The Bundesrat

Frau Dr Seidel was teaching them 1848.

She had been teaching them 1848 since before Christmas, slowly, the way she taught everything, as though the year were a house she was showing to people who might buy it and she wanted them to see every room. On Friday the twenty-third of March, in the second lesson, she had reached the parliament at Frankfurt, which had sat for a year in a church and written a constitution for a Germany that did not yet exist, and she had written on the board, in her large untidy capitals, A CONSTITUTION WITHOUT A STATE, and underlined it twice, and was explaining what that meant, and why it had mattered, and why it had failed, when the door opened.

It was the school secretary. She did not come in. She stood in the doorway and looked at Frau Dr Seidel, and then, very quickly, at the third row by the window, where Alexander sat between Lukas and the radiator, and then at Frau Dr Seidel again.

“It’s sitting now,” she said. “They said about twenty minutes.”

Frau Dr Seidel looked at her over her glasses. Then she looked at the board, at A CONSTITUTION WITHOUT A STATE, and then at the class, and then, as everybody in the room had known she would, at the third row by the window.

She did not ask Alexander anything. That was the thing about Frau Dr Seidel. She had taught the Emperor history since September and had never once asked him a question that was about him, even in the lessons on Frederick the Great, even on the day they did 1871 and half the class had turned round in their seats. She asked the class.

“Well,” said Frau Dr Seidel. “It’s history. Does anybody object to hearing some?”

Nobody said anything. Thirty people did not look at the third row by the window, so hard that Alexander could feel it on the side of his face like the radiator.

Alexander said, “It’s history.”

Frau Dr Seidel nodded, as though that settled a point of method, and went to the cupboard at the back of the room where the school kept the old radio for Kingdom Day and for exams, and brought it out, and put it on her desk, and found the station, and turned it down until it was only a voice in the front of the room, and sat on the edge of the desk with her arms folded and her chalk in her hand, and waited, like everybody else.

---

The voice on the radio was a woman’s, low and even, a correspondent in the Bundesrat’s press gallery, and she was explaining the procedure, because there was nothing else to explain yet.

The Bundesrat was a chamber of governments, she said. Its members were not elected. They were delegates, sent by the ministries of the twenty-seven states and instructed by them, and they voted as their governments told them, each state as a block. A state could not split its vote. If the parties in a state’s coalition could not agree, the state abstained, and an abstention counted against. The amendment needed three-fifths. The Reichstag had given it three-fifths a fortnight before. Today the states would say.

Alexander knew all of this. He had known it since he was nine. He sat at his desk with his hands flat on the lid, the way he had sat in the cathedral with the cushion, and listened to it anyway, because it was being said aloud in a classroom, by a stranger, to thirty people who had not known it, and it was strange to hear his life explained to them as though it were a lesson about the weather.

Beside him Lukas was looking at the board.

Behind them somebody’s pen fell on the floor, and nobody picked it up.

“The President is calling the vote,” said the correspondent.

Then nothing, for a while. The sound of a large room. Chairs. Somebody coughing. A voice, far off, that was not the correspondent’s, saying something formal that the radio could not quite reach. Alexander found that he was counting, the way he had counted the minute hand in the cathedral, and made himself stop, and found that he had started again.

“The amendment has the consent of the Bundesrat,” said the correspondent. “Three-fifths of the votes have been cast for it. It goes now to the states for ratification.”

Nobody in the room moved.

“Prussia’s votes were cast for, on the instruction of the Falk government,” said the correspondent, and Alexander heard the name go round the room behind him like a draught. She read the others, state by state, in the order of the chamber. He did not hear them. He heard one.

“Hanover voted for.”

He kept his hands flat on the desk.

“Brunswick,” said the correspondent, “abstained. The Grand Coalition in Braunschweig was unable to agree an instruction, and its delegation therefore abstained, and under the rules of the chamber that abstention counts against. It was not enough to affect the result.”

She went on. She said the Imperial Chancellor would make a statement at noon. She said the states were expected to ratify through April, and that the Prussian Landtag would take its own amendment after Easter. She said that the Emperor, who was at school, had not been asked to comment, and would not be, and that the Palace had said only that the matter was one for the governments of the states.

