The Timetable

The guns began at eight, as they had begun at eight on every eighteenth of January of his life, and Alexander was already awake to count them.

He lay on his back in the dark with his hands folded on the blanket and counted. The battery was on the parade ground beyond the Neuer Garten, a mile off, and the sound came across the frozen lake flat and late, a thud and then the window answering it, a small tremor in the glass, so that each gun arrived twice, once in the air and once in the frame. There were to be twenty-one for the King of Prussia and a further twenty for the Emperor, because the two offices were legally distinct, and the Ministry of War, which had once proposed in a memorandum to combine them for economy, had been answered in a memorandum of its own that the Constitution did not permit the Crown to be saluted at a discount. Forty-one. He had read both memoranda when he was eleven. He had thought the second one the finest piece of German prose of the twentieth century and he still did.

Seventeen. Eighteen.

He was nineteen today. It was Kingdom Day, the anniversary of the crowning at Königsberg in 1701 and of the proclamation of 1871, and a public holiday in every province of Prussia from the Rhine to the Memel, and it was also his birthday, which was the only part of it that was his. He had been born on it. The newspapers had said, at the time, that the date was a sign; his father had said, at the time, that it was a Saturday, and that it would very likely be the last thing that ever happened to the boy at a weekend.

Thirty-four. Thirty-five.

At forty-one the window stopped. He lay and listened to it stop. Then he reached under the pillow, where he had put it last night at eleven, and took out a sheet of paper folded in four, and unfolded it on his chest in the dark, and did not need the light to know what was on it.

---

There were two programmes for the eighteenth of January 2033.

The first was the official one. It had been prepared by the Hofmarschall’s office in November, approved by the imperial and Prussian secretariats separately in December, because the two offices were legally distinct, and printed in the second week of January on stiff cream card with the arms at the head, in a run of four hundred, for the Household, the ministries, the press office, the protection department and the guests. It had eleven items. Alexander had read it, as he read everything he was given, twice: once for the order of events and once for the errors, of which there was one, on the second page, where the time of the Te Deum in the Nikolaikirche was given as half past ten in the German text and ten thirty in the English, which was the same time and therefore not an error, and he had been disappointed.

The eleven items were these. Eight o’clock, the guns. Nine, the guard mounted at the Neues Palais. Half past ten, the Te Deum in the Nikolaikirche on the Alter Markt, with the Minister-President and the Landtag. Twelve, the deputations of the provinces in the Marble Hall: Rhineland, Westphalia, Brandenburg, Silesia, Pomerania, East and West Prussia, Posen, Saxony, Hesse-Nassau, Hanover’s observers and Schleswig-Holstein, a sentence from each, a sentence back, eleven sentences, two minutes each. One, luncheon for the deputations. Three, the schools. Four, the regimental reception. Five, rest. Seven, the birthday dinner in the Grotto Hall of the Neues Palais for thirty-two. Ten, the guests depart. Half past ten, Nachtruhe.

Nachtruhe was the Household’s word, and he had always liked it. It meant night’s rest. It was what the old Hohenzollerns had written at the foot of their days, and the Hofmarschall’s office still wrote it at the foot of his, in the same Gothic hand, as though someone in the office believed that if it were not written down he might not go to bed.

The second programme was not printed. It was on a single sheet of Neues Palais writing paper, in pencil, in the square hand he had been taught at six and had never made his own, and there was one copy of it in the world, and he was holding it on his chest in the dark.

It began where the first one ended.

21.40. That was the first line. Nothing beside it. It did not need anything beside it.

Below it there were nineteen more. They went down the page in a single column, each time on the left and each item on the right, and they ran from twenty to ten in the evening of the eighteenth to ten past eight in the morning of the nineteenth, which was the time, according to the observatory’s tables, at which the sun would rise over Berlin, and at the foot of them, where the official programme said Nachtruhe, it said, in the same square pencil:

08.10. Sonnenaufgang. Kreuzberg.

Sunrise. He had written it three weeks ago, at the desk in the dome, at half past one in the morning, and then sat for a long time looking at it, because he had never in his life written a programme for himself and had not known, until he was doing it, that he knew how.

He folded it in four again and put it back under the pillow, and lay looking at the ceiling, which was getting grey.

---

He had written it because of Phoenix.

That was not the whole of the reason, and he was a person who preferred the whole of a reason to part of one, but it was where the reason began. A year and five months ago, on the nineteenth of August 2031, on the morning of Theo Hartigan’s eighteenth birthday, his cousin had stood at the back of a water treatment works in a hard hat that did not fit and pulled a gold cord three times and watched it come away in his hand; and that evening, with Theo and Jack and Lukas and Alexander, he had got on a bus. A city bus. On Camelback Road. With no plan and no detail and nothing in his pockets but twenty pound coins, and Theo, who could read a timetable, telling them where to change.

