Clärchens

They came into the Auguststrasse at nineteen minutes to two, and the programme said ten to, and Alexander discovered that being early was as uncomfortable as being late, and in exactly the same place.

He stopped at the corner under the lamp and took out the programme to look at it, although he knew what it said. 01.50. Clärchens. Nine minutes. He had never in his life been nine minutes early for anything. The Household did not permit it. A sovereign who arrives early catches his hosts with their coats half on and their speeches in their pockets, and the Hofmarschall’s office allowed for it in the same way it allowed for rain, by standing him somewhere out of sight with a watch until the minute came. There was nobody to stand him anywhere. There was the Auguststrasse, a long quiet street of tall old houses with the snow lying on the sills of the windows and on the roofs of the parked cars, and a church at the far end, dark, and halfway along, on the left, a gap in the row where a house should have been and was not, and in the gap, set back behind railings and a front garden, a long low building with lights in its windows and music coming out of it.

“Is that it?” said Theo.

“That is it.”

Theo looked up and down the street. He looked at every parked car in the Auguststrasse, one by one, from the near end to the far, the way the small upright shape in the passenger seat had looked at the windows of the beer hall, and Alexander watched him do it and thought that Theo Hartigan had learned more about protection in five years as the friend of a King than most of the officers of the Prussian department had learned in twenty.

“No grey car,” said Theo.

“No.”

“So she was wrong. About the second-nearest place.”

“Or she is round the corner,” said Alexander, “parked facing the way out.” He folded the programme and put it away. “We will go in. If we stand here for nine minutes we will be the only five men in the street, and that is the fourth rule.”

---

The front garden was a garden in summer. He had seen photographs: long tables under the trees, lights strung between the branches, people eating in the evening in their shirtsleeves. In January it was a yard of trodden snow with the tables stacked against the wall under tarpaulins and the strings of lights still up, bare bulbs, unlit, swinging a little in the wind between the black trees, and a path dug through the snow to the door.

The house had been a ballroom since 1913. It had been opened in that year by a woman called Clara, whom everybody had called Clärchen, and it had kept her name for a hundred and twenty years and through everything the hundred and twenty years had done to Berlin, and it had kept, so far as Alexander could see, everything else as well. The door was the same door. The cloakroom inside the door was a hatch in the wall with a woman behind it and a hundred coats on hooks, and she took four overcoats and a cape and gave them five brass tokens without looking up, and Alexander held his token in his hand and looked at it, because it was the first time anybody had ever taken his coat and given him something in return to prove it was his.

Then they went through the inner doors into the ballroom, and he stopped.

It was a long room with a high ceiling and a wooden floor, and the floor was the thing he saw first, because it was full. There were perhaps sixty couples on it, dancing, turning slowly under the lights, and they were of every age it was possible to be: a girl and a boy of about sixteen, holding each other at arm’s length as though each of them might go off; two old men in cardigans, dancing together, beautifully; a woman of eighty with a man of thirty who might have been her grandson and was steering her as if she were made of glass; students; a couple in evening dress who had evidently come on from somewhere grander and preferred this; a very tall man and a very short woman, laughing. At the far end, on a small stage, there was a band of four, piano and bass and drums and a clarinet, and behind the band, from the ceiling to the floor, there hung a curtain made entirely of silver tinsel, thousands of strands of it, which moved when the doors opened and threw the light about the room in small trembling pieces, so that the whole floor of dancers turned in a slow shower of silver.

Round the edges of the floor there were small tables with white cloths and candles in bottles, and at the tables people were eating and drinking and watching the dancers, and the band was playing a foxtrot, and nobody stopped.

That was what he noticed. Nobody stopped. His cousin came through the inner doors behind him, in the black overcoat that the cloakroom had not taken because he had not given it, and still in the bandleader’s green felt hat with the shaving brush in it, which he had forgotten he was wearing, and Alexander waited for the room to stop, as the Meierei had stopped, and the carriage of the S7, and the Last Instance, and two hundred Bavarians on their benches.

The room did not stop. A man at the nearest table, a Berliner of about sixty with a moustache and a glass of beer, looked up, and looked at the King of Hanover in the doorway in a Bavarian hat, and looked at him for about a second.

“Na,” said the man, to nobody. “Der König.”

And went back to his beer.

