Nochebuena

The photograph came at ten in the morning, which was five in the afternoon in London, and it was of the kitchen.

It was the same kitchen, at the back of the London house, with the long scrubbed table and the window onto the area steps, and his mother had made it into Sweden again: the candles in the brass holders from Solliden, the white cloth, the herring in its three kinds, the ham with its crust, the brown beans that nobody but her ever ate, and the bowl of rice pudding at the end with a spoon standing up in it. His father was at the end of the table in a jersey and a paper crown.

And beside him, this year, in the chair at the near end that had been pulled out last year with a cushion on it and a cardigan over the back, his mother, in a red dress, holding up between her finger and thumb towards the camera, with an expression of enormous gravity, an almond.

Under it, in Swedish, she had written:

Julafton in London. I have found the almond. I have told your father that I am already married, and he says that is no excuse, and that he will marry me again, and that this time he will find the church himself. Ebba took the photograph, so that I am in it.

And then, after a space, as though she had put the telephone down and picked it up again:

I am in it, Fredde.

He was on the bed by the window when it came. He looked at it for a long time: at the almond, and his father’s crown, and the red dress, and her face, which was thinner than it had been in 2032 and was looking straight out of the screen at him as though she knew exactly who would be holding it.

He wrote back: God jul, Mamma. You look well.

I am well, she wrote, at once. I have been told so by a man with clean hands on Tuesday, and I believed him, which is new. Tell Alexander God jul. Tell him in Swedish. He will pretend not to understand it, and he will understand it.

He told him, from the window, in Swedish.

Alexander, at the desk by the door, in the grey overcoat, with the short programme in front of him, did not look up.

“God jul,” he said, in an accent that was quite good. “Tell her that I do not understand.”

---

At five in the afternoon in Potsdam, which was nine in the morning in Tempe, it had been Heiligabend for an hour, and Alexander had telephoned his mother.

He had done it at the desk by the door, with the door of 312 shut, and Frederick on the other side of it, in 316, on the floor. That was the arrangement, and nobody had made it: when Frederick’s mother rang he went to the step on the landing, and when Alexander’s mother rang Frederick went out.

At twenty past nine Alexander had opened the door.

“She sends her love,” he said. “She is sending a hat.”

“For Christmas?”

“For tomorrow. By the box.” He considered it. “She said that it is a very good hat, and that I am to carry it to lunch, as agreed.” He looked at the corridor. “She asked whether it was cold. I said sixty-two at night. She said that the Neues Palais was fifty-five in December when she first came to it, and that she had survived it by being English.”

“Did she say anything else?”

Alexander considered this for some time.

“She said good,” he said. “Twice. About nothing in particular.” He went back into the room. “She has never said it twice.”

---

Tyler’s photograph came at a quarter past three, which was a quarter past five in Parma, and it was of the plate.

It was the white plate with the gold rim from the high cupboard, at the end of the long table, with a knife and a fork and the glass with the stem, and the few stalks of pale straw poking out from under the cloth at the corner. Propped against the glass there were two small folded cards, side by side, and on each of them, in blue ballpoint, in the round careful capitals of a very old woman who had been taught to write in a school where they made you do it properly, a name.

FRED

ALEX

Under it Tyler had written:

grandma made 2 cards. she says theres 2 of u now so it has to say both. she says the plate is big enough

And a minute later:

grandpa went on the porch and pointed at nothing. eating now. fish is bad again. dont tell grandma

He showed it to Alexander, and then took it down to the lounge and showed it to Rhys and Sam, and Sam looked at it for a long time, at the two cards against the one glass.

“There’s only one plate,” said Sam.

“She says it’s big enough.”

Sam considered the plate with an accountant’s eye.

“It is,” he said, after a while. “Just.”

---

Theo rang at seven, which was nine at night in New Westminster, from the Hartigans’ flat, with a great deal of noise behind him and somebody, who would be Kate, shouting about a present.

“Merry Christmas Eve, Freddie.”

“Merry Christmas Eve.”

“Dad’s doing the thing with the radio. The carols. He’s got them on the big one in the kitchen and he’s singing the bass.” A door shut, and the noise went down. “He’s not a bass.” A pause. “How is he?”

Frederick was on the step under the narrow window, on the landing, in the jumper, with the thermometer on the wall above him saying seventy-nine, which was a lie.

“He wrote a programme,” he said. “His own. On Saturday.”

There was a short silence on the line.

“How long?”

“Seven lines.”

“Seven’s good,” said Theo. “Short’s good.” Another silence. “Is he eating?”

“All of it. It’s on the programme. He put my brackets in. Eat it.”

