Book Seven: Feierabend Part One: The Count Characters
Chapter Four
Her Second Business
Alexander I. Berlin, in the Kingdom of Prussia. Thursday, 14 December 2028.
He wants the authority to prevent another use of his powers that he considers damaging, but fears that he is not ready to wield the office and does not regard public sympathy as proof that he is.
The study was smaller than he remembered.
He had been in it perhaps a dozen times since February, for papers, for the signing of things he was allowed to sign, which were cards and condolences and a certificate for a woman in Brandenburg an der Havel who had turned a hundred and five; but he had not been in it for this, for a meeting at the table, since the last briefing of his father’s life, on a Tuesday at the beginning of February, eleven days before the corridor. He had been fourteen for a fortnight. He had not done the reading. And now he came in at twenty past four on a Thursday, with his school bag still on his shoulder because nobody had taken it from him and he had forgotten he was carrying it, and the room was smaller, and the table was the same table.
It was not a grand room. That was why his father had liked it. It was at the back of the palace on the second floor, looking out at a courtyard with one tree in it, and it had a round table of pale wood in the middle that would seat six if they did not mind their knees, and bookshelves on two walls, and a radiator under the window that knocked when it came on, and a print of the Havel at Sacrow over the door that his grandmother had chosen and nobody had ever had the courage to move. His father had held the briefings here because, he said, the big rooms made ministers make speeches and the small rooms made them answer questions. There were six chairs. They were all the same chair. That had been his father’s idea too.
Alexander put his bag down by the door.
He stood for a moment looking at the chairs, and then he sat in the one he had always sat in, on the side nearest the window, which was not the head of the table, because the round table had no head, which was the point of it, and which was also not true, because everybody had always known which chair was his father’s, and it was the one with its back to the bookshelves, facing the door. He did not look at it. He sat with his hands on the table, flat, the way he had sat at thirteen, and waited.
Kessler stood outside in the corridor. Through the open door Alexander could see the edge of his shoulder, and the angle of his head, which was tipped very slightly back.
Charlotte came at twenty-five to five, from the hospital, still in her coat.
She came in quickly and quietly and shut the door behind her, and looked at him, and at the chairs, and sat down in the one on the far side of the table from him, with her back to the courtyard, and put her hands in her lap. She did not take her coat off. She smelt faintly of the ward, of the soap they used and something under the soap. Her hair was tied back, and there was no pencil in it today, and he found that he had looked for it.
“Hello,” he said.
She nodded.
That was all. She did not say anything else, and he understood from the way she sat, upright and still, with her hands folded and her face arranged into the expression she wore on the front of newspapers, which was no expression at all, that she was not going to. She was the Regent. She had been asked to be in the room, and was in it, and that was what the Regent was for: to be in the room. Anything she said would be the Regent saying it. So she would say nothing, and the nothing would be hers.
He looked at her hands. They were in her lap, under the table, where he could not see them.
Johanna Falk came at a quarter to five exactly.
The door opened and one of the household said her name and title, and she came in and the door closed behind her, and she stood for a moment just inside it, and looked at the room, at the shelves and the print of Sacrow and the radiator and the table with the six chairs, and at him, and at Charlotte, and he saw her see the room and remember it, the way he had.
She was wearing the grey jacket. He had known she would be. It was the same grey jacket, or one so like it that it made no difference, and the reading glasses were on the same thin chain round her neck, resting on the lapel, and she was carrying nothing at all. No folder. No papers. Her hands were empty, and she held them in front of her, loosely, one in the other, as though she did not quite know what to do with them without a folder in them.
“Majestät,” she said. “Königliche Hoheit.”
“Frau Ministerpräsidentin,” said Alexander.
She looked at the chairs.
Then she crossed the room and sat in the chair opposite the door, with its back to the bookshelves. Not his father’s. The one beside it, on the left, where she had always sat for the briefings, where she had sat in November and December and January of the year before, with her folder open in front of her and her glasses on, explaining the Advice-Binding Declaration to a boy of thirteen as though he were a law student who had not done the reading yet. The same chair. She sat in it and put her hands on the table, the way he had his, and for a moment, across the pale wood, it was last winter, and he was thirteen, and he had not done the reading, and his father was about to come in through the door behind him and say Well, Frau Doktor, what has my son failed to understand this week?
