Three-Fifths

The corner by the atlases was the only place in the library where you could not be seen from the door.

Jakub had found it in their first week at the Humboldt, when they were thirteen and Alexander was nobody in particular, only the boy whose father was the Emperor, which in a Potsdam school was less unusual than it sounded. It was behind the last bookcase, where the atlases were kept flat on long shelves because they were too big to stand up, and there was a radiator under the window that clanked, and a window seat that nobody used because it was too cold in winter and too hot in summer. Jakub sat on the window seat with the laptop on his knees. Alexander sat beside him. Lukas sat on the floor with his back to the radiator, because Lukas always sat on the floor with his back to something.

Amalie stood behind them with a book open in her hands.

“What are you reading?” said Jakub, without looking round.

“The Hanseatic League,” said Amalie.

“You are not.”

“I am. It’s very interesting. Lübeck was a free city.” She turned a page, loudly. “Somebody has to stand here and look as though we’re not all watching the Reichstag in the library during a free period. I am looking as though I’m reading about the Hanseatic League. It’s a public service.”

“Lukas told her,” said Jakub, to Alexander.

“I told one person,” said Lukas, from the floor.

“You told Amalie,” said Jakub, “which is the same as telling the school.”

“It’s the same as telling the school correctly,” said Amalie, and turned another page. “Be quiet. He’s standing up.”

---

The Chancellor stood up at four minutes past two.

He was a tall man with grey hair cut short and glasses he took off to speak and put on to read, and he stood at the lectern in the Reichstag with a folder he did not open, and the camera on the laptop showed him from slightly below, so that he looked like a man standing on a step to say something difficult to a crowd. Dr Matthias Brenner, of the FVP. A Chancellor of a coalition of three parties that agreed about almost nothing except that they would rather govern together than not at all. Alexander had met him twice, both times with his father, and once alone in April, for eleven minutes, on a Council matter, when the Chancellor had been very kind and had looked at his watch only once.

He began.

He spoke about the Constitution of 1871, which had never been replaced, only amended. He spoke about the regency law, and what it had been for, and what it had been asked to do in the last year that nobody had written it to do. He spoke about the Council, abolished in October, and about the Regent, who had served, he said, with a discipline the whole House had observed and which some members of it had found inconvenient, and there was a short sound from part of the chamber that the microphones picked up and the camera did not show.

He spoke about the sovereign.

Alexander took a pencil out of his pocket, and a piece of paper, and began, without deciding to, to make a mark on the paper every time the Chancellor said it.

The sovereign. One. The sovereign’s personal powers. Two. A sovereign whose powers are exercised by others. Three.

“What are you doing?” said Jakub, very quietly, in Polish.

“Counting.”

“Counting what?”

“How many times he doesn’t say my name.”

Jakub looked at the paper. Then he looked at the laptop. Then, after a moment, he took his own pencil out and began to keep a second count, in the margin of his chemistry notes, of something else, and did not say what.

---

The Chancellor spoke for twenty-two minutes.

Alexander knew that because the Reichstag’s own clock was in the corner of the picture, under the eagle, and he watched it, as he had watched the clock over the west door, and the minute hand went round from four minutes past two to twenty-six minutes past, and in all that time the Chancellor did not say Alexander once, or the Emperor, or the King, or His Majesty. He said the sovereign. He said the minority. He said that the question before the House was not whether a particular young man should be trusted, which was not a question for the House, but whether a constitution should go on asking a minority to be governed in its name by people it had not chosen and could not dismiss, when the sovereign concerned was within a year of the age at which the constitution would in any case hand him the whole of it.

Near the end, very near the end, he put his glasses back on, and looked down at the folder he had not opened, and said:

“I will not use his name in this House, because this House has not been asked to vote on him, and he has not asked it to. I will say only this. We are being asked to amend the Constitution for a young man who has given this House no instructions and asked it for nothing. I can recall no precedent for that. I commend the amendment to the House.”

And he sat down.

The camera went, at once, up to the public gallery, and moved along it, slowly, row by row, as though it were looking for somebody. It did not find anybody. It came back down to the floor.

“They thought you’d be there,” said Lukas, from the floor.

“I know.”

“Why aren’t you?”

“Because a King may not sit in the gallery for a vote about himself,” said Alexander. “It’s in the standing orders. Since 1909.”

“Is it really?”

“No,” said Alexander. “But it should be.”

Lukas looked up at him from the floor, with his head against the radiator, for a long moment.

“That was nearly a joke,” said Lukas. “I’m writing it down.”

---

Alexander looked at his paper.