Frau Dr Seidel reached over and turned the radio off.

She did not say anything about it. She stood up off the edge of the desk and went back to the board, and looked at A CONSTITUTION WITHOUT A STATE for a moment, and then turned round to the class with the chalk in her hand.

“So,” said Frau Dr Seidel. “Frankfurt. They had a constitution. They had a parliament. They had everything except the one thing a constitution cannot give itself. Who can tell me what that was?”

A girl in the front row put her hand up.

“Somebody to say yes to it,” said the girl.

“Good,” said Frau Dr Seidel, and wrote it on the board, under the other thing, in the same large capitals, and went on with 1848, and did not look at the third row by the window again for the rest of the lesson, which Alexander understood to be the kindest thing a teacher had ever done for him.

---

At break it was raining, so they stood under the arcade by the bicycle racks, where the smokers in Klasse 12 stood when it was not raining, and where nobody stood when it was.

Jakub had gone to find out what the Chancellor said. Amalie had gone with him, because she said somebody had to make sure he did not tell the whole of Klasse 8 that he had been the first to know. So it was only the two of them, and the rain, and the bicycles, and Kessler at the far end of the arcade looking at the underside of the roof.

Lukas leaned against the wall with his hands in his pockets.

“Did he do it?”

Alexander looked at the rain.

“I don’t know.”

“Will you ever know?”

“No.”

Lukas nodded slowly, the way he had nodded in the dome on the night of the count, as though an answer had been given that he could do something with.

They stood there for a while.

“Brunswick abstained,” said Lukas.

“Yes.”

“Brunswick’s his too.”

“Yes.”

“So one of his said yes, and one of his said nothing.”

“Yes.”

“And he asked about Hanover. And he didn’t ask about Brunswick. You said. In the letter.”

Alexander had not told Lukas what was in the letter. He had told Lukas the one line, and that there had been a question at a kitchen table, and that Brunswick had not been asked. He had not thought Lukas had been listening to the last part. Lukas was always listening to the last part.

“Yes.”

“So the one he asked about said yes,” said Lukas, “and the one he didn’t ask about said nothing.”

“That doesn’t mean anything. Hanover’s coalition is a different coalition. Brunswick’s is a Grand Coalition, they never agree about anything, they abstained on the broadcasting statute two years ago, they abstained on the bridge. It doesn’t mean he did anything. It doesn’t mean his mother did anything. She can’t. She acts on the advice of Hanover’s ministers and on nothing else, it’s in the Act, she took the oath.”

“I know.”

“So it doesn’t mean anything.”

“I know,” said Lukas. “That’s what’s so annoying about it.”

Alexander looked at him.

Lukas was looking at the bicycles. The rain was coming off the edge of the arcade roof in a line, very straight, like a bead curtain, and the bicycles beyond it were wet and shining and nobody’s.

“If it meant something,” said Lukas, “you could be angry with him properly. Or not. Either way you’d know. But it doesn’t mean anything, and it doesn’t not mean anything, and you’ll never know which, and neither will he, and neither will his mother, and neither will the Minister-President of Hanover, probably, because I bet he doesn’t know why he did it either. He probably thought it was his own idea.” He took one hand out of his pocket and put it flat against the wet wall. “That’s what’s so annoying about it. That’s what you said in the letter. That it’s the thing they did in your name. It’s not that they did it. It’s that you can’t ever find out how much.”

Alexander did not say anything.

The bell went. Somewhere inside the building a door banged, and somebody shouted, and the arcade began to fill with Klasse 7 coming out to look at the rain.

“That wasn’t my one thing,” said Lukas, pushing himself off the wall. “That was a fact. I’m still saving it.”

“It wasn’t a fact. It was an opinion.”

“It was an opinion about a fact,” said Lukas. “They don’t count either.” And he went in, with his hands back in his pockets, and Alexander stood under the arcade a moment longer, with the rain coming off the roof in a straight line, and then went in after him.

---

The Chancellor’s statement was in the newspapers by the afternoon, and Jakub had it on his phone in the last lesson, under the desk, and passed it along the row.

