The Movement by petra Hůlová

Author:petra Hůlová [Hůlová, petra]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: World Editions
Published: 2021-03-22T09:10:39+00:00

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There are several reasons I’m making a trip to the women’s Community Center. First, because the Movement explicitly recommends that Institute employees make regular visits to Institutes in other regions and affiliated Community Centers and Gardens (if the right hand doesn’t know what the left is doing, the legs will get them nowhere, as we like to say). Second, I’m overworked, and there’s nothing better for that than a brief change of environment. And third, I want to revisit the situation with Libor’s and Richard’s wives. Technically I’m responsible only for my clients’ reeducation, but any treatment their partners are undergoing falls under the purview of the Community Centers, and coordination of the reeducation process for the couple as a whole is a crucial factor in determining the outcome of their lives. Not to mention, I’m tired of constantly confiscating the correspondence between Richard and his wife.

I still have the same wheeled suitcase from my mother that I brought with me to the Institute almost twenty years ago. I had the pocket zippers repaired and lubricated the wheel that scraped with a bottle of oil I borrowed from the cafeteria cooks. They wish me a pleasant trip, giggling and snorting into their pizza-dough-coated hands. (Simple women with no great ambition, I didn’t expect anything other than crude humor from them. Two of them even used to belong to Manhood Watch. Institutes that struggle with a shortage of personnel are willing to look the other way when it comes to hires who have no ideological influence on the clients.)

I pack only a few necessities. (As an Institute employee, I’m automatically issued a tracksuit at any affiliated facility.) I take Libor’s and Richard’s personal files—on paper, just to be safe—and slip them into my larger suitcase pocket, where, by the way, I also discovered an age-old comb of mine, at this point totally useless, given how short my hair is.

I pack, and in my head I’m already on the road, or at least on my way out the front gate to the parking lot, where a van sits ready and waiting (a decommissioned patrol van with an outmoded GPS and windows built in with a welding torch, courtesy of our technicians).

I pack, counting the months since I last went anywhere—everyone thinks the clients are locked up in here, but really we’re the ones who don’t set foot outside the place. It’s a paradox of fate that the animals brought here for slaughter when it was still a meatpacking plant usually spent no more than a few hours here, whereas Institute staff are cooped up inside for years, despite our total freedom, and whenever a reason presents itself to go out in the world, some special occasion like the anniversary of Rita’s speech in Europarliament, the people who take advantage of it are, to be blunt, usually the ones with the least scruples about missing work. And aren’t they the ones who deserve a break the least? The ones whose conscience allows

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