The Kaiser swung the axe again but this time it bounced violently, jarring his arm as if the log – oak, it looked like – were stone. It was a knotted old log, cross-grained, compacted, irreducible. He blamed Bismarck because he had been thinking of him. Even from his grave that cross-grained old man with the soul of a Pomeranian tenant-farmer still had the power to interpose himself wherever you looked, to make everything awkward, to turn things into problems which only he could solve. They were barely more than peasants, those Bismarcks, all of them. Their servants pulled wine corks with the bottles between their knees in front of you and there were always dogs around the table. The old man fed the dogs from his dinner plate, holding it while they licked it. Perhaps it was the very plate that he himself, the Kaiser, might have eaten from next time. That was a metaphor: Bismarck really cared more for his dog than for his Kaiser.
The Kaiser lowered his axe to the ground and, using the shaft as a prop, carefully lifted one foot. With the hard toe of his boot he nudged the knotted log off the chopping block, a massive section of beech trunk. Then he let go of the axe and stooped to pick up another log. It was hard with one hand because the log was too wide to grip and he had to roll it up the side of the beech trunk. When he was younger he might have exercised his left arm by trying to ease the log into a central position on the block, but he didn’t bother much with that arm now. A withered, blighted thing, from birth three inches shorter than its mate, he could hold with it but not lift or push much. God and he alone knew the youthful effort it cost him to learn to ride and to shoot, to learn above all not to be handicapped by this handicap. God had given it to him to make him tough, he had long ago decided. Years of solitary practice, holding oars out straight, had made his good right arm stronger than most men’s two arms, with a grip that had been compared to that of John Sullivan, the boxing champion. But even John Sullivan was then. Who spoke of him now?
The axe split the new log clean, with a crack that echoed through the trees around the woodshed. Most men could not swing an axe with two arms as he still swung with one. There were plenty of trees ready for felling, more than he had days.
‘Your Highness! Your Royal Highness!’
The Kaiser leant on his axe, turning slowly. The new Dutch maid was running through the rough grass bordering the park and the trees, clutching her white apron in one hand and waving with the other. When she called again he realised he had heard her before swinging at that last log but had not registered it. That happened, nowadays. He waited. He had heard and uttered many urgent summonses in life but now, robbed of their temporary urgency, it was clear that the things that would happen, happened, whether or not you buzzed about like a demented bluebottle. These days, he felt, there was nothing left to be urgent about. What would come would come soon enough, in its own time, and until then one chopped wood and shrugged one’s shoulders at the world. He would not be hurried.
‘– Highness!’
She almost stumbled in the last few yards. She was called Akki, his wife had told him. Breathlessness made her prettier than ever. A wisp of dark hair had come adrift from her bun and her smooth cheeks were coloured. Such beautiful skin, almost olive; he always wanted to touch it. Her grey eyes were quiet and thoughtful, cold as a March wind. Yet it was her hands above all that he looked for, slender, white, quick, full of energy but composed and controlled. With him it had always been the hands. First his mother’s, then those of her friends and then – well, as many as he could get, in his youth. Beloved Dona, his first wife, she had good hands, but she knew what hands meant to him and throughout their marriage had ensured that all female servants had hands either like chicken claws or overgrown potatoes. She would never have permitted Akki to join the household. But Hermo, his new wife, did not know about this thing of his.
‘– Highness!’ The girl stood panting before him, her grey eyes widened, one hand still clutching her apron. ‘Highness, they have come. The Germans. They are here. Princess Hermine begs you to receive them. They are at the gate lodge.’
The Kaiser nodded. So the German Army was reunited with its Kaiser. The sky was not rent asunder, no fiery angels appeared, the voice of God remained silent. No longer the Kaiser’s army, of course, but that fellow Hitler’s, a corporal’s army now. They would more likely view him as their prisoner than their king, unless – but it was useless to speculate. It had come to something when it was hard to take any interest in one’s future. He was more interested in this girl’s accent. She came from Friesland, Hermo had said, so Fries was presumably her first language, Dutch her second, German evidently her third. There was something odd about her German, not an accent – she had none – but more her speech rhythm, her way of saying things. It reminded him of his grandmother, Queen Victoria, whose German was similarly fluent and unaccented but with something of the same difference. Not that pretty little Akki, with her hypnotic hands, was in any way like Grandmama.
‘Where are you from?’ he asked. Her surprise was gratifying. It was always good to surprise them a little.
‘From Leeuwarden, your Highness.’ She went on, evidently thinking he had not understood her. ‘The Princess begs you to come to the house because German soldiers have arrived. They have invaded Holland, as your Highness knows, and now they have come to see you. There is an officer with them. They are talking to our soldiers – your Dutch guard – at the gate lodge. The officer is from Schutzstaffel – SS.’
She used the term familiarly. Perhaps, like him, the Dutch people had studied Corporal Hitler’s armed forces.
But he was Kaiser still, even if unrecognised in his own land. The Kaiser did not dance attendance upon people; they came to him, whether they called themselves SS or Wehrmacht or the Pink Lederhosen. ‘Tell the Empress I shall join her when I have finished here,’ he said. ‘And beg her to invite the Dutch guard commander, Major van Houten, for lunch.’ He bent slowly and scooped up another log with his right hand. The girl bobbed a curtsey, backed a few steps, then turned and walked composedly through the rough grass towards the house. The morning dew lingered in the shade of the trees and she again clutched her apron. A pretty thing, he thought. Without doubt, were he a young man again, he would have sought to know her better, servant or no servant.
This log, too, he split with gratifying ease, plumb down the middle. It fell open like the book of life before God, a perfect symmetry. He would sign the two halves and give them to visitors or deserving Dutch locals. They seemed to appreciate signed logs as much as his books. Perhaps the logs stood for books he had never written.
He looked up at the barking of a dog. Arno, Hermo’s bad-tempered German Shepherd, was bounding across the lawn towards the Dutch girl as if she were a stranger. She stopped and faced the dog. Her admonitions were firm, but taut and nervous. The dog had taken against her from the day of her arrival, and she obviously feared him. Mind you, Arno disliked most people, and sometimes he bit them. That could be quite funny. A green woodpecker laughed raucously in the trees. The Kaiser resumed his chopping.
After four more logs he lay down his axe. He had stayed long enough to show that he was in no hurry but not so long as seriously to upset Hermo, who would be excited and nervous. He strolled back along the track through the trees, contemplating his fine brick house as it came into view. It was a modest establishment compared with all his others, of course, but it was regularly and properly built, handsome in its own way. They had made many improvements so that it was now quite comfortable, even for the servants, and he had opened part of the park to the people of Doorn. From the day he arrived they had treated him with proper respect. Perhaps they had heard of his generosity to the people of Amerongen, the castle and village a few kilometres away where he had stayed when first in exile. He had built