What Comes Next

They sat on the same step, because the stair was wide enough for two and not for two and a space between them, and Alexander, who had sat beside his cousin on a great many staircases in his life, at Herrenhausen and at Coln and on the back stairs of the Neues Palais at Christmas when they were small and had been sent to bed and had not gone, found that he still knew exactly where to put his elbows so that they did not touch.

It was the seventh step from the top. He had counted on the way down.

Below them the stair went on down to the side of the ballroom, and the music came up it, the band of four playing a slow foxtrot now, the clarinet very soft, and with the music came the light, the silver light off the tinsel curtain, so that every few seconds, when a door opened somewhere below, the wall of the staircase opposite them filled for a moment with small trembling pieces of it and then emptied. Above them, behind the doors at the top, the mirror hall was empty and dim and full of nobody. Theo and Jack and Lukas were in it. He could hear Jack’s voice through the doors, saying something about the chandelier. He could not hear what.

His cousin had the green felt hat on his knee and was turning it round, slowly, by the brim, so that the shaving brush went round with it, like the hand of a clock.

“Sorry,” said his cousin. “For dragging you out.”

“You did not drag me. I came.”

“You’d got nothing on the programme for it. I saw you look.”

“No,” said Alexander. “I did not know there would be stairs.”

His cousin laughed, a little, through his nose, and turned the hat round once more and stopped it with the shaving brush pointing at the wall.

“Five months,” he said.

---

Alexander knew what he meant. He had known since the mirror hall; he had known, in a way he could not have written down, since the green felt hat came down off the stage at the Hofbräu and his cousin put his face in his hands and asked why it kept happening.

On the night of Garfield Street, in the small hours of the twentieth of August, behind the bar of Eight Bars in New Westminster, with the street empty and his white tie undone and his apron still on, his cousin had been asked by his father, in the short sentences that had come back to him in the four years since Kittyhawk, what now, for you? And his cousin had thought about it, about the whole of the year, and had said not decided, and his father had said good.

Alexander had not been there. He had left at half past eleven, and by the time the bell was rung he was in the air. But Theo had written to him that night, as Theo wrote to him after everything that mattered, because Theo had decided at fifteen that the German Emperor was a person to whom things ought to be explained; and he had read the letter somewhere over the Atlantic with the blind down, and read it again, and had known, reading it, that not decided was the truest thing his cousin had ever said and that it could not last.

It had lasted five months. The old colleges had written. Theo had told him that too. King’s, in New York, which had a royal charter and nothing else and said so in its first paragraph. Harvard. Oxford, which wrote in a hand that assumed the answer. Uppsala, for his mother’s sake, in Swedish. The Navy had not written, because the Navy did not write, but an admiral had been seated next to him at dinner in October and had talked for two hours about ships. And Göttingen had written.

Göttingen was the university of the Kingdom of Hanover. It had been founded in 1734 by a King of Great Britain who was also Elector of Hanover and who was his cousin’s ancestor, and Alexander’s, and it stood in the south of the kingdom in a small town of old timbered houses, three hours from Potsdam by the ordinary train, two and a quarter by the fast one. The letter had offered him the rooms in the old observatory that his great-great-great-grandfather had been offered and had refused.

Alexander had not mentioned Göttingen. Not once, in five months, in any letter, on any telephone, at the Neues Palais last night or at the dinner tonight or at any point in the whole of the programme so far. He had decided in the dome on the tenth of December, when he wrote Zeigen, was er ist on a line by itself and nearly rubbed it out three times, that he would not mention it at all, ever, whatever his cousin said, because the whole purpose of the night was that his cousin should see what he was and decide knowing it; and a cousin who said Göttingen in the middle of the night would be putting his thumb on the scale, and Alexander had sat on the Council at fourteen and watched nine grown men and women put their thumbs on the scale in his name, and had minuted his opposition, and did not do it to other people.

He did not mention it now. He sat on the seventh step with his elbows where they would not touch and waited.

“Everybody keeps asking,” said his cousin. “That’s the thing. Five months of everybody asking. The Prime Minister asks. My mother asks, except she doesn’t, she just looks at me across the table at breakfast in a way that’s asking. Dad doesn’t ask. Dad said good.” He turned the hat a quarter of a turn. “Kimura doesn’t ask. Kimura’s planning a detail for nine different places and hasn’t said so.”

“Nine?”

