Older Than Fire

Solliden, Öland Monday 1 January, the kitchen, because it is the only warm room

Dear Alexander,

It’s the first day of the year and I’m writing at the kitchen table at Solliden with my coat on, because the kitchen has the big stove and every other room in the house is a summer room that has been asked to do something it was never built for. They opened four of them. The rest have sheets over the furniture and you can see your breath in the corridors. Mamma says it’s character-building. Mamma is wearing two cardigans and a hat indoors and says it in Swedish, so I don’t think she believes it either.

I’ve read yours four times. I’m going to take it in order.

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The dumplings. I told Mrs Hartigan on the Tuesday before we left, at the flat, with Theo there. I told her all of it: the dressing gown, the telegram voice, two standing up, cold, better than his mother’s, and that he’d deny it to the Foreign Office. She didn’t say anything for a moment. Then she said, “Tell the Ambassador he can come for the rest,” and went back to the stove. Theo says that is the highest honour his mother has ever paid anybody and that she once said it to a bishop and then took it back.

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The sink.

I’m not going to ask you anything else about it. You said it was a thing about a sink, and I think that’s right, and I think if I ask any more questions it will turn into a thing about you again, and you’ll have to try four more times.

I’ll tell you one thing instead. On the Tuesday, after the dumplings, I asked Mrs Hartigan if I could do the potatoes. She looked at me exactly the way you said, as though she was checking something that wasn’t on the chart. Then she gave me the lighthouse apron, which I’ve never been given before, and said, “Toward you.” I took a slice off my thumb on the third one. She looked at it. She said, “He didn’t do that,” and put a plaster on it, and gave me the knife back.

So now we’ve both done it. You did it better. It’s on the record, and the record is a plaster.

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Falk.

I know. That’s why.

I’ve thought about that sentence more than anything anybody has said to me since September, and it wasn’t even said to me. You told me I could ask and then what? once, and that you wouldn’t answer. I’m not going to use it. I’m saving it.

I’m going to tell you what I’m going to do instead, so it’s fair. I’m going to think about it until your birthday. I’m not going to write about it before then, not one word, because you said you wanted to think about it until it was yours to think about, and I’m not going to put my thinking in front of yours. On your birthday I’m going to tell you what I think, once, and then you can do what you like with it, including nothing.

That’s a promise. I’ve written it in the green book, so it’s minuted.

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Your Christmas.

I hope the chair was all right. I’m not going to ask. I’m going to say that I thought about it at about the time it would have been the candles at your end, which here was the same time, which is the good thing about Sweden, and that I hope Charlotte came in her coat, and that you were glad.

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Now Solliden, which is what you’ll actually want, because it’s the part with the sky in it.

We came on the twenty-first. It was raining in Stockholm and raining on the bridge to the island and the whole of Öland was grey and flat and wet and Mamma said “Perfekt” in a voice that meant it wasn’t. Then on the twenty-third it snowed. Properly, all day, big flakes, straight down because there was no wind, and by the evening the garden was white down to the water and the bay had gone grey and stiff at the edges.

Elsa decided it was frozen. It wasn’t. She made me walk on it anyway, on the morning of Christmas Eve, out from the end of the boathouse slip, and I went about four steps and then through, up to the knee, in water so cold it felt like being hit. Nils laughed so much he had to sit down in the snow. Castellanos, who came with us, and who is from Tucson, and who had never seen snow fall on purpose before the twenty-third, was standing on the shore in a Swedish coat that somebody at the Court had lent him, and he didn’t move at all. He just looked at the bay. Then he looked at the sky. I think it was the closest Castellanos has ever come to saying something.

Mamma heard about it at lunch, from Nils, and said, “Bra. Nu vet du.” Good. Now you know. And passed me the herring.

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Christmas Eve is the big one here, as it is at yours. The table, the ham, the herring in about nine kinds, and the rice porridge with one almond in it, and whoever finds the almond is supposed to marry within the year. Nils found it. He’s fourteen. He went bright red and swallowed it on purpose so that nobody could prove it, and Elsa said that was legally a marriage to the porridge.

Then at ten at night, which is four o’clock his time, I rang the hospital, the way I’ve done every day since we came. The big man from his detail holds the receiver. I read the trains. On Christmas Day there’s a holiday timetable, which is the thinnest of the year, thinner than Sundays, and I got to the end with eleven minutes to spare, and didn’t know what to do with them, so I told him about the bay.

There was a long silence on the line. Then he said, “Snow?”

I said yes. Snow. Up to the knee.

He made the sound he makes now that is laughing. The big man said, “He’s smiling, sir,” into the telephone, which he’s never done before. Then he put the receiver back to Papa’s ear, and I said goodnight, and Papa said, “Good,” and that was Christmas.

That night Mamma read to me. In Swedish, in the kitchen, by the stove, the book she used to read when I was small, about the boy who flies on the goose. I asked her to stop when I was eleven. I didn’t ask her to stop this time. I don’t know what that means and I’m not going to find out.

