Andromeda

The observatory, Potsdam Saturday 4 November, a little after eleven

Dear Frederick,

I concede the shoes. I do not concede the hat. It was a sash, and it was a man, and I have asked Lukas, who was not there, and he agrees with me, which settles it.

Your letter came last night in the bag, and I read it at the desk in my room in Berlin with the door shut, and then I read the part about the geometry class again, and then I got up and walked round the room twice, which is what I do instead of saying anything.

You found out from a geometry teacher with an email. I found out from a chamberlain who had been crying and could not finish his sentence, so that I had to finish it for him, and I have never told anybody that, including you until now. I think yours is better. I think if I have to choose between the two ways of being told, I would choose a woman who goes a bit pink and asks if you want to come back in. You were right to go back in. I would have gone back in too. The angle in a semicircle is the best thing in geometry and it would have been a waste to miss the end of the proof.

So. Your Majesty. There, I have written it once, and like Dame M I am now going to apologise and never do it again.

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It is clear tonight, which is why I am here, and why this is written in pencil, because ink does strange things in the cold. The dome is open. Lukas is on the floor with his back against the mount, as always, with a flask of tea and the book about the Hanseatic League that I was not reading on Monday, which he took off me and says he will finish before I do. That is not difficult.

You asked me to tell you what I see. I have been looking at Andromeda for you.

You can see it without a telescope, if you know where to look and it is dark enough, which it is not in New Westminster, and which at Solliden it never quite is in the summer, because the sun hardly goes down. Try at Christmas, if you are ever there at Christmas. It is a grey smudge, a little longer than it is wide, near the W of Cassiopeia, and in November at Potsdam at eleven at night it is very nearly overhead. It is a galaxy. It is two and a half million light years away. It is the farthest thing a person can see with their own eyes, without anything at all to help them, and I find that I think about that more than I think about almost anything.

Through the telescope it is a bigger grey smudge. That is all. People are always disappointed. I am never disappointed, because the point is not what it looks like, the point is that the light coming into the telescope tonight left it before anybody on earth had ever made a fire, and has been travelling ever since, and arrived at Potsdam this evening a little after nine, in time for me. That is the thing I come up here for. Not the smudge. The arriving.

Lukas has just said his one thing for the evening, which is that Andromeda is coming towards us at a hundred and ten kilometres a second and will hit us in about four and a half billion years. He says I am to tell you not to worry about it yet. He says you have enough to do.

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Now your letter. I am going to take your things in order, as you took mine, because you are right that it is the only fair way.

Mamma. I am very glad she said yes. I am also glad she asked who told you, and gladder that she did not ask who. Mine would have asked, and then would have found out, and then would have been kind about it, which is the family weakness on both sides. Tuesdays at a kitchen table sound to me like the best constitutional arrangement in any of your fourteen realms, and I would like you to know that we do not have a kitchen table in this palace at all. There is a kitchen, a long way off, and I have been in it twice.

The record. You were right that you have a Council and I was wrong, and I should have known, and I am writing it down. You sat at it for a month without a voice and then you sat at it as King and did not use the voice you had. Charlotte would say that was the right decision, and she would be right, and I am not going to tell her you made it.

The trains. I have looked at a timetable of Union Station on the internet, and there is no five-forty from Baltimore. There is a five-thirty-eight. I assume this is a King’s privilege and I will not mention it again.

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Now the line you dated.

I have read it. I have dated my reading of it. I would like it noted in the same record that I have also looked it up, and that I am, it turns out, behind my mother, which is where I have been standing at every family occasion since I could walk, and that if it ever came to it I would give the whole lot to Theo, on the grounds that he is the only one of us who would know what to do with a bus.

That is all I am going to say about that, ever.

About Charlotte: no.

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Something else, which I am going to say because you are the one person to whom I can, and because the bag is the only place in the Empire where I can say it.

Prussia votes on the third of December. Charlotte dissolved the House on Falk’s advice the day she was sworn, which was right, and since then there has been a campaign going on around me that I am not allowed to have a view about, and I have several.

I am afraid of two things. The first is that nobody wins. The Zentrum has said it will support no ministry whose first business is a contest with the Crown, and the parties of the right cannot make a majority on their own, and if the House comes back the way it went away we will have another winter of a government that is not a government, and in March the Court will be asked something else, and I will be asked to sit and listen to it. The second is worse. The second is that the campaign is about me. It is not supposed to be. There is a budget that nobody could introduce and a coalition that broke and a hundred real things. But there are people on the right who say in every speech that the King’s rights were taken from him, and people in the youth movement who say I should rule at fifteen, and both of them use my name as though I had given it to them, and I have not, and I cannot say so, because saying so would be the thing they want, which is me in the campaign.

