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 for their freakish behaviour to break out again the instant she steps out for even a moment. I once went there to visit and it sent shivers down my spine because I had no idea… there was a girl lying on a bed, she was blind and mentally disturbed, her shift was pulled up, and because her periods had already started, she was absently wiping the blood with her finger and then licking it with a religious devotion, abstracted, enraptured, as if in ecstasy. Sister Beatrice caressed her, placed her arm across her ripening breasts and ran quietly out into the corridor and then into the sunlight outside the house, and there stood a line of children, fifteen of them, and they kept tottering, they were headed by the one who had least wrong with him, he was leading three blind children by the hand, they all held hands, and the procession set off for a walk, I’d never seen so much joy in children who were well as in these kids, who may have been grievously broken, as the way they walked showed, yet their eyes spouted a longing and a capacity to make contact with all the things around them that they alighted on, all that they scented, not only with their little noses but with some higher system of smelling with their whole bodies… and Sister Beatrice strode along behind them, turning to see if a car was coming, a seven-year-old boy walked along by my side, with me holding his drool-covered little hand, this was the boy that Mr Krejčík took into his home for Christmas Eve, he had four children of his own, and the boy had kept whispering to me, in a muffled voice, but with enormous feeling: “I’ve got a home, I’ve got a home…,” and most of all he had liked the little tree covered in lights, but he looked at the Christmas tree the way cats do, he could see it, but he couldn’t explain everything, and most of all he enjoyed striking matches and that was how he set fire to Mr Krejčík’s curtains and he was over the moon, but the curtains were put out, and as Mr Krejčík and I chatted about anything and everything, the boy went on striking matches and Mr Krejčík slapped him and said like he meant it: “Stop doing that, for God’s sake!” And the boy smiled beatifically and told me: “I’ve got a home, I’ve got a home…,” and this time too, he had snuggled up to my hand, tenderly drooling long strings of saliva all over it and whispering: “I’ve got a home, I’m at home, home, home!” I found this yearning for a home startling, the force and feeling with which he voiced his not wish, but the actual condition in which he really was, though outside the home, at home. And I felt like broaching, with Sister Beatrice, the subject of the irresponsibility of bringing children like this into the world, the suffering it brings them, living like this, and whether it might not be better for these children not to be, and she turned and said with a smile: “Homer was born blind,” and I treated myself to a silent, pointless monologue on where all those beautiful and brave people were, all those people of sound stock with whom Homer had lived. All those nameless people had died, for all they were fully competent, while Homer, though by the laws of the earth he should have been cast on the rubbish heap, lives on forever in his writings. And I watched those blind kids, walking along in bliss and trust, one leading the other by the hand, walking along and inhaling the air and stepping up the pace the better to let the air in motion caress their cheeks. And Sister Beatrice told me how the priest came over from Sadská every day, how she went to confession every day, that she had hardly anything to confess, just her dreams, which were like the instalments of a soap opera, St Augustine would come to her, not the church father though, but the dark-skinned young man, the one who would chase pretty girls in Carthage on the coast of Africa, the swarthy playboy who took after his mother, whom she loved above all the other saints, St Monica, who was black, a black beauty… and the motley clothes of the children and their tottering gait, at that instant she seemed irradiated not by a higher something and a light from above, but by the way it was all framed in meadows and flowers and the shadows of pine trees, the clothes and faces suddenly told me how beautiful and complete any here-and-now is, only an actual moment in time in which all things and all creatures move as if illuminated by a sacred radiance that irradiates everything through a glittery, transparent sheet, and everything, anything, is not just beautiful, but breathtaking, including children who throw their excrement at the ceiling, and even that excrement glitters and is the start of a beautiful train of thought, and I had no other wish, if I could be someone other than I am, than to be Sister Beatrice, who reigns over everything like a sun, diminishing apparent ills and misfortunes thereby and receiving in exchange the pure and simple spirit in which she told me how, once a quarter, she had, however, to go to Mcely to super-confession, and with her rich feminine laugh and a healthy animal sensuality she told me that the priest at Mcely was a fine specimen of manhood, that, talking to him, she would even blush, because he was a little bit wicked, only wickedness put colour in her cheeks… was how she put it, and she nudged me and looked me in the eye and I could see it all, that is wasn’t that as a nun she was cut off from sex as by some trauma, but, on the contrary, that there was in her eyes so much sensuality and pure womanhood that I quavered and dropped my gaze, while she kept showering me with an amorous tenderness and said something no one has ever told me before, that I had very fine legs, and I could see that she could see everything, that she could see, if she so wished, me walking along beside her naked, that she could see me tossing about in bed on a summer’s night, and that I would toss and turn whenever I thought of her, just as she might think, in the quiet of the night, of the priest at Mcely, who, as she put it, was like the young Augustine before his sainthood, a man through and through, a male of the species, a sinner who only through sin had been converted and had become, like her, a friend and creature of God, much as the Villa Beránek had become a refuge for hapless children, a refuge in which Sister Beatrice, like a lamb of God, served her children and her God, the beautiful Sister Beatrice, whom I would drive the following week to her super-confession in Mcely, to the priest who so resembled a wise saint.