Sperrstunde

Nobody came up the path.

The car door had shut at the bottom of the hill at seven, and Alexander had listened for footsteps after it, on the snow, on the paths, coming up through the trees, and none had come. He knew why. Kessler did not arrive at the top of things before the person he was guarding. It was bad manners and bad tactics, and Kessler had explained the difference to him once, in the car, on the way back from a cathedral, and said that a protection officer who arrived first at the top of anything was either a fool or a guest. Kessler was neither. Kessler was at the bottom of the hill in a car with the engine running and a full thermos on the dashboard, with Kimura beside him, waiting, as the five of them were waiting at the top, for the same thing.

So nobody came, and they sat on the steps of the monument and watched the city get up.

It got up slowly and then all at once. At a quarter past seven the lit windows were still the most of it, the thousands of them, yellow, in the tenements and the offices and the hospital to the east with its long rows of lights. At half past seven the lamps along the streets began to go off, in sections, a whole street at a time, as though somebody were walking through the city with a switch; and the trams began, lit and nearly empty, going along the long straight streets below them with their bells at the crossings, and the first buses; and the sky over the roofs to the east went from grey to a colour that had no name, the colour of the inside of a shell, and then, very low, along the edge of the world beyond the railway lands, to a thin line of red, like the edge of a coal.

At twenty to eight the first aircraft came in.

It came from the south-east, low, over the roofs, with its lights on, red and green and white, and its undercarriage down, and the sound of it came after it across the cold, and it went past them below the level of the hill, a little to the east, so close that they could see the lit windows of the cabin in a row along its side, and went down behind the trees toward Tempelhof, which was just there, beyond the park, half a mile off, the city airport, closer to the centre than any airfield in Europe; and a minute later another came, and then another.

“That’s the six o’clock from Königsberg,” said Jack, who had not the faintest idea.

“It is the Hamburg,” said Alexander, who had.

“How do you know?”

“Because the Königsberg is the second one,” said Alexander, and pointed, and there it was.

---

His cousin got up at a quarter to eight.

He got up off the step without saying anything and walked away from them, round the monument, through the snow, to the east side of the platform, where there were no steps but a low stone parapet with the snow on it and beyond it the slope of the hill going down through the trees and beyond that the whole of the east of the city to the horizon. He stood at the parapet with his hands in his pockets, in the black overcoat, with the green felt hat in one hand now, and his back to them, looking east.

Alexander had seen him stand like that before. On the summit of Camelback, at the top, on the highest rock, a little way off from everybody, with his back to them, looking east, while the sun came up over Arizona. He had stood like that for a long time. Nobody had gone to him. And he had come back down off the rock afterwards and sat down next to Alexander and Lukas and not said anything, and Alexander had known that he knew something, and had never asked what.

Nobody went to him now. They sat on the north steps, the four of them, and the cactus, and looked at the back of the black overcoat at the parapet against the red line in the east.

“Ten minutes,” said Theo, quietly, without looking at anything.

Alexander looked at his father’s watch. It was seven minutes to eight.

“Seventeen,” he said.

“Sorry. I don’t mean to.” Theo touched the dead phone in his lap. “I keep doing it. I keep saying the time.”

“You are very nearly right,” said Alexander. “You have been very nearly right all night. It is a great comfort.” He watched the back of his cousin’s coat. “Keep saying it.”

---

At two minutes past eight his cousin turned round.

He did not say anything. He turned round at the parapet and looked at the four of them on the north steps, round the corner of the monument, across the snow, and lifted the hand with the green felt hat in it, once, the way a person lifts a hand to people across a platform when a train is about to go, and Alexander understood, and stood up, and so did the others.

They went round the monument. They went through the snow to the east side and stood at the parapet, the five of them, in a row, his cousin in the middle, with Theo on one side of him and Alexander on the other, and Jack beyond Theo, and Lukas beyond Alexander, with the flask; and they looked east, over the city, toward the red.

It was very quiet. The trams had gone somewhere else. An aircraft was coming in, far off, too far to hear. Below them in the park a bird had begun, a single one, in the bare trees, a small thin repeated sound like a question asked over and over by somebody who did not expect an answer. Their breath went up in five clouds and hung in the still air in front of them and did not move away.

At nine minutes past eight Alexander took out the programme.

He unfolded it on the snow of the parapet and smoothed it flat with both hands, there, at the top of the Kreuzberg, in front of all of them, and held it down against the stone, and looked at the last line.

08.10. Sonnenaufgang. Kreuzberg.

His cousin looked at it too, over his shoulder. And Theo. And Jack, leaning round. And Lukas, who had heard it read aloud on the tenth of December in the dome and was looking at it for the first time.

The watch said ten past eight.

And the sun came up.

