The Späti

They crossed the Spree by the Oberbaum Bridge at twenty-eight minutes past three, and it was the first time that night that Alexander did not know the time until somebody told him.

Theo told him. Theo said, “Three twenty-eight,” at the foot of the bridge, out of habit, and then looked at Alexander, and Alexander understood that Theo was waiting to see whether he would take out the programme and make a mark, and he did not, because there was nothing on the programme to make a mark beside. He found that he had stopped looking at his watch at some point between the steel door and the river, and could not have said when, and that this was the first time he had stopped looking at his watch since he was given it, at seven, by his father, with the instruction that a sovereign who has to ask the time has already lost the room.

The bridge was long and red and built of brick, with arches under it over the black water, and on top of it, on a second deck, a railway on its own iron viaduct went across in the air, and in the middle, on either side, there were two towers with pointed roofs like the towers of a castle in a book. It had been built, Alexander knew, to look old when it was new, in the reign of an Emperor who had liked things to look old, and it had succeeded so well that the people who crossed it every day thought it was medieval and were offended when they were told it was not. He did not tell the others. He was finding, as the night went on, that there were things he knew that he did not need to say, and that not saying them was a new kind of pleasure, like taking off a coat.

They crossed it in the middle of the road, because there was no traffic, five abreast, under the towers, with the railway above them silent, and the river below them going east toward the Silesian lands with lumps of ice in it turning slowly in the dark.

On the far side, the city changed.

---

It changed the way cities do when they cross water. On the north bank there had been the railway land and the station and the big plain buildings of the Empire’s business; on the south bank, in Kreuzberg, there were streets, close and crowded and tall, tenements of five storeys with courtyards behind them and courtyards behind the courtyards, the old working Berlin that his great-great-grandfathers had built for the people who built everything else, with shops on the ground floor of every corner and the snow banked in the gutters and bicycles chained to every railing and buried to the saddle. There were lights in some of the windows. There were always lights in some of the windows in Kreuzberg, he had read, because Kreuzberg was where people worked the hours nobody else would.

On the second corner there was a shop with its light on.

It was a small shop, in the ground floor of a tenement, with a window full of things in no order at all: bottles, newspapers, sweets, a stack of firewood in nets, a row of lighters on a card, a small brass bicycle bell on a card of its own, tins of soup, a single cactus in a pot, a sign that said GEÖFFNET, open, in red letters, and a sign under it, handwritten, that said IMMER, always. Outside the window, on the pavement, there was a bench, and beside the bench a stack of empty beer crates, and the snow had been swept off the bench and off the top crate and off a square of pavement in front of the door, carefully, as though somebody expected company.

Inside, behind a counter, under a lamp, a man of about sixty in a cardigan and reading glasses was doing a crossword.

“Oh,” said Jack. “Oh, that’s a shop.”

“It is a Späti,” said Alexander. “A late shop. Berlin has them on every corner. They sell everything, until whenever.” He looked at the sign that said IMMER. “Usually until whenever.”

“Is it on the programme?”

“Nothing is on the programme.”

Jack looked at him, and then at the shop, and then at him again, with an expression that Alexander had last seen on Jack’s face in Scottsdale, at the gate of Boondocks, when the man with the roll of wristbands had put one on each of them and waved them in.

“Then I’m going in,” said Jack, “and I’m buying something, and I’m sitting on that bench,” and went in.

---

The man in the cardigan looked up when the bell over the door rang, and saw Jack in the cape, and looked down again at his crossword, and wrote in a word. Then the bell rang again, and his cousin came in, in the black overcoat and the green felt hat, and the man looked up again, over the reading glasses, and stopped with his pencil in the air.

He looked at the King of Hanover for some time.

“Na,” he said at last. “Der Wirt.”

His cousin closed his eyes.

“Ja,” said his cousin.

The man in the cardigan put down his pencil. He took off his reading glasses and folded them and put them in the pocket of his cardigan. He got up off his stool, slowly, the way a man gets up who has been sitting since nine in the evening, and went to the fridge at the back of the shop, which hummed, and opened it, and took out a bottle of beer, a small brown bottle of the kind that Berlin drank on benches, and opened it with a lighter from the card on the counter in one movement of his thumb, and put it on the counter in front of the King of Hanover, and sat down again on his stool.