“Your brackets,” said Theo, and laughed, once. “Go and get him. I’m not going to say anything. I just want to say it.”

So Frederick went up the last flight and along the corridor and into 312, and held the telephone out across the room, and Alexander got up from the desk and came and took it, and stood in the middle of the floor with it at his ear.

“Good evening, Theo,” he said.

Frederick could not hear what Theo said. He could hear that it was short.

“Frohe Weihnachten,” said Alexander. “Thank you.” He listened. “Yes. All of it.” He listened again, for longer. “Yes,” he said. “I know. You said that on the step. I wrote it down.” He gave the telephone back. “He says that he is going to have a drink,” he said, “and that I am to tell you that he is not crying, it is the carols.”

---

At a quarter to ten the four of them were on the bench in the lobby by the noticeboard.

Nobody had said that this was what they were going to do. Rhys had come down to look at the noticeboard, which had nothing on it but September, and Sam to check the post room, which was shut, and Frederick with no reason at all. And at fourteen minutes to, Alexander had come down the stairs in the grey overcoat, buttoned, with the hat in his hand, and the short programme folded in his pocket with its line 22.00. Mr Luna (the pot), which had been added in ink that afternoon, and sat on the other end, and nobody had said anything about any of it.

At ten the doors opened.

Mr Luna came in through them with the pot.

It was the same pot, an enamel pot, blue with white speckles, the size of a small drum, with the lid tied down with string, and he carried it in both arms wrapped in the striped towel, with a thermos under one elbow, and he put it down on the desk beside the radio and the jar of butterscotch and the faded sun that said IGNACIO, and pressed both hands into the small of his back, and breathed out.

“Feliz Navidad,” said Mr Luna, to the lobby.

“Feliz Navidad,” said Frederick.

Mr Luna looked at the four of them on the bench, in a row, at a quarter past nothing.

“Four of you waiting on a bench,” he said. “Last year three.” He began to untie the string. “Next year I’m going to need a bigger pot.”

He went and fetched the chairs from the lounge himself, and would not be helped, and set them out at the end of the desk in a row beside the plastic one that was always there: four, and then, after a moment’s thought, one more.

---

There were three kinds, and they had come from different rows.

“Red,” said Mr Luna, laying them out on paper plates on the desk, in their husks, steaming, out of the pot, where they had stood on end in rows like books on a shelf. “Pork, red chile. My sister Lupe’s row. Lupe’s heavy on the chile.” He looked at Alexander. “If you’re a crier, son, you’re going to cry.”

“I am not a crier.”

“We’ll see,” said Mr Luna. “This one was,” and nodded at Frederick, and laid out the second kind, smaller and fatter and paler. “Green corn. My niece’s. She’s twenty-seven now and she makes them better than anybody in the family and nobody’s allowed to say so in front of Lupe.” And the third, from the bottom of the pot, a little pink, with raisins showing through. “Sweet. Cinnamon. The kids’. One of ‘em’s got a raisin that isn’t a raisin.”

He unscrewed the thermos and poured the champurrado into five paper cups, thick and dark and steaming, chocolate and corn and cinnamon.

“You unwrap ‘em,” he said. “You don’t eat the husk.” He looked at Rhys over his glasses. “Somebody always eats the husk.”

“Not me,” said Rhys, with dignity. “Not this year.”

Alexander picked up a red one.

He held it for a moment in both hands, as he had held the programme in the minibus, and looked at it, the dried husk folded round the masa and tied at one end with a strip of itself; and then he took the plastic knife and fork from the plate and began, very carefully, to cut it open down the middle, through the husk, as though it were a sausage roll at a reception in the Marble Hall.

The husk did not like it. It split in the wrong place, and the masa came away with it, half on one side and half on the other, and the red chile went down the inside of the husk in a long dark streak, and the tamal lay on the paper plate in two pieces, each stuck to its own half of the husk, like a letter torn in the envelope.

Alexander looked at it.

Mr Luna looked at it too, over his glasses, for some time, with no expression at all.

“Hm,” said Mr Luna.

He took another red one out of the pot and laid it on Alexander’s plate beside the ruin of the first.

“Untie it,” he said. “The end. That’s the string.” Alexander untied it. “Now open it. Don’t cut it. Open it.” He watched. “Like a letter, son. You open it like a letter.”

Alexander opened it like a letter.

He unfolded the husk from the top, one side and then the other, flat, exactly, the way he opened the envelopes that came every morning in the grey box with the red seal, and the tamal lay in the middle of it whole, steaming, red at the seam.

“Now push it off,” said Mr Luna. “With the fork. Push. Don’t pull.”

