Book Seven: Feierabend Part Four: The Day After Characters
Chapter Thirty-three
The Herrenhaus
Alexander I. Potsdam, in the Kingdom of Prussia. Thursday, 26 April 2029.
The Herrenhaus is a continuing chamber and is never dissolved, because none of its three orders derives its mandate from a general election.
Jakub had made a chart.
He had made it the night before, on squared paper, in three colours of ink, and he brought it to lunch folded in quarters in the inside pocket of his blazer, and unfolded it on the table between the soup and the bread with the care of a man laying out a map before a battle. It showed the Herrenhaus. Three blocks of sixty, side by side: the provincial order in blue, the life members in green, the hereditary order in a brown that Jakub said was the only colour he had left and that Amalie said was the colour of the hereditary order whether he meant it or not.
“A hundred and twenty,” said Jakub. “Two-thirds of a hundred and eighty. It sits at ten. It votes at eleven, if nobody makes a speech. Somebody always makes a speech.” He put his finger on the green block. “The life members are the whole question. Judges, doctors, a man who built bridges in Silesia, two trade union officers and an archbishop. Nobody knows how judges vote. That’s the point of judges.”
“And the hereditary order?”
“Will vote for you,” said Jakub, “because you are a King, and against Falk, because she is Falk, and they will have to decide this morning which of those they mind more.” He looked at the brown block with something like affection. “I think they mind Falk less than they like you. But I’ve been wrong about the hereditary order before. In my history project. I said they’d abolish themselves by 2040 and Frau Dr Seidel gave me a four.”
Lukas, beside Alexander, ate his soup and said nothing.
Alexander looked at the chart. It was very good. It was better than anything the newspapers had printed all week, and he thought that if Jakub had been born in a different family he would have been the kind of civil servant who made the government work without anybody ever finding out his name, and that perhaps he would be anyway.
“When will we know?”
“Now,” said Amalie, who had her phone under the table on her knee, which was not allowed at lunch, and which every teacher in the room had seen and decided not to see, because of who she was sitting next to. She looked at it. She looked up. “A hundred and thirty-one,” she said. “To thirty-eight. Eleven abstained.”
Nobody said anything.
Jakub took a pen out of his pocket, a green one, and wrote 131 in the margin of the chart beside the green block, and then crossed it out, because the number was for the whole chamber and not the green block, and wrote it again at the bottom, in black, under all three, and drew a line under it. Then he folded the chart up again in quarters and put it back in his inside pocket, carefully, the way you put away a thing you are going to keep.
“Eleven over,” said Lukas, to his soup.
The press office rang at two.
It did not ring Alexander. It rang Charlotte, who was at the hospital, and who rang Kessler, who came to the door of the history room at a quarter past two and stood in it, enormous and apologetic, until Frau Dr Seidel stopped talking about the Congress of Vienna and looked at him, and then at Alexander, and said, with great dryness, “I believe you are wanted by the nineteenth century.”
In the corridor Kessler held out his telephone.
“Hello.”
“The press office,” said his sister, in the low quick voice she used on the ward, “wants to know whether the King wishes to say anything. About this morning. They say the Kaiser is expected to say something when the Prussian Landtag finishes an amendment touching the Crown, and that it’s been done before, and they’ve drafted three paragraphs, and they’ve sent them to me, and I’ve read them, and they’re very good.” A pause. “I’m asking you. I’m not advising you. I’m required to ask you, under the forms, and I’m asking you.”
He stood in the corridor outside the history room with Kessler looking at the ceiling. Through the glass panel in the door he could see Frau Dr Seidel, back at the board, drawing the borders of 1815 in chalk, quickly, from memory, and Lukas in the second row with his chin on his hand, looking not at the board but at the door.
“No,” said Alexander.
“No to which?”
“No to all three paragraphs. No to anything.” He looked at the borders of 1815 going up on the board. “I haven’t been asked anything. I’ve had nothing to say about any of it since February, and they all know it, and that’s the reason they did it. If I say something now it’ll be the first thing I’ve said and it’ll be thank you, and then it’ll look like I asked.”
His sister was quiet.
“That’s what Falk said,” she said at last. “On the telephone, at one. I asked her, because I’m required to ask the Minister-President when a statement touches the Prussian capacity. She said, He hasn’t said anything. Don’t let them start him now.”
“Then that’s two of us.”
“Three,” said Charlotte. “I’ll tell them no. They’ll be cross. They’ve had the three paragraphs since March.” He heard a door, and the lecture behind her come louder and then quieter, as though she had stepped out of it into a stairwell. “The last state ratifies tomorrow, they think. The imperial one. Then that’s all of it, except Monday.”
“Which state?”
“Brunswick,” said his sister. “Their coalition argued about it for a month. They abstained in the Bundesrat and they’re going to ratify last, tomorrow at four, by about three votes, and nobody in Brunswick will be able to tell you why they did either.” She paused. “You know whose Brunswick is.”
“I know whose Brunswick is.”
