The Letter from Solliden

The placards had multiplied over the holidays.

There had been six before Christmas, on the railings opposite the school gate, white, with the two words in black and nothing else. Now there were perhaps thirty, all the way along the railings from the bus shelter to the corner, and some of them were new and some had been rained on and painted again, and somebody had added a banner at the end, strung between two lamp posts across the mouth of the side street, too high to take down without a ladder: MIT FÜNFZEHN, in letters a metre high, and under it, smaller, in red, Er hat Nein gesagt. Lasst ihn Ja sagen.

He said no. Let him say yes.

Alexander read it from the car. Kessler, in the front, read it too, and said nothing, and looked at the ceiling of the car.

“That’s new,” said Lukas, beside him.

“Yes.”

“Lasst ihn Ja sagen.” Lukas looked at it as the car slowed for the gate. “It’s quite good. As a sentence. Whoever wrote it can write.”

“Lukas.”

“I’m only saying it’s a good sentence. I’m not saying anything else.” Lukas looked out of the other window. “Yet.”

The car stopped. Alexander looked at the back of Kessler’s head. Kessler looked at the ceiling.

---

It was the second day of term, and the school had the stunned, overheated feeling of every second day of term after Christmas: radiators on full, windows steamed, everybody tired from the first day and not yet used to being tired. In the corridor a boy from Klasse 9 he did not know said Frohes neues, Majestät in a voice that was half a joke and half not, and Alexander said Frohes neues back, and the boy went red and walked into a door, and his friends laughed at him for the rest of the corridor, and Alexander walked on and did not look round, which was, he had learned, the only kindness available.

History was 1848. They had started it before Christmas and were in the middle of it now, the barricades in Berlin and the King riding through the city in the black, red and gold, and the parliament at Frankfurt offering him the imperial crown, and the King refusing it because it had been offered by the people and not by the princes, and calling it a crown from the gutter. Frau Dr Seidel, who had taught history at the Humboldt for twenty years, read the phrase out in exactly the same voice as everything else, and did not look at Alexander, and the class did not look at Alexander, so carefully that it was louder than if they had.

Alexander wrote it down. Krone aus der Gosse. He wrote it in the square hand, very neatly, and underlined it, and thought about a banner strung between two lamp posts.

---

At lunch the four of them sat where they always sat, at the table in the corner of the canteen by the radiator, which was the table nobody else sat at because it was too hot, and which they had sat at since Klasse 7 for exactly that reason.

Amalie had soup. Amalie always had soup. She was small and fair and very straight-backed and had known Alexander since they were three, because her mother and his had been friends since before either of them was married, and she was the only person in the school who called him by his name in front of other people without either hesitating or making a point of not hesitating. Jakub had two plates of whatever was hottest, as he always did, and a book open beside them about aeroplanes, and was reading it while he ate, as he always did, and would go on reading it unless somebody said something worth stopping for.

Lukas had a roll and an apple. He did not eat either. He sat with the apple in his hand, turning it, and looked at the table.

“I’m going to say something,” said Lukas.

Jakub did not look up from the aeroplanes. Amalie put her spoon down.

“I’ve said it in the dome,” said Lukas. “Twice. Alex knows. I’ve never said it anywhere else. I’m going to say it here, once, in front of you two, so that it’s been said in front of somebody, and then I’m not going to say it again, because it isn’t mine to keep saying.” He put the apple down. “I think he should take it.”

There was a short silence at the corner table.

Jakub closed the book about aeroplanes. Amalie looked at Alexander, and then at Lukas, and then at Alexander again.

“Take what?” said Jakub, although he knew.

“The amendments. If they pass. If they offer it.” Lukas did not look at Alexander. He looked at Jakub. “I think it’s absurd. I’ve always thought it was absurd. Nine people decided things in his name for eight months and one of the things they decided was wrong, and he said so, and they did it anyway, and the only reason anybody listened to him at all was that somebody leaked a minute. And now he’s got Charlotte, and Charlotte is good, and Charlotte doesn’t want it, and it’s still somebody else deciding. It’s his. It should be his. I’ve thought so since April.” He picked up the apple again. “That’s all. I’ve said it.”

Jakub looked at him for a long moment.

“My father says a King at fifteen is a regency with extra steps,” said Jakub.

“Your father,” said Lukas, “has never met him.”

“My father has met him four times. At parents’ evenings.” Jakub opened the book again, and then shut it. “I don’t think he should take it.”

Lukas turned and looked at him.

“Not because he isn’t ready,” said Jakub. “I don’t know if he’s ready. Nobody knows that. He doesn’t know it.” He looked at Alexander, plainly, the way he looked at a diagram of a wing. “Because it’s on a banner. The minute they put it on a banner it stopped being his and started being theirs. If he takes it now, everybody will say the banner gave it to him. Even if it didn’t.”

