The Kreuzberg

They went into the bakery because Jack said that if they did not he would die, and meant it, and because the smell was coming out of the vent over the door into the street like a hand beckoning.

It was half past five. The bakery was small and bright and very warm, with a glass counter full of bread and a woman behind it in a white apron and a white cap, and three tables by the window with chairs that did not match, and a radio on a shelf playing a song from before any of them were born, softly, and the windows were running with steam on the inside so that the street outside was a grey blur with lamps in it. There were people already. A tram driver in his blue jacket, at the counter, with a coffee and a newspaper, on his way to the depot. Two women in long coats with the hems of green trousers showing under them, sitting at the middle table with their hands round their cups, not talking, with the faces of people who are about to begin a twelve-hour shift at a hospital and have not yet decided to. An old man in the corner with a dog under his chair and a crossword.

Nobody looked up.

That was what he would remember about the bakery. Five young men came in out of the snow at half past five in the morning in four overcoats and a cape, one of them in a green felt hat with a shaving brush in it who had been on the television in Germany more often in the past eighteen months than the Chancellor, and one of them carrying a cactus, and the bakery looked at them for exactly as long as it took to see that they were letting the cold in, and looked away. The tram driver turned a page. The nurses did not move. The old man in the corner wrote in a word.

The woman behind the counter looked at them.

She looked at all five, one after another, from the left, the way Kimura had looked at the windows of the beer hall, and her eyes stopped on Alexander’s feet, at the hem of the navy overcoat, where the boots of the First Foot Guards showed, black, wet now with the snow, and stayed there for a moment; and then she looked up at his face, and something in her own changed, very slightly, the way a person’s face changes when a thing they have been told about turns out to be true.

“Fünf Kaffee,” she said. “Fünf Brötchen. Already paid.”

There was a pause.

“By whom?” said Alexander.

“The lady.” She held up her hand, flat, at about the height of her own shoulder. “Small. Black hair. Twenty minutes ago. With a big man with a thermos.” She took five cups down from the shelf behind her and began to fill them from the machine, one after another, with the ease of a woman who has filled ten thousand cups before six in the morning. “She paid for five coffees and five rolls and she said, five young men will come in, one of them in boots, give it to them.” She put the first cup on the counter. “And she said, he’ll count the rolls.”

Alexander looked at the five rolls, which she was putting on a plate, one by one, with a pair of tongs.

He counted them. There were five.

“Danke,” he said.

“Not me,” said the woman behind the counter, and pushed the plate across. “Her.”

---

They sat at the table in the window with the coffee and the rolls and steamed.

He had never been so warm. He had been in heated rooms all his life, in palaces, in the dome with the stove going, in cars with Kessler’s thermos on the dashboard, but he had never in his life come in from fourteen degrees of frost after seven hours in the open and sat down in a small hot room full of bread with his hands round a cup of coffee he had not paid for, and he understood, sitting there, for the first time, why the people of Berlin had invented bakeries that opened at five. It was not for the bread. It was for this.

The coffee was black and very strong and tasted burnt and he drank all of it. The roll was hot and the crust broke when he bit it and the inside was soft and white and steamed in the cold air from the door when somebody opened it, and he ate it in nine bites, and counted them, and did not mind that he was counting.

His cousin sat opposite him, with the green felt hat on the table beside his cup, and his hair standing up where the hat had been, and his hands round the coffee, and his eyes half closed, and looked, Alexander thought, like a boy at the end of a long journey in a picture book. He had not said much since the carriage entrance. He had not said much since the late shop. Alexander had watched him at the counter of the late shop, shaking the hand of the man in the cardigan, and on the towpath looking at the swan, and in the carriage entrance in the dark among the bicycles with his back to the wall, and had seen in his face each time the same thing, the thing he had seen in it on the seventh step at Clärchens, a kind of listening, as though his cousin were waiting for something to come up, the way the sun comes up, over an edge.

He did not ask what it was. At sunrise.

At the middle table, one of the two nurses had looked up from her cup. She was looking at the King of Hanover with his hair standing up, and then she looked at the other nurse, and the other nurse looked at the King of Hanover too, and the two of them looked at each other, and said nothing, with the perfect discretion of two women who have seen everything at six in the morning and are about to see a great deal more; and then the first one got up, and put on her coat, and as she went past the table in the window on her way to the door, she put her hand, very lightly, for a moment, on the King’s shoulder, as one puts a hand on the shoulder of a patient who has been sitting in a corridor a long time.

