The Four of Them

Lukas had the route in a notebook, and he would not let anybody see it.

He took it out of the pocket of his coat in the car park at Werder, a small black notebook with an elastic band round it and a pencil in the spine, and opened it, and looked at a page for a long time, and shut it again, and put it back.

“You know it by heart,” said Alexander.

“I know it by heart,” said Lukas. “I look at it so that I can see what I wrote last time. Last time was February. There was ice on the second stile. I want to know if there’s still ice on the second stile.”

“There won’t be. It’s April.”

“Then I’ll write that there wasn’t,” said Lukas, “and in February next year I’ll look, and I’ll know.”

Theo looked at the notebook in Lukas’s pocket, and at Lukas, with an expression of deep respect.

“My dad does that,” he said. “With the route. The bus. He’s got a book. He writes down every pothole on his route and the date he first saw it, and when they fill it in, he writes that down as well. He started it the week he got the route. Three years.”

“How many potholes?”

“A hundred and twelve,” said Theo. “Filled, forty.”

Lukas thought about this.

“That’s very bad for the city,” he said.

“It’s very good for the book,” said Theo.

They looked at each other in the car park, two boys who wrote things down for other people and had each just discovered that the other one’s father did too, and Alexander, standing between them with his hands in his pockets, saw something settle between them that had not quite been settled on Saturday on the gravel, and would now not need settling again.

---

It was clear.

It had been clear since six, the first clear morning of the week, the sky over the Havel a hard pale blue from one edge to the other with not a mark on it, and cold, with a wind off the water that went through coats. The town was on an island, with old brick houses and a church with a pointed tower, and the bridge went over to it from the car park, and on the far side, beyond the town, the land went up in long slopes covered in orchards, row after row of low grey trees in the brown grass, bare, with here and there, very early, on the sunny side of a slope, a tree that had gone white.

“Is that snow?” said Theo.

“Blossom,” said Lukas. “Plums. They go first. In three weeks it’ll all be white. The whole hill. There’s a festival. Everybody comes from Berlin and gets drunk on fruit wine and falls in the lake.”

“Can we come?”

“No,” said Lukas, and looked at Alexander, and then at the two protection details, who had got out of their cars at the far end of the car park and were standing about in walking clothes, trying to look like men who had come to Werder on a Wednesday in Easter week to walk eleven kilometres for pleasure. Kessler was in a waxed jacket that had clearly been bought on Monday. Castellanos was in a borrowed Prussian anorak two sizes too small across the shoulders and a pair of walking boots that were his own, from Tucson, which were the only part of him that looked as though they had ever walked anywhere for pleasure. A third man, one of Frederick’s, was pretending to read a map. A fourth, one of Kessler’s, was pretending to look at a duck.

“They’re very bad at it,” said Frederick.

“They’re very good at it,” said Alexander. “They’re just very bad at the walking part.”

---

They went along the shore first, out of the town, on a path between the reeds and the water, with the wind coming across the lake in long grey gusts and the reeds hissing, and then up through a gate into the first of the orchards.

It was Lukas’s walk. That was clear from the first gate. He went in front, with his hands in his pockets and a grey wool hat pulled down over his ears, not the one with the flaps, which never left the dome, at a pace that was not fast and never changed, a pace for eleven kilometres, and he knew every stile and every turn and where the path was boggy and where it was not, and he did not look at the notebook again. Theo walked beside him. Frederick and Alexander walked behind. And behind them, at a distance of twenty yards that never varied, the four men in their walking clothes came on, two by two, like a slow and very well-armed procession.

Lukas talked about Saturn.

He did not usually talk. He said one thing an evening in the dome, and in the car he slept, and at school he said nothing in lessons and a great deal at break, but only to Jakub, and mostly in Polish insults. But on the walk he talked, the way some people sing when they are alone, and he talked about Saturn: about the rings, which were mostly ice, and very thin, thinner than a sheet of paper in proportion, so that if you made a model of them the size of a football pitch they would be as thick as a piece of paper lying on it; about the moon Titan, which had lakes, but not of water; about the way the rings had turned edge-on to the earth four years ago, so that for a while nobody could see them at all, and Saturn had looked like an ordinary planet, round and dull, as though somebody had taken its rings away. Lukas had been ten. He had found it unbearable then and still did. He said so several times.

