Easter Day

Herr Schade came on at seven, because it was Sunday, and Easter made no difference to that.

Alexander met him in the hall on his way down to breakfast: large, grey, quiet, in the dark suit he wore on Sundays, standing by the door with his hands folded in front of him as he had stood by it for six years. And at the other side of the hall, by the foot of the stairs, standing in exactly the same way, with his hands folded in exactly the same place, was Castellanos.

They had not, Alexander understood at once, been introduced.

They were looking at each other across the hall. Not at each other’s faces. At each other’s shoulders, and hands, and shoes, the way two men look who do the same work and have each heard about the other and are deciding whether what they heard was true. Neither of them said anything. Then Herr Schade, very slightly, nodded. And Castellanos, after a pause long enough to be considered, nodded back. And both of them, at the same moment, as though it had been arranged, looked up at the ceiling of the hall, where there was a plaster rose round the light and nothing else, and stayed looking at it.

Alexander went on into breakfast and did not laugh until he was through the door.

---

The Friedenskirche stood at the edge of the park of Sanssouci, a pale church in the Italian manner with a tall square tower and a colonnade, and a pool in front of it with the tower in the pool, upside down, perfectly still.

They walked from the cars, the last part, up through the garden to the colonnade, his mother and his aunt in front with their officers, then Alexander and Frederick, then Theo and Lukas, two paces back and one to the left, and Castellanos and Kessler and Herr Schade’s Sunday counterpart somewhere about them all in a loose shape that was meant to look like a family walking to church and looked, Alexander thought, like a family walking to church inside an invisible box. The people going in at the door looked round at them, and then away, the way Potsdam always did. Potsdam had been looking round at his family and then away for three hundred years and had become very good at it.

The church was full. It was always full at Easter. They sat where his family had always sat, at the front on the right, under a window of coloured glass that put red and blue on the backs of his hands when the sun came out, which it did, twice, and then went in again.

The first hymn was Christ ist erstanden.

He knew it before the organ had finished the first line, as everybody in the church knew it, the oldest hymn in the language, older than any of the Crowns in his family, older than the church. The congregation came in on the second line, all of it, low, the way German congregations sang, as though singing were a thing to be done carefully and without showing off. Beside him his mother sang. On the other side of his mother his aunt sang, in German, which surprised him again. Frederick did not sing; he held the book and looked at the words as he had looked at them on the crest, and Alexander thought he knew why, and thought it was not the same reason, and did not know.

And behind them, from the row behind, very loudly, in a voice that had never been taught to sing quietly in a church in its life, Theo sang.

He sang in German. He sang every word. He sang it in a German Alexander had heard once before, in a kitchen on the fourth floor of a block of flats, at grace: a German with the vowels pulled long and flat and the ends of the words knocked off, the German of a village a hundred and fifty years ago that had got on a ship and gone to Wisconsin and never come back, and had kept the hymn, and kept it exactly. Heads turned. Three rows of Potsdam turned round in their pews to see who was singing Christ ist erstanden as though it were a song from the bus depot, and saw a boy of fifteen with his hair sticking up at the back, singing with his eyes shut, and turned back again, and some of them, Alexander saw, were smiling.

He heard Lukas, beside Theo, say something very low.

“The back of the head,” said Lukas.

Theo did not stop singing. But he opened his eyes, and looked at the back of Frederick’s head, and sang the rest of it to that, all the verses, every word, Kyrieleis, and at the end, when the organ stopped, he sat down and went red to the ears, and Alexander, who had turned round very slightly to look, turned back and looked at the window, at the red and blue, and found that he could not, for a moment, see it properly.

---

The mausoleum was through a door at the side, off the atrium, cold, round, and white, with a dome of its own and a light that came down from the top of it the colour of milk.

His mother went in first. That was the order. She went in alone, for a minute, while the rest of them waited in the atrium by the fountain, which was turned off for the winter and had leaves in it; and then she came to the door and looked at Alexander, and he went in.

He had been here eleven times since February of last year. He had counted. He had come with his mother and with Charlotte and once, in July, alone, with Kessler at the door looking at the ceiling. He knew it the way he knew the dome: the cold, which was a different cold from outside, older; the floor, which was marble and rang; the other stones, the old ones, kings and queens he had learned the dates of at seven, lying in white under the milk-coloured light with their hands folded on their chests and their faces gone soft at the edges after the better part of a century and a half of people looking at them. And his father’s, which was new, and plain, and had no figure on it at all, because his father had said once, at dinner, that he did not want to spend a century being looked at with his hands folded, and that a name and two dates were enough for anybody and more than most people got.

