Two-Thirds

A dome in daylight with the shutter closed is a dark room with a crack of sun in the roof.

Alexander had not known that. In eleven years he had come up the ladder by day only to fetch something, or to stand in the gallery, or once, in March, to burn two letters in the stove; he had never once come up by day to sit. The dome was for the night; that was what it was for; his father had brought him up the ladder at four years old, in December, at five o’clock, with the stars already out, and every time since he had come up after the sun went down or not at all. He had come up today at a quarter to four in the afternoon, straight from the car, in his school blazer, and had closed the hatch behind him, and had stood in the dark for a moment with the hatch under his feet, and understood that he had never properly looked at the inside of his own observatory.

The crack of sun came through the seam of the shutter, a line of white an inch wide from the base of the dome to the top, and fell across the floor and up the pier of the mount and across the tube of the telescope, and lit the dust in the air so that the line looked solid enough to lean on. Everything else was brown dark. The red lamp on the shelf was off. The stove was cold. He could smell the cold iron of it, and the old wood of the boards, and oil, and something like a church.

He did not turn on the lamp.

He took the eyepiece out of the focuser and sat on the stool with it in his lap, in the line of sun, and took the cloth out of his blazer pocket and began to polish the brass ring, very slowly, round and round, the green edge first, where his thumb went.

---

Lukas came up at four.

He came up the ladder without knocking, because nobody knocked on the hatch, and put his head through, and stopped, half in and half out, with his school bag on his back, and looked at the line of sun on the floor.

“Why is it shut?”

“Because it’s daylight.”

“You never come up in daylight.”

“I’m up now.”

Lukas came the rest of the way through the hatch and let it down behind him, not quite to the boards, an inch open, the way Herr Schade did. He took off the bag. He did not sit against the pier, because the line of sun was across the pier and he would have been sitting in it like a man in a spotlight. He sat instead on the boards by the cold stove, with his back to the curved wall, in the dark, where Alexander could see his shoes and his knees and nothing else.

“It’s at half past three,” said Lukas.

“I know.”

“It’s past half past three.”

“I know.”

“I’m only saying.” The shoes moved. “I’m not going to look. You didn’t say. I’m saying it for you. I’m not going to look at anything, and if Kessler comes up the ladder I’m going to tell him to go down again, and if my mother texts me a number I’m going to throw the phone in the lake.”

“You don’t have to.”

“I know I don’t have to. I want to. My mother can’t count. She sent me two hundred and forty-four in December, at nine o’clock, and then she sent me two hundred and forty-two, and then she sent me a picture of a cake.” The knees moved. “I’m not doing that to you again.”

Alexander went on polishing the ring.

He had not asked Lukas, this time, not to tell him. He had not asked anybody anything. He had simply got into the car at the school gate and said the house, please, instead of Berlin, and Kessler had looked at him in the mirror and said nothing and told the driver, and the driver had turned left at the lights instead of right, and here he was. He had not decided not to watch it. He had found, at the school gate, that his body had decided for him, and that he did not want to be anywhere at half past three that afternoon except a dark room with a crack of sun in it, polishing a piece of brass that did not need polishing.

“It’s the strangest majority they’ve ever had,” said Lukas, from the dark.

“I know.”

“Jakub says. He’s been working it out all week in the library. He says it’s your sister’s ministry and the Liberals, and the Catholics, who walked out on her in October, and the Conservatives. The ones with your face on the posters.” A pause. “He says the Social Democrats and the people with your face on the posters are going to go through the same door for completely opposite reasons, and that nobody has ever seen it, and that he’s going to remember where he was, like a war.”

“It’s not my sister’s ministry.”

“You know what I mean.”

“It’s Falk’s ministry. My sister appointed it. That’s different.”

“Alex,” said Lukas, from the dark, quite gently, “I don’t know if you’ve noticed, but I’m trying to talk about something else.”

Alexander stopped polishing.

“Sorry,” he said.

“That’s all right.” The shoes crossed at the ankle. “I’ll talk about something else. Ask me something.”

---

He asked about the brother.

He did not know why. It was the first thing that came. Lukas’s brother was eleven and Alexander had met him perhaps five times, at the café once and at the school gate and twice at the birthday party Lukas’s mother gave every July in the garden behind the café, to which Alexander had been invited every year and had gone twice, with a detail sitting on a bench by the bins looking at the sky. He was a small dark boy who looked like Lukas compressed, and who had asked him, at the first party, at nine, whether it was true that the Emperor owned all the swans in Prussia, and Alexander had said no, that was his uncle in London, and the brother had said Who’s that?, and Alexander had found that he could not explain it in a way that satisfied a boy of six, and had stopped trying.

“He’s building a raft,” said Lukas.

“Where?”

“In the garden. Out of pallets from the café. He wants to sail it to Werder.”

“It’s eleven kilometres.”