Theo talked about Green Bay.

He talked about it in exactly the same way, to the same air, in the same unchanging voice: about a man called the quarterback, and a field called Lambeau, and a winter game so cold at the kick-off that a man in the stands had frozen to his seat and had to be helped up, and about the people of the town owning the team, all of them, in shares, so that nobody could ever take it away to another city, which Theo considered the single finest piece of political economy in the history of North America.

Neither of them listened to the other. Neither of them stopped. They went up the long slope between the plum trees side by side, Saturn and Green Bay, at the same pace, and Alexander, walking behind them, thought he had never in his life seen two people so completely happy in each other’s company while paying each other no attention at all.

“They’re like the trains,” said Frederick, beside him.

“What?”

“Two lines. Running side by side. Same direction, same speed, never crossing. You see it at Union Station sometimes, coming in. The Baltimore stopper and the Richmond on the next track, side by side for a mile, and the passengers look at each other through the windows, and nobody waves.” He watched the two backs in front of them. “It’s the best thing you can see from a platform.”

Below them, at the foot of the slope, a train went past on an embankment, red, very fast, along the edge of the water, and Frederick turned his head and watched it all the way out of sight, the way Lukas watched a satellite.

“Regional,” he said. “To Magdeburg. Ten past eleven. It’s two minutes late.”

“How do you know it’s two minutes late?”

“Because it’s due through here at eight minutes past,” said Frederick, “and it’s ten past.” He looked at Alexander. “I learned them for your birthday. I told you.”

“You said Berlin to Potsdam.”

“I did Berlin to Potsdam first,” said Frederick, “and then I kept going.”

---

They did not talk about Tuesday.

It walked with them all the same, up the slope between them, the width of a person. Nobody asks what’s in a civics folder. Alexander had said it, and Frederick had looked at him with the face that had been hit and not yet decided, and then they had both gone to lunch and said nothing since that was not about Saturn or trains. The light under the door of the blue room had been on at two. Alexander thought about saying something at three separate stiles, and did not, and Frederick did not, and the thing walked between them up the hill and down the other side, and they let it, and talked about the regional to Magdeburg.

---

The gate was at the top of the second hill, where the orchards stopped and the path went into a wood.

It was an ordinary wooden gate, five bars, grey with age, hung on a post that leaned, with a loop of blue rope instead of a latch. It was nothing. There must have been ten thousand gates like it in Brandenburg. Lukas stopped in front of it and looked at it the way Alexander’s father had looked at his lemon trees.

“Fourth year,” said Lukas.

“Fourth year of what?” said Theo.

“Of the rope. The latch broke in March three years ago. Somebody tied the rope. I thought it would last a month. It’s lasted three years. It was green rope the first year. It went blue.” Lukas put his hand on it. “It’s not the same rope. Somebody changes it. I’ve never seen them. Every autumn it’s a different rope, and it’s always blue now, and it’s always the same knot. Somebody in Werder comes up here every autumn and changes the rope on this gate and ties the same knot and nobody knows who.” He took the notebook out at last and opened it and wrote something in it, very small, standing at the gate. “I said I’d tell you at the gate.”

Theo looked at him.

“The ears,” said Lukas.

The two protection details had stopped twenty yards back, at the edge of the orchard, and were looking at the sky. Frederick and Alexander had stopped too, a few yards off, by the leaning post, and Lukas did not look at them. He looked at Theo.

“You can’t stop them,” he said. “Everybody’s go red. Mine go red. Alex’s go white, which is worse, because nobody expects it. The thing is, they go red because you’re thinking about everybody looking at you. That’s all it is. Your ears are listening to the looking.” He put the notebook back in his pocket. “So you give them something else to listen to.”

“What?”

