Jaunde

Dr Nkolo came at six.

He came to the small study, not to Alexander’s room, because papers in the Kamerun capacity were never brought to the private apartments; that was one of the rules, and Dr Nkolo kept the rules of the Kamerun capacity more exactly than anybody in the household kept any rules at all, including Charlotte, which was saying a great deal. He knocked twice. He waited to be asked in. He came in with the folder held in front of him in both hands, flat, a dark green folder with the arms of Kamerun stamped on the cover in faded gold, and he stopped at the correct distance from the desk, and inclined his head, and said, in German:

“Majesty.”

“Dr Nkolo.”

He was a narrow, grey, careful man of about sixty who had come from Jaunde to the imperial household in the year Alexander was born, as the Kamerun secretary, the only Kamerunian official in the household and the only person in it whose whole work was the third drawer. Alexander had met him perhaps a dozen times in his life. Every one of those times had been at this desk, with this folder, and every time Dr Nkolo had said Majesty in exactly that voice, as though the word were a thing he had been asked to carry from a long way off and set down without spilling.

He set the folder down on the desk. It was marked, as everything for Alexander had been marked since February, for information only. Below that, in a different ink, in Charlotte’s quick upright hand, somebody had written two words.

Read it.

“Her Royal Highness the Regent has seen the letter,” said Dr Nkolo, “in her capacity, at the hospital, at four, and has directed that it be shown to Your Majesty this evening, for information.” He paused. “She did not give a direction as to the speed.”

“Thank you.”

“The letter is from the Prime Minister. It came through the High Representative this afternoon, sent from Jaunde as an image and printed here; the original follows in the bag. It is in German. There is a line at the end in the Prime Minister’s own hand that is also in German.” Another pause, very slight. “I mention it so that Your Majesty is not surprised by the handwriting. Frau Mvondo Essomba writes very large.”

---

He opened the folder.

There were two sheets inside. The first was the act itself, a single page, printed, with the Landtag’s seal at the top and the governor-general’s assent at the bottom, signed that afternoon at Jaunde, Albertine Ngo Bayiha, in a small neat hand that took up exactly as much of the line as it was given and no more. The second was the letter, two pages, typed, with a signature at the end that took up half the width of the paper, and under it, printed in the blue of the original ink, very large, a line of writing that slanted upwards as it went, as though it were climbing.

He read the act first, because that was the order, and because he wanted to put off the letter.

It was short. It said, in the long careful German of a statute, that the Landtag of Kamerun, having been asked by the Kaiser von Kamerun through his Regent whether it wished to decide the matter for itself, did decide it; that it took as Kamerun’s own the age at which the German law, once its amendment was in force, would permit the Kaiser to exercise his office in person; that from the day on which he began to exercise his office in person in the Empire, he should exercise the office of Kaiser von Kamerun in person also, by this Act and not otherwise; and that nothing in the Act altered or was to be read as altering the articles of the constitution touching the head of state.

He read by this Act and not otherwise three times.

Then the letter.

Majesty,

I have the honour to inform Your Majesty that the Landtag of Kamerun this morning passed the Act of which a copy is enclosed, by one hundred and forty-four votes to nine, with eleven members abstaining, and that the governor-general assented to it at two o’clock this afternoon, Jaunde time.

Your Majesty will see that the Act does not amend the constitution. It could not. The articles on the head of state can be changed only by two-thirds in two successive Landtags with an election between them, a rule made in 1955 to make the Kaiser hard to remove, and which this House has now discovered makes him equally hard to ask anything. The Act therefore does the most that a single Landtag can do. It takes as Kamerun’s own a thing that the German law would have done to Kamerun without it. In law the effect is the same. My government holds that the difference is the whole of the matter, and the Landtag agreed.

I am obliged to inform Your Majesty also of an objection.

In the debate a member for Duala moved that it be entered in the record of the House that the Landtag had been asked this question only because a boy of fifteen had asked that it be asked, and that it would not otherwise have been asked by anybody, in Berlin or in Jaunde, as it was not asked in February of last year. He said that he would vote for the Act, and did, and that he wished the record to show that he was grateful to a child for something that ought to have been done by a constitution. The House agreed without division that the objection be entered. It is entered. I enclose the page.

