The Terms

Somewhere over the Atlantic Sunday 8 April

Dear Alexander,

This is the first letter under the terms. I’ve written the terms at the top of the page, on the back of the menu, so that I can see them while I write:

Write to each other about anything. Advise each other about nothing that has a vote in it.

I’ve been looking at them for twenty minutes. I’ve started this four times. Every time I start, the second sentence has a vote in it. It turns out that almost everything I want to say to you has a vote in it, and I didn’t know that until somebody told me I wasn’t allowed to say it, which I think is how most people find out what they want to say.

So I’m going to write about anything. Here is anything.

Theo is asleep against the window. He fell asleep before the seatbelt sign went off, with his mouth open and his forehead on the plastic, and he has not moved since Germany. Castellanos is across the aisle, looking at the ceiling of the aeroplane, which has nothing on it worth looking at, and he is looking at it anyway, out of loyalty to the profession. Mamma is on the other aeroplane, an hour ahead of us, because of the rule, which nobody has changed, and I know exactly what she is doing: reading a novel in Swedish with her glasses on the end of her nose and not turning the pages, which means she is not reading it.

She said to me at the airport, before we went through, in Swedish, that she would never read another page that was not hers. I believe her. She said it in Swedish, and she never lies in Swedish, because she says it is too small a language to get away with anything in.

There is a man in the row behind who has been looking at the back of my head since Germany. Not a reporter. Just a man, with a newspaper he isn’t reading. I can feel it, the way Lukas says you can. I’ve decided to let him. It’s a long flight, and it’s only the back of my head, and I’ve had worse looked at.

---

Things that have no vote in them.

My hands. They are blistered in the wrong places. Rowing blisters are at the base of the fingers, and these are on the heels of my thumbs, because a skiff’s oars are not a racing eight’s, and nobody had told me, and I rowed for an hour anyway. Mr Odum will see them on Thursday and ask what I’ve been doing, and I’ll say I was rowing a German Emperor round a lake, and he’ll say, “Badly, by the look of it,” and he’ll be right.

The bus. Theo has woken up long enough to say that I am to tell you that he has worked out the problem with the driver, which is that Berlin buses have a different brake, and that it isn’t the driver’s fault, and that he takes back what he said, and then he went back to sleep. I’m not sure he was awake. I’m passing it on as a fact. Lukas would say facts don’t count.

Schafkopf. Theo says that he is undefeated in the German Empire and that he would like it recorded. I’ve recorded it. It’s in the green book, under today’s date, which is the first entry in the green book that isn’t about a Crown, and I think it’s the best one.

The dome. You told me in March it would be the wrong season and that it would still be there. It was. I’m not going to say any more about it than that, because I don’t want to make it smaller by writing it down. But I’ve seen it both ways up now, once in the snow from a jetty, overhead, and once under a wood, in the branches, from a dome. I know both. You said that was the thing. It was.

---

Things I have crossed out.

There are three sentences on the back of the menu that I have crossed out, very thoroughly, with the airline’s pen, which doesn’t work well, so I’ve had to go over them twice. They had votes in them. Mamma says the terms don’t say I have to show you the crossings-out, and they don’t say I can’t tell you they’re there. So I’m telling you they’re there. That is a loophole, and I know it is a loophole, and I’m using it once, and then never again.

I’m not going to say anything about the date you told me on the lake. It hasn’t been voted on yet. It has a vote in it. So I’ll only say the other thing, which hasn’t.

Nobody has ever let me go first at anything because I should. Only because I was older. I’ve gone first all my life, at everything, by eight months, and it was always the calendar. This is the first time it was somebody. I noticed. That’s all. There’s no vote in noticing.

---

I’m sorry about Thursday. I said it in the dome and I’m writing it as well, because writing is where we keep things, and I want it kept.

I’m not going to say what I’m sorry for in more detail than that, because you know, and because the detail has a vote in it. I’m sorry I did it. I’d do the asking again, I think, if I’m honest, and you’ve always said to be honest on paper. I wouldn’t do it at the kitchen table, in front of my mother, as homework. That was the bit that was wrong. You were right about the bit that was wrong.

You said the other thing. I’m not writing it down either. You said it once. That’s allowed. It’s on no record.

---

Columbia Palace, New Westminster Tuesday 10 April, at the kitchen table

I didn’t finish it on the aeroplane, because we came down into the dark over the river and Theo woke up and asked whether we were in Milwaukee, and then the rest of the day was the rest of the day.

I’m finishing it at the kitchen table. It’s Tuesday. Mamma is at the other end with the folder, and we’ve done the papers, and she has gone through them as she always does, and there was one tonight I’m not going to tell you about, because it has a vote in it.

This is where it would have gone.

She knows I’m writing to you. She looked at the envelope when I got it out and said, “Anything?” and I said, “Anything,” and she said, “Good,” and went back to her folder. It’s the first time since Potsdam she’s said anything about a letter as though it were an ordinary thing. It’s the first time either of us has said the word at the kitchen table. It turns out to be a very ordinary word, and nobody fell down.

---

School started again yesterday. Mr Abernathy said “Hanover” and I said “Here”, and it was exactly the same, except that Marcus, the boy who bowed, asked me in the corridor whether Germany was all right, as though it were a person, and I said it was, and he said, “Good,” and went to trombone. I think I’ve been wrong about Marcus. I think he’s just very polite in a way nobody taught him how to do quietly.

I read Papa the trains yesterday at four, for the first time in ten days. He had them read to him while I was away by the nurse who likes him, who read them in the wrong order, he said. He said it in two words. “Wrong order.” Then I told him about Potsdam. Not all of it. The church, and the bus, and the lake. And Uncle Heinrich. I told him I had stood where Uncle Heinrich is. He looked at me for a long time, and then he said, “Heinrich,” not as a question, and then nothing else, for a long time, and then he said, “Good,” and I don’t know what that one meant, and I didn’t ask.

Theo’s dad wants to know whether it’s true that the Emperor peels potatoes every evening, because Theo has told everybody on the north side of the city that he does. I’ve told him it’s true. I’m not sure it is, but I think it should be.

Kate says that undefeated in the German Empire doesn’t count, because the German Empire wasn’t trying. I’ve told Theo. He says it counts.

Tell Lukas the ears worked. Theo wants him to know. He used them at school yesterday, in assembly, when they read out the notices and everybody looked round at me, and he says nobody noticed a thing, which is the point.

---

That’s anything. It’s three pages of anything, and almost none of it is what I wanted to say, and all of it is true, and I think that is going to be what the terms are like. I think they’re good terms. I think they’re the first rule anybody has given us that we would have written ourselves, if we’d been asked, which we weren’t, which I’m not going to complain about, because it has a vote in it.

Write about anything. I want to know what you can see. I want to know whether you still light the stove in April. I want to know what Lukas spends his one thing on, the next clear Saturday. Those haven’t got votes in them. Tell me those.

Yours, with every formality, and with nothing in this letter that has a vote in it, I think, I’ve checked twice,

Frederick

P.S. I’ve still got the five-forty from Baltimore. It was cancelled on Monday, because of the bridge. It’s the first time it has been cancelled since I took it. I minded more than I expected to. I think you’d understand that better than anybody.