HEINRICH 1969 to 2028

He stood at it. His mother stood beside him. Neither of them said anything; they never did. After a while she put her hand on his back, once, between the shoulders, and took it away, and went out.

Then his aunt came in, and stood a little way back, by the wall, in her dark coat, with her hands folded. And then Frederick.

Frederick came in through the door and stopped just inside it, and looked up, at the dome, and the light coming down, and then round at the old stones, the kings with their hands folded, and then at the new one, plain, at the end. He came across the marble, which rang, and stopped beside Alexander, a little behind, and looked at it.

Then he put his hands behind his back.

He did it without thinking about it. Alexander could see that he did it without thinking: the right hand found the left wrist behind him and held it, and his shoulders went back a fraction, and his head went down a fraction, and he stood there at Alexander’s father’s grave exactly as a man stands at the end of a long walk to look at something he has walked to see. Exactly as Alexander stood. Exactly, Alexander understood, standing beside him, as a man had stood by a bench in the Tiergarten in the rain in February of last year, with his right hand round his left wrist behind his back, looking at nothing, for a long time, before he said three drawers.

They had both got it from the same place.

Alexander had never known that. He had been told by his mother that he walked like his uncle, and had thought it was a thing about walking. It was not. It was a thing about standing still in front of something you could do nothing about. He had learned it in a park in the rain, and Frederick had learned it, he supposed, in a hundred halls and studies and hospital corridors over fifteen years, from the same man, and here they were, the two of them, in a mausoleum in Potsdam, holding their own wrists behind their backs, in front of a stone.

Neither of them said anything for a long time.

His father was under the stone, with a name and two dates. Frederick’s father was in a chair by a window in New Westminster, with a radio on a tray table and about six words a day, and he would be there at four this afternoon, New Westminster time, when the nurse who liked him read him the trains in the wrong order. Alexander thought about that. He thought about which was worse, and he thought about it honestly, the way he had always told Frederick to think about things on paper, and he found that he did not know, and that he was never going to know, and he thought that Frederick, standing beside him with his hands behind his back, was thinking exactly the same thing, the other way round, and did not know either.

Neither of them said which.

“He’d have liked you,” said Alexander at last, to the stone.

Frederick did not move.

“He met me,” he said. “At the wedding. In Stockholm. He asked me what I wanted to be, and I said a signalman, and he said that was a very good answer, because a signalman is the only person on the railway who can stop everything and is never blamed for it.” He was quiet for a moment. “I was eight. I’ve always remembered it. I didn’t know it was him till afterwards.”

Alexander looked at the stone.

He had not known that. He had not known his father had ever said anything to Frederick at all, alone, about anything. It was a thing his father had said to somebody else, eight years ago, at a wedding, and it was new, and he had not thought, standing here eleven times, that there could be anything new left.

“That sounds like him,” he said.

“It was him,” said Frederick.

Behind them, by the wall, his aunt had not moved at all. When Alexander turned round at last she was looking at the old stones, not at either of them, as though she had been somewhere else the whole time, which he understood was the kindest thing anybody had done for him in a year.

---

At lunch there were eggs.

They were in a bowl in the middle of the table, dyed, red and yellow and a blue that had gone green at the edges, hard-boiled, and they were there because they were always there at Easter, and nobody in Alexander’s family had ever done anything with them except eat them, peeled, with salt, at the end.

Theo looked at them for a long time.

“Do you knock them?” he said.

There was a pause round the table.

“I beg your pardon?” said Alexander’s mother.

“The eggs. Do you knock them. Ma’am.” Theo picked one up, a red one, and held it, pointed end up, in his fist, with only the tip showing between his finger and his thumb. “You hold it like this, and somebody holds theirs, and you knock the points together, and whoever’s cracks is out, and you go on until there’s one left. In Milwaukee. My grandma’s family did it. She says it’s from here. From Germany. She says everybody in Germany does it.”

“Eiertitschen,” said Lukas, at once. “Eierpecken. My grandfather did it in Königsberg. Nobody does it in Potsdam. Potsdam thinks it’s common.”

“Potsdam,” said Alexander’s mother, “is quite right,” and picked up a yellow egg, and held it in her fist with only the tip showing, exactly as Theo had shown her, and held it out across the table at him. “Mr Hartigan. If you please.”

Theo looked at the Queen Mother of Prussia holding a yellow egg at him across an Easter table.

Then he knocked it.

Hers cracked. It cracked with a small dry sound right across the point, and everybody looked at it, and Alexander’s mother looked at it too, for a moment, very seriously, and then put it down on her plate and said, “Well. That is that,” and began to peel it, and Alexander had not heard her laugh like that, quietly, through her nose, at a table, since February of last year.

