Breakfast

There were two cars at the foot of the hill.

One was Kessler’s, long and dark grey, at the kerb by the iron gates of the park, with its nose pointing at the way out. The other was behind it, black, with the engine running and a young officer of the King’s detail at the wheel, who had evidently been told at some point in the night to bring a second car to the foot of the Kreuzberg by eight and had been told nothing else, and had asked nothing else, and sat looking straight ahead through the windscreen with the expression of a man who intends, for the rest of his career, never to have seen this.

Theo and Jack and Lukas went in the black car. Alexander and his cousin went in the back of Kessler’s, with Kimura in the front, and the cactus.

Nobody said anything. Kessler drove. He drove as he always drove, with his hands at ten and two, as though the car might decide at any moment to go somewhere on its own, out of Kreuzberg and through the western districts in the bright cold morning, past people going to work, past shops opening, past a school where children in red hats were going in at a gate, and out on to the long straight road to Potsdam through the forest, where the pines stood in the snow on either side in the sun, very tall and very still, and the road ran between them like a ruled line.

Alexander had meant to stay awake. He had meant to watch the forest go past, because he had been driven along that road five hundred times and had never once been driven along it at nine in the morning after a night with nothing on the programme, and he wanted to know whether it looked different. He did not find out. At some point after the last of the city, with the sun coming in flat through the pines and going over his face in bars, light and dark and light, he felt his cousin’s head come down on his shoulder, heavily, the whole weight of it, the way it had come down when they were small in the back of cars on the way to Herrenhausen; and he thought, I must not move, and did not, and the next thing he knew the car had stopped, and the forest had gone, and the cactus had fallen over on his knee, and Kessler was holding the door open on the gravel in front of the house by the Heiliger See.

His cousin was still asleep. Kimura had turned round in the front seat and was looking at him, at her King, asleep against the German Emperor’s shoulder with his mouth slightly open and the green felt hat over one eye, with an expression that Alexander would not have believed her face could make, and which she put away the moment she saw him see it.

“Wake him,” she said. “Or I’ll take a picture.”

---

The Hofmarschall was in the hall.

He was standing in the middle of the stone floor at the foot of the stairs, in his morning coat, exactly where he stood every morning of the year at a quarter past nine to give the Emperor the day’s programme, with his hands behind his back and a card in one of them; and when the front door opened and the German Emperor came in from the gravel in a navy overcoat with the boots of the First Foot Guards showing at the hem, wet to the ankle, with a cactus in his arm and the King of Hanover behind him in a Bavarian bandleader’s hat, the Hofmarschall did not move by so much as a muscle.

“Good morning, Majesty,” said the Hofmarschall.

“Good morning.”

“I trust Your Majesty rested.”

Alexander considered the question honestly, as he had been taught.

“No,” he said.

“No, Majesty,” said the Hofmarschall, gravely, as though this were the answer he had been expecting and approved of, and brought the card out from behind his back, and held it out.

Alexander took it.

It was the programme for the nineteenth of January 2033, on the stiff cream card with the arms at the head, in the same type as the one for the eighteenth, which meant that it had been set and printed in the Household’s own office at some hour of the night when the office was not usually open; and at the foot of it, in small type, it said, as all the Household’s cards said, when it had been printed. Gedruckt 06.00.

There was one item on it.

10.00. Ruhe.

Rest. That was all. The rest of the card, below the one line, was blank, three inches of stiff cream with nothing on it at all, all the way down to the foot.

Alexander stood in the hall in his wet boots and read the one line several times.

Then he looked up at the Hofmarschall, who was looking, with great attention, at a point on the wall above the front door where there was nothing whatever to look at.

“Thank you,” said Alexander.

“Majesty,” said the Hofmarschall, and bowed, from the neck, precisely, the width of a hand, and turned, and went away across the stone floor of the hall toward his office, with his hands behind his back; and as he went, without turning his head, in the voice in which he had announced every engagement of Alexander’s life, he said, to the air in front of him:

“Her Royal Highness is in the kitchen.”

