look at the window.
He signed.
Alexander.
It was the first time. He had signed things in his name since February, a great many things, but they had all been signed by somebody else. He had signed letters, and the log, and the minute in April, which was not an act but a record. He had never once signed his name to a thing that did something. He looked at it on the page, wet, in his father’s ink, in the square hand he had been taught at six and never made his own, and it looked exactly like his name on anything else, and that surprised him, and then did not.
He turned the page round on the desk and pushed it across.
Charlotte came from the window.
She did not sit. She bent over the desk, with one hand flat on it beside the page, and read it, all of it, from the top, as though she had not read it on Saturday and Sunday and approved it on Friday; and then she took the pen out of his hand, without asking, and wrote in the small space below his name the one word the amendments required of a Regent, Gesehen, seen, and her initial, C, and the date. Then she put the pen down by the blotter, square, where it had been, and went back to the window.
He closed the blue folder.
The black and white folder was the same, and not the same.
The words were nearly the same words, and they were not the same document. It said King of Prussia where the other had said German Emperor, and the Constitution of the Kingdom where the other had said of the Empire, and it was addressed to the Presidents of the two chambers of the Landtag, the House of Deputies and the House of Lords, and not to anybody in the Reichstag at all. A person reading the two side by side, he thought, would think them copies of each other. They were not copies. They were two acts by two people who happened to be the same person, under two laws, to two parliaments, and if anybody ever put them in the same folder he would know, and would mind.
He did not read it as slowly. He did not need to. He had read the first one for both of them, and the difference was the whole of what he needed to see, and he saw it.
He signed.
Alexander.
He turned it round. Charlotte came from the window and bent and read it from the top and took the pen out of his hand and wrote Gesehen, and C, and the date, and put the pen back, square, and went to the window again.
He closed the black and white folder and put it on top of the blue one, crosswise, so that they could not be mistaken for one pile.
Dr Nkolo opened the green one.
He did it himself. That was the rule of the Kamerun capacity for a paper the Kaiser was to sign: its own secretary opened it and laid it before him, and the Kaiser did not touch it until it was laid. Dr Nkolo opened it and laid it on the desk in front of him, flat, at the correct distance, and stepped back.
It was different. It was not addressed to anybody in Germany at all. It was addressed to the governor-general at Jaunde, Albertine Ngo Bayiha, and through her to the Landtag of Kamerun, and it said that the Kaiser von Kamerun, the Landtag having by its own Act of the twenty-fourth of April so provided, would exercise his office in person from the third of May; and it said by the Act of the Landtag where the other two had said by the Constitution as now amended, and it said it twice, once in the first sentence and once in the last, which he had not asked for, and which he understood, reading it, that somebody in Jaunde had asked for, and that Dr Nkolo had made sure of.
There was a third space at the bottom, below his and below the Regent’s, that the other two did not have.
“For the Kamerun secretary,” said Dr Nkolo, to the lake. “To witness that the act is done in the capacity and in no other. It is in the constitution of 1955. It has been used four times.”
He signed.
Alexander.
He did not turn this one round. Dr Nkolo came forward and turned it, gently, a quarter turn, so that it faced the window, and Charlotte came from the window and bent and read it from the top and wrote Gesehen, and C, and the date, and then held out the pen, not to Alexander, but to Dr Nkolo.
Dr Nkolo looked at the pen for a moment.
Then he took it, and bent, and signed below them both, in a hand that was small and neat and careful and took up exactly as much of the line as it was given, J. Nkolo, Sekretär für Kamerun, and the date; and he put the pen down by the blotter, square, where it had been; and closed the green folder, and picked it up, and held it against his chest with both hands.
“Majesty,” said Dr Nkolo. “Highness.”
And he went out, and closed the door behind him, very quietly, the way a man closes a door on a room where something has been finished.
That left the two of them.
Charlotte stayed at the window. He stayed at the desk. The two folders lay crosswise in front of him, and the pen beside them, and the blotter, and the lamp, which was on although it was still light outside, because the small study faced north and had never in his life been light enough in the afternoon.
He waited for her to say something. She did not. She stood with her arms folded and her hospital pass turned the wrong way round, and looked out at the courtyard, where her car was, and her officer beside it, and Kessler, who had gone round to the other side of the car so as not to be seen looking at the window.
“Your pass is the wrong way round,” said Alexander.
“I know.” She did not turn it. “It’s been the wrong way round since half past seven. It’s how I know I’ve been somewhere that isn’t the hospital. When I get back on the ward I turn it round.” She looked down at it, the back of the white card with the black stripe across it. “It’s a stupid habit.”
“It’s not stupid.”
