The Back Row

Rocky Point had not given everybody back.

Tolliver 104 on the first Monday after spring break was a room of burnt noses, and the back row, which was always full, had four seats empty in it until five to nine, when three people who were not in the section came in and sat down in them: Jack on the aisle, directly behind Frederick, then Lukas with his hands folded, then Alexander in the linen jacket and the tie, with a notebook open and a pencil laid beside it exactly parallel to the edge. Kessler stood against the back wall under the clock and was not there.

At one minute to nine Brennan came in with the bag and the cup, and looked up the rows.

“Welcome back,” he said. “Some of you are still at Rocky Point. I can see it from here.” His eyes went on up, to the back. “And some of you aren’t in this section. You’re very welcome. It’s Sixteen, which is emergencies, so you’ve chosen well.”

He wrote, in large rapid capitals, XVI. OF EMERGENCY POWERS.

---

“Nine clauses,” said Brennan, walking. “Which of them matters?”

Rhys’s hand went up.

“Mr Whitfield. Since nobody else has had breakfast.”

“Three, sir.” Rhys did not need to look. “Parliament shall be summoned with all practicable speed, and shall not be prorogued or dissolved during the emergency save by its own resolution. Every model of democratic breakdown says the same thing. The executive gets rid of the legislature. Keep the legislature sitting and you’ve kept the check.”

“That’s the textbook,” said Brennan, “and the textbook is usually right.” He stopped dead and looked up into the rows, past the aisle seat two from the back, at the row behind it. “You don’t think so.”

“I did not say anything,” said Lukas.

“You were looking at Mr Whitfield the way I look at essays. Go on.”

“France,” said Lukas. “In 1934 nobody sent the Chamber home. The President invited a man in under the emergency article of 1889, and the Chamber was sitting, and it voted him its confidence, four hundred and two to a hundred and seventeen. Then the article let him make law by decree.” He considered. “Nothing he did was illegal on the day he did it.”

Rhys turned round in his seat, which nobody in Tolliver 104 did.

“That’s history,” he said. “I’m talking about the theory.”

Lukas looked at him, kindly, as he had looked at Sam’s pencil.

“They had the theory in France,” he said. “They had read it.”

The room laughed, and Rhys turned back to the front with his ears going red from the tops down.

“So which clause?” said Brennan.

“Seven. Emergency authority confers no power to make law. Then it does not matter who is sitting.”

Brennan wrote XVI.7 on the board and drew a box round it, twice.

“Mr Whitfield,” he said, with his back to the room, “you have been beaten on your own subject by… where are you from?”

“Potsdam.”

“By Potsdam. Don’t take it hard. It’s happened to bigger countries.” He turned round. “And what brings Potsdam to my back row?”

“Alex wished to see the Charter taught,” said Lukas, and inclined his head, exactly, at the young man beside him in the buttoned jacket.

---

“Professor.”

Pruett, in the front row, in his Sun Devils cap on backwards with Rocky Point across his nose, had turned round in his seat too, and was holding his telephone up towards the bench. On it, small, was the photograph everybody had seen on the first of February: the Hall of State in Stockholm, and on the left of the dais, behind the gilt chair, standing for the family, a young man in a black coat buttoned to the throat.

“Sorry,” said Pruett. “Is that him?”

Brennan looked at it, and up the rows.

“Yes,” said Alexander.

Brennan stood quite still with the chalk in his hand, and Frederick watched the colour start at the collar of the crumpled linen and come up. He did not look at the aisle seat two from the back. Frederick could feel him not looking at it.

Then he picked up the duster and rubbed out Article Sixteen, box and all, in long grey strokes, and wrote in its place:

XV. OF FOREIGN AND IMPERIAL RELATIONS.

“Sir,” said Rhys. “We did Fifteen. On the third of February.”

“We’re doing it again, Mr Whitfield. You’ll have Sixteen on Wednesday. It’s quite a good lecture.” Brennan turned round, with the face of a man who knows perfectly well what he is doing and cannot, as a matter of physics, do anything else. “What do I call you?”

Alexander considered it. “What do you call him?”

“Mr Hanover.”

“Then Hohenzollern.”

“Mr Hohenzollern. The rule in this course is that you may not cite yourself. It cost Mr Hanover a grade in December. It applies to visitors.”

“I know,” said Alexander. “He wrote to me.”

