This week in the saga

Christmas week, and he keeps two ledgers at once. On Christmas Eve morning the outgoing president commutes thirty-seven death sentences and he answers within three hours with a promise to reverse the direction of the machinery the moment he is sworn in. On Christmas Day at a quarter to three he posts a greeting to the soldiers of another country operating a canal he intends to take back, and it is genuinely impossible to read where the joke ends. That afternoon he tells the story of standing beside the greatest hockey player alive and suggesting he run for prime minister of a country that will shortly be a state, and he means the demotion sincerely and the affection sincerely too. At twenty to six he writes that this will be the best Christmas of our lifetime, because of what is going to come, and for once nobody has to guess what he means. Then on Sunday evening a president dies at a hundred years old — a man he spent years insulting — and the notice he writes is unguarded, respectful and short. Both ledgers, in the same week, in the same hand.