Election Night

The polls closed at six, and at five to six the sky over Potsdam was the colour of a wet slate, from the trees on one side of the Neuer Garten to the trees on the other, without a crack in it anywhere.

Alexander wrote it down.

He wrote it in the log, which lay open on the shelf under the eyepiece, in pencil, in the square hand he had been taught at six and had never managed to make his own: the date, the time, bedeckt, and a dash for the seeing, because there was no seeing. Then he put the pencil in the spine of the log and looked up at the slit of the dome, which was open, because he had opened it, and at the slate beyond it, which was not going to move.

“Nothing,” said Lukas, from the floor.

“Nothing.”

“You could close it.”

“I could.”

Lukas was sitting where he always sat, on the boards with his back against the pier of the mount and his legs out in front of him, in his coat and his school scarf and the hat with the flaps that his mother had knitted and that he wore only here, where nobody could see it. He had the flask between his knees. His phone was on the floor beside him, face down, where Alexander had asked him to put it at a quarter past five, when they came up.

“It’s going to go,” said Lukas. “At six. It’ll buzz. My mother will send me the first number before the man on the television has finished saying it. She has been waiting since October to send me a number.”

“You don’t have to read it.”

“I know I don’t have to read it. I’m telling you that it will buzz, so that when it buzzes you don’t jump.”

“I don’t jump.”

“You jumped at the Tomb when the gun went.”

“Everybody jumped at the Tomb when the gun went.”

“Theo didn’t,” said Lukas, and drank from the flask, and that was, Alexander knew, his one thing for the evening, said early, so that he would have the rest of the night free.

---

It buzzed at six.

It buzzed on the boards like something trying to get out, and Lukas did not look at it. He picked it up, face down, and put it in the inside pocket of his coat, and buttoned the coat over it, and folded his arms. It went on buzzing inside his coat for some time, against his chest, a small angry heart.

“She’ll stop,” said Lukas.

“She won’t.”

“She’ll stop when she realises I’m in the dome. She knows the dome. She thinks it’s a church.” It buzzed again. “She’s sending the second one.”

Alexander sat down on the stool by the eyepiece. There was nothing to look at through it, and he looked at the eyepiece instead, at the little brass ring of it, which his father had had re-lacquered the year before he died, because it had gone green, and which had gone green again, a little, at one edge, where Alexander’s thumb went.

He had made the rule in the car.

Not a rule. There were no rules in the dome; that was the point of it. A request, to Lukas, in the car from school on Friday, with the newspapers on the seat between them and his own photograph on the front of two of them: On Sunday, in the dome, nobody reads me the results. Lukas had looked at him, and at the newspapers, and said Fine, and then, after two sets of traffic lights, Why?, and Alexander had said, Because it’s Sunday, and it’s the dome, which was true, and was also not the reason, and Lukas had known it was not the reason, and had let it go, which was the thing about Lukas.

The reason was that he was not allowed to have a view.

The reason was that the King of Prussia was above the parties, and was nowhere near the age at which the constitution allowed him to do anything about being above them, and that half of Prussia had spent six weeks putting his face on posters anyway. He had seen them from the car all week, on the lamp posts along the Berliner Strasse. The parties’ posters had the parties’ faces on them. The others were not the parties’. The one kind was blue and had his own face on it, the one from the coronation, the calm one, and a line underneath about the King’s rights, taken from him. The other was white and had nobody on it at all, only five words in black, the words of his own minute, Der König hat Nein gesagt, the King said no, which the students’ campaign had thought of, and which had been hanging on a banner from the railings opposite the school gate on Wednesday morning when he got out of the car. He had stood on the pavement and read his own no, in letters a metre high, above a bus shelter with an advertisement for a dentist in it.

He had not wanted to hear it counted. That was the reason. He could not have said so to anybody, even to Lukas, because to say so would have been to say that he had a view about how it was counted, and he was not allowed one.