---

Charlotte was at the kitchen table.

The kitchen was at the back of the house, down three steps, a long low room with a stone floor and a big old range and a table down the middle of it that had been scrubbed white by a hundred years of cooks, with a window at the end that looked out over the frozen lake to the Marble Palace on the far shore, and in the mornings the sun came in through it flat across the table and lit everything on it, the bread and the butter and the coffee pot and the jam, as if the table were a stage and breakfast the play. It was the only room in the house that nobody had ever made a programme for. The family had eaten breakfast in it when nobody was looking for as long as Alexander could remember.

His sister was sitting at the end of the table nearest the range, in her coat.

She had not taken it off. It was a dark blue coat, and under it, at the neck, he could see the green of the scrubs she had worked in all night, and her hair, which was longer than it ever looked in photographs, was tied back with a band at the nape of her neck in the way it was always tied back at the Charité, and had come half out of the band at some point in the small hours and not been put back. There was a cup of coffee in front of her, and a plate with the crust of a roll on it, and her telephone, face down, and her hands were round the cup, and she was looking out of the window at the lake with the face of a woman who has been on her feet for twelve hours and has had, at about four in the morning, a patient who did not do what patients are supposed to do, and has stayed with him until he did.

She looked round when he came down the steps.

She looked at him from the boots up. The wet boots of the First Foot Guards, and the navy coat, and the red collar of the uniform at the throat, and the cactus, and his face; and then past him, at the King of Hanover coming down the steps behind him in a green felt hat, and Theo and Jack and Lukas behind the King, from the second car, in a row, like boys coming in late to a class.

“Morning,” said Charlotte.

“Good morning,” said Alexander.

She looked at the cactus.

“You bought a cactus.”

“Yes.”

“Where?”

“Kreuzberg,” said Alexander. “At about four. From a man doing a crossword.”

His sister looked at him for a moment longer. Then she turned back to the window, and drank some of her coffee, and said, to the lake:

“There’s bread. And eggs, if somebody can work the range. Sit down. You all look terrible.”

---

They sat down.

Jack worked the range. It turned out that a landlady’s son from Gloucestershire could work any range ever built, and he had eggs going in a pan in four minutes, a dozen of them, and bacon from somewhere, and was standing at the stove in the cape with a fork, with the bicycle bell clipped to the front of the cape now like a brooch, humming, and Theo was cutting bread, and Lukas had found the cocoa in a cupboard without being told where it was and was making it in a pan, and his cousin was sitting at the table with his elbows on it and his chin in his hands and the green felt hat on the table in front of him, looking at the frozen lake with an expression that Alexander had not seen on his face for five months, which was the expression of a person with nothing left to decide.

Alexander sat down opposite his sister, and put the cactus on the table between them, among the bread and the jam, in the sun.

“Kessler rang me,” said Charlotte.

He looked at her.

“At a quarter to ten. I’d just gone on. I was in the corridor outside the ward, putting my hair up.” She turned her cup slowly on the table by its handle, which was a thing he did, and he had never known that she did it too. “He said, Your Royal Highness, your brother has left the Neues Palais by the soup passage with the King of Hanover and three friends, and I am going to follow him, and I am telling you because somebody in the family must know, and you are the one who will say nothing.” She drank. “Which is the longest sentence I have ever heard Kessler say.”

“What did you say?”

“I said, ring me if anybody’s bleeding.” She put the cup down. “And then I went on the ward. And I had a very busy night, and nobody rang.” She looked at him across the table. “So I assumed nobody was bleeding.”

“Nobody was.”

“I can see that.” She looked at the boots. “Your feet will be a different matter. Take those off before you go upstairs and let me look.”

“You knew,” said Alexander. “Since a quarter to ten.”

“Yes.”

“And you said nothing. To Mama. To anybody.”

