Two Drawers

It rained on Thursday.

It came in off the Heiliger See in the night, flat and grey and steady, and by breakfast it had settled over the Neuer Garten as though it meant to stay the week, and the lake under the windows of the breakfast room had gone the colour of a pewter plate, and nobody was going to walk anywhere, and everybody was glad.

Theo was eating a third roll. He had discovered on Saturday that the rolls at the house came in four kinds and that nobody minded which you took, and had been working through them in order ever since, with the seriousness of a man doing a survey.

“I’ve got legs,” he said, to the table, “like I’ve been hit by a bus. And I know what that’s like. Professionally.”

“Eleven kilometres,” said Lukas.

“Eleven kilometres is nothing,” said Theo. “It’s the eleven kilometres of hills you didn’t mention. You said it was flat. You said Brandenburg was the flattest place in Europe.”

“It is.”

“Then what was that?”

“That was Werder,” said Lukas, as though it were an explanation, and took the last of the dark rolls before Theo could get to it.

At the end of the table the two mothers were reading the same newspaper, in two halves, and passing the halves across without looking up. They had been doing it since Tuesday. Alexander had watched it on Wednesday morning and understood that whatever had been in his mother’s face on Saturday, when she looked at his aunt at the door, was gone, or put away, which with his mother came to the same thing. They were two women of a certain age reading a newspaper in a house by a lake. Nobody would have looked at them twice.

Frederick was at the window with his coffee, looking at the rain.

“The ratifications are on page four,” said his aunt, to her half of the paper, and turned the page, and that was all.

Nobody at the table said anything. Theo reached for the jam. Alexander looked at his plate, and found that his hand had put his knife down, square, on the edge of it, without being asked.

---

Lukas took Theo to his mother’s café at eleven.

It had been arranged on the walk the day before, somewhere on the long flat hill that was not a hill, between a field of asparagus under black plastic and the place where Theo had sat down on a wall and refused to get up. Theo had said that he had been in Germany five days and had not been inside a single ordinary building, only palaces and churches and a mausoleum and a bus, and Lukas had said that his mother had a café in the town with a loan on the coffee machine, and that it was the most ordinary building in Brandenburg, and that if Theo came on a weekday when it was raining she would give him cake until he could not stand up.

“Can I come?” Alexander had said.

And Lukas had looked at him, on the hill, for a long moment, and said, “No,” and then, “You know why,” and Alexander did know why, and had not asked again. He had never been inside the café. He had been past it in the car a hundred times. It had a green awning and four tables on the pavement in summer and Lukas’s mother’s handwriting on a blackboard by the door, and if the German Emperor walked into it on a rainy Thursday in Easter week it would never be an ordinary building again, and Lukas’s mother would never get her loan paid off in peace.

So at eleven they went, in a car Kessler arranged, with an officer who was not Kessler and who had been told it was cake. Theo put his head round the door of the library on the way out.

“Bringing you back cake,” he said. “Both of you. If there’s any left. There won’t be.”

“Thank you,” said Frederick.

“Thank you,” said Alexander.

Theo looked at them both, one at each end of the library, Frederick in the window seat with a book he had not turned a page of, Alexander at the long table with the atlas open at Kamerun, which he had been looking at for twenty minutes.

“Right,” said Theo, and went.

---

It was Frederick who came to the study.

Alexander had gone up after lunch, because the library had begun to feel like a room with something in it, and his study was the one room in the house that was his: small, at the end of the west corridor on the first floor, with a desk that had been his father’s when his father was a boy, and a window over the lake, and the star atlas on the stand, and nothing on the walls but a framed photograph of the dome in snow, taken by his father the winter the stove went in. He had been sitting at the desk for perhaps half an hour, not reading anything, when the knock came.

“It’s me.”

“Come in.”

Frederick came in. He had the green exercise book under his arm, which he carried everywhere now, the way Lukas carried the flask. He did not sit down. He went to the window and stood there with his back to the room, looking at the rain on the lake, and Alexander watched the back of his head and waited.

“The Prussian one,” said Frederick, to the window. “After Easter. The Landtag.”

“Yes.”

“Two-thirds.”

“Of each chamber.”

“Will it get them?”

Alexander did not say anything.