So he sat on the stool in the dome, under a sky with nothing in it, and Lukas’s coat buzzed, and neither of them said anything for some time.

---

At half past seven somebody knocked on the door at the foot of the ladder.

It was Herr Schade, from the house, who was on the door on Sundays and had been for six years, a large grey quiet man who had once carried Alexander up this ladder on his shoulders when he was too small to manage the last rungs and had never mentioned it since. He came halfway up, so that his head and shoulders were through the hatch, and held up a tray with two mugs on it and a plate under a napkin.

“From the house, sir,” said Herr Schade. “Her Majesty asks whether you have eaten.”

“Tell her yes.”

Herr Schade looked at the plate under the napkin, which was the evidence that he had not, and then at Alexander, and said, “Yes, sir,” and put the tray on the boards at the edge of the hatch and went down again. He left the hatch open an inch. He always did.

Lukas reached over and took the napkin off the plate. Sandwiches, cut into triangles, with the crusts off, as though for a child of seven. Lukas looked at them.

“She’s frightened,” said Lukas.

“She’s always frightened.”

“She’s frightened tonight,” said Lukas, “because whichever way it goes, it’s about you, and she can’t come up the ladder.”

“She can come up the ladder.”

“She can’t,” said Lukas. “She never has. You told me. She stood at the bottom once, when your father was alive, and he was up here with you, and she called up to ask if you were cold, and he called down that you weren’t, and she went away again. She has never once been up. She thinks it’s yours.” He took a sandwich. “So she sends cocoa. It’s the same thing as coming up, for her. It’s as near as she can get.”

Alexander looked at the mugs.

He had not thought of it that way. He thought of it that way now, and it was perfectly obvious, and he did not know why he had not thought of it before. He took the nearer mug and held it in both hands for the warmth, and drank some, and it was too sweet, as it always was, because the woman in the kitchen at the house had made it for him since he was four and had not noticed him grow.

“That was two things,” he said.

“What?”

“You’ve said two things tonight. Theo didn’t. And that.”

Lukas considered this, with the sandwich.

“The first one was a fact,” he said. “Facts don’t count.” And he ate the sandwich.

---

He had tried to write to Frederick four times since the Eleventh.

He had tried at the desk in Berlin, and in the car, and once in the dome on the last clear Saturday, in pencil, with Lukas asleep against the mount. He had got as far as Dear Frederick each time, and once as far as the second line, and then stopped, because everything he wanted to say about the Eleventh was a thing that had happened in front of Frederick, and to write it down was to tell Frederick what Frederick had seen, which was absurd, and everything else was a thing he did not know how to say on paper, which was worse, because paper was the one place he had always known how.

“Write about the potatoes,” said Lukas.

Alexander looked at him. Lukas had his eyes shut.

“He was there,” said Alexander.

“He wasn’t at the sink. He came in after. You were at the sink an hour before he came in. Nobody knows about that hour except me and Theo’s mother and Theo’s sister, and Theo’s sister thinks you’re short.” Lukas did not open his eyes. “Write about the hour. He’d want to know what you did with the hour. He’d ask. He asks everything.”

“He’ll ask everything else,” said Alexander, before he could stop it.

Lukas opened his eyes.

“What?”

“Nothing. Something my uncle said.” He put the mug down. “I’ll write about the potatoes.”

“Good,” said Lukas, and shut his eyes again. “That’s three. I’m stopping.”

---

The coat stopped buzzing at about nine.

Alexander noticed it the way you notice a clock stop: not at the moment, but some time afterwards, as an absence. He looked at Lukas. Lukas was looking at the slit of the dome, where the slate had gone from grey to black without changing at all, and his hand was on the outside of his coat, over the pocket, flat.

“She’s stopped,” said Alexander.

“She’s gone to bed. Or she’s crying. Or both. She cries at elections. She cried in 2027 when it was Falk the first time, and my father had to make her a cup of tea, and he votes the same way she does and has never cried at anything.” Lukas took his hand off the coat. “It doesn’t mean anything. It means she’s run out of things to send me.”

