Charlotte's Birthday

There were four flights, and no lift, and a light on a switch that gave you a minute.

He stood at the bottom of the stairs in the hall of a building in a street he had been driven down perhaps a hundred times without once looking up, with the present under his arm in brown paper and Kessler behind him, and he looked up the well of the stairs to the top, where a skylight let in the grey of a Berlin Sunday, and he thought that he had been up four flights to a kitchen once before, in New Westminster, and that it had changed something, and that he did not know whether this would.

“Fourth floor, sir,” said Kessler.

“I know.”

“Her officer’s on the third landing. I’ll be on the second. Between us we’ll have the whole of the stairwell, sir, which is more stairwell than anybody needs.” Kessler pressed the switch, and the light came on, yellow, up the whole height of the building. “One minute, sir. Then it goes off.”

Alexander went up.

On the third landing Charlotte’s officer was sitting on a folding stool by the window with a newspaper, a broad quiet woman he had seen beside his sister for a year and had never heard speak, and she stood up when he came round the turn of the stairs, and said, “Majesty,” very low, and sat down again, and went back to the newspaper, and Alexander understood that she had been sitting on that stool on that landing on her days off for a year, and that this was where she read.

The light went out between the third floor and the fourth. He went up the last half-flight in the grey from the skylight, and the door at the top was already open.

---

“You’re early,” said Charlotte.

“I’m on time.”

“You’re early. You’re always early. It’s twelve minutes to one.” She was standing in the doorway in a grey jumper with the sleeves pushed up and a tea towel over one shoulder and her hair tied back the way she tied it for the ward, and she looked at him, and at the parcel under his arm, and stood aside. “Shoes.”

He looked at her.

“Theo’s mother says it,” said Charlotte. “Lukas told me. Lukas tells me everything you won’t. Shoes. The floor’s mine and I wash it.”

He took his shoes off on the landing and put them beside the door, next to a pair of hospital clogs, white, with somebody’s initials in marker pen on the heel that were not hers, and went in in his socks.

The flat was two rooms and a kitchen, and the kitchen was the size of a lift.

He had been told that, by their mother, who had been up once, the year Charlotte moved in, and had come down again and said, It is the size of a lift, and never been up again. It was true. It had a window at one end that looked at another window across a courtyard, and a stove with two rings, and a table pushed against the wall with two chairs, one on each side, so that if both of them sat down their knees would meet underneath. On the wall over the table, where another person would have had a calendar or a picture, there were three large sheets of paper fixed with drawing pins, each of them a drawing of a human body with the skin taken off one half, every muscle labelled in a tiny hand in black ink, and the labels crossed out and written again in red where she had got them wrong, and in some places crossed out again in green.

“I’m sorry,” said Charlotte. “I forgot about them. They’ve been there since my second year.”

“They’re very good.”

“They’re very wrong,” said Charlotte. “Look at the forearm. I did the forearm four times.” She took the tea towel off her shoulder. “Sit. It’s soup. I don’t cook. I heat.”

He sat. His knees met the table leg. On the other side of the table, against the wall, there was a pile of books on the floor, a high one, medical books with spines like bricks, and on top of the pile, face down, its spine cracked white in three places, a paperback.

He did not look at it. He looked at the forearm.

---

The soup was from a tin, and was tomato, and was very hot, and she had put bread with it, from the bakery on the corner, she said, which was the only bakery in Berlin that opened on a Sunday before ten, which was why she had rented the flat in the first place, at eighteen, when she did not know anybody in the city and needed a reason to get out of bed.

“Happy birthday,” he said.

“You said that on the telephone at seven.”

“I’m saying it in person.”

“It counts once,” said Charlotte. “I’m keeping the seven o’clock one.” She broke her bread in half. “Mama came at eight. She didn’t come up. She sent her officer up four flights with a box, and went to church. The box was a watch. It was Grandmother’s.” She held up her wrist, where there was a small gold watch on a black strap, very plain, the face no bigger than a coin. “I’m not allowed to wear a watch on the ward. Infection control. So I’ll wear it on Sundays. She knew that. The card said For Sundays. In her hand. Underlined.”

Alexander looked at the watch.

“It suits you,” he said.

“It’s a watch, Alex.”

“It suits you anyway.”

Charlotte looked at him across the table for a moment, and then down at her soup, and something happened at the corner of her mouth, the same thing that had happened on the steps on the eighteenth of January, and stayed a little longer.

---

They talked about her finals.

They were in March and the first week of April: the written papers through March, and then, in the week after Easter, the last paper and the long case and the oral, one after another; and she would know in June, and then she would be a person who had passed an examination.

“A doctor,” said Alexander.

“A person who has passed an examination,” said Charlotte. “They’re not the same. Everybody thinks they’re the same. A doctor is somebody who has done it for ten years and been wrong in front of a patient and lived with it. I’ll be somebody who knows where the forearm goes.” She looked at the drawing on the wall. “Mostly.”

“The newspapers call you a doctor.”

