For sale: a St Bernard dog, to a good home only. Price negotiable. Gel.” He stood up, pulled on his buckskin gloves with a small shot-hole in the top side and said: “I’m off to get that St Bernard. If the corner with its baroque chairs is ready and waiting, let’s have the St Bernard ready and waiting as well.” Next day, my brother and sister-in-law not having slept that night, cousin Heinrich Kocian arrived, and that he was a very small cousin we knew — whenever he was about to eat a frankfurter, it would hang down to his knees before he’d taken the first bite — and so from a distance it looked as if he was leading a small cow. When he reached the house, my brother thought he was leading a big calf, a young bullock. But it was the St Bernard. “Six hundred crowns he cost, the owner’s a writer!” he shouted excitedly, “and he’s called Nels! The author’s name’s Gel!” Nels was a handsome beast with a washing-line round his neck, secured with the writer’s dressing-gown cord, and the dog instantly made himself at home, lying down on the cement floor to cool off, and the way he lay there was exactly as if he were practising for how he was going to lie outside the entrance to the Keeper’s Lodge restaurant. And cousin Heinrich sat down on a rococo chair, legs crossed, in his Tyrolean hat, and with one sleeve rolled slightly back he reported how the writer had made him welcome and explained that the main reason he was selling the dog was because he loved him, but Nels loved his young wife much more, so whenever he laid a hand on her, the dog would bowl him over and growl into his face, so he had grown into a disturber of conjugal bliss, and that was why he was selling him. And he had immediately handed over the dog’s pedigree and here it all was: Nels was famous, a descendant of the short-haired St Bernards of the St Gothard Pass and his father was thrice best of breed at the Swiss national dog show, and his mother had come from the St Gothard hospice itself… And cousin Heinrich added the dressing-gown cord to the bill, because Nels had grown up indoors and so in lieu of a lead Mr Gel the writer had let him have the dressing-gown cord for the journey. And then Heinrich left and Nels remained in the house. And so the day came when my brother and sister-in-law went to the Co-op offices to pick up their deed of appointment to the Keeper’s Lodge inn in the forest range of Kersko. But the manager told them that, regrettably, the licensee who had been at the inn before had had second thoughts and decided to stay on, but that there was a pub that had come vacant at Chleby, so that was the deed they were getting. The beautiful lantern-lit garden, the bright lights of the restaurant with its limewood tables and heavy rustic chairs, its corner for regulars with its baroque chairs, all that was extinguished, as if some malevolent magician had hauled it away somewhere on a circus trailer, including the St Bernard, who, along with the chairs, remained the only living evidence that it hadn’t been a daydream, but a snippet of reality, one sector of a beautiful circle, one degree on the basis of which, with a bit of imagination, a circle might have been described. Nels, the St Bernard, was a crumb of the Host in which was the whole Christ. The inn at Chleby was a sorry place where living on the premises was impossible, so my brother and sister-in-law had to commute to it, the St Bernard would lie at my mother’s feet and look fondly up into her eyes, and she was often caught not just talking to him, but lying on the carpet with the dog for a pillow. At Chleby, business was good, but for all that just business, the beer — and the goulash — were so good that workers coming home from their workplaces in town no longer went straight home, but sat around in the inn by the cemetery, drinking and eating until their money ran out, but my brother and sister-in-law were delighted that they’d turned the inn into a real pub, to the extent that finally the wives of the drinkers of its Kolín beer joined forces and complained to the local authority that their menfolk were drinking all their money away and, even worse, had stopped coming home and taken up residence in the inn. So my brother had to get back behind the wheel and become a cab-driver, but he never stopped dreaming, what if the manager of the Keeper’s Lodge restaurant in the Kersko forest range had a sudden heart attack, or if he got slightly run over by a car? But the manager enjoyed rude good health and although he would have gladly left, the knowledge that my brother was so keen on the restaurant, and on no other, gave him added strength and stamina. Cousin Heinrich Kocian came back just once. That was the time when my brother entered Nels in the national dog show in Prague, at the Velká Chuchle race-course. And Heinrich insisted that he would parade Nels. And so that day, in his Tyrolean hat and buckskin gloves, and his leather hunting jacket, he stood there holding Nels tight on a leather lead twisted round his wrist, because the writer, Mr Gel, had written ex post that Nels was not only extremely strong, but also vicious. However, the children had so humanised him that they would lead him at the muzzle, like a horse, put a bathing costume across his back and take him swimming, but he insisted on dragging them out of the water by their trunks, persisting in the belief that the children were drowning and he had to save them. He was only vicious