“A count,” said Lukas. “On the out-breath. Slowly. Up to seven. In through the nose, and then out, and you count the out, one to seven, and by seven they’ve stopped listening to the looking and started listening to the count, and they’re not red any more. And if they’ve gone red again by the time you’ve finished, you do it again.” He looked at Theo very steadily. “Seven. Not six. Not eight. Seven.”

Theo was quiet for a long moment.

“That’s from the Tomb,” he said slowly. “The wreath. You bow your head and you count to seven. They taught us. The sergeant.”

“I know,” said Lukas.

“Where did you get it?”

“From you,” said Lukas. “On the crest. I was holding the tissue paper. I watched you go up to the chain and do the twenty paces and bow your head, and I watched your ears. They were red all the way up. And you bowed your head, and you counted, I could see your mouth doing it, and by the time you came up on seven they were white. I’d never seen anybody do it. I’ve been looking at the back of Alex’s head for six years and I never once worked out what to do about the ears, and you did it in front of three thousand people without knowing you were doing it.” He shrugged. “So it’s yours. I’m only giving it back.”

Theo stood at the gate with his hands at his sides and went, very slowly, from his collar upwards, red to the ears.

Then he breathed in through his nose.

Alexander watched him do it. He watched Theo’s mouth move, very slightly, on the out-breath, one, two, three, and on seven, standing at a gate on a hill above Werder in the wind with three boys and four armed men looking at him, Theo’s ears went white.

“Huh,” said Theo.

“Yes,” said Lukas, and opened the gate with the blue rope, and went through, and held it for the rest of them.

---

They had lunch on the third hill, on a bench at the edge of the wood, with the whole of the Havel spread out below them, the lakes and the islands and the town with its pointed tower and, very far off, the haze where Potsdam was, and somewhere in it the dome.

The woman in the kitchen at the house had sent sandwiches, in four paper packets, with their names on them in pencil, and a flask of soup, and a fifth packet that said For the gentlemen behind, which Lukas carried back down the path twenty yards and handed to Castellanos, who looked at it, and at Lukas, and at the name on it, and said nothing, and opened it, and shared it with Kessler, who had not brought anything either.

They sat on the bench in a row, the four of them, Lukas and Theo at one end and Frederick and Alexander at the other, and ate their sandwiches and looked at the water, and nobody said anything for some time, because there was nothing that needed saying, and the wind went past, and the sun came out from behind the only cloud in the sky and made the lakes go silver all at once from one end to the other, so that Theo said, “Oh,” out loud, and then was embarrassed, and did his seven, and his ears went white again.

“I’d like to come back,” said Frederick, to the lakes. “In four weeks. For the white.”

“You’ll be sixteen,” said Alexander.

“I know.”

“You’ll be reigning.”

“I know,” said Frederick. “I’d still like to come back. I’d like to see it with everything white.” He was quiet for a moment. “I don’t suppose they’d let me.”

“No,” said Alexander.

“No,” said Frederick. “I just wanted to have said it.”

---

Theo had brought cards.

He produced them after dinner from the pocket of his rucksack, a pack in a soft cardboard box with a picture of a lighthouse on it and a rubber band round it, and put it on the table in the small sitting room, and on top of it, folded very small, a note, which he gave to Alexander without a word.

It was in Kate’s hand.

For the Emperor. Ordinary cards, because your German ones are cheating. Rule 7 applies. K.

“She made me promise to give it to you in front of witnesses,” said Theo. “So it’s on the record.”

“It’s on the record,” said Lukas.

They needed five. Kate’s rules wanted five: six cards each and two in the blind, thirty-two cards, sevens up to aces, Queens and then Jacks and then the diamonds for trumps, the picker against everybody except the partner, who was whoever had the ace the picker called, and who nobody knew until it was played. Four boys was one short. Theo looked round the room at the possibilities: at the door, beyond which Castellanos and Kessler were standing in the hall looking at different parts of the plaster; at the window, beyond which the lake was going dark; and at the armchair by the fire, in which Alexander’s mother was sitting with a book she had not turned a page of in twenty minutes.

“Ma’am,” said Theo. “Do you play cards?”

Alexander’s mother put the book down.

