I’m an operator on a private information line that’s past its sell-by date. I inform people. About everything. If there’s something you don’t know, don’t hesitate, just ring me up. I can tell you absolutely anything. As long as it’s in our database or on the internet. So if you want to save some money, just look it up yourself. I can tell you how many teeth a squirrel has, what time your bus is coming, the current exchange rate for the US dollar, which highways are congested right now, how much Justin Bieber weighs, the closest branch of your bank, the number for the post office, or what time it is in Arunachal Pradesh. I’m your instant, obligatory answer. All day long I do nothing but listen to what people want, what they’re looking for, what they need. The world poses questions, I answer. A job as essential as Anna’s existence, my narrator thinks. In the age of the internet and maximum access to information, I play the part of the know-it-all. The online savior of the illiterate. I can tell you anything, and if I don’t know, I will gladly put you through to somebody who does.
The frequency of incoming calls has changed several times since I started the job, and the nature of the questions people ask has changed as well. When I first came on board, people called constantly and asked about all sorts of things. Even though everybody knew about the internet, not everyone was on friendly terms with it, and almost nobody had it on their phone. There was a time when I used to help people solve crossword puzzle clues, do their homework and write their papers, lecture them on history and geography, read them movie listings and book blurbs, order them theater tickets. Then people learned how to use the internet on their mobile phones and half the herd of operators got the axe.
True, I may be past my prime and not exactly bursting with chirpy optimism, but I have certain qualities considered essential for team leaders. Simply put, I’m one of the company’s highest-performing workers: I put in overtime every month, work holidays when the other operators want to be with the people they refer to as their loved ones, plus I keep it brief and I’m not volatile, so people can call me an incompetent bitch and it doesn’t even throw me, have a nice day and call back soon! So my bosses hang a bulletin board behind my head with some optimistic drivel and inspirational quotes and a Polaroid of me in the middle looking like I have a cramp in the right side of my face, since I couldn’t decide whether to smile politely, bolt in panic to the nearest emergency exit, or belch in disgust, and thumbtacked over the photo of me is a piece of paper with EMPLOYEE OF THE YEAR written in pink.
I’ll tell you straight up, this is no job for wimps. After your five-hundredth call at the end of a twelve-hour shift when some grumpy retiree rips into you with such a string of obscenity that I can’t even reproduce it here since dirty words fuck your karma, your nerves can easily snap. And when they snap like that day after day, you start to suffer from an inferiority complex, you turn into a bundle of nerves, unable to withstand the pressure of callers ranting at you for being a stupid (three dots to represent karmic censorship), the pressure from the boss to handle calls faster, the pressure from your spouses and families to be more stable, the pressure of your own nerves to force yourself to communicate with the outside world on your days off. And if you can’t deal with the ferrets on speed that run the place, they start pushing that team-building crap, how you have to be sunny and sweet, and we all have to pitch in, and blah-bleh-blee-blo-blu, so don’t even come at me with that. No, as a matter of fact, I am not sunny, nor am I sweet, and I refuse to pitch in, but I know pretty well how to act the part, or in any case I’m good enough at making excuses that the bosses leave me alone.
“Hello, this is Anna Kaplanová, how may I help you?” I ask, fingers at the ready on my computer keyboard. All ten with filed nails just itching to burst into their symphony. To launch the frenzied quest for truth and information. My ten eager assistants. Here we are. Ready and waiting. Hungry for questions. You need me. So ask away.
“I’m trying to find the train schedule from Ostrava-Poruba to Prague.”
I nibble away at a licorice whip as I read through the timetables for the next departure. Years of practice will teach you how to eat on the phone without anyone being able to tell. Besides, us employees of the year are allowed. The boss waves at me from her desk, taps her watch, and waits for me to nod. This is her code, reminding me not to miss the meeting. Yeah, we’re all action around here. Communicating with signals since we’ve got no time to talk. I watch as my pudgy forty-year-old boss, squeezed into army togs with black grease under her eyes, waves to me, hops to the ground, rolls the barrels to the wall, and crouches down awkwardly, acting out an animal—is that a duck?—then proceeds to spell out some gibberish with her fingers, casts a shadow giraffe on the bulletin board, taps her wristwatch one more time, and crawls off through the glass doors. I take a grenade from my pocket, tear out the pin with my teeth, and fling it into the boardroom.