“That’s not a reason not to take it.”

“It’s a reason to be careful how,” said Jakub, and went back to the aeroplanes, and turned a page, and that was the whole of Jakub’s contribution, and Alexander knew from long experience that it was the most Jakub would say on any subject that was not aircraft for at least a month.

Amalie had not said anything.

She picked up her spoon and looked at her soup, and then put the spoon down again, and looked at Alexander across the table.

“Do you want us to have a view?” she said.

He thought about it. It was, he thought, the right question, and nobody had asked it before. Everybody had told him their view, or told him they would not tell him, or told him that he was not allowed one himself. Nobody had asked whether he wanted them to have one.

“I want you to be allowed to,” he said. “I don’t want to know what it is. Not yet.”

Amalie nodded once.

“Then I haven’t got one,” she said, and picked up her spoon, and ate her soup.

Lukas looked at her. Then he looked at the apple. Then, after a while, he bit it.

---

In the car on the way back to Berlin Lukas was quiet until the Glienicke Bridge.

Then he said, to the window, in German, low, so that Kessler would hear it and could pretend not to:

“Are you angry?”

“No.”

“I said it in front of them.”

“You said you were going to. You said why.” Alexander looked at the bridge going by, the green steel of it, the river grey underneath. “I’d rather you said it at a table than on a banner.”

Lukas thought about that for the length of the bridge.

“Jakub’s right,” he said at last. “About the banner. I hate that he’s right. He’s always right about things that aren’t aeroplanes, and he never talks about them, so nobody knows.”

“I know.”

“I know you know.” Lukas leaned his head against the window. “I still think you should take it.”

“I know that too.”

“Good,” said Lukas. “Then that’s said.” And he closed his eyes, and did not say anything else until Berlin, and Kessler, in the front, looked at the ceiling of the car for the whole of the Avus.

---

The letter was on the tray with the evening post at six.

It was inside a long grey envelope from the Foreign Office with nothing written on it but his name, the way they had all come, and inside that was another envelope, smaller, cream, with Alexander on the front in Frederick’s hand, sloping, quick, every letter joined to the next, which was the hand Frederick had been taught by somebody who had never had to learn a new one. The Foreign Office envelope had a small typed label in the corner that was not the usual one. Über Stockholm. By way of Stockholm.

He took it to his room and shut the door.

The box was in the second drawer of the desk, where it had been since November: his father’s walnut pen box, long and shallow, with four grooves in the green baize where the pens had been, and in it, tied with a length of dark blue ribbon that had come round the programme for the coronation, the letters. Three of them. He took the box out and opened the lid and untied the ribbon, and put the new letter on top of the others, unopened, and looked at it there for a moment, on top of the pile, by way of Stockholm.

Then he took it out again and opened it.

---

He read it at the desk, under the lamp, with the box open beside him.

He read the first part quickly, the cold kitchen and the two cardigans and the dumplings, and slowly when it reached the sink, and stopped altogether at So now we’ve both done it. You did it better. It’s on the record, and the record is a plaster, and sat for a while with that, because he could see the plaster, and Mrs Hartigan’s face, and Frederick’s thumb.

He read the part about Falk twice.

I’m going to think about it until your birthday. I’m not going to write about it before then, not one word, because you said you wanted to think about it until it was yours to think about, and I’m not going to put my thinking in front of yours. On your birthday I’m going to tell you what I think, once, and then you can do what you like with it, including nothing.

He put the letter down on the desk and looked at it.

His birthday was in fourteen days. He found that he did not know whether what he felt about the promise was relief or dread, and then that it was both, exactly, in equal amounts, the way the two halves of a scale are equal when there is nothing on either side and everything on both. Lukas had said it at a table. Frederick was going to say it in a letter. Neither of them was going to let him not hear it. He thought that this was what it meant to have friends, and that it was very inconvenient, and that he would not have exchanged it for anything.

He read the part about Christmas, and the almond, and the telephone.

There was a long silence on the line. Then he said, “Snow?”

He stopped there too.

He read the part about Andromeda slowly, all of it, with his hand flat on the desk beside the page, the way Charlotte held her place in a book. Then I looked a little to one side of it, the way you said, and it came. He had written that to Frederick in the dome, in pencil, three weeks ago, a thing his father had told him on a night when he was eight and could not see the Pleiades, and Frederick had stood on a jetty in Sweden in the snow and done it, and it had worked, and it was the first time anything his father had taught him had been passed on to somebody else, by him, and come back.

It’s older than fire. You were right.