Nobody came in through the door.
The radiator knocked, once, under the window.
“Thank you for seeing me,” said Falk.
“Thank you for asking.”
“I asked properly,” she said. “Through Her Royal Highness. I want that understood. I didn’t write to you, and I didn’t telephone, and I didn’t send anybody. I asked the Regent whether the King would see me, with the Regent in the room, and the Regent said yes, and here we are.” She glanced at Charlotte, who did not move. “I’ve spent eight months in court over who may speak to whom in this kingdom and on whose advice. I’m not going to start my second year by walking through a door I’ve been arguing about.”
“No,” said Alexander.
She looked at him then, properly, over the table, the way she had looked at him in the briefings, kindly, and with complete seriousness, as though what he said next would be written down and read later by somebody who mattered.
“I came to thank you for the minute,” she said.
She said it plainly, without any weight at all, the way you would thank somebody for holding a door.
“I know you didn’t do it for me. You did it because you thought it was wrong, and you wanted it written down that you thought so, with a date on it. I know that. I read it.” She paused. “It made the difference anyway. I don’t think it would have gone to the Court without it. I don’t think the Court would have heard it the way it did. I don’t think I’d be sitting in this chair. I wanted you to hear me say so once, in a room, and not read it in a newspaper.”
Alexander looked at his hands on the table.
He did not know what to say. He had been told, all his life, what to say when somebody thanked him, and every one of the things he had been told was wrong for this, because they were all ways of saying that it had been nothing, and it had not been nothing, and she knew that, and so did he.
“Thank you for telling me,” he said at last.
Falk nodded, as though that were a reasonable answer, which perhaps it was.
“I’m not going to make you my first business,” she said.
He looked up.
He had said that. He had said it to Frederick, in a letter, in pencil, in the dome, in November: I hope, he had written, and then, a long way further on, that Falk wins enough that she does not need anybody, and that when she wins she does not make me the first thing she does. He had said it to nobody else. And she sat across the table and said it in nearly his words, as though she had read the letter, and she had not read the letter, because nobody had, and he felt the back of his neck go hot, and kept his face still.
“My first business is the budget,” said Falk. “There are no estimates for next year. If there’s no budget by the new year, Prussia goes into January on continuing supply, and the hospitals with it.” She did not look at Charlotte when she said it, and Charlotte did not move, and Alexander understood that the sentence had been put in for Charlotte, quite deliberately, and received. “That’s the first thing. It has to be. If I did anything else first, I’d deserve to lose.”
She paused.
“You’ll be my second.”
“Your second?”
“My government will back the amendments,” said Falk. “Both of them. The Empire’s and Prussia’s, together, so that the age changes in both at once. There’s no point in one without the other, you’d be a King in Prussia and a minor in the Empire, or the other way round, and I’ve had enough of things that apply in one capacity and not the next.” She put one hand flat on the table. “The Chancellor knows. He’s not against it. He wants to be seen to be thinking about it until the New Year, which is his business. We’ll bring the Prussian one when the Empire’s has been through the Reichstag, so that nobody can say Prussia went first and dragged the rest.”
The amendments. The ones on the boards at the bus shelter. Mit fünfzehn, in letters too straight to be anything but a ruler on a kitchen table. He thought about the girl in the green coat turning hers to her knees.
“I haven’t asked for them,” he said.
“I know,” said Falk. “That’s why.”
He did not say anything to that.
He could not think of anything to say that was not either thank you or no, and he was not allowed to say either. If he said thank you, he was a King thanking a Minister-President for a constitutional amendment that would give him personal power, and that was a thing that could be written down and given to a newspaper within a fortnight. If he said no, he was a King of fourteen refusing a constitutional amendment, which was the same thing from the other side. He sat at his father’s table with his hands flat on the pale wood and his mouth shut, and across from him his sister sat with her hands in her lap and her mouth shut, and between them the radiator knocked again, twice, and the courtyard tree outside the window moved a little in the wind, and nobody said anything for what he thought afterwards was nearly a minute, and was probably ten seconds.
Falk took her glasses off.
She took them off the chain, which he had never seen her do, and folded them, and held them in one hand, and looked at him without them, and her face was different without them, older, and tireder, and much less like a lawyer.
