Concerning the Maintenance of Signs Whose Meaning Has Been Misplaced

The café was wrong. I had chosen it because its menu was printed in two languages, which seemed thematically appropriate, but when I sat down I discovered that both languages said the same thing and neither was the language of the country we were in. Kafka was already there, as I somehow knew he would be, occupying a corner table with a cup of something dark that had gone cold. He was reading a newspaper, or rather holding a newspaper open to a page he had no intention of reading — a kind of prop, I thought, the way some people hold cigarettes without smoking them.

Orwell arrived four minutes late and apologized for it, which told me everything about the dynamic that would follow. Kafka did not apologize for being early. People who arrive early never do. They treat their own punctuality as a weather event — something that happened to them, not something they performed.

“A greengrocer,” I said, once the waiter had taken Orwell’s order and ignored mine. “A man who has been displaying a sign in his shop window for eleven years. He doesn’t know what it says. The sign breaks, and he spends the day trying to replace it.”

Kafka set down his newspaper. He did not fold it. “Why eleven years?”

“It felt right. Long enough that the routine has calcified. Not so long that anyone would find it remarkable.”

“Eleven is a number that doesn’t round,” Kafka said. “Ten years would be a milestone. Twelve would suggest something cyclical. Eleven is just — continuation.”

“Like a lease no one remembers signing,” Orwell said. He had ordered black coffee and was drinking it as though it were medicine — necessary, not pleasant. “I want to understand the political situation. What is the sign? Who mandated it? Is there a party, a government, a bureau of signs?”

“There’s a sign office,” I said. “He goes there to get a replacement.”

“No. Before the offices. Before the bureaucracy. What is the system?” Orwell leaned forward, and I noticed his hands were large and rough, workman’s hands, which made sense and also didn’t. “You can’t write about compliance without knowing what’s being complied with. Kafka can, maybe. I can’t.”

Kafka looked at him with what I initially mistook for irritation but was actually interest. “You think I don’t know what my characters are complying with?”

“I think you don’t care.”

“That’s different.”

“Is it?”

There was a pause. The waiter returned with my coffee, which I had not ordered, and which turned out to be exactly what I wanted. This was either excellent service or a mild violation of my autonomy, and I could not decide which.

“The system doesn’t need to be named,” I said, attempting diplomacy. “This isn’t a historical allegory. It’s about the mechanism of compliance — how it perpetuates itself after the original purpose is gone.”

“Everything is a historical allegory,” Orwell said, flatly. “You just haven’t decided which history yet.”

Kafka made a sound that might have been agreement. “He’s right that it’s historical. He’s wrong that you need to decide. History decides for you. The reader brings the country.”

“That’s a dodge,” Orwell said.

“It’s a method.”

“It’s the same thing.”

I drank my unsolicited coffee. It was good. The café’s ambiguity was starting to feel less like a flaw and more like a feature — a place that existed in no particular country, serving coffee that belonged to no particular tradition. This was useful. This was the setting I needed.

“Let me try something,” I said. “The greengrocer — his name doesn’t matter, or it matters in a way we’ll get to — he puts the sign up every morning. Takes it down every evening. The sign is in a script he can’t read. He knows it isn’t his language. He doesn’t know whose language it is. He knows only that the sign was given to him by someone in some capacity of authority, and that displaying it is part of the texture of his life, like sweeping the sidewalk or turning the door sign from CLOSED to OPEN.”

“Given to him by whom?” Orwell asked.

“He doesn’t remember.”

“He must remember something.”

“Must he?” Kafka said.

Orwell turned to him. “If a man does something for eleven years and can’t remember why he started, that’s not mystery, that’s brain damage.”

“Or it’s how most people live,” Kafka said, quietly. He picked up his cup, looked into it, set it down again. The gesture was somehow complete in itself, a tiny narrative with a beginning, middle, and end that resolved nothing. “I have been doing my exercises every morning for years. I do not remember who first told me to do them. A doctor, perhaps. Perhaps a pamphlet. The origin has been consumed by the habit.”

“Exercises aren’t political compliance.”

“How would you know?” Kafka said. “You’ve never lived in my body.”

This was, I realized, not a joke. Or it was a joke of the kind Kafka specialized in — one that was funny precisely because it was also the literal truth. Orwell seemed to recognize this too, because he didn’t push back. He just drank his coffee.

“The sign falls,” I continued. “Tuesday morning. It falls and the glass cracks — the sign is laminated, or framed, some kind of protective casing — and the text, whatever it is, is damaged. He can’t just tape it back together. He needs a new one.”

“And so he enters the system,” Kafka said. There was something in his voice that I can only describe as professional satisfaction. A carpenter hearing about a joint that needs fitting.

“He enters the system. He goes to the sign office, which is a real place, a municipal building with operating hours and a queue. He takes a number. He waits. When he reaches the counter, the clerk asks him what the sign said. He doesn’t know. The clerk asks him for the original requisition form. He doesn’t have it. The clerk directs him to the lamination bureau, which is in a different building.”

“Of course it is,” Orwell muttered.