He sat back in the chair.

---

Then the jetty.

I went down at a quarter to. Elsa and Nils came, and then, at five to, Mamma came, which I hadn’t expected, in the two cardigans and her big coat and the hat, carrying a thermos, and stood next to me at the end of the jetty, and didn’t say anything. Castellanos stood at the land end.

He read it once, all the way through, without stopping, to the end of the section.

Mamma said, “Gott nytt år, älskling,” and poured me some of whatever was in the thermos, which was hot blackcurrant, and Castellanos said, “Happy New Year, sir,” at one second past, exactly, the way he’d say it in a corridor.

Alexander put the letter down.

He sat very still at the desk. He thought about Kessler, standing by the steel door on the roof with the thermos under his arm, looking at the sky over the cathedral, saying Frohes neues Jahr, Majestät at one second past, to the sky, with his face doing nothing at all. And a man from Tucson, on a jetty in Sweden, at the land end, at the same second, saying it in a corridor voice to a boy at the other end of the jetty with a thermos of his own.

Two men with their faces doing nothing, five hundred and thirty kilometres apart, at one second past midnight, both of them.

He did not know why it undid him. It did. He sat at the desk with his hand over his mouth for some time, and did not make any sound, and the lamp made a circle on the desk with the letter in it, and the box open beside it, and outside the door the corridor was quiet.

Then he picked up the letter and read the rest.

And I thought about you on your roof.

I don’t know if they let you. You said it was three permissions and none of them were yours. I decided that they did. I decided you were on the roof in Berlin with Lukas and Charlotte and a man with a thermos, looking at the Spree, in the same minute as me. It was the nearest we’ve been since the Eleventh, and the farthest apart we’ve been in the same minute, and I stood on the jetty and drank the blackcurrant and thought that it was the first New Year I’ve ever spent knowing exactly where somebody was without being able to see them, and that it was all right.

Tell me if I was right about the roof.

---

He read Kate’s rules last.

He read them twice, and then took a pencil and went through them a third time, rule by rule, the way he would have checked a proof, and made two small marks in the margin beside rule 4, because he thought Kate was wrong about the partner, and then rubbed them out, because he thought on reflection that she was not wrong but Wisconsin, and that Wisconsin was entitled to its own rules, the way Kamerun was.

7. Nobody lets anybody win. Including the Crown.

He looked at that for a while. Then he laughed, once, out loud, alone in his room, at the desk, and put his hand over his mouth again, for a different reason.

---

The sheet of cream paper was where he had left it on the first of January, square on the desk under the lamp, at the edge of the circle of light. Berlin, 1. Januar. And under it, on the left, Dear Frederick, and nothing else.

He pulled it into the middle of the desk and uncapped the pen.

The date was wrong. It was the fourth now. He looked at it for a moment, at the first sheet of the first paper that had ever been entirely his, with a mistake at the top of it already, before he had written a single sentence, and thought about taking a second sheet, and starting again, clean.

Then he drew one line through 1., neatly, in the square hand, and wrote 4. beside it, and left both. Mending it would be replacing it. He had that on good authority, twice now, from a Tomb and a telescope.

Then he wrote, under Dear Frederick, that he had been right about the roof.

He wrote that it had been Lukas and Charlotte and a man with a thermos, and that the thermos had been apple juice for children, and that the man had said it at one second past, to the sky, with his face doing nothing, and that he had read about Castellanos on the jetty half an hour ago and had had to stop reading for a while, and that he did not know why, and that he thought Frederick might. He wrote that he had faced the wrong way at midnight, away from the fireworks, north, a little east, towards Sweden, and that Lukas had turned round too and said directions did not count. He wrote that he had told Lukas’s mother on the telephone that the two of them looked after each other and that this was the arrangement, and that he had never said that to anybody before, including Lukas. He wrote that Kate was right about rule 4, and wrong about nothing, and that he had laughed out loud at rule 7 in an empty room.

He did not write anything about the amendments, or the banner, or what Lukas had said at the corner table. He had been promised a birthday, and he would wait for it.

He wrote for an hour. The paper took the ink well. It was thick enough that nothing came through on the other side, and when he held the first sheet up to the lamp the watermark showed through it faintly, under his words, a shape he still could not read.

At eleven the guard went past his door, and paused, and went on.

He finished the sentence he was on, and signed it, and folded it, and put it in one of the plain envelopes with no crest on it, and wrote Frederick on the front, and put it on the tray by the door for the morning. Then he put Frederick’s letter back in the box, on top of the others, four now, and tied the ribbon round them again, the way he always tied it, with the knot underneath, and closed the lid, and put the box back in the second drawer, and turned off the lamp.