Alexanderplatz

The square had been named for an Emperor, and the Emperor it had been named for was not his.

Alexander explained this to Jack on the walk from the Waisenstrasse, under the railway arches, because Jack had asked, in the cape, whether Alexanderplatz was named after him, and had been told no, and had not believed it.

“It was named for the Tsar,” said Alexander. “Alexander the First of Russia. He came to Berlin in October 1805 to see the King, and the King renamed the cattle market in his honour, because it was where the parade was, and it has been Alexanderplatz ever since.” He walked on under the arches with his hands in the pockets of the navy coat. “I was named for him also. Indirectly. My grandmother liked the square.”

“So you’re named after a car park,” said Jack.

“I am named after a cattle market that was named after a Tsar who came to visit and then went home and fought Napoleon and lost,” said Alexander. “It is the most Prussian name I could have been given. My father said so.”

They came out from under the arches into the square.

It was very large and very bright and almost empty. It was a great paved space in the middle of the city, ringed with tall buildings with lit windows and shops with their shutters down, with the tramlines crossing it in long silver curves and the snow swept into heaps at the edges, and in the middle of it the old fountain, frozen, with its bronze figures in a white crust. There were not many people. It was half past twelve in the morning after a holiday, and the square had emptied after the fireworks, and the ones who were left were walking across it with their collars up, going somewhere warmer.

Nobody looked at him. He walked into the middle of the square that had been named for the man he had been named for, in his own capital, on the morning after his birthday, under the windows of the Prussian Ministry of the Interior, which had a photograph of him at fourteen on the wall of every office, and nobody looked at him at all.

He stopped by the frozen fountain and looked up at the lit windows, and felt it again, on his skin, like the lake in June.

“Where now?” said his cousin, beside him.

Alexander took out the programme.

“Hofbräu Wirtshaus,” he said. “Over there. By the railway. It is a Bavarian beer hall.”

His cousin looked at him.

“In the middle of Berlin?”

“Yes.”

“On Kingdom Day?”

“Yes,” said Alexander. “It is a federation, not a nation. The Chancellor says so every year at my birthday dinner.” He folded the programme. “There is a brass band until two.”

---

The brass band was playing when they came in, and it did not stop.

The hall was enormous. It was a long hall under a high vaulted ceiling painted blue and white in lozenges, like the Bavarian flag, with long wooden tables running down it in rows, scrubbed white, and benches without backs, and on a stage at the far end, on a platform of planks with a painted backdrop of mountains behind it, a band of eight men in leather shorts and green waistcoats and white stockings, at a quarter to one in the morning in January, playing a polka on tubas and trumpets and a clarinet and an accordion so loudly that the steins on the nearest tables walked across the wood by themselves.

It was full. It was much fuller than it had any right to be at a quarter to one, because the Bavarians who were in Berlin for Kingdom Day, to see the Prussians do their guns, had come here after the fireworks to sit among their own and drink their own beer out of their own litre glasses and be Bavarian at the Prussians in their own capital until the band stopped, which was a thing, Alexander had once been told by the Bavarian minister in Berlin, that Bavarians had been doing to Prussians for two hundred years and did not intend to stop doing.

They came in the door at the side, the five of them, in four overcoats and a cape, out of the cold, into the noise.

Nobody stopped. The band did not stop, and the tables did not stop, and for nearly a minute, standing inside the door with the heat and the music and the smell of roast pork and beer coming at them like a wall, Alexander thought that it would be different here, because they were Bavarians, and Bavarians did not watch Prussian television, and had not been at Garfield Street, and did not care about the King of Hanover; and then a woman in a dirndl came past with eight litre glasses in her two hands, four in each, by the handles, and looked at the door, and dropped one.

It did not break. They were very thick glasses. It hit the floor and bounced and rolled away under a table, spilling a litre of beer in a long gold fan across the boards, and the woman did not look at it. She was looking at the door, at the tall fair young man in the black overcoat, with her mouth open, and the seven glasses in her hands going very slowly sideways.

“Jessas,” she said. Jesus. “Der Wirt.”

