Silvester

Kessler said yes on the thirtieth, at four in the afternoon, in the corridor outside the library, as though he were reporting the weather.

“The roof,” said Kessler. “From half past eleven to twenty past twelve. The east end, by the chimneys, not the west, because the west has the parapet down for the repairs. Four persons. You, the Princess if she comes, Brandt, and me. Nobody stands on anything. Nobody leans on anything. Nobody lets anything off.” He paused. “I will bring a thermos.”

“Thank you.”

“It isn’t for you, sir. It’s for me. It’s going to be minus four.” Kessler looked at the ceiling of the corridor, at a cornice that had a crack in it, with professional interest. “Brandt’s mother has telephoned the household. Frau Reinhardt took the call. Brandt is to ring her at one minute past midnight, wherever he is, and he is to sleep here, in the blue room, and not be driven home through Berlin on Silvester by anybody, including me. She said, according to Frau Reinhardt, that she has seen what Berlin does at midnight and she would rather her son were on a roof with the Emperor than in a car with the Emperor’s driver.” Kessler moved his eyes from the cornice to Alexander. “Frau Reinhardt said she agreed with her.”

“And Charlotte?”

“The Princess finishes at the Charité at ten,” said Kessler. “Her officer says she has said she will come if she is still awake. Her officer says she is never still awake.” He looked back at the cornice. “That’s three, sir. All yes. I didn’t think you’d get the third.”

“Neither did I.”

“I know,” said Kessler, and went away down the corridor with his hands behind his back, slowly, the way he walked when he had decided something and did not want it remarked on.

---

His mother did not come up.

She had said so on the twenty-eighth, in the car from Potsdam, without being asked, looking out of the window at the Avus: that she was not going to stand on a roof in December at sixty-two to watch a city set itself on fire, and that she would be in the small drawing room with the television, as she was every year, watching the sketch.

The sketch was the old English one about the butler and the birthday dinner, with the four guests who are all dead and the butler who drinks for all of them, and falls over the tiger’s head. Germany watched it every Silvester and had done for longer than his mother had been alive. England had never heard of it. His mother, who had been born in London and had lived there until she was thirty-six, had never once in her life met an English person who had seen it, and had watched it every Silvester since 2002 with a face of complete bafflement, and laughed at the tiger every year, at the same place, and said every year afterwards that she still did not understand why.

At eleven he went to the small drawing room to say goodnight.

She was on the sofa with her feet up and a rug over them and a glass of something on the table, and the butler on the television was pouring the sherry, and she looked up at him in the doorway and patted the end of the sofa, and he went and sat on it.

“You’ll freeze,” said his mother.

“Kessler’s bringing a thermos.”

“Kessler is the most sensible man in the household,” said his mother. “I’d marry him if he weren’t married, and if he could stand me, which he can’t.” She watched the butler trip over the tiger. She laughed, at exactly the place, and then looked baffled. “I don’t understand it.”

“You say that every year.”

“It’s true every year.” She pulled the rug further up. “Your father understood it. He said it was about duty. A man doing his duty for people who aren’t there, and getting drunker, and doing it anyway, and falling over the same thing every time and never once moving it.” She looked at the screen. “He said it was the most Prussian thing the English had ever made, and that it was no wonder they’d given it to us.”

Alexander watched the butler pour four glasses for four empty chairs.

“I think he was right,” he said.

His mother did not answer. On the television the butler said the line about the same procedure as every year, and the old lady at the end of the table said yes, the same procedure, and his mother laughed again, and wiped her eyes with the back of her hand, and it was not from laughing, and neither of them said so.

“Go on,” she said. “Go and freeze. Ring me if you fall off.”

“I won’t fall off.”

“I know you won’t,” said his mother. “Kessler won’t let you. Ring me anyway.” She looked at him. “Happy New Year, my darling. In case I’m asleep.”

“You won’t be asleep.”

“No,” said his mother. “I won’t.”