“Gute Nacht, Majestät,” she said. Good night.

And went out into the snow, to her shift.

His cousin looked after her for a long time.

“She said good night,” he said. “Not good morning.”

“Yes,” said Alexander. “For her it is the end of the night. For you also. She has decided.”

His cousin looked at him across the table, over the cup, with his hair standing up, and Alexander saw something go across his face, quickly, and then away.

“Yeah,” said his cousin. “Yeah. I think she has.”

---

Lukas had his flask out.

Alexander saw it at a quarter to six, on the table, beside Lukas’s cup: the steel flask with the dent in it that had come up through the trapdoor into the dome at twenty past five the evening before, a lifetime ago, with cocoa in it. Lukas had unscrewed it and was holding it out, across the counter, to the woman in the white apron, and saying something quietly in German, and the woman was looking at it and at him, and then she took it, and went to the machine, and Alexander heard the sound of milk being steamed.

She gave it back to him full. Lukas put a coin on the counter. She pushed it back. He pushed it back again. She looked at him, a pale nineteen-year-old with grey eyes in a school scarf and a hat with flaps, and at the flask with the dent in it, and put the coin in the tin by the till that was for something, Alexander could not see what, and said für den Berg, for the hill, and Lukas inclined his head to her exactly as he inclined it to the Hofmarschall.

He screwed the top back on the flask and put it inside his coat, and sat down again, and did not say anything.

“Cocoa,” said Alexander.

Lukas nodded.

“For the top.”

Lukas nodded again.

“You have been carrying it all night,” said Alexander. “Empty.”

Lukas looked at him, and the corner of his mouth went, very slightly, as it had gone at Clärchens, and he did not nod this time, or speak, because he did not need to, and Alexander understood that Lukas had been carrying an empty flask through Potsdam and Berlin since twenty to ten the night before for exactly this, for a bakery at a quarter to six and a hill, because he had known, since the tenth of December, since a boy on the boards of the dome had heard a programme read aloud and said you have put the sun in it, that somebody would have to bring something warm to the top.

---

They left the bakery at twenty past six, because the woman behind the counter had begun, with great politeness, to sweep round their feet.

The park was three streets away. Theo took them there by the map, saying straight and then left, with the phone held out in his glove, and at the gate of the park, a pair of tall iron gates standing open between stone piers with snow on top of them like hats, the phone gave a small sad sound and went dark in his hand.

He looked at it.

“Dead,” he said.

“What does that mean?” said Jack.

“It means I don’t know the time,” said Theo. He looked at the dark phone for a long moment, in the glove, as though it had personally let him down, which Alexander supposed it had. “I’ve known the time all night. I’ve known the time for five years. I know what time it is in New Westminster and in Coln and in Phoenix and here, all the time, without looking, because he might need to be somewhere.” He put the phone in his pocket. “And now I don’t.”

“It is twenty-four minutes past six,” said Alexander.

They all looked at him.

He had not looked at his watch. He had not looked at it since the steel door. He had not known he knew until he said it, and then he looked, to see, and it was twenty-four minutes past six, and he looked at the watch for a moment on his wrist in the light of the lamp at the gate, the watch his father had given him at seven with the instruction about the room, and thought that perhaps a person who had counted all his life did not stop because he stopped looking, and that this was not, after all, the worst thing to be.

“Thank you,” said Theo, and meant it, and they went in.

---

The Kreuzberg was not a mountain.

That had to be said, and Jack said it, at the bottom, looking up. It was a hill, the only hill in that part of the city, which was otherwise as flat as Kimura had said, a long wooded slope going up out of the streets on the south side of the district to a height that Alexander knew to be sixty-six metres above the sea and about thirty above the street, which was nothing, which was a hill a child could run up in five minutes in summer, on the grass, without stopping. But it was January, and dark, and the paths were under snow, and the five of them had been walking for nine hours, and in the dark under the trees it went up like a mountain.

