Feierabend

He sat on the stool in the hall to take off his shoes.

It was low and dark and carved out of one piece of wood, with a seat worn pale in the middle, and it stood by the umbrella stand where it had always stood. He had sat on it all his life and had never asked, until last Tuesday, where it came from. He undid his laces with the tin of plum cake on his knees and thought of a chief in Kamerun handing his father a stool in the heat, and his father carrying it home on an aeroplane and being told that he had bought it at the airport.

He put his shoes on the rack. He stood up.

His mother was at the top of the stairs.

She was in a dress. Not a good one, a plain dark blue one, but a dress, on a Wednesday, in the house where she had worn his father’s old cardigan with the elbows gone every evening since February. She came down with one hand on the rail and looked at him, at the blazer and the socks and the tin.

“Supper’s at seven,” said his mother. “It’s an ordinary supper. I’ve told the kitchen. Nothing special. I’ve told them twice.”

“All right.”

“What’s in the tin?”

“A cake. From Lukas’s mother.” He held it out. “She said it’s for you. She said it’s a thank you for last year, and that you’d know what for.”

His mother looked at the tin.

It was a plain round tin with a dented lid and a strip of brown paper round it, with one word on the paper in pencil, Pflaumen. She took it in both hands, the way Dr Nkolo held the green folder, and held it against her dress.

“She said something else,” said Alexander.

“Did she.”

“She said she knew what it cost you. Being kind when you were frightened.” He looked at the tin, not at her. “She said she’d never had the chance to tell you, and she was telling me instead, and I could tell you or not.”

His mother did not say anything for some time.

“I was frightened for him,” said his mother at last. “Not of anything he’d said. For him. He was fourteen, and he’d been put in front of a whole country beside you, and nobody had asked him either.” She lifted the tin a little, as though weighing it. “It’s the one with the plums. I had it once, at the gate of the school, in the summer, at the parents’ day, before any of it. She won’t remember. I said it was the best cake I’d ever eaten and she said it was because it was the first warm day.”

“Lukas says she remembers everything.”

“Then she’ll have remembered that,” said his mother, “and that’s why she sent this one.” And she went along the passage to the kitchen with the tin against her, quickly, and he heard her say something there in a voice that was meant to be ordinary, and was not.

---

The table was laid for two.

It was the small table in the garden room, with the long windows onto the lawn and the lake, where they had eaten since February because the dining room echoed. It was laid with the white china with the thin gold rim, the Christmas china. There were candles. His mother’s place was at the end by the window, as usual. His was at the other end.

At the other end, in the chair with the arms, was where his father had sat.

He stood at the door and looked at it. His mother was standing behind her own chair with her hands on its back, waiting to sit until he did, which she had never once done in his life.

“It’s an ordinary supper,” said his mother. “Sit where you like.”

He looked at the chair with the arms.

Then he went round to his own place on the long side by the wall, where he had sat since he was big enough not to need a cushion, and sat down, and moved his plate and his knife and his fork and his glass along the table to it, one at a time, square.

His mother watched him do it.

She sat down at her end and put her napkin on her knee and looked at the empty chair with the arms, and then at him, and her face did what it had done at supper in Berlin in April, when he told her about Frederick’s blistered thumbs.

“Your father sat on the side as well,” said his mother. “The first year. He wouldn’t take the end. Your grandfather had sat at the end, and he said it would be like sitting in a coat that was still warm.” She picked up her spoon. “He moved to the end in the second year. Nobody asked him to. One evening he simply came in and sat there, and I said nothing, and neither did he, and that was all.”

“I’ll move,” said Alexander, “when nobody asks me to.”

“Yes,” said his mother. “I know you will.”

---

It was Königsberger Klopse.

The kitchen brought it in on the good china, grey meatballs in the white sauce with capers, and set it down between the candles and went out, and his mother looked at it with an expression of great dignity and complete defeat.

“I said nothing special,” said his mother.

“I know.”

“I said it twice.”

“I know.”

“It was your father’s favourite. I said to them this morning, in so many words, Make whatever you would make on an ordinary Wednesday.” She looked at the dish. “And they have made the most Prussian thing it is possible to put on a plate, on the night before the King of Prussia takes his oath, and I do not know whether to be angry or to cry.”

He looked at the dish, and then at his mother, and then at the dish again.

“It’s what they make on Wednesdays,” he said.

His mother looked at him.

“It isn’t.”