She looked at Theo for a moment, and at the pack with the lighthouse on it, and at the note in Alexander’s hand, and Alexander saw something go across her face that he had not seen on it since Tuesday: something that was not frightened.

“I played bridge,” she said, “for twelve years, with three ambassadors and a bishop, every second Thursday, and I was the only one who ever won. Will that do?”

“It’s not bridge,” said Theo. “It’s better.”

“Then you had better teach me,” said the Queen Mother of Prussia, and got up out of her armchair, and came and sat down at the card table between her son and her godson, and held out her hand for her six cards.

---

They played until eleven.

Theo won. Theo won the first hand, as picker, calling the ace of clubs, which turned out to be Lukas’s, so that the two of them took ninety-one points between them and the rest of the table took twenty-nine, and Lukas said nothing, and looked at the back of Theo’s head with great satisfaction. Theo won the second hand, as partner, without anybody knowing he was partner until the fourth trick, when he played the ace of hearts on Alexander’s mother’s king, and she looked at him across the table with an expression of pure delighted outrage, and said, “You,” and he said, “Sorry, ma’am, it’s the rules,” and she said, “I know it’s the rules, that’s what’s so dreadful about it.”

He won the third, and the fourth, and the sixth. He lost the fifth, to Alexander’s mother, who picked, and called, and went alone, and took sixty-four points by herself with two Queens and a Jack and a run of diamonds, and laid her last card down on the table very quietly and said, “Bridge,” as though it explained everything, and Theo said, “That was very good, ma’am,” with real respect, and she went pink.

Frederick won once, by accident.

Alexander did not win at all.

He lost every hand. He lost as picker, twice, calling aces that turned out to be in the blind. He lost as partner, once, by playing the right card at the wrong moment and handing the trick to his own mother. He lost as nobody in particular, four times, quietly, steadily, with great concentration, his cards held very close in both hands, two fingers underneath, while the others laughed, and he did not mind. He found, at about ten o’clock, losing his sixth hand in succession to a bus driver’s son from Milwaukee with his mother on one side of him laughing at the cards and his cousin on the other side of him laughing at him, that he did not mind at all, and that he could not remember the last time he had not minded losing something, and that he could not remember the last time his mother had laughed like that, out loud, at a table, with her head back, and that both of those things were the same thing.

“Undefeated,” said Lukas, at eleven, as Theo gathered the cards.

“In the German Empire,” said Frederick.

“In Potsdam,” said Alexander’s mother. “Which is a very small part of the German Empire, as I keep telling him.” She stood up and put her hand, once, on the top of Theo’s head, as she had used to put it on Alexander’s when he was small, and took it away. “Thank you, Mr Hartigan. That was the best evening I have had in this house since my husband died.”

She went out, and the room was very quiet.

Theo looked at the cards in his hands. His ears, Alexander saw, had gone red, from the collar upwards, all the way.

He did not do the seven. He let them.

---

It had clouded over at dusk. The clear day had lasted exactly as long as the walk and no longer, as though it had been arranged, and by the time they came out of the small sitting room at eleven the sky through the hall window was a flat grey lid from one edge to the other, and the dome in the trees was dark.

“Not tonight,” said Frederick, at the foot of the stairs, looking at it.

“No.”

“When?”

“When it’s clear.”

Frederick nodded. He stood at the foot of the stairs a moment longer, with his hand on the newel post, and Alexander thought he was going to say something, about Tuesday, about the folder, about anything, and he did not. He said, “Goodnight, Alexander,” and went up, and the light went on under the door of the blue room, and stayed on.

Alexander went up to his own room and sat on the edge of the bed for a while with his shoes in his hand.

It had been the best day. He knew that already. He knew it the way you know, on a clear night, before you have looked at anything, that the seeing is going to be good: by the feel of it, all the way through. A gate with a blue rope. Saturn and Green Bay. Seven on the out-breath. His mother’s head going back at a card table. He had lost every hand. He would remember every one.

He had known since the bench above the lakes, and it had been the best day anyway.

He thought that tomorrow was Thursday.

He put his shoes on the floor, side by side, and turned out the light.