Standing Instruction

The sign fell on a Tuesday, which was the day Tomáš Polák received his lettuce. He heard it from the back room where he was checking the delivery against the invoice — four crates of butter lettuce, two of romaine, one of something the driver called frisée but which looked like a weed that had been allowed to develop ambitions. A crack, then a sliding, then silence. He knew what it was before he reached the front of the shop.

The sign had hung in the window for eleven years, fixed to the glass with two adhesive hooks that had yellowed and grown brittle. The left hook had given way. The sign swung down on the remaining hook, struck the window ledge, and cracked diagonally. It now hung at an angle, the two halves held together by the lamination, like a face trying to compose itself after bad news.

Tomáš picked it up carefully. The text — three lines of characters in a language he did not read — was undamaged except where the crack bisected the middle line. Only the backing board, a stiff grey card, had broken. He could still make out every character, though he had never been able to read them. He placed the two halves on the counter and went to finish checking his lettuce.

The shop had been his father’s, and before that his uncle’s, and before that it had been a tobacconist’s, but that was before the restructuring. The sign had arrived in the first year after Tomáš took over from his father, delivered by a municipal courier in a brown envelope along with an adhesive strip and a one-page instruction sheet. The instruction sheet was in his language: the enclosed sign was to be displayed in the front window of the premises, visible from the street, at all times during business hours. It was to be maintained in good condition. Damage or loss should be reported to the Municipal Office of Display Standards.

The instruction sheet did not say what the sign said. It did not say what language the sign was in. Tomáš had asked his father, who was still alive then, and his father had looked at the sign with the expression of a man being shown a parking ticket and said, “Put it up.” So Tomáš had put it up.

Every shop on Kovářská Street had one. The baker, the pharmacist, the woman who sold buttons and thread and small items of haberdashery whose purpose Tomáš could never determine. Each sign was identical: the same grey card, the same lamination, the same three lines of foreign text. Tomáš had once asked the baker whether he knew what the signs said. The baker had laughed and said, “Something about hygiene, probably,” and gone back to his ovens. Tomáš had not asked anyone else.

He called the Municipal Office of Display Standards at nine-fifteen. A woman answered on the seventh ring and listened to his description of the damage with what he took to be professional interest.

“You’ll need to come in,” she said. “We can process a replacement, but I’ll need the registration number.”

“The registration number,” Tomáš repeated.

“It’s on the back of the sign. Lower left corner. A seven-digit number beginning with DS.”

Tomáš turned the broken sign over. The back was blank grey card. There was no number. There was nothing at all except a small stain that might have been coffee or might have been there since manufacture.

“There’s no number,” he said.

“Then you’ll need to bring the sign itself. We can look it up in the system by the content.”

“By the content.”

“The text on the sign. We’ll match it to the registry.”

“I don’t know what it says. It’s in a language I don’t read.”

There was a pause. Tomáš heard a chair creak.

“That’s fine,” the woman said. “Bring it in. We have translators.”

The Municipal Office of Display Standards occupied the second floor of a building on Lipová Street that had once been a school. The hallways still had the proportions of hallways designed for children — ceilings too high for the width, doorways slightly too narrow. Tomáš climbed the stairs with the broken sign in a plastic bag and found Room 214, which had a frosted glass panel in the door and no nameplate.

The woman behind the desk had arranged her workspace with the precision of someone who believed strongly in right angles. Stapler, pen cup, telephone, and a small framed photograph of a dog, all aligned with the edges of the desk. She took the sign from the bag, examined both halves, and typed something into her computer.

“Polák. Kovářská Street. Greengrocer.”

“Yes.”

“The sign was issued—” She paused, scrolling. “I don’t have an issuance date. That’s unusual. Let me check the content.” She placed the two halves of the sign side by side on her desk and looked at the text. She looked at it for a long time.

“I’ll need to send this to Linguistic Services,” she said. “The content doesn’t match anything in my standard registry. It may be filed under a different category.”

“What category is it supposed to be under?”

“Display Standards. Which is my department. But this text—” She tapped the middle line with one finger. “This isn’t in any of our standard sign languages. We use Czech, Slovak, and German for historical premises. This appears to be something else.”

“What?”