“I counted the folders on her desk. She left the door open. I think she meant to.” His cousin looked down the stair at the silver light. “And I keep saying the same thing to all of them. You know what I keep saying?”

“No.”

“He has not decided anything. He wants to know before he decides.”

Alexander was quiet.

He knew the words. Everybody in fourteen countries knew the words. They had been read aloud by a boy of fifteen, standing beside a table with nothing on it, in a room at Columbia Palace at two o’clock in the afternoon of the twenty-fifth of October 2028, in a voice that did not shake until the last part, about his father, who had asked what it would require for him to give up the Crown and had not decided, and who could not say so himself any more because the words would not come. Alexander had watched it in the house by the Heiliger See, on the television in the library, at eight in the evening, with Charlotte beside him on the sofa and their mother in the doorway, eight months after his own father’s funeral, and he had watched his cousin read it, and look up for the last part, and take no questions, and walk out; and at the end Charlotte had said, very quietly, he’s doing it the way you did, and he had not known what she meant, and had gone upstairs, and had known.

“I read it out about Dad,” said his cousin. “When I was fifteen. And now I say it about me. Every time somebody asks. Not decided. Wants to know first. I’ve been saying Dad’s sentence for five months like it’s mine.” He stopped the hat. “It isn’t mine. Dad did decide. Five days later. He decided the biggest thing anybody in our family’s decided in two hundred years, and he couldn’t even say it out loud. And I can’t decide where to go to college.”

---

The band below them finished the foxtrot and began a waltz, and the silver light came up the stair and went down again.

“I’ll know by sunrise,” said his cousin.

Alexander looked at him.

“Why sunrise?”

“Because the last time I watched the sun come up, I knew something.” His cousin turned his head and looked at him, under the dim lamp on the landing, a tall fair young man of nineteen with a patted cheek and a bandleader’s hat on his knee, who had been a King since a Tuesday in a geometry class. “On the mountain. In Phoenix. I didn’t know I was going to know it until it came up, and then it came up, and I did. I didn’t tell anybody. I’m not sure I could have said what it was. But I knew.” He looked back down the stair. “I want to see if it works twice.”

“It is on the programme,” said Alexander. “08.10. Sonnenaufgang.”

“I know. I saw it. At dinner. That’s why I said yes.” His cousin was quiet for a moment. “You put the sun in it.”

“Lukas said that,” said Alexander. “In December. Those words.”

“I know. He told me. On the platform at Potsdam.” His cousin almost smiled. “That was one of his.”

Alexander had not known that. He did not know, now, how many Lukas had used on the platform at Potsdam that he had not heard. He found that he did not want to know, and that he would not count them.

---

“Can I ask you something?” said his cousin.

“Yes.”

“You can say no.”

“I know.”

His cousin put the hat down on the step beside him, carefully, on the far side, the shaving brush up, and put his elbows on his knees, and looked at his hands.

“What’s it like,” he said, “to have had no choice? At all. Ever. About anything.” He did not look up. “I don’t mean the crown. I didn’t have a choice about the crown either. Neither of us did. I mean after. I mean the rest. I’ve had five months to choose where I go and what I do and who I’m with for the next four years, and everybody’s asking, and it’s horrible, and I’ve never once, in five months, thought about the fact that you never got asked. Not once. Nobody wrote to you. Nobody sat an admiral next to you at dinner. You were fourteen and then you were Emperor and then you were reading papers.” He turned his hands over and looked at the palms. “So I’m asking. Now. Sorry it took five months. What’s it like?”

Alexander did not answer at once.

He had been asked a great many questions in his life by a great many people, and he had answered all of them, honestly, because he had been taught at six that an Emperor who lies even once will spend the rest of his reign remembering which lie he told to whom, and that the work of remembering is more than the work of the truth. But nearly all of them had been questions about the Empire. Nobody had asked him a question about Alexander since his father died. Charlotte did not need to ask. His mother could not. Lukas never would. Kessler had once, in the car, in the spring of 2028, asked him whether he was sleeping, and he had said no, and Kessler had said thank you, and driven on, and the next week a doctor had come.

He sat on the seventh step and thought about it properly.

“It is restful,” he said.

His cousin looked up.

