Sign, Frame, Glass

The sign fell on a Tuesday, which was the day Ivo Polak arranged his plums by color rather than size because that was what his customers expected on Tuesdays, though he could not have said when this expectation began or whether it was an expectation at all or simply a habit he had assigned to them. He was positioning the last of the dark ones — the ones that were almost purple, almost black, the ones he thought of as the serious plums — against the window glass when he heard the sound, which was small and specific, like stepping on a walnut shell.

The sign had detached from the window. This was a matter of adhesive. He had fixed it to the glass eleven years ago with a clear mounting strip, the kind sold at the hardware store on Masarykova for purposes exactly like this, and the strip had held for eleven years, which was longer than most things held, and now it had stopped holding. That was what adhesive did, eventually. It was not a surprise. It was barely an event.

He picked the sign up. It was heavier than he remembered, which meant either the sign had gained weight — unlikely, though he did not rule it out entirely — or he had lost the memory of its weight, which was more probable and also less interesting. The glass was cracked across its face, a single fracture line that bisected the foreign text diagonally. The mkhedruli script, Georgian he had been told once, was divided by the crack: curling letters on one side, curling letters on the other, and between them a seam of white where the light came through.

He could not read it. He had never been able to read it. He had not tried to have it translated, not because translation was impossible but because it had never occurred to him as necessary. He put it there every morning at 6:50, after unlocking the shop and before arranging the vegetables, and he removed it every evening at 7:15, after sweeping and before turning the door sign from OPEN to CLOSED. These were facts about his life the way the location of his kidneys was a fact about his body — structural, unglamorous, not worth discussing.

He held the two halves of the sign and looked at the window. Without the sign, the window was just glass, and beyond the glass was Zeleznicni Street, and on Zeleznicni Street nothing was happening that required his attention. He set the broken pieces on the counter next to the cash register and went to get a broom, because there were small shards on the floor among the plums, and customers would be arriving in forty minutes, and glass in fruit was the kind of thing that ended a business.

The sign had fallen before — once, three years ago, in January, when the cold contracted the mounting strip enough to release it. He had pressed it back. The adhesive held. But this time the glass was cracked. The sign could not be pressed back. It would need to be replaced. He knew there was a sign office because he had seen it listed on the municipal directory in the post office lobby, between “Sanitation Scheduling” and “Street Naming (Historical).” He had never thought about the sign office. Now he did.

The sign office was in the municipal building on Komenskeho Square, which Ivo had entered perhaps three times in his life — once to register the shop after his wife’s father died, once to pay a fee whose nature he had already forgotten, and once to use the toilet during a rainstorm. He remembered the toilet. It had been clean and cold, with a lever flush that required two hands. The sign office was on the second floor, Room 214, and the door was open, and behind a desk a woman with short gray hair was eating an apple and reading something on her computer screen.

“I need a replacement sign,” Ivo said.

The woman set down her apple. She did not seem surprised by his arrival or his request. She pulled a form from a stack on the left side of her desk — there were three stacks, left, center, and right, each a different color, and she chose from the left without hesitation, which suggested either long experience or an organizational system so thorough it had eliminated the need for thought.

“Requisition number?”

“I don’t have a requisition number.”

“The original requisition number. From when the sign was first issued.”

“I don’t remember a requisition.”

She considered this with the equanimity of someone who had heard worse. “The replacement process requires the original requisition as proof of authorized display. Without it, we can’t verify what the sign said, and without verification, we can’t reproduce it.”

“It said something in Georgian,” Ivo offered.

“Georgian script, or Georgian language?”

“I don’t know.”

She nodded, as though this distinction were academic. “The content is held in the archives — they maintain copies of all requisitions. If you bring the original or a certified copy, I can process the replacement. The physical casing — the lamination and glass — that’s handled separately, at the lamination bureau. Palkova 18, third floor.”

“The lamination is separate from the sign?”

“The content and the casing are administered by different departments. The lamination bureau handles the material encasement. We handle the authorization and content. The compliance office verifies the display status. The archives maintain the records.”

Ivo wrote down the address of the lamination bureau on the back of a receipt he found in his jacket pocket. The receipt was from the hardware store on Masarykova, dated eleven years ago, for one package of clear mounting strips. He did not notice the date.