She looked at him with the expression of someone who has been asked a question that is simultaneously reasonable and unanswerable. “I don’t know. I can issue you a temporary display waiver while we determine the content. Or you can take the sign to the Bureau of Public Signage on Sokolská. They handle non-standard content.”

“A temporary display waiver,” Tomáš said. “For how long?”

“Fourteen days. After that you’d need to reapply.”

“And the Bureau? How long would they take?”

She considered this. “They’re usually quite quick. A few days for identification, a few more for the replacement requisition. You should have a new sign within the month.”

Tomáš took the temporary waiver — a yellow slip of paper with a carbon copy underneath, stamped twice — and the broken sign in its bag, and walked to Sokolská Street.

The Bureau of Public Signage was in a newer building with an elevator that worked and a lobby directory under glass. The directory listed the Bureau on the fourth floor, Rooms 401-409. Tomáš took the elevator to the fourth floor and found a waiting area with six plastic chairs, four of which were occupied. A man with a ticket machine stood beside a door marked INTAKE. Tomáš took a ticket. His number was 347. The display above the door read 312.

He sat. The man next to him was holding a sign much larger than Tomáš’s — a wooden board with painted letters in what appeared to be Czech, though the paint had faded to the point where individual words were a matter of interpretation. The man held this sign on his lap with both hands, like a father holding an infant. A woman across the aisle had no sign at all; she held only a folder of papers and an expression of settled endurance.

The ticket numbers advanced with the regularity of something mechanical and the speed of something organic. 313. 318. A long pause. 319. The man with the large sign was called at 324 and carried his board through the intake door with visible effort, turning it sideways to fit the frame.

After forty minutes, Tomáš’s number was called. The intake room contained a desk, two chairs, a filing cabinet, and a poster that read CLEAR SIGNAGE IS CIVIC PARTICIPATION. The intake officer was a man in his fifties with hair that had receded to the exact midpoint of his scalp and stopped, as though it had encountered a jurisdictional boundary.

Tomáš explained. The officer examined the sign, consulted a binder, consulted a different binder, and typed something into a terminal that chirped with each keystroke.

“This isn’t ours,” the officer said.

“The Municipal Office sent me here. They said non-standard content—”

“Non-standard content, yes. But this is non-standard in a way that puts it outside our jurisdiction. We handle signs in recognized municipal languages. Czech, Slovak, German, Polish for border districts. This—” He held up one half of the sign. “This isn’t any of those.”

“What is it?”

The officer turned the sign so that it faced Tomáš, as though seeing it from this angle might help. “I couldn’t say. Have you tried the Regional Authority for Linguistic Compliance?”

“Is that another office?”

“Na Poříčí. Third floor. They handle anything we can’t identify. They have linguists.”

“The Municipal Office said they had translators.”

“Translators translate from known languages. Linguists identify unknown ones. Different skill set.” The officer wrote an address on a slip of paper and handed it to Tomáš. “Take the sign with you. They’ll want to see the original.”

The Regional Authority for Linguistic Compliance was in a building that had been a church at some point — the windows were too tall and too narrow, and the entrance had a stone arch with carvings worn smooth by weather or hands. The third floor was reached by a staircase that turned twice and deposited him in a corridor lined with doors, each bearing a number and a name in a typeface so small he had to lean close to read them. Room 311 was marked DR. HEŘMANOVÁ — INQUIRY AND CLASSIFICATION.

Dr. Heřmanová was not in. A note on her door, handwritten and taped at an angle, read: Consultations by appointment only. For urgent matters, see Room 304 (Archives).

Room 304 was open. Inside, a man sat at a desk surrounded on three sides by shelving units that rose from floor to ceiling and were filled with binders of identical maroon — decades of institutional purchasing from the same supplier. The man was eating a sandwich. He finished his bite before looking up.

“I was sent here from the Bureau of Public Signage,” Tomáš said. “I have a sign that needs to be identified.”

The man put down his sandwich and reached for the bag. He removed the two halves, placed them together, and looked at the text. He looked at it the way a mechanic looks under a hood — not reading but assessing.

“Ah,” he said.

“You recognize it?”

“I recognize the format. This is a Standing Instruction display. SI-7 series. Issued sometime in the eighties or early nineties — the lamination stock matches. We processed quite a few of these.”

“What does it say?”

