PRIDE

At ten in the morning, the doors opened for Class 3B.

Twenty-eight children walked in pairs, as they had been taught, all in identical dark blazers. Each wore a triangular neckerchief, half white and half red, with its ends drawn through a gold clasp bearing an emblem. They had worn them that way since first grade, and nobody remembered there had ever been another way. Only the girl at the back of the line had a neckerchief that was entirely white. “A blank slate,” their teacher would say, and the girl would nod proudly. The red half had to be earned.

The guide met them at the entrance to the first gallery. An immaculate uniform, freshly pressed cuffs, and a faint accent he had spent twenty years filing down until it was almost imperceptible. When he said “we,” the word came out louder than it did from anyone else.

“Once, we were too polite,” he said. “We spent so long apologising that we forgot what we were apologising for.”

The children laughed. They liked it when grown-ups made jokes.

He led them past display cases: maps on which the country covered three times as much ground as it did today; banners; letters; the first passport issued in the new format. He spoke warmly, without notes, and so well that by the end of the gallery even the security guard had stopped checking his watch.

An enormous screen glowed in the third gallery. The guide brought the class to a halt in front of it.

“Do you know who that is?” he asked, though they all did.

“The one who said it out loud first,” the children answered in chorus.

“The one who said it out loud first,” the guide agreed with a nod. “They laughed at him. Then they stopped.”

The recording was digital and in colour, but the shape of the frame alone showed how old it was: nobody filmed like that anymore. A cold square, breath steaming in the air, and above the crowd dozens of raised hands holding flat, gleaming rectangles. In those days people still filmed everything themselves. A man in a grey overcoat stood without a podium, the wind whipping at his hair.

“They tell me not to speak so loudly,” he said. “People will be offended. I don't want to offend anyone. I want us to stop feeling like guests in our own home.

We opened our doors. We shared our schools, our hospitals, our bread. And I'm proud of that. But bread comes at a cost, and hospitals have queues. And when our child is standing in that queue, that child has the right to stand first. This isn't cruelty. This is order.

We apologised for so long that we forgot what for. Enough. We have nothing left to prove to anyone. Let everyone who enters our home know the rules of this home. Then they will be welcome here.”

During those last words, the guide moved his lips silently along with the man, the way people move their lips in church. Two boys in the line did the same. The square on the screen broke into applause, not wildly but evenly, as people applaud someone who has said what they had long been thinking themselves.

A man with a mop stood against the far wall. He knew the speech by heart, down to the breath between phrases, and, as always, mentally corrected the date in the caption beneath the screen. He had mopped this gallery forty-one times. Not once had the floor stayed clean beyond the next school visit.

“Any questions?” the guide asked.

A hand went up halfway down the line. The red half of the boy's neckerchief had slipped to one side.

“Why is the man in the coat on the screen, but the man with the mop isn't?”

Nobody had time to hush him. The guide crouched so their eyes were level and answered as one answers a question worth asking:

“Because the Hall of Glory preserves the things we are proud of. And he is the reason it's always clean in here. We appreciate that. We really do.”

The boy considered this and nodded. It was an honest answer.

The man with the mop lowered his eyes and went on washing the floor.