He thanked her and left. In the corridor, a man in a blue coat was sitting on a bench with a numbered ticket in his hand, waiting for something that had not yet been called. He looked at Ivo with the neutral recognition of one petitioner acknowledging another. Ivo nodded and kept walking. Outside, Komenskeho Square was bright and cold, and the tram that ran along its northern edge was discharging passengers who dispersed across the cobblestones with the purposeful scatter of people who knew exactly where they were going, which Ivo did not, or rather he knew the address but not the route, and he stood for a moment on the steps of the municipal building, orienting himself by the position of the church spire and the angle of the sun, which was the way his wife’s father had navigated this city and which Ivo had adopted without deciding to, the way one adopts the gestures of the dead.

The lamination bureau was in a different building, newer and uglier, with corridors that smelled of disinfectant and the particular stillness of institutions where people are paid to wait. The third floor was reached by a staircase whose banister had been removed, leaving only the mounting brackets, which jutted from the wall at intervals like small chrome fists. Ivo climbed the stairs holding nothing.

The clerk at the lamination bureau was younger than the woman at the sign office, and his boredom was of a different grade — not the settled patience of long tenure but the restless indifference of someone who had been placed here by a process as opaque as the one Ivo was navigating.

“Lamination requires an active sign requisition,” the clerk said. He had not asked Ivo to sit down, and there was no chair, so the question was moot.

“I don’t have the requisition. The sign office sent me here, and I was going to go to the archives, but I thought—”

“Without the requisition, I can’t laminate. The material spec — thickness, UV coating, border width — those are determined by the requisition class. Different classes, different lamination. I can’t just laminate a thing.”

“What classes are there?”

The clerk looked at him with something that was not quite pity. “Seven. But the class is on the requisition.”

“Which I don’t have.”

“Correct.” He opened a drawer and produced a form — cream-colored, single-sided, dense with small print. “This is a 14b. Request for Retroactive Requisition Status. You submit it at the compliance office and they backfill the requisition into the system, which then allows the archives to release the copy, which you bring to the sign office, which authorizes the content, which you bring here for lamination.”

“Where is the compliance office?”

“Same building as the sign office. Room 311.”

Ivo took the form. He folded it twice and put it in his jacket pocket, next to the eleven-year-old receipt. He was aware that he had been in this building for nine minutes and had accomplished nothing except acquiring a piece of paper that entitled him to visit the building he had already left. This did not strike him as unusual. It struck him as Tuesday.

The compliance office had a waiting area with four chairs, a low table holding magazines from the previous year, and a framed rectangle on the wall where a picture should have been. The frame was polished wood, dark and well-maintained, and inside it was nothing — a cream-colored wall, a small brass plate at the bottom that read “Awaiting Installation.” Ivo sat in the second chair and looked at the empty frame for several minutes. It was the kind of absence that seemed deliberate, though he could not have said what it was deliberately being.

His name was called by a woman whose desk occupied the corner of a room larger than the others he had visited. She was perhaps fifty-five, with reading glasses pushed up on her forehead and a manner that suggested competence as a settled condition rather than an aspiration. There were no stacks of colored forms on her desk. There was a computer, a telephone, a single pen, and a glass of water.

“Polak, Ivo. Zeleznicni 14.” She read from her screen. “Sign registered at this address. Yes, I have it. Registered under — let me see — Category 7: Civic Participation (Voluntary).”

Ivo heard the words and understood them individually. Category. Seven. Civic. Participation. Voluntary. He had not known it had a category. He had not known it was civic. He had not known it was participation.

“Voluntary,” he said.

“Yes. Category 7 is voluntary. Categories 1 through 4 are statutory — those are road signs, safety postings, commercial registrations. Five and six are institutional — schools, hospitals, public buildings. Seven is voluntary civic display.”

“I didn’t volunteer.”

The compliance officer looked at him over the top of her reading glasses, which had migrated back to her nose during her explanation. “The classification indicates the display type, not the manner of acquisition. Many Category 7 displays are inherited, assumed, or continued from prior occupants. The voluntary designation refers to the category’s regulatory status — it is not mandated by statute, therefore it is classified as voluntary.”

“But I display it every day.”

“Yes. And that display is voluntary. Your compliance record is exemplary, actually. Eleven years of continuous display. No lapses, no complaints, no inspection failures.” She said this with what appeared to be genuine admiration. “I can authorize a replacement. But I’ll need the content verified. The original text has to match the archives.”

“The archives are where?”

“Basement level. This building. Take the main stairs down, turn left, second door.”

“Are they open today?”

She paused. Something crossed her face — not concern, exactly, but the expression of a person who has just remembered a fact she wishes she had remembered sooner. “What day is it?”

“Tuesday.”

“Ah.” She removed her glasses entirely and set them on the desk beside the pen. “The archives are closed on Tuesdays. Directive 7, 1987. I can notate your file and flag the request for Wednesday processing, if that would help.”