to tramps and postmen, and one time he dragged a postman delivering telegrams, along with his mailbag, into his kennel, where he munched up all the registered letters and three telegrams, though he left the postman unharmed except for tearing his uniform and covering him in saliva, it being his breed’s fate to slaver a lot, and whenever he shook his head, he spattered everyone and everything around with great gobbets of spit. In short he was a purveyor of showers. When our cousin saw that he and Nels were being filmed, he was on cloud nine. And he started spinning yarns to my brother, because such a glorious environment called for it, with so many dogs and so many people about, so many foreigners who’d brought their dogs along to compete for some award, like Nels himself, some certificate in whatever category their dog was entered in. Once again, Heinrich Kocian was loud on the subject of the Prince von Thurn and Taxis, his friend, and his friend the Baron Hiross, and because the turn of the St Bernards was a long time coming, he went on with particular zest about how his friend, Prince Kinský, loved riding around in his carriage drawn by four black horses, who had to have white socks, and how one broker and horse-trader had supplied his friend Kinský with a pair of black horses with white socks and the prince had hitched them up right away and they’d careered off together from Chlumec to Bydžov over flooded meadows, so the white socks got left behind in the flood water. And Count Kinský had told him, Heinrich, that he’d had the trader come over so he could give him a present, and he, damn fool that he was, came, and the Count’s grooms grabbed him and shoved him up to his chest in a barrel filled with manure, “…and then, my friend,” Count Kinský had said, “I took my sword and swung it at the horse-trader’s neck and he ducked down into the manure, so I did it several times more and finally told the grooms to tip the manure out onto the compost heap along with the trader…” and the band was playing at the Chuchle race-course and dogs were barking and finally it was the turn of the St Bernards, and suddenly — Nels puckered his brow, the way he would so as to peer after objects a great distance away, as was ever the wont of his forebears, sitting up in the snow-covered mountains and peering after anything that might stir amid those august heights, and there at the end of the race-course was Mr Gel, the author, alighting from a bus with his young wife, and Nels spotted her and peered towards her and the young woman called out, from a half a mile away: “Nels!” And Nels saw that it was his mistress who he had been so fond of and he broke into a run, haring off to get to her as fast as he could, but my cousin Heinrich had the leather lead wrapped so firmly round his wrist that he had to run too, initially, but then Nels pulled out all the stops and my cousin went flying through the air like a banner being pulled behind the dog, who was pelting along and getting his rear legs tangled in his ears, and Nels ran past the twelve tables where the judges were sitting in the sun, a hundred or more sworn experts on dog breeds and pedigrees, and experts on all a dog’s pluses and minuses… and as cousin Heinrich flew over the tables, hauled along by the wrist of one hand, he just had time to raise his Tyrolean hat with his free hand and salute the dog show committee, though they were horrified at this strange apparition, and as cousin Heinrich shot through the air in the wake of Nels the St Bernard past the chairman of all the chairmen the latter gave vent to his disgust: “Outrageous! Not even lunchtime and some competitors are already drunk…” Nels meanwhile had reached his mistress, lain down on his back and presented her his underbelly so that she could kill him, the weakest spot on his body… Cousin Heinrich doffed his Tyrolean hat and introduced himself: “Heinrich Kocian, illegitimate son of Count Lánský von der Rose…,” and he set about flicking off the grass and dust from his coat, then, grabbing himself by the elbow, he found that a hole had been worn right through the leather to his very skin. The young woman knelt down and lay her head on the head of the St Bernard and the two friends, the woman and the St Bernard, merged in a mystical union, and the writer, Mr Gel, said: “Nels must weigh at least ninety kilos now and the strength of him, eh? He must have dragged you through the air a good hundred metres…,” and cousin Heinrich said: “What do you mean dragged? He was only obeying my command; once I did the same thing before the company at my friend the Prince von Thurn and Taxis’ place, only that time it was a Great Dane…” And Nels purred with delight and, as he lay there on his back, he cast sheep’s eyes up at his mistress and signalled to her with his paw that he wanted her to put her arms round him again, and again… But all that, including Nels, is now lost in the sands of time, though whenever I pass by the Keeper’s Lodge, that restaurant in the Kersko woods, I see a huge St Bernard lying on the little patio, the apron, lying there and watching and greeting the patrons and puckering his brow, and dreaming of quiet music playing in the abandoned and jumbled restaurant garden, of cloth-covered tables scattered about the lawn with the customers sitting at them on red chairs, chatting quietly and sipping beer and ordering pot-roast beef with stout gravy and Oumyslovice goulash…