House of Holes

The Story of Prince Bohuslav’s Beard

Bohuslav was a powerful prince in the country of Bohrania. When he was nineteen, he married a tall comely princess, with pale eyelashes and freckled shoulders, who bore him a son. She had an unusual habit during their lovemaking: At the point of her climax, she would bite hard on his luxuriant braided beard. As a result of this repeated act of passion, Prince Bohu’s beard began to develop a memory.

For the most part he ruled with fairness, and he loved his tall pale queen, but every few weeks her perfect beauty and her perfect goodness made him restless, and he became possessed with the need to plunge his purple cameroon into an ugly-but-lovely woman. He liked them plump and awkward and shy and full of jokes, with a gap between their two front teeth. He called them Uniques. When his queen visited the sick in the northern colonies every other Thursday, he would whisper to his court, “Find me a new and wonderful Unique for tonight,” and then he would begin washing and singing and braiding his enormous beard. When the candles were lit, he sat on his throne, wearing a tiny toga, and the Unique was brought in, holding a penis sandal made of heavy black ribbon. She had been bathed and scented and told strange stories about mountain zebras mating, and she had been closely instructed in the art of lacing the penis sandal.

The king would ask her to kneel before him and he would open his legs, and she would lace the ancestral sandal around his swelling penis, telling him the new jokes that were circulating in his kingdom. He would laugh loudly, and his penis would become as hard as applewood and knotted with veins, whereupon he and the Unique would begin kissing eagerly on his throne. Then he would say, “Untie the sandal,” and with one pull, as she had been trained to do, the girl untied it, so that it hung dangling for a moment from his royal turgidity.

“Stuff me full of your hot substance, oh mighty king, for I am Unique,” the girl would say, as she knelt over him on the throne, planting her hands on his enormous chest. And at the moment of their perfect union, King Bohuslav would seize his black braided beard and hold it to her mouth, whereupon she would clamp down on it to stifle her cries. Thus the memory of innumerable couplings entered his beard.

This went on for almost ten years. Bohu’s beard by now had a huge double braid and looked like a loaf of pumpernickel challah. It was said by some in the court that if you held your ear to his beard, you could hear the pleasure cries of a thousand women.

One night, though, a Unique of uncommon intelligence was lacing up the penis sandal. King Bohuslav groped for her breast and tried to kiss her, but suddenly she pulled out a large pair of shears and lopped off his beard with one powerful snip. King Bohuslav let out an agonized bellow and lost consciousness. The girl ran out the side door and hid carefully for a week in the hills with a friend.

Meanwhile the prince had sent guardsmen and black dogs out in search of his braided beard. “How can we hide it?” asked the girl of her friend. The friend knew the arts of pharmacy, and the two young women boiled the beard until it dissolved. Then they skimmed off the purple scum and buried it, and they purified and distilled the barbaric essence, mixing it with the liqueurs of fennel and saps of wild spinach, making of this mixture an uncommonly powerful aphrodisiac. The two women fled to Paris and grew wealthy selling Prince Bohu’s beardwater, under the name Gouttelettes de Bonheur, or Droplets of Happiness. Even much diluted, the liquid had a startling effect on anyone, male or female, who tasted it.

The prince, meanwhile, took the loss of his beard as a warning. He ended his dalliance with Uniques and built a large hospital so that his wife wouldn’t go away on Thursdays. Seventeen of his penis sandals are on view in the museum of the House of Holes.