Christmas Eve

The tree had real candles on it, because his mother would not have the other kind, and beside it on the parquet, where it had stood every Christmas Eve of his life, there was a zinc bucket of water with a sponge floating in it.

Alexander looked at the bucket for some time.

It had always been his father’s bucket. Not in any sense that would stand up in a court; it belonged to the house, and lived the rest of the year in the boot room with the dog’s lead, which still hung there although the dog had been dead since 2024. But on Christmas Eve his father had carried it in from the boot room himself, at four, and set it down beside the tree, and put the sponge in it, and said every year, to nobody, Für alle Fälle, in case of everything, and every year his mother had said that nothing had ever caught fire in that house in two hundred years and his father had said that this was what the bucket was for.

Somebody had carried it in this year. It was in exactly the right place. He did not know who, and he did not ask.

“It’s straight,” said his mother, behind him.

He turned round. She was in the doorway of the drawing room in the dark green dress she wore every Christmas Eve, with her reading glasses pushed up into her hair, holding a list.

“The tree,” she said. “You were looking at it as though it wasn’t straight.”

“It’s straight.”

“Herr Schade straightened it. Twice. The second time I think it was only to be doing something.” She looked at the list. “We’re going to the Vesper at four. The car is at twenty to. Your sister says she’ll be here by six, which means seven, which means after supper, and we are not going to wait for her, because if we wait for her she will feel that we waited, and that is worse for her than missing supper.”

“Yes, Mama.”

His mother looked at him over the list.

“And we’re not going to the mausoleum,” she said. “Not tonight. I went this morning. I took the greenery.” She folded the list in half. “Tonight is for the living. He would have said so. He would have said it in a speech, and taken eleven minutes, and the soup would have gone cold.”

Alexander almost smiled. He felt it start and let it go.

“Eleven minutes,” he said.

“Thirteen, the year you were born.” His mother turned to go, and stopped. “Wear the grey suit. Not the black one. It’s Christmas.”

---

The Friedenskirche at four was full and dark and smelled of wet wool and candle smoke, and they sat where the family always sat, at the side, and nobody turned round, which was Potsdam’s present to them every year and had been since before he was born. The pastor read the Christmas Gospel in a voice that carried to the back without trying. Halfway through it Alexander realised that the mausoleum was perhaps forty metres away from where he was sitting, through a wall and across a courtyard, and that his father was nearer to him now than he had been at any time since the funeral, and he held the hymn book with two fingers underneath and looked at the candle on the end of the pew in front and thought about nothing else until the blessing.

His mother did not look at the wall. She looked at the pastor the whole time, with complete attention, as though he were giving evidence.

On the way out Herr Schade was at the car, in his good coat, although it was Sunday and he had been on the door since eight.

“Frohe Weihnachten, sir,” said Herr Schade.

“Frohe Weihnachten.”

Herr Schade opened the door. Then, which he had never done before, he put his hand very briefly on Alexander’s shoulder as Alexander got in, the way you would steady somebody on a step, and took it away again, and shut the door, and walked round to the front without a word.

---

Supper was potato salad and sausages.

It had always been potato salad and sausages on Christmas Eve, because it had been potato salad and sausages in his father’s family since anybody could remember, and his mother, who had grown up in London with a goose, had married into it in 2002 and kept it ever since without once remarking that it was an odd thing for an Emperor to eat on the holiest night of the year. The potato salad was the Potsdam kind, with vinegar and stock and no mayonnaise, which was made in the kitchen by the woman who made the cocoa and had been made by her every Christmas Eve since he was four.

He looked at the bowl when it came. He thought about a sink, and a sack, and a knife from a drawer, and the long curls of peel going into the water, and said nothing, and took some.

They ate in the small dining room, the two of them, at the end of the table nearest the fire.

His father’s chair was at the head.

Nobody had laid a place there. There was no plate, no glass, nothing. The chair was simply where it had always been, at the head of the table, pushed in, with its back to the window, and the table had been laid for three along one side and the corner, his mother’s place and his and Charlotte’s, so that the head was empty and it was not possible to sit at that table without the empty chair being in the corner of your eye.

He did not know whether it had been decided or whether nobody had decided. He thought that it had probably been discussed in the kitchen, at length, and that in the end the staff had done the only thing that could not be wrong, which was nothing, and he was grateful to them, and could not tell them so.

His mother did not look at the chair. She talked about the Vesper, and the pastor, and the Christmas card from Aunt Christina, which had come from New Westminster on the twentieth with one line in it in Swedish, Mod, Caroline, courage, which his mother said was the kind of thing the Swedes said when they had no idea what else to say and were too honest to pretend. She talked about Charlotte’s finals, which were in April, and about the woman in the kitchen’s knee. She was kind about everybody. She was kind the whole of supper, steadily, without a break, as though kindness were a thing you could do with your hands to keep them occupied.

Alexander ate his potato salad and watched her do it.

At a quarter to eight he said, “Mama.”

“Mm.”

