The Door

They walked east along the river for forty-one minutes, as Theo had said they would, and Theo timed it.

It was the coldest part of the night. The sky had cleared while they were in Clärchens, and the cloud that had held the orange of the city over them all evening had gone away to the south, and above the river there were stars, hard and small and a great many of them, which Alexander had not expected to see in Berlin and saw now, walking, with his head back, and named to himself as he walked, because he had been taught them at nine in the dome and had never forgotten one: Capella, very high; the Twins; Procyon; and low in the south-west over the roofs of the far bank, enormous and white, Sirius, which the old Prussian almanacs had called the Dog and which his father had called, for no reason he ever gave, the Hofmarschall.

The snow had stopped. It lay on everything, on the river walls and the iron railings and the bollards and the roofs of the barges tied up along the bank for the winter, and it squeaked under their feet, the way snow squeaks only when it is very cold, a dry small sound like something being wound. Their breath went up in five clouds. Jack had his hands in his armpits under the cape. Theo had his phone in his glove and was looking at it every two minutes, at the map and at the time, and saying the time aloud, quietly, as though he were reading the minutes at a meeting.

“Two thirty-one,” said Theo.

They passed under the railway at the Jannowitzbrücke, where the arches went over the river and over the road together and the sound of their footsteps came back to them off the brick. They passed the barges. They passed a man walking a dog in a coat, the dog in the coat, not the man, who looked at the five of them and at the King of Hanover in a green felt hat and did not say anything at all, because he was a Berliner and it was half past two in the morning and he had a dog to walk.

“Two forty,” said Theo.

Ahead of them, on the left, set back from the river behind a wide yard of snow, a great dark shed went up into the sky, long and arched and black against the stars, with a clock in its gable that said twenty to three and was right.

“The Schlesischer Bahnhof,” said Alexander. “The Silesian Station. The trains to Breslau go from it. An Emperor of my family opened its new hall in a January and caught cold, and was in bed for a fortnight, and wrote a memorandum from his bed that all future stations should be opened in the summer.” He walked on. “They have all been opened in the summer since.”

“Is everything in this city something your family did?” said Jack.

“No,” said Alexander. “Most of it is something my family was told about afterwards.”

---

At three minutes to three they turned away from the river.

The programme did not say where. The programme said 03.00. Berghain, and nothing else, because when he wrote it, in the dome, he had not needed to write anything else; he had looked at the map of the city on the wall of the dome, which was a map of 1910 with the railway lands coloured in grey, and found the place, and known the way to it, and known that he would know it. He knew it now. They went up a road away from the river, between the backs of the station’s goods yards and a long wall, under a single lamp, and the road went on into the railway land, which was wide and white and empty and full of the shapes of things the railway had left there and forgotten, old sheds and a signal box with no glass in its windows and a water tower with icicles on it like the teeth of a comb; and at the end of the road, by itself, in the middle of the white, there was a building.

It was very big and very plain. It was a block of grey concrete, five or six storeys high, with tall narrow windows that went up its front in rows, and a squarer part on one side that went higher, and nothing on it anywhere to say what it was. No sign. No name. There was a fence round it, and a gate in the fence, and beyond the gate a yard of gravel with the snow lying on it unmarked, and across the yard, in front of a door, a line of steel barriers set out in a long double row, the kind that are put out to keep a queue in order.

There was no light in any of the windows. There was no light over the door.

Alexander looked at his watch.

It was one minute past three.

“03.00,” he said. “One minute late.”

He took the programme out of his coat and unfolded it and held it up, in the light of the single lamp at the end of the road, and looked at the line. 03.00. Berghain. It was in the same square pencil as all the others. He had written it on the tenth of December at about a quarter past one in the morning, and he remembered writing it, because he had written it and then sat back from the desk and looked at it for some time, and thought that it was the most improbable line on the page, and that he wanted it more than any of the others except the last one.

He did not tick it. He would tick it when they were inside.

“Right,” he said, and folded the programme away, and went through the gate.