“Geht aufs Haus,” he said. On the house. And then, in an English that had been learned from films, flatly: “For the August. With the beer. And your Emperor.” He put the reading glasses back on and looked at his crossword. “You pour badly.”

“I know,” said his cousin.

“Very badly.”

“Seven,” said Alexander, from the door.

The man in the cardigan looked up at him, over the reading glasses, at the young man in the navy coat with the red collar who had said a number, and looked at him for exactly as long as a Berliner looks at anybody, which is not long, and looked down again at the crossword.

“He counts,” said the man in the cardigan to the King, with his pencil, not looking up. “Your friend. Is he all right?”

“He’s fine,” said his cousin. “He’s Prussian.”

“Ah,” said the man in the cardigan, as one says ah to a diagnosis, and wrote in another word.

---

They bought things. Jack had already bought whatever he had gone in for, with a note of his own, before anybody else came in, and had put it inside the cape without showing anyone. Everything else Alexander bought, with the leather purse that had been his father’s: a bottle of beer for Jack and one for Theo, and a bottle of something brown and fizzy and very sweet for himself, because he wanted to know what it was, and a packet of biscuits, and a bar of chocolate with a cow on it, and, on an impulse that he did not examine, the cactus in the pot from the window, which had a price on it in pencil and looked, he thought, as though it had been in that window for a long time and would like to go somewhere. Lukas bought nothing, and then, at the last moment, a newspaper, yesterday’s, the evening edition, which had on its front page a photograph of the guard being mounted at the Neues Palais that morning, in the snow, with a small figure on the steps in a spiked helmet returning a salute.

Alexander put a five-mark piece on the counter.

The man in the cardigan picked it up. He did not look at it as the waitress at the Meierei had not looked at it, because nobody looks at a coin; but he was a man who did crosswords, and a man who did crosswords looked at things, and he held the coin up under the lamp between his finger and thumb and turned it, so that the light ran round the rim and across the face, and looked at the head on it, the young man’s head in profile facing left with the crown on it, the head that had been struck at fifteen in the year after the accession and was in every till in Prussia.

“Armer Kerl,” said the man in the cardigan. Poor sod.

Alexander stood very still at the counter.

“Nineteen,” said the man, to the coin. “Yesterday. Did you see him? On the television, this morning? On the steps. In that helmet. In this cold.” He shook his head, slowly. “Eleven minutes, they stood him there. I timed it. With the kettle.” He put the coin in the till and shut it. “And tonight they will have had him at a dinner in Potsdam with thirty people who are not his friends, and made him listen to speeches about himself, and by half past ten he will have been in bed, with a guard on the door.” He gave Alexander his change, in coins, with the same head on all of them. “Nachtruhe. They still write it on the programme. I read that once. They write it at the bottom, like he is a child.”

“Yes,” said Alexander. “I believe they do.”

“Somebody should take that boy out for a beer,” said the man in the cardigan. “Once. Before they wear him out.” And went back to his crossword.

Alexander took his change and the cactus and went out of the shop and sat down on the bench in the snow, and held the cactus in his lap, and did not say anything for some time.

Nobody asked him what was wrong. His cousin had heard it. Theo had heard it, and Lukas, and Jack, who did not speak German, had heard the tone of it, and they came out of the shop one by one and sat down round him, on the bench and on the crates, with their bottles, and did not ask him anything, and Alexander understood that this was the kindest thing that four people had ever done for him at once.

“He was right,” said Alexander eventually, to the cactus. “About the eleven minutes.”

“He timed it with the kettle,” said Theo.

“Yes,” said Alexander. “That is the part I will keep.”

---

They sat outside the late shop on the corner for an hour.

It was the strangest hour of the night and the most ordinary, and afterwards Alexander could not have said what happened in it, because nothing did, and that was the thing that happened. They sat on the bench and the crates in the square of swept pavement under the light from the window, in the cold, with the snow banked up round them and the tenements going up into the dark on every side, and drank from the small brown bottles, and ate the biscuits, and broke the chocolate with the cow on it into five pieces, exactly, which Alexander did, because he was the only one who could; and the brown fizzy drink was very sweet and tasted of something he could not name and kept him, he thought, more awake than he had ever been, and he decided he would not ask what was in it.