“I only mention it,” said Charlotte, and rang off, and Kessler took back the telephone and looked at the ceiling, and Alexander went back into the history room, where the Congress of Vienna had redrawn the map of Europe in his absence, in chalk, and nobody had asked anybody.
“Come to the café,” said Lukas, at the gate, at four.
He said it as though it were nothing, the way he said everything that was not nothing. He was standing by the railings with his bag on one shoulder and his hands in his pockets, where the banner had hung in December with the five words on it, and he did not look at Alexander when he said it. He looked at the street.
Alexander had never been to the café.
He had been to the garden behind it, twice, for the birthday parties, through the side gate, with a detail on a bench by the bins. He had never been through the front door. He had never been allowed. It was on a corner two streets from the Brandenburg Gate in Potsdam, the small one, not the Berlin one, with big windows onto both streets and six tables and a counter, and since the summer it had been the kind of café that people came to on purpose, not for the coffee but to look through the big windows at the place where the Emperor’s friend’s mother worked, and the household’s view had always been that if the Emperor went through the front door himself, on a Thursday afternoon, the café would never again be anything else.
“I’m not allowed.”
“I know you’re not allowed.” Lukas looked at the street. “I’m asking anyway. My mother asked me to ask. She’s asked me every week since your birthday. I’ve never asked. I’m asking today, because it’s today, and because on the third you’ll be allowed to do what you like, and then you won’t come, because it’ll be a decision, and you hate decisions that are only about you.”
Alexander looked at him.
“That’s a lot of things for one evening.”
“It’s four o’clock,” said Lukas. “It’s not evening. They don’t count.”
Kessler said no.
He said it in the car, in the mirror, at once, and then he said it again on the telephone to somebody in Berlin, and then he listened for a long time, and said Ja twice, and then Fünfzehn Minuten, and then Ein Tisch, hinten, and put the telephone down and looked at Alexander in the mirror with the expression of a large tired man who has been overruled by somebody he respects.
“Fifteen minutes,” said Kessler. “One table, at the back. I will be at the door. Nobody else will come in while you are there. Nobody will be asked to leave. If anybody takes a photograph we will leave at once and you will not argue.” He paused. “Her Royal Highness says you may. She says she is not advising you and she is not deciding it, she is only telling me that she has no objection, which is a thing a Regent may say to a protection officer about a café, and she has looked it up.”
“Thank you.”
“Don’t thank me,” said Kessler. “I said no.”
It was smaller inside than the windows made it look.
Six tables, as Lukas had said, and a counter of pale wood with a glass case on it full of cakes, and behind the counter a coffee machine, enormous, steel and black, with dials and pipes and a brass eagle on the top that was not the imperial eagle but somebody’s idea of one, and Alexander knew without being told that it was the machine the loan was for. There were four people at the tables by the windows, two old men with newspapers and a young woman with a pram and a girl doing homework, and when the door opened and Kessler came through it first and stood beside it with his back to the wall, all four of them looked up, and saw Kessler, and then saw who was behind him, and then, all four of them, at the same moment, looked down again.
Nobody said anything. The young woman with the pram picked up her cup and drank from it and put it down. One of the old men turned a page.
“They’ve been told,” said Lukas, very quietly, walking ahead of him to the back. “My mother told them. At half past three. She said if anybody stares she’ll stop serving them, and she means it, and they all know she means it, because she did it to a man from a magazine in July.”
The table at the back was by a door that led to a kitchen and a corridor and, through a glass panel, to the garden. Lukas sat with his back to the room. Alexander sat facing it, because that was where Kessler had pointed, so that Kessler could see his face from the door, and so he saw the whole café at once: the windows, the old men, the pram, the girl’s homework, the glass case of cakes, the machine with the eagle on top, and coming round the end of the counter with a tray, a small dark woman in an apron with her sleeves pushed up and Lukas’s eyes, exactly, looking at him the way Mrs Hartigan had looked at him on a landing in New Westminster, as though checking something that was not on any chart.
“Majesty,” said Lukas’s mother. “What will you have?”
He had not thought.
“Coffee,” he said, because Lukas always had coffee, and because he was fifteen, and because it was the first thing anybody had offered him in a room that did not belong to him in fourteen months and he wanted to answer it like a person and not like a boy.
Frau Brandt looked at him for a moment longer.
“Coffee,” she said, and went back behind the counter, and the machine with the eagle on top began to hiss and knock and roar, the loudest thing in Potsdam, and the girl doing her homework put her hands over her ears and grinned, and the old man turned another page.
It came in a small white cup on a small white saucer with a biscuit on the side, and it was very black, and very strong, and he tasted it, and it was the most bitter thing he had ever put in his mouth, and he did not let his face do anything at all, because Frau Brandt was watching from behind the counter and so was Lukas and so, from the door, was Kessler.
“It’s strong,” said Lukas, without expression.
“It’s very good.”