After a wasted hour of my otherwise totally gainful life, filled with upturns and downfalls, action and reaction, reproduction and reincarnation, after a meeting in which everyone consults everyone on everything and smiley faces and whoops there goes my nose up your ass and what a witty slogan, I split my sides, ba-dum tss, and gee I wish I were that witty, I go back to my hutch. Quitting time for today, so I’m packing my things in my bag, and then I feel a light tapping on my shoulder. I jump. The boss chirps that she’d like to pull me aside for a little feedback, which means they take you up to their desk, up there, by the windows, to their throne at the head of the calling floor. It means they seat you in an upholstered armchair, larger and more comfortable than you have in your hutch, and offer you a set of velvet-padded headphones inlaid with precious stones, nicer-looking and higher-quality than you have in your hutch, and then they play you a call or two, a call you took that day that they listened in on, and there’s something they want to say to you about it, something they want to praise you for, although usually it’s the opposite, usually you screwed something up, and the sun clouds over with little black clouds, no, it isn’t harassment, it’s feedback. I put on the headphones, and the boss plays me the call. I knew she would play this one.
His voice sounded like you when you crack through a caramel crust with a spoon, and I just wanted to hear it crunch in my ear for a while.
“Where to, did you say?” I asked.
“The embankment.” Crunch.
“I’m sorry, could you please repeat that? I think the connection’s a little weak.” “Sure,” crunch. “The embankment.”
“Could you spell that for me?”
“E, em—”
“Em as in Marie?”
“Yes, e as in Edgar, em as in Marie.”
Then he said b as in Benjamin. Then k as in Karel. Crunch crunch.
He said, “You see, I’m not from Prague.” And then, “If you’d be so kind, I’m getting desperate.”
“Do you know why I’m playing you this?” asks my boss.
“No. I gave him the right directions.”
“Did you really not hear him? Because I understood what he was saying crystal-clear the first time.”
“I’m sorry, but I didn’t. If I had, I wouldn’t have asked him to spell it out.” My boss looks a bit confused. She might even have frowned, if she had known how. “I followed the right procedure, didn’t I?”
“You followed the right procedure, but the call lasted two minutes longer than necessary.”
“But I didn’t understand him, though.”
Mind closed. She waves her hand. “I won’t write it up. It wasn’t the wrong procedure, but next time listen more carefully, hm?” She adds a little encouraging chirpity chirp at the end. I nod.
“That’s all then.”
“I’d like to listen one more time, if that’s all right.”
The boss raises her eyebrows two levels higher in surprise, then smiles at me. “No need for you to agonize over it. It’s no big deal.”
I won’t agonize.
“I know, but I’d still like to listen, if you don’t mind.”
“All right, but you do realize it’s Friday? Make sure you go home soon.” “Don’t worry,” I nod.
“Aren’t you and your boyfriend heading off to Šumava again?” she asks as she stands, shifting her fake Vuitton on her fleshy shoulder.
“We are. I won’t be long.”
“Good. And don’t worry. I mean, you know,” she says, raising her chin toward the photo of me on the bulletin board and giving me a conspiratorial wink. I do know.
She waves goodbye and walks away. I toss a second grenade over my shoulder, then put back on the headphones.
He said, “I’m desperate,” and I, only I, could free him from his desperation. He said, “If you’d be so kind,” and I smiled at his misguidedness. I should be going, I’ve got that trip to Šumava. Desperate, desperate, desperate.
