The Ribbon

He went to the box for the rules.

It was a quarter to seven on Tuesday, five days before Easter, and the house in Berlin was still dark at the edges, the corridor lamps on and the windows grey, and he had been awake since five thinking about Schafkopf. Not about anything else. He had decided that, lying in bed with the guard’s footsteps going past at their hour and the street outside beginning: that he would think about Schafkopf and nothing else until Saturday, because on Saturday there would be four people in the house at Potsdam who played it, and he was the worst of them, and Kate Hartigan’s rules were in the box.

They were in Letter Seven. Frederick had written them out from Solliden, numbered one to eight, in Wisconsin terms, with Kate’s opinions in brackets, and Alexander had corrected them in pencil in January and sent the corrections back, and Kate had said he was wrong about the Wenz and then that he was right. He wanted to read them again. He wanted to have them by heart by Saturday, the way he had I Vow to Thee by heart, so that whatever else happened in the house at Potsdam he would at least not have to be taught the rules at the table like a child.

The box was in the second drawer of the desk.

It was walnut, long and shallow, and it had been his father’s, and had held his father’s fountain pens, four of them, on a bed of green baize with four grooves in it. The pens were in a drawer at Potsdam now, because he did not write with fountain pens; he wrote in pencil, because ink did strange things in the cold. The grooves were still there. Frederick’s letters lay on top of them, folded, in the order they had come: the timetable letter at the bottom, then the kitchen table and the Admiralty, then Two Over, then Solliden and the snow and the rules, then the birthday, then the winter’s others, one a week, and on top the homework letter, face down, where he had put it on the Wednesday night with his hand still flat on it from the car. Round them all, twice, went a length of dark blue ribbon that had come round the programme for the coronation, and that he had kept because it was the only thing from that day he had wanted to keep.

He tied it the same way every time. He tied it with the knot underneath, against the baize, so that it lay flat and the lid of the box closed flat on it. He had done it that way since the second letter. He did not think about it. It was one of the things his hands did, like holding a cushion with two fingers.

He took the box out of the drawer and put it on the desk and opened the lid.

The knot was on top.

---

He stood and looked at it for a long time.

It was a small knot, a reef knot, neat, pulled tight, the two ends of the dark blue ribbon lying out on either side of it on the top letter like the arms of somebody asleep. It was a good knot. It was better than his. It was on top, where he never put it, where it would have stopped the lid from lying flat, except that whoever had tied it had pressed it down, hard, so that the lid had closed after all; and he had not noticed, because he had not opened the box since the Wednesday night.

He did not touch it.

He made himself look at it the way he looked at the sky before he wrote anything in the log: what was there, and not what he wanted to be there, and not what he was afraid of. A knot. On top. The letters under it in their order. He could see the edges of them, folded, and he counted them without lifting the ribbon, from the side, by their edges, the way he had once counted the ribs in the vault of the cathedral. They were all there. The homework letter was on top, face down, as he had left it.

Then he untied the knot.

He did it slowly, so that he would remember it, and lifted the ribbon off, and turned the homework letter over, and then the one under it, and the one under that, down to the timetable, looking at each of them for anything else: a fold put back the wrong way, a page out of its order, a corner turned. There was nothing. Whoever had untied the ribbon had read them and put them back exactly, in their order, each fold in its fold, and then tied the ribbon again the way any careful person would tie a ribbon round a set of letters, with the knot on top, because nobody would ever think to tie it underneath unless they had done it every time since the second letter.

He put the letters back. He put the ribbon round them, twice, and tied it, with the knot underneath, against the baize, and closed the lid, which lay flat.

He did not take out the rules. He had forgotten about the rules.

---

His mother was at breakfast.

She was always at breakfast on school days in Berlin, in the small dining room at the end of the corridor, with a pot of coffee and the newspapers, which she read the way other people did crosswords. She looked up when he came in, and put the paper down at once, and smiled, and said, “There you are,” as though she had been waiting, which she had.

He sat. There was bread, and butter, and the plum jam from the Uckermark that she had sent for every autumn since he was five, when he had said that it was the best thing in Prussia.

“Your aunt and I spoke on Sunday,” said his mother. “About the rooms.”

“Which rooms?”

“For Saturday. At Potsdam. Frederick’s and Theo’s, and hers, of course. I thought the garden side, all three, so they can see the lake. Frederick likes water, your aunt says. She says he rows.” She poured herself more coffee, which she did not want; he could tell, because she did not drink it. “And Lukas at the end, by the back stairs. His mother says yes, for the week. I telephoned her. She was very kind about it.”

