Tomas earned his living teaching the Father how long to wait before saying he was proud of you.
Too little hesitation sounded cheap. Too much sounded disappointed. The most effective interval was just long enough for a person to begin wondering what he had done wrong.
Tomas was good at his work.
Every morning, he took the lift to the ninth floor of the National Reassurance Service, hung his coat beneath a portrait of the Mother, and put on his headphones.
There were several thousand versions of the Father. Dockworkers received the version with gravel in his throat. University graduates received the version that occasionally admitted uncertainty, then overcame it. Men who had been beaten as children were assigned either a gentle Father or a sterner one, depending on which produced better results.
The Mother required different adjustments.
She could forgive you before you had confessed to anything. She could make a ration reduction sound like the last portion she had scraped from her own plate. When she announced an increase in working hours, her voice sometimes trembled.
“You know how much I have already done for you.”
Tomas had edited that sentence eleven times.
At forty-six, he still found it difficult to hear without apologising.
His own father had left when he was six.
That was how he had always said it: left. A small word, efficient enough to carry forty years.
There had been a brown coat on a hook. Then there had been no coat.
His mother had explained that his father had found work in another province. Later, she had explained that he would not be coming back. She said this while washing a saucepan, and Tomas remembered the saucepan more clearly than her face: black underneath, with a handle that moved when she scrubbed it.
For some years, letters had arrived from the Employment Authority.
Then a letter arrived in his father’s handwriting.
Don’t wait for me.
His mother worked nights at a rehabilitation centre and mornings at a packing station. She slept sitting up. When Tomas spoke to her, she sometimes answered a question he had asked the previous day.
He learned to wait until her eyes were properly open before saying anything important.
By the time she died, he had almost nothing important left to say.
The Reassurance Service recruited him at nineteen. His aptitude assessment described him as unusually sensitive to small variations in approval.
He had been proud of that.
The recording arrived on a Tuesday, in a batch marked DOMESTIC SOURCE MATERIAL.
The Service was replacing its older voices. Surveys showed that citizens had begun to recognise the Father’s consoling phrases. Familiarity was reducing their effect.
The new programme would use the voices of real parents.
Tomas opened a file and heard a chair scrape.
Then a man said:
“Please. Just tell him I’m trying.”
Tomas removed his headphones.
Across the office, his colleagues worked beneath the soft, recurring click of keyboards. A cleaner guided a machine between the desks. On the wall, the Mother smiled at somebody slightly to the left of the viewer.
He put the headphones on again.
The man swallowed before the word trying.
Tomas knew that swallow.
His father used to do it before asking the landlord for another week.
The source field read:
«EMIL HALE. DEPENDENT CONTACT PETITION 17. APPLICATION UNSUCCESSFUL.»
Tomas listened nineteen times.
On the twentieth, he noticed something beneath the voice: a bell sounding at regular intervals. His father had been calling from a factory.
He opened the source record.
There were seventeen petitions.
The first requested permission to return for his son’s seventh birthday. The second asked for a transfer. The third offered to accept lower wages. The sixth requested a photograph.
Beside each application was the same administrative code.
CONTACT DEFERRED: DEVELOPMENTAL CONTINUITY.
Petition seventeen included a letter.
Tomas recognised the handwriting at once. The small, apologetic letters. The unnecessary loop beneath the final e.
He found the sentence he had carried through his life.
Don’t wait for me by the window, Tom. It will only make your mother sad. I am trying to come for your birthday.
The version delivered to their apartment had contained four words.
For a long time, Tomas looked at the rest.
He used his lunch break to look up DEVELOPMENTAL CONTINUITY.
It was not classified. That disturbed him more than a locked file would have done.
The original study was seventy-three years old. Twenty-four countries had participated. They had retained their flags, currencies, religions, constitutions and grievances. Each government had promised its citizens a different future.
The research arrangements were shared.
Early reports examined the political behaviour of children born outside registered marriages. The findings had disappointed the sponsors. Marriage records were poor predictors. So were blood relationships.
One troublesome household consisted of a woman raising twins alone. Another contained two grandfathers and a girl whose parents had died. A third was a boarding house where the cook made breakfast for children who were not hers.
The subjects in these households showed low responsiveness to official reassurance.
A note in the margin explained:
A substitute attachment figure may nullify the intended effect.
Later phases changed the experiment.
Parents were moved for work. Visiting permits expired between provinces. Care centres rotated staff before children became too attached. Grandparents were housed near medical facilities, far from their families. Neighbours who collected several children from school were required to obtain licences.
A father could come home on Sunday, provided his wife accepted a Sunday shift.
A mother could reduce her hours, provided the family surrendered its second bedroom.
There were choices everywhere. Each could be defended in a separate office.
Tomas scrolled through tables of wages, housing density, travel restrictions and projected births. The desired population had to be tired enough to lose contact, but solvent enough to keep producing children.
The word bastard appeared in an early working paper. Someone had underlined it and added, Informal designation. Remove from public materials.
The public name became the Family Renewal Programme.
In later documents, the researchers used the old word freely.
They compared bastard populations. Bastard voting patterns. Bastard responses to ceremonial praise.