“The newspapers have called me a doctor since February last year, and I’ve corrected them every time, and they keep doing it, and I’m going to keep correcting them until it’s true and then I’m going to correct them the other way.” She ate some bread. “It’s the only thing I’m allowed to correct. I’m not giving it up.”

He laughed. He had not meant to. It came out of him in the kitchen the size of a lift, short, the way it had come out in the rain in the Tiergarten and at a table in New Westminster, and his sister looked at him as though he had dropped something.

“What?”

“Nothing.”

“You laughed.”

“You said it’s the only thing you’re allowed to correct.”

“It is.”

“You’re the Regent,” said Alexander. “You correct everything. You’ve corrected the whole of Prussia since October. You corrected the Chancellery about Kamerun.”

Charlotte put her spoon down.

“That,” she said, “was a question.”

“It was a correction dressed up as a question.”

“It was a question,” said Charlotte, “and Jaunde has answered it, and the answer is theirs, and I am not going to have it called a correction in my own kitchen on my birthday.” She picked the spoon up again. “Jakub showed you, didn’t he. The four lines in the Tagesspiegel.”

“How do you know?”

“Because Jakub reads every newspaper in the school library every morning before the bell,” said Charlotte, “and Lukas told me.”

“Lukas tells you everything.”

“Lukas tells me everything you won’t,” said Charlotte. “I said.”

---

They talked about the amendment.

They talked about it the way you talk about the weather in a place you are not going to: carefully, and around it. He told her about the corner by the atlases, and Amalie and the Hanseatic League, and the Chancellor’s eleven and six and one. She told him the Bundesrat would sit on the twenty-third, and that the states would be the slow part, because the states always were, and that the Prussian amendment would go to the Abgeordnetenhaus after Easter, and that Falk had the two-thirds if the Zentrum came with her and the people with his face on their posters did as well, which they would, because they had said so, for their own reasons.

“Strange majority,” said Alexander.

“The strangest the Landtag’s ever had,” said Charlotte. “They’ll vote for the same thing and not look at each other while they do it.” She turned her spoon over in the soup. “Like the Reichstag. I watched it. The tray.”

“Jakub said both sides were embarrassed by the same noise.”

“Jakub,” said Charlotte, “should be in the Chancellery.”

She did not say what would happen when it passed.

He did not say it either.

He sat across the small table from her with his knees against the table leg and thought about it, the thing neither of them was saying, which was that if the amendment passed, and the states ratified it, and the Landtag did its two-thirds, then on a day that had not been chosen yet she would stop being his Regent. That the two folders and the two sittings and the two seals and the chair she sat in that had been their father’s, and the hand on the back of his coat on Kingdom Day, all of it, would stop being hers, and become his. That she had never wanted any of it. That she had never once said she did not want it, either, to him or to anybody, and was not saying so now, across a table the size of a tray, on her birthday, with their grandmother’s watch on her wrist.

He did not know whether he would be taking something from her or giving her something back. He had written that to Frederick the night before, in the dome, by the red torch. He still did not know.

She did not tell him. He did not ask.

The radiator under the window ticked. In the courtyard somebody’s radio was playing something with a trumpet in it, very far away.

---

“There’s a letter on the shelf,” said Charlotte, after a while, “from Frederick.”

He looked up.

It was on the shelf by the window, propped against a jar of pencils: a long envelope, American, with three stamps on it, one with an eagle, and the address written in a hand he knew better than his own now, and had to look at without knowing it.

“He writes to me,” said Charlotte. “You know that. I told you in the summer.”

“About a novel.”

“About a novel,” said Charlotte, and looked, briefly, at the paperback face down on top of the pile of books against the wall. “He’s wrong about the ending. He’s been wrong about the ending since September. He’s written to say so again, for my birthday, which is the most Frederick thing anybody has ever done, and he says he’ll prove it at Easter.” She paused. “Is he coming at Easter?”

Alexander looked at the envelope on the shelf.

He thought about the box in the second drawer of his desk, with the ribbon round it, and the birthday letter in it, and the first page of the answer he had finished last night in the dome and given to Kessler for the bag this morning. He thought about what his face was doing, and made it do nothing, the way Frederick had made his do nothing in the front row on the crest, and found that it was harder in a kitchen than in front of three thousand people.

“Mama and Aunt Christina are talking about it,” he said. “On the telephone.”

“In which language?”

“English. Mama’s Swedish is worse than Aunt Christina’s German.”

“Everybody’s Swedish is worse than Aunt Christina’s German,” said Charlotte. She looked at him a little longer than was usual for her. Then she looked away. “I’ll be sitting papers at Easter. If he comes. Tell him he’s still wrong.”

“Tell him yourself. You write to him.”

“I’m the only one in the family who does,” said Charlotte, and picked up the soup bowls, and turned to the sink, which was close enough to reach without getting up, and ran the tap.

He sat at the table and looked at the back of her head.

He did not know whether she knew. He thought, looking at her grey jumper and her hair tied back for the ward and her shoulders as she rinsed the bowls, that she might, and that if she did, she was going to go on not knowing it for as long as he wanted her to, which was the kindest thing anybody in his family had ever done for him, if it was true, and he would never find out whether it was.