Eleven marks for the sovereign. A second column, which he had started without noticing, for the minority: six. And at the bottom, by itself, a single line, for the young man who had given the House no instructions and asked it for nothing.

“Eleven,” said Jakub, looking at it.

“And six.”

“And one.” Jakub turned his chemistry notes round and showed him the margin. There was a column of marks there too, nine of them, very neat. “That’s how many times he looked up at the gallery himself while he was speaking. Nine. Before the camera ever did. He kept looking up there, between sentences, the way you look at a door.” He turned the notes back. “He was looking for you all the way through. He just wasn’t going to say so.”

Alexander said nothing.

Behind them Amalie turned a page of the Hanseatic League, very slowly, as though it were the most important page she had ever read.

---

The division took eleven minutes.

The members went out through the two doors, the Ja and the Nein, the way they had for as long as anybody could remember, and the chamber emptied and filled again, and on the laptop it looked like a tide going out and coming in. Alexander did not watch the doors. He watched the clock under the eagle. Jakub watched the doors. Lukas watched Alexander, from the floor, and did not pretend not to.

The tellers came back. They stood in a line in front of the President’s chair, four of them, two from each side, and bowed, and the one on the left read the numbers, very fast, in the voice of a man who had read a great many numbers in that room and did not expect any of them to be remembered. The President repeated them more slowly. Then she said that the amendment had been carried by more than the three-fifths required by the Constitution, and that it would be sent to the Bundesrat.

There was a moment of nothing.

Then the benches on the right of the picture stood up. The benches that had his coronation face on their posters, the calm one, with the clock in it that nobody knew was there; they stood up all at once and began to applaud, and at exactly the same moment, as though somebody had given a signal, the benches on the left of the picture stood up too, the Social Democrats, who had never once put his face on anything, and they applauded as well.

They applauded the same vote. For opposite reasons. And somewhere in the second or third second of it they all heard each other doing it, and Alexander, watching on a laptop in the corner by the atlases, saw it reach them: the right hearing the left, the left hearing the right, both of them looking across the chamber at the other with their hands still going.

They stopped.

All of them, at the same moment, on both sides, as though somebody had dropped a tray.

There was a silence in the Reichstag, on the laptop, of perhaps two seconds, in which nobody on either side knew where to look. Then the President said something about the order of business, and somebody coughed, and the members began to sit down, carefully, the way people sit down after they have stood up at the wrong moment at a wedding.

Jakub shut the laptop, very gently.

“That,” said Jakub, “is the first time in the history of the Reichstag that both sides have been embarrassed by the same noise.”

Nobody said anything.

Then Amalie, behind them, shut the Hanseatic League with a snap, and said, “Lübeck would never have stood for it,” and Lukas laughed, on the floor, against the radiator, out loud, in a library, and the librarian, who had moved her chair at two o’clock so that her back was to the corner by the atlases, which was her way of being on their side, said “Ruhe” without turning round, and the bell went.

---

Falk did not speak.

He looked for her on the way home in the car, on Kessler’s phone, which Kessler held out over the seat without being asked, open at the news. She had not spoken. It was not her House. She had been at the Landtag, in a committee on the hospitals, and a reporter had caught her on the steps afterwards and asked her what she thought, and she had said that the Reichstag had done the Reichstag’s business and the Prussian Landtag would do its own after Easter, and gone back inside. That was all. She had sent nothing to him. She had not telephoned Charlotte, who would have told him.

He gave Kessler back his phone.

“Thank you.”

“Sir.” Kessler put the phone away and looked at the roof of the car, where the light was, for some time. “Sir, if I may. It’s not over.”

“I know. There’s the Bundesrat. And the states.”

“I meant, sir,” said Kessler, still looking at the roof of the car, “that it’s not over for you. Whatever they do. You don’t have to have done anything because they’ve done something.” He paused. “My father was a policeman in Pomerania for forty years, sir. He used to say that the worst thing that can happen to a man is to be blamed for a vote he didn’t cast.”

Alexander looked at the back of Kessler’s head for a long moment.

“Did that happen to him?”

“Once, sir,” said Kessler. “In 1981. He never said what it was.” And he looked out of the side window at the Havel going by, grey, under the bridge, and did not say anything else all the way to Berlin.

---

His mother was in Berlin that night, and they ate in the small dining room, the two of them, at one end of a table for twelve, which was how the Imperial Palace had been built, by somebody who had expected the Emperor to have more people to dinner than he did.

She did not mention the vote until the soup was gone.

“They’ll say it’s for you,” said his mother.

“It is for me.”