---

The way up was a service stair at the east end that he had never used, behind a door in the second-floor corridor that he had always assumed was a cupboard. It went up steeply between bare walls to a small flat landing and a steel door with a bar across it, and Kessler opened it with a key from his pocket, and cold came in like something solid.

The roof at the east end was flat and leaded, with a low parapet on the river side and a cluster of chimney stacks in the middle, square and black, and between the chimneys and the parapet there was room for four people to stand if nobody stood on anything. Kessler went out first and walked the whole of it, slowly, looking at the parapet and the chimneys and the sky, and then came back to the door and stood aside.

“Four persons,” said Kessler. “Not five.”

Lukas came out behind Alexander in his coat and the knitted hat with the flaps, which he had brought from Potsdam in his bag and put on at the top of the stairs, because, he said, nobody was going to see him on a roof in the dark and it was minus four. He walked to the parapet and stopped half a metre from it, exactly where Kessler had stopped, and looked.

“Oh,” said Lukas.

Alexander came and stood beside him.

The river was below them, black, with the lights of the bridges on it, broken up and moving. On their own island, across the dark of the Lustgarten, the museums stood unlit, and beside them the cathedral, enormous, its green dome lit from below so that it floated over the roofs, and beyond that the whole of the city to the north and east, a field of lights going out to the edge of the sky. Fireworks were already going up from it. Not the real ones; those were at midnight. These were the early ones, the ones people could not wait for, single rockets going up from courtyards and balconies and the ends of streets all over Berlin, red and green and white, one here, two there, a cluster somewhere out by the television tower, opening and going out without any order at all, and under all of it, like weather, the sound of bangers going off in the streets, continuous, a long rattling roar that came up from the whole city at once and did not stop.

“It sounds like a war,” said Lukas.

“It sounds like a city that has won one,” said Alexander. “Which it hasn’t.”

“Is that yours or somebody else’s?”

“Mine. I wrote it to somebody.”

Lukas looked at him sideways, under the flaps of the hat, and did not ask to whom.

Alexander looked at the cathedral. He could not see the clock from here. It was inside, over the west door, and the west door faced the other way. But he knew exactly where it was, behind the dome, in the dark, a white face with black hands, and that it was going round, and that in thirty-one minutes it would say midnight, and that it had said seventeen minutes past the hour on the first of March when the bishop put the crown on his head, and eighteen minutes past when the bishop took his hands away.

He had not been inside the cathedral since. He looked at the dome, floating over the island in its light, and thought that the clock was a good clock, and that it had kept him in the building for an hour and twenty minutes, and that a crack in a lid was better, and that he had not said so to anybody except one person, on a path between graves.

---

Kessler poured the thermos into four plastic cups at twenty to twelve. It was hot spiced apple juice, with cloves in it, the kind they sold at the Christmas markets for children.

“No alcohol,” said Kessler, handing them round. “Two of you are under sixteen, and I’m on duty, and the Princess is a doctor.”

“She isn’t a doctor,” said Alexander and Lukas, at the same time.

Kessler looked at them both. Then he looked at the sky.

“Not yet,” he said.

At ten to twelve the steel door opened behind them and Charlotte came out onto the roof.

She was in the long blue coat and the scarf, and her hair was down, and she had come straight from the Charité, still in the grey jumper, with her officer behind her on the landing, who did not come out, because Kessler had said four persons and Charlotte’s officer had been told so and had decided, Alexander could see from his face, to take it personally. Charlotte walked across the leads to the parapet and stood beside Alexander and looked at Berlin.

“I’m awake,” she said.

“Your officer said you’d be asleep.”

“My officer,” said Charlotte, “has never once been right about anything I’ve been going to do. It’s why I like him.” She took a cup from Kessler without looking at it and drank half of it. “Oh, God, it’s the children’s one.”

“Two of them are under sixteen,” said Kessler, “and I’m on duty, and you’re not a doctor.”

Charlotte turned and looked at Kessler for a long moment.