---

The five of them stood in the queue.

There was no queue. That was, Alexander would think afterwards, the first thing that ought to have told him, and he had noticed it, and he had explained it to himself, which was worse. He had expected a queue. He had never in his life arrived anywhere that did not have one, because wherever he arrived the queue had been there for hours, to see him, and he had allowed for it here as he would have allowed for it anywhere: he had allowed forty minutes, between 03.00 and the time he expected to reach the door, and had written nothing in the forty minutes because there was nothing to write in a queue but waiting. And so when he came through the gate at one minute past three and found the long double row of steel barriers in the gravel and nobody standing in them, he had thought, we are early, or the others are late, and he had gone and stood at the front of it.

Somebody had to be at the front of a queue. That was how a queue began.

The others stood behind him. His cousin first, in the black overcoat and the green felt hat, with his hands in his pockets. Then Theo. Then Jack, in the cape, stamping. Then Lukas, at the end, in the school scarf and the hat with the flaps, with his hands folded in front of him as though he were in church.

They stood between the steel barriers in a straight line in the snow, five young men at three in the morning in a yard of gravel in the railway land of Berlin, facing a door, and waited.

The door was a door. It was steel, painted grey, set in the concrete under a small flat porch, with a handle and no window, and it was shut. Alexander looked at it and thought that it was a good door, a serious door, and that a door like that would open when it opened and not before, and that he would know what to say when it did. He had prepared what to say. He had prepared it in German and in English, in two sentences each, and had said them over in the dome until they sounded like something a person might say rather than something an Emperor might, and he said them over again now, under his breath, in the snow, as he had once said over his sentences for the deputations.

“Three oh three,” said Theo, behind him.

“Thank you.”

The snow did not move. The lamp at the end of the road did not move. Somewhere a long way off, beyond the railway land, a single car went along a road and its sound came across the white and went away, and Alexander listened to it go and thought, without turning his head, grey, and facing the way out, and then thought that it did not matter, because they were in a queue, and even Kessler would not take an Emperor out of a queue.

“Do you think,” said Jack, from the middle of the line, “they have last orders? In there?”

“I do not know.”

“Because if anywhere in this city has a bell,” said Jack, “it’s going to be somewhere with a door like that.”

“Three oh five,” said Theo.

---

Alexander counted.

He counted because it was what he did with time that had nothing in it, and he had been doing it since he was small: at the guard, at the Te Deum, in the Marble Hall, on the dais, in the cars, in every minute of his life that the programme had allotted to standing still. He counted seconds against his pulse and minutes against the seconds, and he did it so exactly that he could tell the Hofmarschall, at the end of a reception, how long each guest had held his hand, and once had, to the Hofmarschall’s distress. He counted now, in the snow, at the front of a queue of five, with his eyes on the grey steel door and the two sentences ready in his mouth.

At four minutes his cousin shifted from one foot to the other behind him.

At five minutes his cousin said, very quietly, “Alex?”

“Yes.”

“Is it, um.” His cousin stopped. “Never mind.”

At six minutes Theo said, “Three oh seven,” and then said nothing for a while, and Alexander heard him do something with the phone, the small sound of a glove against glass, several times.

At seven minutes Jack said, “My feet have gone.”

At eight minutes the car went along the far road again, the other way, more slowly.

At nine minutes he began to feel, not as a thought but as a thing in the back of his neck, like the guns arriving twice in the glass of his bedroom window, the first cold edge of something; and he looked at the door, and the door was the door, grey and shut and serious, and he looked at the windows above it, which were tall and narrow and black, all of them, every one, and he looked at the gravel of the yard round the barriers, where the snow lay unmarked except for the line of their own footprints coming in from the gate.

Only theirs.

At ten minutes Theo drew a breath to say something, and then let it out again, and did not say it, and Alexander understood that Theo knew, and had known for some minutes, and was not going to be the one to say it, because Theo had been the friend of a King for five years and knew that some things had to be said by the right person or not at all.