The woman with him did not look up at all. The foxtrot went on. The silver curtain moved and settled. Sixty couples turned on the wooden floor of a ballroom that had seen the Kaiser’s soldiers dancing before they went to the First Great War, and their sons before they went to the Second, and everybody since, and had evidently decided some time ago that a King in the doorway was not, on its own, a reason to miss a beat.

His cousin let out a breath that he seemed to have been holding since Potsdam.

“Oh, thank God,” he said. “Berliners.”

“Yes,” said Alexander. “They will not make a fuss of you. They regard it as provincial.”

---

They were given a table by the wall, at the side of the floor, under a window, and Jack went to the bar to ask about last orders and came back with five glasses of something and the expression of a man who has asked a question and been answered with a shrug.

“She says they close when the last one goes home,” said Jack. “I said, but what time is that. She said, it depends on the last one.” He sat down heavily. “It’s like the whole city’s run by somebody who’s never been told no.”

“It is run by the Magistrat,” said Alexander. “Which is told no very often, by me.”

They sat and watched the dancers. Alexander watched them as he watched everything, closely, counting, and found that he could not count them, because they would not keep still, and that the band played a foxtrot and then a slow waltz and then something with a Latin rhythm that the two old men in cardigans clearly knew and nobody else did, and that the floor emptied for it, all but the two old men, who danced it alone in the shower of silver with their heads up and their faces perfectly serious while the whole room watched them and at the end applauded, and the old men bowed, and went back to their table, and the floor filled again.

He thought he had never seen anything so ordinary or so beautiful in his life, and he had been to the opera in four capitals.

It was during the waltz that the women from Hanover saw them.

He heard them before he saw them. There was a sound from a table at the far corner of the room, by the band, which was not a scream, quite, but was the sound four women make together when they have all seen the same thing at the same moment and are each trying to be the first to say so; and he looked, and there they were, four women of about fifty in good coats and good shoes, at a table with a bottle of Sekt in a bucket and the remains of a cake with candles in it, all four of them half out of their chairs and staring across the floor at the table under the window.

“Oh no,” said his cousin.

“Who are they?”

“I don’t know. I don’t know. But I think they know me.” He pulled the green felt hat down an inch, as though that would help, which it did not. “They’ve got a cake.”

Alexander watched the four women confer. They conferred as women confer at a table when something must be decided quickly and properly: with their heads together over the cake, all talking at once, and one of them, the one in the red scarf, pointing across the room, and another, with glasses on a chain round her neck, shaking her head, and then pointing in a slightly different direction. And then the one with the glasses got up, and smoothed her skirt, and came round the edge of the floor between the tables, past the band, past the silver curtain, past the dancers, with great determination, toward the table under the window.

She did not come to his cousin.

She came to Alexander.

She stopped beside his chair and bent down, because the band was loud, and put her hand on his arm, on the sleeve of the First Foot Guards under the navy coat, which he had not taken off, and said, in German, in the German of Hanover, which is the cleanest German in the world and knows it:

“Entschuldigung. Excuse me. You are with him? With the King?”

Alexander looked up at her.

“Yes,” he said.

“We were at the Bear,” she said. “In Hanover. In October, the year before last. The Friday. The four of us. We were at the bar, at the end by the window. He poured my friend’s husband a Broyhan and spilled half of it on his shoes, and my friend’s husband has never cleaned them. He keeps them in a box.” She glanced back across the room at the table with the cake, where the other three were watching with their hands clasped. “It is Renate’s birthday. Her fiftieth. We came to Berlin for it. We have been here since six. And now he walks in.” She took a breath. “Would you ask him? Would you ask him if he would dance with her? Only one dance. It is her birthday. She would never ask herself. We would never ask him ourselves. But you are his friend.” She squeezed his arm. “You could pass it on.”

---

Nobody had ever asked him for an introduction.

He sat at the table under the window with a woman from Hanover holding his arm and understood this, fully, for the first time, at nineteen, at a quarter to two in the morning. He had been asked for a great many things in his life. He had been asked for his signature, his consent, his presence, his patronage, his opinion, his blessing, his photograph, his hand, and once, by a child in Breslau, for his crown, to try on. He had never been asked to pass a word to somebody more important. There had never been anybody more important. He had always been the end of the line, the place where the asking stopped.

Lukas had been asked for introductions since he was nine.