“Thank you.”

“And I’ve asked the kitchen what Americans eat at Easter. They didn’t know. I’m going to ask your aunt.” She smiled at him again. “I don’t suppose you know.”

“Lamb,” said Alexander. “Probably. And eggs.”

“We have both of those.”

“Then they’ll be fine.”

His mother put her hand out across the table and moved the jam an inch nearer to him, which it did not need, and then, before he could see it coming, put the same hand up and pushed the hair back off his forehead, once, the way she had when he was small and had a temperature, and took it away.

She had not done that since he was twelve.

“You look tired,” said his mother. “Are you sleeping?”

“Yes.”

“You’d tell me if you weren’t.”

“Yes.”

She looked at him, with her hand back round the cup she did not want, and he looked back, and saw that she knew he would not tell her, and that she had decided not to say so, and that this was costing her something, the way the face on the crest had cost Frederick something, in front of three thousand people; and that she was going to pay it.

“Well,” said his mother. “It’ll be lovely. Having them. All of them. In the house.” She looked out of the window at the grey courtyard, where there was nothing to look at. “I’m glad you asked for it. I don’t think I’ve told you that. I’m glad.”

He had not asked for it. Frederick had asked, in a letter, and his aunt had said yes in Swedish and then in English, and his mother had been telephoned. He did not say so.

“Thank you, Mama.”

She smiled, and picked up the paper, and did not read it.

He ate the bread. He could not have said afterwards what it tasted of. When he went out into the corridor he stopped, and stood with his back against the wall by the door for a moment, and found that he was breathing as though he had come up the dome’s ladder too fast, and waited for it to stop.

She had never once in his life been glad of anything without saying why.

---

The car was in the forecourt when he went down.

Not his. His was at the side door, where it always was at a quarter past seven, with Kessler beside it. This one was in the forecourt itself, by the front steps, a long dark car with Foreign Office plates and a driver beside it in a grey coat, looking at nothing, the way drivers did when they had been told that the person they had brought would be some time.

He stopped on the side steps.

“Kessler.”

“Sir.”

“Whose is that?”

Kessler looked at it as though he had not already looked at it, which was a thing Kessler did when he wanted to be seen to be answering a question rather than reporting a fact.

“The Ambassador to New Westminster, sir. He’s in Berlin for consultations over Easter. He’s seeing Her Majesty at half past.”

“At half past seven in the morning.”

“Yes, sir.”

“Is he on my programme?”

“No, sir.”

Alexander looked at the car. The driver looked at nothing.

“Was he here last week?”

Kessler did not answer at once. He looked, very briefly, at the underside of the portico, at an old iron hook up there where a lamp had once hung, and then down again.

“Wednesday, sir. The twenty-first. In the afternoon. You were at school.”

“Was that on anybody’s programme?”

“It was on Her Majesty’s, sir.”

“Thank you, Kessler.”

“Sir.”

He did not go back in. He did not go to the front steps, or up them, or along the corridor to his mother’s sitting room, where in a quarter of an hour the Ambassador to New Westminster, who had eaten two of Mrs Hartigan’s dumplings standing up in his dressing gown at midnight in November and said they were better than his mother’s, would be sitting on the edge of a chair with his knees together being frightened of her. He stood on the side steps in his school coat with his bag over his shoulder until Kessler opened the car door, and then he got in, and the car went out by the side gate, and he did not look back at the forecourt.

---

He told Lukas at lunch.

They took their trays to the corner of the library by the atlases, where nobody ate because eating in the library was not allowed, and where nobody had ever stopped them because the librarian had decided in September, without consulting anybody, that the rule did not apply to two boys who sat in the corner and did not talk. They did not talk, usually. Today Alexander talked.

He told him about the box, and the knot, and that it was on top, and that everything under it was in its order and every fold in its fold. He told him about breakfast, and the plum jam, and the hand on his forehead, and I’m glad. He told him about the car in the forecourt, and the twenty-first, and that it had been on his mother’s programme.

Lukas listened to all of it with his eyes on the atlases.

When Alexander had finished he put his fork down on the tray, and looked at the spines of the atlases for a while longer, the big ones on the bottom shelf, Westermann, Diercke, the old one with the Empire in pink that nobody had taken out in years, and then he said:

“Your mother read them.”

“You don’t know that.”

“I know your mother.”

Alexander looked at him.

Lukas did not look away. For once he did not look at the atlases or the window or the back of anybody’s head. He looked at Alexander.

“When I said that thing,” said Lukas. “About her. The thing that went in the paper.”