---

THE CROWN MAY BE ONE IN PERSON, YET DISTINCT IN RIGHT.

“Eight words,” said Brennan. “Every realm that shares the Crown runs on them, and in twenty-two years I’ve never had a first-year explain them without the word capacity. So the word’s banned. Somebody. In English.”

Nobody.

Behind Frederick, very low, in the voice for saying things along a bar, Jack said, “It’s like a licence.”

“The gentleman on the aisle who said licence,” said Brennan, without turning round from the board. “Louder.”

Frederick heard him breathe in.

“It’s like a licence. In a pub. The licensee’s name goes over the door. And you get blokes with two pubs, right, and it’s his name over both doors, but it’s two licences, one for each house. So if there’s a fight in one and the police go to the council and it gets suspended, the other one stays open. Same bloke. Same name. Doesn’t touch it.” He stopped; and then, because he had been brought up to finish a thing: “The council doesn’t care who you are. It cares which door.”

Brennan stood with the chalk on the board. Then he wrote under the eight words, SAME NAME. TWO DOORS. And under that, XV.5.

“And a fight in one isn’t a fight in the other,” he said. “That’s the next clause. Have you read the Charter, Mr…”

“Fennell. No. Only the bit on the tea towel.”

The room laughed, and Brennan laughed too, once, the short surprised sound he seemed to disapprove of.

“That’s the clearest account of fifteen point four I’ve had in this room in twenty-two years,” he said, “and it came from behind a bar.”

---

“Now here’s what’s wrong with it.” He came down off the step. “When there’s a fight in one of them, Mr Fennell, whose name is in the paper on Tuesday?”

There was a pause on the aisle.

“His,” said Jack.

“His. The law says two licences and the paper says one man, and the paper’s right, because there’s only one face to print. Mr Hohenzollern. In 2028 a ministry with a majority was dismissed in the name of the King of Prussia, and the Empire stayed out of it, because it was distinct in right. Whose face was on the placards in Berlin?”

“Mine,” said Alexander.

“So the law said two Crowns and the street said one boy. Which was right?”

“Both. The street was right that I could not get out of it.” Alexander sat forward, as he had for Tyler in the lounge. “That is why the separation holds. A man who will be blamed for both his Crowns has every reason never to let one be used against the other. You think the person is the weak place in fifteen point four. It is the guarantee.”

“A guarantee that rests on one man’s character isn’t a constitution. It’s a temperament. I tell every first-year that in November. And the Commons can be voted out. You can’t.”

“No,” said Alexander. “I will not pretend otherwise.”

“Then tell the room what your office can do.”

“The German Emperor appoints the Imperial Chancellor and may dismiss him. He has an absolute veto over ordinary imperial legislation. The last Emperor used it once in twenty-three years, and published his reasons. He dismissed nobody.”

“Absolute,” said Brennan, to the room. “The King of this Realm can do nothing without advice, and that office can stop a law passed by the elected members of a hundred and fifteen million people, on its own. What stops it?”

“The cost of using it. And the Kaiser has no part in amending the Constitution. The Reichstag and the Bundesrat and the states may take the veto away whenever they choose, and I may not stop them. The one instrument that could reduce my powers is the one I cannot touch.”

“And nobody’s ever used it.”

“Nobody has needed to.”

“Those are the same thing,” said Brennan, “until the day they aren’t.”

Alexander considered it. “Yes,” he said.

“I’d still rather the person at the top was somebody I could vote out.”

“The Russian Republic held elections for a hundred years. Everybody voted. The ballots were counted. The results were settled before the campaigns began. The line does not run between crowns and republics, Professor. It runs between governments that can be stopped and governments that cannot. I would rather argue with you about which side of it a veto is on than about whether I was born.”

Frederick turned round in his seat, as Rhys had. His cousin was sitting forward with his eyes on the professor, and his face was doing what it had done at the whist table: it was the face of complete and private happiness.

“And when the Russians were at last asked properly,” said Brennan, “they chose a crown, which is the most annoying thing that has happened to a republican in my lifetime.” The room laughed, and he let it. “But they were asked. That’s my question. I wrote it on that board in August. Nobody in this Realm has been asked since 1783.”

“Then you should be,” said Alexander.

Brennan stopped.

“In my country it would be the Reichstag and the Bundesrat and twenty-seven states, and nobody would ask me. In yours, I think, nobody would ask him.” Alexander did not look at the aisle. “It is the part of the procedure I like best.”