“The lamination bureau sends him to the compliance office. The compliance office sends him to the archives. The archives are closed on Tuesdays.”

Kafka nodded. He was not smiling, but there was a looseness in his face that hadn’t been there before. “The archives should not be closed on a different day each week. They should be closed on Tuesdays specifically, permanently, for a reason that was once explained but has been forgotten.”

“Yes,” I said. “Exactly.”

“And at each office,” Kafka continued, “the official he meets is perfectly polite. Each one is doing their job correctly. The system isn’t broken — it’s working as designed. The design is simply…”

“Insane,” Orwell offered.

“Complete,” Kafka said. “The design is complete. It accounts for everything except the thing the man actually needs.”

Orwell stood up, walked to the window, came back. I don’t think he was aware he’d done it. “Here’s what worries me,” he said. “If the story is only bureaucratic surrealism — only the nightmare of offices — then it’s a clever exercise but it doesn’t matter. The greengrocer’s situation is political. He’s been coerced. Not violently, not overtly, but structurally. The sign in the window is a loyalty oath he performs every morning, and the fact that he can’t read it makes the coercion worse, not better. He doesn’t even get the dignity of knowing what he’s agreed to.”

“But if you make the politics explicit,” I said, “you collapse the universality. It becomes about one regime, one country—”

“Good,” Orwell said. “It should be about one country. Universality is the enemy of truth. Every country has its own sign in the window. Making it generic means you never have to face any of them specifically.”

Kafka was quiet for a while. The café had filled up around us, and the noise was the kind that makes conversation both easier and harder — easier because you can say things without feeling overheard, harder because you must speak with more precision to be understood.

“The sign is in a real language,” Kafka said, finally. “Not a made-up script. A real language that the greengrocer does not speak and has never studied. This is important. It must be a language someone could learn but he has not learned. The gap is specific, not metaphysical.”

“Czech?” Orwell said. “Russian?”

“That’s your department,” Kafka said, and I understood he was making a concession — a real one, not a tactical retreat. He was allowing the story to have geographical specificity, a particular city, a particular history, while insisting that the experience of the greengrocer remain unattached to any political analysis. The sign is political. The man’s morning routine is not.

“Can it be both?” I asked.

They looked at me with expressions I found difficult to distinguish. Patience, maybe, or pity for the moderator who keeps asking if the two positions can be synthesized.

“It can’t be both in the same sentence,” Orwell said. “You can alternate. You can let the political reality press against the absurdist surface. But the moment you try to fuse them — the moment the bureaucratic nightmare is also a clear political allegory in the same gesture — you get neither. You get satire, which is the lowest form of political fiction.”

“Satire is not the lowest form of anything,” Kafka said, with unexpected heat. “Satire is what people call comedy they’re afraid to take seriously.”

Orwell blinked. I wrote that down, not because I would use it but because I wanted to remember that Kafka could be provoked, and that what provoked him was a dismissal of laughter.

“The ending,” I said, because I could feel the conversation branching into a thicket of competing principles, and I wanted to bring it back to the specific problem. “By evening, the greengrocer has been through the entire municipal apparatus and has learned that no one — not one official, not one clerk, not one archivist — knows what his sign says. Everyone has been maintaining a system of compliance whose original purpose has been lost. He goes home. He has three options. He fabricates a new sign with different words — words in a language he can read, or new words in the old language, copied from somewhere. He puts up a blank sign — the frame, the lamination, the official form of the sign, without content. Or he leaves the window empty.”

“He leaves the window empty,” Kafka said, immediately.

“He makes a new sign,” Orwell said, at the same time.

They looked at each other.

“If he leaves the window empty,” Orwell said, “the story is about refusal. It’s a story of courage, in the end. The man who stops performing the loyalty oath. That’s Havel’s greengrocer — the one who lives in truth.”

“Havel’s greengrocer is a philosopher’s fiction,” Kafka said. “A thought experiment. Real greengrocers don’t live in truth. They live in their shops. They sell vegetables. The question isn’t whether he’ll be brave. The question is what happens the next morning — whether his neighbors notice, whether anyone cares, whether the empty window creates a problem or dissolves into the general indifference of daily life.”

“And if he makes a new sign?”

“Then it’s a story about reproduction,” Kafka said. “About how systems rebuild themselves through the people trapped inside them. He becomes the author of his own compliance. That’s worse, actually. That’s much worse than obeying an order. He’s generating the order himself.”

“It’s not worse,” Orwell said. “It’s how it actually works. That’s how every totalitarian system survives — not through central directives but through millions of individual acts of anticipatory compliance. People don’t do what they’re told. They do what they think they’d be told if anyone bothered to tell them.”

The café was getting loud. A group at the next table had begun arguing about football, or politics, or football as politics — it was hard to tell. I found their energy useful. It reminded me that the world outside the greengrocer’s dilemma was continuing its ordinary business.

“What about the blank sign?” I said.

Neither of them answered immediately. Kafka tilted his head. Orwell frowned.

