Eight in Potsdam

Jack came off the tram at twenty to eleven in a red sweatshirt with a rucksack and no coat.

He came across the road from the stop with his breath going up in front of him, and in under the arcade, where Frederick was waiting by the glass doors; and he put the rucksack down on the concrete and did it, the arm and the hand, quickly, with his palm flat in the middle of Frederick’s back, for exactly as long as two men hold on at an airport, although it was not an airport, and let go.

“Hanover.”

“Where’s your coat?”

“In Gloucestershire.” Jack looked round at the arcade, and the fins, and the four palo verdes black against the lamps of the car park. “It’s forty-four degrees, mate. That’s not cold. That’s April.” He picked up the rucksack. “Where is he?”

“Upstairs. He doesn’t know you’re here.”

“He knows,” said Jack. “He always knows. He just won’t say till it’s on a list.”

“You told me not to put you on the list.”

“I told you,” said Jack. “I didn’t tell him.”

---

Mr Luna looked at Jack over his glasses from the night desk, with the pen in his hand and 10 p.m. 64 on the clipboard.

“Son,” said Mr Luna.

“Mr Luna.”

“No coat, son.”

“It’s warm.”

Mr Luna looked at him for a long moment.

“It’s forty-four,” said Mr Luna. “Going to be thirty-nine by six. I write it down.”

“In England,” said Jack, “this is a heatwave,” and Mr Luna considered this, and pushed the jar of butterscotch an inch across the desk, and Jack took one.

---

At twenty to twelve they were all on the stairs.

Frederick had not arranged it. He had typed one line, and on Wednesday the line had gone round the floor, the way lines did, by Sam and by Lena and by nobody, and at twenty to twelve the doors of 314 and 316 and 308 opened, one after another, and people came out in coats.

Rhys and Sam, from 316. Felix and Lena, from 314 and 308, Lena in a long dark coat buttoned to the chin, and Felix with his telephone in his hand and a charger lead coming out of his pocket, as though he had not trusted the battery. Kessler last, from 314, in his dark coat, with his hands at his sides, not there.

And Alexander, from 312, with the two pages folded in half in the inside pocket of the linen jacket, and the pencil in his shirt pocket, buttoned, all of it, to the neck.

He stopped in the doorway of 312 and looked at Jack.

“Good evening, Jack.”

“Alex.”

“You are not on the programme.”

“I’m not on it,” said Jack. “I’m near it.”

Alexander considered this, in the doorway, with great seriousness.

“Yes,” he said. “That is a distinction.” And he came out, and shut the door behind him, and they went down the forty-five steps together, eight of them, in coats, at a quarter to twelve at night, past the landing where the thermometer said seventy-nine, and Frederick heard Alexander count them under his breath, all the way down, and arrive at forty-five, and not argue.

---

The steps of Palo Verde Hall were concrete, three of them, wide and shallow, going down from the glass doors under the arcade to the path, with the four palo verdes beyond in their squares of gravel and the car park beyond those, and the road, and the dentist’s, dark, with one window lit on the second floor behind a blind halfway down.

They stood on the steps in the cold.

Nobody had said where to stand. Alexander stood on the middle step, in the middle. Frederick stood on his left, a foot off, as he stood beside things. Jack on Frederick’s other side, in the red sweatshirt, with his hands in the front pocket of it. Rhys and Sam on the top step behind them, Sam with the notebook out. Lena on the bottom step, with her arms folded. Kessler at the end of the top step, by the pillar of the arcade, as he had stood at the end of the steps of the Neues Palais by the pillar on the eighteenth of January two years ago, with his face turned to the car park and his eyes on everything else.

Felix stood in front of Alexander, on the path, and held the telephone up.

He held it in both hands, at the height of Alexander’s face, turned so that Alexander could see it and the others could see it past his shoulder, quite still, the way an engineer holds a thing he has measured; and on the screen there was the morning.

It was grey. That was the first thing Frederick saw. It was eight o’clock in the morning at Potsdam, in January, ten minutes before the sun, and the light was the colour of a wet slate: a flat parade ground under a flat grey sky, with bare trees beyond it, black, in a long row, and beyond the trees, faintly, the shape of water, frozen, or nearly. And on the parade ground, in a line, small, a row of guns, with men beside them in greatcoats, standing.

There was a small sound coming out of the telephone. It was wind, in a microphone, far away.

Behind them, inside the glass doors, Mr Luna had come out from behind the night desk. Frederick did not turn round, but he saw him reflected in the glass of the door beside the pillar: a small man in a cardigan, standing just inside the doors, not coming out, with one hand flat on the inside of the glass.