“No,” said his sister. “It isn’t.”
The clock on the mantelpiece, his father’s, ticked. It was a small gilt clock that lost two minutes a week and that his father had refused to have mended because he liked to know, every Monday, that it was wrong by exactly two minutes, and could correct for it. Nobody had mended it since February either. Nobody had wound it, he realised, until today. Somebody had wound it this afternoon. It said six minutes past five, and the real time was eight minutes past.
“On Thursday,” said Charlotte, “at nine, in the Herrenhaus, with both Presidents, you take the oath. The Prussian one. I’ll be there. I’m not Regent after nine. I’ll be standing at the side with Mama. I’ll be your sister. And until you’re eighteen I’m the one person in Prussia who’s allowed by law to tell you you’re wrong, and you’re not allowed to sack me.” She paused. “I looked that up as well.”
“I wouldn’t.”
“You might. You’re a Hohenzollern. We all sack somebody eventually.” She almost smiled, at the glass. “Not yet, though.”
She was quiet again.
He sat at the desk with his hands flat on the two folders and thought about the thing he had told Frederick in the rowing boat, at half past six, with the light going on the Heiliger See and the oars knocking in the rowlocks: the because. He had found it in the boat. He had found it by being asked, plainly, the way Frederick asked everything, and he had said it out loud for the first time in his life to somebody who was not her, and he had known as he said it that he would never say it to her, because to say it to her would be to do the very thing it said he must not do. If he told her it should have been hers, and she did not want it, he would have taken from her the one thing she had chosen, which was not wanting it.
So he did not say it.
He sat at the desk and did not say it, with all his strength, and it was the hardest thing he had done that day, harder than the pen.
Charlotte turned round.
She turned round from the window and looked at him, across the small study, past the lamp and the desk and the two folders and the pen, and her face was the face from the ward, the one he had seen once through the glass of a door at the Charité in March of last year, when he had been brought to visit and had seen her before she saw him: tired, and exact, and entirely occupied with the question of what to do next.
“I’m going to say one thing,” said his sister. “And then I’m going back to the hospital, because I’m on nights, and somebody on the ward has had a pulmonary embolism and I want to see whether the heparin’s holding.”
“All right.”
She unfolded her arms.
“I’d have been good at it,” said Charlotte.
She said it plainly, the way she said everything, the way she had said She needs nobody on the telephone in December between two pages of pharmacology. She did not say what. She did not say whether she meant the regency, which she had done for six months and done well, more strictly than anybody had asked her to, or whether she meant the other thing, the thing he had told her once, years ago, and she had not answered, and he had never raised again. She said it, and stopped, and looked at him.
He did not know what his face did.
He felt it do something. He felt it go, the way it had gone in the front row at Arlington when his cousin said Alexander, and he did not stop it this time, because he did not know how, and because he did not want to. He did not know what it showed. He did not know whether it showed that he agreed, or that he was sorry, or that he had heard both things she might have meant and would not choose between them for her, or simply that he was fifteen and it was ten past five by his father’s clock and his sister was going back to a ward to look at somebody’s blood.
He thought Charlotte knew.
She looked at his face for a long moment, across the small study, the way she looked at a patient, all of it at once, missing nothing; and whatever she saw in it, it answered her. He saw it answer her. He saw her take it, and put it away somewhere he would never be shown, and he understood that he never would be, and that this was correct.
“And I’m glad it’s you,” said Charlotte.
Then she turned her hospital pass round on its lanyard, so that it showed her face, and went out.
He sat in the small study for some time after the door closed.
He heard her feet in the corridor, quick, and then on the stairs, and then nothing, and then, from the courtyard, her car door, and her car going, and Kessler’s voice saying something to the driver of his own car, low, in the tone that meant we’ll wait.
He looked at the two folders.
Then he picked up his father’s pen from beside the blotter, and turned it over in his fingers, the heavy black barrel and the gold band, warm still from three hands; and he opened the drawer of the desk, the top one on the right, where his mother had put it in February, and found the drawer empty except for a single sheet of the paper with the eagle on it, folded once, which he had not put there.
He unfolded it.
It said, in his mother’s hand, which was large and sloped and had been taught by a governess in London in 1972, one line.
He would have signed three as well. M.
He put the pen in the drawer, on top of the sheet, and closed the drawer, and sat with his hand on it.
The clock on the mantelpiece said ten past five. It was twelve minutes past. On Thursday morning, before nine, somebody would have to set it right, or decide not to; and he thought, sitting at his father’s desk with his hand flat on the drawer, that he knew already which it would be, and that it would be the first thing he decided, and that nobody would ever know.