The Frame and the Dome

I don’t belong here. Not anymore.

It started a week ago. When… you know what happened. The Government gave it names, but deep inside we know, we feel, we admit. Surprising, really, how we keep finding nicer names for ugly things. Well… Who am I kidding? We do exactly the same thing ourselves. Masks, nicknames, excuses. It is in our nature, of course.

But the story isn’t about the Government. It would be too boring.

It is about me. More boring, you think? Yeah, ’cause you don’t know me. Yet.

Or, perhaps you are right.

Yesterday my resignation letter found its way to the boss’s office. Victoria — what a name, you might say! — signed it that afternoon after we talked.

Don’t get me wrong, I totally understand her. Damn, yeah. And… totally not.

I worked in this country for years. It had become my second home. Just a year ago I thought: “What a country! What a people!”

And now… Let me borrow one of their favourite phrases: “It’s not that simple.”

I got my citizenship — my second one — quite recently. I came here as the alien husband of my beautiful and strikingly smart wife.

She works in marketing. I worked in training. There was even a time when we — meaning I — provided them — meaning her company — with a service, when they ordered some team training from us.

You may be wondering: what about her? Is she happy about my resignation?

Well, let me tell you a little later. It’s worth waiting.

But today I am packing my stuff. And Pavel is going to inherit my office. Well, I’m so happy for him, what can I say? “Office” may be a generous word, of course. There are sixteen of us in one large room, divided by low partitions into little territories that give you just enough privacy to pretend you have some.

Mine is Pavel’s now.

I am an extremely organised person. My desk, however, regularly presents evidence to the contrary. Give it a few days, and it starts producing piles of drafts and notes all by itself. Then I check the handwriting and have to admit that, yeah, apparently I did it all myself.

And now I should probably ask for your forgiveness. My irony and humour are quite misplaced, since the story itself is very sad. In my defence, this is how it always works with me.

So, part of the job is to sort the drafts and notes into things I need and things I don’t.

I pick up one sheet of paper. Read it through. Bin it. Pick up another. Bin it. One more. Aha. Here are some ideas I’d better keep. Put it aside. Having a hard copy is better than taking a picture.

But after twenty minutes of sorting, I decide it’s taking too long. I start checking only one out of every three or four sheets and sending the rest to the shredder. Done in fifteen more minutes. Good.

Now certificates and diplomas.

What would you do? You’re not just moving out of the office. You’re probably — most likely — leaving the country soon. Nice pieces of “acknowledgement art” under glass. Simple yet beautiful frames. Heavy.

Well, I know who I am. There are many of these on the desk and in the drawer.

Should I take them to Lina, Karina’s sister? Karina is my wife, by the way. Their parents passed away a few years ago.

I sigh heavily. Take the papers out of the frames and feed them into the shredder.

I will remember the sound of paper crunching and tearing.

But I can easily reprint them from the files.

Pavel enters the room to tell me he’s sorry to see me go. He is a good guy. One of the few who were crushed by what happened.

He points to my little kinetic sculpture: a steel ball resting just above its stone base, turning lazily one way, stopping, then suddenly changing its mind and spinning the other way.

“Are you taking it?” he asks.

“Of course not. You can keep it,” I say, smiling.

He offers a few words of encouragement. Pavel often talks to me in English. He’s actually quite fluent, and we’ve been on quite a few business trips together, running training sessions for international companies.

“You can also take some of the training equipment,” I say, pointing at the Bluetooth speaker, the size-changing balls, and the colourful items beside the monitor. “There’s more in the bottom drawer.”

“Great, thanks,” he says. “But I already have my own. Maybe you can pass these on to Anna?”

“Well, yes. Could you please tell her to pick them up?”

He nods. And leaves.

On a partition wall rising a couple of feet above the table, there’s another frame. With the words

“Inspiring freedom and creativity —

from communities to the world.”

It’s one of our strategy-related slogans. The one I like the most.

Actually, this slogan is the very problem. It is to blame.

Simply put, a week ago it stopped working. Yet not many have noticed.

Honestly, it hadn’t been fully working for quite a while before that. But there was hope. And now that hope is dead. I wouldn’t have believed you if you’d told me a year ago that I would ever say this.

And my wife, Karina. Well, she was raised with the kind of ‘patriotic’ mindset that makes it almost ‘immoral’ to resist. Yet she tries. We talk. Cry. Argue. Ask questions. Hold hands. Argue again. And hope. The two of us still do have hope.

