The Third Drawer

On Monday it had been a year.

They had gone to the Friedenskirche at seven, the three of them, before school and before the hospital, in one car, with the officers in another, and stood in the mausoleum in the cold with the doors shut behind them, and nobody had said anything, which was how they had agreed to do it. His mother had put her hand flat on the stone for a moment. Charlotte had not. Alexander had stood with his hands behind his back and looked at the letters of his father’s name, which were new, and sharper than the others round them, and would not be for a long time.

Then Charlotte had gone to the hospital and he had gone to school, and Jakub had said, at the door of the classroom, very quietly, in Polish, the thing you say, and Alexander had answered him in Polish, badly, and Jakub had corrected his grammar, which was the kindest thing anybody did all day.

That had been Monday. By Thursday it had gone back to being February.

---

The folder was on his desk when he came in from school.

It was a grey folder, the Regent’s office’s, with a white label on the front that said Zur Kenntnis, for information, in the hand of Charlotte’s private secretary, who wrote the label the same way every time, in capitals, as though the words were a warning. Since the spring everything the regency decided in his name had come to him in a folder like this, the day after, so that he could see it; that was where he had found the Falk papers. When Charlotte took the regency in October he had asked her to go on sending it, and it had been his first request of her, and the only one, and she had said yes before he had finished asking.

Most weeks the folder was thin. A list of appointments. A judge. A bishop. The kind of thing Frederick said came across his mother’s kitchen table on Tuesdays, which Frederick was not allowed to have an opinion about until the second Tuesday, and which Alexander was not allowed to have an opinion about at all.

This one was thick.

He sat down at the desk with his coat still on and opened it. The first paper was a note from the Chancellery, two pages, on the imperial amendment, which was going to the Reichstag in March: what it changed, which was one number in one article, and what it touched, which was more. The second paper was a summary, in German, of a debate in the Landtag at Jaunde the week before.

He read the note. He read the summary. Then he read the summary again, slowly, with his coat on, while the light went outside the window over the Spree.

The Landtag at Jaunde had debated a motion on the German amendment. The motion said that the amendment, if it passed, would end the minority of the Kaiser von Kamerun at the same moment as the minority of the German Emperor and the King of Prussia, without any act of Kamerun’s, because Kamerun’s constitution applied the German regency law to its head of state and said nothing else. It said that this was the second time in a year that a German law, amended by German institutions, would decide who exercised the powers of Kamerun’s head of state. It said that Kamerun had not been asked the first time and was not being asked now.

A member from the north had said, and the summary gave it in quotation marks: We are told the constitution settled this in 1955. The constitution settled that Berlin would decide. That is not the same thing as Kamerun deciding.

The government had answered, as it had in October, that Kamerun’s own constitution had settled the question, and that Kamerun could change it if it chose. The motion had been noted. It had not been put to a vote.

At the bottom of the second page, in the Chancellery’s hand, in the margin, was a pencilled line: No act of Kamerun is required.

Alexander took his coat off.

He hung it on the back of the door, and came back to the desk, and did not sit down. He walked round the room. Once, past the window and the river going dark. Twice, past the bookcase and the door and the coat on it. Then he stood at the desk and looked at the pencilled line in the margin, and he thought about a park in the rain, and a bench, and his uncle walking beside him at a pace that never changed, saying nothing for an hour, and then saying it.

You have three capacities. Keep them in three drawers. Never open two at once.

He had kept two. He had been very careful about two. He had never once, since February, let a Prussian question into an imperial room or an imperial question into a Prussian one, and Charlotte had been more careful still, and the whole of Germany knew it, because of the Falk papers, because the two capacities had been kept so far apart that not one person in the country had been able to say the Empire was used to remove a Prussian minister.

He had forgotten the third.

Not forgotten. He had never been allowed to remember it. It came with the second, by somebody else’s law, without a sitting or an oath, and it had been in the bottom of the desk for a year, and nobody had ever opened it, because nobody had ever had to.

And now the German drawer was going to open it by itself.

He picked up the telephone.

---

Charlotte came at a quarter to nine.

She came up the back stairs, the way she always did now, because the front stairs went past the portraits and she said she had seen enough Hohenzollerns for one day by the time she got to him, and she came in without knocking, in her coat, with her bag on her shoulder and her hospital lanyard still round her neck under her scarf. She had been on since seven. She looked it.

“You telephoned,” she said.

“Yes.”

“You never telephone.”

“I know.”

She looked at him, standing by the desk, and at the folder open on it, and at the coat on the back of the door, and put her bag down on the chair by the window and did not take her own coat off.

“Is it the Kamerun paper?”

He looked at her.

