The S7

The tickets had been bought on the tenth of December, at a quarter to four in the afternoon, from the machine on the concourse of Potsdam Hauptbahnhof, in cash, by Lukas, in his school scarf and the hat with the flaps.

There were five of them. They were the small stiff orange cards that the machines printed when you asked for a day ticket for the whole network, Berlin and its surroundings, zones A, B and C, valid from the first train of a date you chose to three in the morning of the next, and Lukas had chosen the eighteenth of January 2033, five times, and paid for them with a fifty-mark note, and received his change in coins, and brought them back to the dome and laid them on the desk in a row, without saying anything, and Alexander had looked at them for a long time.

He had never had a ticket for a train. He had travelled on trains all his life, on the imperial train and the Prussian train, and on the ordinary express from Berlin to Hanover in a reserved carriage with Kessler at one end and somebody else at the other, and once, at twelve, in a cab with the driver, because he had asked; but he had never in his life held a piece of card that said he had paid to be there. He had put the five tickets in an envelope and the envelope in the drawer of the desk with the log, and taken them out every night for five weeks to look at them, and on the fifteenth of January had moved them to the breast pocket of the First Foot Guards, behind the programme, where they had been all day, through the guard and the Te Deum and the eleven deputations and the dinner, against his chest.

He took them out now, on the platform, and gave them out, one each, like a man dealing cards.

“Tageskarte,” he said. “Zones A, B and C. Valid until three in the morning. After three we are travelling without tickets, which is an offence, but by then we will be walking.”

Theo turned his over and read the back of it, all of it, the conditions in small print, with his lips moving.

“You bought a ticket for the King,” said Theo.

“I bought a ticket for everyone.”

“He’s never had a ticket either. Has he.” Theo looked up at his friend, who was standing a little way along the platform, under a lamp, in the black overcoat, holding his orange card in both hands and looking at it the way he had looked at the bottle on its own on the shelf at Giligin’s. “He’s going to keep that. He’s going to keep it in a drawer for the rest of his life.”

“I know,” said Alexander. “So am I.”

---

Potsdam Hauptbahnhof at eleven at night on Kingdom Day was nearly empty. The fireworks in Berlin had been at ten, over the Spree, from barges, and the half of Potsdam that had gone in to see them was still in Berlin, on the far side of the city, waiting on some other platform to come home, and the half that had stayed was in the Meierei and the other pubs of the old town, or in bed. The platform for the S7 was long and grey and lit in pools, with the snow blown in at the open end and lying in a thin drift along the edge, and there were nine people on it besides the five of them: two old men with a dog, a woman with a pram, a young couple in identical red hats, and four nuns.

Nobody looked at Alexander.

Everybody looked at his cousin, or tried not to. The old men looked and then looked at their dog. The woman with the pram looked and then said something to the pram. The young couple in the red hats looked, and looked at each other, and the girl took out her phone and then, very visibly, decided not to, and put it away again, which Alexander thought was the most Prussian thing he had seen all day. The four nuns looked, all four, together, and then went into a huddle, and one of them, the youngest, came out of the huddle and walked along the platform towards them with her hands folded in front of her and her face very red, and stopped in front of his cousin.

“Majestät,” she said. “Entschuldigung. We are from Hanover. From the convent at Wennigsen. We prayed for you. In October. When you were in the bar.” She paused. “We prayed that you would not drop anything.”

His cousin looked at her.

“Thank you,” he said, in German, slowly. “It worked.”

The nun went back to the huddle, glowing, and the huddle received her like a returning hero, and Jack, in the cape, at the edge of the platform, put his forehead against a pillar.

“Nuns,” said Jack. “Nuns pray for him. In Hanover.” He turned his head on the pillar and looked at Alexander. “Do nuns pray for you?”

“Every day,” said Alexander. “It is in the liturgy. For the Emperor and the King. By office.” He watched the young nun telling the others about it with her hands. “Nobody has ever prayed that I would not drop anything.”

---

The two minutes past eleven came in at a minute past, because it was a holiday and the drivers were early on holidays, which Theo said was the opposite of everywhere else in the world, and they got on.

It was a long red and cream train of the old kind, with seats facing each other in fours, and the carriage they got into had nobody in it, and Alexander sat down by the window, facing the way they were going, because the programme had been written facing the way they were going, and his cousin sat opposite, and Theo beside his cousin with his phone, and Lukas beside Alexander, and Jack across the aisle, in a seat of his own, so that he could spread the cape.