Alexander pushed. It came off the husk in one piece, clean, onto the plate.

He sat back on the plastic chair and looked at it, and at the empty husk, open and flat, with nothing on it; and then at Mr Luna.

“I open a great many letters,” he said.

“Then you’re set, son,” said Mr Luna, and handed him a fork.

---

The red ones made Frederick cry, as promised, and as last year.

They made Alexander cry too. Frederick watched it happen: the first bite, and the second, and then a very small change at the corners of his eyes, and his face entirely composed over it, upright on the plastic chair in the overcoat with the tears going down quite steadily on both sides, and his fork going on, and not stopping, until the tamal was gone.

“It is very hot,” said Alexander, when it was.

“Told you, son.”

“I am not a crier,” said Alexander. “It is the chile.”

“That’s what they all say,” said Mr Luna, and gave him a paper napkin, and a green one.

Sam ate four green ones, one after another, in a perfectly straight line, and wrote nothing down. Rhys ate the husk of nothing, and was very pleased with himself, and said so twice. And in his second sweet one Sam found the raisin that was not a raisin, and held it up between his finger and thumb, a small silver bell on a thread, and looked at it.

“That’s luck,” said Mr Luna. “Means you’re getting married.”

Sam considered the bell.

“Actuarially,” said Sam, “that’s unlikely,” and put it carefully into the top pocket of the grey quarter-zip, and buttoned the pocket; and Mr Luna looked at him for a while, and then at Rhys, who had had it last year, and said “Didn’t say this year,” to both of them, and drank his champurrado.

The radio played carols, very low, in Spanish, from the church in the old barrio where he had been baptised; and Mr Luna said that his mother had not gone to the Misa de Gallo again this year, because her granddaughter the nurse had said the same thing as last year about ambulances, and his mother had stayed in, because she had wanted to all along and only wanted it recorded that she had been made to.

---

At eleven Rhys got his phone out and sent a message across the road, because the sergeant’s rule was no deliveries, and he was still not sure whether a night porter’s mother counted.

The answer came in under a minute. Rhys held the phone at arm’s length.

“She says,” said Rhys. “Four. Red.”

“Four?”

“Two for her. Two for…” Rhys stopped, and went pink, and looked at Sam, and Sam looked back at him, and Rhys did not finish the sentence.

Sam carried them across at ten past, on a paper plate, under a napkin, four red ones in a row, with two paper cups of champurrado held very level in his other hand; and Frederick watched from the doors as he crossed the dark road under the one street lamp and went up the outside stair beside the dentist’s and knocked, and the door opened about a foot, and the light came out, and the plate and the cups went into it; and then the door shut, and Sam came back down the stair and across the road with exactly the face he had gone with.

“She said thank you,” said Sam.

“Anything else?”

“Kessler said thank you.”

Alexander, on the plastic chair, looked up.

“In which language?”

“German. I think.” Sam considered it. “It sounded like thank you. It was short.”

“Danke.”

“That.”

Alexander looked at the doors, and the dark road beyond them, and the one window over the dentist’s with its light on and its blind halfway down; and then back at the paper plate on his knee with the empty husk on it, open, flat, like a letter that had been read.

“She said one other thing,” said Sam. “She said to tell Mr Luna they were the right ones.”

Mr Luna, at the desk, wrapping the pot back in its towel, did not look up.

“I know they were,” he said.

---

The telephone on the desk rang at midnight.

It was the same telephone, cream-coloured, with the curly cord and the row of buttons, and it rang with a real bell, very loud in the empty lobby; and Mr Luna put down the crossword and picked it up on the second ring without looking at the clock.

“Palo Verde, night desk.” And then, in a different voice altogether: “Sí, Amá.”

He listened.

“Sí. Los comieron. Todos.” He listened. “No, Amá, los rojos.” A pause. “Sí, lloró.” He looked at Frederick over his glasses. “El flaco.” He listened again. Then he looked at Alexander, on the plastic chair, in the overcoat, with the hat on his knee. “Y el alemán también,” said Mr Luna. “Los dos.”

He listened for some time after that. He said sí three times and no once, quite firmly. Then he held the receiver out across the desk on its curly cord, at the full stretch of it.

“She wants the thin one,” said Mr Luna.

Frederick took it.

“Buenas noches, señora,” he said. “Feliz Navidad.”

The voice came at once, very old and very small and absolutely clear, like a piece of paper that has been folded and unfolded a great many times and has never torn; and she did not say good evening. She said, in Spanish, quite fast, as though she had been waiting a year to say it and had no intention of waiting another minute:

“¿Y el novio?”

