Early one spring morning Priest Beneventura steals into the church garden to relieve himself. On the other side of the church the ghetto of the city wakes with its poverty stricken: the panhandlers, moochers and scroungers; with its booze barrels and wounds; its dregs: the lushes, alkies and rubies; its worn-out homeless mutts and gaunt alley cats. On this side there are neatly tended old graves, surrounded by a high fence. The wild tulips are already in bud. Nothing beats such a view while taking a leak early in the morning. Beneventura is caught between well being and a feeling of sin. Overall he has done well in life. Barely thirty, he already is well-respected. He serves God and is duly paid for it. He is a contemporary man. He communicates with his brothers across the world on his laptop. He has two e-mail addresses – one for official, the other for personal communication. He has learned several foreign languages and travels a great deal on behalf of the church. Before entering the seminary, he had one sexual contact with a woman, which he remembers reluctantly, if only because she hissed over and over: “Lower! Lower!” – and he lost it before he could find where the “lower” was. During his time at the seminary and in one of his trips abroad he had had two, well, fine – four sexual encounters with men. Those were significantly better than the “lower” episode, but he has no intention of becoming dependent on such encounters. (Besides that, in two of those instances, he was troubled by the comments of his partners, such as “fuck me like crazy,” “shove it right up to my kidneys,” and so on.) However, he is very careful with such encounters because he knows of some that have led to great trouble. Beneventura much prefers to go to a weightlifting gym, drink freshly-squeezed juices (well, fine, in the evenings some wine, but within reason) and eat healthy food. One could say that God loves him. His professional day unwinds without any untoward incidents. Except one time, when two warring camps of relatives had invited two priests to the funeral of a dearly departed. They also had arranged two kinds of musical accompaniments – a French horn and the Latvian zither-like instrument – a kokle. Since they did not succeed in appeasing the warring factions, the ministers each said their piece on opposite sides of the coffin, speaking one over the other. The musical cacophony of the two instruments playing in tandem was the hardest to bear. Instead of the traditional three handfuls of earth, six were thrown into the grave. The one thing that all could agree on, however, was that there should be only one grave. Beneventura put this odd funeral to good use in the lesson he read during mass the following Sunday about the enmity between brothers, that should be eradicated at its very root.