The Dome in Advent

It was clear.

He knew before he opened the shutter. He knew at the foot of the ladder, at six, from the cold, which had a different edge to it on a clear night, harder and cleaner, and from the gravel, which had frozen white at the edges of the path, and from the trees on the far side of the Neuer Garten, which stood up black against something that was not cloud for the first time in a fortnight. He went up the ladder and through the hatch and stood in the dark of the dome with his breath going up in front of him, and turned the crank, and the shutter went back along its track with the long iron complaint it always made, and squealed at three-quarters as though it had never been opened before, and there it was.

The sky. All of it. Black, and hard, and full.

He stood and looked at it for some time without doing anything. He had not seen it since the Saturday before the election. He had sat up here under cloud on the night of the election with nothing to look at, and the Saturday after that it had rained all day and he had not come up at all, because he did not come up to sit in a closed dome with a piece of paper in his pocket, and he had told himself that the paper would keep. It had kept. It was in his blazer, folded small, with three lines on it.

Below him on the gravel Lukas was coming round the side of the dome from the house, with the flask under one arm and something else under the other, and the knitted hat with the flaps already on, because nobody could see him.

---

“Pine,” said Lukas.

He was on his knees in front of the stove with the door open, feeding it from the basket. The stove was a small black iron thing by the hatch, about the size of a dog, with a pipe that went up the wall and out through a hole that had been cut for it the winter Alexander was nine. The pipe smoked when the wind was from the west. The wind was from the west.

“You said birch last week.”

“Last week was a birch week,” said Lukas. “This is a pine week. Birch burns clean. Pine burns hot. You want clean when the wind’s in the west, because of the pipe, and you want hot when it’s this cold, whatever the pipe does.” He put another piece in. “That’s not a theory. That’s a fact.”

“The wind’s in the west.”

“It’s also this cold.” Lukas shut the stove door and sat back on his heels. “Two facts. They contradict each other. That happens.”

Alexander did not argue. He had never won an argument about the stove, with anybody. His father had put it in the winter he was nine, after the night Alexander had refused to come down from the dome at one in the morning in January, with frost on the inside of the shutter, and his father had come up the ladder in his overcoat to fetch him and had stood in the dark and looked at him, and at the eyepiece, and at the frost, and had said nothing at all, and had gone down again. The next week there had been a man in the grounds with a ladder and a length of pipe. If I cannot make you come down, his father had said at dinner, to the table, not to him, I can at least stop you freezing to death up there, and your mother can stop looking at me like that. It was the only argument Alexander had ever heard his father admit to losing. He had lost it to a boy of nine and a telescope, and he had paid for the stove himself, out of the household’s petty cash, and had been pleased with it for the rest of his life, and had never once come up to sit by it.

The stove ticked, getting warm. The smoke came back down the pipe in a thin grey breath and went out through the slit.

---

He took the paper out of his blazer and unfolded it on the shelf under the eyepiece, beside the log, under the red lamp.

Three lines. 6 December. Alexander. Good. Then 11 December. Cold hands. Then 14 December. Second.

He opened the log.

The log was a black book with squared pages, bought from the stationer’s in the Brandenburger Strasse, the fourth of its kind; the first three were on the shelf below, with the dates on their spines in his father’s hand, because his father had dated the spines of the first one for him when he was eight and Alexander had kept doing it the same way. Every night he came up, he wrote the date, and the time, and the sky, and the seeing, and what he had looked at, and what it had looked like. Most nights that was all. The night of the election there was one number under the seeing and nothing else.

He turned back to the page for the sixth of December.

There was no page for the sixth. He had not been here. He took the pencil out of the spine and made one, after the last entry for November, and wrote the date at the top, and under it, where the time and the sky would have gone, he wrote Berlin, and a dash, and under the seeing, where nobody would ever look, very small:

Alexander. Good.

Then a page for the eleventh, and under the seeing, Cold hands. Then a page for the fourteenth, and under the seeing, Second.

Then he folded the squared paper, and opened the door of the stove, and put it in, and watched it go, and shut the door again.

“What was that?” said Lukas, from the floor.

“Notes.”

“Notes for what?”

“For the log.”

Lukas looked at him for a moment, in the red light, and then at the stove.

“You put three days in the log that you weren’t here for,” he said.

“Yes.”

“Under the seeing.”

“Yes.”

Lukas nodded slowly, as though that were the most reasonable thing in the world, and unscrewed the flask.

---

Andromeda was nearly overhead.

At this time of year, at seven, it stood almost straight up from the dome, so that he had to swing the telescope round on the mount and bring it up nearly to the vertical, and put his head right back to get to the eyepiece, and his neck hurt, and he did not mind. He found the W of Cassiopeia first, high in the north-east, the five stars like a letter somebody had written on the sky and not finished, and came down from it, and across, and there it was. A grey smudge, longer than it was wide. Older than fire.

He looked at it for a long time.

Then he took his eye away from the eyepiece and looked at the sky without it, and worked it out. Öland was a little north of here and a little east. On Christmas Eve, at six in the evening, the W would be higher than it was now, almost straight above, because the sky turned and Christmas Eve was eight days off and six was earlier than seven. Andromeda would be below it, towards the south. A boy on a jetty would have to lean back. His neck would hurt.