“I’m still a republican, Mr Hohenzollern.”

“I should hope so,” said Alexander. “I came a long way to hear one.”

---

Brennan went back to the board.

“Let’s count,” he said, “since we’re here. By my count there are seventeen Crowns in the last two rows.”

“Sixteen, sir,” said Sam. “And an office. Malaya’s an office.”

“Thank you, Mr Oyelaran.” Brennan turned round. “Mr Hanover.”

The room did not turn round, with tremendous force.

“You know the rule. Answer from a source. How many of the sixteen are in this room?”

“None, sir. There’s a memo, from the Household to the university, last June. The King attending a fixture as a student is not present for the purposes of the royal anthem.”

“This isn’t a fixture.”

“No, sir. But I’m a student.” He looked at the eight words on the board. “So it’s one in person. The rest are distinct.”

Brennan looked at him for a long moment, with the face of a man who has just heard himself, and then past him, at the back.

“And you, Mr Hohenzollern?”

“I am on a private visit. It is not recorded as an engagement.”

“So,” said Brennan slowly. “Sixteen Crowns and an office in the last two rows of my room, and in law not one of them is here.”

“I’m here,” said Jack.

The whole of Tolliver 104 went up, and Brennan put his hand over his eyes.

“Mr Fennell is here,” he said, through it. “Thank God for the licensed trade.” He looked at the clock. “Wednesday. Sixteen. Properly.”

---

Brennan was at the door at ten, with the empty cup. “You’re wrong, Mr Hohenzollern,” he said, as Alexander went past, and Alexander said, “Yes. So are you,” and went on, delighted.

Jack stopped too, with his hands in his pockets and his face the colour of the cap, and Frederick, a pace behind, watched him find the word he had paid sixty-five pounds to have.

“He’s not getting another C,” said Jack.

Brennan looked at him over the cup; and briefly past him at Frederick, and back.

“That’s up to him, Mr Fennell.”

“I know. I’m just telling you.”

“Noted,” said Brennan.

---

The aircraft was grey, with nothing written on it but a number, as it had been nine days before.

It stood where it had stood then, on the far side of the field at Sky Harbor by the low white building with nobody’s flag on it, with its steps down and a man at the bottom of them who might have been Kessler’s brother. On Rhys’s telephone, a minute before they got out, there had been a message from across the road.

Wheels up 14.10. Tell Kessler same time next year. K.

They said it on the concrete, in the heat, by the steps.

Jack said it to Alexander first, because Jack did not know how not to: the hand shaken hard, and then the other arm round him, quickly, with his hand flat on the middle of his back, for exactly as long as two men hold on at an airport, and not one second more; and Alexander stood quite still in his buttoned jacket throughout, as a man stands for an anthem, and afterwards looked at Jack as though he had been given directions.

Then Jack turned to Lukas.

“Right,” said Jack.

He did it again. The hand, and the arm, and the flat palm between the shoulder blades, and the exact length of it, and the letting go. And Lukas stood in it, as Alexander had, and when it was over he did not move for a moment; and then he looked at Jack with his grey eyes, steadily, the way he had looked at a dartboard and at three people in the trees.

“Again,” said Lukas.

“What?”

“Do it again. Please.”

Jack stared at him. Then, slowly, as though he were being asked to demonstrate a thing he had never once in his life thought about, he did it again; and Lukas watched it, all of it, from inside it, with his chin over Jack’s shoulder and his eyes open; and when Jack let go, Lukas turned round on the concrete to Frederick, and put one arm round him, quickly and hard, with his hand flat on the middle of his back, and held on for exactly as long as two men hold on at an airport, and let go.

It was perfect. It was correct to the second.

“I watched you,” said Lukas, to Jack. “Three times. Once when you came.”

Jack looked at him for a long time, with his face going slowly the colour of the cap.

“Did I win?” he said. “Is that it? Is that the one?”

Lukas considered it.

“Yes,” he said. “That one you won.”

He went up the steps without looking back, because looking back was not in it, and at the top he stopped, in the door of the aircraft, and turned round after all, and lifted one hand, and Frederick saw that he was holding up, very slightly crooked, three fingers.

---

Alexander stayed at the foot of the steps a moment longer, upright, with the sweat on his temples, and for a while said nothing, which was not like him.

“I have seen it now,” he said.