Oh, right, I forgot, I think, smacking myself in the forehead as I take the headphones off. I sometimes lie.
two
It’s two in the morning and my ass is as wooden as the parquets I was sitting on a while back. Usually I’m happily snoozing away by this time, snuggled up in comforters, waiting for a nightmare to come. But I’m not feeling tired today. My one-woman show is getting to the point where it’s so boring it’s beyond embarrassing. My infinitely uneventful life, my infinitely boring self, which there’s nothing to say about, I mean, seriously, the narrator is standing there waiting with folded arms. He pours me another glass of port to speed my journey to limbo. He’s bored. My narrator is bored and I’m worried he might leave me, maybe find another Anna, one who doesn’t make so much work for him. Parquet floors crunch, bones crunch. Ba-dum tss. Nervous coughs and the creaking of seats under the buttocks of fidgety spectators. Hour after hour, whispering, poking each other in the ribs and pointing at me, dubbing my silent film, heads on TV opening and closing. Try watching TV with the sound off sometime. It’s totally different if you watch what the actors are doing instead of listening to what they say, and it’s the same only the other way around if you listen to their voices with no picture. All of a sudden, the movie’s about something totally different. For instance, people are doing all sorts of things when they call me up. Some of them hold the phone to their ear with their shoulder and cook, and I cook right along with them. Your chicken broth is strongest if you roast the meat a while with the bones, or fry it in a pan. Not that I like making soup with people. But they force me. They need me. I’m their only hope for a genuine homemade broth. Some put me on handsfree and take me on trips. To get to Znojmo from Velká Bíteš you can go through Brno or Hrotovice. It’s shorter through Hrotovice, but faster through Brno. I do all sorts of regular stuff with them. Cook and bake and travel and order deliveries of bouquets of peonies and go to the doctor and the movies and the hairdresser. I spent a weekend in the Krkonoše Mountains with someone I had met for sushi a while back in that new place on the square in Jičín. Who knows. There have been tens, hundreds, thousands of voices. Most of them blend together into two or three universal tones, a distorted sound sent by way of electrical signals into my ear. In fact, looking at the Greek, what’s being sent to me is their tele (“afar, far off”) foni (“voice, sound, language”): their distant voice. But sometimes some of that tele foni sticks in your head.
I focus my gaze on the mute TV. There’s a crook in dark glasses talking to another crook with his head sunken between his shoulders. I dub them, sitting with a glass perched on my stomach and my head bent against the wall, till a bullet goes crashing into the head of the guy with no neck. I get a memory crashing into my head, which I immediately flush (pwu-ssshhh, the water whirls around the bowl). But even after I jump off the seat it’s still here. I’m five or six years old. And just like when they run the closing titles on TV, I can see one of those Saturday or Sunday mornings when my father would sit in front of the TV to while away the time waiting for lunch. I know that’s what’s going on because my mother is in the kitchen scraping potatoes, a pot of soup bubbling on the stove, the aroma of meat wafting from the oven, or not, could be the stink of pea soup from the stove, depending on how long it was till the tenth of the month. Dana would be hovering around our mother, either that or more likely getting in her way. Or playing with her dolls. Ever since she was little my sister had had three dolls that she played with constantly, feeding and parenting them, ordering them around and brushing their hair, spanking them on their plastic behinds, then comforting them and telling them don’t cry, everything’ll be all right, as she wiped away their imaginary snot. She kept up the habit for a really long time, till the day they took us away. After that, she just had me. The only doll she managed to save was the rag doll. But that’s a different memory. Pwu-ssshhh.
My father would watch TV in the living room. When he was at home, he often walked around in nothing but boxers. Pretty much the classic model of a Czech man. A schlub in saggy underpants, from which every once in a while something would peek out that should never peek out unbidden. Bottle of beer in hand, periodically dozing off, head drooping to his shoulder, urp, sunken into his armchair, legs outstretched in front of him, ankle over ankle. Heels pounding the rug as he switched positions, tossing one leg over the other, the rustling of chapped skin. And me, classically bored. Kicking myself in the butt. Nothing was any fun and I had no idea what to do. Actually, I spent most of my time bored out of my mind, drifting around the apartment, scoping out hiding places or messing with Dana, which I usually got away with, because I was the younger one. But mainly because nobody paid any attention to me.