“It is now,” said Alexander, and served her first, the way his father had served her, which he had watched from the side of the table for fourteen years and never once done himself; and after a moment his mother picked up her fork.

She tried not to make it an occasion. He watched her try. She asked about the Congress of Vienna. She told him that the hospital had rung from New Westminster at five, which it never did on a Wednesday, and that his uncle had had the radio on in his chair by the window, and had known what it was, and had said one word to the nurse when it ended, and the word was Good, and he had said it twice. She told him that she had rung his aunt at six, and they had talked for twenty minutes about nothing, and it had been the most useful conversation she had had with anybody in a year.

And she failed. She failed with the candles, which she did not blow out. She failed when the kitchen brought in a Rote Grütze in the cut-glass bowl and she sent it back, at once, and asked instead for the cake Lukas’s mother had sent, cut, on the good plates, and ate the first mouthful with her eyes shut.

He let her fail. He said nothing about the candles, or the china, or the dress, or the chair with the arms. He had a second slice of the plum cake when she offered it, and thanked her for supper as though it had been any supper, and it was, he thought, the first thing he had done all day that he was quite sure was right.

When they stood up she came round the table and put her hand flat on his hair, once, the way she had when he was very small and came down the ladder for the first time with his eyes enormous, and took it away.

“Thank you for the pen,” said Alexander.

“What pen?” said his mother; and went out, to the kitchen, to tell them about the pudding.

---

Charlotte rang at a quarter to nine.

He was in the hall, on the stool, putting on his boots for the dome, and he answered it with one boot on and one in his hand.

“Where are you?”

“In the hall. Going out.”

“To the dome.”

“Yes.”

“Good.” He heard her flat around her: the radiator, a tap, somebody’s music through the wall. “I’ve got four minutes. I’m going in at half past nine, because somebody’s off sick, and if I sit in this flat until tomorrow I’ll go mad.” A pause. “I’m going to give you an order.”

“All right.”

“It’s the last one. After nine tomorrow it’s advice, until you’re eighteen, and you’re allowed to ignore advice, and you will.” He heard her almost laugh. “I’ve had six months of orders and never once gave you one, because they were all in your name and it would have been like ordering myself about in a mirror. So this is the only one.”

He held the boot.

“Go to bed before midnight,” said his sister.

He sat on the stool in the hall in one boot with the telephone against his ear.

“That’s it?”

“That’s it. You’ve got a car at seven and an oath at nine and two Presidents and a bishop and Mama in a hat, and you will not do any of it well if you’ve been up a ladder till two looking at something that’s in the wrong season. I’m not ordering you not to go up the ladder. I’m ordering you to come down it.”

“I’ll come down it.”

“Before midnight.”

“Before midnight.”

“Good.” The tap stopped. The music through the wall went on. “Then that’s my regency. Six months, and one order, and it was about bedtime.” She was quiet for a moment. “Papa would have thought that was very funny.”

“He would.”

“I’ve got to go. I’ll see you at nine. I’ll be at the side, with Mama, with my pass the wrong way round.”

“Charlotte.”

“Mm.”

He did not say anything. He had said her name and he had nothing after it, and she waited, in her flat the size of a lift with the anatomy on the walls, and he could hear her waiting, and he understood that she knew there was nothing after it, and was waiting anyway, so that there would be a space where it would have gone.

“Go,” he said.

“I’m going,” said his sister, and went.

---

Lukas was already in the dome.

He was on the boards against the pier of the mount, in the knitted hat with the flaps, with the flask between his knees and the stove lit, though it was May, because Lukas said a stove was not for warmth, it was for company. The shutter was open. The sky in the slit was very deep and very clear, the first clear night in a week, as though somebody had arranged it.

“You’re late,” said Lukas.

“Charlotte rang.”

“What did she say?”

“Go to bed before midnight.”

Lukas considered this.

“That’s very good,” he said. “That’s the best thing anybody in your family has said all year.”

Alexander sat on the stool and looked up through the slit with his own eyes first, the way his father had taught him, so that you knew what you were looking at before you looked at it closely. Arcturus was high and very orange. Vega was up in the east, blue-white, coming. The spring sky, nearly finished, with the summer behind it whether anybody had voted on it or not.

He took the red torch and the chart and found the north, under the line of the trees on the far side of the Heiliger See, where Andromeda was. He could not see it. He had known he would not. It was lower than at Easter, the wrong season. He looked at the place on the chart with the red torch, and then at the trees, to check.