“That is the first thing, and it is true, and I am ashamed of it, and it is still true.” Alexander looked at the opposite wall, where the silver light came and went. “When I danced with Renate, she said that I danced like a timetable, and that it was very restful, because one always knew where one would be. That is what it is like. I have always known where I would be. At nine I would be on the steps for the guard. At half past ten I would be in the Nikolaikirche. At twelve, the deputations. On my sixteenth birthday the Regency would end. On my eighteenth my sister would stop advising me. On the day I die there will be a programme, and it is already written, in a drawer in the Hofmarschall’s office, and I have read it, and there is one error in it, on the fourth page, and I have not told them.” He paused. “It is very restful to know where one will be. You never have to wonder whether you chose wrong. You did not choose.”

“That doesn’t sound restful,” said his cousin. “That sounds like being a parcel.”

Alexander turned his head and looked at him.

“Yes,” he said. “That is the second thing.”

---

The waltz below them came to its end, and there was applause, and somebody laughed, and the band began something faster.

“After Papa died,” said Alexander, “I was not well.”

He had said it in public. He had said it in a statement at fourteen, in the autumn of the year his father died, in four sentences, which had been drafted by him and corrected by nobody, because he had wanted it said in his own words or not at all. The newspapers had printed the four sentences and then written a great many more of their own about them, and he had read those too, all of them, twice. He had never said it to his cousin. He had never needed to. His cousin had been at the funeral, at fourteen, in a black coat too big for him, three rows behind, and had written to him every week afterwards for a year, about nothing, about football and Theo’s mother’s cooking and a dog in New Westminster that stole shoes, and had never once asked how he was, which was the reason the letters had helped.

“I was not well for a long time. Two years, the doctors say. I think it was longer, and that some of it is not finished.” He said it as he would have said it in a statement: plainly, in order. “And the thing I remember most about it is not that I was unhappy. It is that I was not permitted to be unhappy anywhere. There was nowhere it was not on a programme. I was unhappy at the guard, at nine. I was unhappy in the Marble Hall, at twelve. I was unhappy at the regimental reception, at four, in the uniform of the regiment, while a colonel told me about the regiment, and I said the sentences, and he went away and told his wife that the young Emperor was very composed.” He looked at his hands, which were folded in his lap, as they were always folded. “I was very composed. I was composed for two years. It was the only thing I was permitted to choose, how composed I was, and so I chose it as hard as I could, and I was very good at it, and it nearly killed me.”

His cousin did not say anything. He did not move. He sat on the seventh step with his elbows on his knees, quite still, and listened, as Theo listened, and as his cousin had learned to listen from Theo; and Alexander understood that this was the first time anybody had ever let him say it all the way to the end without telling him that it was better now.

“It is better now,” Alexander said himself. “Mostly. I am telling you so that you know what having no choice is like. You asked.” He paused. “It is like a waltz with a very good dancing master. Every step is correct. You are never lost. And you count, the whole way round, under your breath, so that you will not have to notice that you are not the one dancing.”

---

The faster music below them stopped, and started again, and somebody on the floor whooped.

“I’m sorry,” said his cousin.

“There is nothing to be sorry for. You did not do it.”

“I’m sorry I never asked.”

“You wrote about the dog,” said Alexander. “Every week. For a year. The dog that stole shoes.” He looked at his cousin. “I knew what that was. I have always known what that was. Nobody else wrote about a dog.”

His cousin looked down at the step between his feet. His ears had gone red, from the top, the way Theo’s did, which Alexander had never seen them do before and supposed his cousin had caught from Theo, as one catches an accent.

“And the third thing,” said Alexander.

“There’s a third thing?”

“There is always a third thing. I was taught to divide answers into three.” He unfolded his hands, and put them on his knees, and looked down the stair at the silver light. “The third thing is tonight.”

His cousin waited.

“Tonight is the first thing I have ever chosen,” said Alexander. “All of it. The tunnel and the train and the tickets and the Last Instance and the Bavarians and the stairs I did not know about. I chose it, in the dome, at half past one in the morning, on the tenth of December, and wrote it down, and it is the most frightening thing I have ever done, and I include the coronation.” He paused. “At the coronation I knew where I would be. Tonight I keep finding that I do not. The Meierei knew you. The train knew you. The judge did not know me, and talked to me for half an hour about my own minute. The Bavarians stood on their benches. A woman from Hanover asked me to pass it on. I have been nine minutes early. I am going to be wrong about something before the sun comes up, I think, quite badly wrong, and I have no one to blame for it but myself.” He looked at his cousin. “That is what choosing is like. I have found out. It is horrible. You were right.”

“And?”

“And I would not give back one minute of it,” said Alexander, “for every programme in the drawer.”

