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12 BEATRICE
THE VILLA BERÁNEK is three storeys high, the summer seat of Beránek the Butcher, it also had its own game preserve, so whenever the chain butcher got the urge, he could shoot male and female roe deer and pheasants from his very own bedroom. A villa in the middle of a pine forest, a villa with a gardener and a caretaker and a telephone, so if ever Mr Beránek and his friends were to arrive for a banquet, a long weekend or the holidays, the rooms of the villa would be agreeably heated and decorated with flowers, and the drive from the main avenue, lined with a tunnel of pine branches and freshly resanded, afforded arriving cars an impressive sight, and not only his green, gamekeeper’s short jacket and Tyrolean hat tipped down over his forehead, but also the hunting rifles and trophies displayed along the corridors gave the butcher, Mr Beránek, and his friends the glorious sensation of being God’s elect. And since Mr Beránek also had shops and a restaurant in Prague and so there were pailfuls of leftovers from lunches and offal from the abbatoir, Mr Beránek recalled that his father had also been in the butchery business before him, but horse butchery, and he had also kept ten pigs, which grew before your very eyes thanks only to the whole horse entrails and all the horse poop that came from the knacker’s yard and went straight to the pigs, who put on a kilo, or even more, daily. So Mr Beránek had a fifty-strong piggery created at the back of his villa and a lorry would arrive daily with pails of scraps from his restaurants and shops and the knacker’s yard and nine months later, for next to nothing, Beránek’s trucks would carry fifty pigs off and bring fifty piglets back to begin again, without Mr Beránek even noticing that, whenever the wind blew towards his villa and windows from the styes, despite their being concealed behind rhododendrons and conifers, the pig manure gave off a pungent, repellent stench. But to Mr Beránek the pig manure smelled sweet, he had no inkling of it, he merged as one with it, like a true feudal lord, he couldn’t live without the fragrant smell of outbuildings and horse manure and animal urine. And so, in order to wash and cleanse his soul, Mr Beránek had a tiny chapel in one of his rooms, turned one room into a shrine, with stained-glass windows, scenes from the lives of the saints set in lead, and in front of the windows stood a little altar, above which shone an everlasting light, and a kneeler, and whenever Mr Beránek sensed that he was a bit forlorn among his abbatoirs and agencies and shops and restaurants, that he was surrounded by too much manure, he could kneel and cleanse himself through pious prayer so thoroughly that he glowed with good health and good humour, which anyway flowed from the fact that Mr Beránek was a millionaire, and all rich people were merry back then and crowed with contentment and were kind and generous, and generosity flattered his healthy pride and often helped him to shed a tear to himself, almost to burst into tears, at how kind and amiable he was to people… and his father had built almost an entire house in Prague, Hlahol House down by the river… But that was then, then came the time when Mr Beránek lost everything, when he lost his good temper and generosity as well, and now his villa is a home for unfortunate children who have been born with both physical and mental disorders and are a burden to society. There are forty children here, from five to fifteen, ten cannot walk and just lie there, some of the children are blind or deaf, five sit on special chairs with the seats removed, and they sit on them, belted in, and they eat and they defecate into prepared vessels. From time to time a child dies, and at its dying the other kids don’t even register the tragedy, because their minds are in darkness and their only slightly human eyes seem now and again to recollect something, seem to look about them and briefly see all the horrors that enclose them before a mantle of mercy descends again and they retreat once more into the dark. And so the spirit of Beránek the chain butcher still enfolds the house in an odour of excreta, nowadays human, and three sisters in black dresses with white starched coifs and guimpes wrestle with the excreta, from morning till evening, and from evening through midnight to morning the house is full of moans and groans and whimpers, most of the children utter just squawks and snorts and whines, for a brief moment they may wear a beatific smile, but it’s the smile of the blessed on the tympanon of a Romanesque cathedral, a beautiful smile, and Sister Beatrice does what she can to elicit this human smile, she is kind and beautiful, she is young and full of courage and fervour in the name of God, because, as they taught her in her convent, God is here, even in this house, here among these shit-filled nappies and pots, God is here where a feeble-minded youngster grasps his genitals — like a calf’s foot — squawking and howling with puberty and adolescence, the two elderly sisters flee blushing and wringing their hands, and they go into Mr Beránek’s old room where the altar still stands, surrounded by flowers and the everlasting light, and there they fall down to cleanse themselves with prayer and thrust aside the boy’s blood-filled member, while Sister Beatrice offers comfort, sitting there and soothing the boy, stroking him quietly and turning his eyes towards her own, and because her God is right here now and not somewhere else, she establishes communication with the imbecile, she is briefly in a fusion with him, and for Sister Beatrice this fusion is the scale-pan in which she encounters her Lord, her God, who resides within her and lights up her beautiful face with an almost rococo impishness, and so she wipes the boy’s member, washing it in cold water until it shrinks back to normal… she kisses him on the forehead and goes off into the next room, the playroom, as it’s called, where, like other kids, these poor unfortunates play with the same toys as normal children, except that they don’t know how to play, having been shrouded in a dark cloud since birth, since having scarlet fever, or some accident, a cloud that makes their play monstrous, they tear most dolls apart and start poking their fingers right inside them, they poke the eyes out of clowns and most of all they like to smear them with their own excrement, because with so many children the duty of care hasn’t to be just to the one, but to all, and so it may happen that while the sisters are extracting soiled nappies from pants and skirts, other children who have soiled themselves may be picking out their excrement and throwing it gleefully up at the ceiling and then it falls back off the ceiling into their hair, making duties in this house, once that of chain butcher Mr Beránek, hard, quite a job for the three nuns and Sister Beatrice, who alone shines and smiles through any contingency the house may throw up. At night, during sultry summer nights, being on duty is even tougher, child patients as young as ten can show such powerful sexual instincts that they lie on top of each other with great, sweet pleasure, and, if the nuns don’t intervene, a child might, by the morning, have one eye sucked raw, another its eyebrows, by the unrelenting and insatiable tongue and lips of those who seem to have some remembrance of the sweet maternal breast that was denied them, they suck away at anything that comes their way if it’s warm, human, anything that projects, anything that carries an animal smell… and again, while the maids see to the children who aren’t that big a problem, since they have some sense of order and rules, able to make their own way to the toilet, while the maids darn and mend the children’s tights and trousers and skirts and blouses and pyjamas and nighties, and while ten children are in the back room, whether sighing gently in their sleep or troubled, in the three other rooms a state of heightened vigilance still reigns, dark Tertiary instincts struggle out through the children’s flesh and manifest themselves in unpredictable situations that only Sister Beatrice can cope with, all smiles in her starched collar and surplice, aglow like little Saint Thérèse of Lisieux, constantly removing the hands the children poke in places they’re not supposed to, calling to them soothingly, Beatrice clicks her tongue as you do with startled horses for as long as it takes for the children to settle, only