The man sat back. “That’s a good question,” he said. “The SI-7 series was issued by the Committee for Public Communication, which operated under the Ministry of Cultural Affairs, which was dissolved during the restructuring of — let me think — 1994 or 1995. The original text specifications would have been in their files.”

“And where are their files?”

“Here. Theoretically. The files of all dissolved committees were transferred to Regional Archives. But the Committee for Public Communication files were misfiled during the transfer. They’ve been in the indexing queue since 1996.”

“The indexing queue.”

“Yes. We have a backlog.”

“A thirty-year backlog.”

“It’s not as bad as it sounds. The queue moves. Just not quickly. Your sign is in there somewhere. The original text, the language specification, the purpose statement — it’s all in the committee files. We just can’t access it until the files are indexed.”

Tomáš looked at the man. The man looked at the sign between them on the desk.

“So no one,” Tomáš said, “in any office in this city, knows what this sign says.”

“I wouldn’t say no one,” the man said. “Someone wrote it. Presumably they knew.”

“And where are they?”

“Retired. Or dead. The Committee for Public Communication was staffed by — I’d have to check — perhaps fifteen to twenty people. That was thirty years ago. I don’t know their names. Their names would be in the files.”

“Which are in the indexing queue.”

“Yes.”

Tomáš sat down in the chair across from the archivist’s desk, though he had not been invited to sit. The chair was wooden and had no cushion. He could feel the slats against his back.

“I have been putting this sign in my window every morning for eleven years,” he said. “My father put it up before me. I have been displaying a sign in a language I do not speak, whose meaning no one in the entire municipal government can tell me, because a form told me to.”

“A standing instruction,” the archivist said. “Yes. The instruction persists even after the issuing authority dissolves. Standing instructions don’t expire unless they are countermanded by an authority of equal or greater—”

“But the authority no longer exists.”

“Exactly. So the instruction cannot be countermanded. It will stand until an equivalent authority is established and chooses to revoke it. In practice, this means it will stand indefinitely.”

“Even though no one knows what it says.”

“The content of the instruction is irrelevant to its standing. The instruction is to display the sign. The content of the sign is a separate matter. You are required to display it. What it says is — administratively speaking — not your concern.”

Tomáš walked home in the late afternoon. The light was thin, grey, impartial — the light of a city that has been overcast so long it has forgotten the alternative.

He passed the baker’s shop and saw the baker’s sign in its window: the same grey card, the same three lines. The pharmacist’s sign. The haberdasher’s sign. Identical. Unread. Present. He had the sudden, vertiginous sense that the signs were not displayed in the windows but that the shops existed around the signs — that the businesses, the streets, the routines of commerce had arranged themselves to support and frame these small grey rectangles.

He let himself into the shop through the back. The lettuce crates were still on the floor where the driver had left them; he had forgotten to put them in the cold room. Two of the butter lettuce heads had begun to wilt, their edges browning. He moved the crates mechanically, not thinking about lettuce.

The front window was empty. In eleven years, the window had never been empty during business hours. The space where the sign had hung was marked by two faint adhesive rectangles on the glass, slightly less dirty than the surrounding surface. Ghosts of hooks.

He placed the broken sign on the counter. He looked at the temporary display waiver — the yellow slip — and considered taping it in the window. But the waiver was not the sign. The waiver was a document about the absence of the sign.

That evening Tomáš sat at the kitchen table — pine, scarred by decades of knives and plates, things soaked in and become part of the grain. The broken sign lay before him. Upstairs, through the ceiling, his neighbor was watching television — the murmur of voices whose words were inaudible and whose emotional tenor was, regardless, clear. Someone was upset. Someone was explaining.

He could wait for the indexing queue. The archivist had not committed to a timeline, and Tomáš understood, in the way that all citizens of administrative cities understand, that a timeline that has not been committed to does not exist. He could put up a blank sign — a grey card, laminated, the same dimensions. The instruction was to display the sign; the content was not his concern. No one had ever checked the content. The system verified presence, not meaning.

He could leave the window empty. Simply open the shop in the morning with nothing in the window but vegetables and see what happened. Perhaps nothing would happen. Perhaps the baker would notice and say nothing, or notice and say something, or not notice at all. The sign had always been there. Its absence would not be the absence of a thing but the absence of an arrangement — the way a room changes when a piece of furniture is removed, not because the furniture was beautiful or useful but because the room had been shaped around it, and now the shape was wrong.

