Göttingen

The syllabus had come on Boxing Day, at four in the afternoon, with an apology.

Dear Mr Hanover, Ashby had written, I’m so sorry to send this on the twenty-sixth, which I realise is a holiday in, um, most of your countries. It’s the reading for HST 110. You don’t have to read it before January. Nobody does. I just didn’t want you to think I hadn’t done it. N. Ashby.

Frederick had read the um several times. He had not known that a man could write one.

At seven in the morning he took the laptop down to the lounge, because the printer was in the lounge, on a table under the scorpion poster, and it was the only printer in Palo Verde Hall that worked during the break, and it worked the way the lift worked when it worked, which was slowly and with an air of personal sacrifice.

The printer took in the first sheet, thought about it, and gave it back.

---

Rhys was at the card table by the window, playing patience with Sam’s cards, in a fleece, because it was sixty-three in the lounge and he had grown up in Wilmington and regarded sixty-three as a betrayal. Sam was in the armchair with his notebook on his knee, watching the printer.

“That’s four minutes for two pages,” said Sam.

“It’s thinking.”

“It’s not thinking. It’s warming up. It’s been off since the fifteenth.” Sam wrote something down. “It’ll be faster after six.”

It was faster after six. The eleventh page came out at twenty past seven, warm, with nothing on it but the footer, HST 110 The Realm since 1865 (Ashby) Spring, and the page number, and Frederick stood at the table and squared the eleven of them against its edge and looked round the lounge.

“Has anybody got a stapler?”

“Sam,” said Rhys, without looking up from the cards.

Sam took a stapler out of his jacket. It was small and black and had a piece of tape round it with S. OYELARAN on the tape in capitals. He opened it, and looked inside it, and closed it, and put it back in his jacket.

“Empty,” said Sam.

“I had a thousand in August,” said Sam. “They went into things.”

Rhys moved a red seven onto a black eight.

“Ask the Emperor,” he said. “He’s got a stapler. He’s got everything. He’s got a spare pencil sharpener for the spare pencil sharpener.”

“Go on. He’s up. He’s been up since five. I heard him tick.”

“You can’t hear him tick.”

“I can hear him think about ticking,” said Rhys. “Through a wall.”

---

Alexander was at the desk by the door with the box open.

The pill box stood at the right-hand corner of the desk, in the place where it had stood since the thirteenth of November, with its seven small lids in a row and the labels on them in his square hand, MO DI MI DO FR SA SO, and the time under each in smaller figures; and under MO and DI there were ticks, and MI was shut, waiting for the evening. The programme for the day was on the left of the desk, short, in his own hand. The pencil lay beside it, parallel to the edge of the desk.

Frederick looked at it for a moment. He had been looking at it since Christmas.

“Good morning,” said Alexander.

“Morning.”

Alexander finished the paper he was reading, all the way to the end, including the small type at the bottom, and initialled it at the top, small, in pencil, and put it on the pile on the left, and put the pencil down parallel again.

“Ashby sent the syllabus,” said Frederick. “Eleven pages.”

“On Boxing Day.”

“How do you know?”

“You read it aloud yesterday at four. Twice. You did the um both times.” Alexander turned the next paper over. “It was a good um.”

“Can I borrow your stapler?”

“Yes.” Alexander did not look up. “I am going down to the laundry at ten past eleven. You may have it then. I am using it for the box.”

“You’re stapling the box?”

“I am stapling the minutes of the Bundesrat’s committee on railways to the Chancellor’s note about the minutes of the Bundesrat’s committee on railways,” said Alexander, “because the courier has separated them, and they should not be separated, and I am the only person in Arizona who minds.”

---

At ten past eleven exactly he stood up from the desk with the laundry basket.

He had learned the laundry in October, from the instructions on the lid, read three times, and now he did it every Wednesday at ten past eleven, and it took an hour and thirty-five minutes, which he had timed. The shirts in the basket were folded. Nobody needed to fold shirts before washing them. He folded them.

“The stapler is in the bottom drawer,” said Alexander, at the door, while Frederick was looking at the um in Ashby’s email again and not listening. “Put it back where it was.” He considered. “It jams. It is German. It takes German staples, and the stationer on the Avenue does not sell them, and I have counted what is left.”

“How many?”

“Two hundred and twelve,” said Alexander, and went out, and Frederick heard him on the stairs, going down, counting under his breath, forty-five, because it was always forty-five when he counted it.

