“Babies,” he told her. “Hundreds of babies.” He gave her a smile. “Our baby is in there.”
After dressing in street clothes, they walked down Bělohorská toward the spot on the map where the chapel was supposed to be. In the late-summer morning, Susan detected traceries of autumnal chill, a specifically Czech irony in the air, with high wispy cirrus clouds threading the sky like promissory notes. Elijah took her hand, clasping it very hard, checking both ways as they crossed the tramway tracks, the usual Pozor! warnings posted on their side of the platform, telling them to beware of whatever. The number 18 tram lumbered toward them silently from a distance up the hill to the west.
Fifteen minutes later, standing inside one of the chapels, Susan felt herself soften from all the procreative excess on display. Elijah had been right: carved babies took up every available space. Surrounding them on all sides—in the front, at the altar; in the back, near the choir loft, where the carved cherubs played various musical instruments; and on both walls—were plump winged infants in various postures of angelic gladness. She’d never seen so many sculpted babies in one place: cherubs not doing much of anything except engaging in a kind of abstract giggling frolic, freed from both gravity and the earth, the great play of Being inviting worship. What bliss! God was in the babies. But you had to look up, or you wouldn’t see them. The angelic orders were always above you. At the front, the small cross on the altar rested at eye level, apparently trivial, unimportant, outnumbered, in this nursery of angels. For once, the famous agony had been trumped by babies, who didn’t care about the Crucifixion or hadn’t figured it out.
“They loved their children,” Susan whispered to Elijah. “They worshiped infants.”
“Yeah,” Elijah said. She glanced up at him. On his face rested an expression of great calm, as if he were in a kingdom of sorts where he knew the location of everything. He was a pediatrician, after all. “Little kids were little ambassadors from God in those days. Look at that one.” He pointed. “Kind of a lascivious smile. Kind of knowing.”
She wiped a smudge off his cheek with her finger. “Are you hungry? Do you want lunch yet?”
He dug into his pocket and pulled out a nickel, holding it out as if he were about to drop it into her hand. Then he took it back. “We just got here. It’s not lunchtime. We got out of bed less than two hours ago. I love you,” he said matter-of-factly, apropos of nothing. “Did I already tell you this morning? I love you like crazy.” His voice rose with an odd conviction. The other tourists in the chapel glanced at them. Was their love that obvious? Outside, the previous day, sitting near a fountain, Susan had seen a young man and a young woman, lovers, steadfastly facing each other and stroking each other’s thighs, both of them crazed with desire and, somehow, calm about it.
“Yes,” she said, and a cool wind passed through her at that moment, right in through her abdomen and then out the back near her spine. “Yes, you do, and thanks for bringing me here, honey, and I agree that we should go to the Kafka Museum too, but you know what? We need to see if we can get tickets to The Marriage of Figaro tonight, and anyway I want to walk around for a while before we go back to that hotel.”
He looked down at her. “That’s interesting. You didn’t say you loved me now.” His smile faded. “I said I love you, and you mentioned opera tickets. I hope I’m not being petty, but my love went out to you and was not returned. How come? Did I do something wrong?”
“It was an oversight. No, wait a minute. You’re wrong. I did say that. I did say I love you. I say it a lot. You just didn’t hear me say it this time.”
“No, I don’t think that’s right,” he said, shaking his head like a sad horse, back and forth. “You didn’t say it.”
“Well, I love you now,” she said, as a group of German tourists waddled in through the entranceway. “I love you this very minute.” She waited. “This is a poor excuse for a quarrel. Let’s talk about something else.”
“There,” he said, pointing to a baby angel. “How about that one? That one will be ours. The doctor says so.” The angel he had pointed to had wings, as they all did, but this one’s arms were outstretched as if in welcome, and the wings were extended as if the angel were about to take flight.
After leaving the chapel, walking down a side street to the old city, they encountered a madwoman with gray snarled hair and only two visible teeth who was carrying a shopping bag full of scrap cloth. She had caught up to them on the sidewalk, emerging from an alleyway, and she began speaking to them in rapid vehement Czech, poking them both on their shoulders to make her unintelligible points. Everything about her was untranslatable, but given the way she was glaring at them, she seemed to be engaged in prophecy of some kind, and Susan intuited that the old woman was telling them both what their future life together would be like. “You will eventually go back to your bad hotel, you two,” she imagined the old woman saying in Czech, “and you will have your wish, and with that good-hearted husband of yours, you will conceive a child, your firstborn, a son, and you will realize that you’re pregnant because when you fall asleep on the night of your son’s conception, you will dream of a giant raspberry. How do I know all this? Look at me! It’s my business to know. I’m out of my mind.” Elijah gently nudged the woman away from Susan, taking his wife’s hand and crossing the street. When Susan broke free of her husband’s grip and looked back, she saw the crone shouting. “You’re going to be so terribly jealous of your husband because of the woman in him!” the old woman screamed in Czech, or so Susan imagined, but somehow that made no sense, and she was still trying to puzzle it out when she turned around and was gently knocked over by a tram that had slowed for the Malostranské stop.
The following commotion—people surrounding her, Elijah asking her nonsensical diagnostic questions—was all a bit of a blur, but only because everyone except for her husband was speaking Czech or heavily accented English, and before she knew it, she was standing up. She looked at the small crowd assembled around her, tourists and citizens, and in an effort to display good health she saluted them. Only after she had done it, and people were staring, did she think that gestures like that might be inappropriate.
“Good God,” Elijah said. “Why’d you do that?”
“I felt like it,” she told him.
“Are you okay? Where does it hurt?” he asked, touching her professionally. “Here? Or here?”
“It doesn’t hurt anywhere,” she said. “I just got jostled. I lost my balance. Can’t we go have lunch?” The tram driver was speaking to her in Czech, but she was ignoring him. She glanced down at her jeans. “See? I’m not even scuffed up.”
“You almost fell under the wheels,” he half groaned.
“Really, Elijah. Please. I’m fine. I’ve never been finer. Can’t we go now?” Strangers were still muttering to her, and someone was translating. When they calmed down and went back to their business after a few minutes, she felt a great sense of relief. She didn’t want anyone to think of her as a victim. She was no one’s and nothing’s victim ever. Or: maybe she was in shock.