Older Beer

The problem was the door.

It was an ordinary door, oak, about three hundred years old, with iron studs and a brass handle worn pale by the hands of every drinker in the Altstadt since the Seven Years’ War, and it was the door of the Zum Schwarzen Bären, a pub in a narrow street behind the market church in Hanover, and it was the width of one man.

On one side of it, on the cobbles, in the October dusk, stood the King of Hanover.

On the other side of it, also on the cobbles, stood the German Emperor.

“After you,” said Frederick.

“No,” said Alexander. “After you.”

“It’s my kingdom.”

“It’s my empire,” said Alexander. “Your kingdom is in it.”

“I’m older.”

“By eight months.”

“Eight and a half.”

“That is not,” said the German Emperor, King of Prussia, with the faint pained precision he used for things he had looked up, “a principle of precedence recognised by the imperial constitution.”

Behind them, in a semicircle on the cobbles, stood the following: a guard of honour of the Hanoverian infantry, twenty men in grey with a colour, who had marched in at five and presented arms to the pub; a band, which had stopped playing in order to listen; two Hofmarschälle, one Hanoverian and one Prussian, each holding a folder, each folder containing an order of precedence, neither of which agreed with the other; the landlord of the Zum Schwarzen Bären, a large red-faced man in an apron called Herr Kuhlmann, who was standing in his own doorway holding the door open and had been for two minutes; Kimura; Mr Quennell, with a notebook, writing; Theo; and Lukas Brandt, Alexander’s friend, his Page, who said one thing an evening, and who was standing slightly apart from all of them in a dark coat with his hands in his pockets, looking up at the sky over the roofs, where the first star was out.

“We could go through sideways,” said Theo. “Both at once.”

“It’s one man wide,” said Frederick.

“You’re not very wide.”

“It is a question of principle,” said one of the Hofmarschälle.

“It’s a question of a door,” said Herr Kuhlmann, in German, in a voice like a cellar. “And my arm is tired.”

There was a pause.

Lukas Brandt, without taking his eyes off the star, said: “Herr Kuhlmann should go first. It is his door.”

Everybody looked at him.

Then everybody looked at Herr Kuhlmann.

Herr Kuhlmann considered this, and nodded, once, and went in through his own door, and the King of Hanover went in behind him, and the German Emperor went in behind the King of Hanover, by a margin so small that both Hofmarschälle afterwards recorded it as simultaneous, in their respective folders, in different ink.

“That was his one thing,” said Alexander, in English, very quietly, at the bar, unbuttoning his coat.

“His what?”

“Lukas says one thing an evening. That was it.” Alexander looked back at the door, where Lukas was coming in last, still looking at the sky through the window as though he could see through the ceiling. “He will say nothing else now until tomorrow. He has spent it on a door.”

---

The trip had been Alexander’s idea.

He had written in August, the week after Phoenix, which he had been in, and which he was also not allowed to talk about. I am coming to the Realm next August, the letter had said, in the diplomatic bag, in his small upright hand. A state visit. It has been arranged since the spring. You will be behind your bar by then, I am told. I should like to see a bar first, so that I know what I am visiting. You are doing Hanover and Brunswick in October. Hanover is my mother’s. I was born there. I will meet you in Hanover. It will be a rehearsal. A.

And under it, in a different pen:

I have heard about your father and the darts. I have bought a board. Lukas says I am very bad. I have ten months.

---

The Zum Schwarzen Bären was long and dark and low, with black beams across the ceiling and a floor of red tiles, and a bar along the right-hand side with eight brass taps, and behind the bar on a shelf a row of stoneware jugs, very old, each with a pewter lid. It held about a hundred and twenty people. There were four hundred in it by six. Herr Kuhlmann had stopped letting people in at a quarter past five, and there was a crowd in the street from the door to the market church, singing.

Frederick went behind the bar at half past five.

Alexander did not. Alexander sat on a stool at the end of the bar, the stool next to Kimura’s, with a glass of apple juice, because it was a rehearsal and he did not drink at rehearsals, and watched, the whole evening, without moving, the way he watched the sky through the telescope at Potsdam: carefully, from end to end, so as to know it later.

“You will tell me,” he said, at six, “how it is done.”

“I don’t know how it’s done.”

“You have done it for five weeks.”

“I’ve done it badly for five weeks.” Frederick pulled a pint of the house lager, which came out of the tap pale and fast and hit the side of the glass and slid. “It’s like the telescope. You can’t tell anybody how to do it. You just look until you can see.”

Alexander thought about this.

“That,” he said, “is not a method.”

“No.”

“I shall have to watch, then,” said Alexander, and watched.

---

It was easier in German than it had been in French.