I open the top drawer of the desk. In the front left corner there is a small, light wooden box the size of a matchbox. I keep it here because I spend more time here than at home. Well, sometimes I keep it at home too.

“It protected your grandpa,” my mother said when I was a teenager. “Let it protect you too.”

Well, it sounded silly. The older my mum got, the more she believed in that kind of stuff. She is no longer in this world, so now I keep it as a sign of respect.

I open the box. An old brass necklace with a locket. I open it as well. A picture of a young girl with plaits. Smiling. Black and white. My grandpa’s love. My grandma. It was among the few things he took with him when he left home in 1941 to join the resistance against the German occupation.

“Truth is truth. A lie is a lie. You will see it if you are sincere,” he told me many times. “Evil destroys, humiliates, neglects values. Goodness creates something we can enjoy forever. If you follow your conscience, you won’t regret it.”

How many people have had to choose what to take in difficult times?

World wars, revolutions, disasters, exile...

Again and again. And now — me.

Anna arrives with a smile, fresh, sincere, almost childishly happy.

“Hi, Martin. Pavel told me you had something for me.”

I point at the items on the desk and open a drawer. “Everything’s yours!”

“Wow!” is all she manages before she starts picking things up, examining them, almost petting them. “Can I get a box or a bag? I’ll be back soon.”

“Sure,” I say. “Even a trolley, if you like.” Anna laughs.

She is almost out of the door when I stop her.

“Sorry, Anna. Do you feel we’re still inspiring freedom and creativity?”

“What?” she says, caught off guard. Then her face grows serious. She sighs. “Maybe we can still try?”

I nod.

Maybe.

But I won’t be able to.

Will I continue with training people? Not likely. We make people play roles, experiment with pretending… Yeah, for the sake of finding their own way, their true selves. But somehow, it all smells a little fishy to me now. I know I’m wrong and being emotional. It’s not about the industry. But I may quit completely. Almost decided.

You might think I’m judging the whole industry by our company. No. It’s more like a worldwide habit. We pretend to support people in their search for freedom with one hand, while accepting all kinds of injustice as some sort of norm with the other.

Yeah, I know what you would say. We just train skills. It’s outside politics. Sure. Everything is outside politics — art, sports, business, education, engineering, social work. So where exactly is politics? Maybe we just made it up? Maybe it doesn’t exist? Or maybe it’s simply another convenient word for saying that we actually don’t care?

Marta from HR walks over and leans against the desk next to mine. She was the one who headhunted me for this job. And I am grateful for those years.

My neighbours are out at the moment. Olga and Amir are away at an overseas event, and Milena, one of the project managers, is already out for lunch.

Marta looks at me as I hold our team photo taken four years ago. We were a smaller company then, yet energised and full of plans.

“Hard decision,” I say eventually. “My heart is kind of still here.”

“I know,” she says, standing straight, her arms folded. “I’m ready to talk if you need to. You’ll be paid extra, as usual in cases like this. If there is anything else I can do for you, please let me know.”

I smile. “I won’t leave without saying goodbye.”

She taps me on the shoulder and leaves.

Anna comes back with a box.

“Actually, Anna, do you want this picture?” I ask.

“Wow! Sure!” she replies. “I’ve heard about those days.” She puts the box on the desk next to mine and looks at the faces. Many are still with us. Some have left.

“What about him?” she asks, pointing at a tall and strong man in a suit in the front row.

“Alex,” I reply. “He was our marketing director. Was kind of a creative and kind guy.” Memories flash past me. “Now he is sort of a top manager at a state-owned media company. You might see him on TV from time to time.”

“Oh, my…” she exclaims. “Yes! I thought his face looked familiar.”

I’ve heard he has become quite radical, supporting militarisation and expansion. Well, I keep that to myself.

I remember the first day of the disaster. It was winter. The team literally split. Some were shocked and tried to protest, not only speaking out on social media but actually joining a protest in one of the central city squares. A large part of the team supported the attack. As crazy as it sounds.

The whole thing caught me by surprise. I was running an event for a big energy company a thousand miles away. Later I heard that about two thousand people had been detained.

“What now?” Karina asked when I called her that evening.

I didn’t have an answer.

Victoria enters the room.

She sighs. “I don’t have any predictions,” she says. “But maybe it’s better this way for both of us.”