The landlord.

---

The Bavarians did not do it the way the Prussians did.

The Prussians had stopped, and gone quiet, and looked, and then sent one person forward, correctly, with a glass. The Bavarians did not stop and did not go quiet. They stood up. They stood up on the benches, the whole of the nearest table, twelve people from somewhere, in their coats, with their glasses in their hands, and roared, and the table beyond them heard the roar and looked round and saw why and stood up on their benches too, and roared, and it went down the hall like a wave going down a beach, table after table, until two hundred Bavarians were standing on the benches of a beer hall in the capital of Prussia at ten to one in the morning, roaring at the King of Hanover, and the band, which could see it all from the stage, stopped the polka in the middle of a bar and went straight into something else, very loud, with a great deal of tuba, that Alexander did not know and that everybody in the hall except the five of them clearly did.

“What is it?” Theo shouted.

“I do not know!” Alexander shouted back. “It is Bavarian!”

His cousin was standing just inside the door with his hands at his sides and the black overcoat open and an expression of profound and helpless alarm, being roared at. He looked round for Alexander. Alexander was standing beside him, a step back, in the navy coat. Nobody was roaring at Alexander. Nobody was looking at Alexander. He was standing in the door of a full beer hall in his own capital with two hundred people on the benches in front of him and he was, as far as any of them could tell, the friend.

“Go on,” he said to his cousin, under the tuba. “They are waiting.”

“For what?”

“I do not know,” said Alexander. “You are the landlord.”

---

They were put at a table in the middle of the hall, which was cleared for them, by its occupants, who were from Rosenheim, and who took their glasses and their pork knuckles and stood behind the bench in a row and watched them sit down with the satisfaction of people who have given up their table to a King and will be able to say so at home.

The woman in the dirndl came with the glasses. She came down the middle of the hall between the tables with five litre glasses in her two hands, two and three, full to the brim, gold, with a white head an inch thick on each, held high, over everybody’s heads, and the hall cheered her all the way down, and she set them on the table, one, two, three, four, and the fifth, last, in front of the King, with a bang that slopped the head over the side and down the glass and across the table.

“Maß,” she said. “Für den Wirt.” And then, in English, wiping her hands: “A litre. For the landlord. From Bavaria. We see you in August in America. We see you in Hanover the year before.” She pointed at him with a red finger. “You pull the beer badly.”

“I know,” said his cousin.

“Very badly,” said the woman, with tremendous warmth, and patted his cheek, actually patted it, twice, and went back up the hall.

His cousin sat with the litre glass in front of him and his cheek where it had been patted and looked at it.

“Five,” said Alexander.

“That’s not even from anybody,” said his cousin. “That’s from the waitress.”

“It is from Bavaria. She said so.” Alexander picked up his own glass, which was very heavy, and needed both hands, as everything he had ever been given needed both hands. “That is five.”

Jack had picked up his. Jack was holding it in one hand, by the handle, the way a landlady’s son holds a litre glass, with the wrist straight and the weight on the forearm, and looking at it with respect.

“This,” said Jack, “is a proper glass.”

“It holds a litre,” said Lukas.

They all looked at him.

He was sitting at the end of the bench with his own glass in front of him, untouched, and his hands in his lap, and he had said it to the glass, quite quietly, as if stating a fact about a planet.

That was three.

---

The bandleader came down at one o’clock.

He was a large red-faced man with a white moustache waxed into points and a green felt hat with a shaving brush in the band of it, and he came down off the stage of planks with his baton in his hand, between the tables, with the band behind him still playing something slow and swaying, and the hall turned to watch him come, and he stopped at the end of the table where the King of Hanover sat with a litre of Bavarian beer in front of him and a patted cheek, and bowed, from the waist, with a flourish of the baton.

“Majestät,” he said. “Darf ich bitten?”

May I ask?

He held out the baton, handle first.

