The Hour at the Sink

The observatory, Potsdam Saturday 16 December, after eleven

Dear Frederick,

I tried four times. You are right to have dated it, and I have dated my reading of your dating, and we will now never speak of it again.

The Embassy ate the dumplings. The Ambassador came into the hall of the residence that night in his dressing gown, which I had not known ambassadors owned, saw the foil, asked what it was, and said, “A family in the north-east of the city has sent the Embassy Klöße?” in the voice of a man reading a telegram announcing a war. Then he ate two, standing up, cold, and said they were better than his mother’s, and that he would deny it to the Foreign Office. Kessler ate the third. Lukas and I had the fourth on the aeroplane, over Newfoundland, with our fingers. Please tell Mrs Hartigan all of it, the Ambassador’s part especially.

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It is clear tonight, for the first time in a fortnight, and the stove is lit.

I don’t think I have told you about the stove. There is a small iron one by the hatch, with a pipe through the wall that smokes when the wind is from the west, which it is tonight. Papa had it put in the winter I was nine, because I would not come down, and he said that if he could not make me come down he would at least stop me freezing. It was the only time I ever heard him lose an argument to me and admit it. Lukas feeds it. He has a theory about birch and a theory about pine and they contradict each other.

You put the potatoes last so that I would have to read the rest first. I read the last part first. You knew I would.

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The hour at the sink.

I am going to tell it to you in order, because it is the only way I know how to tell things.

Theo came down the four flights for us at six, and pressed the light, and said “For later” about the chair on the first landing, and did not explain. I did not ask. By the third landing I knew who the chairs were for, and that it was not me, and I was glad, and I did not know why I was glad, and I have thought about it since and I think it is because it was the first door I had been through in nine months behind which nothing was arranged for me.

Then a woman with a wooden spoon said “Shoes.”

I said that I had been sick on a woman’s shoes once, at a wedding, when I was seven, and that my cousin says she was Norwegian. I was quoting you. I was reporting a disputed claim to a third party, and conceded nothing. Mrs Hartigan said, “Then you’ll know why we take them off at the door,” which was the cleverest thing anybody has said to me this year, and I took them off.

Then Kate told me I was shorter than on the news. I told her everybody is; they stand you on a box. She asked if I played cards. I said not well. She said “Good.” I have since learned that she meant it.

Then for about four minutes I stood in the middle of the kitchen in my socks doing nothing.

Lukas had been sent down for two chairs from a Mrs Okonjo. Theo was setting the table. Kate was doing something to a red cabbage with a knife I would not be allowed within a metre of. Mrs Hartigan was at the stove. Everybody had a job, and nobody was going to give me one, because I was a guest, and I understood, standing there, that in the most ordinary kitchen I have ever been in I was still being protected from something, and that this time I could ask.

So I asked. I said, “Mrs Hartigan, may I have a job?”

She looked at me for a long time, the way the doctors looked at me in February, as though she was checking something that was not on the chart. Then she gave me an apron off the hook. It is blue and has a lighthouse on it, faded, and I think it is from the same place as Lukas’s tea towel. She said, “Potatoes. There’s a sack under the sink. Small knife in the drawer. Peel toward you, not away, or you’ll take a slice off yourself and I’ll have to look at it, and I’ve been looking at people all week.”

So I peeled toward myself.

I had never peeled a potato. There is no reason in either of my constitutions why I should have. I stood at the sink with my hands in the water and a potato in one and the knife in the other, and I looked at it, and I began, and it was not difficult. That is the thing I have been trying to write four times. It was not difficult. The peel came off in long curls into the sink, and the potatoes went into the colander, white, one after another, and every one of them was finished when it was finished, and nobody was going to minute it, and nobody was going to say afterwards that I had done it well, or done it with Haltung, or done it at fourteen, which is what they say about everything. It was the first thing I had done since February that was entirely mine and entirely simple and that ended.

For about fifty minutes, for the first time since Papa died, I did not think about anything at all. The radio played an accordion. The window over the sink steamed up until the depot was yellow blurs. Lukas came back with the chairs and was given a tea towel that says Greetings from Door County, and dried plates at the end of the counter, and looked at the back of my head every few plates, which I did not turn round to check, because I did not need to.

At seven I heard you on the stairs.

I heard the light go, and feet, a great many of them, slowly, and then a stop, and the light again from higher up, and I counted. It was a minute and a half each time. I stood at the sink with a potato and counted the light, the whole four flights, and did not turn round, because if I had turned round I would have had to stop peeling, and I did not want to stop. I knew what was coming up the stairs. I wanted to have the potato in my hand when it came.

You know the rest. You were on one knee on the landing undoing your father’s laces. I saw that through the door, and did not tell you I saw it.

That was the hour. And then what? Then I went back to Berlin and tried four times to write it, and every time it came out as a thing about me, and it was not a thing about me. It was a thing about a sink.

I don’t know if that is an answer. It is the only one I have.

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Alexander. Good.

Thank you for that. I am not going to say anything more about it, because I can’t, and you know that, and you sent it anyway. I have written it in the log, on the page for the night I got your letter, under the seeing, where nobody will ever look.

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Now your question, which was not unkind, and which was exactly what I would have asked, which is the trouble with you.

Does that include you?

I will tell you what happened, because you are the only person I can tell it to as it happened, and not as it is going to be written.