“You don’t need to check,” said Lukas, from the floor.

“I know,” said Alexander, and checked.

It was there. It was under the trees. It would be up before morning.

---

They did not say much.

Lukas fed the stove birch, which he said burned better than pine and which last week he had said burned worse. Alexander found the double in Boötes that his father had shown him at nine and that he had never once split cleanly, and split it tonight, the two stars sitting apart in the eyepiece like two people at a table, one orange and one blue. He wrote it in the log: the date, klar, the seeing, which was very good, and the double, getrennt.

At half past ten Lukas said:

“Alex.”

“Mm.”

“I’m going to use it.”

Alexander turned round on the stool.

Lukas was not looking at him. He was looking at the stove, with his hands round the flask.

“My one thing,” said Lukas. “I’ve been saving it since March. Since before Easter. I told you I’d know when. It’s now.”

“All right.”

Lukas turned the flask round in his hands.

“Saturday,” he said. “There’s a train. The ten past nine, from Potsdam Hauptbahnhof to Werder. It takes eleven minutes. It costs about the same as a coffee.” He did not look up. “You’ve never been on one. You said so. In your letter. You said you’d like to, once, and you’d put it in the log as an observation. Frederick told Theo and Theo told me. That’s why I know. It’s the only thing in any of your letters I know, and it isn’t my fault.”

Alexander did not say anything.

“So my one thing is: come on the train to Werder on Saturday. The ten past nine. And then we walk back. Eleven kilometres. Like at Easter. But you’ll have come on a train.” Lukas looked up, at last, from the stove, in the red light. “That’s a question. Questions count. It isn’t a fact.”

Alexander looked at him.

“I’m not allowed to decide anything until tomorrow.”

“I know.”

“It’s eleven minutes to Werder,” said Alexander. “And a coffee. And eleven kilometres back.” He looked up at the slit, at Arcturus, orange, high, steady, in no hurry. “It hasn’t got a vote in it.”

Lukas waited.

“Yes,” said Alexander.

Lukas looked at him for a long moment. Then he nodded, once, the way he had nodded at the gate, as though it were the answer to something he had been asked a long time ago, and looked back at the stove.

“Good,” said Lukas.

At eleven the guard passed the foot of the ladder.

They heard him on the gravel, slow, and the pause at the bottom of the ladder, and the gravel again, going on round towards the lake. It had been the signal for eleven years. Lukas put the flask in his bag and stood at the top of the ladder with his hand on the hatch.

“Before midnight,” said Lukas. “Your sister said.”

“I know.”

“I’ll see you at the train,” said Lukas. “Not tomorrow. Tomorrow I’ll see you in the Herrenhaus, at the back, with my father, who has bought a tie. I mean Saturday. Ten past nine. I’ll be the one with the hat.”

“You don’t wear the hat outside the dome.”

“I’ll make an exception,” said Lukas, and went down the ladder, and left the hatch open an inch.

---

He was alone in the dome.

He sat for a while without doing anything. The stove ticked. Through the slit Arcturus went on moving very slowly west, the way it would whether anybody watched it or not.

Then he took a sheet of the paper with the eagle on it from the back of the log, where he kept a few, and the pencil out of the spine, and wrote at the top, in the square hand, by the red torch:

The observatory, Potsdam

Wednesday 2 May, nearly midnight

Dear Frederick,

I watched it at four, on Jakub’s laptop, in the school library, with Lukas, in the corner by the atlases where we watched the Reichstag. The sound was very small. You said them in your own voice. I could hear that it was your voice even through a laptop, and I could hear that you had decided where to look, and I would like to know, one day, what it was. I did not know what to do with my hands. I have been telling you for six months what to do with yours.

He stopped. He thought about Lukas’s scarf held up over Lukas’s shoulder without a word, and his own two fingers underneath. He did not write it. It was Lukas’s.

You went first. That was the arrangement. It is the only arrangement I have ever made that went exactly as arranged.

He wrote about the sky, because Frederick had asked what he could see and there was no vote in it: Arcturus, Vega, Andromeda under the trees, the wrong season, still there. He wrote that Lukas had gone down at eleven when the guard passed the ladder. He wrote about supper, in one sentence, because one sentence was all it would go into:

Mama tried very hard not to make supper an occasion, and failed, and I let her fail, which I think is the first thing I have done tonight that I was sure was right.