I nod. “You won’t have to struggle with the decision to fire me if things get worse.”

“Yeah.” She half-smiles. “It could be a heavy burden. Thank you for all these years. And let’s keep in touch. Who knows…” She leaves the sentence unfinished, making it hard to tell whether it is hope or despair.

Victoria reaches into a paper bag and places a small trophy on the desk.

“If you hadn’t been here, we wouldn’t have won that training contest.” She smiles. “It’s light. And I want you to have some good memories.”

I pick it up, feeling tears coming on.

“Actually,” I say, “I want to leave something for you too. Remember Paris, 2013?”

It was the first time Victoria and I had done a project together. Back then, we were both hired by a huge HR company. Afterwards, there was that EVENT. She got tied up with other responsibilities, but I managed to make it. From time to time after that, I teased her about being the one who had his signature.

I hold out the book to her, the autograph right there on the cover.

“I just like his writing style,” I say. “But you actually like the man himself. You deserve to have it.”

A strange hobby for people like us, honestly. But, as a matter of fact, I’ve witnessed even weirder combinations.

“No, Martin. Don’t be ridiculous,” she protests, clearly unable to resist taking the book.

Stephen King. Under the Dome.

I smile. “Things aren’t that bad here yet, right?”

Victoria smiles back sadly. “Well, I hope not.”

We part.

“Don’t come to say goodbye,” she says.

“Don’t give it to your kids too early,” I reply.

She laughs. “See you, Martin.”

I pick up a magnet. Funny enough, it’s from my country, but it was a little gift from Karina. She bought it for me at a small market, as a joke. A country that managed to hide “love” in its name. Karina fell in love with it instantly.

“Why don’t we just stay here forever?” she asked me, laughing, back then.

“Well,” I answered. “You have responsibilities back there. Huge responsibilities. Your company will die without you!” I tried to sound serious.

“Yeah,” she sighed. “And more than that… I am a loyal citizen.”

“And I have a five-year contract,” I added.

“I love the Alps and the sea so much here,” she said dreamily.

I put it in my backpack.

Boris enters with a smile, shakes my hand and says a few words. He is the one who supported the attack, calling it “geopolitics”. He is a new hire. We worked together on a project for about a month and seemed to become almost friends, though I was his senior instructor. What happened struck both of us. I expected him to be anti-war. He expected me to join in “fighting for values”. But he learned a lot from me and still respects me.

If it hadn’t happened, we could even have gone fishing together, or bowling. Doesn’t matter. Now never.

“Do you have friends or relatives there?” I ask, meaning the neighbouring country.

“Not many,” he replies. “Some of them moved back here. Others are just crazy, wanting to stay.”

I hum. “Don’t they have the right to have their own opinion?”

“What? No, believe me, they are crazy.”

The dialogue doesn’t go well. Words sound almost empty.

He leaves.

Everything is packed. I pick up my wedding photo with Karina.

We wanted to have kids. We planned. Postponed. Planned and postponed again.

We were young.

Our careers seemed more important.

I breathe in deeply, as if breathing in the memories.

“I will go with you,” she said yesterday. “I’ve already told Lina. I’ll tell the others after we get there.”

We saw tears in each other’s eyes.

“What will you do?” she asked.

“Well,” I sighed. “I was thinking of going back to psychology. Of even teaching kids at school. I am multi-skilled, remember?”

She half-smiled.

“And you…” I gave her a meaningful look. “You can even get back to music.”

“Don’t joke like that.” There was relief in her voice.

“The good thing is,” I continued, “we are going to be closer to the sea. You liked it there.”

She smiled. With a mix of hope and pain.

I’ve prepared some gifts for everyone I worked closely with. Let them remember me as a good guy. I’ve already handed some of them out today.

I’m done here. Empty desk and drawers. Bare partition walls. Files downloaded. The backpack and two bigger bags are ready. The car is waiting outside.

The only thing left is a frame that reads:

“Inspiring freedom and creativity —

from communities to the world.”

They need the reminder, I think.

I say goodbye to my colleagues. I imagine walking down the corridors, down the stairs from the second floor, waving goodbye to familiar faces. I know many will regret seeing me go; few will allow themselves to show it. I’ll visit Marta’s office. And I won’t go to Victoria’s door.

What lies ahead? The end of the life I know?

Or the end of the world?

What I know for sure is that I don’t belong here.

As painful as it is to admit.

But I mean it.

Not anymore.