“It’s all right. The chair.”

His mother stopped talking. She put down her fork. She looked, for the first time all evening, at the head of the table, at the chair pushed in with its back to the dark window, and then at him.

“Is it,” she said.

“I don’t mind it being there. I’d mind more if they’d moved it.”

His mother looked at him for a long moment.

“So would I,” she said, very quietly, and picked up her fork again, and went on, and did not talk about anybody else for the rest of supper, and it was better.

---

At twenty past eight the front door went, and there was cold air in the hall, and his sister’s voice saying something to Herr Schade, and Herr Schade’s voice saying something back, and then Charlotte came into the small dining room in her coat.

She had not taken it off. It was the long dark blue one she had worn every winter since she was eighteen, and it was undone, and under it she was still in the clothes she wore under the white coat on the ward, a grey jumper and dark trousers, and she smelled of hospital soap and outside. Her hair was coming down at one side. She looked as though she had been awake since five, which she had.

“I’m here,” said Charlotte.

“You’re here,” said their mother.

“I said six.”

“You said six,” said their mother, “which we all understood to mean now. Sit down. There’s potato salad. It’s cold. It’s meant to be cold.”

Charlotte sat down in her coat, in the place that had been laid for her, and pulled the bowl towards her, and ate potato salad out of it with a serving spoon, without a plate, for about a minute, while their mother watched her with an expression of great forbearance and Alexander watched both of them.

“A woman on the ward wanted to go home for Christmas,” said Charlotte, with her mouth full. “She’s eighty-six. She’s not well enough. The registrar said no. She said she had been going home for Christmas since 1942 and she wasn’t going to stop for a registrar.” Charlotte swallowed. “I sat with her till seven. Her son came. He’s sixty. He brought her a tree in a pot, about this high, and put it on the locker.” She held her hand thirty centimetres above the table. “That’s why I’m late.”

Nobody said anything for a moment.

“Then you’re not late,” said their mother.

Charlotte looked at her. Then she looked, for a second, at the head of the table, and at the chair, and Alexander saw her see it, and saw her decide not to say anything about it, exactly as he had, and exactly as their mother had, and he thought that they were three people at one end of a table all deciding the same thing in silence, and that this was perhaps what a family was.

“Good potato salad,” said Charlotte, and put the spoon down.

---

The Bescherung was in the drawing room, after dark, with the candles.

His mother lit them herself, with the long taper, one at a time, from the bottom of the tree to the top, standing on the little library steps for the highest ones, while Charlotte held the steps and Alexander stood by the bucket. The room went gold. The rest of the house was dark. Through the tall windows the Neuer Garten was black, and beyond it, in the trees, there was a darker shape against the sky that was the dome, shut, with nobody in it.

Then there was the bell.

It was a small brass bell with a wooden handle that lived in the drawer of the hall table all year and came out once. His father had rung it. It was the signal, at every Christmas Eve Alexander could remember, that the tree was lit and the doors could be opened and the presents were there: his father in the doorway of the drawing room with the bell held up at the level of his ear, ringing it twice, very precisely, as though it were a procedure, and saying So, and stepping aside.

His mother took it out of the drawer and stood in the doorway with it, and then did not ring it.

She looked at it in her hand. She looked at Alexander. She held it out, a little, towards him, without saying anything, and he looked at the bell and at her hand and found that he could not take it, that his hands had gone behind his back by themselves, the way his uncle’s did, and that he could not bring them round again.

“I can’t,” he said.

“No,” said his mother. “No, of course.” And she did not ring it either, and stood in the doorway with the bell held out, and the candles burned on the tree behind her, and nobody moved.

Then Charlotte took it out of her hand.

She took it quite gently, the way you would take something from a patient who had been holding it too long, and lifted it to the level of her ear, and rang it twice, briskly, like a nurse at the end of visiting hours, and said, “So,” and stepped aside.

Their mother put her hand over her mouth. Then she took it away, and laughed, the short surprised laugh, and said, “Charlotte,” in a voice he had not heard her use since February, and went into the drawing room, and they followed her.

---

His mother gave him paper.

It was a flat box, wrapped in dark red, and inside it there were two hundred sheets of thick cream writing paper and a hundred envelopes, plain, with no crest on them, no cipher, no address, nothing at all. He took the top sheet out and held it up to the candles. There was a watermark in it, very faint, that he could not read.

“It’s from a mill in Bavaria,” said his mother. “They’ve been making it since the Thirty Years’ War. I asked them for it without the crest.” She sat down on the arm of the sofa. “Everything you write on is somebody’s. The Council’s, or the Empire’s, or Prussia’s, or the household’s. I thought you should have some paper that was only yours. For writing to people as yourself.”

Alexander looked at the paper in his hand.

“Thank you,” he said.

“You write such good letters,” said his mother. “Everybody says. The Ambassador in London said your thank-you letter after the funeral was the best he had ever received from anybody under sixty.” She looked at the tree. “I don’t suppose you write to anybody much. At your age. There isn’t time.”