“Seen what?”

“The hill.” Alexander looked past him, across the field and the flat brown distance of the Valley, to where very far off, small, the colour of a flowerpot, the butte stood up out of the town by itself. “On the Kreuzberg you said that you wanted to go somewhere you could climb a hill every morning and nobody would care. I said good, because it covered both. I did not understand it. I walked past eleven hundred people on Wednesday and nobody cared. This morning a man told me for twenty minutes in front of eighty people that I was wrong, and did not once say with respect.” He looked back at Frederick. “I would not have chosen it. But I know now why it was this one.”

“Does it still cover both?”

“Yes,” said Alexander. “It still covers both.” He considered. “The second part has got smaller.”

He held out his hand. Frederick took it, and they shook hands on the concrete at Sky Harbor, the King and the German Emperor, correctly, once; and then Alexander did a thing that Frederick had never seen him do, which was to put his other hand on top, for a second, over both of theirs, the way you might steady somebody on a boat, and take it away again.

“Give my love to your mother,” said Alexander.

“Shall I tell her what you wrote? On the first?”

Alexander considered it.

“No,” he said. “I wrote it once.” And went up.

---

Jack’s flight was at six, from Terminal Four, and he did not say anything all the way out on the little train with nobody driving it.

At the gate, by the desk, he stopped.

“Right,” said Jack. “Right. Right.”

He did not move. The queue went on without him.

“May,” said Frederick.

“May. The first.” Jack looked at the queue, and the door of the jet bridge. “And you’re going to have passed the Charter. I’ve had my word.”

“You said eleven words to him.”

“And he noted it.” Jack looked back at Frederick. “Noted. Like the brewery.”

Then he did it, the arm and the hand flat on his back, and held on for exactly as long as two men hold on at an airport; and then, which he had never done, a second longer, and his hand on Frederick’s back closed, briefly, on a fistful of the shirt, and let go of it, and let go.

He gave the woman at the desk his boarding pass, and did not drop it this time, and went past her to the door of the jet bridge.

Then he turned round.

He turned round in the door of the jet bridge, as he had in November, with three hundred people in the lounge behind Frederick, and Frederick braced; and Jack filled his chest, and put up one hand over his head with three fingers crooked, correctly, at last, the fork, and shouted, in the voice that had called last orders across the whole of Berlin:

“WHO ARE WE?”

There was a silence in the gate lounge.

It lasted about a second. Three hundred people turned round and looked at a man from Gloucestershire in a maroon cap with his hand in the air.

And then a woman in the boarding queue, about fifty, in a Sun Devils visor, put up her own hand with three fingers crooked, and so did the man behind her, and an officer of the airport police at the next gate with a coffee in his other hand, and a great many more, a whole forest of crooked fingers going up all over the lounge, and the Valley of the March, which had been told in its first week for a hundred and forty-nine years what it was, told him.

“THE BOOBY PRIZE!”

It went up to the roof of Terminal Four and came back off it.

Jack stood under it with his hand still up. Frederick saw his face across the lounge, and it was a face he had seen once before, at the top of the Kreuzberg, on a landlady’s son who had rung a bicycle bell at a city of six million and been told by a man in a vest to shut up: the face of somebody who has shouted at a place and been answered.

Then Jack put his hand down, and put both hands in his pockets, and turned round, and walked away down the jet bridge, and was gone.

Sam came back from the departures board and looked at the lounge, where three hundred people were turning back to their telephones with the faces of people who have surprised themselves.

“Shall we go, sir,” said Sam.

---

The paper sun that said FRED had gone from the door again, as it went, leaving its rectangle of old tape beside Tyler’s. The camp bed was across the floor of 312, where Jack had left it, with the white hat on the pillow end.

Frederick did not let the air out of it. He folded it in three, the way it went, and it sighed, and went on breathing a little, faintly, as it always did; and he pushed it under the bed by the door, and put the hat back on the shelf beside the jumper.

On the bed by the window Tyler lifted one side of his headphones an inch.

“He go?”

“Yes.”

“They all go?”

“Yes.”

Tyler looked at the floor where the camp bed had been, and then at the screen, where the snow was falling on the forest and the thirty-four were standing round the fire.

“Jussi wants to know if the German’s coming back,” said Tyler.

“What did you tell him?”

“I said he said brb.” Tyler considered the fire. “Jussi says that’s a long sandwich.”