Ten in the Morning

It was a Wednesday, and the railings were bare.

He noticed them from the car, the way he had noticed them every morning since December, without meaning to: the railings opposite the school gate, black, iron, with the bus shelter beside them and the dentist in the bus shelter, smiling with all his teeth. Nothing hung on them. Nothing had hung on them since the morning after the election, when somebody had taken his no down in the night, and nobody had put anything up again, not in January when the placards came, not in March when the Reichstag voted, not last week, not this morning. The students had carried their placards. They had never come back to the railings. He did not know why, and had never asked, and had decided, some time in February, that it was because the railings had been his, and they had known it, and had left them alone.

The car stopped. Kessler got out first, as he always did, and looked at the roofs.

It was a quarter past eight. In New Westminster it was a quarter past two in the morning, and his cousin was asleep, or was not.

---

Tuesday had been the first of May, and the school had been shut, and he had spent it at the house in the Neuer Garten doing nothing on purpose, which his mother had arranged and which had been, by some distance, the most tiring day of the spring. So Wednesday was the first day back after the holiday, and felt like a Monday, and everybody in Klasse 8 was slow and cross and in the wrong books, and Frau Dr Seidel gave them a test on the Congress of Vienna that nobody had been told about and said that this was what the Congress of Vienna had been like for most of the people in it.

Alexander did the test. He knew the answers. He wrote them in the square hand and did not think about anything else for forty minutes, and it was a relief, and he understood, writing Talleyrand for the third time, that Frau Dr Seidel had known it would be, and had set the test on purpose, on this day, for him, without saying so.

When he handed it in Frau Dr Seidel took it without looking at him.

“Thank you, Hohenzollern,” said Frau Dr Seidel, which was what she called everybody, by their surname, without a title, and had since the first day of Klasse 7, when Alexander had been King of nothing and German Emperor of nothing and only a boy whose father was. She had gone on calling him Hohenzollern in February. She had gone on in October, and in December, and she said it now, on the second of May, in exactly the voice, and Alexander thought that on Thursday and Friday and the Monday after she would go on saying it, and that it was, in its way, as good a thing as anybody had done for him all year.

---

At lunch nobody talked about it.

They talked about the test, and Amalie’s mother, and Jakub’s sister, who had been accepted to study engineering in Danzig and had told the family at dinner by putting the letter in the bread basket. They talked about the raft, which Lukas reported had now acquired a flag, a pillowcase on a stick, which his brother said was a sail and which Lukas said was a pillowcase. They talked about a teacher who had come back from the Easter holidays with a beard. They did not talk about what was going to happen at four o’clock, in a room in another country, on a screen, and they did not talk about what was going to happen at nine o’clock tomorrow, in the Herrenhaus in Berlin, in a room Alexander had never been inside, and the not talking was so careful and so complete and so plainly organised that he knew Lukas had organised it, at break, without telling him.

Halfway through the bread Jakub looked at the clock on the wall of the dining hall.

He did not say anything. He looked at it, and then at his plate, and then, very briefly, at Alexander, and Alexander saw him do a sum in his head, the way Jakub did sums, without moving his lips: six hours. And then Jakub went back to his bread, and said something about the bearded teacher, and the sum was not mentioned again.

---

The library at four was nearly empty.

It always was on Wednesdays. The last lesson finished at a quarter to, and the day pupils went home, and the boarders went to their houses, and the library was left to the people who had nowhere to be until the cars came, which in Klasse 8 meant the three of them and Amalie, who had a car of her own coming and always made it wait.

They went to the corner by the atlases.

It was where they had watched the Reichstag in March. Nobody had suggested it. They simply went there, all four, and Jakub sat down in the same chair, the low one by the window with the broken spring, and opened his laptop on his knees, and Lukas sat on the floor with his back against the shelf of atlases, the way he sat against the pier in the dome, and Amalie took a book off the shelf behind them without looking at it and stood with it open, pretending to read, and Alexander saw that it was the same book, the one on the Hanseatic League, and that she had chosen it on purpose, and that she knew he would see.

