The Temporary Room

Tomáš arrives to study programming and brings a familiar frustration with physics: the vocabulary keeps changing before anyone identifies where the physical description changed.

The Temporary Room

By the time Tomáš arrived, the room had been rearranged three times.

It had once been Jan’s study, although he had rarely used it for sustained work. The desk held unopened envelopes, adapters for devices that had disappeared years earlier, and notebooks he continued to keep because he could no longer remember what was inside them. After Anna was born, the room became the place where things went when they needed to stop existing in the rest of the apartment.

Now a narrow bed stood against the wall. The desk had been moved beneath the window, and most of Jan’s books had been transferred into boxes stacked in their bedroom.

Mila had spent the previous evening trying to make the room look prepared rather than evacuated.

Jan had helped by carrying the same two boxes between rooms.

“This one can remain here,” he said, lowering a box marked PAPERS beside the wardrobe.

Mila looked at the box and then at the space she had cleared for Tomáš’s suitcase.

“It remained here for three years. That is why I asked you to move it.”

“I thought you meant away from the desk.”

“I meant away from the person who will be sleeping here.”

Jan lifted the box again. Something shifted heavily inside it.

“I probably should have sorted this before now.”

“You said that when I was pregnant.”

“That was not a good time.”

“No. You were very busy explaining why it was not a good time.”

Anna sat on the floor with one of Jan’s notebooks open across her knees. She had found a blue marker and drawn a broad line through several pages of equations. Whenever the marker caught on the paper, she pressed harder.

Jan put down the box and reached for the notebook.

Anna folded herself over it.

“That belonged to me,” he said.

She looked towards Mila, who was straightening the blanket on the bed.

“It has been under the desk since before she was born,” Mila said. “I think ownership becomes difficult to defend after that.”

“There could be useful work in it.”

“Then this is a good opportunity to find out.”

Anna resumed drawing.

Jan carried the box into their bedroom.

When he returned, Mila had placed a folded towel at the foot of the bed and a glass of water on the desk. The lamp beside it leaned slightly towards the window. She adjusted the shade, but it returned to the same angle when she released it.

“Do you think this looks too temporary?” she asked.

“He is staying here temporarily.”

“That does not mean the room has to remind him.”

“He grew up with two sisters and a grandmother downstairs. Having a door that closes may feel luxurious.”

Mila stood in the middle of the room, examining what remained. “He already thinks he is inconveniencing us. His mother apologised three times during one phone call.”

“That is his mother’s normal rate.”

“He may have inherited it.”

Jan understood that this was not really about the room. Mila wanted Tomáš to arrive without feeling that the household had been bent out of shape to accommodate him.

“He can stay until he finds somewhere suitable,” Jan said. “There is no deadline.”

“You told him there was a bed and that the tram stop was close.”

“I assumed the rest was clear.”

“To you, most things are clear before you have said them.”

Anna stood, carrying the notebook against her chest, and pointed towards the bed.

“Toma sleep?”

“Tomáš,” Mila corrected gently.

Anna attempted the name and produced something that ended in a hiss.

Jan crouched beside her. “You may have to call him that when he gets here.”

“Toma,” she said, already satisfied with her version.

They heard a car stop outside. A few seconds later, it started again, moved farther down the street, and stopped once more.

Jan went to the window. A small grey hatchback was reversing towards the building.

“You told Pavel the entrance was opposite the pharmacy,” Mila said.

“It used to be.”

“The pharmacy closed before Anna was born.”

“The building is still there.”

“The building was the pharmacy.”

Jan went downstairs before Pavel decided the street itself was incorrect.

The boot of the car was open. A suitcase, two boxes, a backpack, and a plant wrapped in newspaper had been fitted inside with the care of a difficult packing problem. Pavel stood beside them, checking the number above the entrance.

He had put on weight in the face and lost it from the rest of him. His hair was thinner than in the photographs, though he still wore it in the same style he had when they were both young enough to believe that adults eventually stopped changing.

“You look almost the same from the car,” Pavel said when he saw him. “It becomes less convincing at this distance.”