“Thank you, Herr Kessler,” she said. “That’s the first time anybody has said it to me today without me having to.” And she drank the other half, and held out the cup, and Kessler filled it again without a word.

---

At five to midnight Lukas took out his telephone and set it on the parapet, face up, with the clock showing, the seconds going.

Alexander looked at it. Then he turned round.

He turned his back on the river and the cathedral and the city and the fireworks, and faced across the leads, past the chimney stacks, to the north, a little east, where there was nothing to see but the dark roofs of the palace’s other wing and beyond them more roofs and beyond them the sky, which was clear and very black above the glow of the city, with a few stars in it that had survived Berlin.

“What’s that way?” said Lukas.

“Sweden.”

Lukas looked where he was looking. Then at him.

“You can’t see Sweden.”

“No.”

“It’s about five hundred kilometres.”

“Five hundred and thirty,” said Alexander. “To Öland. I looked it up.”

Lukas was quiet for a moment. Then he turned round too, and faced the same way, beside him, with his back to the fireworks, and put his hands in his pockets, and looked at the dark roofs and the sky and the five hundred and thirty kilometres of nothing, very seriously, as though there might be something to see if he looked properly.

“Is this your one thing?” said Lukas. “Because if it is, I’m not counting it. It’s a direction. Directions don’t count.”

“I didn’t say anything.”

“You turned round. That’s saying something.” Lukas did not look at him. “Is he there?”

“On a jetty,” said Alexander. “Looking at Kalmar. At midnight. Same clocks.”

Lukas nodded slowly.

Charlotte had turned round too, now, between them, with her cup in both hands, and was looking the same way with the expression she wore when somebody on the ward said a symptom that did not fit, patient and alert and not yet asking. She did not ask. She looked at the dark for a moment, and then at her brother’s face, and then back at the dark, and did not say anything at all, and Alexander was more grateful to her for that than he had been for anything since the bell.

Behind them, on the parapet, Lukas’s telephone said eleven fifty-nine.

---

The city went up at midnight.

It went up behind them all at once, a sound like the sky being torn along its whole length, and the light came over the roof from behind and threw their shadows forward across the leads towards the chimneys, four long shadows, flickering, red and gold and white, and he did not turn round. He stood with his back to Berlin and his face to the north and looked at the five hundred and thirty kilometres of dark, and thought about a boy on a jetty in Sweden in a coat looking at Kalmar, which would be small and very far away, like matches, in the same minute, exactly the same minute, with nothing between them but the Baltic and the dark and the fact that neither of them could see the other, and he thought that this was the nearest they had been since the Eleventh, and also the farthest, and that it was all right.

“Frohes neues Jahr, Majestät,” said Kessler, behind him, at one second past.

Alexander turned round.

Kessler was standing by the steel door with the thermos under his arm, looking at the sky over the cathedral, which was full of fire, and his face did nothing at all.

“Frohes neues Jahr, Herr Kessler,” said Alexander.

“Thank you, sir,” said Kessler, to the sky.

Charlotte put her arm round him. She did it without warning, sideways, with the cup still in her other hand, and pulled him against her shoulder in the blue coat that smelled of hospital, hard, for about two seconds, the way she had not done since he was small and fell off things; and then let go, and said, “Frohes neues, Alexander,” in her ordinary voice, and turned to look at the fireworks properly, as though nothing had happened.

Lukas was on the telephone.

He had picked it up off the parapet at one minute past, exactly, as instructed, and rung his mother, and was standing with it pressed to one ear and his hand over the other, against the noise, saying Ja, Mama. Ja. Auf dem Dach. Ja, er ist hier. Ja. Nein, Mama. Mama. Mama, weine nicht. And then, after a while, quite gently, Ich weiß. Ich auch. And then he held the telephone out to Alexander.

“She wants to say it to you,” said Lukas. “I’m sorry. I couldn’t stop her.”

Alexander took it.

“Frau Brandt,” he said.

There was a sound on the line that was a woman in a kitchen in Potsdam crying and laughing at the same time.