Now and then somebody came along the street. A woman in a long coat with a violin case, coming home from somewhere, who looked at the King of Hanover on a beer crate, and said na, and went into the shop, and came out with milk, and said na again, going past, in a slightly different tone, and went away. Two young men on bicycles, riding through the snow in the middle of the road, slowly, wobbling, who saw the green felt hat and shouted WIRT! together, and raised their fists, and rode on without stopping. A man with a dog, possibly the same dog, in a different coat. Nobody stopped. Nobody bought anything for anybody. It was Kreuzberg at four in the morning, and Kreuzberg had seen everything at four in the morning, including, Alexander supposed, a King on a crate, and regarded it as no business of anybody’s but the King’s.

Theo sat beside him on the bench.

“Can I tell you something?” said Theo. “That I’m not supposed to?”

“Yes.”

“Your sister sent me her notes.”

Alexander turned his head.

“From her second year,” said Theo. “Pharmacology. In October. When I went back. I’d written to you that I was finding it hard, the pharmacology, and you must have told her, or she read it over your shoulder, I don’t know. And a packet came. Forty pages. In English. She’d translated them herself, you could tell, the English was all slightly too correct. With diagrams. And a note on the top.” Theo looked at the bottle in his hands. “It said, Do not tell my brother.”

Alexander looked at him for a long moment.

“I did not tell her,” he said. “That you were finding it hard.”

“Then she read it over your shoulder.”

“She does not read over shoulders,” said Alexander. “She reads the letter afterwards, in the library, when I have gone to bed, and puts it back in exactly the same place in the envelope, the same way up, and thinks I do not know.” He looked out at the snow. “I have always known. I have never told her. It is the only thing in the house that is nobody’s business but ours.”

“Should I not have told you?”

“No,” said Alexander. “You should have told me.” He thought about Charlotte at a desk in the library at two in the morning translating forty pages of her own pharmacology notes into English that was slightly too correct, for a boy from Milwaukee she had met perhaps four times, because her brother’s letter had said that the boy was finding it hard. “She is on nights this week. At the Charité. Until eight.”

“Could we go and see her?”

“No,” said Alexander. “She would put all five of us on a drip and write us up for the psychiatrist.” He paused. “Possibly she would be right.”

---

The baker came at twenty past four.

He came along the street from the direction of the river, a big man of about forty in a white jacket under a padded coat, with flour on the cuffs of the jacket and a woollen hat, walking fast with his head down, the way a man walks who has somewhere to be at half past four every morning of his life; and he went into the shop, and the bell rang, and the man in the cardigan said Morgen without looking up and reached under the counter and put a packet of cigarettes on it, the same packet, Alexander guessed, that he had put on it every morning for twenty years.

It was Jack who spoke to him.

Jack had been quiet for most of the hour. He had been sitting on the top crate with his bottle, in the cape, looking at the street, at the lit windows in the tenements, at the sign in the shop that said IMMER, with an expression that Alexander had been watching grow all night, since the Meierei, since the woman in the apron had looked at him with pity when he asked about last orders; an expression of a landlady’s son who has come at last to the end of something. And when the baker came out of the shop with his cigarettes and stopped on the swept square of pavement to light one, Jack stood up off the crate.

“Excuse me,” said Jack. “Sorry. Entschuldigung. Do you speak English?”

The baker looked at him over the lighter.

“Some,” he said.

“Can I ask you something? About Berlin?”

The baker lit the cigarette, and put the lighter away, and looked at Jack in his cape, and at the King of Hanover on the bench, at whom he looked for perhaps a second, and said na, and looked back at Jack, and waited.

“When do the pubs shut?” said Jack.

The baker considered it.

“When they are empty,” he said.

“No, but, like, what time. When’s last orders. When does somebody ring the bell.”

“What bell?”

Jack took a breath. Alexander saw him take it, and knew, with a feeling of great tenderness, that Jack was going to explain, and that nothing on earth was going to stop him.