I have not been asked by the House to say anything further to Your Majesty, and I have not been advised to, and so I will not, in this part of the letter, which is the part that will be kept.

Below the signature, in the large blue climbing hand, there was one line.

Es ist das erste Mal seit 1955, dass man dieses Haus etwas über seinen Kaiser gefragt hat. Danke.

It is the first time since 1955 that anybody has asked this House anything about its Kaiser. Thank you.

---

He sat with the letter for a long time.

Dr Nkolo did not move. He stood at the correct distance from the desk with his hands folded in front of him and looked at a point on the wall above Alexander’s head, where there was a small dull painting of a lake that nobody had ever looked at, and he looked at it now with great courtesy, as though it were the most interesting thing in the room, so that Alexander would not have to be looked at while he read.

Alexander turned to the enclosed page. It was a photocopy of a page of the Landtag’s record, in small grey type, with a line drawn in the margin in pencil beside one paragraph. He read the objection again, in the record’s words this time, which were drier than the Prime Minister’s, and said the same thing.

Only because a boy of fifteen had asked that it be asked.

“Dr Nkolo.”

“Majesty.”

“Who is the member for Duala?”

“A Social Democrat, Majesty. A schoolteacher. He has sat for twenty years.” Dr Nkolo did not take his eyes off the lake. “He opposed my appointment to this household, in 2014, in the Landtag, on the ground that the Kaiser’s papers should be kept in Jaunde and not in Berlin. He was right. I have told him so. We are friends.”

Alexander looked up.

“Was it meant as a reproach? The objection.”

Dr Nkolo considered the painting of the lake for some time.

“It was meant as a record, Majesty,” he said at last. “In Kamerun we have a great respect for the record. It is the only thing anybody ever gave us that could not be taken back.” He brought his eyes down from the lake to the desk, and then, for the first time in any of the dozen meetings Alexander could remember, to Alexander. “He was saying that it should not have needed you. And that it did. Both. He wanted both written down, so that in fifty years nobody could say that either was untrue.”

---

The atlas was in the library, on the bottom shelf by the window, where it had been all his life.

He went down for it after Dr Nkolo had gone, with the folder closed on the desk and the green cover with its faded gold arms catching the lamp. It was the big atlas, the one with the cracked spine that his father had used to teach him the provinces when he was seven, opening it on the floor of the library and lying beside it on his stomach in his shirtsleeves, which was the only time Alexander had ever seen his father lie on a floor. It was too heavy to carry with one hand. He carried it up the stairs with two, against his chest, the way Theo had carried the box at the Tomb.

He put it on the desk in the small study, beside the folder, and opened it.

Kamerun was on a double page near the back, after the Empire and its states and before the rest of the world, because the atlas had been made in Berlin by people who knew which order things were in. It was large. He had known it was large, and had not known it was this large: a great wedge of country from the sea to a lake in the north that the map coloured blue and the key called seasonal, twelve hundred kilometres from end to end, larger than Prussia, with the border with Nigeria running up the left side in a thin red line that somebody in London and somebody in Berlin had drawn in 1913.

He found Jaunde. A dot on a plateau, in the middle, inland. He found Duala on the coast, at the mouth of a river, the Wuri. He found the line of the coast running south.

He found the mountain.

It was at the edge of the sea, west of Duala, a brown smudge on the green with the contour lines drawn tight around it like the rings of a cut tree, and a small triangle at the top, and a number. He read the number. He read the small print beside it, which gave the years it had erupted, and the last was the year 2000, fourteen years before he was born. He found, on the seaward side of it, almost in the water, a name in italic so small he had to bend his head to the page: Debundscha. The atlas did not say what Debundscha was. He knew, because he had read it once in the Register, at eleven, in the article on Kamerun, on a wet afternoon with nothing to observe. It was one of the wettest places on earth. It rained there more than almost anywhere a person could stand.

He looked at the triangle at the top of the mountain for a long time.