“Can you tell me what the sign says? From the record?”

She turned to her screen and scrolled through what appeared to be a long list of entries, each one a line of compressed data — numbers, abbreviations, dates. She scrolled with the practiced efficiency of someone who could read this compressed language as fluently as Ivo could read the ripeness of a pear.

“The record indicates that a sign is displayed. It records the category, the address, the registration date, and the compliance history. It does not record the content.”

“So the record of my sign doesn’t include what the sign says.”

“The content is held in the archives. We maintain the compliance data. That’s the division. Content is archival. Compliance is operational. They’re different functions.”

She said this without defensiveness, the way one might say that water flows downhill.

Ivo looked at the 14b form in his hand. He looked at the compliance officer, who was already turning back to her screen, her glasses returning to the bridge of her nose, her attention shifting to the next item with the fluid disengagement of someone whose workday contained hundreds of these encounters, each resolved and filed and replaced by the next. He thanked her. She nodded without looking up.

The archives were in the basement. Ivo went anyway, though he knew they were closed, because the compliance officer had given him directions and following directions was what he had been doing all day and he did not see a reason to stop now. The staircase to the basement was narrower than the one to the upper floors, and the light had a yellow cast, as though the bulbs down here were older or weaker or simply tired.

The door was closed. On it, a note, handwritten in ink that had faded to the color of weak tea:

“Closed Tuesdays (pursuant to Directive 7, 1987).”

Below it, taped at a slight angle, a second note in different handwriting, blacker, more recent:

“For Tuesday inquiries, please visit Wednesday.”

Ivo read both notes. He read them again. He stood in the corridor and looked at the closed door. He did not try the handle.

He climbed back upstairs. The building was quieter now. It was past four. The sign office was still open — he could see the gray-haired woman through the doorway of Room 214, eating what appeared to be a second apple — but he did not stop. He walked through the lobby, out the front entrance, and into the late afternoon of a city that had continued to function normally while he spent six hours inside its administrative organs.

The shop had been closed all day. This was the first time Ivo had closed on a Tuesday in eleven years, and the fact sat in his chest like a small stone — not painful, but present, an awareness of deviation that was indistinguishable from guilt. He unlocked the door and turned on the lights. The vegetables he had set out that morning were still there, undisturbed, slightly less fresh. The plums in the window display had softened in the sun. He would have to discount them tomorrow, or eat them himself.

The window was empty. The system that might have produced a replacement had, over the course of six hours, demonstrated that it maintained every aspect of the sign except the one aspect Ivo needed: what it said.

He stood behind the counter and looked at the window from the inside. From this angle, the window was a rectangle of darkening street — Zeleznicni folding into evening, the streetlights coming on in their usual sequence, left to right, which he had watched so many times that he could predict each one by the slight flicker before ignition. Across the street, the pharmacy’s sign glowed green, and beside it the stationery shop’s window held a display of notebooks arranged by color, and next to that the kebab place where Brada sometimes ate lunch had a menu board propped against the door frame. Signs everywhere. He had never read any of them, not really. They were fixtures, like drainpipes or mailboxes, part of the street’s grammar rather than its content.

The door opened. Brada came in — heavy coat, oil-darkened hands, the particular stiffness of a man who has spent the day bent over machinery. He nodded at Ivo and went to the onion bin.

“Closed today?” Brada said, selecting onions by weight, turning each one in his hand.

“Broken sign. Spent the day at the municipal building.”

“Get it fixed?”

“No. Archives are closed on Tuesdays.”

Brada grunted. He was not a man who required explanations of institutional failure. He set four onions on the counter and reached for his wallet.

“I’m working on Horak’s Skoda,” Brada said, counting coins. “He wants more power. Wants me to take the restrictor plate out.”

“The what?”

“Restrictor plate. Factory thing. Sits on the intake, limits how much air gets in. Engine’s built to do more than the plate lets it do. That’s the whole point — it keeps the engine running at the level it’s supposed to run at. Horak wants it out because his brother-in-law told him it’d give him another twenty horsepower.”

“Will it?”

“Maybe. Runs too hot after, though. Wears itself out. Horak doesn’t care. He wants the twenty horsepower.”

Brada paid for his onions and left. Ivo watched him cross the street, a heavy man walking with the careful gait of someone whose knees had been reporting from the front lines for decades. The shop was quiet. The broken sign lay on the counter. The window was dark.