At eleven minutes Lukas spoke.

He spoke from the end of the line, behind them all, quite quietly, in the voice in which he had told Alexander in December that he had put the sun in it, and he said it in German, to the back of Jack’s cape, as if stating a fact about a planet:

“Es steht niemand an der Tür.”

There is nobody at the door.

---

Nobody moved.

Alexander stood at the front of the queue and looked at the door, at which there was nobody, and at the porch over it, under which there was nobody, and at the steel barriers on either side of him running away across the gravel in their long double row, between which there was nobody but five young men, and at the black windows, and at the snow, which had been lying on the yard unmarked since it fell, because nobody had walked on it, because nobody had come.

He did not count it. It was the most important thing anybody had said all night, and it had been said by Lukas, and the score had been suspended by both parties on an iron bridge over the Spree, and he did not count it. But he heard it, in Lukas’s voice, in German, in the snow, and he knew that he would hear it for the rest of his life at every door he ever stood in front of, and that he would be grateful.

Behind him Theo let out the breath he had been holding for two minutes.

“It’s shut,” said Theo. “I looked. Three oh two. I’m sorry. I didn’t know how to.” He held up the phone, over Jack’s shoulder, over the King’s, so that Alexander could see it if he turned round, and Alexander did not turn round. “Not tonight. It’s a Tuesday.”

“It is a Wednesday,” said Alexander. “Since midnight.”

“It’s a Tuesday night,” said Theo, very gently. “That’s the one that counts.”

Alexander took out the programme.

He unfolded it in the snow, at the front of the queue, and held it up to the light of the lamp at the end of the road, which was a long way off and very faint, and found the line, 03.00. Berghain, in the same square pencil as all the others. And below it, a long way below it, with nothing whatever in between, because he had thought there would be nothing in between but the inside of a building, the next line:

07.00. Viktoriapark.

Four hours.

He had put four hours on the programme with nothing in them. He had sat in the dome at a quarter past one in the morning on the tenth of December and given four hours of the night to a place he had never seen, on the strength of a guidebook that he had sent Lukas to buy in a shop in Potsdam, so that it would not come into the house through the Household, and had not written down one word about what would happen in them, because he had not known, and had liked not knowing, and had thought that whatever happened inside would be the part of the night that was not his to arrange. And it was a Tuesday. He had looked up the sun to the minute. He had looked up the trains to the minute, and the tickets, and the band at the Hofbräu, and the hours of the Meierei. He had not looked up the day.

He looked at the line for a long time.

Then he took the pencil out of his pocket, and in the margin, beside 03.00. Berghain, very carefully, the same size as the ticks, he made a small cross.

It was the first one. He looked at it. It was a perfectly good cross, neat, the two strokes the same length, and it meant exactly what the crosses meant in the files of the Hofmarschall’s office, which was this did not happen, and beside it, where the time would have gone in brackets if the thing had happened at a different time, he wrote nothing, because it had not happened at any time at all.

---

“Alex,” said his cousin.

Alexander turned round.

His cousin was standing behind him in the queue, the second in a queue of five behind nobody, with his hands in the pockets of the black overcoat and the green felt hat on the back of his head and the shaving brush standing up behind his ear, and his face was doing something it did not often do, which was trying very hard not to do something; and behind him Theo was doing the same, and Jack had his hand over his mouth, and only Lukas, at the end, was perfectly still, with his hands folded, looking at Alexander with his grey steady eyes as though he had been waiting for ten years for exactly this.

“I’m so sorry,” said his cousin, and his voice went. “I’m so sorry. It’s just, you had sentences.”

“I had sentences,” said Alexander.

“In two languages.”

“In two languages.”

“For a door.”

“For a door,” said Alexander, and heard his own voice say it, flat and exact and perfectly serious, in a yard of unmarked snow at twelve minutes past three in the morning at the front of a queue for nothing, with a cross on his programme; and something happened in his chest that had happened once before tonight, under a stage in a beer hall, and that before that had not happened in four years and eleven months.