The doors closed. The train pulled out. Potsdam went by in the dark, the old town and the river, and then the Havel, very wide and frozen, with the lights of the bridges on it, and then the woods.

Alexander took out the programme and looked at it.

23.02. S7, Potsdam Hbf. He made a small tick beside it with a pencil from his pocket, very neatly, in the margin. It was the fifth tick. There were four above it: 21.40, Communs; 21.48, Wagen; 22.05, Meierei; 22.45, Wagen. Each tick was the same size. He had practised the size of the tick in the dome, on another piece of paper, so that they would match.

Across the table, his cousin watched him do it.

“How long has it got to go?” said his cousin.

“Fifteen lines.”

“And you’re going to tick every one.”

“Yes.”

“What if one of them doesn’t happen?”

Alexander considered the question honestly, with the pencil in his hand, while the woods went by.

“Then I will put a small cross beside it,” he said. “And the time it did happen, if it did, in brackets. That is how the Hofmarschall’s office does it. I have seen the files. Every programme of my life has ticks and crosses on it in the margin, in the same ink, and some of them have times in brackets.” He put the pencil away. “Mine will be the same. Except in pencil. And by me.”

His cousin looked at him across the table for a while. Then he looked out of the window at the woods, and at his own face in the glass with the woods going through it, and said, quietly, not to Alexander exactly:

“I’ve never had a programme I could put a cross on.”

“Nor had I,” said Alexander. “Until this one.”

---

At Wannsee a crowd got on.

They had come from the fireworks, the wrong way, because they were not going home, they were going on, as the young of Berlin went on after everything; and there were about twenty of them, young men and women of twenty or so, in black and white scarves and black and white woollen hats, because black and white were the colours of Prussia and on Kingdom Day the young wore them to the fireworks the way the young in Milwaukee, Theo said, wore green on Saint Patrick’s Day, which was to say without any very clear idea why, and loudly. They came down the carriage in a body, singing, with three bottles of Sekt between them and a stack of paper cups, and filled the seats round the five of them and the seats across the aisle round Jack, who sat in the middle of them in the loden cape and the stag clasp with an expression of a man who has been surrounded by geese.

They were singing the Prussian anthem. They were singing it badly, and too fast, and with words in the second verse that Alexander was almost sure were not in the second verse, and they were singing it, he realised, to him, or near him, or in his general direction, because he was the King of Prussia and it was his birthday and they had been at his fireworks; and not one of them, singing it, looked at him.

Then a girl in a black and white hat, at the end of the second verse, stopped singing, with her mouth open, and stared across the table at his cousin.

“Oh, mein Gott,” she said. “Leute.” Guys. “Leute. Das ist der König von Hannover.”

The carriage stopped singing.

It stopped all at once, mid-word, twenty young Prussians in black and white, and every one of them turned and looked at the fair young man in the black overcoat by the window, and the fair young man looked back at them with the expression he had worn behind the bar of Eight Bars on the first night, when the queue went round the block.

“Der Barkeeper,” said somebody at the back.

“Er hat für den Kaiser Bier gezapft,” said somebody else. He pulled beer for the Kaiser. “In Amerika. Im August. Ich hab’s gesehen.”

“Wir haben’s alle gesehen,” said the girl in the hat. We all saw it. And then, in English, leaning across the table, very seriously, as if she were telling him something he might not know: “You are very famous in Prussia.”

“I’m not Prussian,” said his cousin, apologetically.

“Egal,” said the girl. Doesn’t matter. And she took one of the bottles of Sekt from the boy beside her, and a paper cup from the stack, and filled it, carefully, with the train swaying, to the very brim, and held it out across the table, in both hands, to the King of Hanover. “Zum Königstag,” she said. For Kingdom Day. “From Prussia.”

His cousin looked at the paper cup. Then, over it, across the table, at Alexander.

Alexander was looking out of the window at the dark.

“Three,” he said, to the window.

His cousin took the cup. He held it up an inch, to the carriage, and twenty young Prussians in black and white held up their paper cups back, and he drank, and they cheered, and started the anthem again, from the beginning, louder, worse, and this time, Alexander noticed, they sang the second verse at his cousin.

He sat by the window in the navy coat with the red collar of the First Foot Guards just showing at the throat and listened to twenty of his own subjects sing his own anthem at the King of a different country on his own birthday in his own train, and the feeling of not being looked at was on his skin like cold water, like the lake at the end of the garden on the first day of June, and he had never felt anything so good in his life.

---

At Zoo the inspector got on.