He looked across the table at Lukas, who was sitting with his back to the wall and his glass untouched in front of him, watching, and he thought of Lukas at the gate of the school at ten, with older boys round him, and at the café where Lukas’s mother worked, with strangers at the counter asking for nothing but a look at him, and at every reception for ten years at which somebody had found the Emperor’s friend in a corner and leaned down and put a hand on his arm and said, you could pass it on. And Lukas had passed it on, or not, according to rules that he had made himself, at nine, and had never written down, and had kept for ten years without once being thanked.

Lukas looked back at him across the table. He did not say anything. But one corner of his mouth moved, very slightly, and Alexander understood that Lukas knew exactly what was happening to him, and was enjoying it more than anything that had happened all night.

“Yes,” said Alexander to the woman from Hanover. “I will ask him.”

He stood up. He went round the table to his cousin, who was sitting very still under the green hat with the face of a man who has heard every word, and bent down, as the woman had bent down, and said, formally, in English, because it was the language they had always used for the things that mattered:

“Four ladies from Hanover would like to know whether the King of Hanover dances. It is Renate’s fiftieth birthday.”

His cousin looked up at him.

“Which one is Renate?”

“I do not know,” said Alexander. “I have passed it on. That is the whole of my function.”

---

His cousin danced with all four of them.

He danced with Renate first, the one in the red scarf, whose fiftieth birthday it was, a foxtrot, and he danced it the way he did most things he had not been taught, which was badly and with total commitment, and Renate, who had danced it properly all her life, steered him round the floor through the shower of silver as though he were a large and willing dog on a lead, and laughed all the way round, and the whole of Clärchens watched them, now, at last, and smiled, and did not stop dancing. Then he danced with the one with the glasses, and then with the third, who was very small and danced on her toes, and then with the fourth, who had said nothing at all and turned out to dance better than anybody in the room except the two old men, and who took the King of Hanover once round the floor in a quickstep at a speed that made the band laugh and lifted the silver curtain in their wind.

When he came back to the table he was pink to the ears and out of breath and the green felt hat was over one eye, and Renate came with him, and with her came the bottle of Sekt from the bucket, and a glass, which she filled and put into his hand and closed his fingers round with both of hers.

“Für den König,” she said. “From Hanover. For dancing so badly.”

“Six,” said Alexander.

“That’s not fair,” said his cousin. “That’s for a dance.”

“It is a drink,” said Alexander. “It was bought for you by a stranger. It is six.”

Renate looked at Alexander, then, properly, for the first time, the young man in the navy coat who had passed it on, and he waited, out of habit, to be recognised, as he had waited all night; and she looked at him with great kindness, as a woman of fifty looks at a boy of nineteen who is standing at the edge of a dance floor while his friend is the one being danced with, and said:

“And you, young man? Do you dance?”

---

He had been taught.

He had been taught at eleven, in the Marble Hall of the Neues Palais, on Thursday afternoons, by a dancing master who had taught his father and his grandfather and who had come out from Berlin every week with a gramophone and a pupil of his own to stand in as the lady, and had taught him the waltz, the slow foxtrot, the polonaise and the quadrille, which were the dances a German Emperor might be required to perform at a state ball, in that order of likelihood, with a Grand Duchess. He had performed them since twice, at two state balls, with two Grand Duchesses, in front of four hundred people, without a single error, and both times he had counted every step under his breath from the first bar to the last, and both times the Grand Duchesses had told the newspapers afterwards that His Majesty danced with great correctness, which was what Grand Duchesses said instead of the truth.

The band was playing a waltz. He took Renate’s hand and her waist exactly where the dancing master had shown him, at the correct height, with the correct distance between them, which was the width of a hand, and led her out on to the floor, and began.

Eins, zwei, drei.

He did not know he was saying it aloud until she laughed.

He took her round the floor of Clärchens in the shower of silver as he had taken the Grand Duchesses round the Weisser Saal of the Imperial Palace, precisely, on the beat, every turn at the correct point in the bar, every step the same length as the step before it, his back straight, his head up, his eyes fixed on a point over her right shoulder, as the dancing master had required, so that he would not look down; and he steered her between the other couples the way he would have steered a ship between buoys, and he did not once tread on her foot, and he did not once smile, because he was counting.

“Eins, zwei, drei,” said Renate, along with him, laughing. “Eins, zwei, drei. You count!”

“I always count.”

“You dance,” she said, “like a timetable.”