“Eleven fifty-nine,” said Sam, very quietly.

Alexander did not move.

He stood on the middle step with his hands at his sides and his eyes on the telephone, on the grey parade ground five thousand miles away and eight hours ahead, where it was already his birthday and had been for eight hours, and where the guns were about to fire for him without him; and his face did nothing at all, nothing, the face of the end of a dais three paces from the wall, and Frederick, beside him, did not look at it, and looked at the telephone instead.

“Twelve,” said Sam.

---

The first gun fired.

It was a puff of white at the end of the line, sudden, and the gun jumped back on its wheels, and then, a second after, the sound came out of the telephone, small and flat and late, a thud, like a door shut in another house; and the white went up slowly into the grey and hung there over the parade ground and did not move.

Nobody on the steps said anything.

The second. The third.

Frederick heard Alexander breathe in, beside him, and out.

He did not look at him. He looked at the telephone in Felix’s hands, which did not shake, and at the white going up, and felt the cold come up through the concrete of the step into his shoes.

Behind him, very faintly, a pencil was going. Sam, in fives. Four strokes and a bar.

Beside him, quite as faintly, under his breath, so that only Frederick could hear it, Alexander was counting.

Sechs. Sieben.

The seventh. The eighth.

Neun.

The ninth gun fired, and the minute was over.

Nobody said anything.

Frederick had known they would not. He had typed one minute and he had known, typing it, that it was the wrong length, and Alexander had told him so on Tuesday night under the lamp, and he had left it, because a minute was the time he had been told, and the rest was not his to programme. And the minute ended at the ninth gun, by Sam’s watch, and nobody on the steps of Palo Verde Hall moved, or spoke, or looked at anybody else; and the guns went on firing at Potsdam, and the eight of them went on standing in the cold, in silence, for all of them.

Fünfzehn. Sechzehn.

Jack, on Frederick’s other side, had taken his hands out of the pocket of the sweatshirt and was holding them at his sides, quite still, the way a man stands at a war memorial in a village in Gloucestershire on a Sunday in November.

Einundzwanzig.

There was a pause on the parade ground. It was longer than the others. Frederick heard Alexander, beside him, not breathe.

“Prussia,” said Alexander, under his breath, in English.

Then the twenty-second.

Für das Reich, Frederick thought, and did not say it. The offices were distinct. The Constitution did not permit the Crown to be saluted at a discount.

The guns went on.

Lena, on the bottom step, had unfolded her arms. Rhys, behind, had put his hand on the pillar of the arcade, as though the step might go. On the screen the white smoke lay over the parade ground in a long low bank, and the light was getting up behind the trees very slowly, the way it gets up in the north in January, as though it were not sure it was wanted.

Vierzig.

Einundvierzig.

The last gun fired.

The sound came out of the telephone, late and small, and went away into the cold over the car park, and was gone; and on the screen the men in greatcoats stood by their guns in the smoke, and did not move, and the wind went on in the microphone.

Nobody said anything for a long time after that.

---

“Forty-one,” said Sam, at last, very quietly, from the top step.

“Forty-one,” said Alexander.

He took the two pages out of the inside pocket of the linen jacket, and unfolded them, and held them against his chest with his left hand, flat, the way a man holds a hymn book; and with his right he took the pencil out of his shirt pocket, and beside the first line, 00.00, small and exact, a short stroke down and a long one up, under the light from the arcade, he made a tick.

Then he folded the pages again and put them back, and the pencil, and buttoned the pocket.

Felix lowered the telephone.

“Thank you, Felix,” said Alexander.

“Majestät,” said Felix, very quietly, which Frederick had never heard him say, in the whole of the year, to anybody; and put the telephone in his pocket, with the lead, and stepped back onto the path beside Lena.

Jack turned round on the step.

He looked at Alexander for a moment, in the light from the arcade, with his hands at his sides and the colour coming up in his face from the neck, as it did; and then he did it, because Jack did not know how not to, the arm and the hand, with his palm flat on the middle of Alexander’s back, for exactly as long as two men hold on at an airport; and Alexander stood in it as a man stands for an anthem, quite still, with his hands at his sides.

“Happy birthday, Alex,” said Jack.

“Thank you, Jack.”

Jack let go, and stood back, and wiped his nose on the cuff of the sweatshirt, and said, “It’s the cold,” which nobody had asked.