He laughed.

It was worse than the Hofbräu. At the Hofbräu there had been two hundred Bavarians shouting and nobody had heard him. Here there was nobody. There was the snow and the lamp and the black windows and the railway land and five young men, and the sound of the German Emperor laughing went out across the empty yard and came back off the concrete, and his cousin heard it and gave up completely and sat down on the gravel against a steel barrier with his hands over his face, and Theo bent over with his hands on his knees, and Jack leaned on the barrier and made a noise like a kettle, and Alexander stood at the front of the queue with the programme in one hand and the pencil in the other and laughed until he had to hold on to the barrier himself, and could not stop, and did not try to.

Lukas did not laugh. Lukas did not laugh at things. But he unfolded his hands, at the end of the line, and took off the hat with the flaps, and held it against his chest, and bowed to the grey steel door, gravely, from the waist, as one bows to a sovereign at the end of an audience; and then put the hat back on.

That set them off again.

---

At a quarter past three they stopped, mostly.

His cousin was still sitting on the gravel against the barrier, with his long legs out in front of him in the snow and his head back against the steel, looking up at the stars. Theo had sat down beside him. Jack was leaning on the barrier with his arms folded under the cape, breathing hard, wiping his eyes with the corner of it. Lukas had not moved from the end of the queue, because, Alexander supposed, nobody had told him the queue was over.

“So,” said his cousin, to the sky. “What’s next?”

Alexander looked at the programme.

07.00. Viktoriapark.

“Nothing,” he said. “For four hours.”

“Nothing?”

“Nothing is written.” He looked at the space on the page between the cross and the next line, which was a space of perhaps three inches of plain Neues Palais writing paper with nothing on it at all. “I gave it to the building.”

“And the building’s shut.”

“Yes.”

His cousin turned his head and looked at him from the gravel.

“Then what do we do?”

And Alexander stood in the yard in the snow, with the programme in his hand, and considered the question honestly, as he had been taught to consider every question, and found that for the first time in his life he did not have an answer to it, not in either language, not in two sentences or one, not on any page in any drawer in the Hofmarschall’s office; that the question of what the German Emperor would do between a quarter past three and seven o’clock on the morning of the nineteenth of January 2033 had no answer anywhere in the world, and was his.

“I do not know,” he said.

He heard himself say it. It sounded quite ordinary. It sounded like something a person says.

“I do not know,” he said again, to see if it sounded the same the second time, and it did, and he folded the programme in four, with the cross inside it, and put it away in the navy coat, and did not take it out again for a long time.

His cousin got up off the gravel. He held out a hand to Theo and pulled him up, and Theo held out a hand to Jack, who did not need it and took it anyway, and the four of them looked at Alexander.

“Then we walk,” said his cousin. “Toward the hill. And we stop wherever we stop.” He put the green felt hat straight. “That’s how Theo did it. In Phoenix. He didn’t have a programme. He had a bus.”

“I had a timetable,” said Theo.

“You had a bus and a timetable and no idea where we were going,” said his cousin. “It was the best night of my life.”

Alexander looked at him.

He had never told his cousin that it had been the best night of his own. He did not tell him now. But he thought that perhaps his cousin knew, and had always known, and had just told him, in the way that people who have been to the same place tell each other things, by saying it about themselves.

“The hill is that way,” he said, and pointed south, across the railway land, toward the river and the bridge with the two towers and the dark roofs of Kreuzberg beyond it. “Three miles. Perhaps four. There is no programme.”

“Good,” said his cousin.

They went out of the gate. Lukas came last, from the end of the queue, and as he passed the grey steel door he looked at it once, without expression, and Alexander saw him, and thought that the door had been the only thing all night that had not recognised anybody, and that it had not recognised them because there was nobody there to do it, and that this was, if he was honest, the most German thing that had happened to him all night.

Behind them, on the far road beyond the railway land, the car went along a third time, very slowly, with its lights off, and did not stop.