Tomas found a chart correlating cancelled childhood visits with adult enthusiasm for military parades.
Below it, two researchers disagreed about the sample size.
There were failures.
Tomas read them carefully.
A woman in a southern province continued leaving food for the children next door after being fined. A retired tram driver taught boys to repair bicycles and remembered their birthdays. Foster carers ignored rotation notices. A man crossed three provincial boundaries every month to spend one afternoon with his daughter.
The reports called these people continuity hazards.
There were also citizens who remained suspicious of the Father despite every favourable prediction. Some grew angry with the government. Some withdrew from everything. Several pilot districts had become unmanageable.
The Service measured the refusals and adjusted the offer.
Under PATERNAL RESPONSE, Tomas found recordings of leaders promising strength, order and restoration. Under MATERNAL RESPONSE were speeches about sacrifice, ingratitude and belonging.
In one country, the ruler told citizens they had become weak.
In another, the ruler told them that only she understood how badly they had been hurt.
The first country sold weapons to the second.
Both submitted their results to the same annual conference.
An old photograph showed the two leaders standing together beside a lake. Neither was making the face Tomas recognised from the broadcasts.
They looked bored. Someone had caught them waiting for lunch.
That evening, he found Ivo sitting outside his apartment.
The boy was nine. His mother, Mara, worked at a sterilisation plant. Her shifts changed every week.
“Your mum late?”
“Again.”
Tomas let him in.
He had been doing this for six months. At first, he had given the boy water. Later, biscuits. Eventually, without discussing it, he had begun buying enough for two suppers on Tuesdays.
Ivo sat at the table and took a broken toy train from his pocket.
On the ceiling screen, the Father was speaking about the deterioration of the family.
Tomas recognised the pause before “my children.”
He had made it longer the previous Thursday.
“Can you turn him down?” Ivo asked. “I can’t hear the wheel.”
Tomas reached for the control.
The domestic system allowed citizens to reduce entertainment volume. Public addresses had a fixed minimum.
He moved the train and two plates into the kitchen, where the extraction fan was louder.
When Mara arrived, she was carrying a small cake in a plastic box.
“They gave us these,” she said. “For Appreciation Week.”
Inside the box lay a card from the Mother.
Thank you for being there.
Mara laughed once.
Then she sat down, still in her coat.
At work the next morning, Tomas searched for his father.
Emil Hale was alive.
He was seventy-nine and lived in a residential complex eleven kilometres away.
Eleven kilometres.
For years, Tomas had imagined distances vast enough to excuse him.
The screen offered a route requiring two buses.
He wrote the address on the back of a maintenance form.
At ten, his supervisor asked him to come upstairs.
Director Senn had a narrow office and a real plant. Tomas could not remember seeing another real plant in the building.
“Your source access triggered a welfare review,” she said.
He stood in front of her desk.
“We should have handled the transition more sensitively.”
“The transition?”
“Between archival material and personal experience.”
He put the maintenance form in his pocket.
Senn folded her hands.
“Your father tried to reach you. You have every right to feel distressed.”
“You sent me a different letter.”
“That happened before I joined the Service.”
“You still have the programme.”
“Yes.”
She did not look embarrassed. He had expected denial, or at least some preparation for it. Her calm left him briefly without language.
Senn opened a folder.
“We can arrange a meeting.”
“I have his address.”
“Then you know that he is in supported accommodation. Travel is difficult. There are medical considerations. We can make everything comfortable.”
She turned a sheet towards him.
The heading read COMING HOME.
Beneath it was a photograph of an armchair.
The Service was planning a season of televised reunions. The Father would introduce them. The Mother would read from the letters. Families divided by earlier policy failures would be brought together in a private room furnished to resemble an ordinary home.
Cameras would be concealed so nobody felt observed.
“We would ask you to speak honestly,” Senn said.
The proposed dialogue was attached.
Tomas read his first line.
I thought I had been forgotten.
He read his last.
Thank you for bringing my father home.
“Which father am I thanking?”
Senn waited.
She knew exactly how long to wait.
He left work early and took the buses.
At the residential complex, an attendant asked whether the visit had been arranged.
“No.”
“Are you family?”
Tomas looked at the word on the form.
“Yes.”
The attendant studied him, then pressed a button.
“Twenty minutes. He gets tired.”
His father was in a room with a narrow bed and a window that opened only at the top. A pair of trousers hung over the back of a chair.
Tomas had expected recognition to be immediate and terrible.
The old man looked up and said, “Maintenance?”
“No.”
Something moved in his father’s face.
“Tom?”
Tomas remained by the door.
His father tried to stand. One hand missed the arm of the chair. Tomas moved forward before he had decided whether he wanted to touch him.
They ended up holding each other awkwardly by the elbows.
“You got tall,” his father said.
It was such a stupid thing to say that Tomas nearly left.
Instead, he helped him sit down.
There was a kettle on a shelf. Tomas filled it.
Neither man knew where to look while it boiled.
“I saw the applications,” Tomas said.
His father closed his eyes.
“I thought they would have destroyed them.”
“Why did you stop?”
The old man opened his eyes again.
