Homework

On Wednesdays he went to the dome after school and stayed there until the car came at six.

It had been the arrangement since September, when the timetable at the Humboldt-Gymnasium gave Klasse 8 a free last hour on Wednesdays and his mother, who had wanted it for Latin, had been told by his tutor that a boy who had been crowned in March and had a government dismissed in his name in April without being asked could have one hour a week that nobody organised. His mother had agreed. She had not liked it. The hour had become two, and the two had become the whole afternoon, and nobody had said anything, because on Wednesdays he came back to Berlin at seven and ate his supper and was in bed by ten, which on the other nights of the week he was not.

The letter was waiting for him at the house.

The under-butler had it on a tray in the hall, by itself, which was how the house had learned from somewhere that these were to be brought, and he held it out without a word as Alexander came in from the car in his school coat.

“From Berlin, sir. It came out with the noon post.”

Alexander looked at it.

It was Frederick’s hand. He knew the hand now the way he knew his own: the capitals too large, the k with a loop in it that nobody in Germany had been taught since the war, the address written as though by somebody who had been told to make it look like nothing and had very nearly managed. He had sent Frederick the answer on Saturday. It had gone in the bag on Sunday night and reached New Westminster, the Ambassador’s office said, on Monday. Frederick answered in a week. He always answered in a week; it was one of the things Alexander had come to count on without ever deciding to, like the guard on the corridor and the squeal of the shutter at three-quarters.

This had come in two days.

He took it off the tray, and said thank you, and went out again by the garden door without taking off his coat, across the wet grass in the thin March light to the dome, and up the ladder, and shut the hatch behind him all the way, and sat down on the stool by the eyepiece, and opened it.

---

It was not long. He read it once.

Your letter came yesterday. Dame M brought it up after the hospital, on the tray, by itself, and stood in the doorway for a moment longer than she usually does, as though the envelope were heavier than the others and she had noticed.

He read the second paragraph, and it said that the first thing you decide should be the first thing you are allowed to decide, and that this was the best reason anybody had given Frederick for anything this year, and for a moment he was warm in the cold dome, and did not know why he had been afraid of an envelope.

Then the third section.

Then, at the end, when she was putting it back in the folder, I asked her something. I said it was for civics.

He read on.

So I said, “For civics. Can the King of Hanover have a view on how Hanover instructs its delegates in the Bundesrat?”

He stopped there, and sat very still on the stool, with the letter in his hands, and the dome very quiet round him, and the light through the closed shutter grey.

Then he read the rest, all of it, without stopping, to the end. The Swedish, set out in italics, “Det får han. Men det är inte hans fråga, och nu har han ställt den.”, and Frederick’s word for word under it, He may. But it isn’t his question, and now he has asked it. The three ways of reading it. I asked the question so that she would know what I wanted, and that I’m not sure that’s allowed. And then the part he had known, from the second line, would be somewhere in it:

It wasn’t civics. I’m not going to pretend to you that it was. I wanted to help. You’ve had thirteen months of people deciding things in your name and for once there’s a thing being decided that you might want, by people who don’t care what you want, and two of the states that vote on it are mine, and I thought, I can’t do anything, I’m not allowed to do anything, but I can ask a question at a kitchen table, and that’s not doing anything, that’s asking.

And Brunswick, not asked, because asking twice would have made it a question. And the green book, with the date. And the river, and the blisters, and his uncle, and Kamerun, and Good said twice, put near the end so that it would not be the thing he used to stop being angry. And Charlotte, and the novel, and Easter, and Andromeda the wrong way up, and the old ladies on the buses.

So here it is. It was homework. It wasn’t homework. I don’t know what she meant.

Yours, with every formality, and not sure,

Frederick

He put the letter down on the shelf, under the eyepiece, beside the log.

He got up off the stool and walked round the dome. It was round, so it took longer than walking round a room, and there was nowhere in it to stop. He walked round it twice and then a third time, which he had never done, and then stood with his back to the pier of the mount where Lukas sat, and looked at the closed shutter, and found that his hands were not shaking, and that he would have preferred them to be.

He knew what this was. He had been this angry once before.