“I read the folder before it comes to you,” said Charlotte. “That’s what the folder is. I read it, I decide, and then you see what I decided. I saw the Kamerun paper on Tuesday night.” She came over to the desk and looked down at it, at the pencilled line. “I wondered if you’d notice it. Most people would have read the first paper and stopped.”

“You noticed it.”

“I noticed it in October,” said Charlotte. “When they noted the regency by resolution and three parties said they hadn’t been asked. I couldn’t do anything about it then. The law had already done it. It was done the moment Papa died.” She looked at the summary. “It’ll be done again in the spring, the moment the amendment’s ratified. Same law. Same drawer.”

He looked at her sharply.

“What drawer?”

“I don’t know. It’s what you were thinking. It’s on your face.” She sat down on the arm of the chair by the window, which their mother said not to do. “Go on.”

---

So he told her.

He told her about the Tiergarten, which he had told nobody in the family, only Frederick, and Lukas, and the log. He told her about the rain, and the hour of saying nothing, and the details walking twenty yards behind like two funerals. He told her what their uncle had said. Three capacities. Three drawers. Never two at once.

Charlotte listened the way she listened to a patient, which was without moving, and without helping, and without deciding anything until it was finished.

“And the third drawer is Kamerun,” she said.

“Yes.”

“And the German amendment is going to open it.”

“By itself. Nobody’s going to open it. It’s just going to come open, because the German one did. That’s two at once.” He put his hand flat on the folder. “And I won’t have done it. It’ll just have happened. That’s worse than doing it. If I did it, at least it would be somebody.”

Charlotte looked at him for a long time.

“What do you want me to do?”

“Ask them.”

“Ask Jaunde.”

“Yes. As Regent. For the Kaiser von Kamerun. Ask them whether they want it to happen by itself, or whether they want to do it themselves.” He heard himself, and stopped, and said it more carefully. “Ask whether it’s theirs.”

“It is theirs,” said Charlotte. “Their constitution says so. Their government said so in October, in that chamber, to the people who said it wasn’t. Kamerun may change it. That’s their answer. It’s on page two.”

“Their constitution says a German law decides,” said Alexander. “That isn’t theirs. That’s ours, in their constitution. Somebody put it there in 1955 because it was easier, and everybody’s been grateful to them ever since, and it’s never mattered, because nobody was ever fourteen.” He looked at her. “I was fourteen. Now it matters.”

Charlotte said nothing.

She sat on the arm of the chair with her coat on and her lanyard round her neck and looked at him, and he made himself look back, and not at the window, and not to the right.

“Why?” she said.

“I told you why.”

“You told me what Uncle Ernest said in a park. That’s not why. That’s a rule somebody gave you.” She folded her arms. “Why do you want it, Alex? You haven’t asked me for anything since October. You asked to see the folder, and I said yes, and you’ve never asked for anything else. You didn’t ask me to stop the amendment. You didn’t ask me to back it. You didn’t ask me to do anything about Falk, you only told me what I should have said in April, and I told you why I didn’t. You didn’t ask about the election, or the campaign, or the man in the Reichstag who says you’re being robbed. You’ve sat there for four months and let me decide everything and read about it the next day. And now you want me to write to Jaunde.” She paused. “Why this?”

He thought about it.

He thought about it properly, the way he had thought about the clock on the path at Arlington, for the whole length of a row of graves, and Charlotte waited, the way Frederick had waited, as though she had all night, which she did not, because she was on at seven.

“Because it’s the only one that isn’t about me,” he said at last.

Charlotte’s face did not change.

“Everything else is about me,” said Alexander. “The amendment’s about me. The campaign’s about me. The banners. Falk’s about me, she says she isn’t, but she is. If I ask you to do anything about any of them, it’s a fifteen-year-old asking for something for himself, and everybody will know, and they’ll be right.” He looked at the summary. “This isn’t for me. It doesn’t make any difference to me at all. I’ll be Kaiser von Kamerun either way, on the same day, whatever Jaunde does. It’s only whether they were asked.” He stopped. “It’s the only thing in the folder that I can want without wanting it for me.”

There was a long silence in the room. Outside, on the river, a boat went by with its lights on, slowly, towards the Museum Island.

“You know what they’ll say in Jaunde,” said Charlotte, at last. “If I do it.”

“No.”

“They’ll say it took a boy of fifteen.”

“Fifteen and a month.”

“They’ll say,” said Charlotte, “that for seventy-four years nobody in Berlin thought to ask, and then the first person who did was the one person in Berlin who wasn’t allowed to.” She unfolded her arms. “And they’ll be right as well.”

---

She did it there, at his desk.