So that particular day I was drifting around, just making sure to steer clear of the kitchen so I wouldn’t get stuck with some chore, since I wasn’t too young for that anymore. And eventually I dropped anchor in the living room, entranced by the mouflon ballet of my father’s feet. There was some guy movie on. Two goons chasing each other around, one guy trying to kill the other. It was the only kind of movie my father watched. Or maybe those were the only movies they showed on weekends back then, I don’t know. Every once in a while it would be a western, cowboys and Indians, or some classic with Seagal or Van Damme: a mountain of muscle, a hollow head, and lots of guns and badass one-liners. Guy (heel boom rustle rustle heel boom) watches guys (bang boom pow pow bang boom). I would sometimes ask my father who was the good guy and who was the bad guy. And sometimes he would tell me. If he was in the mood. Declaring out of nowhere, “This guy here’s good,” tipping his head at some slimy dude with slicked-back hair. On that particular day, I had asked my father again, who’s the good guy and who’s the bad guy. For a while he didn’t say anything, and I was starting to think he wouldn’t answer, but then all of a sudden he said that they were both good. I was confused. So who was I supposed to root for then? Who did we want to win? Why would two good guys be fighting it out? It didn’t make any sense. Shouldn’t they both be bad?
THE END.
Dana of course was already waiting for me at our usual spot. She’s always on time, everywhere. No, actually, she’s always early everywhere, so I can be the one who’s late even if I arrive on time. Our usual spot is here, on the top floor of a shopping mall. A compromise between a smoker-friendly café and a play area for kids. As the animals are let loose in the pen, I start in with the click-click, while Dana repeatedly clears her throat. In other words, same old same old. I know my smoking bothers her, since she never tires of reminding me whenever we get together. But I know what bothers her even more. That she can’t get up, open the window, and close the door where we are now.
“Looks like you were somewhere last night,” she says.
“Obviously I was somewhere.”
“?”
“Everybody’s somewhere.”
“Somewhere out and about,” she adds.
“Just at home. What makes you ask?”
“You’ve got bags under your eyes.”
“I know, they’re spilling onto my cheeks.”
“You’re such a jerk,” she says with a faint smile.
“Hm, tell me what else I am.”
“You tell me,” she says, taking a sip of tea. It was an automatic response, just a conversational reflex, but then she stopped with an odd look, darting her eyes around the room. She had passed mental gas, a thought fart, which you can barely hear, barely smell, but once it escapes you, it’s out, and there’s no taking it back. And you don’t know if you’re the only one who knows, or if other people noticed, too, and all you can do is wait for their reactions. My sister had passed mental gas, and neither of us realized until a second later, in that second when it saturated the space between us, then dissipated again, like the smoke she normally closed the door on and fanned out the window when I visited her at home.
Karolína stepped the wrong way on the plastic beads or sand or piles of chips, or whatever it is they put in that pool, what do I know? Now she’s going to cry in three two one, but of course first she has to make sure Dana saw her fall. To judge from the intensity of her squalling, my guess is it’s chips. As she runs to her mother to be consoled, I feel the urge to get up and trip her.
I light a second cigarette from the stump of the first, somewhat neurotically bouncing my legs under the table and playing with the lighter. Click-click.
“Seriously,” my sister says as she comfortsher smaller self, “what’re you going to do when you have one of your own?” (I go tumbling down from my ninety—no, one hundred and fifty—foot tower.)
“Just calm down, Kája, honey, everything’s fine.” (I am crushed flat. Not even moving. It’s cool.)
“That’s what happens when you’re not careful,” I say softly.
“Your aunt is right,” says Dana, looking down at the screaming, leaking minihead in her lap. “You have to be careful.”
Is she talking to her daughter or herself? Choose whichever you like best.
“Yep,” she says, sniffing at her sweater after Karolína is comforted and let loose in the pen again. “You can smell it on me already. Seriously, doesn’t it bother you stinking of that all the time?”
“No, in fact I enjoy it,” I say.
My sister shakes her head.
“I sometimes even catch myself wiping the ashtray out with my hair.” Dana rotates her head, left right, left right. Thanks to her time in my presence, my sister’s cervical spine is always perfectly stretched.