---

It came up exactly where the observatory’s tables had said it would, at exactly the minute, over the far roofs, beyond the river and the railway lands and the dark shape of the Silesian station, a little to the south of east: first an edge, very thin, very bright, not red but gold, so bright at once that it was not a colour but a sound, a single high note on the rim of the world; and then more of it, quickly, the whole upper curve of it, swelling up out of the haze along the roofs of the eastern districts, so that the haze caught fire round it; and then the light came.

It came across the city toward them. He saw it come. It came across the roofs of the east in a long running line, gold, from the horizon, touching the tops of things first, the chimneys and the church towers and the tall gables of the tenements, and leaving everything below them in blue, and running on, west, over the railway lands, over the river, where it caught the ice and the ice lit up in a long white flash from end to end like a blade being drawn, over the Schlesischer Bahnhof and its clock, over Kreuzberg, roof after roof, street after street, fast, faster than he would have believed light could move across a city, and it reached the hill, and came up the hill through the bare trees, and came up the slope, and reached the parapet, and the snow on the parapet went gold under his hands and under the programme, and reached their faces.

He felt it on his face. It was not warm. It was fourteen degrees below and the sun in January has no heat in it at all. But he felt it, on his face, the first light of the nineteenth of January, at the top of the Kreuzberg, at ten past eight, as he had written it down.

Behind them, high over their heads, the iron cross on the top of the spire caught the light, and burned.

Nobody said anything.

Alexander took the pencil out of his pocket. He held the programme down against the gold snow of the parapet with his left hand, and with his right, very carefully, beside the last line, 08.10. Sonnenaufgang. Kreuzberg, the same size as all the others, he made a tick.

Then he put the pencil away, and folded the programme, and put it in his coat, and looked up.

His cousin was looking at the sun.

---

“The University of the March,” said his cousin.

He said it to the sun. He said it quite quietly, in the gold light, with his hands on the parapet, in the voice in which he had said not decided to his father across a bar in August, the voice of a person saying a thing for the first time out loud to find out what it sounds like.

“In Tempe. In Arizona. In the autumn.”

Nobody moved.

“I knew on the mountain,” said his cousin. “I think. On Camelback. When the sun came up, I knew that was the best night of my life, and that I’d been nobody for the whole of it. Nobody bought me anything. Nobody looked. I paid for my own lemonade. I didn’t know what it was, at the time, what I’d found out. I’ve been trying to work it out for a year and a half.” He looked at the sun, which was clear of the roofs now, the whole of it, small and white and far away. “And then last night, at the Meierei, and the train, and the judge, and the Bavarians, and Renate, and the man in the shop. Alex showed me.” He did not look round. “Zeigen, was er ist. He showed me what I am. Here. It’s lovely. It’s the loveliest thing that’s ever happened to me, being that, here. And I don’t want to be it for four years.” He was quiet for a moment. “I want to be the one that nobody buys a drink for. For four years. In a place where I was nobody once, for one night, and it was the best night of my life. I want to see if I can be nobody on purpose.”

“There’s a hill,” he said. “At Tempe. On the campus. A butte. It’s on the seal. I looked it up, in December, after Alex’s dinner invitation came and I couldn’t sleep. There’s a sun on the seal, coming up behind the butte, and a path up the front of it to the top, a little stepped path.” He almost laughed. “You can climb it before class. Every morning. And see the sun come up over the Valley. Every morning for four years.” He turned his head, at last, and looked at them, at the four of them, along the parapet, in the gold light. “I’m going to go somewhere I can climb a hill every morning and nobody’ll care.”

---

Theo was the first.

Theo did not say anything. Theo stood at the parapet beside him in the brown coat with the dead phone in his hand and his ears gone red from the top, and his face did a thing that Alexander had seen it do once before, in Phoenix, on the mountain, when the sun came up on his eighteenth birthday; and then Theo put his arm round his friend’s shoulders, roughly, the way a defensive lineman puts his arm round anybody, and held on, and said, into the black overcoat, “Good. Good, Freddie. Good.” And then, because Theo was Theo, and could not help it, and was in medical school, and knew: “It’s a hundred and fifteen degrees there in July.”

“I know,” said his cousin.

“You’ll die.”

“I’ll stay indoors until October.”

“Arizona,” said Jack, from beyond Theo, in the tone of a man repeating the name of a disease. “Arizona. Of all the places. You’ve got Oxford writing to you. You’ve got Harvard. And you pick the place where we spent all night on buses.”

“It was the booby prize,” said his cousin. “The March. In 1885. The first Diet gave the university to Tucson and the teachers’ school to Tempe and said in the debate that Tempe had got the lesser.” He looked at Jack. “They tell the students that. In the first week. I read it. They tell you, we were the booby prize, and they’re proud of it.” He shrugged. “I liked that. I’ve been the first prize my whole life. I’d like to go somewhere that knows what the other thing is like.”