Jan embraced him. The movement was familiar, but they had not done it often enough in recent years for it to be effortless.

“You drove seven hours to inspect my face?”

“Six and a half. The final half hour was spent circling a pharmacy that no longer exists.”

“I gave you the building number.”

“You gave me a history of the neighbourhood.”

Tomáš waited on the other side of the car with one hand on the strap of his backpack.

Jan remembered him mostly as a boy running after older cousins in Pavel’s garden, willing to accept any rule of a game as long as he was allowed to remain in it. Now he was taller than Jan had expected and seemed uncertain whether to offer his hand or step forward.

He tried both and nearly struck Jan’s shoulder with the backpack.

“Sorry,” he said, adjusting the strap. “And thank you for letting me stay. I know it is not ideal with Anna and everything.”

“It is fine. The room is small, but the door works, and one of the hallway switches appears to control nothing. You will get used to both.”

Tomáš smiled with visible relief.

Pavel opened the boot fully. “Tell him he did not need to bring all of this. He stopped listening to me when I suggested that programming could probably be studied without transporting every book ever written about it.”

Jan lifted the first box and felt the weight settle into his arms.

“What is in here?”

“Books,” Tomáš said.

“That part was evident.”

“Mostly programming and mathematics. Some of them were recommended by students in the second year.”

“Students in the second year recommend whatever caused them the most suffering. They need to believe it was necessary.”

Pavel pointed towards Jan as if this confirmed a position he had defended throughout the drive.

They carried everything upstairs in several trips. Tomáš had packed very few clothes, but enough books to make the desk unusable. The plant came last. It had four long leaves, one bent near the tip, and loose soil had spilled into the newspaper.

“My mother thought the room would feel more familiar if I brought something from home,” Tomáš explained.

Mila accepted the pot from him. “We will keep it in the kitchen until we know whether Anna thinks leaves can be removed.”

Anna had been watching from behind the living-room door. When Tomáš crouched, she remained where she was and studied him.

He took a small wooden animal from the side pocket of his backpack.

“My sister said you liked horses.”

The animal was plainly a cow, though its paint had worn away around the head.

Anna came closer and took it from him.

“Horse,” she said.

Tomáš looked at Jan.

“It will be easier if you agree,” Jan told him.

Tomáš nodded. “It is a horse.”

Anna pointed at him. “Toma.”

“I was warned.”

She took his hand and pulled him towards a line of toys arranged along the rug. Tomáš allowed himself to be taken. Within a minute he was sitting cross-legged on the floor while Anna showed him which animals could occupy the wooden house and which had been permanently excluded.

Later, after Anna had woken once, demanded water and fallen asleep again, Jan found Tomáš sitting on the floor between the open boxes.

Most of the books were about programming, discrete mathematics and computer systems. Several covers promised that their contents were practical, modern or complete. The physics textbook lay alone on the desk, still wrapped in plastic from the university shop.

Tomáš placed another programming book on the shelf, considered it, and moved it two positions to the left.

“You brought material for more than one semester,” Jan said.

“Some of it is not for the course. I wanted to learn C properly before we start systems programming, and one of the students online said the mathematics book used by the university leaves out too much.”

“Students online often speak as though a missing chapter has ruined their lives.”

“I bought it before I realised they disagree about everything.”

Jan picked up the physics textbook.

“This one looks untouched.”

“It is. Physics is compulsory in the first semester.”

“You sound as though they added it as a punishment.”

“I do not hate physics. I just never understood why the explanations kept changing.”

Jan put the book back on the desk. “Changing how?”

“In school, I could usually understand a chapter while we were doing it. Then we started a different topic and used new terms, even when it seemed connected to the previous one. The teacher would say it was all part of the same physics, but the rules and the language changed, and we were expected to know when to use which version.”

“That is partly because different models are useful in different situations.”

“I know. In programming, though, when something changes type, the conversion has to happen somewhere. You can point to it. In physics I often felt that the description had changed before anyone told us exactly what had happened.”

He spoke without accusation. It was an old irritation rather than a newly formed theory.