“You could look.”

“You said.”

“I said nobody reads it to me. I didn’t say you couldn’t look.”

Lukas turned his head and looked at him for a long moment, in the dark, with the red light from the shelf on one side of his face.

“No,” said Lukas. “You said nobody reads you the results. If I look, you’ll watch my face. You’ll read it off my face. You read everything off everybody’s face. You read your mother’s face off a plate of sandwiches.” He looked back at the slit. “So I’m not looking.”

Alexander did not say anything to that.

He sat on the stool and looked at the eyepiece. He thought about Johanna Falk, whom he had met at the table in the small study in Berlin for the constitutional briefings in the last three months of his father’s life, a tall woman in a grey jacket with reading glasses on a chain who had talked to him, at thirteen, as though he were a law student who had not done the reading yet, kindly, and with complete seriousness, and who had once said to his father, in his hearing, Your son asks better questions than my cabinet, and his father had said, That is not difficult, and they had both laughed. He had not seen her since. He had seen her only on the posters, and in the newspaper photograph from October, on the steps of the Constitutional Court, with her hand up against the cameras, not smiling. He thought about the winter if it went wrong: a House nobody could command, a caretaker in the Minister-President’s office until spring, and the whole of Prussia arguing about the King’s no as though he had said it last week, on purpose, to them. He thought about the posters on the tram.

He did not think about what he wanted. He did not let himself.

At twenty past nine the guard went past the foot of the ladder below, and paused, and went on. It was too early for it to mean bed. It meant only that it was Sunday, and that somebody in the house had asked whether he was all right, and that the answer had been taken down to them.

---

At twenty to ten Lukas took his phone out of his pocket.

He did it without any warning at all, the way he did most things, so that Alexander had no time to say anything. He unbuttoned his coat, took the phone out, turned it over, and looked at it, and the light from it came up white on his face in the dark, and Alexander, who had asked him not to, and who had just been told that he would read it off his face, read his face, and could not.

There was nothing on it. Lukas’s face had nothing on it at all. He looked at the screen for perhaps four seconds, and then he put the phone face down on the boards again, and folded his hands, and looked at the slit of the dome, where the sky had not moved.

“One number,” said Lukas.

“I said.”

“I know what you said. I’m going to read you one number, and then I’m going to put it in my pocket, and I’m not going to read you another one tonight, and you can be angry with me in the morning.” He did not look round. “Two hundred and forty-three.”

Alexander sat very still on the stool.

“Of?”

“Four hundred and eighty.”

He did not need to do the arithmetic. He had done it a hundred times, in bed, in the car, in history lessons, against his will, until the numbers had worn a groove in him. Four hundred and eighty seats. Half of four hundred and eighty, and one more. He had done it so often that he did not even hear himself think it.

“Who?”

“Her,” said Lukas. “Hers and the Liberals. Together. Without the Zentrum.” He paused. “Two over.”

“Two over,” said Alexander.

Neither of them said anything after that for a long time. Lukas put the phone in his pocket, as he had said he would, and buttoned the coat over it. Alexander sat on the stool with his hands on his knees and looked at the eyepiece with nothing in it, and found that his hands were shaking, a little, and put them under his thighs on the stool, where nobody could see, and sat on them, the way he had at nine when his mother took him to the dentist, and waited for it to stop.

It did not mean anything. He knew that it did not mean anything. A projection was a projection. It was a man on the television with a model, and the count would go on until after midnight, and it could be two over at twenty to ten and two under at one in the morning. It did not mean anything, and he was not allowed to have a view about it, and he sat on his hands in the dark and had one.

“You’re not supposed to mind,” said Lukas, to the slit.

“I know.”

“Do you?”

“I’m not supposed to.”

Lukas nodded slowly, as though that were an answer, which, Alexander thought, between the two of them, in the dome, it was.