“Majestät,” said Frau Brandt. “Frohes neues Jahr. Ich wollte nur. Ich wollte nur sagen.” She stopped. “Passen Sie auf ihn auf. Auf meinen Lukas.”

Look after him. Her Lukas.

Alexander looked at Lukas, who was standing at the parapet in the knitted hat with the flaps, with the whole of Berlin going up behind him, red and gold and white, looking at the cathedral with his hands in his pockets and his face turned carefully away so as not to listen.

“Ich passe auf ihn auf,” said Alexander. “Er passt auf mich auf. Das ist die Abmachung.”

I look after him. He looks after me. That’s the arrangement.

There was a silence on the line. Then Frau Brandt said something he did not catch, because a rocket went off very close, from the bridge below, and then she said Gute Nacht, and was gone.

He gave Lukas the telephone back.

“What did she say?” said Lukas.

“She said to look after you.”

Lukas went red under the hat. It was visible even in the dark, in the light of the fireworks.

“What did you say?”

“I said you look after me. I said it was the arrangement.”

Lukas put the telephone in his pocket. He looked at the cathedral for a while.

“That’s two things,” he said at last. “You’ve said two things tonight. Sweden, and that.”

“Sweden was a fact.”

“Facts don’t count,” said Lukas. “I know. I made the rule.” And he went on looking at the cathedral, and did not say anything else, and Alexander saw that he was smiling, very slightly, under the flaps, and that he did not want it seen, and did not look.

---

At a quarter past twelve Charlotte sat down on the leads with her back against the chimney stack and closed her eyes.

“Five minutes,” she said. “I’m not asleep. I’m on since seven tomorrow.”

“Today,” said Lukas.

“Today,” said Charlotte. “God.” And she was asleep, at once, completely, the way she had always been able to sleep, sitting up, in a coat, anywhere, with her hands in her lap and her head against the brick.

Alexander took his coat off and put it over her. Kessler watched him do it and said nothing and looked at the sky. Lukas took off the knitted hat, after a moment’s visible struggle, and put it on her head, over her hair, crooked, with the flaps down, and stepped back and looked at the effect.

“The Regent of Prussia,” said Lukas. “In my mother’s hat.”

“Don’t,” said Alexander.

“I wasn’t going to say anything else,” said Lukas. “I was going to look.” And he looked, and Alexander looked, and the fireworks went on behind them over Berlin, fewer now, and further apart, and the bangers in the streets had gone from a roar to a crackle, and Charlotte slept against the chimney in the Emperor’s coat and a cafe owner’s knitted hat, and her officer, on the landing behind the steel door, which was ajar, looked out at her once and went back in.

At twenty past twelve Kessler said, “Time, sir.”

They woke her. She did not remember the hat. She took it off and looked at it and gave it back to Lukas, and gave Alexander his coat, and said, “I wasn’t asleep,” and her officer took her down the stairs, and she was gone.

---

In his room he did not go to bed.

He sat at the desk with the lamp on. The box from his mother was on the desk, the cream paper from the mill in Bavaria, and he took the lid off and took out the first sheet and laid it square in front of him and uncapped his pen.

He wrote the date at the top. Berlin, 1. Januar. Then, under it, on the left, in the square hand:

Dear Frederick,

He stopped.

He did not know yet whether Frederick had been on the jetty. He thought he had been. He was almost certain he had. But he did not know it, and he found that he did not want to write a single word on this paper, the first sheet of the first paper that was entirely his, until he did, until it came in the bag and he had read it in Frederick’s own hand, whatever Frederick would find to say about it. He wanted to write the answer to that, and not to his own guess at it.

So he left it.

He put the cap on the pen, and left the sheet on the desk with the date and the two words on it and nothing else, square, under the lamp, and turned the lamp off, and went to bed.

At half past one the guard went past his door, and paused, and went on, and somewhere out over the river a last rocket went up from a balcony, late, by itself, after everybody else had stopped, and opened, and went out.