“No.” She put her spoon down. “It’s about you. That’s not the same thing. Something for you, you would have asked for. You didn’t ask for this.” She looked at him down the short end of the long table. “I watched it at the house. I watched the camera go up to the gallery.”

“He’d been looking up there all along,” said Alexander. “Nine times. Jakub counted.”

His mother’s face did something it did not often do in front of him, and then stopped doing it.

“I’m glad you weren’t there,” she said.

“I wasn’t allowed to be there.”

“I know you weren’t. I’m glad anyway.” She picked up her glass and did not drink from it. “Alexander. You don’t have to decide anything tonight.”

“I’m not going to.”

“Good,” said his mother, and then, more quietly, looking at the glass and not at him: “You don’t have to decide anything at all. You know that. If it passes. You don’t have to take it because it’s there.”

“I know.”

“Do you?”

He looked at her. She was frightened. She was always frightened; Lukas said so, Frederick had said so in a letter, he had always known it himself. But she was frightened tonight of something particular, and he could see what it was, and he found that he could not tell whether it was that he would take it, or that he would not.

“I’m not going to decide,” he said, “until it’s mine to decide.”

His mother looked at him for a long moment, down the short end of the table for twelve.

“Your father,” she said, “used to say that.”

---

He wrote it at the desk in his room, late, with the door shut.

He took the box out of the second drawer first. It was his father’s walnut box, which had held his father’s fountain pens, and it held the letters now, all of them, in the order they had come, with a ribbon round them that he tied himself, the same way every time, and that nobody else had ever touched. He untied it. He found the birthday letter, which was the thickest, and took it out, and read the paragraph he had read more times than anything since the first letter, and put it back, and tied the ribbon again, the same way, and put the box away.

Then he took a sheet of paper and the good pen and wrote at the top, in the square hand:

Imperial Palace, Berlin Thursday 8 March, late

Dear Frederick,

He stopped. He looked at it for a while. Then he wrote:

This is the answer to your birthday letter. It is seven weeks late. You said I would walk round the room twice and then not write for a week and then write about something else, and you were wrong by six weeks and right about everything else.

It was easier after that. He wrote that Frederick had told him to take it if they offered it. He wrote down the five things Frederick had said, the eleven months and the dissent and the readier and the May, because Frederick should see that he had kept them. He wrote that the Reichstag had passed it today, three-fifths, and that he had watched it on a laptop in the school library, because a King may not sit in the gallery for a vote about himself. He wrote that it went to the Bundesrat on the twenty-third, and then to the states, and the Prussian one to the Landtag after Easter. So it has nearly been offered. In a few weeks it may be.

Then he stopped again, and sat for a long time with the pen above the paper, and the guard went past the door outside, once, and did not stop.

He wrote:

I have decided nothing. I will not decide until it is mine to decide.

He looked at it. It was the sentence he had said to his mother at dinner, and she had said that his father used to say it, and he had not known that. He did not know whether that made it better or worse. He decided, after a while, that it did not make it anything; it was true or it was not, and it was true.

I know how that reads, he wrote. It reads like the thing you said I would do, the boy who is only good at saying no. It isn’t that. It is that the whole of this year has been other people deciding things in my name, some of them wrong and some of them right, and the right ones were no more mine than the wrong ones. If I decide now, before the law gives it to me, I will be one more person deciding in my name. I want the first thing I decide to be the first thing I am allowed to decide. That is all. It is not modesty. You are right that modesty would be a bad reason. It is the only way I can think of for it to be mine.

He read it back. It was the most he had ever written down about himself, on any piece of paper, for anybody, and he was writing it for a boy in New Westminster who rowed on a machine facing a wall at half past six in the morning and had told him, on his birthday, to take it.

You are not my adviser, he wrote. You are my cousin, and you told me what you thought on my birthday, and I am telling you what I think back, seven weeks later, which is the slowest I have ever been at anything. That is allowed. You decided it was allowed. I have decided the same.

He drew a line under it, the way Frederick did, and left the rest of the page empty.

Then he went on, on the next page, about the vote, and the corner by the atlases, and Amalie and the Hanseatic League, and the Chancellor’s eleven and six and one, and the benches stopping as though somebody had dropped a tray; and about Kamerun, which he had not told anybody, and found that he could tell Frederick, all of it, the folder and the pencilled line and Charlotte at his desk with his pen; and when he had written It is the only thing I have done all year. I would like you to know about it. I do not want anybody else to, the guard went past the door a second time, slower, and stopped, and went on.

He put the pages in the drawer, under the box, not sealed.

It was clear on Saturday, they said. He would finish it in the dome.