He wrote it down on the back of a page at the end of the log, in the margin, in figures, the way his father had shown him with the planisphere: the latitude, the hour, where the W would be. Then he wrote, under the figures, in words, look a little to one side, and looked at it, and thought that he would put that in the letter, and that he would have to be careful how.

“Is that for him?” said Lukas.

“Yes.”

“The jetty.”

“Yes.”

“Will he find it?”

Alexander thought about Frederick, who had once found the Union Station arrivals for every day of the week in a single summer and could recite them backwards, and who had found a crack in the lid of a tomb to look at in front of three thousand people.

“He’ll find it,” he said. “He’ll find it by looking at something else.”

---

At nine they played cards.

He had bought the pack in Potsdam on Thursday, after school, in the toy shop on the corner by the Nauen Gate, with Kessler standing in the doorway looking at the ceiling of the toy shop as though it were the ceiling of a cathedral. Thirty-two cards, German suits, acorns and leaves and hearts and bells, in a red cardboard box. He had never owned a pack of cards. He had played them at Christmas with his grandmother and at nobody else’s table until the Eleventh. Lukas had never played Schafkopf in his life. They sat on the boards by the stove with the red lamp on the floor between them and the box open on Lukas’s knee, and Alexander explained the rules as he understood them, which were the Bavarian ones, out of a book, and Lukas listened very seriously and asked two questions and then won the first hand.

He won the second hand too.

“How?” said Alexander.

“You lead your trumps too early,” said Lukas. “You want to be rid of them. You want to have done the important thing before anybody’s looking.” He gathered the cards. “It’s very obvious. I’m sorry.”

“Don’t be sorry.”

“I’m not,” said Lukas. “I’m being polite.”

They played six hands. Alexander won one. Lukas was gracious about it in a way that was worse than not being gracious, and Alexander thought about Kate Hartigan dealing on her knee under a kitchen table in New Westminster, and beating him in eleven minutes without letting him lose, and found that he wanted very much to learn the game properly before he saw her again, and that he had no idea when that would be, and that he had thought before I see her again as though it were a thing that would happen.

Lukas put the cards back in the box and closed it and handed it to him.

“You’ll get better,” said Lukas.

“That’s what she said.”

“She was right,” said Lukas, and took the book out of his coat.

---

It was the book about the Hanseatic League.

It had been Alexander’s, from the library in Berlin, a heavy old thing in a green cloth binding with a map of the Baltic on the endpapers and the ports marked in red. He had had it open in front of him on the evening of the thirtieth of October and had not read a word of it. Lukas had taken it off him at the beginning of November and said he would finish it first, and Alexander had said that would not be difficult, and Lukas had now, by Alexander’s count, read two hundred and twelve pages of it, by the light of the red lamp, in the dome, on Saturdays, sitting against the pier of the mount in his hat.

He read it now. He held it tilted to the lamp, and his lips moved very slightly on the names of the ports, Lübeck, Visby, Danzig, Riga, and Alexander watched him for a moment and then turned back to the shelf.

It was eleven.

The sky was still clear. The stove was hot now, and the dome was almost warm, warm enough to take his gloves off, and he took them off and put them on the shelf beside the log. He took out the writing pad from his bag, the plain one, and the pencil, because ink did strange things in the cold, and sat on the stool under the eyepiece with the pad on his knee, and wrote the place and the time in the top corner, the way he always did.

Then he wrote the first line.

I tried four times. You are right to have dated it, and I have dated my reading of your dating, and we will now never speak of it again.

He looked at it. It was the first line that had come in four weeks that he did not want to cross out. He did not cross it out.

He wrote about the dumplings, and the Ambassador in his dressing gown, and the fourth dumpling eaten with their fingers over Newfoundland. He wrote about the stove, because Frederick had never been told about the stove, and he wanted him to have it.

Papa had it put in the winter I was nine, because I would not come down, and he said that if he could not make me come down he would at least stop me freezing. It was the only time I ever heard him lose an argument to me and admit it.

He stopped there for a moment. The stove ticked. Lukas turned a page.

Then he wrote the hour at the sink.

He wrote it in order, because it was the only way he knew how to tell things: the chairs on the landings, and Shoes, and the Norwegian, which he conceded nothing about, and the four minutes in the middle of the kitchen doing nothing, and asking, and the apron with the lighthouse, and the potatoes. He wrote it slowly. Twice he stopped and looked up at the slit of the dome for a long time before he went on. When he got to the part he had not been able to write four times, he found that it came quite easily now, because he had stopped trying to make it about anything.

That is the thing I have been trying to write four times. It was not difficult.

He wrote the rest of it. The light on the stairs, counted from the sink. The potato in his hand when it came up.

That was the hour. And then what? Then I went back to Berlin and tried four times to write it, and every time it came out as a thing about me, and it was not a thing about me. It was a thing about a sink.

He put the pencil down and flexed his fingers, which had gone stiff, and held them out towards the stove for a while, and picked the pencil up again.