On Monday Charlotte reappointed her. I was in a chemistry lesson. Our teacher put the radio on at the end, the way yours did with the statement, and then put it off again and gave us the homework, and nobody in the room looked at me, which, as I told you, is how you know everybody is. That evening Charlotte said one sentence about it in the car and no sentences about anything else.

On Thursday Falk asked to see me.

She asked through the Regent, properly, and Charlotte said yes, and said she would be in the room, and was. It was the small study in Berlin, where Papa had the briefings. The same table. She came in in the same grey jacket, with the reading glasses on the same chain, and sat in the same chair, and for a moment I was thirteen and had not done the reading.

She thanked me for the minute, plainly, the way you would thank somebody for holding a door. She said she knew I had not done it for her, and that it had made the difference anyway, and that she wanted me to hear her say so once, in a room, and not read it in a newspaper.

Then she said she was not going to make me her first business. I had hoped that, and I told you so, and she said it as though she had read the letter, which she has not, because nobody has. Her first business is the budget, she said, because there are no estimates for next year, and if there is no budget by the new year Prussia goes into January on continuing supply, and the hospitals with it. Then she said that I would be her second.

I said, “Your second?”

She said that her government would back the amendments. Both of them, the Empire’s and Prussia’s, together, so that the age would change in both at once. The ones the students have been putting on banners. Mit fünfzehn.

I said I had not asked for them.

She said, “I know. That’s why.”

I did not say anything to that. I could not think of anything that was not either thank you or no, and I am not allowed to say either.

Then she took her glasses off and said the thing I have been thinking about for two days. She said, “I’m not doing it for you. I’m doing it because of what was done in your name.” She said that as long as I am a minor, the King’s personal powers can be used by other people, and they were used once against my own view, written down, with a date on it, and she does not intend to leave a door open that has been walked through once. She said the only safe place for those powers is with the one person who has put on the record what he thinks they are for.

Charlotte did not say anything at all, the whole time. In the corridor afterwards she said, “Well,” and went back to the hospital.

So, to answer you. She needs nobody. And she has decided to need me anyway, on purpose, which is not the same thing, and which I did not hope for, because I did not know it was possible to hope for it.

You were right that it does not feel like what I hoped. You were wrong about how. It does not feel like being left out of a room. It feels like being asked into one before I have decided whether I want to go in. I am fourteen. In January I will be fifteen. I have been a King for ten months and have not been allowed to do one thing with it, and I have told you that I wanted the authority to stop the next Council, and I do, and I have also told nobody, and am now telling you, in pencil, that I do not know whether I am ready, and that a banner on some railings is not evidence that I am.

I am not going to say anything else about it. Not to you, yet. I want to think about it until it is mine to think about.

You may ask and then what? once. I will not answer it.

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Christmas.

It is the first one without him, in eight days, at Mama’s house in the Neuer Garten, on the other side of the trees from where I am sitting. We do it on the evening of the twenty-fourth, as everybody here does: the tree, the candles, the presents after dark. Nobody has said anything about his chair. I think it is going to stay where it is, with nobody in it, and Mama is going to be kind to everybody all evening as though kindness were a thing you could do with your hands, and Charlotte is going to come late from the hospital in her coat, and this year I am going to be glad, because it will be one more person at the table and one fewer thing to look at.

I am not looking forward to it. I wanted to say that to somebody, and it is not a thing you can say in this house.

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Now, Solliden.

I am very glad she said yes, and gladder that she said it in Swedish, and gladdest about Elsa and the ice, which I hope is thick.

Here is what you do. Wait until six, when the sky is properly black, and give your eyes twenty minutes to stop being the eyes of a person who has been indoors. Go out on the jetty, away from the house lights. Find the W of Cassiopeia. At six on Christmas Eve, from Öland, it will be almost straight above you, so you will have to lean back, and your neck will hurt, and you must not mind. Andromeda is below the W, towards the south, a little smudge, longer than it is wide. If you look straight at it you may not see it. Look a little to one side of it, and it will come. That is the whole trick, and it is true of more things than galaxies, and I am not going to say which.

Then use Elsa’s grandfather’s telescope. It will be a bigger smudge, and you must not be disappointed.

And I will be on the roof. Not here. In Berlin, on the roof of the palace, at midnight on New Year’s Eve, if they let me, which depends on three permissions and none of them is mine: Charlotte says she will come if the hospital lets her, and Lukas says he will come if his mother lets him, and Kessler says we will all come if he lets us, and he is the only one of the three who has not said yes. Berlin lets off fireworks at midnight as though it had won something. You will be on your jetty and I will be on my roof, in the same minute. I had not thought of that until you wrote it. I have thought of very little else since.

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Two short things. The trains: you are right, and I am sorry for Halethorpe, and I will think of you two minutes earlier. Kate: tell her I have bought thirty-two German cards in Potsdam and am practising against Lukas, who had never played either and is already better than me, and that I expect to lose to her for the rest of my life.

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Lukas has said his one thing for the evening. He has been quiet for an hour, feeding the stove, and has just looked up from the pine and said:

“Tell him the potatoes were good. Nobody said, at the table. Everybody ate them and nobody said. Tell him I said.”

So I have.

It is nearly midnight. The officer on the door has come round the side of the dome on the gravel and gone away again, which is how it is done at Potsdam on a Saturday, when Herr Schade is not there to do it properly. I am going to close the shutter, which squeals at three-quarters, every time, as though it had never been closed before.

Yours, with every formality, and with an apron I was not allowed to keep,

Alexander

P.S. I conceded nothing on the landing. I want that understood. The Norwegian remains in dispute.