I hope, and I know that I am not allowed to hope it, and that is why I am writing it in a telescope dome at half past eleven at night with a pencil, 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. She was right in April. The Court said so. But she could make being right the whole of her next government, and then the Zentrum would be right about her too, and nobody would be governing Prussia except lawyers.

There. I have never said that to anybody. Lukas is pretending not to have heard, which is one of the things he is best at.

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You asked for advice back, and gave me some, and I owe you more than one piece for it, so here are four, and then I will stop.

The first is a word. We have a word, Feierabend, for the end of the working day, the hour when the work is put away and you are allowed to be a person again. It is a very German word. It has a whole culture in it, of beer and gardens and men in slippers, and you will be pleased to know that it does not apply to Kings. Nobody tells you when your Feierabend is. Nobody puts the work away for you. The boxes come at all hours and they will always be there in the morning. So you have to make one. You have to choose an hour, and say that it is yours, and say it to the people who bring the boxes, and then keep it even when it is inconvenient, especially when it is inconvenient. This dome on a clear Saturday is mine. I have kept it through a dismissal and a court case and a regency, and the only time I did not keep it was the week after Papa died, and that was the week I needed it most. Find yours. I do not think it is the trains, because the trains are for Papa. Find another.

The second is the coronations. You will be crowned in London after you are sixteen. I will be crowned again at Königsberg when I am sixteen, as King of Prussia, because the one in March was the Empire’s and Prussia has its own and they would not let me have it until I could rule. So we are both waiting for the same birthday, yours in May and mine in January the year after, and you are going first, as usual. I want to tell you what to do with your hands, and I already have. Hold the cushion. Find the clock. But I want to say something else, which is that the second time is not like the first. I know that because I have asked people who were crowned twice, which is not a large number of people. They all said the same thing. The first time you are being made into something. The second time you have already been it for a while, and you know what it costs, and that makes it worse and better. You will only have it once. I think that is probably right for you.

The third is the papers. Read the ones you are not required to read. There is always a pile, at the bottom of a box or in a folder somebody has marked for information only, and nobody will ask you about it, and that is the pile in which they put the things they hope will not be noticed. Not because anybody is wicked. Because the people who choose what a King reads are tired, and they put the dull things at the bottom, and the dull things are where the Crown actually lives. The paper that told me what the Council meant to do about Falk was in a folder marked for information only. I read it because I could not sleep.

The fourth is being looked at. When I went back to school after Papa died, nobody looked at me for the whole of the first morning, not once, not in any class, and that was how I knew that every single person in the building was looking at me all the time. It is worse than being stared at. Being stared at you can stare back. My advice is to choose one person in each room to look at, deliberately, as though it were perfectly ordinary, and to say something boring to them, like asking whether they have done the homework. After a week people forget. After two they forget that they were trying not to look. Theo is the obvious person, but you should not always choose Theo, or they will think he is your guard. Choose the boy who bowed. I am sure there will have been a boy who bowed.

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Now the desk.

I was very glad you read it to him. I am more glad than I can easily write that he laughed. I have been thinking all day about the word, and about him saying it on the pillow, and I find that I want to tell you the rest, because I left something out of the first letter, and I left it out on purpose, and you are the person who has told me that a half-answer is a thing you cannot leave alone.

In the Tiergarten, after the drawers, after the desk, after I laughed, we walked on for a while more in the rain, and then, just before we came back to the cars, he stopped and said one more thing. He said: “When it is Frederick’s turn, write to him. He won’t ask for help. He’ll ask everything else.”

I did not put it in the first letter because I did not want you to think the letter was an errand. I did not want you to read it and think, he is doing this because Papa asked him to. It was not an errand. I would have written anyway. I think I would have written anyway. But he did ask. And you should know that he asked, because it means that in February, in the rain, a long time before any of this, he was thinking about the day it would be your turn, and about who would be there, and he had already decided. He was eighty-one and he had fourteen drawers and he was thinking about who would write to you.

So I am doing as I was told, which you will tell nobody, because it would ruin my reputation.

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Lukas has a message for Theo, and has written it out on the back of a page of the Hanseatic League so that I get it exactly. Page to page, he says. Here it is.

The knees are right. Also: never look at the face of the person you are standing behind. Look at the back of their head. If you look at their face you will laugh, and so will they, and then you will both be in the newspapers. The back of the head is the whole secret. I have not yet managed it. L.

He says the last sentence is important and I am not to leave it out.

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It is nearly midnight. The guard has come up the stairs twice and gone down again, which here means the same as it means in Berlin. Andromeda has moved a little to the west while I have been writing, which is to say we have, and Lukas has finished his tea and is reading by the red light, and I am going to close the dome.

Write when you can. Tell me what was on the kitchen table. I want to know what a King is not allowed to have an opinion about.

Yours, with every formality, and with eleven fewer capacities than you, which I have counted twice, as you would,

Alexander

P.S. You signed it Frederick, and not George R. I read it with a straight face. Nobody here believes me.