Frederick stood at the desk with the telephone at his ear and felt his face go, from the ears inwards, the way Rhys’s went.

“Sí, señora,” he said. “Todavía.” Still.

“¿Dónde está?”

“En Inglaterra. Detrás de una barra.” In England. Behind a bar.

There was a short silence on the line, and then a sound that he understood, after a moment, was a woman of ninety-two laughing; and Mr Luna, at the desk, put his hand over his eyes.

“Bueno,” said Mr Luna’s mother. And then, as briskly as before: “¿Y tu mamá?”

“Está bien,” said Frederick. He looked at the paper sun on the front of the desk. “Está muy bien, señora. Este año.”

The old voice did not say anything for a while. He could hear behind it, very faint, a kitchen on the other side of the town, a television with a Mass on it, and somebody laughing in another room.

“Gracias a Dios,” she said, slowly, the first thing she had said slowly. And then, at once, fast again: “¿Y el otro? ¿El alemán? ¿El que no se pone el sombrero?”

And the other one? The German? The one who won’t put his hat on?

Frederick looked at Alexander.

Alexander was sitting on the plastic chair with the hat held in both hands on his knee, upright, looking back at him, with no idea at all that he was being discussed, and the tears from the red tamal not quite dry on his face.

“Está mejor,” said Frederick. He’s better.

“Entonces que coma más,” said Mr Luna’s mother. Then he must eat more. “Y que se ponga el sombrero.” And put his hat on. “Dámelo.”

Give him to me.

---

Frederick held the telephone out across the desk.

“She wants you,” he said.

Alexander looked at the receiver as he had looked at the tamal.

“I do not speak Spanish.”

“Say buenas noches, señora. And feliz Navidad.”

Alexander stood up. He took the receiver, on its curly cord, and held it to his ear, and stood at the desk of Palo Verde Hall in the grey overcoat, upright, the way he stood for an anthem.

“Buenas noches, señora,” he said, with every consonant in it. “Feliz Navidad.”

Then he listened.

He listened for some time. Frederick could hear the voice from where he stood, small and fast and absolutely certain, going on; and Alexander listened to all of it with great attention and no comprehension whatsoever, and at intervals, when the voice went up at the end, he said “Sí,” gravely; and he said it four times, and then the voice stopped, and he said “Sí, señora,” and held out the receiver to Mr Luna across the desk, and Mr Luna took it, and said “Buenas noches, Amá,” and something else, quietly, and put it down.

Alexander sat down on the plastic chair.

“I did not understand any of it,” he said.

“Nobody does, son,” said Mr Luna. “You said sí in the right places.”

“Which were they?”

Mr Luna picked up the crossword.

“She asked were you eating,” he said. “And were you warm enough. And did you have a mother.” He wrote a word, in pen. “And were you going to put that hat on your head where it works.”

Alexander looked at the hat on his knee.

“I said sí to all four,” he said.

“I know,” said Mr Luna. “She’s going to hold you to it.”

---

He went up at one. Mr Luna gave the towel to Alexander this time.

“A boy who can’t fold a towel at twenty,” said Mr Luna, holding it out across the desk, “can’t fold one at forty.”

Alexander took the striped towel, and stood in the lobby, and folded it: once, and once again, and once more, the corners exactly to the corners, in hospital corners, the way somebody in 312 made a bed when the other person in it was in Stockholm; and handed it back, square.

Mr Luna looked at it for a while.

“Huh,” said Mr Luna.

“It took me three goes,” said Frederick, on the stairs.

“I know,” said Alexander. “You wrote and told me. Last January. You said that it was the hardest thing you had done in the Realm.” He counted the steps under his breath, and Frederick did not, and on the landing the thermometer said seventy-nine, and the step under the narrow window was in shadow, and the one window across the road had its light on. “I have been practising,” said Alexander. “Since August. On my own towels.”

In 312 he took the short programme out of his pocket, and unfolded it on the desk by the door under the lamp, and ticked 22.00. Mr Luna (the pot), at seven minutes past one in the morning, for the time he had been told.

Then he wrote under it, small, in ink, in his exact hand, a line that had not been there before; and Frederick, who had come to stand by the desk to take off the jumper, read it upside down under the lamp.

00.00. Telephone. Señora Luna. Sí (4).

Alexander ticked it, and looked at it for a moment, and then turned off the lamp; and they lay in the dark at sixty-two degrees, the bed by the door and the bed by the window; and Frederick thought of four sís said gravely into a cream telephone in the right places, and of a woman of ninety-two in a kitchen on the other side of the town, who was going to hold somebody to every one of them.