And then he wrote about the hour.

This is the hour I told you about. Feierabend. The hour when the work is over. Tonight it is the hour before it starts, and I do not think there is a word for that, in German or in English, and I have looked.

He had looked. In the dictionary in the school library, under the clock, and in his mother’s face at supper, and in Charlotte’s voice, and in the back of Lukas’s head on the floor. There was an hour when the work was over, and an hour when it had not yet begun, and they were the same hour, and only one of them had a name.

He wrote that he had meant to write a proper letter, with parts and an order and a joke about the hat he had been saving since November, and would write it next week, when he had something to tell Frederick that he had decided himself. He thought of the clock on the mantelpiece in the small study in Berlin, two minutes slow a week, and of what he would do about it before nine in the morning, and did not write that either. That was his.

Then he wrote:

The other thing I wanted to say is

And stopped.

---

He sat with the pencil over the paper.

He knew what the other thing was. He had known it since the rowing boat, or since the front row at Arlington, when his cousin said his name and kept his face in front of three thousand people, and it cost him something, and he paid it. He could have written it in about eleven words.

He did not write it.

It was not that he could not. It was that the small brass clock on the shelf, which his father had put in the dome the winter he put in the stove, said eleven minutes to twelve, and his sister had given him one order in six months and it was about bedtime, and the work started tomorrow. And the other thing would keep. It had kept since Arlington. It was not the kind of thing that went off. It was the kind of thing that was still there in the morning, like a galaxy under the trees.

So he wrote, below the line that stopped:

It is late. The work starts tomorrow. I will send this as it is.

Alexander

He did not write Yours, with every formality. He looked at the space where it would have gone. He left the space.

---

He was folding the letter when he heard the gravel.

It was not the guard. These steps were lighter, and quick, and uneven, as though whoever it was had come out in the wrong shoes. They came round from the direction of the house and stopped at the foot of the ladder, under the hatch.

He sat very still on the stool. He heard whoever it was breathe, once, the way you breathe before you say something you have not said for a long time.

“Alexander.”

It was his mother.

She had not climbed it. She had never climbed it. Lukas said she thought it was his. She was standing at the bottom of it at ten minutes to midnight, in the wrong shoes, with her face turned up to the hatch, and he could see through the inch the pale shape of it, and her hand on the bottom rung.

“Are you cold?” said his mother.

He sat on the stool in the red light with the letter folded in his hands.

He had heard her ask it once before, from the bottom of this ladder, when he was very small and his father was beside him at the eyepiece; and his father had called down the answer for him, cheerfully, He’s not cold, Caroline, he’s looking at Saturn, and she had laughed, and gone away. She had never asked it again. And since February there had been nobody to call down the answer for him.

She was asking him now.

“No, Mama,” he said.

He said it down through the inch, not loudly, in the voice he used in the dome, and he heard her hear it. She stood a moment longer with her hand on the bottom rung; then she took it off, and went away across the gravel towards the house, slowly, in the wrong shoes, the way his uncle had walked the length of the Tiergarten in the rain, at a pace that never changed.

---

He put the letter inside the log, at the back, where it would stay until the morning.

He turned off the red lamp. He did not close the shutter. He sat in the dark with the stove ticking and the slit of sky above him, Arcturus going west, Vega coming up, and looked at the line of the trees in the north, across the lake, where Andromeda was, behind the branches, where he could not see it and did not need to.

It was nine minutes to twelve. Tomorrow at nine there would be two Presidents and a bishop and his mother in a hat and his sister at the side with her pass the wrong way round and Lukas at the back with his father in a new tie, and an oath in the old words that his father had said and his grandfather and the men before them, back to Königsberg, and he would say it, in his own voice, having decided where to look. And on Saturday at ten past nine there would be a train.

But not yet. Not for nine hours. There was this first: a dome, a stove, a stool, a slit of sky, the hatch open an inch, nobody passing the foot of the ladder, and the hour when the work is over, which tonight was the hour before it began, and had no name, and was his.

He sat in it until eight minutes to midnight, which was before midnight, as ordered.

Then he got up, and stood for a moment at the top of the ladder with his hand on the hatch, and looked back once at the slit of sky over the dark trees in the north, where the light that had left Andromeda before anybody on earth had ever made a fire was still travelling, and would arrive at Potsdam some time after four in the morning, in time for nobody, and would come anyway.

It was still there.