---

He opened the top drawer, because the top drawer is where anybody keeps a stapler, and because he had not been listening.

It was the tidiest thing he had ever seen in his life, and he had grown up in a house where a man was employed to dust the clocks. There were four pencils in it, sharpened, parallel to the front of the drawer. There was a ruler, and a rubber still in its paper sleeve, and the spare pencil sharpener’s spare. And behind them, filling the back of the drawer from side to side, there was a folder of dark blue card with nothing written on it, its edges parallel to the edges of the drawer to the sixteenth of an inch. There was no stapler. He thought it might be behind the folder.

He took the folder out by its two edges, carefully, as you lift a tray.

It was heavier than a folder. Something stiff inside it slid as he lifted it clear, and the folder opened along its spine in his hands, as a book opens when you hold it wrong; and a large sheet of paper folded in four came out and fell on the carpet of no colour, and came unfolded on the way down, the way paper does that has been folded and unfolded many times along the same lines, and lay open on the floor.

He looked down at it.

---

It was a plan.

It was printed, in grey and black, on heavy paper, the kind of plan a university sends out to explain what it means by rooms. At the top there was a crest, a lion and a crown and a book, and under the crest, in a severe old typeface, the words Georg-August-Universität; and under that, smaller, Sternwarte, Erstes Obergeschoss. The observatory. First floor.

The rooms were drawn in thin lines. A long study across the front, Arbeitszimmer, with four windows. A staircase with an arrow, zur Kuppel, to the dome. And across the back, side by side, the same size, each with one window, two bedrooms: Schlafzimmer I and Schlafzimmer II.

Beside Schlafzimmer II, in pencil, small, there was a tick.

He knew the tick. He would have known it in a heap of a thousand ticks. It went down short and came up long, and the long stroke was quite straight, and it was the same size as every other tick he had seen at the edge of every programme on the desk by the door since August, and on the parapet of a hill in Berlin at ten past eight in the morning, in the snow.

Beside the tick, in the same pencil, smaller still, there was a date.

19.01.33.

He crouched down on the carpet.

In the margin, at the right, by the four windows of the study, there was one other thing written, in the same square pencil, a little faded, as though it had been written first and longest ago: Potsdam Hbf. 2 Std. 15.

Two hours and a quarter. On the fast train.

---

He did not touch it. He crouched on the carpet of 312 with the folder open in his hands and looked at it.

He remembered the letter. It had come in the autumn of 2032, in the months when everybody wrote: King’s, and Harvard, and Oxford in its hand that assumed the answer, and Uppsala in Swedish, for his mother’s sake. And Göttingen, which had offered him the rooms in the old observatory, offered once before to somebody in the family and refused. He had read it at the desk in the north wing and put it on the pile with the others.

He remembered a stair. The seventh step from the top, at Clärchens, at a quarter past two in the morning, with a band playing a waltz below them and a green felt hat on his knee, and himself saying Do you want to know which one I’m leaning toward?, and his cousin, beside him, not touching, saying No. Not yet. At sunrise.

He had known then that something had been offered. He had not known what.

He remembered a parapet. He remembered saying The University of the March to the sun, and Theo’s arm round his shoulders, and Jack saying Arizona like a disease, and Lukas with the cocoa; and his cousin, last, at the parapet, with his hands on the gold snow, saying Good. And then, when Frederick had asked if that was all: It is what your father said. I think it is the right word now. It covers both.

He had known then that there had been a stone. He had seen him carry it. He had not known what it was made of.

It was made of this. Two bedrooms, the same size, at the back of an old observatory in a small town of timbered houses in the Kingdom of Hanover, two hours and a quarter from Potsdam on the fast train; and the second one ticked in pencil, on the morning he had stood at a parapet and said Tempe.

A tick is for the time you were told, Alexander said, about every programme he had ever written. Not the time it happened.

He had been told on the nineteenth of January 2033, at ten past eight in the morning. And he had ticked it.

---

Under the plan, in the folder, there were two other things.

One was the prospectus, a thick book in a grey cover with the same crest, Georg-August-Universität Göttingen, and under the crest, 2033. It had been opened a great many times. Its spine had gone white in one place, the way a spine goes when a book is always opened at the same page.