---

His own telephone went at five to ten.

It was in his coat, where it always was, and he took it out, and it said Charlotte, and he looked at the name for a moment before he answered, because she never telephoned on a Sunday; Sunday was the day she sat in her flat with the door locked and her books on the floor and did not answer anybody, including the Chancellor, who had tried once and been told by her officer that the Regent was revising.

“Hello,” he said.

He could hear the flat behind her. He had never been inside it, but he could hear it: very small, very quiet, a radiator ticking, and the sound of a page being turned, slowly, and then left, as though she had her hand flat on it to keep her place.

“She needs nobody,” said Charlotte.

He closed his eyes.

“Good,” he said.

There was a short pause on the line, in which he could hear the radiator, and his sister breathing, and the page under her hand; and then the line closed, quite gently, the way she put down a telephone when there was nothing else on it, and he sat in the dark with the phone against his ear, listening to nothing, and then took it away and looked at it. Eleven seconds. Five words, and one of them was hello. It was the longest conversation they had had about Prussia since October.

“Your sister?” said Lukas.

“Yes.”

“What did she say?”

He thought about how to say it, and could not find a way that was less than it, and so said it as it had been said.

“She said, She needs nobody.”

“And you said?”

“Good.”

Lukas looked at him. Then he looked away, at the slit, and his mouth did something in the dark that Alexander could not see properly and did not need to.

“That’s the whole call?”

“That’s the whole call.”

“You Hohenzollerns,” said Lukas, “could do an entire war on a postcard.” And he picked up the second mug, which was cold, and drank it anyway, because it was from the house, and it would have been wrong to send it back full.

---

They closed the dome at eleven.

There had been nothing to see all night, and there was nothing now, and they closed it anyway, the long way, by hand, Lukas on the crank and Alexander on the shutter, the way his father had shown him, with the old iron squeal at the three-quarter mark that nobody had ever been able to oil out. The slate went from a slit to a line to nothing. The red lamp on the shelf was the only light in the dome. Lukas put the flask in his bag, and the plate on the tray, and stood at the top of the ladder in his knitted hat, looking at Alexander, who had not moved from the stool.

“Coming?”

“In a minute.”

Lukas went down. He left the hatch open an inch, the way Herr Schade did. Alexander heard his feet on the gravel outside, going round to the house, and then nothing.

He sat in the dome alone.

He did not think about the number. He thought about a kitchen on the fourth floor of a block of flats in New Westminster, three weeks ago, where a woman with a wooden spoon had looked at him on a landing and said one word, and waited. He thought about the hour at the sink, when nobody had been watching him, and the peel had come off the potatoes in long curls, and he had not had a view about anything. He thought that he would write that down. Not the number. The hour.

He thought that it was the first time since February that he had sat in the dome on a Sunday night and wanted to be somewhere else, and that the somewhere else was a kitchen, and that he would not write that down.

At half past eleven Herr Schade came round the side of the dome on the gravel, slowly, and stopped at the foot of the ladder, and stood there for a moment, and went on. It was the signal. It had been the signal for six years. Alexander got up off the stool, and turned off the red lamp, and went down the ladder in the dark, and pulled the hatch shut behind him, all the way.

---

He wrote it in the log in the morning.

He went up before school, at seven, in the half-dark, in his uniform, with the car waiting on the gravel and Herr Schade’s replacement standing beside it looking at his watch. The dome was cold. The sky through the closed shutter was nothing. He opened the log on the shelf, and found the entry from the night before, bedeckt, and the dash for the seeing, and below it, in the space where he would have written what he saw, if he had seen anything, he took the pencil out of the spine and wrote, in the square hand, very small:

243.

He looked at it. Then he shut the log and put it back on the shelf, and went down the ladder, and got into the car, and went to school, and the railings opposite the gate at a quarter past eight that morning had nothing on them at all except the bus shelter and the dentist, because somebody had already taken his no down.