---

He wrote about Falk.

He wrote it more freely than he would have said it to anybody in a room, because it was pencil, and the dome, and Frederick, and nobody else would ever read it. He wrote the chemistry lesson, and the car, and the study, and the same table and the same chair, and I know. That’s why. He wrote I’m not doing it for you. I’m doing it because of what was done in your name. He wrote about the door that had been walked through once. He wrote Well. He did not write about the cold hands. That was Charlotte’s, and he kept it.

Then he wrote the answer to the question Frederick had asked, which had been exactly the question he would have asked, which was the trouble with Frederick.

So, to answer you. She needs nobody. And she has decided to need me anyway, on purpose, which is not the same thing, and which I did not hope for, because I did not know it was possible to hope for it.

He read it over. It was true. He had not known it was true until he wrote it down, and now it was on paper, in pencil, in the dome, and he could not take it back without rubbing it out, and he did not rub it out.

He wrote that he did not know if he was ready. He had not said that to anybody. He said it to the pad on his knee, in the square hand, and it looked smaller written down than it had felt in the study, and also more permanent.

You may ask and then what? once. I will not answer it.

---

Christmas was harder.

He sat for a while with the pencil over the paper and did not write anything, and looked at the stove. Eight days. The tree in the hall of the house in the Neuer Garten, on the other side of the trees from where he was sitting, which the gardeners had brought in on Thursday and nobody had decorated yet, because his mother had said, at dinner, that they would do it on Saturday, and then on Saturday had said nothing, and gone upstairs early. The table. The chair at the end of it.

He wrote it down as plainly as he could.

I am not looking forward to it. I wanted to say that to somebody, and it is not a thing you can say in this house.

He looked at that line for a long time. Then he turned the page, quickly, and wrote about Solliden, and the jetty, and Andromeda, from the figures at the back of the log: wait until six, give your eyes twenty minutes, find the W, lean back, and your neck will hurt, and you must not mind.

If you look straight at it you may not see it. Look a little to one side of it, and it will come. That is the whole trick, and it is true of more things than galaxies, and I am not going to say which.

He wrote about the roof. The three permissions, none of them his. Berlin letting off fireworks at midnight as though it had won something. You will be on your jetty and I will be on my roof, in the same minute. He wrote that he had not thought of that until Frederick wrote it, and that he had thought of very little else since, and that was true, and he left it.

He wrote two short things, about the trains and about Kate and the thirty-two German cards and Lukas, who was already better than him.

Then he stopped.

---

Lukas had been quiet for an hour.

He had put the Hanseatic League face down on his knee some time after eleven and had not picked it up again. He had fed the stove twice, pine, and sat with his arms round his knees and his back against the pier, looking at the stove door, which had a little grille in it that let out a pattern of orange squares onto the boards, and he had not said anything at all, not even facts.

Now he looked up from the pine.

“Tell him the potatoes were good,” said Lukas. “Nobody said, at the table. Everybody ate them and nobody said. Tell him I said.”

Alexander looked at him.

Lukas looked back, quite steadily, with the orange squares from the grille on one side of his face and the red lamp on the other, in his mother’s hat with the flaps, and did not say anything else, and did not need to, and Alexander understood that this had been the one thing for the evening, and that Lukas had been saving it for an hour, and had chosen it out of everything he could have said about the cards, or the stove, or the placards at the bus shelter, or the three pages in the log for days nobody had been in the dome, and had chosen this.

He bent over the pad and wrote it down, exactly, word for word, and under it:

So I have.

---

At five to twelve the officer on the door came round the side of the dome on the gravel.

It was not Herr Schade. Herr Schade did Sundays. On Saturdays it was a younger man from the house whose name Alexander knew and who had not yet learned the round properly, and who came round too early and too loudly and stopped at the foot of the ladder and stood there for a moment, as though he were not quite sure what the stopping was for, and then went away again, and his feet on the frozen gravel faded round towards the house.

Alexander wrote the last part. The officer on the door, and Herr Schade, and the shutter. He signed it. He wrote the P.S. about the Norwegian, which remained in dispute, and conceded nothing, and then he folded the sheets once and put them in the envelope he had brought, and wrote the name on the front, Frederick, nothing else, and put it in the inside pocket of his coat.

Lukas was standing at the top of the ladder with the flask and the book, waiting.

Alexander turned off the red lamp. He went to the crank and turned it, and the shutter came round along its track, slowly, closing out the sky a strip at a time, the W going and then Andromeda going and then the whole black glittering field of it narrowing to a line, and at three-quarters the iron squealed, the long high complaint it had made every time since he was eight, as though it had never been closed before, and Lukas, at the top of the ladder, said, without turning round, in the dark:

“It does that every time.”

“I know.”

“Every single time. You’d think it would learn.”

“It’s a fact,” said Alexander.

Lukas went down the ladder. Alexander shut the stove door properly, and checked it, the way his father had shown the man with the pipe to show him, and stood for a moment in the warm dark of the dome with the letter in his coat and his gloves in his hand, and then went down after him, and pulled the hatch, and left it open an inch, the way Herr Schade did, because it was Saturday, and somebody had to.