Until It Is Mine

Imperial Palace, Berlin Thursday 8 March, late

Dear Frederick,

This is the answer to your birthday letter. It is seven weeks late. You said I would walk round the room twice and then not write for a week and then write about something else, and you were wrong by six weeks and right about everything else. I have written to you six times since and not answered it, and you have noticed, and you have not said so, which I know cost you more than it would cost anybody else alive.

You told me that if they offered it, I should take it. You said I had been a King for eleven months with my hands tied, that I had minuted my dissent, that I was readier than you, and that you had till May. You wrote it in your green book with the date. I have read it more times than I have read anything since the first letter.

Today the Reichstag passed it. Three-fifths. I watched it on a laptop in the school library, because a King may not sit in the gallery for a vote about himself. It goes to the Bundesrat on the twenty-third, and then to the states, and the Prussian one goes to the Landtag after Easter. So it has nearly been offered. In a few weeks it may be.

I have decided nothing. I will not decide until it is mine to decide.

I know how that reads. It reads like the thing you said I would do, the boy who is only good at saying no. It isn’t that. It is that the whole of this year has been other people deciding things in my name, some of them wrong and some of them right, and the right ones were no more mine than the wrong ones. If I decide now, before the law gives it to me, I will be one more person deciding in my name. I want the first thing I decide to be the first thing I am allowed to decide. That is all. It is not modesty. You are right that modesty would be a bad reason. It is the only way I can think of for it to be mine.

You are not my adviser. You are my cousin, and you told me what you thought on my birthday, and I am telling you what I think back, seven weeks later, which is the slowest I have ever been at anything. That is allowed. You decided it was allowed. I have decided the same.

---

The rest, which is longer, and less important, and which I would rather write than the first page.

The vote. Jakub held the laptop on his knees in the corner by the atlases, and Amalie stood behind us and pretended to read about the Hanseatic League, which I am now told is a joke all over the school, because Lukas told one person. The Chancellor spoke for twenty-two minutes and did not say my name once. I counted. He said “the sovereign” eleven times and “the minority” six times and “a young man who has given this House no instructions and asked it for nothing” once, near the end, and that was the only time the cameras looked at the gallery, where I was not. When they counted, the benches that put my coronation face on their posters stood up and applauded, and so did the Social Democrats, at the same moment, for opposite reasons, and they all heard each other doing it, and stopped at the same moment as well, as though somebody had dropped a tray. Jakub said it was the first time in the history of the Reichstag that both sides had been embarrassed by the same noise. I think he is right. I think it may be the only thing they will ever agree on.

Falk did not speak. It was not her House. She sent nothing to me afterwards, which is correct, and I am glad of it, and I have not seen her since December, when she told me she was not doing it for me. I believe her. I think it is the most useful thing anybody has said to me this year, after the drawers.

---

I opened the third drawer.

I did it on purpose, which is the first thing I have done with any of my Crowns on purpose since February, and I want to tell you, because you are the only person who will see why it matters, and because it is not about a vote, or not one that is mine.

Kamerun’s constitution says that whoever is German Emperor is Kaiser von Kamerun, and that the German regency law acts for the Kaiser von Kamerun as well, without any act of Kamerun’s own. So when Papa died a German law decided who exercised the powers of Kamerun’s head of state, and Jaunde was not asked, and their Landtag said so, in a debate I read in a folder marked for information only. And when this amendment passes, a German amendment will end my minority in Kamerun as well, and Jaunde will not have been asked again.

Your father told me to keep my capacities in three drawers and never open two at once. If the German drawer opens the Kamerun drawer by itself, that is exactly two at once, and I would not have done it, it would simply have happened, which is worse. So in February I asked Charlotte, as my Regent, to ask Jaunde. She asked me why. I told her. She looked at me for a long time, and then she did it. The Prime Minister in Jaunde has said her government will bring an act of Kamerun’s own. I do not know whether their Landtag will pass it. That is the point. It is theirs to pass.

It is the only thing I have done all year. I would like you to know about it. I do not want anybody else to.

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The observatory, Potsdam Saturday 10 March, after ten

Clear tonight, at last, the first clear Saturday since the beginning of February, and so I am finishing this in the dome, in pencil, with the stove going, and Lukas on the boards against the pier with his flask and his hat.

Lukas gave me a red torch for my birthday, so that my eyes stay dark when I write the log. I am writing this by it. It makes everything I write look as though it was written in a darkroom, which Lukas says is appropriate.

Andromeda is going down in the north-west by nine now, into the trees. In April it will be in the branches, and at Easter you will have to look for it under the line of the wood, very low, the wrong season for it. I am telling you now so that you are not disappointed. I am never disappointed by it. But you have only seen it once, at Solliden, overhead, the right way up, and you should know that it will not be like that here. It will still be there. It is always still there. It is only lower.

What is up instead is the winter going down in the west, Orion with his shoulder in the trees, and in the south-east Leo well up, which is the spring, and which Lukas says is the most boring constellation in the sky because it looks exactly like what it is called. I have told him that is the best thing a constellation can do. He says that is the most Hohenzollern thing I have ever said.

He has said his one thing for the evening, and it was not about the stars. Lukas has said out loud since January that he thinks I should take it, which you know, because I told you, and which the whole of Klasse 8 knows, because he told them. Tonight he did not say that. He said, from the floor, with his eyes shut: “Whatever you decide, I am still sitting here.” Then he said that it was a fact, and that facts don’t count, so he still had his one thing left, and he was saving it.

He has not used it. It is nearly eleven. I think he is going to keep it until Easter, out of spite.

---

Charlotte is twenty-four tomorrow.

I have made her a present, and I am going to take it to her flat for lunch, which I have never been inside, because she has always come to us. Lukas says the present is a present for me. I am not going to tell you what it is, because you will say the same thing, and then there will be two of you, and I will have to give it to her anyway.

She has her finals soon. She will be a doctor by the summer. If the amendment passes she will stop being my Regent, which she has never wanted, and I will have taken something from her or given her something back, and I cannot tell which, and she will not tell me, and I am not going to ask her.

I still have no because for you. I know you have noticed. You will have to wait.

---

Your father. You wrote that he said Königsberg, and that you worked out why, and that he said Good. I have thought about that more than I have thought about the Reichstag. He was thinking about my coronation. He has lost most of his words and he used one of the ones he has left on a city where I have not been crowned yet. I do not know what to do with that, except tell you that I have it, and that it is in my log, in pencil, under the red torch, between the seeing and the transparency, where nobody will ever look: 10 March. Onkel Ernst said Königsberg.

Tell him I know.

Tell Theo, because Lukas says it is too long for their one line a week, that Lukas says the old ladies turn round because they have been on buses for seventy years and know exactly what the back of their head looks like from every seat, and that he is not to try it on them again, out of respect.

The guard has passed the foot of the ladder. Herr Schade’s replacement is less patient than Herr Schade and passes it every quarter of an hour after eleven, like a clock that has been told to hurry.

I am going to close the dome. I have answered you. It took seven weeks. I am sorry it took seven weeks, and I am not sorry for what it says.

Yours, with every formality, and undecided, on purpose,

Alexander

P.S. You are right about the trains to Potsdam. It is showing off. I have never taken one. I am driven, with one car in front and one behind, and I have looked at the trains from the window of the middle car every Friday of my life without knowing until your letter that they were a thing a person could be proud of. I would like to take one, once. I shall put it in the log as an observation.