The other was a single sheet, printed, which he could see only the top of, because it was underneath the prospectus. He did not need to see the rest. He knew the top of it. He had heard it read aloud in this room on the seventeenth of August at six in the evening, question by question, in the same voice as his own answers: Residence Life. Roommate Matching Questionnaire. University of the March.

He did not take it out.

He sat back on his heels on the carpet, and looked at the door, which was shut, and at the bed by the door, which was made, in hospital corners, and at the window, and out of it, at the butte, standing brown in the clean cold light of a December morning with the A on its flank, a mile off.

A hill. He had chosen a hill. And somebody had put a tick against a room in an observatory, and dated it, and folded it in four, and kept it; and then, a year and a half later, had filled in a questionnaire for the hill.

He did not say anything. There was nobody to say it to. He would not have said it if there had been.

---

He folded the plan along its own folds.

It went easily, the way a map goes back into its four for somebody who has carried it for years, and he put it in the folder on the prospectus, edges to the edges, and put the folder back in the drawer.

Then he took it out again, because it was not right, and put it back so that its front edge lay parallel to the front of the drawer and the pencils parallel to it, and moved it the width of a fingernail to the left, where it had been. There was nothing behind it. He shut the drawer.

He opened the bottom drawer. There was nothing in it at all but the stapler.

The stapler was heavy and grey and very old, and had a small brass plate on the top of it, worn smooth, on which he could just read Neues Palais.

He put Ashby’s syllabus in it, all eleven pages, squared, and pressed.

It jammed.

---

Alexander came back at a quarter to one.

He came in with the basket on his hip and the shirts in it, warm, folded, and stopped in the doorway, because Frederick was sitting on the bed by the window with the stapler upside down in his lap and a paper clip in one hand, prising at its jaw.

“It jammed,” said Frederick.

“Yes.”

“You said it jams.”

“I said it jams.” Alexander put the basket down on his own bed, squarely, in the middle. He looked at the desk, once, at the drawers, which were shut. He did not open it. Then he came across the room and held out his hand, and Frederick gave him the stapler, and the paper clip, and Alexander sat down on the end of the bed by the window, which he had never done, and turned the stapler over.

“You have to hold it at the back,” said Alexander.

“I was holding it at the back.”

“You were holding it in the middle. You were holding it as an English stapler wants holding.” He took out the bent staple with the paper clip in one movement, neatly, and dropped it into his palm. “This one is from Potsdam. It was my grandfather’s, and then it was on the desk in the dome, and Charlotte gave it to me when she left the dome, because she said it was the only thing in the dome I had not already taken.” He closed the jaw. “It wants holding at the back. Then it does what it is for.”

He took the syllabus off the blanket, and squared it on his knee against the edge of the stapler, and held it at the back, and pressed, once.

It went through all eleven pages like a door shutting.

“There,” said Alexander. He gave it back to him, stapled. “Two hundred and ten.”

“I’ve used one of your staples.”

“You have used two. One of them is in my hand.” He looked at the bent one. “It still counts. It did not do anything, but it is gone.”

---

Frederick looked at the syllabus. He did not read it. He looked at the staple in the corner, small and German and exactly square to the edge, and at his cousin’s hands, on his knees, with the bent staple in one palm.

“Did you find it?” said Alexander.

“In the bottom drawer.”

“Yes,” said Alexander. “The bottom drawer.”

There was a short silence in 312, of the kind there had not been since August. The chillers on the roof were off for the break. A tram went past on the road below, and the window answered it, faintly.

“Thank you,” said Frederick.

“For the stapler.”

“For the stapler,” said Frederick.

Alexander looked at him for a moment, on the end of the bed by the window, with the light from the window on the side of his face; and Frederick could not tell, then or afterwards, whether he knew. He thought he might. He thought that a person who could hear a pencil sharpener being borrowed through a wall could probably hear the wrong drawer being opened from the basement. But he did not know, and he was not going to ask, and Alexander was not going to say, and he saw, at once, that this was the point.

Alexander stood up.

“I will put the shirts away,” he said, “and then I will finish the railways.”

“Okay.”

“It does not count,” said Alexander, from the basket.

“What doesn’t?”

“Okay. Your mother’s rule.” He took the first shirt out and held it up and looked at it. “I am applying it in her absence.”

---

Rhys knocked at one, flat, with the side of his hand.

“Did you get a stapler?”

Frederick held up the syllabus.

Rhys looked at the staple in the corner with the face of a political scientist who has seen a great many instruments of government and recognises another.