“I was on a ward,” said Charlotte. “What happens on the ward is not a story.” She almost smiled. “We have an agreement about that, at the Charité. Nobody’s ever written it down. They don’t photograph me coming off nights and they don’t mention me in front of the press and they don’t talk about what happens in there, and I asked them to stop being so protective, years ago, and they didn’t.” She shrugged, very slightly, in the coat. “So I thought I’d try it the other way round, for once. On you.”

He did not say anything for a moment.

He thought of her in a corridor at the Charité at a quarter to ten at night, with her hair half up, with a telephone at her ear and Kessler’s flat voice in it, being told that her younger brother, whom she had stood behind in two lines of succession since she was ten, for no reason but fourteen months and a law that ran only forwards, had gone out through a tunnel built for soup to do the first thing in his life that nobody had arranged; and saying, ring me if anybody’s bleeding, and putting the telephone in her pocket, and going on to the ward, and saying nothing, to anybody, for twelve hours. He thought that it was possibly the kindest thing that anybody had done for him all night, in a night of very kind things, and that she would never in her life allow him to say so.

He did not say so.

“Thank you,” he said instead.

“Don’t,” said Charlotte. “I’ve been up for twenty-six hours. If you’re nice to me I’ll cry into the eggs.”

---

She turned her telephone over at twenty to ten.

She did it without saying anything, and pushed it across the table toward him, past the cactus, with one finger, and he looked down at it.

It was a photograph. It was on the front of the morning edition of a Berlin paper, the one that came on the telephone before it came on paper, and it had been taken at about five past one in the morning from somewhere in the middle of a beer hall with a blue and white ceiling, by somebody standing on a bench: and it showed a stage of planks, and a brass band of eight men in leather shorts, and in front of them, with his back half to the camera and a baton raised high over his head and an expression of total, helpless, serious concentration, a tall fair young man in a black overcoat, conducting.

The headline said, in large type: DER WIRT DIRIGIERT. The landlord conducts.

And underneath, smaller: The King of Hanover leads two hundred Bavarians in “Ein Prosit” at the Hofbräu Wirtshaus on Alexanderplatz, a few hours after his cousin’s birthday dinner in Potsdam. With him, the King’s friends.

Alexander looked at it.

The photograph was wide. It had the whole of the middle of the hall in it, the long tables, the people standing on the benches with their glasses up, the roar of it, which you could see in the photograph even though you could not hear it. And at the bottom, at the edge, at a table in the middle of the hall, among the litre glasses, there was Theo, standing on a bench with his hands cupped round his mouth, shouting; and Jack, with a glass; and Lukas, at the end, with his hands in his lap; and beside Theo, below him, sitting, half turned toward the stage, a young man in a navy coat with a narrow pale serious face like a hundred young men’s in Berlin, with a litre glass held in both hands.

Laughing.

He was laughing. You could see it. His head was back and his mouth was open and his eyes were nearly shut, and he was laughing the way a person laughs who did not know he was going to, and he was not named. With him, the King’s friends. The German Emperor was at the bottom of the front page of a Berlin newspaper on the morning after his nineteenth birthday, laughing in a beer hall, and the caption had counted him among the friends of somebody else, and nobody in the whole city had noticed.

He looked at it for a long time.

Then he looked up at his sister.

She was not looking at the photograph. She was looking at him, across the table, with her hands round her cup, and her face was doing something that he had seen it do once before in his life, on a February morning in 2028, at the foot of the stairs in this house, when she had come back from the hospital and he had known, before she said anything, from her face, what she had come back to tell him. It was not the same thing. It was the other thing. It was the face of a woman who has been looking at a photograph on her telephone in a corridor at the Charité at half past six in the morning, at the end of a twelve-hour night, over and over, and has not, for four years and eleven months, seen her brother do what he is doing in it.

“That’s you,” said Charlotte.

“Yes.”

“You’re laughing.”

“Yes,” said Alexander.

His sister looked at him a moment longer. Then she took the telephone back across the table with one finger, and turned it face down again, and put her hand flat on top of it, and kept it there.