His cousin looked at the baton. Then, over the litre glass, at Alexander. And Alexander, who had stood on the dais in the Marble Hall that morning for two hours in the uniform of the First Foot Guards being handed things by people from eleven provinces, and had known the whole time exactly what to do with each of them, looked back at his cousin across the table and felt something he had not felt before in his life, which was the luxury of not having to know.

“Go on,” he said. “You are the landlord.”

His cousin took the baton.

He went up to the stage. He went up the hall between the tables with the bandleader in front of him and two hundred Bavarians standing on the benches on either side, roaring, and climbed the plank steps on to the stage, in the black overcoat, among eight men in leather shorts, and turned round and faced the band with the baton in his hand, and looked at it, and at them, with the expression of a man who has been given a scalpel in a corridor.

The band waited.

He lifted the baton. He lifted it the way Alexander had once seen him lift a gold cord at a water treatment works, carefully, as though it might come away in his hand. The band watched it go up. The whole hall watched it go up. And he held it there, at the top, for a long moment, in the silence, the first silence there had been in the Hofbräu Wirtshaus since they came in; and then, because he did not know what else to do, and because Theo, at the table, had stood up on the bench and was shouting something at him through cupped hands, he brought it down.

The band played Ein Prosit.

It was the only thing, Alexander thought afterwards, that they could have played. It was the only thing every Bavarian band in the world played when a stranger brought down a baton, because it was eight bars long and it was the toast, and everybody in the hall knew it, and it ended with everybody drinking; and two hundred Bavarians on the benches roared it, Ein Prosit, ein Prosit, der Gemütlichkeit, with their glasses up, and swayed, and his cousin stood on the stage with the baton in his hand conducting it, badly, with great seriousness, four beats in a bar when it was three, and at the end of it, when the band stopped and the hall shouted Oans, zwoa, drei, g’suffa! and two hundred glasses went to two hundred mouths, Theo, at the table, standing on the bench, shouted PROST! louder than all of them, in the voice of a pensioner from Sheboygan, and Alexander, sitting below him, unrecognised, with a litre of beer in both hands, laughed out loud.

He did not know he was going to. It came out of him all at once, in the middle of the hall, a sound he had not made in public in four years and eleven months, since a February morning in 2028, and he could not stop it, and nobody looked round, because two hundred people were shouting and drinking and he was only a young man at a table laughing at his friend on a stage.

Lukas, at the end of the bench, was watching him.

He did not say anything. He had used up his three. But he picked up his own glass, at last, in both hands, and raised it an inch toward Alexander across the table, and drank.

---

At ten past one his cousin came back down from the stage, with the bandleader’s green felt hat on his head, because the bandleader had put it there at the end and would not take it back, and the shaving brush in it nodding, and sat down at the table, and put his face in his hands.

“Why,” said his cousin, into his hands, “does this keep happening?”

“Because they saw you,” said Alexander. “In August. And in Hanover. They saw you be a person.” He drank some of his beer, which was cold and heavy and tasted of bread and of something sweeter than bread. “Nobody has ever seen me be a person. They have seen me be a uniform.”

His cousin took his face out of his hands and looked at him across the table, under the green hat.

“Is that why we’re here?”

“Partly,” said Alexander. “Partly I wanted to know what it felt like. To be in a room where nobody looks.” He turned the litre glass slowly on the table by its handle. “And partly I wanted you to see what you are. Here. In my country. You do not know. You think you are a boy who pulls a pint badly in a dive in the Fourth Ward. You are not. You are the most loved man in Germany who is not German.” He paused. “It is useful to know that. Before you decide anything.”

His cousin looked at him for a long time under the green hat with the shaving brush in it.

“You planned that too,” he said. “Didn’t you.”

“I put it on the programme,” said Alexander, “between the Last Instance and Clärchens.” He took it out of his coat and unfolded it on the table, among the litre glasses and the wet, and showed him: a line, in the same square pencil, that had no time beside it and no place, only three words, which he had written in the dome at a quarter to two in the morning on the tenth of December and nearly rubbed out three times.

Zeigen, was er ist.

“Show him what he is,” said Alexander, and folded it up again, and put it away, and made the tick in his head instead, because the paper was wet.