Tomas had intended to ask about the transfers, the letters, the last time his parents had spoken. Instead, this was the question that came out.
“Seventeen applications. Then nothing.”
“They said every new application delayed the existing review.”
“And you believed them?”
“For a while.”
“What about afterwards?”
His father rubbed a thumb along the seam of his trousers.
“I was afraid of losing the job. Your mother depended on the money.”
“She depended on you.”
“Yes.”
The kettle switched off.
After a while, his father said, “Then I got used to being afraid.”
Tomas made the tea too strong. His father drank it without comment.
There was no explanation large enough to fit the room.
His father told him about the hostel, the factory, a man who had escaped on a freight train and been sent back. He described the afternoon he had been told Tomas had changed his surname.
“I thought you didn’t want me.”
“I was twelve.”
“I know that now.”
“You should have known it then.”
“Yes.”
The old man began to cry without covering his face.
Tomas had imagined this moment in so many forms that the actual room seemed inadequate. His father was neither the monster he had needed nor the innocent man the Service wanted to place in its armchair.
He was an old man who had tried, and failed, and eventually stopped trying.
Tomas could not forgive forty years in twenty minutes.
When the attendant knocked, he asked for ten more.
By the end of the week, the reunion invitation had acquired several attachments.
A new apartment was available, with space for an elderly dependent. His father could receive specialist treatment. Tomas could be promoted to a supervisory role.
A broadcast slot had been provisionally reserved.
All that remained was consent.
Senn called him back to her office.
“You think the meeting happened outside the system,” she said. “The address was in our records. Our buses took you there. A public attendant opened the door.”
Tomas said nothing.
“The state cannot repair everything it has done. It can repair this.”
She placed a photograph on the desk.
His father, smiling uncertainly beside a care worker. Somebody had combed his hair.
“He has agreed?”
“He wants to see you.”
“That wasn’t what I asked.”
Senn leaned back.
“You know how these programmes help people.”
Tomas did know.
He had watched the audience recordings: adults leaning towards the screen when the Father lowered his voice; women crying when the Mother said they had suffered enough; men sitting very still, waiting to be told they had done well.
He had spent his life making the invitation sound personal.
“What happens if I refuse?”
“The special arrangements lapse.”
“And his treatment?”
“His ordinary entitlements continue.”
Senn slid the consent form towards him.
In the space for his response, Tomas wrote that he would visit on Sunday.
On Saturday, Mara found him carrying an extra chair up the stairs.
“Company?”
“My father.”
She stopped halfway through taking off her gloves.
“I thought he was dead.”
“So did I.”
He had not thought that. It was simply easier than explaining what he had thought.
She helped him manoeuvre the chair through the doorway.
Inside, Ivo was waiting with the train. A wheel had come off again.
“You said you’d fix it.”
“I said I’d look at it.”
“You said you’d fix it.”
Tomas heard the impatience in his own breath.
There had been a time, very recently, when he would have told the boy to be grateful. He could almost hear the sentence in the Father’s voice.
He sat down.
“All right. Show me.”
Mara stayed for tea. They argued about whether the old man would manage the stairs. She suggested asking the caretaker for the folding chair kept near the lift. Tomas said he could manage. Mara said that was not a plan.
After a while, he went to ask.
Sunday morning, the government announced a border emergency.
The Father appeared in dress uniform. He spoke of disloyalty, foreign insults and the duty of grown children to defend the home that had raised them.
Across the border, Tomas knew, another parent would be making a similar request.
At half past ten, his father had not arrived.
At eleven, Tomas called the residential complex.
The first attendant knew nothing about a visit. The second said a transport request had been declined. The third asked whether he was calling about the broadcast.
“No,” Tomas said.
“Then I don’t have an authorisation.”
He stood in the kitchen holding the telephone.
The prepared meal was on the table. He had bought pears because his father had once liked them. He did not know whether he still did.
For a moment, he was six again.
Mara came in carrying the folding chair.
“What happened?”
He told her.
She put the chair down.
“Which buses?”
They returned just after two.
Mara had gone ahead to heat the food. Ivo held the front door while Tomas helped the old man through it.
The journey had been slow and humiliating. The first driver refused to wait. At the interchange, his father needed a toilet. Twice, he told Tomas to go home.
Tomas had snapped at him.
His father had gone quiet.
Now, in the apartment, the old man sat in the borrowed chair and looked at the table.
“Pears,” he said.
“Can you eat them?”
“Of course I can eat pears.”
It was the first irritated thing he had said, and Tomas felt an unexpected relief.
The Father was still on the ceiling. The speech had ended, but the emergency channel was repeating selected passages.
His real father looked up.
“I met him once,” he said.
Tomas put down a plate.
“The one before this. He visited the factory.”
“What did you say to him?”
“I thanked him.”
The old man picked up his spoon, then set it down.
“They’d told us we might get visiting leave.”
Nobody spoke.
From the ceiling came the voice Tomas had spent his working life perfecting.
“You have never been alone.”
Ivo reached for a pear.
Mara told him to finish his soup.
The old man asked Tomas to pass the salt, and Tomas passed it.
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