It was in February, the week after the corridor, when a man from the Household had come to his room with a card, a stiff white card with a crest on it, and given it to him, and it had been the order of his father’s funeral: who would walk, and where, and behind whom, and which hymn, and at what minute the guns. It had all been decided. It had been decided by nine people at a table, in his name, while he was in his room not reading a book about the Hanseatic League, and it was right, every line of it was right and proper and what his father would have wanted, and he had stood in his room with the card in his hand and been so angry that he could not see the crest. Not because it was wrong. Because it was right, and it was his, and nobody had asked him.

He had not been that angry since. Not in April, when they voted six to three. In April he had been something else, something colder, that knew what to do: ask for it to be written down. This was not that. This was February. This was the card.

I can ask a question at a kitchen table, and that’s not doing anything, that’s asking.

---

He lit the stove.

It was four o’clock in the afternoon in March and not cold enough, and the stove was for the nights, and his father had put it in the winter he was nine because he would not come down, and it was the only argument his father had ever admitted losing to him. He knelt in front of it and opened the little iron door and put in the kindling from the basket that Lukas kept filled, birch, because Lukas said this month it was birch, and lit it with the long matches from the shelf, and watched it take, and shut the door, and stood up.

Then he sat down at the shelf with the writing block he kept for the letters, and a pencil, and wrote.

Dear Frederick,

Hanover’s Act of 11 October provides that the Regent acts only on the advice of Hanover’s own ministers. The Bundesrat is a chamber of governments. Its delegates are instructed by the ministries of the states and may be replaced at any time by the government that sent them. The King of Hanover has no part in the instruction of Hanover’s delegates and may not have one. You know this. You have marked it in blue. I want to set out, so that it is on the record, exactly what it was you did at your mother’s table, and why it was not civics, and why it was not asking.

He wrote four pages. They were very good. They were the best thing he had ever written about the constitution of anything, exact, and fair, and cold, and every sentence of them was true, and he read them through from the beginning when he had finished, and on the third page he found that he had written, You asked the Regent of Hanover what the King of Hanover may think, in front of the Regent of Hanover, and that it was the only sentence in four pages that was not a citation, and that it was the only one he meant.

He opened the stove door and put the four pages in.

They curled at the edges and went brown and then black, and the pencil stood out for a moment on the black, silver, the King of Hanover, and was gone.

---

Lukas came up the ladder at half past four.

Alexander heard the hatch go, and the ladder, and Lukas’s bag being put down on the boards, and then a silence, which was Lukas seeing the stove.

“It’s March,” said Lukas.

“I know.”

“It’s daylight.”

“I know.”

Lukas looked at the stove, with the door open and the last of the four pages lying grey on the birch. Then he looked at Alexander, at the writing block, at the letter on the shelf under the eyepiece, which was not in Alexander’s hand. He did not go near it. He sat down where he always sat, on the boards, with his back against the pier of the mount, and took off his coat, because the dome was warm now, and took the knitted hat out of his pocket and looked at it and put it back.

“Is it Frederick?”

“Yes.”

“Is he all right?”

“He’s very well.”

“Is his father all right?”

“He said Good. Twice.”

Lukas considered this.

“Then whatever it is,” said Lukas, “it isn’t the worst thing.”

Alexander did not answer. He tore the next sheet off the writing block and wrote on it again, Dear Frederick, and then sat looking at the two words for a long time, with Lukas on the floor behind him not saying anything, and the stove ticking, and then he wrote.

The second one was short. It was not cold. It was the other thing, the thing underneath, and he wrote it quickly, without stopping, the way he had once written in the dome about Andromeda, and it said that he had written to Frederick on Saturday that the first thing he decided must be the first thing he was allowed to decide, and that Frederick had read it on Monday, and said on Tuesday night that it was the best reason anybody had given him for anything, and then gone downstairs. You read my first page, it said, and went downstairs. And then it said other things, about February, and the card, and nine people at a table, and what it was like to be the person things were done for, and it said them in a way he had never said them to anybody, not to Charlotte and not to Lukas and not to the doctor in Berlin with the green chairs who was paid to be told them.

He read it through once.

He opened the stove door again and put it in.

It went faster than the first, because it was only one page, and because the stove was hot now. He watched it go. He did not feel better. He had not expected to.

“That’s two,” said Lukas, from the floor.

“Yes.”

“Are there going to be more?”

“One.”

“Is that one going in the stove?”

“No,” said Alexander. “That one’s going in the bag.”

---

The third took less time than it took the stove to burn the second.

He tore off a fresh sheet. He wrote the place at the top, and the day, the way he always did, because Frederick had once said that the place at the top was the best part of a letter, because it was the only part you could be sure of. Then he wrote:

Dear Frederick.