Frederick turned round. He had the face he had worn on the crest, the one that did nothing, and Alexander knew it now, from the inside of a front row, and knew what it cost.

“If it does,” said Frederick. “When it’s yours. And then what?”

It was the one he had been saving.

In fifteen years of weddings and Christmases, and five months of letters, and five days in this house, Frederick had asked everybody else in the world and then what?, and had asked Alexander only once, in December, about an hour at a sink, which did not count. The one about this, the one Alexander had given him leave to ask in December and promised not to answer, he had kept, and Alexander had noticed, and had been grateful, and had understood, without either of them saying so, that it was being saved. And now it had been spent, in his study, on a Thursday, in the rain.

“That’s a vote,” said Alexander.

“It’s a question.”

“It has a vote in it.”

“Everything has a vote in it.” Frederick put the green book down on the corner of the desk, square. “That’s what the terms are. They’re a way of making sure we never talk about anything again. I’m asking you a question. I’m not telling you anything. I’m asking.”

Alexander got up.

He went past Frederick to the door, and shut it. He had never in his life shut a door in a room with Frederick in it. He heard it close, the latch, very small, and stood with his hand flat on the wood for a moment, and then turned round.

“That’s what you said,” he said, “at the kitchen table.”

Frederick’s face did nothing.

“In March,” said Alexander. “You said it was civics. You said you were asking. You put it in a letter. You said It was homework. It wasn’t homework. I don’t know what she meant. I have that letter in a box in a desk in Berlin, and I have read it more times than I have read anything except the one before it, and I know what you said, and I know what you meant, and so does your mother, and so does mine.”

“I only asked.”

“You asked the Regent of Hanover what the King of Hanover may think, in front of the Regent of Hanover.” He heard his own voice. It was the voice. It was the one his father had used on the telephone to ministers, the one that had come out of him at seven in the morning in February to finish a chamberlain’s sentence, and he had not known it was coming now, and could not stop it. “That isn’t asking.”

“It passed.”

“Did it pass because of you?”

Frederick opened his mouth, and shut it.

“I don’t know,” he said.

“Neither do I.” Alexander had not moved from the door. “Neither will anybody. Not you, not me, not your mother, not Hanover’s ministers, not the clerk who wrote down the vote. It passed, and Hanover was for it, and nobody will ever know whether Hanover was for it because Hanover thought so or because a boy asked his mother a question at a kitchen table on a Tuesday and his mother went to see Hanover’s ministers on the Thursday with the question still in her face. That’s what you did. You didn’t make it pass. You made it so that nobody can ever say it passed by itself.”

“Brunswick abstained.”

“I know Brunswick abstained.”

“I didn’t ask about Brunswick. I told you I didn’t. I stopped. On the stairs.”

“I know you stopped on the stairs. I read it.” He took his hand off the door. “One drawer open and one shut. That’s worse. Don’t you see that’s worse? If you’d asked about both and they’d both voted for it, somebody might have thought it was a pattern. One voted for and one didn’t, and the one that voted for is the one you asked about. Every Social Democrat in Hanover who wanted to vote against me and didn’t is going to wonder for the rest of his life whether his Regent’s face changed his mind. And he’ll never know. And I’ll never know. And I’m going to be King in my own right on the strength of a vote that has a question in it that nobody can answer.”

The rain was loud on the window. Somewhere below, on the stairs, somebody went past, slowly, and did not stop.

Frederick said, quite quietly:

“You’d have done it for me.”

“No.”

“You would. If it were the other way round. If it were my eight months and your two votes. You’d have done it for me, and you’d have done it better than I did, so that nobody would ever know you’d done it at all.”

“Never open two drawers at once,” said Alexander.

He had not meant to say it. It came out of him the way the voice had, from a long way back, from a park in the rain with two details walking behind like funerals.

Frederick looked at him for a long moment.

“He said that to you,” he said.

It was not loud. It was hardly anything. It was four words, said in an ordinary voice, by a boy standing by a window with the rain behind him, and it went into Alexander the way the chamberlain’s half-sentence had gone in, all the way, without stopping anywhere on the way.

He said that to you. Not to me. To you. My father, in a park, to you, about your drawers, as plainly as that, in one sentence, in the rain. You got him in the rain saying the thing straight out. I got him at the end of a telephone on Sunday afternoons, asking which Crown, and now I get him in a chair by a window, and he has six words left, and I read him the trains.

