There's Something I Want You to Do

In Prague, the Soviet-era hotel where they stayed smelled of onions, chlorine, and goulash. The lobby had mirrored ceilings. Upstairs, the rooms were small and claustrophobic; the TV didn’t work, and all the signs were nonsensical. Pozor! for example, which seemed to mean “Beware!” Beware of what? The signs were garbles of consonants. Prague wasn’t Kafka’s birthplace for nothing. Still, Susan believed the city was the perfect place for them to conceive a child. For the first one, you always needed some sexual magic, and this place had a particular old-world variety of it. As for Elijah, he seemed to be in a mood: early on their second morning in the hotel, he stood in front of the window rubbing his scalp and commenting on Prague’s air quality. “Stony, like a castle,” he said. Because he always slept naked, he stood before the window naked, with a doctor’s offhandedness about the body, surveying the neighborhood. She thought he resembled the pope blessing the multitudes in Vatican Square, but no: on second thought he didn’t resemble the pope at all, starting with the nakedness. A sexual sentimentalist, he loved the body as much as he loved the spirit: he liked getting down on his knees in front of her nakedness to kiss her belly and incite her to soft moans.

“We should go somewhere,” she said, thumbing through a guidebook, which he had already read. “I’d like to see the Old Town Square. We’d have to take the tram there. Are you up for that?”

“Hmm. How about the chapels in the Loreto?” he asked. “That’s right up here. We could walk to it in ten minutes and then go to the river.” He turned around and approached her, sitting next to her on the bed, taking her hand in his. “It’s all so close, we could soak it all up, first thing.”

“Sure,” she said, although she didn’t remember anything from the guidebooks about the Loreto chapels and couldn’t guess why he wanted to go see them. He raised her hand to his mouth and kissed her fingers one by one, which always gave her chills.

“Oh, honey,” she said, leaning into him. He was the only man she had ever loved, and she was still trying to get used to it. She had done her best not to be scared by the way she often felt about him. His intelligence, the concern for children, the quiet loving homage he paid to her, the wit, the indifference to sports, the generosity, and then the weird secret toughness—where could you find another guy like that? It didn’t even matter that they were staying in a bad hotel. Nothing else mattered. “What’s in those chapels?” she asked. “How come we’re going there?”

“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 exercise caution toward…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. Eli 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 Eli. “They worshipped infants.”

“Yeah,” Eli 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?”