Jack looked at him for a long time across Theo’s shoulder.

“You’re mad,” said Jack. “You’re completely mad.” And then, in a different voice: “My mum’s going to cry.”

“Your mum doesn’t cry.”

“She’ll cry at this,” said Jack.

Lukas, at the end, beyond Alexander, said nothing. He unscrewed the flask, and poured the cup full of cocoa, and the steam came up gold, and he reached across Alexander and held it out to the King of Hanover; and his cousin took it, and looked at Lukas, and Lukas inclined his head, exactly as he inclined it to the Hofmarschall, and his cousin drank.

---

Alexander did not say anything yet.

He stood at the parapet in the sunlight with his hands on the gold snow and felt two things, at the same time, quite distinctly, as he had been taught to feel things, in order, so that he could report them afterwards if asked.

He was glad. He was glad as he had not known he could be glad for another person, so that it went right through him, from the face where the sun was to the boots of the First Foot Guards in the snow. His cousin had decided. Nobody had decided for him. Nobody had put a thumb on the scale. He had stood at a parapet with his back to them all for twenty-five minutes and looked at the sun and chosen, and the choice was his, entirely, and it was a good one, and it was mad, and it was his. Alexander had done that. Not the choosing. He had done the night. He had put the sun in it.

And he minded.

He minded as he had known he would, since the tenth of December, since he wrote Zeigen, was er ist on a line by itself and nearly rubbed it out three times. Tempe was eight hours behind Potsdam. It was eleven hours in an aeroplane. It was not two and a quarter hours on the fast train to a small town of timbered houses in the Kingdom of Hanover where his cousin was already King, and a room in the old observatory, and a bar by the river on a Friday night. He had held Göttingen in his mouth like a stone on the seventh step at Clärchens and not said it, and he held it now, at the top of the Kreuzberg, in the sunlight, and did not say it, and knew that he never would, and found that the stone, now that he knew he would not say it, had become very small, and that he could carry it.

He turned to his cousin.

“Good,” he said.

His cousin looked at him over the cup of cocoa.

“That’s it? Good?”

“It is what your father said,” said Alexander, “when you said not decided. I thought it was the right word then.” He looked at the sun. “I think it is the right word now. It covers both.”

His cousin looked at him a moment longer, in the gold light, with the cup in his hands; and Alexander saw him understand, slowly and then all at once, what both meant, and that there had been a stone, and what it had cost to carry it to the top of a hill and not put it down. His cousin did not say so. He had learned that from Theo. He held out the cup of cocoa to Alexander instead, half full.

Alexander took it, and drank.

---

Kimura and Kessler came up the path at a quarter past eight.

They came round the last bend below the summit, out of the trees, into the sunlight, side by side, not hurrying, at the pace of two people coming up a hill on a cold morning to look at a view: Kessler large and square in his dark coat, with the tall steel thermos in one hand, held by the bottom, full, and Kimura small and upright beside him in her black coat, with the paper bag from the bakery, and the two of them came across the platform through the snow, past the iron niches, past Leipzig and Paris and Belle-Alliance, round the monument, to the east side, and stopped a few yards off.

Nobody ran. There was nowhere to run to, and nobody wanted to.

Kessler looked at Alexander. Alexander looked at Kessler. It was the face like the end of a wardrobe, entirely without expression, with frost on its eyebrows.

“Majestät,” said Kessler.

“Kessler.”

Kessler unscrewed the top of the thermos, which was also a cup, and poured it full, and the steam came up gold, and he held it out, and Alexander took it. It was coffee. It was very hot and very strong and had sugar in it, three spoons, which was how Kessler took it and not how Alexander did, and he drank it anyway, all of it, standing at the parapet, while Kessler watched him with no expression at all.

“Happy birthday, Majestät,” said Kessler.

“It is not my birthday,” said Alexander. “It ended at midnight. Under the Red Town Hall.”

“In Phoenix,” said Kessler, “it ended at eight o’clock.” He screwed the cup back on to the thermos. “Ten minutes before the sun. I worked it out in the car.” He did not smile. Kessler did not smile. But something happened at the very corner of the wardrobe, very far back, and went still. “I thought you would want to know.”

There was a short pause.

“And in Tempe,” said Alexander’s cousin.

Kessler looked at him.

“Tempe is the same as Phoenix,” said Kessler. “It is the same zone. It does not change its clocks in summer.” He looked at the King of Hanover for a moment longer. “Why?”