“I told him. He says I walk it, so he can sail it. He says it’s the same distance whether you walk or float.” Lukas thought about it. “He’s not wrong.”

“It won’t float.”

“He knows. He’s not building it to float. He’s building it to have built it. My father says that’s the most Brandt thing anybody in the family has ever done, and my mother says it’s the most Prussian, and they had an argument about it at dinner that lasted until the washing-up.” The shoes uncrossed. “That’s something else. Ask me another.”

He asked about Theo.

Lukas said that Theo had sent a line on Monday, the first since the airport, and that the line had been The ears worked, and that he, Lukas, had sent back Of course they worked, and that this was the whole of their correspondence for the week, and was, in his opinion, a model of what correspondence should be, and was a great deal more than certain other people managed in eleven pages.

“Twelve,” said Alexander. “It was twelve. Two of them were a menu.”

“I rest my case,” said Lukas.

The line of sun had moved. Alexander saw it had moved. It had been across the pier at four and now it was across the base of the telescope, a hand’s width further round, because the sun was going down outside in the west over the Heiliger See and the seam of the shutter faced south-west, and the line was walking round the dome on its own, the way it must have walked every afternoon of his life, on all the days he had never been up here to see it.

He looked at his watch, because he could not stop himself.

Ten to five.

He did not know how long a third reading took. He had not let himself find out. He thought that it was probably over, and that it could just as easily not be, and that somewhere in the old building on the Leipziger Strasse with its garden backing onto the Herrenhaus four hundred and eighty people, or as many of them as had come, had stood up or had not, and that the President of the House had read out a number, and that the number was either at least three hundred and twenty or it was not, and that he was the only person in Prussia with any interest in the matter who did not know which.

He found that he did not mind not knowing. He found that it was the first time in a year that he had not minded.

“Lukas.”

“Mm.”

“Thank you.”

“What for?”

“For talking about the raft.”

Lukas did not say anything for a moment, in the dark by the stove.

“It’s a terrible raft,” he said. “You’ll see it in July. It’s the worst raft in Brandenburg. He’s put a mast on it. There isn’t a sail. He says the sail comes later.” A pause. “That’s a fact, by the way. Facts don’t count. I’ve still got my one thing.”

---

At twenty past five Kessler came up the ladder.

He came up slowly, the way a large man comes up a ladder he does not trust, and put his head and shoulders through the hatch, and looked, as he always did, at the ceiling first, at the curved dark of it and the line of sun across it, before he looked at anybody.

“Sir,” said Kessler. “Her Royal Highness is on the telephone. She says your telephone is off.”

It was. He had turned it off in the car.

“She says,” said Kessler, still looking at the ceiling, “that it is a medical matter, and that if you do not come to the telephone she will come here herself, and that she is in the car already.”

“Is she?”

“No, sir. She is at the Charité. I can hear the hospital.” Kessler held out his own telephone through the hatch, at arm’s length, as though it might be hot. “But she said it in the voice.”

Alexander got up off the stool and went to the hatch and took the telephone, and Kessler went down two rungs, so that only the top of his head showed, and stayed there, and looked at the underside of the boards.

“Hello,” said Alexander.

He could hear the hospital. Kessler was right. Behind his sister there was a corridor, and a trolley going by on a bad wheel, and somebody being paged in a calm flat voice, twice, and a door that sighed shut. She was standing still. He could hear that she was standing still and that everybody round her was not.

“I have a sentence for you,” said Charlotte. “It isn’t mine. It’s Falk’s. She asked me to give it you exactly, and I said I would, and I’ve written it on my hand so that I don’t get it wrong, which is a thing I’ve told every patient on this ward never to do.”

“What is it?”

“Tell him the hospitals have this year’s numbers.”

He stood at the hatch with the telephone against his ear and the line of sun across his shoes.

“That’s all she said?”

“That’s all she said. She asked me to give it you exactly. I have. The budget went through the Herrenhaus on Tuesday and it’s promulgated tonight and from tomorrow every hospital in the kingdom is on this year’s figures and not last year’s, for the first time since January.” A pause. “That’s the sentence. That’s what she wanted you to have, out of everything today. She didn’t say anything else. I asked her if she had anything else and she said no, that was her first business, and she’d done it, and she wanted you to know it was done.”

He thought of the small study in Berlin in December, and the grey jacket and the glasses on the chain, and the voice saying the hospitals with it, and You’ll be my second.

“Tell her thank you,” he said.

“I’ll tell her. She’ll pretend she doesn’t know what for.” The trolley went by again, the other way. “Do you want mine?”

“Your what?”

“My sentence. I’ve got one as well. It’s a number.”

He closed his eyes.