“I’m keeping that,” she said, and her voice was not quite steady, and she did not care. “I’m keeping it. I’m going to have it printed. I’m going to have it framed and put it on the wall of the doctors’ room at the Charité, and when anybody asks me who that is, at the bottom, laughing, I’m going to say, one of the King’s friends.” She took a breath. “And I’m going to say it every time.”

---

Jack put the eggs on the table at a quarter to ten, a dozen of them, in the pan, with the bacon, and the toast that Theo had made on the range, and Lukas put the cocoa in a jug beside it, and they ate.

They ate everything. They ate as only five young men can eat who have been up all night in fourteen degrees of frost, without speaking, steadily, and Charlotte watched them from the end of the table in her coat with her hand on her telephone and the expression of a doctor who has seen a great many people eat after a long night and approves of it professionally. When the eggs were gone Jack made more. When the bread was gone Theo cut more. Lukas poured the cocoa, round the table, and when he got to Charlotte he poured hers too, without asking, into her coffee cup, on top of the coffee, and she looked at it and at him, and drank it.

His cousin had not said anything. He ate, and looked out of the window at the lake, and now and then at Alexander, across the table, and once, when Charlotte got up to put the kettle on, at Charlotte; and she came back to the table and stood behind his chair, and looked down at him, at the top of his head, at the hair standing up where the green felt hat had been.

“You’ve decided something,” said Charlotte.

His cousin looked up at her.

“Yes,” he said.

“Don’t tell me.” She put her hand on his shoulder, briefly, as the nurse in the bakery had, and took it away. “I’ve been up twenty-six hours, and if you tell me I’ll tell Mama, and then it’ll be in the papers by lunch.” She went back to her end of the table. “Tell me when you’ve told whoever you have to tell first. I can wait. I’m good at waiting.” She sat down. “It’s my one qualification.”

His cousin looked at her for a long moment. Then he looked at Alexander.

“She’s like you,” he said.

“Yes,” said Alexander. “Only better at it.”

---

At ten o’clock, by his father’s watch, which was the time on the Hofmarschall’s card, Alexander took out the programme.

He took it out of the navy coat for the last time and unfolded it on the scrubbed white table among the plates and the jam and the cactus, in the sun, and smoothed it flat with both hands; and they all looked at it, the five of them, and Charlotte, who had never seen anything her brother had written for himself and leaned across the table to see it now, and read it, from the top, 21.40, to the bottom, 08.10, all of it, every line, the ticks in the margin all the same size, the arrows and the times in brackets, the cross at 03.00 with nothing beside it, and the three inches of nothing under the cross, and the torn edge at the bottom.

She put her finger on a line.

It was the one that had no time. The one between the Last Instance and Clärchens, written in the dome at a quarter to two in the morning on the tenth of December and nearly rubbed out three times. It had no tick beside it on the paper, because he had made the tick in his head instead, at the Hofbräu, because the paper was wet.

Zeigen, was er ist.

“What’s this one?” said Charlotte.

Alexander looked at his cousin.

His cousin looked back at him across the table, in the sun, with his hair standing up. And then he reached across the table, past the cactus, and took the pencil out of Alexander’s fingers, very gently, the way you take a thing from someone you are not sure will let go of it; and leaned over the programme, and beside Zeigen, was er ist, in the margin, he made a tick.

It was not the same size as the others. It was bigger, and it went up at the end, and it was not neat at all. It was the tick of a person who had never practised the size of a tick in his life, and did not care, and had just decided where he was going to go.

He gave the pencil back.

“That one,” said his cousin, to Charlotte, “was me.”

---

The drawer was in the Hofmarschall’s office.

He went there at eight minutes past ten, alone, in his stockinged feet, because Charlotte had taken his boots off him in the kitchen and looked at his feet and said nothing about them that he would repeat, and he went along the stone corridor in his socks with the programme in his hand, past the portraits, to the door at the end, and knocked, and went in, and the Hofmarschall was not there, because the Hofmarschall, Alexander suspected, had arranged very carefully not to be.