His German was the Household’s German, which was the German his grandmother had spoken and her grandmother before her, the language of letters between Kew and Herrenhausen in 1820, and it was correct, and courteous, and about a century out of date. It worked perfectly well behind a bar. Ein Helles, bitte. Ein Helles. A lager. Zwei. Two. Das macht sieben Mark. That’s seven marks. Danke schön. The words came out with a slightly formal ring, the way a sword sounds when it comes out of a scabbard in a museum, and people in the Zum Schwarzen Bären, who were from Hanover and had never in their lives heard their own King speak, found it, Herr Kuhlmann told him at seven, very touching, and a little bit funny, and tipped him, in marks, with coins that had the imperial eagle on them, which was, Alexander pointed out from the end of the bar, more or less his.

He put the coins in his apron, because there was nowhere else to put them, and thought about Mr Quennell’s Rule Four, which said nothing about members of the public in Hanover, and decided that it did not apply.

At the end of the bar, Kimura wrote on her beer mat. Mr Quennell, beside her, with his notebook, wrote in his.

---

The quarrel began at eight, and it began with a jug.

Herr Kuhlmann took it down from the shelf behind the bar. It was the oldest of the stoneware jugs, grey and blue, with a pewter lid and a crest on the side, the white horse of Lower Saxony, worn almost smooth. He set it on the bar in front of the King and filled it from a tap that Frederick had not seen anybody use all night, the eighth tap, at the far end, which had no label on it, and the beer that came out was pale and cloudy and slightly sour-smelling, like bread left out overnight.

“Broyhan,” said Herr Kuhlmann, in German, with immense pride. “The beer of Hanover. Brewed here first by Cord Broyhan in the year 1526. The oldest beer in the kingdom. For you, Majesty. On the house.” He pushed the jug across. “In honour.”

Frederick looked at the jug. He looked at the cameras, of which there were two, from Hanoverian television, at the window. He looked at Kimura, who looked at him, and at Mr Quennell, who looked at his notebook, where it said, in his own handwriting, underlined, Rule Five. The Sovereign shall not taste spirits on live television.

It was not a spirit. It was a beer.

He drank.

It was, he found, extraordinary: sharp and light and cloudy and faintly lemony, like nothing he had ever drunk, and he put the jug down and said, honestly, “Das ist wunderbar,” and four hundred people in the Zum Schwarzen Bären cheered, and the people in the street outside, who could not see, cheered because the people inside had, and a man in the crowd by the market church started a song about Hanover that was, Alexander told him later, from 1837, and quite rude about the Prussians.

Then a voice from the end of the bar said, in German, very clearly, “Five hundred and twenty-six.”

Everybody turned round.

It was a small elderly man in a green hat with a feather in it, who had been sitting at the end of the bar since four in the afternoon over a single glass, and who now stood up, and took off the hat, and held it to his chest.

“Fifteen twenty-six,” he said. “Is that what they tell you here? The oldest?” He put the hat back on. “In Brunswick, we were brewing Mumme in thirteen ninety. A hundred and thirty-six years before your Herr Broyhan was born. They drank Mumme in London. They drank it in Stockholm. They took it to the Indies on ships, because it kept.” He looked at Herr Kuhlmann. “Broyhan is a very good beer. For a young one.”

There was a silence in the Zum Schwarzen Bären of the kind that falls before a fight in a cowboy film.

Herr Kuhlmann put both hands flat on his bar.

“Mumme,” he said, as though naming a disease.

“Mumme,” said the man in the green hat.

They looked at each other.

Then, slowly, both of them looked at the King.

Frederick, who was King of Hanover, and also, by a separate instrument, under a separate law of succession, in a separate capacity, Duke of Brunswick, and who had been both of them since a Tuesday in October three years ago in a geometry class, stood behind the bar of the Zum Schwarzen Bären with a jug of Broyhan in his hand and four hundred Hanoverians in front of him and one Brunswicker, and understood, with total clarity, that there was no answer to this question that would not end with somebody singing a song from 1837.

“I’m in Brunswick tomorrow,” he said, in his grandmother’s German.

“Yes,” said the man in the green hat.

“I’ll try the Mumme there.”

“Yes.”

“And then,” said Frederick, “I’ll decide.”

The man in the green hat looked at him for a long moment, and then nodded, and sat down, and put his hat on the bar.

“Then I will see you tomorrow,” he said, “Your Highness,” with immense and deliberate emphasis on the Highness, which was the Duke’s style, and not the King’s, and the Zum Schwarzen Bären, which had understood this perfectly, roared.

---

Brunswick was forty miles east, an hour on the train, and the train was the ordinary train, at eleven on Saturday morning, with two carriages reserved and the rest full of people who had bought tickets for that train because the King was on it, and a guard who announced every station in German and then, with great deliberation, for the King’s benefit, in English, Next station: Peine, which made Theo laugh so hard that he had to put his head on the table.

