Issue #96

The Duel, Geography of the Niche, and Immobility of Thought

by Martin Čech

The Duel

Gustav fell asleep at the swimming pool. When he woke up, the time written on his ticket had long since passed. It was dark, and the water had been drained from the pool. He got up and hurried toward the corridor leading to the changing rooms. However, he didn't get very far—after just a few steps he realized that the glass doors between the pool and the showers were already locked. The lifeguard's cabin, where the phone was kept, was locked as well. The double doors leading to the winter garden were chained shut. Gustav was completely alone in the huge glass hall. It was so quiet that even a word spoken in his mind seemed to echo like a storm. Gustav was afraid to shout anything, afraid even to think anything, afraid that the echo would sweep him away before anyone came. Instead of shouting, he climbed down to the bottom of the empty pool. He walked to the corner where the coiled lane dividers used during the day lay piled together and lay down between them to sleep a little longer. "If I'm going to oversleep, I'm going to do it properly," he said to himself.

Still in his swimming trunks, he dropped down between the hoses and tried to fall asleep again. "They'll wake me in the morning when they start filling the pool," he thought. He fell asleep even though the ribbed rubber of the hoses was digging into his skin.

However, he was awakened by a sudden burst of deafening noise and then unbearable pain beneath his left shoulder blade. He reflexively rolled onto his back, swung his arm, and saw a man kneeling directly above him with a rattling electric drill. The man aimed the spinning tip at him, his narrowed eyes flashing in the darkness.

The pain in his back was terrible, unbearable. Gustav felt blood gushing from the wound, soaking his back all the way down to his swimming trunks. He shouted something, rolled backwards, jumped to his feet, and ran. Away. Away. Away from here. He started running, and the man with the drill was panting a few steps behind him. They ran almost three-quarters of the length of the pool.

Suddenly the noise stopped.

Gustav stopped, heard his pursuer cursing, turned around, and saw that he too was looking back. They both realized that the cord connecting the drill to the power source was too short and had been pulled out of the socket while he was running.

For a moment they stood silently facing each other, the man staring at the ground and whispering something to himself. Then suddenly he set the drill down on the ground and approached Gustav. Gustav stood motionless. The man came right up to him, without even looking him in the eye, and with his fingertips picked up a strand of hair stuck to Gustav's shoulder with sweat. Then he turned, quickly crossed the bottom of the pool, and stopped at the opposite end. He took a lighter from his pocket and burned the hair in the flame. He watched until it burned completely.

***

The Geography of the Niche

I wanted to study geography... It was my dream... Instead, I found myself at a lecture of some expert on cadastral maps who studied their changes throughout history.

From all this emerged a completely different picture than what I knew from books about the adventurous journeys of brave sailors. Everyone was roasting in a strange hell invented by someone, where the loss of one inevitably meant the gain of another. And that they all tried to outwit God! I attended a meeting of a club called "Conquerors of the Clouds." Everyone there wore some kind of club uniform with epaulettes that signified their importance within that social club. But they were probably descendants of the farmers from the lecture on cadastral maps, because in their imaginations the sky was divided up just like the land in some nameless village.

I saw a blacksmith in the ancient mechanical nativity scene located in the cathedral church. I saw him when I was seven years old. He stood in his niche and hammered his piece of iron. I came back there when I was twenty-seven. He stood in his niche and hammered his piece of iron. When I was forty-three, I came back there and said to myself, "During that time, you must have built a crankshaft factory, which first overshadowed General Motors' main suppliers, then you started making ball bearings, high-pressure valves and chassis for rail vehicles. After your investment in ironworks in Liberia failed, you returned to your old craft..." He stood there hammering his piece of iron.

I set out to map the world, but ended up charting the geography of a niche.

***

Immobility of a Thought

Sadness for the petrified black horse

He was commissioned to create a sculpture based on a legend so that the creation could stand in one of the three castle courtyards. In the legend, a knight was riding his faithful horse somewhere in a hurry and, somewhere along the way, he plainly did not do something as he should have because his black horse—undoubtedly under the influence of some dark spell—turned to stone on the spot. Someone imagined it as a touching scene—a knight mourning his petrified horse.

Yes, it was supposed to be an emotionally moving sculpture in the third courtyard, a sculpture for school trips, where a castle legend would be told... However, it was a superhumanly difficult task to carve the story into stone, because there is no easy way to indicate that the stone knight is alive and the stone horse is stone. In other words, stone offers no easy way to escape dependence on castle keepers, who may one day forget the legend, or distort it, or leave it untold, leaving the sculpture standing in the rain with only its ambiguity.