The paths wound up through the trees in loops. There were lamps along them, old iron lamps with glass heads, a long way apart, so that they went from light to dark to light again, and between the lamps the snow was blue and the trees were black and the city below them went away and came back through the branches as they climbed. Down the middle of the hill, from the top to the bottom, there ran a waterfall, which in summer, Alexander knew, came down the slope over rocks in a long white staircase, and pools, and more rocks, to a basin at the foot by the street. In winter it was turned off. Its bed was a staircase of bare grey rocks with ice in all the crevices, and the ice had caught the lamplight and held it, so that the whole hill had down its middle a long glittering ladder of frozen light, going up into the dark, as though it had been put there to show them the way.

They climbed beside it.

His cousin went first. He went up the path a little ahead of them, with his hands in the pockets of the black overcoat and the green felt hat back on his head, not fast, but steadily, the way he had gone up the trail on Camelback in the dark a year and five months ago, a little way ahead of everybody, not looking back. Theo went after him, out of habit, keeping the distance. Jack came next, slowly, breathing hard, holding on to the railing where there was a railing and to the trees where there was not, and saying at every bend that he was a landlady’s son and not a goat, and that goats did not have to climb in capes. And Alexander came last, with Lukas, and the cactus.

He had not put the cactus down all night. He did not know why. He had bought it on an impulse in a late shop, and he had carried it through a carriage entrance and a bakery and up the towpath of a canal past a swan, in the crook of his left arm, the way he carried a sceptre on the one day a year he carried a sceptre, and it had a small spine in the ball of his thumb that he had not taken out. He thought that he would take it home. He thought that he would put it in the dome, on the desk, under the slit, where there was sun in the afternoon in summer. He thought that it would be the first thing in the dome that nobody had given him.

Halfway up, by a lamp, Lukas stopped.

Alexander stopped beside him. Above them the others went on round a bend and out of the light. Below them, through the trees, the city lay spread out to the north, all of it, as far as the eye could go, under the stars: the lamps of the streets in long lines and curves, and the lit windows, thousands of them, more every minute, as the city got up; and the railway lines picked out in signal lights, red and green; and the black line of the river; and on the far side of the river, small and very clear, the dome of the Cathedral, and the long dark front of the Palace beside it, with a single light burning in one window on the second floor, which was, Alexander knew, the window of the room where the guard officer sat at night with a telephone and nothing to do.

Somewhere in that, in the middle of it, a car was going south, with its lights off, toward a hill, with a full thermos.

Lukas looked at the city for a long time.

“Danke,” he said.

Alexander turned his head.

Lukas did not look at him. He was looking at the city, at the lights, with his grey eyes, steadily, as he looked at everything, and his hands were in the pockets of his coat and the flask was inside it, against his chest, and his breath went up in the light of the lamp in a small white cloud and was gone.

Alexander did not ask him what for. He did not count it. He stood beside Lukas Brandt on the side of the Kreuzberg in the snow at a quarter to seven in the morning, and looked at the city that was his, all of it, every lit window, and thought that in ten years of three things a night Lukas had never once said thank you to him for anything, because it had never once been necessary, and that it had not been necessary now, and that Lukas had said it anyway, which was the whole of the meaning.

“Bitte,” said Alexander.

They went on up.

---

The monument was at the top.

It stood in the middle of a round open space at the summit, a platform of stone with steps up to it on every side, and it was made of iron, all of it, cast iron, dark grey, nearly black, and it went up out of the snow in a single tall spire, like the spire of a church that had been built without a church under it, in narrow pointed arches and pinnacles and crockets, story above story, to a point high over their heads; and on the very top of the point, small and black against the stars, there was a cross. The iron cross. The cross that had given the hill its name, and the hill the district, so that every person in Kreuzberg, every tram driver and nurse and baker and man in a cardigan, lived and worked and went home at four in the morning under the name of a thing on top of a spire on a hill that most of them, Alexander supposed, had not climbed since they were children.

Round the base of the spire, in twelve niches, there were twelve figures, iron, larger than men, standing in the snow in the dark with their heads bowed or raised: one for each of the twelve great battles of the wars against Napoleon, each with its name in iron letters above it.