Frederick had not said any of that. He had said four words. Alexander heard all of it.

And he said the thing.

He did not decide to. He heard it start, and could not stop it, the way you cannot stop a glass once it has left the edge of the table.

“I am second in line,” he said, “to fourteen Crowns. Yours. All of them. Since seven o’clock in the evening on the thirty-first of October, by my clock. I have never once said so, except as a joke, once, in pencil, and then I wrote that it was all I was ever going to say about it, and it was. I have never put my hand anywhere near one of them, not in a letter, not at a table, not in my head when I can help it, because they are yours, and because if I ever did, even once, even as a joke, there is a version of the world in which I would be the person who did. And I have one. One. It is not even a Crown. It is a date, which a law I didn’t ask for is going to let me choose, if a Landtag I can’t speak to gives me two-thirds. That’s all I have. And you’ve just put your hand in it.”

The room was very quiet.

He heard what he had said after he had said it. He heard it go round the small room and come back, off the window and the atlas and the photograph of the dome in the snow, and he knew, before it had finished coming back, that it could not be unsaid, and that he would hear it for a long time, and that Frederick would hear it for longer.

Frederick picked up the green book from the corner of the desk.

He did not say anything. He held the book against his chest with both arms, the way Theo had held the box on the crest, and looked at Alexander, and his face was doing something now, not nothing, something Alexander had never seen it do, and then it stopped doing it, and was still.

He went to the door. Alexander stood aside. He did not know he had stood aside until he had done it.

Frederick opened the door and went out, and did not shut it.

---

Castellanos was in the corridor.

He was standing against the wall opposite the study door, a little to one side, the way he stood everywhere, with his hands clasped in front of him and his eyes on the ceiling of the west corridor, which was white and had a crack in the plaster running from the cornice to the light fitting, and which he was looking at with great attention, as though it were the only thing in Potsdam that interested him and he had been sent to study it.

He did not look at Frederick as Frederick went past him. He did not look at Alexander in the doorway. When Frederick had gone down the corridor and round the corner to the stairs, Castellanos stayed where he was for a moment longer, looking at the crack in the ceiling. Then he went after him, at the same pace, not hurrying, and round the corner, and was gone.

Alexander shut the door.

He walked round the room twice.

Then he walked round it a third time, and stopped at the window, where Frederick had stood, and looked at the rain on the lake, and could not see the far side of it.

---

Frederick did not come down to dinner.

His aunt said he had a headache, to the table, in English, quite pleasantly, and helped herself to potatoes, and his mother said, “Poor boy,” and asked for a tray to be sent up, and neither of them looked at Alexander, and neither of them said anything else, and Alexander thought that they had both been told nothing and had both understood everything, and that they had both decided, separately, at some point that afternoon, to say nothing; and he thought he knew why, because on Tuesday they had told two boys that their letters might advise each other about nothing that had a vote in it, and this had a vote in it, and he did not think either of them would ask of two boys what she would not do herself.

Theo and Lukas had come back at five, wet, with a cake box from the café held level between them like the Book coming up the path. There had been cake left. It had been put on the sideboard. Nobody had eaten it.

Lukas sat across the table from him through the soup and the fish and said nothing. Theo sat beside Lukas and looked at Frederick’s empty chair, and then at Alexander, and then at his plate, and ate everything on it, slowly, because the rule was the rule, even here.

After dinner Lukas found him on the stairs.

“Alex.”

He stopped.

Lukas looked at him from two steps below, in the light from the hall, for a long time. Then he did the thing he never did. He did not say anything at all. He looked at Alexander’s face as though it were the sky through the slit of the dome on a night when the forecast had been wrong, and then he nodded, very slightly, as though he had found what he expected to find, and went past him up the stairs, and along the corridor, and knocked on a door that was not Alexander’s.

Alexander heard it open. He heard Theo’s voice, low, and then Lukas’s, and then the door shut.

He went to bed. He did not sleep. At eleven the guard went past his door, and paused, and went on, and at a quarter past it went past again, which it never did, and he lay in the dark and understood that somebody in the house had asked whether he was all right, and that the answer had been taken down to them, and that he did not know what it had been.