He picked up the sign and turned it over. On the back, in pencil, someone had written a number — 7-4015-V — which might have been a requisition number or a serial number or an inventory code or nothing at all. He had never looked at the back before. In eleven years of placing the sign in the window every morning and removing it every evening, he had touched only its face, which was glass, and its edges, which were metal, and he had never turned it over because there was no reason to turn over a thing whose function was entirely frontal. Signs face outward. That is what makes them signs.

The number told him nothing. Or it told him something he could not hear, in a language as foreign as the script on the front — the administrative language of categories and requisitions and retroactive status, which was, in its own way, as unreadable to him as Georgian.

He set the broken pieces down. He stood in the dark shop for a long time. The window faced west, and the last light came through it at a low angle, casting a rectangle of pale orange on the floor where the vegetable bins normally stood but didn’t today.

He turned off the lights. He locked the door. He walked home through streets he had walked for eleven years, past buildings he had entered and not entered, beneath signs he had not read, and he carried with him the fact that no one in the municipal apparatus — not the gray-haired woman in Room 214, not the clerk on Palkova 18, not the officer in Room 311, not the closed door of the archives in the basement — no one in the entire chain of offices that maintained and regulated and classified and verified the sign in his window, knew what it said.

He did not think about his wife. He thought about plums.

Wednesday morning. Ivo arrived at the shop at 6:45, which was the time he always arrived, because 6:45 was the time that made it possible to unlock the door, check the temperature of the cold case, inspect the produce for overnight deterioration, sweep the entrance, and begin the window display by 7:00, when the first customers sometimes appeared, though on Wednesdays the first customer rarely came before 7:20.

He unlocked the door. He turned on the lights. The fluorescent tube above the counter flickered once, as it always did, and then held. He checked the cold case: the lettuce was fine, the herbs were beginning to flag, the mushrooms were where he had left them, pale and earthen and unbothered by the passage of time in the way that only mushrooms can be.

He swept the entrance. A leaf had blown in under the door. It was dry and brown and from a tree he could not identify, though it grew across the street in front of the pharmacy and had been dropping leaves on his entrance for as long as he could remember. He swept it into the gutter.

The vegetables. He began with the root section — carrots, beets, parsnips, the tapered radishes that Mrs. Hovorkova preferred and that no one else bought, which meant he stocked them for Mrs. Hovorkova specifically, a private subsidy he had never calculated and did not intend to. Then the greens. Then the tomatoes, which were greenhouse this time of year and tasted of very little but looked correct, which was what mattered in February. Then the peppers, which he arranged by color because customers expected it and because the sight of peppers arranged by color confirmed something about the order of the day that he would not have called pleasure but that functioned like it.

He reached the window.

On the ledge where the sign had stood for eleven years, between the display of plums (fresh ones now, replacing yesterday’s softened casualties) and the parsley in its metal bucket, he placed a rectangle of white card stock. He had cut it the previous evening from a sheet he kept in the back room for pricing labels. The dimensions were the same as the sign’s — he had measured the broken pieces — and he had inserted the card into the old frame, which he had cleaned with glass cleaner and re-glued with a new mounting strip from the hardware store on Masarykova. The frame was metal, silver-colored, and it held the white card firmly. The glass was new — a sheet from the picture-frame section of the same hardware store, cut to size by a teenager who had asked no questions.

The card was blank. No text, no script, no Georgian characters, no language of any kind. White card, metal frame, new glass. From across the street, it would look like a sign. It had the shape of a sign, the placement of a sign, the frame of a sign. Up close it was nothing.

He adjusted its angle. He stepped back. The morning light, entering through the east-facing window, hit the glass and for a moment the blank card became a mirror — reflecting the street, the pharmacy, the stationery shop, the kebab place, and across all of them the moving shapes of people who were going places and doing things and not looking at the greengrocer’s window, which was exactly what they had done every morning for eleven years when the sign was there, in a language none of them could read either.

The door opened. His first customer — not Mrs. Hovorkova, who came at 8, but a younger woman he recognized without naming, a regular who bought tomatoes on Wednesdays and sometimes peppers if they were firm enough.

She glanced at the window. She said nothing about it. She selected four tomatoes and a bunch of parsley and paid with exact change, which she counted from a coin purse with the deliberation of someone for whom the act of counting is its own small anchor in the morning.

After she left, Ivo looked at the window again. The blank sign sat in its frame, white and mute and precisely positioned between the plums and the parsley. It was, he thought, a good sign. Not good in the sense of quality or content or civic participation, voluntary or otherwise. Good in the sense of sufficient.

He turned back to the carrots. One of them had a crack running down its length, and he set it aside for the discount bin.