“Right,” said Jack. “So. Where I’m from. Gloucestershire. In England. My mum’s the landlady of a pub, and she’s been behind that bar since before I was born, and every night at ten to eleven she rings a bell. A brass one. It hangs over the bar on a hook and it’s got a rope on it, and at ten to eleven she rings it, once, and she says last orders, and everybody’s got ten minutes to get one more in. And then at eleven she rings it again, three times, and she says time, gentlemen, please, and everybody finishes up and puts their coats on and goes home. Every night. Since before I was born. And it doesn’t matter who you are. It doesn’t matter if you’re the vicar or the squire or a farmer or some lad on his first pint. It doesn’t matter if you’re the King.” He pointed at the bench, without looking. “He’s had it. At ours. He’s been rung out like anybody. And everybody goes. Because it’s time. Because somebody’s decided. And then you go home, and it’s done, and you know it’s done, and the night’s over, and it was a good night, because it ended.” He stopped. “And I’ve been in this city since half past nine and I’ve asked in every single place and there isn’t one. There isn’t a bell anywhere. There’s no last orders. Nobody ever decides. It just goes on and on, and it never ends, and you never know when you’re allowed to go home.” He looked at the baker in despair. “How do you know? How do you know when it’s over?”

The baker smoked his cigarette and looked at Jack for a long time.

“So,” he said, in his English that had been learned from somewhere, flatly. “Every night. A woman rings a bell. And everybody goes home.”

“Yes!”

“Even if they are not finished.”

“That’s the point.”

“And she decides. Your mother. When everybody has had enough.”

“Yes.”

“Since before you were born.”

“Yes.”

The baker nodded slowly. He took the cigarette out of his mouth and looked at the end of it, and then at Jack, with an expression of perfect Berlin seriousness, and said:

“In Berlin we have a word for that.”

“What?” said Jack. “What’s the word?”

“Kindheit,” said the baker.

He put the cigarette back in his mouth, and nodded to the King of Hanover on the bench, Majestät, and walked away up the street toward his ovens, fast, with his head down, leaving a small trail of smoke in the cold behind him, and did not look back.

Jack stood on the pavement.

“What’s Kindheit?” he said.

Nobody answered for a moment. Then Lukas, from the crate at the end, looking at yesterday’s newspaper, said, quite quietly, “Childhood.”

Jack stood on the swept square of pavement outside the late shop in the snow, in the cape, with his bottle in his hand, and looked up the empty street after the baker, and said nothing for a long time; and Alexander, on the bench with the cactus in his lap, watched him, and saw the expression on his face change, slowly, from despair to something else, something that Alexander would not have expected and could not at first have named, and then could.

It was the face of a landlady’s son who has just been told, by a stranger, at twenty to five in the morning, that if he wants a bell, he will have to ring it himself.

“Right,” said Jack, at last, to nobody, very quietly. “Right.”

He sat back down on the crate. He did not say anything else. But Alexander saw him put his hand inside the cape, at the chest, where a person keeps a thing he means to use later, and keep it there.

---

At twenty to five Alexander stood up from the bench.

He did not take out the programme. He stood on the swept pavement with the cactus in the crook of his arm and looked at the four of them on the crates and the bench, under the light of the shop window that said IMMER, and found that he knew what came next without looking, as one knows the next line of a thing one has said every night of one’s life, and that it was not on any programme and did not need to be.

“The hill,” he said. “We should go toward the hill. Slowly.”

“How slowly?” said Theo.

“We have until seven,” said Alexander. “We will walk until we get there, and stop wherever we stop, and if we are early, we will be early.” He thought about it. “I have been early once tonight. I believe I can bear it.”

His cousin got up off the bench. He went back into the shop, alone, and Alexander saw him through the window go up to the counter and say something to the man in the cardigan, and the man look up over his reading glasses, and listen, and then put down his pencil and laugh, a short dry Berlin laugh, and shake the King of Hanover’s hand across the counter, once, firmly, as one shakes the hand of a man who has paid his bill.

“What did you say to him?” said Alexander, when his cousin came out.

“I told him somebody had,” said his cousin.

“Had what?”

“Taken that boy out for a beer.” His cousin put his hands in his pockets. “He said, good, and then he said, and is he enjoying it?, and I said, he bought a cactus.” He looked at the cactus in the crook of Alexander’s arm. “And he said, then yes.”

They walked on into Kreuzberg, five of them and a cactus, toward the hill that gave the district its name, through the tenement streets in the snow; and behind them, under the light of the shop window, the man in the cardigan took off his reading glasses and came to the door and stood in it, for a moment, in the cold, and watched them go, and Alexander, who was not looking back, knew it anyway, and was glad.