---

“Open it,” he said.

She turned off the tap.

“It’s not a book,” said Alexander. “Lukas said you’d think it was a book, because it’s flat. It isn’t a book.”

Charlotte dried her hands on the tea towel. She sat down again across from him, and took the parcel, and turned it over, and undid the tape at the back with her thumbnail, very carefully, the way she undid a dressing, and folded back the brown paper.

It was a chart.

It was a single sheet of heavy card, the size of a newspaper folded once, and on it, in black ink, in the square hand, very small, was the sky. A circle, for the whole of it, the horizon round the edge with the points of the compass, north at the top, and inside the circle the stars, hundreds of them, each one a dot sized to its brightness, the bright ones named, the constellations joined by thin lines, the Milky Way a pale wash of grey pencil running across the north. In the south-east, a single larger dot, ringed, with a label beside it: Jupiter, in Virgo. In the west, another: Saturn, in Gemini. And in a box at the bottom, in the same hand:

The sky over Potsdam at midnight on 11 March 2005. No moon. It was new the day before.

Charlotte looked at it for a long time.

He had drawn it over four weekends, in the dome, from the tables in the back of the log and the old atlas of his father’s that had the positions of the planets for every year until 2050, by the red torch, with Lukas on the floor holding the card flat at the corners when it curled. He had got Jupiter wrong twice and had to scrape it off with a razor blade and draw it again. Lukas had said, on the second Saturday, that it was a present for him, not for her, because it was stars, and he liked stars, and she did not especially, and that he should give her a book.

Charlotte did not say anything for so long that he began to think Lukas had been right.

Then she put one finger, very lightly, on the ringed dot in the south-east.

“That was there,” she said. “When I was born.”

“In the south-east. In Virgo. You’d have seen it from the window if you’d been able to see anything.”

“I couldn’t see anything. I was born.” She did not take her finger off it. “No moon.”

“It was new the day before.”

“So it was dark.”

“It was very dark,” said Alexander. “It was the darkest it could have been.”

Charlotte looked at the chart.

“Lukas said you’d think it was for me,” he said. “That it’s stars, so it’s for me. He said I should give you a book.”

Charlotte took her finger off Jupiter and looked up at him across the table the size of a tray.

“Lukas is wrong,” she said.

He looked at her.

“It’s the first present you have ever given me,” said Charlotte, “that you didn’t choose for yourself.” She looked back at the chart. “You’ve given me things you liked since you were four. Telescopes. A book about comets. A model of the solar system that you then took back and kept in your own room. Every one of them was for you. This one’s stars, and it’s the first one that isn’t.” She put her hand flat on the card, the whole of it, over the north and the Milky Way and the grey wash of pencil. “It’s mine. It’s the night I was born. You drew the night I was born.”

He did not know what to say. He said nothing. It was, he thought afterwards, the right thing, and it was not on purpose.

Charlotte stood up, which in that kitchen meant turning round, and reached past the drawings of the man with half his skin off, and took out four of the drawing pins, and took down the one with the forearm, the one she had got wrong four times, and rolled it up and put it on the floor on top of the books, on top of the paperback, so that he could not have read the title now if he had tried. Then she held the chart up against the wall where the forearm had been, and pinned it there, at the corners, carefully, one pin at a time, and stood back, as far as the kitchen allowed, which was one step.

“There,” said Charlotte. “Over the table. Where I’ll see it when I’m revising and I’ve got the brachial plexus wrong again.”

“You’ll get it right.”

“I’ll get it right in May,” said Charlotte, “and wrong again in June, and right for the rest of my life after that, probably, on the ward, at three in the morning, when it matters.” She looked at the chart. “And I’ll look at Jupiter.”

---

He went down the four flights at half past two.

The light gave out between the fourth floor and the third, as it had on the way up, and Charlotte’s officer stood up on the third landing and said “Majesty,” very low, and sat down again, and on the second landing Kessler was looking at the ceiling, at a crack in the plaster that ran from the corner to the light fitting, as though it were going somewhere.

“All right, sir?”

“Yes.”

They went down. In the hall at the bottom he stopped, and looked back up the well of the stairs to the skylight, and the grey, and the door at the top, which was still open, and his sister standing in it, in her grey jumper, with the tea towel over her shoulder again, looking down at him over the rail.

She did not say anything. She lifted one hand, the one with the watch on it.

He lifted his.

In the car his telephone buzzed. It was Lukas.

Well?

He looked at it for a long time. Then he wrote back, with one thumb, which he was not good at:

She said it wasn’t for me.

There was a pause, while the car went down the street he had been driven down a hundred times without looking up, and he looked up, at the fourth floor, until it had gone.

Then I was wrong, wrote Lukas. Write it down. It’s the first time since 2022.

He did not write it down. But he did not forget it either, and on the Saturday after, in the dome, by the red torch, between the seeing and the transparency, where nobody would ever look, he wrote it in the log anyway, very small: 11 March. L. wrong. And then, under it, after a long time, because it was true and there was nowhere else to put it:

No moon. It was the darkest it could have been.