“That’s not an American staple,” he said.

“It’s from Potsdam.”

“Of course it is.” Rhys leaned in the doorway and looked past him at the desk by the door. “Sam wants to know if you’re free at three. It’s three of us. Felix and Lena are in Germany. Sam says…”

“Yes,” said Alexander, from the desk, without looking up.

“I haven’t said what it is yet,” said Rhys.

“It is whist,” said Alexander. “At three. In the lounge. Sam will keep the score, and you will lose, because you play the cards you like instead of the cards you have, and I will win, unless I am partnered with you, in which case I will lose, and minute it.” He turned a page. “Yes.”

Rhys looked at Frederick.

“He’s back,” said Rhys, quietly, so that it would not carry, although it did.

“I know,” said Frederick.

---

At nine Alexander was at the desk by the door with Ashby’s syllabus.

He had asked for it, at eight, in exactly those words, May I read the syllabus?, as though it were a paper from a ministry that had come to him by mistake, and Frederick had given it to him and gone to the bed by the window with his telephone; and now Alexander was on the fourth page, reading the small type at the bottom, with the pencil in his hand and not using it, because it was not his to mark.

“Week Five,” said Alexander.

“What’s Week Five?”

“The Long Reign, from 1972.” Alexander did not look up. “It is three weeks long. It is the longest topic on the syllabus. It is longer than the war.”

“It was longer than the war.”

“Yes.” Alexander turned the page. “He has put your father’s whole reign under one title. He has called it long.” He considered it. “It is accurate. It is not very interesting. I think he will find, when he gets there, that you are in the room.”

“He knows I’m in the room.”

“He knows you are in the third row,” said Alexander. “That is not the same.”

Frederick sat on the end of the bed by the window with the telephone dark in his hand and looked at the back of his cousin’s head, and at the buttoned collar, and at the pencil, held, unused.

“Can I ask you something?” said Frederick.

“Yes.”

“You can say no.”

“I know.”

Frederick looked at the butte, which was black now in the window, against the orange of the town.

“Do you want to know which one I’m leaning toward?” said Frederick. “For May. For the form.”

Alexander’s hand stopped on the tenth page.

He did not turn round. He sat at the desk by the door with his back to the room, quite still, the way he sat still at the end of a dais three paces from the wall, and Frederick watched the back of his neck above the buttoned collar and waited; and it was a long time, long enough for a tram to go past on the road below and for the window to answer it.

“No,” said Alexander. “Not yet.”

“When?”

“In May,” said Alexander. “When it is in ink.”

He turned the tenth page over, and read the eleventh, which had nothing on it but the footer and the number, and read that too, all the way to the end; and then he squared the syllabus on the desk, and laid it to the right of the pill box, and put the pencil down beside it, parallel to the edge.

Frederick did not say anything. He sat where he was.

He had asked that once, on a stair, and been told at sunrise, and been let alone. He had not known then what it cost to let somebody alone. He knew now to the inch. It was a room at the back of an observatory, the same size as the room next to it, with a tick beside it in pencil.

---

Mr Luna came on at ten.

They heard him through the floor, because the hall was empty and the stairwell carried, the glass door at the bottom and the plastic chair going back and the radio coming on, low, and then nothing, which was the pen.

Alexander stood up at twenty-five past ten, and went down the corridor with his towel and his washbag, and came back at twenty-nine minutes past, and got into the bed by the door, and lay on his back, and took the book off the shelf above his pillow, and opened it, and read one page, and closed it, and put it back.

At half past ten exactly his lamp went off.

Frederick lay on the bed by the window with his own lamp on and Ashby’s syllabus on his chest, stapled in the corner with a German staple, and did not read it.

“Goodnight, Frederick,” said Alexander, in the dark by the door.

“Night.”

He lay and looked at the ceiling. The desk was a shape against the wall by the door, with the pill box on it, and the programme, and the pencil, which he could not see, and knew was there, and knew was parallel; and under them the top drawer, shut, and in the back of it, behind four pencils and a ruler and a rubber still in its sleeve, a blue folder, its edges to the edges, exactly where it had always been.

He did not say it. He was never going to say it. He reached up after a while and put out his own lamp, and lay in the dark of 312 with the butte in the window, and the A on it that he could not see, and his cousin breathing by the door, slow, all the way down, asleep, on the hill he had come to.