It had been the best night of Alexander’s life.

He had not said so to anybody, because it would have sounded like something a person says. But he had known it on the summit of Camelback Mountain at sunrise, sitting on a rock with Lukas, with his cousin standing a little way off on the very top with his back to them, looking east, and Jack sitting down and holding on, and Theo with his birthday watch on his chest, and Kimura small on the trail below running up with a phone in her hand, and he had known it every day since. He had counted, afterwards, in the plane, the things that had happened to him that night that had never happened to him before. There were thirty-one. He had been carded. He had been given an orange wristband. He had been bought a margarita by a man in a fishing hat whose grandfather was from Bremen. He had asked a policeman for directions. He had been recognised in five bars by five strangers who had bought him five drinks, of which he had taken five sips, and his cousin, standing next to him, the King of fourteen countries, had been recognised by nobody at all and had paid for his own lemonade, in coins, with his own face on them.

And he had done none of it. That was the thing he had understood in the plane. Every one of the thirty-one things had happened to him. He had not made one of them happen. Theo had found the bus. Chaos had chosen the bars. Kessler had followed them all night in a dark car with its lights off and said nothing, which was Kessler’s gift and Kessler’s decision. Alexander had been carried through the best night of his life like a parcel.

He was nineteen. He was of age. Nobody now exercised his powers but himself; the Regency had ended at his sixteenth birthday, and his sister’s advisory office at his eighteenth, and for a year now every paper that came to him in the red box from Berlin and every paper in the blue box from the Prussian secretariat had been his to read and his to sign and his to refuse, and he had read all of them, twice. He had not once in that year done anything that was not on a programme.

So he had written one.

---

At nine he was dressed and standing on the steps of the Neues Palais in the uniform of the First Foot Guards, which he wore once a year, today, because the First Foot Guards had stood at the proclamation of 1871 and the Household had never found a reason to stop, and the guard was mounted on the forecourt in the snow.

It was very cold. The thermometer on the colonnade said nine degrees below. The snow on the forecourt had been swept into two long white banks on either side, exactly parallel, and between them the guard came on in its grey greatcoats and its spiked helmets with the black horsehair, two companies, to the band, at the slow march, and wheeled, and halted, and the officer came forward and saluted, and Alexander returned it, and it took eleven minutes, as it had taken eleven minutes the year before and the year before that.

Behind him on the steps the Household stood in its furs in order of precedence, and behind the Household, in the doorway, out of the wind, in a dark overcoat with the collar up and his hands in his pockets, stood the King of Great Britain, Hanover, America and eleven other countries, who had arrived the evening before on the late flight from New Westminster and was here, the Household had been told and the newspapers had been told, privately, for his cousin’s birthday.

Alexander did not turn round. He could feel his cousin there. He could feel, in the precise way he had felt such things since he was small, where everybody on the steps was standing and how far each of them was from each other and from him: the Hofmarschall two paces to his left and one behind; his mother three paces behind him, in grey, in the only fur she wore; Kessler at the end of the steps by the pillar, in a dark coat, with his face, which Theo had once said looked like the end of a wardrobe, turned toward the forecourt and his eyes on everything else; and in the doorway, behind them all, his cousin, and beside his cousin, a small upright woman in a black coat with her black hair cut short, who was Sergeant Kimura, and who was looking, Alexander knew without turning, not at the guard and not at the forecourt but at the back of the German Emperor’s head.

He wondered whether she could see the shape of a folded sheet of paper in his breast pocket through the cloth of the First Foot Guards.

He decided that she could not, and that if she could, she would say nothing, and that he would rather not know.

---

They did not speak until the deputations.

That was the programme. The guard, and then the Te Deum, where his cousin sat three rows behind him in the Nikolaikirche between Theo and Jack, who had come on the same late flight and who had been put, by the Hofmarschall’s office, in the fourth row of a state service in a Lutheran church on Kingdom Day without, so far as Alexander could see from the order of service, anybody having asked either of them whether they were Lutherans. Jack was not anything, as far as Alexander knew, except a landlady’s son from Gloucestershire. Theo was a Catholic from Milwaukee. They had both stood and sat and stood again at the right moments, by watching the row in front, and Jack had sung the chorale in English, loudly, to a tune that was not the tune, and nobody in the Nikolaikirche had said a word.

And then the Marble Hall, and the deputations.