---

They went in. Mr Luna had gone back behind the desk, and was sitting, with the pen, and the clipboard in front of him, and he looked up at them over his glasses as they came through the glass doors one after another out of the cold, and looked last at Alexander.

“Feliz cumpleaños, son.”

“Gracias, Mr Luna.”

Mr Luna looked at him for a long moment, and at his hands, which were at his sides, and at his face, which was doing nothing, carefully; and pushed the jar of butterscotch an inch across the desk.

Alexander took one. He did not put it in his pocket. He unwrapped it, there, at the desk, and put it in his mouth, and folded the paper in four, and put the paper in his pocket instead, and Mr Luna watched him do it, and nodded slowly, as at a thing that was correct, and wrote on the clipboard 12.10 a.m. 43, which the law did not require.

On the forty-five steps, going up, Alexander’s telephone went.

He stopped on the landing, by the thermometer, and looked at the screen, and answered it.

“Ja, Mama.”

Frederick went on up past him, with Jack, and did not listen, and heard anyway, because the stairwell carried.

“Ja. Ich habe sie gezählt.” A pause. “Einundvierzig. Ja.” A longer pause. “Nein. Auf den Stufen. Draussen. Mit allen.” And then, after a very long time, so quietly that the stairwell nearly did not carry it: “Danke, Mama.”

---

Jack talked until two.

He lay on the camp bed between the two beds, which sighed when he lay on it and went on sighing for some time, in the red sweatshirt, on London time, which was nine in the morning and broad day, wide awake, with his hands behind his head, and talked in the dark in the low voice for saying things along a bar: about the pub, and the man from Bibury, who had learned a fourth verse of a song that had three; and about Sue, who had asked whether there would be a cake, and been told there would, and said there always was, somebody always made one.

“How does she know?”

“She knows Lenas,” said Jack, with great certainty, and turned over on the camp bed, which went up at one end and down at the other.

At ten past two he stopped talking in the middle of a sentence about Gaz and the dartboard, and did not start again, and breathed all the way down.

On the bed by the door Alexander had been asleep since a quarter to one. Frederick had heard him go. He had lain on his back with his hands folded on the blanket, and then unfolded them, and put them at his sides, and gone, quite quickly, the way he had gone at New Year, and had not moved since.

Frederick lay on the bed by the window and looked at the inch of window at the edge of the blind, where the shoulder of the butte was black against the stars, and did not sleep for a while, and then did.

---

The alarm went at half past six, under his pillow, and said BUTTE.

Alexander was already up. He was standing at the desk by the door in the buttoned shirt and the jumper, dressed, with a glass of water in his hand, drinking it, all of it, standing, because it was the line at six thirty and it said Water, with a comma after it and Mr Luna’s rule in brackets. When he had finished he put the glass down on the desk, square to the edge, beside the two pages, which lay open there at the first page with one tick on it.

He did not pick them up.

“You’re not bringing it?” said Frederick.

“No.” Alexander looked at the programme. “It was told here. I will tick it here.”

On the camp bed Jack lay on his back with his arm over his face.

“Is it six?”

“It is six thirty-one.”

“What’s at six thirty-one?”

“You,” said Alexander, “are not on the programme.”

“Then I’ll come anyway,” said Jack, from under his arm, and got up, which took some time, and put his trainers on without undoing them, and stood in the middle of 312 in the red sweatshirt with his hair standing straight up at the back, and looked at the window, where it was entirely dark.

“It’s the middle of the night.”

“It is half past six,” said Alexander. “In London it is half past one in the afternoon. You have had your lunch.”

“I’ve had four hours,” said Jack.

---

The Avenue was dark and cold, thirty-nine degrees by the clipboard, and their breath went up under the street lamps, five of them: Frederick and Alexander in front, Jack behind with his hands in the sweatshirt, Rhys with the torches, and Sam with nothing, because there was nothing this morning to hold flat on his palm.

At the top of the Avenue there was the butte, and at the gate there was Kessler.

He was standing under the green board on its post, which said PATH OPEN and, under it, in white, SUNRISE 7.32; in his dark coat, with his hands at his sides, and at his feet, on the gravel, a tall steel thermos, standing up straight.

“Majestät.”

“Kessler.”

“I am at the bottom,” said Kessler. “As agreed.”

“As agreed,” said Alexander, and went through the gate.

---

They went up in the dark.

