Too Heavy a Weapon
by Marek Šindelka
Translated from Czech by Graeme Dibble
A foreign city outside the window. Lenka was in the shower, Petr was getting dressed. He buttoned up his shirt and opened the map he had picked up from reception. As his eyes wandered over the exotic-sounding street names, he suddenly heard a scream from the courtyard. He leaned out of the window: a summer’s evening, a few trees down below, a playground somewhere beneath their canopy. A child was yelling. Nothing unusual about that. Except the fact that he was screaming in a foreign language, arguing with his father in French. It was a real meltdown: the child was hysterically demanding something. Like a broken record, he kept screaming the same word over and over again until it became completely distorted in his mouth – Petr didn’t understand French, but the word had long since lost its meaning in any language. All that was left was the sound. A biological screech. The vibrating string of the vocal chords stretched red raw. The child was emitting sounds in an attempt to overpower his father, who was saying something dispassionately in a calm voice, driving the young boy completely crazy.
Petr remembered a game he used to play as a child. If he wanted to think of nothing at all, he’d begin to mechanically repeat a word. He’d look up at the sky and say “sky” and repeat the word until it lost its meaning and no longer had anything in common with the enormous expanse of blue above him. Suddenly it was merely his tongue rising up to the top of his mouth and the movement of his lips as he breathed out. All of the magic was gone; his mouth made two hissing sounds like a snake and a flat tyre, and suddenly that infinite blue was completely free and beyond reach. After that it took a while for the word to heal inside him. For some time afterwards he was afraid to put too much weight on it.
Petr remembered how easy it had been in childhood to reach the nothingness beyond words. It had been easy to suspend or obliterate the meaning of things. You were always just one step away from the void. Terms still didn’t quite fit; they didn’t adhere to things so well. It was only later that they became solid and intertwined: the world with its coating of damp, milky words passed through the furnace of Petr’s adulthood and came out hardened. In the reality he had slowly grown into, everything suddenly meant something, and it was by no means easy to disarm some terms. They were invariably and insistently meaningful; he invariably understood them.
The screeching from the courtyard continued.
“Upbringing,” said Petr by way of an experiment. He repeated the word several times, but nothing happened. A kind of upbringing was still going on down below. The child yelled. The parent stood there and spoke. He was passing on the familial baton. He was educating his son in a calm, quiet voice. He stood there and inculcated himself within his son: he grafted himself onto him, and his son was as defenceless as a tree when a fruit grower sticks a new branch into its wound, a piece of dead stick that will start to take root there. The screeching intensified. The child screamed like an animal. He screamed words because his father had taught him to do that, but now they had long since ceased having any meaning for him. Just like Petr when he had played his games long ago, the boy suddenly found himself beyond the border of nothingness, in that nihilistic desert where the world stands before you in all of its horror: monolithic, indigestible, not cut up into bite-size pieces.
At this point, words were still too heavy a weapon for the boy. But one day, thought Petr, one day he will accomplish things with them. He’ll use them like a picklock to break into the world of various girls and women, make money using words, weave them together into a huge nest of prestige. He might go far: already you could see he had staying power. He’ll set himself difficult goals. He’ll fight for human rights, he’ll fight against corruption, he’ll become a politician and climb all 14 eight-thousanders of public life. Petr smiled. No doubt about it. Towards the end of his life he’ll become sclerotic, all of the energy within him will putrefy and turn to apathy and hatred, that’s the way it goes, he’ll be left with a mindless struggle against anything and everything, the words will solidify into childish ideals and phrases, slowly and imperceptibly reverting to nothingness, perhaps he’ll change his ways, perhaps he’ll steal some money, who knows, but in any case he’ll fight on because the void will be breathing down his neck. He’s precisely that type. He’ll spend his whole life pummelling people with words, he won’t back down and he’ll go his own way, he’ll chop off heads and take no prisoners. When no-one else happens to be around, he’ll trample himself into the ground. Petr felt admiration for the boy, tinged with regret. He had never been able to muster that much toughness within himself; he’d never face a monster head on, he’d always find an easy way round.
Petr came back down to earth because the politician in the courtyard was crying. His whole future lay before him, but didn’t yet have the strength to wield his most powerful weapon. The sight of this injustice, of the way his father calmly demonstrated his superiority, sent the child into utter despair. In a broken voice he tearfully repeated his one and only word, rummaging through the syllables, through those meaningless sounds, as though rummaging through a jewellery box with sticky fingers, babbling, sniffing, long since having forgotten what he was demanding – it no longer played any role in this battle. People leaned out of the windows opposite, craning their necks to catch at least a glimpse of this scene through the leaves.
And suddenly silence. A terrible silence deadened the courtyard. Blue shadows, reflections in windows, swallows in flight. It seemed to Petr that he could hear an icy crackling somewhere, the grinding of teeth. The child laboriously gathered all his strength and yelled out one clearly articulated sentence. It was incomprehensible, but it had a fateful sound to it; someone chuckled from one of the windows. The child must have hit his father where it hurt, because for the first time he yelled too.
Lenka came out of the bathroom wrapped in a towel and ran around the room, quickly gathering up pieces of clothing left lying on the bed and the floor after their love-making.
“What’s going on out there?” she said, motioning to the window, and without even waiting for an answer she closed the bathroom door again. Petr shrugged.
“Lenka,” he thought with a sudden insistence. He repeated the word several times but then quickly stopped because Lenka had immediately begun to disappear before his eyes. For a moment he had glimpsed with horror what the set of attributes with her name contained: a few freckles around her collarbone, which he tended to look at when they were talking, the movement of her hand as she tucked a strand of hair behind her ear, a few words, phrases and puns which they tossed back and forth like a ball, a few notions about what her world was like (they had only known each other for a few months), a nice smell, a couple of different smiles. All of that burst open like the bud of an impatiens before Petr’s startled gaze.
He didn’t dare mention the word love.
“Shall we go?” said Lenka. She was standing in the doorway, already dressed.
As if caught red-handed, Petr quickly gathered up all the freckles, smells and smiles and put them back more or less in their place; then he kissed this set of attributes on the lips and they left.
They went down the stairs. Petr slowed down on the landing and, as if in a dream, passed an angry man carrying a young boy whose eyes were red from crying. The man and the child were both stubbornly silent as they wearily ascended the staircase. Words had failed after all: there was the imprint of the father’s hand on the boy’s cheek, and for a moment Petr seemed to glimpse a tiny genealogical branch grafted onto the boy’s side.
He caught up with Lenka and opened the door. They walked out into the evening of an unfamiliar city and, just like all tourists, headed in the direction where they assumed the centre to be.
Graeme Dibble is originally from Scotland and has lived in the Czech Republic for over twenty years. He specializes in history, music and literature translations.
Marek Šindelka is an award-winning poet and novelist. His books have been published in English, Dutch and Polish translation. “Too Heavy a Weapon” is taken from a collection of short stories by contemporary Czech authors published in 2014. Šindelka has won both critical and popular acclaim for his works, including Map of Anna (2014) and Fatigue (2016). He has also recently seen the successful production of his play The Feminist (2023) on stages across the Czech Republic.