And Kimura, beside him, small and upright in the black coat with the paper bag, who had been looking at her King since she came round the monument with an expression that Alexander had never seen on her face, which was the expression of a woman who has just had something confirmed that she has known for a week, said, without any expression in her voice at all:

“Folder six.”

His cousin stared at her.

“Folder six?”

“I had nine,” said Kimura. “On my desk. With the door open. You counted them.” She opened the paper bag and looked into it. “Tempe’s six. It’s the thickest.” She took out a roll and held it out to him. “Eat something. You’ve been up twenty-six hours and you just decided your life on cocoa.”

---

They ate the rolls on the parapet in the sunlight, seven of them now, the five and the two, with the city going about its morning below them, the trams, the aircraft coming down into Tempelhof one after another, the people in the streets on their way to work, all of them, every one, not knowing that at the top of the hill above them two sovereigns and their friends and their protection were eating bread rolls out of a paper bag in fourteen degrees of frost.

At nineteen minutes past eight, Jack put down his roll on the parapet.

He stood up straight. He took his hand out of his cape, at the chest, where it had been since a quarter to five outside a late shop in Kreuzberg, and in it, held up between his finger and thumb in the gold light, there was a small brass bicycle bell, on a clip, the kind that goes on handlebars, bright and new, with the price still on it in pencil on a scrap of paper stuck to the bottom.

They all looked at it.

“He said,” said Jack, “if you want a bell, you ring it yourself.” He looked at the bell. “Well. He didn’t say that. He said Kindheit. But that’s what he meant.” He held it up higher, toward the city. “Somebody’s got to decide. Somebody’s got to say it’s over. And nobody in this whole city ever will, so.” He swallowed. “So.”

He put his thumb on the lever.

And Jack Fennell, landlady’s son, of the New Inn at Coln Saint Aldwyns in the county of Gloucestershire, stood at the top of the Kreuzberg in the sunrise in a cape, and faced the capital of the German Empire, six million people in the snow, and rang the bell. Once.

Ting.

It was a very small sound. It went out over the parapet into the cold gold air above the slope and was gone at once, into the enormous morning, like a single grain of salt into the sea.

“LAST ORDERS!” roared Jack.

His voice went out over Berlin. It went down the hill through the bare trees and over the frozen waterfall and out across the roofs of Kreuzberg, the voice of a landlady’s son who had been calling across a crowded bar since he was fourteen, enormous, round, carrying, the voice of every pub in England at ten to eleven at night, and it came back off the iron of the monument behind them, ORDERS, and the single bird in the park stopped asking its question.

Nobody below took any notice at all.

Jack waited. He waited exactly ten minutes’ worth, which was, Alexander saw, about four seconds, because Jack was not, in the end, a patient man, and then he lifted the bell again, and rang it, three times, ting, ting, ting, and filled his chest, and shouted, to the whole of Berlin, from the top of its only hill:

“TIME, GENTLEMEN, PLEASE!”

The words went out over the city in the sunrise and were gone.

And from somewhere below them, from the street at the foot of the hill, from one of the tenements on the far side of the park railings, a window went up, with a bang, and a man’s voice came up through the trees, very loud, very flat, in the purest Berlinerisch Alexander had ever heard, the voice of a man in a vest who has been woken at twenty past eight on a Wednesday morning by an Englishman shouting from a monument:

“RUHE DA OBEN, DU SPINNER!”

Quiet up there, you lunatic!

And the window came down again, with another bang.

---

There was a silence at the top of the Kreuzberg.

Then Jack turned round. He turned round from the parapet with the bicycle bell in his hand and his face was a thing Alexander would remember for the rest of his life: the face of a landlady’s son who has come at last, after ten hours and nine places and a city that never ends, to a bar where somebody has answered.

“He answered,” said Jack. “Did you hear? Somebody answered. Somebody said shut up and go home.” He held up the bell, as though it were a trophy. “That’s it. That’s last orders. That’s how you know.” His voice cracked, and he did not care. “It’s over. Somebody decided.”

Theo sat down in the snow.

His cousin put both hands over his face, with the cup of cocoa still in one of them, and the cocoa went down his sleeve, and he did not notice. Kimura turned away to the parapet and stood with her back to them all, and her shoulders went, very slightly, twice. Lukas closed his eyes. And Kessler, the great square shape of Kessler, in his dark coat, with the thermos, with the frost on his eyebrows, looked at Jack Fennell with the bicycle bell for a long, long moment, without expression, and then said, in his flat English, gravely, as one professional to another:

“Sperrstunde.”

Closing time.

And Alexander stood at the parapet at the top of the Kreuzberg in the sunlight, at twenty past eight on the morning of the nineteenth of January 2033, nineteen years and one day old, with a programme in his coat that had one cross on it and one line still without a mark, and laughed for the third time that night, out loud, in front of everybody, and did not count it.