He stood. He did not sit. There was a chair beside Jakub’s, and he did not take it. He stood behind Jakub’s chair with his hands at his sides, looking over Jakub’s shoulder at the screen.

“Do you want to sit down?” said Jakub.

“No.”

“All right.” Jakub turned the sound down. He turned it down very far, until it was almost nothing, so that the librarian at the desk by the door would not hear, and because, Alexander understood, Jakub thought he would not want it loud. He was right. Alexander had not known he was right until the sound went down, and then he did.

The clock over the librarian’s desk said two minutes to four.

---

The picture was very small.

It was a stream from the ABC, the American broadcaster, with a line of white writing along the bottom that Jakub had to lean in to read, and it showed, for a long time, nothing that Alexander understood: a room, with panelling, and a good deal of light coming in from somewhere on the left, and people standing, a great many of them, in dark clothes, very still, the way people stand when they have been told where to stand and have been standing there for some time. The camera moved along them slowly. He did not know any of their faces. He did not try to.

Then the camera stopped moving.

He did not know, afterwards, what the room was, or who else was in it, or what was said before or after, or by whom. He did not take any of it in. He saw only, in the middle of the very small picture, on a laptop on Jakub’s knees in the corner by the atlases, a tall fair boy in a dark suit, standing very straight, with one hand on a book and the other at his side; and he heard, under the nearly nothing of the sound, a voice he knew.

He could not hear the words.

He could hear that there were words, and that there were a great many of them, and that they were the old words, the long ones, with the rhythm in them of something that had been said over and over by other people in other rooms for a very long time. He could not hear what they were. The sound was too low, and the room in the picture was too large, and the voice was not loud. But he could hear that it was Frederick’s voice. Not a voice somebody had given him for the occasion. His own. The voice from the front row at Arlington, Alexander, and from the boathouse, and from the rowing boat at half past six with the oars knocking. He could hear that the voice was not hurrying. He could hear that it was not afraid of the words, or not so afraid that it showed, and that it had decided, before it began, to say each of them as though it meant it, because it did.

And he could hear, though he could not have said how, that Frederick had decided where to look.

He watched the very small face on the screen. It was too small to see properly. It was a pale shape under fair hair, in the middle of a room, turned slightly up and to one side, towards something above and beyond the camera that the camera did not show; and it did not move. The whole time the voice went on, the face did not move. It was looking at one thing, steadily, the way he had looked at the clock over the west door, the way Frederick had looked at the crack in the lid, and Alexander did not know what it was, and could not see it, and knew it was there.

He wanted, very badly, to know what it was.

He did not know what to do with his hands.

He found them at his sides, and they would not stay there. He put them behind his back, the way he walked, the way his uncle walked, and they would not stay there either. He put them on the back of Jakub’s chair, and that was wrong, because Jakub felt it and went still. He put them in his pockets, which he never did, and took them out again. He had told Frederick, in October, in the first letter he had ever written him, what to do with his hands: hold something, two fingers, underneath, where nobody can see. He had told him for six months. He had nothing to hold. There was nothing in the corner by the atlases that a person could hold with two fingers underneath, except the back of a chair, or a book, or the edge of a shelf.

Lukas, on the floor, without looking up, held out the end of his school scarf.

He held it up over his shoulder, the striped end of it, the way you would hold up something for somebody to take, and did not turn round, and did not say anything, and went on looking at the screen.

Alexander took it. He held it between two fingers, underneath, the way he had held the orb’s cushion in the cathedral and the hymn sheet at Arlington, the striped wool of a school scarf that smelled of Lukas’s coat and the dome and, faintly, the café, and he held on to it, and his hands stopped.

---

It did not take long.

