But her poor stupid husband wouldn’t listen to her when they were fleeing Prague. He was too horrified by the loss of his army and of his throne and only muttered again and again that it had been a mistake to accept the Bohemian crown. Everyone who mattered had told him that it was a mistake, everyone, time and again, but in his stupidity he had listened to the wrong people.
By which he meant her, of course.
“I listened to the wrong people!” he said again, just loud enough that she could hear it, as the coach—the least conspicuous one they had—left the capital.
At that moment she realized that he would not forgive her for this. But he would still love her, just as she loved him. The nature of marriage consisted not only in the fact that you had children, it also consisted of all the wounds you had inflicted on each other, all the mistakes you had made together, all the things you held against each other forever. He would not forgive her for persuading him to accept the crown, just as she would not forgive him for having always been too stupid for her. Everything would have been simpler if only he had been somewhat quicker-witted. In the beginning she had thought she would be able to change this, but then she had recognized that nothing could be done. That disappointment had never entirely faded, and whenever he entered a room with his well-bred firm steps or she looked into his beautiful face, she felt at the same time as love a slight pang.
She raised the curtain and looked out the coach window. Prague: the second capital of the world, the center of scholarship, the old seat of the Kaiser, the Venice of the East. Despite the darkness, the contours of the castle could be made out, illuminated by the glow of countless tongues of fire.
“We shall return,” she said, although even now she no longer believed it. But she knew that the only way to endure a flight was to cling to a promise. “You are the King of Bohemia, as God wills. You shall return.”
And as awful as it was, there was still something about this moment that pleased her. It reminded her of the theater: acts of state, a crown changing heads, a great lost battle. All that was missing was a speech.
For here too Friedrich had failed. When he had hastily taken leave of his followers, who were pale with worry, that would have been the moment for a speech; he would have had to climb onto a table and speak. Someone would have committed it to memory, someone taken it down and passed it on. A great speech would have made him immortal. But naturally nothing had occurred to him, he had mumbled something unintelligible, and then he and she were out the door, on the way into exile. And all the noble Bohemian lords whose names she had never been able to pronounce, all the Vrshvitshkys, Prtshkatrts, and Tshrrkattrrs that the court tutor responsible for the Czech language had whispered in her ear at every reception without her ever being able to repeat them, would no longer live to see the dawn of the new year. The Kaiser was not playing games.
“It’s all right,” she whispered in the coach, without meaning it, for it was not all right. “It’s all right, it’s all right.”
“I should not have accepted the damned crown!”
“It’s all right.”
“I listened to the wrong people.”
“It’s all right!”
“Is it still possible to go back?” he whispered. “To make a change? With an astrologer? It would have to work, wouldn’t it, with the help of the stars, what do you think?”
“Yes, perhaps,” she replied, without knowing what he meant. And when she stroked his tearstained face, she thought, strangely enough, of their wedding night. She had known nothing, no one had deemed it necessary to explain such things to a princess, whereas someone had apparently told him that it was quite simple, you just had to take the woman, she would be shy at first, but then you seized her; you had to meet her with strength and determination like an adversary in battle. He must have been trying to follow this advice. But when suddenly he grabbed hold of her, she thought he had gone mad, and since he was a head shorter than she, she shook him off and said: “Stop this nonsense!” He made another attempt, and she pushed him away so hard that he staggered into the sideboard: A carafe shattered, and for the rest of her life she remembered the puddle on the stone inlays, on which three rose petals floated like little ships. There had been three—that she remembered clearly.
He straightened up and tried again.
And since she had noticed that she was stronger, she didn’t cry for help, but only held him firmly by the wrists. He could not break free. Gasping, he pulled; gasping, she held him; their eyes wide with fear, they stared at each other.
“Stop it,” she said.
He began to weep.
And as she would later in the coach, she whispered: “It’s all right, it’s all right!” and sat down on the edge of the bed and stroked his head.
He pulled himself together, tried one last time and grabbed at her breast. She slapped his face. Almost with relief he gave up. She gave him a kiss on the cheek. He sighed. Then he curled up, slipped so deep under the blanket that even his head could no longer be seen, and fell asleep immediately.
Only a few weeks later they conceived their first son.
He was a kind child, alert and as if suffused with light, he had bright eyes and a clear voice, and he was beautiful like his father and clever like Liz, and she remembered distinctly his rocking horse and a little castle he built out of little wooden blocks and how with a high, strong voice he had sung English songs, instructed by her. At the age of fifteen he drowned under a capsized ferryboat. They had lost children before, but never so late. When the children were little, you expected it almost daily, but they had become accustomed to this one for fifteen years, he had grown up before their eyes, and then, all at once, he was gone. She found herself thinking about him all the time, and always about the moments when he was trapped under the overturned vessel, yet when she managed to put him out of her mind, he only haunted her dreams all the more vividly.
But she knew nothing about this yet on their wedding night; nor did she know it later in the coach when they were fleeing Prague; only now did she know it, in the house at The Hague that they called their royal residence, even though it was only a villa with two floors: downstairs the sitting room, which they called the reception hall and sometimes even the throne room, and a kitchen, which they called the servants’ wing, and the little annex, which they called the stables, and on the second floor their bedroom, which they called their apartments. In front was a garden, which they called the park, surrounded by a hedge too infrequently trimmed.
She could never keep track of how many people were living with them. There were lady’s maids, there was a cook, there was Count Hudenitz—an old idiot who had fled Prague with them and whom Friedrich had without further ado appointed chancellor—there was a gardener, who was also the stable master, which didn’t mean much, since they had barely any animals in the stable, and there was a lackey, who announced the guests with a loud voice and afterward served the food. One day she realized that the lackey and the cook didn’t merely resemble each other, as she had previously thought, but were one and the same—how had she not noticed it before? The servants lived in the servants’ wing, except for the cook, who slept in the foyer, and the gardener, who spent the night in the throne room with his wife, if she was his wife, Liz was not sure, it was beneath the dignity of a queen to concern herself with such things, but the woman was round and winsome and a dependable minder of the children. Nele and the fool slept upstairs in the corridor, or perhaps they didn’t sleep at all; Liz never saw them sleep. Housekeeping not being her forte, she left it to the majordomo, who, incidentally, also cooked.