He had never been there. He had never been anywhere in Kamerun at all. He had never been anywhere, he realised, sitting at his father’s desk with his father’s atlas and a letter from a Prime Minister who wrote in a hand that climbed, in any country where he reigned, except this one. Germany and Prussia were the same ground. Every place he had ever been King of, he had been King of in the same few hundred kilometres between the Rhine and the Memel, and most of it in two cities forty minutes apart. And there was a country on the Gulf of Guinea, twelve hundred kilometres long, with a mountain that came straight up out of the sea into the wettest rain in the world, which had been his since a Saturday morning in February, and which had sat in his third drawer for fourteen months while other people opened it for him, and which he had opened, on purpose, once, in February, by asking his sister to ask.

And it had answered. By a hundred and forty-four to nine. With an objection entered in the record, without division, that it should not have needed him, and that it did.

He thought of Frederick, who held fourteen, and in one of them, Malaya, did nothing at all, because the law there had already decided that he should do nothing, and decided it well. He thought that Frederick had probably looked up Malaya in an atlas at some point in the winter, at a desk, at night, and found that it was larger than he had thought, and had said nothing about it to anybody, and had written it down. He thought that he would ask, in a letter, what Malaya looked like on Frederick’s map. There was no vote in that.

---

At nine Charlotte rang.

She rang his own telephone, which was on, this time, and he answered it before the second ring.

“You read it,” said his sister.

“Yes.”

“Good.” He heard her sit down somewhere, a chair taking her weight, a sigh that was the chair and not her. “I read it at four, between two patients, in the sluice room, which is the only room on the ward with a lock. I read the line at the end and had to stand in the sluice room for a minute before I could go back out. I don’t know why. It’s a perfectly ordinary sentence.”

“It’s not ordinary.”

“No,” said Charlotte. “It isn’t.” She was quiet for a moment. “You did that. In February. You telephoned me, which you never do, and I came up the back stairs, and you had a folder marked for information only open on your desk, and you asked me to ask Jaunde, and I asked you why, and you told me about the drawers, and I thought it was the most Uncle Ernest thing I had ever heard come out of anybody who wasn’t Uncle Ernest, and I did it.” Another pause. “I want you to know I didn’t do it because you asked. I did it because you were right. Those are different, and you of all people should know they’re different, and on the third of May you’re going to need to know it more than you’ve ever needed to know anything.”

He held the telephone.

“Charlotte.”

“Mm.”

“Have you ever been there?”

“Kamerun?” She sounded surprised. “No. Papa went. In 2016. You were two. He came back with a sunburn and a wooden stool he said a chief had given him and Mama said he’d bought at the airport, and they argued about it until about 2019.” He heard her almost laugh. “It’s in the hall at the Neuer Garten. By the umbrella stand. You’ve sat on it a thousand times.”

He had. He knew the stool. It was low and dark and carved out of a single piece of wood, with a seat worn pale in the middle, and he had sat on it to take off his boots all his life and never once asked where it came from.

“I didn’t know,” he said.

“Nobody tells you anything,” said his sister. “That’s the job. Go to bed. You’ve got chemistry.”

---

He did not go to bed at once.

He sat at the desk in the small study with the atlas open at Kamerun and the green folder beside it, closed, with for information only on the cover in print and Read it below in his sister’s hand, and he looked at the mountain coming up out of the sea, and at the dot on the plateau where a woman who wrote in a hand that climbed had sat that morning and listened to a man from Duala ask for something to be written down.

Then he took a sheet of paper, the ordinary paper, not the paper with the eagle, and a pencil, and wrote at the top of it, in the square hand, Jaunde, and the date, and under it, carefully, from the atlas, a list. The height of the mountain. The years. The name of the place where it rained. The name of the river at Duala. The length of the country from the sea to the lake. He wrote them the way he wrote the log, as observations, one to a line, with nothing added.

At the bottom he wrote: Not yet seen.

He folded the sheet once and put it inside the back cover of the atlas, where nobody would find it, and closed the atlas, and carried it back down to the library with both hands against his chest, and put it on the bottom shelf by the window, where it had always been.

On the stairs going up again the guard passed him, coming down, and stopped, and stood aside, and said Goodnight, Majesty, which the guards never said, because the guards never spoke; and Alexander said goodnight; and he understood, on the landing, that the guard had been told, as the whole household had been told by now, as Dr Nkolo had known at six and Charlotte at four and a man from Duala in the morning, that in nine days there would be somebody in the apartments who could be said goodnight to in a different way, and that the guard had decided to start practising.