“I know.”

“You don’t know this part.” Lukas folded his hands on the edge of the tray. “Frau Reinhardt sat me down and I told her how it happened, and it was horrible, and then it was over. And then your mother was kind to me. For a week. She asked my mother how I was eating. She asked me what I was reading and listened to the answer. She sent a cake to the café, a whole one, with a card. She never once said one word about it. Not one. She was just kind.” He looked at his hands. “It was the worst week I’ve had. I couldn’t eat. Four days. Because I knew exactly how angry she was, from how kind she was. She doesn’t do kind for nothing. She does kind instead.”

Somebody came into the library, saw them, and went out again.

“So she read them,” said Lukas, more quietly. “And she knows, now, whatever was in them. And she’s not going to say. She’s going to be kind to you until Saturday, and then on Saturday he comes, and then I don’t know what. But she read them.” He put his hand flat on the pocket of his blazer, where, Alexander knew, the knitted hat was, because it went everywhere in that pocket and came out only in the dome. “I’d put my hat on it.”

---

Alexander did not say anything for a long time.

He thought about the letters, in their order, on the green baize, in the grooves where his father’s pens had been. He thought about which ones she would have read. All of them, if she had read any; she had never in her life read half of a document. The timetable, and I have signed it Frederick, and not George R. The kitchen table. Two over, and Solliden, and the jetty. The snow, and the almond, and the rules. And then the birthday.

If they offer it to you, take it.

Don’t tell your mother I said it. I mean that.

And the homework. On top. Face down. For civics. Can the King of Hanover have a view on how Hanover instructs its delegates in the Bundesrat? She would have read it on the Wednesday, the twenty-first, in the afternoon, while he was at school, with the Ambassador to New Westminster gone back down the front steps to his car, and the Bundesrat two days away.

And she had been kind to him since. He had not noticed. He had been too busy being angry with Frederick to notice that his mother had been kind to him for six days.

“What are you going to do?” said Lukas.

“Nothing.”

“Are you going to ask her?”

“No.”

“Are you going to tell Frederick?”

“He isn’t writing to me.”

“You could write to him.”

“No,” said Alexander. “I wrote to him. I wrote one line. He’s answering it.”

Lukas thought about that.

“By not writing.”

“Yes.”

“That’s very Hohenzollern of him.”

“He’s not a Hohenzollern.”

“Your mother isn’t either, and she’s the most Hohenzollern person I know,” said Lukas. “It’s catching. You’re all the same family. I’ve stopped trying.” He picked up his fork again and looked at it. “Easter’s on Sunday.”

“I know.”

“He comes on Saturday.”

“I know.”

“With his mother. Who your mother rang on Sunday. About rooms.” Lukas put the fork down again. “Nobody rings anybody about rooms.”

Alexander had not thought of that. He thought of it now, in the corner of the library by the atlases, with the lunch going cold on the tray: his aunt at a kitchen table in New Westminster, and his mother on the telephone on Sunday, about rooms, and two Queens on two sides of an ocean deciding something in a language neither of their sons was in the room for.

“That’s two things,” he said, because he could not say anything else.

“Both facts,” said Lukas. “I’m still saving it. I said Easter. I meant Easter.”

---

He went back to Berlin at the end of the afternoon, as on every Tuesday, and ate his supper alone, because his mother was dining with somebody from the Church, and went to his room at nine.

He opened the second drawer and took out the box and opened the lid.

The knot was underneath, where he had put it in the morning. He looked at it for a while. Then he thought: she will look again. Before Saturday. She will come in while I am at school, and open it, not to read them, she has read them, but to see whether I know. And she will see the knot underneath, and she will know I know.

He could tie it on top. He could tie it her way, a reef knot, pulled tight and pressed down, and then she would think he had not noticed, and they could both go on being kind until Saturday, and on Saturday Frederick would come, and whatever was going to happen would happen to all of them at once, in the house, with the lake outside.

He sat with the ribbon in his hands for a long time.

Then he tied it the way he always tied it, with the knot underneath, against the baize, and closed the lid, which lay flat, and put the box back in the second drawer, and shut the drawer.

It was his box. It had been his father’s, and it was his. If she looked, she would see that he knew. That was all right. He did not want to be the kind of person who tied a knot the wrong way on purpose so that his mother would not see that he had noticed her tying it the wrong way. He thought that there had been enough of that in the family already, on both sides, for long enough, and that somebody might as well stop.

At ten the guard went past the door. He went to bed. He thought about Schafkopf, as he had decided to, and could not remember any of the rules at all.