The cabinet was against the far wall. It was tall and dark and old and had forty drawers in it, each with a brass frame on the front and a card in the frame, and in each drawer were the programmes of a year, every one of them, the printed cards on stiff cream with the arms at the head, filed in order, with the ticks and the crosses in the margins in the office’s ink, and some of them with times in brackets where things had happened late, all the way back. He had seen the files. He had been shown them at twelve, so that he would understand what a programme was for.

He found the drawer for 2033. It was the newest, and it had almost nothing in it yet, eighteen days of January. He opened it.

The card for the eighteenth was on the top. Dienstag, 18. Januar 2033. Eleven items, in the Household’s type. Beside each, in the margin, in the office’s ink, a tick, all the same size: the guns, the guard, the Te Deum, the deputations, luncheon, the schools, the regiment, rest, the dinner. 22.00. Abfahrt der Gäste. Tick.

And at the foot, the last line, in the same Gothic letters as always:

22.30. Nachtruhe.

And beside it, in the margin, in the office’s ink, the same size as all the others, somebody had made a tick.

Alexander looked at it for a long time.

Somebody in the office had sat at a desk last night at half past ten and been told, by Kessler, on the telephone or at the door, in the flat voice, that the Emperor had retired; and had looked at the card, and at the last line, and known, as everybody in the house had known, and the Hofmarschall, and his sister, and Kessler, and Kimura, and a woman in a bakery, and a man doing a crossword in Kreuzberg who had said somebody should take that boy out for a beer; and had dipped the pen, and made the tick, beside Nachtruhe, exactly the right size, so that the file would be complete.

He did not take it out. It was the office’s tick, and it was correct, in its way, and he would not have it any other way.

He folded his own programme in four, the sheet of Neues Palais writing paper with his own square pencil on it and his own ticks and his one cross and his cousin’s one tick that was too big, and the torn edge at the bottom, and laid it in the drawer, behind the card for the eighteenth, where it would be found, by somebody, in a hundred years, filed in its place among the programmes of a reign, in order, with nothing to say what it was.

Then he shut the drawer.

---

He went up to the dome at a quarter past ten, with the cactus.

He went up the stairs in his socks, and up the narrow stair beyond them, and through the trapdoor, and the dome was as he had left it at twenty past five the evening before, cold, with the slit shut and the desk under it and the lamp and the telescope on its pier, and the map of 1910 on the wall with the railway lands in grey; and he went to the desk and put the cactus on it, under the slit, in the place where in summer the sun came in in the afternoon, and stood back and looked at it.

It looked, he thought, as though it had always been there.

Below him, through the floor, the house was quiet. His cousin was asleep in the blue room, face down, in his clothes, with the green felt hat on the pillow beside him; Theo was asleep in the room beyond, and Jack on the sofa in the library with the bicycle bell still clipped to the cape; and Lukas, he knew without looking, was asleep in the chair in the corridor outside the blue room, as he had fallen asleep in that chair at the end of every long day in that house since he was nine, sitting up, with his hands folded, and the empty flask in his coat. Charlotte had gone home. Kessler was in the car on the gravel with his hands at ten and two and his eyes shut, which did not mean that he was asleep.

Alexander lay down on the old sofa under the dome with his coat over him.

It was a quarter past ten in the morning on the nineteenth of January, and the sun was coming in round the edge of the shutter on the slit in a single thin bright line across the boards, and across the cactus, and across his face; and he thought of the card in the Hofmarschall’s office, with its one line, 10.00. Ruhe, and of the other card, in the drawer, with its tick beside the last line that somebody had made last night at half past ten, exactly the right size, so that the file would be complete.

Nachtruhe, he thought. Night’s rest.

It was the wrong time of day for it. It always had been. For nineteen years it had been written at the foot of his days by somebody else, in Gothic letters, as though someone in the office believed that if it were not written down he might not go to bed.

He did not write it down. He closed his eyes, in the line of sun, and slept.