She did not use the telephone. She said that the Regent of the Kaiser von Kamerun did not advise Kamerun’s government, because Kamerun’s government advised the Kaiser, and that a Regent who rang Jaunde with an opinion would be doing the exact thing the north had stood up in the Landtag to complain about. What she could do, she said, was ask a question. A question was not an act. It was not advice. It was a letter.

She took a sheet of his paper from the drawer, the plain kind, without the arms on it, and his pen, and sat in his chair, which he had never seen anybody else sit in, and wrote.

He stood beside the desk and watched her write it. It took a long time. She wrote in the hand she used for ward notes, she had told him once, the ones a consultant had to countersign, which was the only hand of hers anybody could read. She wrote to the governor-general at Jaunde, by name, Albertine Ngo Bayiha, who had been president of their Supreme Court and had served under governments of both parties and through the regency without once being asked anything by Berlin. She wrote that the Regent, acting for the Kaiser von Kamerun, had read the record of the Landtag’s debate of the sixth. She wrote that the imperial amendment, if ratified, would end the Kaiser’s minority in Kamerun by the operation of Kamerun’s constitution and of no act of Kamerun’s. She wrote that the Regent would be glad to know whether the Government of Kamerun wished that to be so, or wished instead to give it effect by an act of its own, and that the Kaiser von Kamerun would await Kamerun’s decision in either case, and that the question was asked and not advised.

She read it through twice. She changed one word. Then she signed it: Charlotte, Regentin.

“There,” she said, and put the pen down, square, on the desk, the way their uncle put things down.

Alexander looked at the letter.

“Thank you,” he said.

Charlotte looked up at him from his own chair.

“Do you know,” she said, “that’s the first thing you’ve ever asked me to do?”

“I asked to see the folder.”

“That was asking to see. This is asking me to do.” She folded the letter in three and put it in an envelope from the drawer and did not seal it. “Not to stop something. Not to let you watch. To do.” She stood up. “I’ll send it in the morning, through the Foreign Office, with a covering note that says nothing at all. Somebody in the Chancellery will ring me by lunchtime to ask what I think I’m doing.”

“What will you say?”

“That I’m asking a question,” said Charlotte. “On behalf of the Kaiser von Kamerun, who is fifteen and a month and asked me to.” She put the envelope in her bag, and her bag on her shoulder, and stood for a moment by the door with her hand on his coat on the back of it.

“Alex.”

“What?”

“It’s a good reason,” said Charlotte. “The one that isn’t about you. It’s the best reason I’ve heard for anything since February.” She opened the door. “Don’t tell Mama I said so. She’ll think I’m encouraging you.”

“Are you?”

“I’m going to bed,” said Charlotte. “I’m on at seven.” And she went, down the back stairs, past nobody, and he heard the outer door, and her officer’s voice, and the car.

---

He stood at the window for a long time after she had gone.

Then he sat down at the desk, in his own chair, which was still warm, and looked at the folder, and at the pencilled line in the margin, No act of Kamerun is required, and took a pencil out of the drawer and wrote under it, very small, in the square hand:

Asked.

And then he closed the folder, and put it on the corner of the desk where the folders went, and Kessler took it in the morning back to Charlotte’s office, and he never knew who read it there, or whether anybody asked what the word meant.

---

The answer did not come for twelve days, and when it came it was not to him.

It was four lines at the foot of page nine of the Tagesspiegel, on a Wednesday at the end of the month, under a report on the Elbe ferries, and Jakub found it, because Jakub read the whole of every newspaper in the school library every morning before the bell, on principle, like a man checking his traps.

He put it on the table in front of Alexander without saying anything, folded so that only the four lines showed.

JAUNDE. The Prime Minister of Kamerun, Theresia Mvondo Essomba, told the Landtag on Tuesday that her government would bring an act of Kamerun’s own on the age of the Kaiser’s personal rule, in answer to an inquiry from the Regent in Berlin. Several members welcomed the inquiry. One said it was the first time in the history of the association that Berlin had asked.

Alexander read it three times.

“Is that you?” said Jakub, in Polish, very low.

“It’s the Regent.”

“Is the Regent you?”

“No,” said Alexander. “That’s the point of her.”

Jakub looked at him for a long moment, with the expression he had when Alexander’s Polish was wrong and Jakub was deciding whether to say. Then he tore the four lines out of the newspaper, carefully, along the fold, and gave them to him, and went back to the sports pages.

On Saturday it was overcast again, and there was nothing to see, and Alexander went up to the dome anyway, and opened the log on the shelf under the eyepiece, and found the page for the night, bedeckt, and the dash for the seeing, and put the four lines from the Tagesspiegel between that page and the next, where nobody would ever look, and closed it.