The Infant of Prague

A tree branch scraped a window in the wind. The wind rattled the panes again. The night howled.

“Jesus,” Stephanie said. She got up and checked the locks on the front door again. She walked through the apartment and turned on lights and checked the windows again. She said aloud, “This is stupid, I am not going to be afraid.”

She made Anna afraid.

Anna went to her room and put on her robe and lay down on her bed and listened to heat clatter up through the radiator pipes. She closed her eyes and thought of the woman named Elena.

Elena Jelinak had a very pinched look to her as though she had been crying or drinking too much. Her hand shook when she talked to Anna.

“You have to stop this foolish thing,” Elena had said. “You shame me, you shame yourself, to say you are an orphan in the world. You know I am your mother.”

She said nothing to Elena that afternoon in the interview room. There were just Elena and Anna, two women who had lived together in four rooms in the old section of Prague down by the Charles Bridge. They had nothing to say to each other, Anna thought. She even thought Elena would agree with that.

“You did not see Jesus weep,” Elena said.

Anna said, “I saw it. My Infant of Prague.”

“Blasphemy,” said Elena. “This is nonsense. You have gotten so famous and proud because of the films — well, you are causing no end of trouble. What if I told you that the government is very worried about this?”

The thought had not occurred to Anna. Why would it possibly interest her what the government thought of anything?

“What do you want, Anna? You have everything.”

Anna had stared at the woman. She would never understand, not any of it. How could she explain to Elena that the Child was in the statue in their rooms in Prague, that she could pray to the Child and even talk to it? You had a mother and a father and you knew love. What is it that no one can love me? And then, one day in a strange city in a strange country, the Child comes to her again, and this time the Child weeps for her, for Anna Jelinak, who is not loved. In that act of love, the world opens for her. There is Stephanie with soft, kind words who shares her house and her warmth, and there is Kay Davis, who listens to her, who holds her in her arms when she weeps about the miracle she has seen. There is love and she feels it as solidly as she feels warmth, as she feels the luxury of silk beneath her fingers, as she can smell the newness of the world.…

She opened her eyes.

Stephanie had turned on the television and was watching the local news. The windowpanes continued to rattle and the steam pipes clanged and hissed their merry sounds of warmth. Comfort in the sounds, in the wind that cannot penetrate the windowpanes.

Anna padded on bare feet out of her bedroom and down the lighted corridor that connected all the rooms. She went into the living room and curled up on the couch without a word to watch the TV and to be in Stephanie’s presence. In the silence of the darkened room, they watched the images of the world on the screen and comforted each other with their presence, with the sounds of the artificial fireplace. Anna fell into a soft, drowsy sleep and Stephanie wrapped a blanket around her and she felt Stephanie’s light touch and the warmth and it was so good and safe to be here, she thought. It was almost the pleasant dream of her life to be here. It was the dream she could not explain ever to Elena, to anyone else except the beautiful Child who had wept for her when He saw her loneliness.