The bar in Brunswick was by the cathedral, in the old square, under the bronze lion that Henry the Lion had put up in 1166, which was, the man in the green hat said, meeting them on the platform in the same hat, the oldest freestanding bronze statue north of the Alps, and older than anything in Hanover by about four hundred years, and Frederick said he was sure it was.

The man in the green hat’s name was Herr Brandes. He was eighty-one. He was, it turned out, the landlord.

The bar was called the Mummehaus. It had been the Mummehaus since 1612. It had a guard of honour outside it, of the Brunswick infantry, in blue, which had marched in at four, and a band, which played the Brunswick march and then, pointedly, did not play the Hanoverian one, and a crowd that ran from the door to the lion and round it.

And at seven, with the cameras at the window and the crowd in the square singing a song from 1830 about Brunswick that Alexander said was quite rude about Hanover, Herr Brandes took down from behind the bar a black glass bottle, very old, with a wax seal, and broke the seal, and poured out into a small heavy glass something so dark it was nearly black, and thick, and smelling of molasses and smoke and burnt sugar, and pushed it across the bar.

“Mumme,” he said. “As it was in thirteen ninety. For you, Highness. On the house.”

Frederick drank it.

It was like drinking a very old church. It was thick and sweet and bitter all at once and it coated the inside of his mouth and stayed there and it tasted, he thought, of history, specifically of the sort of history that had happened in a cellar, and he put the glass down, and looked at Herr Brandes, who was looking at him the way Señora Ruelas had looked at him across a kitchen table, the way every old person in every country looked at a boy they had decided to have an opinion about.

“Well?” said Herr Brandes.

The bar was silent. Three hundred Brunswickers. One German Emperor on a stool. One Page of Honour. One protection officer, writing. One young man from the Household, not writing, for once, because he wanted to hear.

“It’s older,” said Frederick.

Herr Brandes’s face did not move.

“Mumme is older than Broyhan,” said Frederick. “By a hundred and thirty-six years. That’s a fact. You can look it up. It’s in the records.” He picked up the glass, and looked at it, and put it down. “And Broyhan’s a better beer to drink on a Friday night in October with four hundred people. That’s also a fact. You can’t look that up. You have to be there.” He looked at Herr Brandes. “So I’m the King of the one, and I’m the Duke of the other, and I’ve decided.”

“And?” said Herr Brandes.

“Brunswick’s older,” said Frederick. “Hanover’s younger.” He paused. “I’m not going to say anything else, because I’m the King of Hanover, and the Duke of Brunswick, and if I say anything else, one of me is going to be in trouble.”

There was a long pause in the Mummehaus.

Then Herr Brandes began to laugh. He laughed silently at first, with his shoulders, and then not silently, and he took off the green hat and hit the bar with it, twice, and said, “Older!”, and the Mummehaus, which had understood perfectly well that it had been given exactly half of what it wanted, which was in Brunswick a famous victory, roared, and somebody started the song from 1830 again, and the band outside, hearing it, joined in.

---

At the end of the bar, Alexander had not moved all evening. He had watched it all, the jug and the glass and the decision, with his apple juice in front of him and his hands folded.

“That,” he said, when Frederick came down the bar at last with a tray of empties, “was a method.”

“It wasn’t. I made it up.”

“That is what a method is,” said the German Emperor, “when it works.” He looked at the room. “I begin to see what I am visiting.”

“In August.”

“In August.” Alexander finished his apple juice. “I shall have to practise.”

“The darts?”

“Everything.” He put the glass down, very precisely, in the exact centre of the mat. “Lukas says I am still very bad.”

“Lukas has spent his one thing.”

“He spent it last night. Tonight is a new night.” Alexander looked down the bar, to the window, where Lukas Brandt was standing with his back to the room and his hands in his pockets, looking out at the square, where Henry the Lion’s lion stood black against the floodlights and the singing crowd went round and round it.

At that moment, as if he had heard, Lukas turned round.

“The Page,” said Lukas Brandt, to nobody in particular, in German, across the whole of the Mummehaus. “Everybody is looking at the Page.”

And then he turned back to the window, and did not say anything else, because that was his one thing.

Frederick looked round.

At the other end of the bar, in the corner, by the stoneware jugs, there was a crowd. It was the biggest crowd in the room, bigger than the one round the King, which had, he now noticed, been getting smaller. It was about forty people, most of them under twenty-five, and they were packed round something, or somebody, in the corner, laughing, and in the middle of them, very red, with a jug of Mumme in one hand and a beer mat in the other on which somebody was writing a telephone number, was Theo.

“What’s he doing?” said Frederick.

Alexander looked.

“Speaking German,” he said. “With an accent from Milwaukee in 1910.” He considered. “They seem to like it.”