He looked at the full stop. He had always put a comma there. Every letter since October had begun with a comma, the way he had been taught, the way you begin a thing that is going to go on. He did not change it.

It is the thing they did in my name.

Alexander

He did not write Yours, with every formality. He looked at the space where it would have gone. He did not write it.

He folded the sheet once and put it in an envelope and wrote on the envelope, in the hand he had been taught at six, the address that looked like nothing, and sealed it, and sat with it in his hands.

Behind him Lukas got up off the boards.

He came and stood beside the shelf, not close, and looked down at the envelope in Alexander’s hands, and then at the letter from New Westminster under the eyepiece, and then at the stove.

“Can I ask what it says?”

“One line.”

“Which line?”

Alexander told him.

Lukas was quiet for a long time. Outside, beyond the shutter, somebody went past on the gravel, the gardener, with a wheelbarrow, and the wheel squeaked, and went away towards the lake.

“Is it true?” said Lukas.

“Yes.”

“Is it all of what’s true?”

Alexander looked at the envelope.

He did not answer, and Lukas did not ask again. Lukas went back to the pier of the mount and sat down on the boards and took out his flask, and drank, and looked at the stove, and after a while he said, to the stove, quite mildly:

“That’s not my one thing. I’m still saving it. I wanted you to know it wasn’t that.”

“I know.”

“Good,” said Lukas, and shut his eyes.

---

The car came at six.

Kessler stood at the bottom of the ladder, as he did on Wednesdays, and did not come up, because nobody came up, and Alexander closed the stove’s damper and turned off the red lamp and came down with his school bag over one shoulder and the envelope in his hand.

“For the bag,” he said.

Kessler took it. He looked at the envelope, at the address that looked like nothing, which he had taken to the Foreign Office every week since October without once looking at it longer than it took to put it in his inside pocket. He looked at it now for perhaps a second longer than that.

“It’ll go tonight, sir.”

“Tonight.”

“Yes, sir.”

Kessler put it in his inside pocket, and buttoned his coat over it, and looked at the sky, which was going dark over the Neuer Garten, and then at the dome, where a thread of smoke was still coming out of the pipe and bending away towards the west, and said nothing about it at all.

---

In the car he took out Frederick’s letter and read it again.

He read it from the beginning, the way he had not let himself the first time. He read the river, and the blisters, and the cox who said they rowed like eight people who had spent the winter facing a wall. He read Charlotte, and the novel, and I’ll prove it at Easter. He read I bet it’s a map of something, and nearly laughed, in the back of the car on the Berliner Strasse, because it was, more or less, and he had told nobody.

He read his uncle.

I told him that you’d opened the third one on purpose, so that Jaunde would be asked, and he looked at me for a long time, the way he does, going to the back of the room for the word, and when he came back with it, it was “Good.” He said it twice. He hasn’t said anything twice since November. I wanted you to have that before anything else in this letter, and I’ve put it near the end, because I didn’t want it to be the thing you used to stop being angry.

He read that three times.

It nearly was. He sat in the back of the car with the lights of the Glienicke Bridge coming up and going by, and he thought of his uncle in a chair by a window in New Westminster, going to the back of the room for a word and coming back with Good, twice, for him, for the third drawer; and of Frederick, who had known that it would nearly be the thing, and had put it near the end, on purpose, and said so, because Frederick could not do anything sideways even when he was trying to, even when he had gone downstairs and asked his mother a question for civics. He thought that he could ask Kessler to stop the car. He thought that Kessler would, without a word, and would take the envelope out of his inside pocket, and hold it out, and look at the roof of the car.

He did not ask.

It was true. It was the thing they had done in his name. A Council of nine at a table, deciding a thing he might have wanted, or not wanted, on his behalf, because they could, and because they loved him, some of them, and because it was easier than asking. Frederick had not had nine people. He had had a kitchen table and a mother and a question. It was smaller. It was the same.

The car went on into Berlin. He folded Frederick’s letter along its creases and put it in the inside pocket of his school coat, where Kessler kept his, and kept his hand over it, flat, as Lukas had kept his hand over his phone on the night of the count, and did not take it away until they were in the forecourt.

At ten the guard went past his door, and he went to bed, and did not sleep for a long time, and did not write anything in the log, because there was nothing to observe, and because there was nothing he could have written in it that was an observation.