The Marble Hall was the largest room in the Neues Palais and the coldest, a long hall of red and white marble with a painted ceiling of gods in a sky that had been very bright in 1769 and was now the colour of weak tea, and the deputations came up it one at a time from the far end to the dais where he stood, a man or a woman from each province, in the costume of the province where the province had a costume, and stopped at the foot of the dais and said their sentence, and he said his.

The Rhineland said that the Rhineland wished the King a happy birthday and reminded him of the bridges. He said that he remembered the bridges. Westphalia said that Westphalia had sent a ham. He said that Westphalia was very kind. Brandenburg said that Brandenburg was proud to have him and hoped he would come to Cottbus. He said that he would come to Cottbus. Silesia, an old woman in black with a stick, said something in a dialect he did not understand and then, in German, and God keep you, child, and he said, and you, and meant it.

Then Hanover’s observers came up the hall. Hanover was not a province of Prussia, it was a kingdom of the Empire in its own right, and its King was not him; its King was standing at the side of the Marble Hall by a window, behind the Household, in a dark suit, with Theo and Jack on either side of him. So Hanover sent observers to the Prussian deputations on Kingdom Day, two of them, by a courtesy two hundred years old, and they came up the hall and bowed to the Emperor at the foot of the dais and said that the Kingdom of Hanover sent its greetings to His Majesty the German Emperor on his birthday.

And then they turned round, both of them, without being told to, and bowed again, lower, to the window.

There was a small sound in the Marble Hall. It was not a gasp. It was what a room does when two hundred people realise at the same moment that something has happened which is not on the card.

Alexander looked at the window. His cousin, by it, had gone very slightly pink, the way he did when he was looked at in a room, and inclined his head to the observers of the Kingdom of Hanover about an inch, and Jack, beside him, was looking at the painted ceiling with an expression of enormous innocence, and Theo had put his hand over his mouth.

Alexander turned back to the observers and said that the Emperor thanked the Kingdom of Hanover, and the observers went away down the hall, very pleased with themselves, and Schleswig-Holstein came up.

He did not look at the window again. But he thought, standing on the dais in the uniform of the First Foot Guards with the gods fading above him, that it had begun already, at a quarter past twelve, before anybody had even left the building. Last year in America nobody had known who his cousin was. This year, in Germany, everybody did.

---

At five, by the official programme, he rested.

He went back to the house by the Heiliger See, where he had lived all his life, and up the stairs, and up the narrow stair beyond them to the dome, where nobody came unless he asked them, and sat at the desk under the slit, which was shut, in the cold, with the lamp on, and unfolded the second programme on the desk and smoothed it flat with both hands and read it once more.

21.40. Communs.

21.48. Wagen, Hintertor.

22.05. Meierei.

23.02. S7, Potsdam Hbf.

It went on down the page. He did not read the rest. He knew the rest.

At twenty past five the door at the foot of the stair opened and closed, and somebody came up, slowly, the way only one person in the house came up those stairs, as though each step had been personally designed to give offence, and the trapdoor in the floor lifted, and Lukas Brandt put his head through it, in his coat and his school scarf and the hat with the flaps, although he had not been at school for two years, and looked at Alexander at the desk, and at the sheet of paper.

He had been told. He was the only one who had. He had been told on the tenth of December, here, in the dome, at half past one in the morning, when Alexander had finished writing it and had sat looking at it and had then, without having decided to, read it aloud.

Lukas had listened to the whole of it, all twenty lines, sitting on the boards with his back to the pier of the telescope, and at the end he had said nothing for a long time. Then he had said one thing, which was all Lukas ever said on an ordinary night, and it had been: “You have put the sun in it.”

Now he climbed the rest of the way up through the trapdoor and stood on the boards and looked at the desk.

“It is still the same,” said Alexander.

Lukas nodded.

“They arrived last night. All three. I have not told them.”

Lukas nodded again.

“I will tell them at dinner. At the end. After the speeches. There will be a moment, between the speeches and the guests departing, when the Hofmarschall goes to see to the cars, and Kessler goes with him, because Kessler always goes to see to the cars.” He folded the paper in four and put it in his breast pocket. “That is the moment.”

Lukas looked at him. He had grey eyes, very steady, and a face that was not yet sure what it was going to be, and he had known Alexander since they were nine, and he had been made Page and Gefährte when Alexander became Emperor, which was an office with no duties that anyone had ever been able to write down, and he had never once in ten years told Alexander that something he wanted to do was a bad idea.

He did not tell him now. He sat down on the boards, with his back to the pier, and took the flask out of his coat, and unscrewed it, and poured, and held the cup up.

It was cocoa. It was always cocoa.

“Happy birthday,” said Lukas.

That was one. On an ordinary night it was all there was. Alexander took the cup and drank, and wondered, because it was not an ordinary night, whether there would be another.