Ta-da. My sister. She would parent everything that crosses her path if she could. Whip them all into shape. Lick her hanky and scrub all their dirty little mouths, let them pee in the gutter, then dust them off and pull their bottoms up so hard that they cut into their thighs, smack them one around the ear to teach them a lesson, we don’t do that, slide their chair up to the table and tie a bib around their necks, blow, it’s hot, my sister, who at this point can’t do anything but wearily shake her head over me. The world won’t listen to her. At least she can tuck her son’s shirttails in.
Now she’s telling me about her favorite little fishie, Zdenda, their oldest. How he’s a bit of an idiot, though she uses a different word, and she’s concerned. “And it isn’t just Zdeněk who thinks so. (That’s her husband, Chickenshit.) I was actually thinking the same thing. Maybe it’s got something to do with me or our parents. Maybe it’s something genetic that I passed on to him?”
“I doubt Chickenshit’s genes are flawless either.”
“Zdeněk’s genes may not be flawless, but they’re certainly not as defective as ours.” “It isn’t just about genes, is it?”
“What do you mean?”
“Like maybe upbringing might also have something to do with it?” Click-click.
“Excuse me, but are you trying to tell me I’m raising my children wrong?”
I can’t help but smile. I believe the sentence continues: “You, who have no children?” I believe the sentence continues with some bullshit about responsibility and maturity.
“Excuse me,” I ask, “but are you the only one raising them?”
“What is it you’re trying to say?”
“I’m saying that if you weren’t raising your children” (yes, Dana, they’re your children, not mine, I know—or actually I don’t, since after all, what do I know?) “with a tyrannical idiot who’s trying to make you think that you and your son are mentally ill, you might not be so worried about whether Zdenda was okay.”
“Stop playing with that lighter! I can’t even talk about this with you.”
“Then don’t!”
For a few moments, neither of us says a word. This time she gets absorbed in some fabric weed the mall has placed as decoration in the middle of the table. I don’t do anything at all, though after a half a minute, I realize the inside of my cheek is all chewed up.
“So talk about him to someone else. There’s all kinds of psychologists, guidance counselors . . .” I say finally.
“Yeah, I already did that.”
“And?”
“Well, he’s not a child psychologist, but I went to see this man I know.” “You know a psychologist?” I’m genuinely surprised.
“Well, sort of. He’s not a psychologist anymore.”
I’m sort of suspicious of the fact that she’s avoiding my gaze, and she clearly doesn’t want to tell me the whole story. Like she’s describing a pimple in a sensitive location.
“Uh-huh,” I say, though it still sort of sounds like a question.
“Whatever. Anyway, he doesn’t think there’s anything wrong with Zdenda. Maybe he’s just slow. But he did tell me I should talk to an expert.”
“You went to an expert who told you to go to an expert? Does Chickenshit know about these rendezvous of yours with the former psychologist?”
“Look, they’re not rendezvous. I’m just in contact with him every now and then.” “So he doesn’t know.”
“What do you think? It’s not easy to talk about Zdenda with him.”
“I can imagine,” I snort. “Or about the fact that you’ve been seeing another guy.”
“No comment. And as for Zdeněk, you only know the worst parts of him,” she says to the weed. “So it’s hard to talk about him with you. All you ever see is the dark side.”
“Clearly.”
“It isn’t easy for him with me either. We all have our quirks. Marriage is hard work.” “Clearly.”
“No one’s ever going to stick it out with you unless you can compromise.”
Compromise means things only ever get settled on the surface. For appearances’ sake. But farts, hugs, and kisses, who cares if neither party is satisfied with the outcome, as long as they can congratulate each other for sorting it out like adults. Because compromise is the adult thing to do and marriage is hard work. Pardon me while I throw up in my mouth.
“That reminds me, you’ll never guess who I met.”
Someone who didn’t stick it out with me, I bet.