“The blank sign is interesting,” Kafka said, slowly. “It fulfills the form. The frame is there, the glass, the lamination. Anyone passing the shop sees a sign. They see the shape of compliance. But there’s nothing written on it.”

“Which means,” Orwell said, “that the greengrocer has discovered something. That the content never mattered. That what mattered was the display — the act of putting something in the window. The obedience was always structural, not semantic.”

“Yes,” Kafka said.

“And that’s terrifying,” Orwell said.

“Yes,” Kafka said again, and for the first time they were in complete agreement, which felt less like a resolution and more like two people arriving at the same cliff edge from different directions.

I sat with this for a moment. The blank sign. The frame without content. The display without meaning. It was the most interesting of the three options because it was the one that offered the greengrocer no moral clarity. Leaving the window empty is defiance. Making a new sign is capitulation. But a blank sign is something else — a kind of honesty about the nature of what he’s been doing all along, which was never about the words. It was about the glass, the frame, the morning ritual of placement and evening ritual of removal.

“He could do all three,” I said.

“No,” they said, together.

“He has to choose,” Kafka said. “The choosing is the story.”

“But what if the point is that he can’t choose? What if the night passes — this night of decision — and in the morning he still hasn’t decided, and he has to open the shop anyway, and customers come in, and someone eventually asks about the window, and he says—”

“Nothing,” Kafka said. “He says nothing. He sells them vegetables.”

“Or he says something,” Orwell said, “and the thing he says is a lie, but the lie is so mundane that it doesn’t register as deception. ‘The sign’s being repaired.’ ‘It’ll be back next week.’ And this small, pragmatic lie accomplishes what the entire bureaucratic apparatus could not — it buys him another day without the sign, during which nothing changes, nobody is arrested, no inspectors arrive.”

“The banality of the solution,” I said.

“Don’t call it banal,” Orwell said. “Banal is what intellectuals call other people’s survival strategies.”

That landed. I felt it land, a small correction that reoriented my understanding of the character. The greengrocer is not a philosopher. He’s not an intellectual. He doesn’t think in categories like compliance and resistance. He thinks in terms of the shop, the window, tomorrow. His horizon is Tuesday becoming Wednesday.

“Kundera would say it’s about lightness,” I offered. “The unbearable lightness of the sign. It means nothing — it always meant nothing — and the discovery of its meaninglessness should be liberating but instead it’s vertiginous. Without the sign, the window is just a window. The morning is just a morning. The routine that organized his life was hollow, and now he has to fill the space with… what?”

Kafka considered this. “Kundera is too interested in the metaphysics. The greengrocer is not having a philosophical crisis. He is having a practical one. Where does he get a new sign? That is the crisis. The philosophical dimension is there — I don’t deny it — but it should arrive as a by-product of the practical problem, not as its replacement.”

“Like a man who discovers the meaning of life while trying to find a parking space,” Orwell said.

I stared at him.

“I’m capable of analogy,” he said, somewhat defensively.

“The weight of the choice, though,” I said. “Kundera’s framework — lightness versus weight. The sign has no weight. It’s arbitrary, it’s meaningless, it might as well be a laundry list. But the absence of the sign has enormous weight. Its removal would be an act, a statement, a rupture. So the meaningless object carries more significance than the meaningful gesture. That inversion — that’s what I want the story to hold.”

“Then hold it lightly,” Kafka said. “If you grip it, it becomes a thesis.”

Orwell pushed his empty cup to the center of the table, a gesture that seemed to indicate he was done with coffee but not with the conversation. “I’ll tell you what I need from this story,” he said. “I need the reader to understand that the greengrocer’s situation is not exotic. It’s not a fable about life behind the Iron Curtain. It’s about every sign in every window — the company mission statement nobody believes, the corporate values poster in the break room, the national anthem before the baseball game. Compliance that has outlived its content. If the story works, the reader should feel the greengrocer’s vertigo, and then look up from the page and notice the signs in their own windows.”

“If the story works,” Kafka said, “the reader should not look up from the page at all. They should remain inside the greengrocer’s day, inside his specific bewilderment, and never once think about their own windows. That recognition, if it comes, should come later. Perhaps much later. Perhaps while doing something else entirely — making dinner, say, or walking past a shop that has a sign they’ve never bothered to read.”

“You’re describing the same thing,” I said.

“We’re describing opposite things,” Kafka said. “Orwell wants the story to point outward. I want the story to be so precisely itself that the reader has no room to think about anything else while reading it. The pointing outward happens later, involuntarily, or not at all.”

“Both can be true.”

“Stop saying both can be true,” Orwell said. “Choose.”

The waiter appeared and asked if we wanted anything else. Kafka ordered another coffee he would not drink. Orwell asked for the bill. I sat between them and thought about a greengrocer standing in front of an empty window on a Tuesday night, holding nothing, deciding nothing, waiting for Wednesday to make the decision for him.

I did not tell them about this image. Some things are better held in silence, in the space between two irreconcilable positions, where stories actually live.

Orwell paid. Kafka let him. This, too, told me something, though I am still working out what.