He was a short square man of about fifty in the blue uniform of the S-Bahn with a cap and a machine on a strap round his neck, and he came down the carriage saying Fahrkarten, bitte, in the voice that inspectors in every country in the world use, and the twenty young Prussians produced their tickets, all of them, from inside hats and gloves and the backs of phones, because they were Prussians and a Prussian does not travel without a ticket even when he is singing.

He reached the table by the window.

He looked at his cousin, who held out his small orange card. And the inspector stopped, with his hand out, and looked at the card, and looked at the face above it, and Alexander watched it happen to him too, the fourth time that evening, the eyes and then the mouth, and then the inspector took off his cap.

He took it off and held it against his chest. Then he took the ticket from the King of Hanover’s hand, very carefully, between his finger and thumb, and put it into the machine on his strap, and the machine stamped it with the date and the time, 18.01.33 23:41, and he took it out and looked at the stamp and gave it back, with a small bow.

“Es ist mir eine Ehre,” he said. It is an honour.

His cousin took back his ticket with his own name on nothing and the date stamped on it by a man who had taken off his cap, and looked at it, and Alexander knew, without looking, that that card would be in a drawer in Columbia Palace in New Westminster for the rest of his cousin’s life.

Then the inspector put his cap back on and turned to Alexander.

“Fahrkarte.”

Alexander gave him his card.

The inspector put it in the machine and looked at it. He looked at the stamp. He looked at the date. He turned it over and looked at the back. Then he looked down, slowly, at Alexander’s feet, which were in the boots of the First Foot Guards, black, to the knee, polished that morning by a man who had polished the boots of three Emperors, and which were showing below the hem of the navy overcoat like the feet of a costume.

“Sind Sie in einer Kapelle?” said the inspector. Are you in a band?

Alexander considered the question honestly.

“Nein,” he said.

The inspector looked at the boots a moment longer, and at the red collar showing at the throat of the coat, and at the face above it, which was a narrow pale serious face like a hundred young men’s in Berlin, and which was on every office wall in Prussia, at fourteen, looking as though the camera owed it money; and his own face did not change at all. He gave Alexander back his ticket, without stamping it, as you give back a ticket to a young man who is probably in a band, and went on down the carriage, saying Fahrkarten, bitte.

Lukas, beside him, made a very small sound.

Alexander turned his head.

Lukas was looking straight ahead, across the table, at the window, at nothing, with his hands in his lap. He had not said anything since the dome. But the corner of his mouth was doing something that Alexander had seen it do perhaps four times in ten years, and his shoulders were very slightly shaking, and he did not stop them.

“He thought you were in a band,” said Lukas.

That was two.

---

At Friedrichstraße, across the aisle, behind Jack’s cape, a boy in a black and white scarf held his phone up.

He did not hold it up very high. He held it up at the height of his chest, discreetly, the way the young of Berlin had learned to hold their phones up in the presence of anybody who might be anybody, and pointed it across the aisle at the table by the window, and Alexander, who had been watching for it since Wannsee, saw the small red light come on.

He did not move. He looked out of the window at Friedrichstraße going by, the station and the river and the lights, and did the arithmetic.

The boy would put it up. In a minute, or five, or ten. Der König von Hannover in der S7, Königstag, with a photograph of the back of a fair head and half a black overcoat and a paper cup. It would be shared. In half an hour it would be on a screen in the protection department in Berlin, where they watched for such things, and Kessler would see it on his phone in a car on the road out of Potsdam, and look at the time on it, and at the line, and know the train, and know the direction, and know, because Kessler always knew, which way they were going.

He took the programme out of his coat and unfolded it on the table among the paper cups.

“What?” said his cousin.

“Somebody has taken a photograph,” said Alexander. “Across the aisle. Do not look. It does not matter. I allowed for a photograph. I allowed for it at Alexanderplatz, at a quarter past twelve, because I thought Berlin would be where it happened.” He took out the pencil. “It has happened at Friedrichstraße, at eleven forty-eight. That is twenty-seven minutes early.”

He looked at the programme for a long moment. Then, very neatly, beside 23.50, Zur letzten Instanz, he drew a small arrow, and beside the arrow wrote 00.02, in brackets, in the same square hand.

“Twelve minutes,” he said. “We will be twelve minutes late for the Last Instance.”

“Is that bad?” said Theo.

“It is the first correction to a programme I have ever made,” said Alexander. “I do not know yet.” He folded it again. “I think it may be very good.”

The train came into Alexanderplatz at six minutes to midnight, under the great curved roof, and the twenty young Prussians got off it singing, and so did a King, and so did a young man in a band.