“It’s strong. She makes it strong on purpose. She says Potsdam drinks weak coffee because it thinks it’s Berlin.” Lukas drank his own, which was the same, without blinking, the way he did everything that was difficult. “You don’t have to finish it.”
“I’m going to finish it.”
“You’re not,” said Lukas. “But you can try.”
His brother came through the kitchen door at that moment, at speed, in socks, with a length of broom handle in one hand, and stopped dead at the sight of the table, and said Oh in a voice that went up at the end, and stood there.
“This is my brother,” said Lukas. “He’s building a raft.”
“I know,” said Alexander. “Hello.”
The brother looked at him. He was eleven and small and dark and looked like Lukas compressed, and he looked at Alexander, and at the cup, and at the broom handle in his own hand, and then held it up.
“It’s for the sail,” he said.
“You haven’t got a sail.”
“It’s for when I get a sail. It’s the boom.” He looked at the glass panel in the door behind Lukas, through which, if Alexander leaned, he could see the garden, and the back of the café’s bins, and in the middle of the grass, on bricks, a raft: four pallets lashed together with blue rope, and a mast, an actual mast, a length of drainpipe fixed upright in the middle with more blue rope, leaning very slightly to the left. “Do you want to see it?”
“Fifteen minutes,” said Kessler, from the door, to the ceiling.
He saw it through the glass. That was all there was time for. The brother held the kitchen door open and he leaned, with the cup in his hand, and looked out at the worst raft in Brandenburg sitting on its bricks on the grass in the April sun, with its drainpipe mast and its blue rope and no sail, eleven kilometres from Werder and going nowhere, built to have been built.
“It won’t float,” said the brother. “Lukas says. I know it won’t. That’s not what it’s for.”
“What’s it for?”
The brother thought about it, holding the door, with the broom handle that was a boom for a sail he did not have.
“For when I’ve finished it,” he said. “Then I’ll know I can.”
Alexander looked at the raft.
Behind him, at the counter, he heard Frau Brandt put a cup down, quite hard, on a saucer, and then nothing, as though she had stopped to listen; and he did not turn round.
“That’s a good reason,” he said.
“Lukas says it’s a stupid reason.”
“I didn’t say stupid,” said Lukas, from the table, without turning round. “I said Brandt. It’s different.”
Frau Brandt came to the table as they were standing up.
She did not bring the bill. She came round the end of the counter wiping her hands on her apron and stopped beside the table and looked at the cup, which was still half full, black and cold now, with the biscuit untouched on the saucer, and then at him.
He thought she would say something about the coffee. He thought she would say what Mrs Hartigan had said about the potatoes, something plain and exact that weighed what he had done and gave it back. She did not.
“Your mother,” said Frau Brandt, “was kind to my son once. Last year. When he’d said a thing he shouldn’t have, about her, and it got into a newspaper, and he didn’t eat for four days.” She folded the cloth over her hands. “She didn’t have to be kind. Most people wouldn’t have been. She was kind in a way that was worse for him than shouting, because he couldn’t be angry with anybody but himself. He’s been careful ever since. Too careful, I think. He’s fourteen.” She looked at the half-full cup. “I’ve never had the chance to tell her that I know what it cost her, being kind when she was frightened. I’m telling you instead. You can tell her or not.”
He stood by the table with his bag on his shoulder.
“I’ll tell her,” he said.
“Good.” Frau Brandt picked up the cup and the saucer and the untouched biscuit. “Come back when you’re allowed to finish it,” she said, and took them away.
In the car Lukas said nothing for the length of two streets.
Then he said, to the window:
“You didn’t finish it.”
“No.”
“Nobody does. The first time. She knows. She makes it like that so that she knows who comes back.” He was quiet for a moment. “My father didn’t finish his. In Königsberg, before I was born, in the café she worked in then. He came back four times before he finished one, and the fifth time she married him.”
Alexander looked at him.
“That’s true?”
“It’s a fact,” said Lukas. “Facts don’t count.” He watched the trees of the Neuer Garten come up on the left, the long wall and the gates and the glint of the lake through the branches. “That wasn’t my one thing. I’m still saving it.”
“What for?”
“I’ll know when,” said Lukas.
Charlotte telephoned at a quarter to five on Friday. Brunswick had ratified at ten past four, by three votes, after an afternoon’s debate in which, she said, nobody had mentioned the Duke, and she had been informed at half past; and the twenty-seven states of the German Empire had all, at last, said yes, the slowest of them to the last, and the imperial amendment was in force, and there was nothing left to be decided by anybody except one sentence on Monday, which was his.
He made no statement on Friday either.
He went to the dome at Potsdam on Friday night, because it was clear, and wrote in the log the date and klar and the seeing, which was good, and what he saw, which was Regulus high in the south and Arcturus coming up orange in the east and Andromeda nowhere, under the trees, in the wrong season, still there; and under it, in the space where in December and April he had written a number, he wrote nothing at all, because he had found, sitting on the stool in the dark with the red torch, that he did not need to.
Then, very small, at the bottom of the page, where nobody would look:
Café. Half a cup.