They went round. Theo’s red egg broke his aunt’s, and Lukas’s, and Frederick’s, with a crack like a knuckle. It broke Castellanos’s, who had been called in from the hall by Alexander’s mother and given an egg and had held it out, in the doorway, very gravely, with a face of absolute professional neutrality, and had looked at the crack in it for a long moment and said nothing and gone back to the hall. It broke Herr Schade’s, who had been called in after Castellanos and had said, before he held it out, “With respect, ma’am, I am from Saxony,” which nobody understood, and which Lukas said afterwards meant that he had expected to win.

Then it was Alexander’s.

He held it the way he had seen Theo hold it, with only the tip showing, a blue egg gone green at the edges, and Theo looked at him across the table and held out the red one.

“Ready?” said Theo.

“I’ve never done it.”

“Nobody has, the first time,” said Theo, and knocked.

Alexander’s cracked. Of course it did. It cracked with the same small dry sound as all the others, a neat line across the point, and he looked at it in his hand, and Theo’s red egg sat in Theo’s fist without a mark on it, and Theo looked at it too, with an expression of mild surprise, as though somebody else had done it.

“Undefeated,” said Lukas.

“In the German Empire,” said Frederick.

“In Potsdam,” said Alexander’s mother. “Don’t let it go to his head. It’s a very small part of the German Empire.”

Theo put the red egg down very carefully beside his plate and did not eat it, all through lunch, and at the end, when the plates went, he put it in his pocket. Alexander saw him do it. Nobody else did, except Lukas, who saw everything Theo did and pretended not to, and who looked at the back of Theo’s head for a moment with an expression Alexander had last seen on him in the dome in March, when he had said Whatever you decide, I am still sitting here.

---

Charlotte telephoned at three.

He took it in the hall, by the stairs, standing up, with Herr Schade at the door looking at the ceiling and Castellanos at the foot of the stairs looking at a different part of it.

“Happy Easter,” said Charlotte.

“Happy Easter.”

He could hear the flat behind her. The radiator, ticking. A page. She was revising; she had been revising since January and would be revising until her finals ended on Friday, and she had told him at her birthday that she was going to spend Easter Day with the bones of the hand, all twenty-seven of them, and that they were better company than most of the family.

“Is he there?”

“Yes.”

“Is he all right?”

He thought about the mausoleum. About the hands behind the back.

“Yes.”

“And you?”

“Yes.”

She was quiet for a moment. He could hear the page under her hand.

“You are very bad at the telephone,” said Charlotte. “Did you know that? You’re the worst person I know at it. You’re worse than Papa was, and he used to answer it by saying the number.”

“I know.”

“Tell him the novel’s still terrible,” said Charlotte. “He’ll know which novel. Tell him I’ve got to the part where the man goes back to the house, and it’s worse than he said.” She paused. “Tell Mama I’ll ring her tonight. Tell Aunt Christina I’m sorry I’m not there. Tell Lukas his mother’s cake is the only thing keeping me alive. Mama brought me a whole one on Thursday and pretended it was from her.”

“I’ll tell them.”

“Alex.”

“Yes.”

“It’s Easter,” said Charlotte. “Go and be with them. Stop standing in the hall.”

He had not told her he was standing in the hall. He looked at the receiver.

“How did you know?”

“Because you always stand in the hall,” said his sister. “You’ve stood in the hall to answer the telephone since you were six. Go.” And she rang off, quite gently, the way she always did, as though putting the receiver down were a thing you could do kindly if you took care.

He stood in the hall for a moment longer anyway, out of principle.

Then he went back into the sitting room, where Theo was showing his aunt how to hold an egg, and his mother was laughing at it, and Lukas was on the floor by the fire with his back against the side of an armchair as though it were the pier of a mount, and Frederick was standing at the window looking out at the trees where the dome was, with his hands, Alexander saw, behind his back.

---

He wrote in the log that night, before bed. He went out to the dome alone at half past nine, in the dark, across the wet grass, and climbed the ladder and lit the red lamp and opened the log on the shelf under the eyepiece, without opening the shutter, because the sky was cloud from edge to edge and had been all day.

1 April. Bedeckt. No observation.

He looked at it for a while, by the red light.

Then he wrote, underneath, small, in the square hand, where nobody would ever look:

F. at the stone. Hands behind his back. Onkel Ernst.

He shut the log and put it on the shelf and went down the ladder, and Herr Schade was at the foot of it in the dark, waiting, as he had been for six years, and they walked back across the grass to the house together, the two of them, and Herr Schade did not say anything for the whole of the lawn, and then, at the door, he said, “The American is a good man, sir. He held the egg correctly,” and went back to his post.