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Andromeda.

I did exactly what you said. It was Christmas Eve, after the candles and before the telephone, and it was clear for the first time since we came, and cold enough that the snow squeaked. I went out on the jetty at six. I waited the twenty minutes, which is longer than you think when you’re standing on a jetty in December. I found the W, straight overhead, so that I had to lean back until my neck hurt, and I didn’t mind. I looked below it, towards the south.

I didn’t see anything.

Then I looked a little to one side of it, the way you said, and it came. A smudge. Grey. Longer than it is wide. Exactly where you said, and exactly as small, and I stood on the jetty and looked at it out of the side of my eye, because when I looked straight at it it went away, and I thought that you were right about it being true of more things than galaxies, and I’m not going to say which either.

Then Elsa brought her grandfather’s telescope down from the boathouse. It’s brass, on a wooden tripod, and he used it for ships, and it has a crack in the paint where somebody dropped it in 1974, she says, and it has never been mended because mending it would be replacing it. (I didn’t tell her about the Tomb. She said it on her own.) It took us twenty minutes to find Andromeda in it, because it’s a telescope for ships and it doesn’t want to point upwards. When we did, it was a bigger smudge.

I wasn’t disappointed. I stood there with my eye on a ship’s telescope on a jetty in Sweden and thought about the light leaving it before anybody had made a fire, and travelling the whole time, all of it, and arriving on Öland that evening a bit after six, in time for me. It’s older than fire. You were right.

Nils asked whether you could see Russia with it. Elsa said no, you could see Kalmar, and two and a half million years. Nils said that was worse.

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And the jetty at midnight.

I went down at a quarter to. Elsa and Nils came, and then, at five to, Mamma came, which I hadn’t expected, in the two cardigans and her big coat and the hat, carrying a thermos, and stood next to me at the end of the jetty, and didn’t say anything. Castellanos stood at the land end. It was clear again. The water was black and still. Across it, a long way off, Kalmar was a line of small lights along the edge of the sky.

At midnight it started. Small. Very far away. Gold and red and white, going up over Kalmar and opening and going out, without any sound at all for a second and then a sound like somebody knocking on a door in another house. Like matches, the way I said. Behind us, from the village, the church bell started.

Mamma said, “Gott nytt år, älskling,” and poured me some of whatever was in the thermos, which was hot blackcurrant, and Castellanos said, “Happy New Year, sir,” at one second past, exactly, the way he’d say it in a corridor.

And I thought about you on your roof.

I don’t know if they let you. You said it was three permissions and none of them were yours. I decided that they did. I decided you were on the roof in Berlin with Lukas and Charlotte and a man with a thermos, looking at the Spree, in the same minute as me. It was the nearest we’ve been since the Eleventh, and the farthest apart we’ve been in the same minute, and I stood on the jetty and drank the blackcurrant and thought that it was the first New Year I’ve ever spent knowing exactly where somebody was without being able to see them, and that it was all right.

Tell me if I was right about the roof.

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Kate’s rules. She gave them to me the day before we left, in an envelope, with instructions that they were to go in the bag and that I wasn’t to read them first. I read them first. Here they are exactly. She numbered them herself.

SCHAFKOPF. HARTIGAN RULES. For the Emperor, to practise.

1. Thirty-two cards. Sevens up to aces. If you have the German cards, the Obers are the Queens and the Unters are the Jacks and you’re on your own.

2. Trumps, in order: the four Queens, clubs, spades, hearts, diamonds. Then the four Jacks, same order. Then the rest of the diamonds.

3. Diamonds. Not hearts. I said hearts on the Eleventh because you’re German and I was being nice. In Germany it’s hearts. In Wisconsin it’s diamonds. You’re playing in Wisconsin.

4. Two cards go in the middle, the blind. Whoever picks them up is the picker and plays against everybody else, except the partner, who is whoever has the ace the picker calls. You find out who your partner is when they play it. This is the best part.

5. Points: aces eleven, tens ten, kings four, queens three, jacks two. A hundred and twenty in the deck. The picker needs sixty-one.

6. Nobody refuses the cabbage. That’s not a rule. Nobody ever has.

7. Nobody lets anybody win. Including the Crown.

8. Practise. K.

Theo says rule 7 was written with me in mind and rule 3 with you.

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This is going to the Embassy in Stockholm. Mamma’s office sends a car to the city tomorrow, and Ebba Lindqvist, who is Mamma’s Private Secretary and has never in her life carried a letter she was not told the contents of, has agreed to put this into the hand of somebody at your Embassy there for the bag, on condition that she is never told the contents. She asked me whether she should minute it. I said no. She said, “Good,” which in Ebba is the same as a medal.

We fly home on Tuesday. School on Wednesday. The kitchen table on the ninth.

Yours, with every formality, from the only warm room in Sweden,

Frederick

P.S. My knee is fine. Elsa wants it recorded that it was frozen, and that I went through it because I’m heavier than her, and that this is a fact and not an opinion. I’ve recorded it. I don’t agree with it.