---

They sat for a while on the seventh step, not touching, while the band played below them.

Alexander did not say Göttingen. It was there, in his mouth, the whole time, two and a quarter hours from Potsdam on the fast train, the rooms in the old observatory, the timbered houses, a kingdom of the Empire where his cousin was already King and already loved, where Alexander could have come on a Friday evening without a programme and sat in a bar by the river and not been recognised; and he held it in his mouth like a stone and did not say it, because his cousin had just asked him what it was like to have no choice, and the least a person could do, having answered, was to leave the other person his.

“Can I tell you something?” said his cousin.

“Yes.”

“I’m scared I’ll pick the one that’s furthest from everybody. Just to see if I can.” His cousin picked up the green felt hat from the step and looked at the shaving brush. “And I’m scared I’ll pick the one that’s nearest. Because it’s easy. And I’m scared I’ll pick the one Dad would’ve picked, or the one Mum would, or the one the papers think. And I’m scared I won’t pick at all and it’ll be August again and I’ll be standing behind a bar saying not decided to a man in a white tie.” He put the hat on his head, slowly, at a slight angle, so that the shaving brush stood up behind his ear. “That’s a lot of scared for one college.”

“It is the right amount,” said Alexander. “For one life.”

His cousin looked at him under the brim.

“Do you want to know which one I’m leaning toward?”

Alexander thought about Göttingen, three hours by the ordinary train.

“No,” he said. “Not yet. At sunrise.”

His cousin looked at him a moment longer, and Alexander saw him understand, in the way that he understood things, slowly and then all at once, that he had been offered something and that it had cost something to offer; and his cousin did not say so, because he had learned that from Theo too.

“At sunrise,” his cousin said.

---

The doors at the top of the stair opened at nineteen minutes past two, and Theo came out, with his phone in his hand, and looked down at the two of them on the seventh step with an expression that said he had been standing behind the doors for some time deciding when it would be all right to open them, and had decided now because he had no choice.

“Sorry,” said Theo. “Sorry. It’s twenty past.”

“Yes,” said Alexander.

“You said Berghain was three. On the programme. And I looked it up, and it’s forty-one minutes on foot from here, along the river, if we walk at the pace.” Theo held up the phone. “Forty-one. So we’re four minutes behind already. I didn’t want to come out. But you’d want to know.”

Alexander stood up. He took out the programme and unfolded it and looked at it under the lamp on the landing. 02.15. Zu Fuss. 03.00. Berghain. He took the pencil and made a small arrow beside 02.15, and beside the arrow wrote 02.20, in brackets, the same size as the others, and found that his hand was perfectly steady, and that he did not mind at all.

“Thank you, Theo,” he said. “I did want to know.”

They collected Jack and Lukas from the mirror hall, where Jack had found out from somebody what it cost to keep the chandelier lit and had been silenced by it, and went down the stair, past the seventh step, and through the edge of the ballroom, where Renate and her three friends waved at them from the table with the cake with both hands, and to the hatch in the wall, where the woman took five brass tokens without looking up and gave them back four overcoats and a cape, and out through the front garden, under the bare unlit bulbs swinging in the black trees, into the Auguststrasse.

Theo stopped on the pavement.

At the far end of the street, by the dark church, a car had just turned in. It was coming very slowly along the Auguststrasse toward them, between the parked cars, with its lights off, a long dark grey saloon; and as they watched it pulled in to the kerb, a hundred yards away, under a lamp, and stopped, and did not turn off its engine, and they saw it do the thing that Alexander had been taught to look for in a yard with a piece of chalk at fourteen. It did not stop facing them. It reversed, neatly, in one movement, into a gap between two parked cars, so that when it came to rest its nose pointed back the way it had come.

The way out.

“She was right,” said Theo, in a whisper. “Second-nearest place.”

“Yes,” said Alexander. “Eight minutes late.” He put the programme away and buttoned the navy coat to the neck. “We will go the other way. Do not run.”

They went the other way, at the pace of five young men going home after a holiday, toward the river, with the dark grey car behind them under its lamp with its nose pointing at the way out, not following. Alexander did not look back. He knew that Kessler was sitting with his hands at ten and two, and that Kimura was watching them go, and that neither of them would move until the five of them had turned the corner; and he thought, walking, that the hunt had been one street behind them all night, and that it was one street behind them now, and that he was beginning to understand that it was going to stay exactly there, one street behind, until the sun came up, because that was where two old allies had decided it should be.