“I’m not doing it for you,” she said. “I’m doing it because of what was done in your name.”
He waited.
“As long as you’re a minor,” said Falk, “the King’s personal powers can be used by other people. That’s what a minority is. Somebody else holds the pen. That’s not wrong in itself. Somebody has to. But they were used once, in April, against your own view, written down, with a date on it, by people who knew your view and used them anyway. A door was opened, and somebody walked through it, and I was on the other side of it.” She turned the folded glasses over in her hand. “I don’t intend to leave a door open that has been walked through once. The Council is gone. Her Royal Highness is a better Regent than that Council ever was or ever could have been, and I say that in front of her because it’s true. But she’s a Regent. The next one might not be. And the only safe place for those powers, the only place I can think of where nobody else can pick up the pen, is with the one person who has put on the record what he thinks they’re for.”
She put her glasses back on the chain.
“That’s my reason. You can tell anybody you like that I gave it. I’ll be saying it in the Landtag in the spring, in nearly those words, and somebody from the other side will stand up and say that I’m doing it so that you’ll owe me, and I want you to know now, from me, that I’m not, and that you don’t.”
Alexander looked at her.
He thought that he had never in his life been told by anybody that he did not owe them something. He thought it was possibly the most useful thing anybody had said to him since the Tiergarten.
“I understand,” he said.
“I hope so,” said Falk. “Your father said once that you asked better questions than my cabinet. You haven’t asked me one.”
“I’m not allowed to.”
“No,” said Falk. “Not yet.”
She stood up at ten past five.
She shook Charlotte’s hand first, across the table, and said Königliche Hoheit, and Charlotte said nothing, and nodded, and let go. Then she came round the table to him, and he stood up, because he had been taught to, and because he wanted to, and she held out her hand, and he took it.
Her hand was cold.
It was very cold, colder than the room, colder than the courtyard looked, a cold that had been in it for some time, and he held it for perhaps two seconds, the length of a handshake, and let go, and she said Majestät and turned and went to the door, and the household opened it for her, and she went out, and the door closed.
He stood by the table.
He thought about Monday, and the car, and the bridge over the black water, and his sister saying, to the roof, with her eyes shut, She has very cold hands.
He looked across the table at Charlotte. She was still sitting with her hands in her lap. She was looking at the door. She did not look at him.
In the corridor afterwards she put her bag on her shoulder.
Kessler had stepped back against the wall, the way he did, and was looking at the ceiling, at the moulding, and the household man who had shown Falk out was at the far end by the stairs, and for a moment the corridor was nearly empty, the two of them standing outside their father’s study, in the light from the one window, in their coats.
Charlotte looked at him.
He waited for her to say something about it. About any of it. About the door that had been walked through once, and the pen, and the one person who had put on the record what he thought the powers were for. About the regency that would end if the amendments passed, which was hers, which she had not asked for, which she had never once said she wanted, and which Falk had just told her, to her face, kindly, with complete seriousness, that she was going to lose.
“Well,” said Charlotte.
Then she turned and went down the corridor towards the stairs, with her bag on her shoulder and her coat crooked under the strap, and the household man at the end stood aside for her, and she went down, back to the hospital, where she had a shift at six, and he heard her steps go all the way down the stone stairs to the bottom and stop at the door, and then not.
He went back into the study.
He did not know why. He went in and shut the door, and the room was empty, and smaller still, and the six chairs were where they had been, three of them pushed back a little now from the table, and the radiator was quiet. He walked round the table twice. He did not sit down.
He stood behind his father’s chair, the one with its back to the bookshelves, facing the door, and put his hands on the top of it, on the wood, and stood there for a while looking at the door from where his father had looked at it, at everybody coming in, every Tuesday, for years.
Then he took his hands away, and picked up his school bag from where he had left it by the door, and went out, and shut the door behind him, and Kessler came off the wall and fell in two paces behind him and one to the left, without a word, all the way along the corridor to his room.
At his desk he took out the squared paper from his blazer, folded small, with the two lines already on it, and unfolded it, and wrote a third under them, in the square hand:
14 December. Second.
He looked at it. He thought that it was the shortest thing he had ever written that he did not understand, and that he would understand it later, and that he did not want to.
He folded the paper up again and put it back in his pocket for Saturday.