Brenner had spoken for four minutes. He had thanked the states. He had said that the amendment was now a matter for their parliaments and that the government would not comment on the instructions of any of them, since that was not the government’s business, and that the sovereign had given no instructions and asked for nothing, and that this was how it should be. He had not said Hanover. He had not said Brunswick. Nobody had asked him about either. The newspapers said, in the paragraphs underneath, in the way newspapers did, that the abstention of Brunswick, a state held in personal union with Hanover by the young King who had succeeded in New Westminster in October, had been noted in some quarters, and that the Hanoverian ministry had declined to explain its instruction beyond saying that it was a settlement the Prussian government itself had asked the states to make.

He read it twice and passed the phone back to Jakub.

“Noted in some quarters,” said Jakub, very quietly. “That means one man at one paper noticed and nobody else cared.”

“Yes.”

“Do you care?”

“No.”

Jakub looked at him for a moment over the phone, with the face Jakub had when somebody had said something in Polish that he was going to have to translate later, and then put the phone back under the desk, and said nothing else.

---

The car came at four. On Fridays it took him to the house in the Neuer Garten for the weekend, not back to Berlin, and Kessler sat in the front beside the driver and the other car went in front, and the third behind, and they went down through the town in the rain past the station.

At the station a train was coming in from Berlin. He watched it from the window of the middle car. It was red and white and nearly empty, and it slid in along the platform under the lights and stopped, and its doors opened, and a woman got off with a dog and a man got off with a bicycle, and that was all. Every ten minutes, Frederick had written. That was not a timetable. That was showing off.

“Kessler.”

“Sir.”

“Was there anything in the bag?”

Kessler did not turn round. He had the list on his knee, the list he always had on Fridays, of what had come for Alexander in the week and what had gone, and he did not look at it, because he did not need to.

“No, sir. Nothing today.”

“Nothing from New Westminster?”

“Nothing from New Westminster, sir.”

The car went on, past the station and out along the Berliner Strasse towards the lake, in the rain.

It was the first week since the New Year without one. He had not counted the weeks. He found, sitting in the back of the middle car with his hands on his knees, that he knew exactly how many there had been anyway, the way he knew the seats in the Abgeordnetenhaus and the minute hand in the cathedral and the number of steps on the dome’s ladder, because some things counted themselves whether you asked them to or not. Eleven. There had been weeks without one before, the three after the Eleventh, when neither of them had written, and the week of Christmas, when Frederick was on Öland; but from the letter from Solliden to the homework letter there had been one every week, eleven weeks running, on Kessler’s list, in the capitals that were too large.

And today there was nothing, because nine days ago he had written one line, with a full stop after Dear Frederick, and sent it, and Frederick had read it, and had done what Alexander would have done, which was not answer.

He had wanted that. He had written the line so that there would be nothing to answer. He had not thought about what it would be like when there was nothing.

---

That night it cleared, a little, after ten, and he went up to the dome by himself, because Lukas was at home on Fridays, and opened the shutter by hand, with the squeal at three-quarters, and stood at the eyepiece for an hour.

Andromeda was gone. It had gone down in the north-west before nine, into the trees, the way he had told Frederick it would. In April it would be lower still, in the branches, the wrong season for it. He had written that so that Frederick would not be disappointed. He looked at the place where it had been, at the dark line of the wood, and then at Leo, high in the south-east, which looked exactly like what it was called, and then at nothing in particular.

He opened the log, and found the line for the night, and wrote the date, and aufgeklart nach 22 Uhr, and the seeing, which was poor, and the transparency, which was worse. In the space where he would have written what he saw he held the pencil for a long time over the page.

He did not write Hanover. He did not write Brunswick. They were not observations. He did not know what they were.

He wrote: Nichts im Beutel. Nothing in the bag.

Then he looked at it, under the red lamp, for a long time, and decided that it was an observation after all, because it was a thing he had looked for, at a particular time, in a particular place, and not found; and he closed the log, and closed the shutter, and went down the ladder, and the officer who did Herr Schade’s round on Fridays had not yet come past, so for once he went to bed before he was told to.