The torches made two small rooms of light, Rhys’s ahead and Sam’s behind, and the steps came up into them one at a time: the old ones first, cut in the rock and worn hollow in the middle like the steps of a church, and then the concrete and the maroon rail, zigzagging across the face. Alexander went up at exactly the pace of somebody who had read the time it took and intended to take it. Jack went up behind Frederick with his hands in his armpits, saying, at every turn of the path, very quietly, bloody hell.

At the second bend the path went past the grave.

It was a small square of rock with a low stone at the head of it, and on the stone, and round it, a great many pebbles, small and pale, laid on it one at a time by people going past for years. RUTH ABERNATHY, it said, and two dates. Rhys’s torch went over it and away.

Alexander stopped.

He bent down at the side of the path, and looked at the ground in the light of Sam’s torch behind him, and picked up a pebble, a small one, nearly white, and looked at it, and stepped across to the stone, and put it on the top, among the others, carefully, so that it sat flat and did not roll.

Then he stood back and looked at it for a moment.

“The heat dead,” he said.

“Yes.”

“She counted them. So that they would be counted.” He looked at the pebble. “It is the right thing to do on the way up.”

He went on. Frederick, behind him, did not say anything, and nor did Jack; and Frederick heard him stop, behind them, briefly, in the dark, and bend, and go on.

---

The top was small and cold and nearly dark. The old man’s stone on the east side had nobody on it.

Below them the Valley was still lit to the edge of the world in its long straight lines of orange lamps. To the east the sky over the mountains was grey, and then not grey: the pale clean yellow of the inside of a lemon, along the whole line of the ridge, which stood up black against it, ragged at the top like torn paper.

They stood by the old man’s stone, the five of them.

Jack had his hands in his armpits.

“It’s very nice,” said Jack.

Nobody said anything.

“It’s very nice,” said Jack again, as though it had not been heard the first time, and stood with his hands in his armpits and looked at it.

At seven thirty-two by Sam’s watch the tables said that the sun had risen over Tempe, and the edge of the ridge caught fire along the top, a thin line like the edge of a coal; and the sun did not come.

At seven thirty-three Sam said, quietly, “Seven thirty-three.”

Alexander’s hand went to his shirt pocket, where the pencil was, and stopped there, flat, on the outside of the pocket, and stayed.

He did not take the pencil out. He stood on the top of Hayden Butte with his hand on his pocket and his face to the mountains, and Frederick watched him not take it out, and knew where the programme was, open at the first page on a desk by a door a mile away, with a glass of water beside it, square to the edge, and one tick; and knew that at seven thirty-three, on the desk, without anybody there, it had become true.

At seven thirty-six the sun came.

It came where the line of fire was brightest along the ridge: first an edge, so bright at once that it was not a colour at all, and then the whole upper curve of it, clearing the Superstitions in a few seconds; and then the light came across the Valley towards them, over the grid of lamps, which went pale under it street by street, and the lake, which went from black to bronze in one long flash, and up the side of the butte, over the pebble on the stone at the second bend, and reached the top, and their faces.

It was not warm. It was thirty-nine degrees and the sun in January has no heat in it. Alexander stood in it anyway, with his hand on his pocket, quite still, twenty-one years old and seven hours and thirty-six minutes, on the top of a hill in Arizona with the light on his face, and did not tick anything.

Nobody said anything.

Then Alexander took his hand away from his pocket, and put both hands at his sides, and looked at the Valley for a long time in the sun.

“Good,” he said.

Frederick looked at him.

“It is what your father says,” said Alexander, to the sun. “I think it is the right word.”

---

They came down fast, because Jack was cold, and because it was on the programme that breakfast was at nine and Jack had been told he was not on the programme and intended to sleep until then on principle.

At the gate Kessler was standing exactly where he had been, under the green board, with the thermos. He looked at Alexander coming down the last of the steps in the morning light, with the dust of the path on his shoes, and his face did nothing at all, the face like the end of a wardrobe; and he unscrewed the top of the thermos, which was also a cup, and poured it full, and the steam came up gold in the low sun, and he held it out.

Alexander took it. It was coffee. It was very hot and very strong and had three sugars in it, which was how Kessler took it and not how Alexander did; and he drank it, all of it, standing at the gate, while Kessler watched him with no expression whatsoever.

“Happy birthday, Majestät,” said Kessler.

Frederick, a step behind on the path, waited for it. He had heard it once before, at the top of a hill in Berlin in fourteen degrees of frost, the morning after a birthday, and he knew the answer that had been given to it then, word for word: It is not my birthday. It ended at midnight.

Alexander gave the cup back.

“Yes,” he said. “It is.”