He had not wanted it. He had come up the ladder in daylight and shut the shutter and sat in the dark with Lukas talking about a raft so as not to have it. He found, standing at the hatch with his sister’s hospital in his ear, that he did want it, very much, and that he would rather have it from her than from anybody else alive, and that this was perhaps why his body had turned the car left at the lights instead of right, so that it would come from her and not from a man on a television with a model.

“Yes,” he said.

“Three hundred and thirty-eight,” said his sister. “To ninety-one. It needed three hundred and twenty.”

He opened his eyes. The line of sun was on the hatch now. It was on his hand, and on Kessler’s telephone in it.

“Eighteen over,” he said.

“Eighteen over.” She was quiet for a moment. “The Social Democrats and the Conservatives went into the same lobby. I watched it on the screen in the doctors’ room with a cardiologist who votes for the Conservatives and has never said a word to me about anything except troponin, and when they came out of the same door he said Well, I never, and went back to his coffee. Falk spoke for six minutes. She didn’t say your name. She said the King once, at the very end, and sat down.”

“What did she say about him?”

“That he had asked for nothing,” said Charlotte, “and that the House was not giving him anything. It was giving him back.” The page went in the corridor again, the calm flat voice. “That’s me. I’ve got to go. Somebody’s got chest pain and I’m the person whose job it is to find out why.”

“Charlotte.”

“Mm.”

He did not know what he had been going to say. He had said her name, and she had stopped, and was waiting, in a corridor at the Charité with a number on her hand and somebody’s chest pain at the end of it, and he did not know what came next, and he understood that whatever it was, it was not for a telephone held through a hatch by a protection officer looking at the underside of a floor.

“Go and find out why,” he said.

“I am,” said his sister, and went.

---

He gave Kessler back his telephone. Kessler took it, and looked at the ceiling once more, and went down the ladder, slowly, and Alexander heard his feet on the gravel going round to the house, and then nothing.

He went back to the stool and sat down.

“Well?” said Lukas, from the dark.

“Three hundred and thirty-eight.”

Lukas did not say anything. Alexander heard him breathe out, a long breath, through his nose, the way he did when a planet came into focus after a long time of not coming into focus.

“Who voted against?”

“Ninety-one.”

“I mean who.”

“I don’t know. I didn’t ask.” He thought about it. “I don’t want to know. Not tonight. Jakub will tell me in the morning, all of them, by party, with a chart.”

“He will,” said Lukas. “He’ll have made the chart already. He’ll have made two, one for each result, so that he only has to throw one away.”

“Lukas.”

“Mm.”

“Open the shutter.”

Lukas got up off the boards. He went round to the crank, in the dark, by feel, the way they had done it a thousand times at night and never once in the day, and put his hands on the handle, and looked across the dome at Alexander, and Alexander nodded, and Lukas turned it.

The shutter went. The line of sun widened to a slit and the slit to a strip, and at three-quarters the iron squealed the way it always squealed, and then the whole of the opening was full of sky, and the dome was full of light, ordinary afternoon light, pale and yellow and plain, that showed everything: the dust on the shelf, and the log, and the scuffs on the boards where Lukas had sat for six years, and a cobweb in the angle of the mount that nobody had ever seen in the dark, and the stove with its pipe going up into the wall, and the scratch in the paint of the tube from the night his father had knocked it with a ring and sworn, in English, which he never did.

Alexander sat in it and looked at everything. He had never seen any of it. He had been coming up here all his life.

“There’s nothing to see,” said Lukas. “It’s half past five. It’s daylight.”

“I know.”

“So what are we looking at?”

Alexander looked at the sky in the opening, which was empty, and very pale, and going faintly gold at the bottom where the trees were, and had nothing in it at all except a single small cloud, high up, moving east, very slowly, in no hurry.

“The dome,” he said.

---

He wrote it in the log before he went down.

He took the pencil out of the spine and found the place, and wrote the date, and Tag, because it was day, and where the seeing went he wrote nothing, because there had been nothing to see, only things to look at, which was different. Then, below, where he would have written what he observed, he wrote it, in the square hand, small:

338.

He looked at it on the page. He turned back, without meaning to, through the winter, page after page of the pencil hand, the seeing and the transparency and the stars and the dates and bedeckt and bedeckt and klar, until he found the other one, in December, alone in its space under a night of cloud:

243.

They were the only two numbers in the log that were not the sky.

He looked at them both, the one in December and the one in April, more than four months apart. He thought that a person reading the log in fifty years, if anybody ever did, would not know what either of them meant, and would think they were some kind of measurement he had forgotten to label, and would be right.

He closed the log. He put the eyepiece back in the focuser, polished, with the green gone from the edge for once, where his thumb went. Then he and Lukas closed the shutter between them, the long way, by hand, with the squeal at three-quarters, and the dome went brown and dark again, and the line of sun was gone, because the sun had gone down behind the trees while they were not looking, and there was nothing in the dark at all but the two of them and the cold stove and the hatch, open an inch.