He thought about the baker, who had laughed. He thought about the haberdasher, whose sign he had seen that afternoon, hanging in her window at the same angle, with the same adhesive hooks, unread and present. He thought about the fifteen to twenty people who had once staffed the Committee for Public Communication, who had chosen this language, this text, these words — whatever they were — and had printed them on grey cards and sent them out to every shop on Kovářská Street, and who had then retired or died, taking the meaning with them.

It was possible — he considered this while staring at a burn mark his father had made with a cigarette in 1983 — that the sign had never meant anything specific. That the Committee for Public Communication had selected the text precisely because it was unreadable, because a sign that cannot be read cannot be disagreed with, cannot be proven false, cannot become embarrassing when the political situation changes. A sign in an unknown language is a perfect sign. It means compliance. It means: this shop is in order. This citizen has received his instruction and has followed it.

He tried to believe the alternative — that the sign had meant something precise and important, something that mattered to the fifteen or twenty people who composed it, something they had argued about in committee meetings in a ministry building that had since been converted to apartments. But he could not make the idea hold. Whoever those people had been, the system they built had outlasted their intentions so thoroughly that the distinction between meaningful text and arbitrary characters had ceased to matter. The sign had endured. It hung in windows across the city, maintained by shopkeepers who did not read it, inspected by no one, lasting forever. Whether it had once meant something only made the persistence worse.

At half past nine, Tomáš got up from the table. He went to the shelf in the hallway where his father had kept books — not many, perhaps thirty, most of them bought secondhand or inherited from relatives whose reading habits were unknowable at this distance. He found a dictionary. It was Czech-to-something; the something was written on the cover in characters he did not recognize but which resembled, he thought, the characters on the sign. The spine was cracked and the pages had the color of weak tea.

He opened it at random. The entries were arranged in two columns, the foreign characters on the left and Czech translations on the right. He could read the Czech. He could not read the other.

He sat back down at the kitchen table with the dictionary and a piece of grey card he had cut from a box in the shop. He had a pen. He did not have a laminator, but that seemed like a problem for another day.

He copied three lines of characters from the dictionary. He chose them without system — the first line from page forty-seven, the second from page one hundred and twelve, the third from page two hundred and three. He copied them carefully, the way his father had taught him to copy figures in the shop ledger: slowly, with attention to the shape of each character, without needing to understand what the shapes meant.

When he was finished he held the card up and looked at it. The characters were slightly uneven, written in ballpoint pen rather than printed, and the lines were not perfectly straight. It did not look like the original sign. It looked like what it was: a handmade copy of something, produced by a man who did not know what he was copying.

He did not know what the three lines said. It was possible they said something coherent, or that they said “river” and “the third Tuesday” and “wool,” or that they said nothing at all — words so ordinary that their combination was meaningless.

He took the card downstairs and taped it in the window, in the space between the adhesive ghosts. It hung slightly crooked. He straightened it. It hung slightly crooked again, as though crookedness were a property of the space rather than the card.

He went back upstairs. The television upstairs had stopped. His neighbor had gone to bed, or had given up on the conversation, or had found some resolution that made continued listening unnecessary. The apartment was quiet in the way that apartments above shops are quiet — not the absence of sound but the presence of a specific emptiness, the emptiness of a commercial space after hours.

Tomáš washed his cup. He checked that the back door was locked. He set his alarm for five-thirty, as he did every morning, as he had done every morning for eleven years, and before that his father had done, and before that his uncle, though his uncle had set it for five because he had been a tobacconist and tobacconists opened earlier, for reasons no one had explained to Tomáš and which he had never thought to ask about.

In the morning he would open the shop. The lettuce delivery was already in, though two heads had wilted. He would display the sign. The baker, walking past on his way to his ovens, might notice that the sign looked different — newer, handwritten — or might not notice anything at all. The content was, administratively speaking, not his concern.

He turned off the kitchen light and stood for a moment in the dark. Through the window he could see the street, and the fronts of other shops, and their signs. He thought he should feel something — relief, or defiance, or the grim satisfaction of a man who has seen through the system. He did not. He felt the same. He went to bed.