He considered this. It was, he thought, the most accurate thing anybody had said about his dancing in his life, including the dancing master.

“Is that bad?”

“No, no.” She patted his shoulder as they turned. “It is very restful. One always knows where one will be.” She looked up at him with her head on one side. “What do you do, young man? Are you a student?”

“No,” he said. Eins, zwei, drei. “I read papers, mostly. And sign them.”

“A clerk.”

“In a way.”

“For which ministry?”

He thought about it honestly, as he had been taught to think about every question honestly, on the turn, at the correct point in the bar.

“Most of them,” he said.

Renate laughed again, and squeezed his hand, and said, with tremendous warmth, in the voice of a woman who has a son of her own somewhere about his age and worries about him, “It will get better. They will promote you. A boy who counts like that, they will promote you in no time”; and the waltz ended, and he stopped, exactly on the last beat, and stepped back the width of a hand, and bowed to her from the neck, as the dancing master had taught him, as he had bowed to the Grand Duchesses.

She curtseyed. It was a small curtsey, half a joke, the curtsey of a woman from Hanover who had seen the court on television; and then she kissed him on both cheeks, and went back to her table and her friends and her cake, and did not look back, and had no idea.

He stood on the floor of Clärchens in the shower of silver with his cheeks kissed and thought that he would remember that he had been told he would be promoted for the rest of his life.

---

The mirror hall was upstairs.

They went up at five past two, the five of them, because Theo had read on his phone that it was there and wanted to see it, and because Alexander had it on the programme, in small letters, under 01.50, with no time of its own: Spiegelsaal. The stair went up from the side of the ballroom, a wide wooden stair with a worn rail, and at the top there was a pair of doors, and beyond them a room.

It was the old ballroom, the grand one, for the grand occasions, and it was empty. Nobody was dancing in it tonight. The lights were low, a few lamps on the walls and the candles in a great old chandelier that had been lit, he supposed, for the sake of it, and the floor was a dark parquet that had been danced on until it shone like water, and the walls were lined from the wainscot to the ceiling with tall old mirrors in gilt frames, and the mirrors were old enough to have gone grey and soft and spotted at the edges, like the surface of a pond with frost on it, so that everything in them looked as though it were being remembered rather than reflected.

He walked out into the middle of the floor and stood there.

There were a great many of him. That was the thing about a mirror hall: the mirrors faced each other across the room, and each of them held the others, and he stood in the middle of it and went away from himself in every direction in long grey corridors of gilt, smaller and smaller and fainter and fainter, a young man in a navy overcoat with a red collar at the throat and the boots of the First Foot Guards showing at the hem, a hundred of him, a thousand, all the way down into the grey.

He looked at them for a long time.

He had seen his own face more often than any person of nineteen in the Empire. It was on every office wall in Prussia. It was on the coins in his pocket. It was in the newspapers every morning, in the Household’s albums, on the stamps, in the oil painting in the Reichstag that had been done at fifteen and in which he looked, Charlotte said, like a boy waiting to be told he could leave. He had never in his life looked at it in a room where nobody else was looking at it at the same time.

Nobody was. Theo was at the window, looking down at the garden. Jack was looking at the chandelier and calculating, Alexander could see, what it would cost to keep lit. Lukas had sat down on a gilt chair by the wall, with his hands in his lap, and was watching the doors. And his cousin had come in behind them all and stood just inside the doors, with the green felt hat in his hand now, at last, and was looking not at the mirrors but at Alexander, in the middle of the floor, among the thousand of him.

Alexander saw him, in the mirrors. A thousand of his cousin, in a thousand doorways, looking.

“Alex,” said his cousin.

He did not often say it. Nobody said it. It was a name from before, from the summers at Herrenhausen when they were small, before either of them had a number after his name; and his cousin said it now, quietly, from the doorway of the mirror hall, in a voice that Alexander had heard him use perhaps four times in their lives.

“Yes.”

“Can we talk?” His cousin turned the green felt hat round once in his hands. “Just us. Somewhere.” He glanced at the stair behind him, at the dim wooden landing between the mirror hall and the music, where the sound of the band came up from below. “There,” he said. “On the stairs.”

Alexander looked at him for a moment longer, in the mirrors and out of them.

Then he took out the programme, and looked at it, and found that there was nothing on it for this, because he had not known, in the dome on the tenth of December, that there would be; and he folded it again without making a mark, and put it away, and went.