He had thought it would take longer. He had thought, somehow, that a thing which had been coming since a Tuesday afternoon in October in a geometry class would take as long as it had taken to come. It took perhaps eleven minutes. The voice stopped. There was a pause, in the picture, a long one, in which nobody in the panelled room moved at all, and the fair boy at the middle of it stood with his hand still on the book and his face still turned up to whatever he had chosen; and then he took his hand off the book, and lowered his face, and looked, for the first time, at the people in the room, and the picture cut away to a man in a studio in New Westminster talking quickly about something, and Jakub reached out and touched the trackpad and the man stopped talking, frozen, with his mouth open, and the corner by the atlases was very quiet.

It was eleven minutes past four. It was eleven minutes past ten in New Westminster.

His cousin had taken his oaths, in his own voice, and reigned in his own right, in every realm at once.

Nobody said anything. Amalie closed the book on the Hanseatic League, very gently, as though it might wake somebody, and put it back on the shelf behind Lukas’s head without looking. Jakub sat with his hands on either side of the laptop, not touching it. Lukas sat on the floor with his scarf held up over his shoulder, and Alexander, behind him, still holding the end of it, two fingers, underneath.

He let go.

Lukas pulled the scarf back down, slowly, and put it round his neck, and tucked the end in, and that was all.

“Well,” said Amalie, at last.

“He looked at something,” said Jakub. “The whole time. Did you see? Up and to the left. He didn’t look at anybody until the end.” He frowned at the frozen man in the studio. “I wonder what it was.”

“A clock,” said Lukas, from the floor, without looking up. “Probably. Or a crack. Something nobody’s mended.”

Alexander looked at the back of his head.

“How do you know?”

“I don’t,” said Lukas. “It’s a guess. Guesses don’t count either.” He reached up behind him and put his hand flat on the spine of the atlas on the shelf above his head, the big one, the one with Kamerun in it, and left it there. “I’m still saving my one thing.”

---

The cars came at half past.

Amalie’s first, which she made wait, and then Jakub’s father in his own car, and then Kessler, at the library door, enormous and patient, looking at the ceiling, which in the school library was a good one, with plaster fruit on it that nobody had painted since the Kaiser before last.

Alexander picked up his bag.

At the door Jakub said, “Good luck tomorrow,” very fast, and went red, and went, without waiting to see whether it had been the right thing to say. Amalie said nothing. She only put her hand on his arm, once, for about a second, the way she had when they were six and he had cried at a birthday party because a balloon had gone up into a tree and nobody could get it down, and she had been the only one who did not tell him it didn’t matter; and then she went out to her car and made it wait a little longer.

Lukas walked with him to the gate.

They did not say anything on the way. The school was empty, and their feet were loud on the stairs, and on the path the trees were new green and the light was long and yellow and the railings opposite the gate were bare, black, iron, with the bus shelter and the dentist and nothing else.

At the gate Lukas stopped.

“I’m coming to the dome,” he said. “Tonight. My mother says. She says it’s the last night and somebody should be sitting on the floor.”

“Your mother said that?”

“She said, Somebody should be sitting on the floor. I’m translating.” Lukas looked at the railings. “She also sent a cake. It’s in Kessler’s car. It’s for your mother. It’s the one with the plums. She says it’s a thank you for last year, and that your mother will know what for, and that you are not to eat any of it in the car.”

“I won’t.”

“You will,” said Lukas. “But not much.”

He looked at Alexander for a moment, at the gate, in the long yellow light, with his bag on his shoulder and his scarf tucked in.

“He went first,” said Lukas.

“Yes.”

“Tomorrow it’s you.”

“Yes.”

Lukas nodded, slowly, as though that were the answer to something he had been asked a long time ago, and turned, and walked off down the street towards the café and the raft and the pillowcase on a stick, and did not look back; and Alexander got into the car, where there was a cake on the seat in a tin with a lid, smelling of plums, and Kessler looked at him in the mirror and did not say anything, and the driver turned left at the lights, towards the Neuer Garten, and the house, and the lake, and the dome.