A few seconds later, I discover I was right on target. The bridges of logic that my sister builds in her mind are so rigid you could break your skull on them. And meanwhile she just goes right on acting like a naïve little girl, what logic, what bridge. And I just go on smiling at her, with the loveliest smile I can. That’s how I get over the bridge.
“Jakub,” she says, looking at me in a strangely elated way. What are you going to do now? What kind of face are you going to make? What do you have to say to that? How fast can you pick yourself up off the ground?
“The soccer player?” I ask.
“Which—? What? No, Anna, which Jakub do you think.”
Probably the Jakub who didn’t stick it out with me.
A hesitant smile and raised eyebrows to express misunderstanding.
I’m almost across to the other side.
How much longer till she gets tired of it? How much longer will she go on stirring the shit? How much longer? And not a trace of malice. Not so much as a hint of spite. Just that playful, naïve tone of voice and that avid, eager look.
“Your boyfriend Jakub,” she says, fairly curling herself all over the second word.
“Hm.” I can hardly keep from slapping myself in the forehead. I take a sip of my drink and shrug.
“He was handsome, he was—”
“Why are you telling me this?” Smile, the bridge is slowly burning behind you, just like the back of your neck.
“I thought you’d be interested.”
Try asking sometime if I’m interested in what you have to say.
“Oh,” I nod, scratching the back of my neck. “Well, not really. I don’t have anything to do with him anymore. I hope he has what he wants.”
“Odd,” she says. Yes, we know this game, too. Drop a word and wait till someone picks it up, dusts it off, and hands it back to you. This game is the most boring one of them all. She says half, then waits for me to ask for the rest. So I just leave her word lying there and picture myself dropping my panties, squatting down, and peeing on it in a steady stream that sounds like the soothing burble of a forest brook.
“That’s really odd,” she says once more. Picking up the word and throwing it to the ground again, only this time from a greater height. Plop. I can feel the vein in my temple throbbing. “That you would take it that way,” she adds, as if I had asked, ‘What’s really odd?’ That weed of hers really is quite an interesting item, I can see now for myself. “Like it was the past. And the end.”
“Well, I do. That’s the way it is, isn’t it?”
“But still, he was a part of your life. And a fairly important one.”
“How do you know who’s important to me?” I blurt, now genuinely amused. I start back in playing with my lighter, more relentlessly than before.
“I figure if you’ve been with somebody that long, there’s probably a reason for it.” “You’re practically a fortune-teller. You should do it for money on the street.” “There you go again.”
“I saw a gypsy woman selling perfume at the entrance to the mall. You could stand next to her and offer to tell people’s fortunes. You wouldn’t even need to see their hands.”
“I should’ve kept my mouth shut.”
I pause a moment to enjoy the way she flinches every time I click the lighter. Then I get tired of it, so I stop.
“Unlike you, I know how to put the past behind me. Just toss it over my shoulder like a used tissue. You should try it. It’ll save you a lot of worries. Maybe then you could stop trying to figure out who’s sick and with what and why and how.”
“But some bridges can’t be burned. You’re not doing it right.”
Oh but they can. All of them.
Author and Translator Bios
Author Bio
Lucie Faulerová is a writer, editor, and screenwriter. Her debut novel, Dust Collectors (2017), was nominated for the Magnesia Litera Award for Prose (the Czech Republic’s most prestigious award), and the Jiří Orten Prize, awarded to the best work of prose or poetry by a Czech author under 30. It has been translated into Spanish and German. Her second novel, Deathmaiden (2020), was nominated for the Magnesia Litera Award for Prose and was a winner of the European Union Prize for Literature. More at https://praglit.de/authors/lucie-faulerova/.
Translator Bio
Alex Zucker’s translation of The Movement, by Petra Hůlová, was published in 2021 by World Editions. His translations of Bianca Bellová’s novel The Lake (Parthian Books) and of Jáchym Topol’s novel A Sensitive Person (Margellos World Republic of Letters) are forthcoming in 2022, as well as his Englishing of essays by phenomenologist Jan Patočka, in The Selected Writings of Jan Patočka: Care for the Soul (Bloomsbury). More at alexjzucker.com.
