The Whistle

The factory whistle blew at six and the town woke up. Not gradually, the way cities wake — alarm clocks at different times, coffee machines at different speeds. All at once. Six o'clock. The whistle. The town. This was Ostrava, in the northeast, where the steel was. I say "was" because the factory closed in 1998 and the whistle hasn't blown since, though people my mother's age still wake at six and can't explain why. The body remembers the schedule after the schedule is gone. A ghost alarm. My father worked the rolling mill. He came home smelling of metal and heat, a specific smell that isn't like anything else and that I could identify in a room of a thousand smells, which is what happens when your childhood has a scent. He washed his hands for ten minutes at the kitchen sink, scrubbing with a brush that was designed for pots and worked better on his fingers, which were thick and cracked and permanently grey in the creases no matter how long he scrubbed. I was not going to work in the factory. My parents made this clear early and often and with a firmness that suggested the matter had been discussed and decided before I was involved. I was going to go to university. I was going to Prague. I was going to study something that did not involve molten steel or shifts that started before the sun. I studied computer science. I live in Prague. I work for a company that makes software for logistics, which means I help trucks find shorter routes, which is less romantic than steelmaking but easier on the hands. I go home four times a year. The factory is still there — you can't demolish something that large quickly, and nobody has decided what to replace it with, so it sits, enormous and empty, like a cathedral to a god people stopped believing in. The windows are broken. The chimneys don't smoke. Kids ride bikes through the loading yard. My father is retired. He's seventy and his back is bad and his hearing is worse — the mill was loud in a way that hearing protection didn't fully solve, especially in the eighties when hearing protection was optional and optimism was not. He gardens now. Tomatoes, mainly. He's good at it. His tomatoes are better than anyone's tomatoes in a five-block radius, and he knows this, and the neighbors know this, and there is a quiet competition every August that nobody admits to and everyone participates in. The whistle is still on the roof of the main building. I can see it from my mother's kitchen window. Rusted, silent, pointing at the sky like it has something to say and nobody is listening. Someone on the town council proposed turning the factory into a museum. Someone else proposed apartments. Nothing has happened. The factory waits. Six AM. My mother is already up. My father is in the garden. The kettle is on. The town is quiet in a way that isn't peaceful, exactly — more like the silence after a long conversation. Everyone has said what they came to say. The whistle is done. We are what's left.