“No,” said Alexander. “Not much.”

He put the sheet back in the box, on top of the others, very carefully, square, and put the lid on it, and held the box on his knees with both hands, and did not look at his mother, and did not look at Charlotte, who was opening her own present on the other side of the tree and had not heard.

He had written three letters to New Westminster on paper that was somebody’s. He thought that he would write the fourth on this, and that it would be the first letter he had ever written that was entirely his, and that his mother had given him the paper to write it on and would never know.

He felt, holding the box, worse than he had felt at any point since the Tiergarten, and also, underneath that, something he did not have a name for that was not worse at all.

Charlotte gave him thermal socks.

“For the dome,” she said. “Lukas told me you sit up there with your feet on an iron floor.”

“It’s a wooden floor.”

“Lukas said iron.”

“Lukas says a lot of things,” said Alexander, and put them on over his own, in front of the tree, at once, and his mother looked at the socks and at the grey suit and said nothing at all, which was her present to both of them.

---

At half past ten Charlotte went out onto the front steps.

She said she needed air. She said the drawing room was too hot with the candles, which was true, and that she had been indoors since five that morning, which was also true, and she went out into the hall and put her coat back on and opened the front door and went out and sat down on the top step, in the cold, in the dark, with the door ajar behind her.

Alexander waited two minutes. Then he took her scarf off the hall stand, where she had left it, and went out.

It was very cold. There was no snow, but there was frost on the gravel of the drive, and on the lawns, so that the whole of the Neuer Garten was grey-white under a sky that had no moon and was clear from one side to the other. Orion was up over the trees, enormous, tipped on his side. He looked at it automatically, and then at his sister.

She was sitting on the top step with her knees drawn up and her arms round them, looking at the frost.

He gave her the scarf. She put it on without looking at it. He sat down on the step beside her. The stone was so cold that he felt it through the grey suit and the thermal socks and everything else, at once, all over.

“You’ll freeze,” said Charlotte.

“So will you.”

“I’m used to it. The hospital’s heating goes off at ten.” She put her chin on her knees. “Is Mama all right?”

“She was kind all through supper.”

Charlotte nodded slowly. She understood exactly what that meant; he could see her understand it.

“And you?”

“I’m all right.”

“You said I can’t,” said Charlotte, “to the bell. I heard you from the hall.”

He did not say anything.

“I’m not asking about it,” said Charlotte. “I’m telling you I heard. That’s all.” She was quiet for a moment. “I couldn’t either. I just didn’t say so. I rang it because somebody had to, and I’m the eldest, and I’ve rung a great many bells since October that I didn’t want to ring.” She looked at the frost. “That’s the job. You ring the bell for the person who should be ringing it, and then you step aside.”

Alexander looked at her.

He looked at his sister on the top step in her old blue coat, with her hair coming down and the hospital still on her and her chin on her knees, saying that’s the job to the frost; and the thing came up in him all at once, the thing he had said to her once, in February, in the weeks after, in the corridor at the palace in Berlin with nobody else there, the thing she had not answered and that neither of them had said since. It came up so fast that he had his mouth open before he knew it, and the first word was there, and it was her name.

“Charlotte.”

“Mm.”

He stopped.

She had turned her head and was looking at him, waiting, tired, with no idea at all of what was coming, and he saw that if he said it she would have to answer it this time, on the step, on Christmas Eve, with the hospital still on her and their father’s chair in the dining room behind the wall; and that whatever she answered, she would have to carry it back to her flat and her finals and the regency she had never wanted and the Council she had never wanted either, and carry it for him. And that she had not answered it the first time for a reason, and that he did not know what the reason was, and that it was hers.

“Thank you,” he said. “For the socks.”

Charlotte looked at him a moment longer. Then she looked back at the frost.

“You’re welcome,” she said. “Put your feet on the iron.”

“It’s wood.”

“Lukas said iron,” said Charlotte, and leaned her shoulder against his, very slightly, on the cold step, and they sat there without saying anything else for some time, under Orion, until the cold had got all the way through both of them and it was time to go in.

---

He went up at eleven.

He took the box of paper with him and put it on the desk in his room, unopened, square, with the lid on, and put the thermal socks on the chair, and got into bed, and lay looking at the ceiling, where the light from the lamp on the gravel outside made a long pale shape that had been there every night of his life in this room and that he had never once thought about.

At eleven the guard went past his door. He heard the footsteps come along the corridor and slow, and pause, the way they did, and go on.

It was the same corridor. He had known that all day and had not let himself think it. His room and his father’s study were on the same floor, three doors apart, and the corridor that ran past them to the stairs was the corridor, and the guard had just walked the length of it, past the study door, at the pace you would walk to somebody’s door, and gone round the corner at the end, and it had sounded exactly like every other night.

He lay and listened to it go.

Then he turned over, and looked at the box on the desk, square in the dark, and thought about what he would write on the first sheet, and to whom, and fell asleep before he had decided anything at all.