The others were there already. His cousin was standing at the foot of the steps on the north side with his hands in his pockets, looking not at the monument but out over the city. Theo was sitting on the bottom step. Jack was lying flat on his back in the snow on the platform with his arms out, in the cape, and his eyes shut, saying I’m a goat, I’m a goat to the sky.

Alexander went round the monument.

He went round it once, slowly, in the snow, reading the names. He did not need the light to read them. He had learned them at nine in the dome with the map of 1910 on the wall, in order, with the dates, because they were the battles of his own house, and he said them over to himself as he passed each niche, as he had said the sentences for the deputations. Grossgörschen. Grossbeeren. Katzbach. Dennewitz. Kulm. Wartenburg. Leipzig. La Rothière. Bar-sur-Aube. Laon. Paris. Belle-Alliance. Twelve. Seven for the year of the great reversal, four for the march into France and the city that fell at the end of it, and one for the summer after, when it all had to be done again.

“Who built it?” said Theo, from the step.

“Schinkel,” said Alexander. “Karl Friedrich Schinkel. The architect. He built half of what you have seen tonight that is beautiful.” He stopped by the niche for Leipzig and looked up at the figure in it, a tall iron genius in a helmet, larger than a man, standing quite still with the snow on its shoulders. “The King laid the first stone in 1818. Three years after the end. The Tsar was there. Alexander the First of Russia. The same one.” He looked up at the cross. “The one the square was named for. Who came to Berlin in 1805, and went home, and fought Napoleon, and lost.”

“I thought you said he lost,” said Jack, from the snow, with his eyes shut.

“He lost in 1805,” said Alexander. “He came back.” He looked at the iron figure in the niche. “That is the thing about the people I am named for. They lose, and then they come back. It is very nearly the only thing they are good at.”

---

At seven o’clock by his father’s watch, Alexander took out the programme.

He took it out for the first time since the steel door, and unfolded it, in the snow, at the top of the Kreuzberg, under the iron cross, and held it up to the light of the single lamp at the top of the path, which was enough, and found the line.

07.00. Viktoriapark.

He took the pencil, and very carefully, the same size as all the others, he made a tick.

Then he looked at what was left. There was one line. 08.10. Sonnenaufgang. Kreuzberg. And under it, nothing, the plain Neues Palais paper, and the torn edge along the bottom where he had taken the strip for Kimura on the far side of the bridge. Above it there were ticks all the way up, and the arrows, and the times in brackets, and the one cross, at 03.00, with nothing beside it, and then three inches of nothing at all, and then the tick he had just made.

He looked at the three inches of nothing for some time.

It had the canal in it, and the swan. It had a late shop and a man in a cardigan who timed the guard with a kettle, and a baker who had said Kindheit, and a cactus. It had a carriage entrance and six minutes in the dark and two words in German and a bread roll. It had five coffees and five rolls and a nurse who had said good night. It had Lukas saying danke on the side of a hill. None of it was written down. None of it ever would be. And he thought, looking at it, that it was the best part of the programme, and that he had not written a word of it, and that this was the thing he had wanted to know in the dome on the tenth of December at half past one in the morning, and had not known how to ask.

He folded the programme and put it away.

They sat down on the steps of the monument, on the north side, facing the city, the five of them, in a row. His cousin at one end, with his long legs out and his hands in his pockets. Theo beside him, with the dead phone in his lap, looking at it now and then out of habit. Jack, who had got up out of the snow at last, beside Theo, with the cape round him like a tent and one hand inside it, at the chest, where it had been since a quarter to five. Lukas. And Alexander, at the other end, with the cactus on the step beside him.

Lukas took out the flask. He unscrewed it, and poured the cup full, and the steam came up off it in the cold in a great white cloud that smelled of chocolate and milk and the bakery, and he passed it along the row, and they drank from it one after another, each a mouthful, passing it on, and it came back to Lukas, and he filled it again.

The city lay below them. The stars were going out over it, one by one, from the east. The sky over the roofs to the right of them, over the railway lands and the river and the dark shape of the Schlesischer Bahnhof far off, had stopped being black and was not yet anything else, and the lamps along the streets were beginning to look, against it, a little less bright than they had.

Nobody said anything. There was an hour and ten minutes to go.

On the path below them, a long way down, in the dark under the trees, a car door shut.