Nothing, of course.

"Like unto us in all things, sin only excepted," as the New Testament declares, Jesus was born speechless and remained so until he spoke his first word, probably eema, Aramaic for "Mommy." Because God seems so implacably silent in our own day, the silence of the divine infant has provoked some of the best late examples in the long canon of Christmas poetry. Just as divine nakedness lies at the focal point of so many Renaissance paintings of the Nativity, so in these modern poems divine silence is the still point amid the whirl of wondering adults and caroling angels.

Some years ago, I came across a wonderful poem— Joseph Brodsky's"Flight Into Egypt (II)"—that ends on just this note. Its final stanza, in Seamus Heaney's translation, reads:

The star looked in across the threshold.
The only one of them who could
Know the meaning of that look
Was the infant. But He did not speak.

Last year, that stanza turned up on a Christmas card from my German publisher, Hanser Verlag. Even those who don't read German can tell that the Hanser translation is more strongly rhymed and metered than Heaney's:

Ein Stern hat über die Schwelle geschaut.
Doch keiner von ihnen war vertraut
mit der tieferen Ursache des Lichts.
Bis auf das Kind—und das sagte nichts.

I liked this translation so much that, for all my unbounded admiration for Seamus Heaney, I decided to try something similar in English and came up with:

A star across the threshold shone,
Its light a gaze whose import none
Of them but one alone could tell:
The baby knew, but he kept still.

Dramatic power accrues to any character who can hold center stage in silence or near silence while others gush language. A touching example of this is 8-year-old Rory Culkin's performance as Rudy in Kenneth Lonergan's 2000 film You Can Count on Me. Rudy's divorced mother and his scapegrace uncle have a troubled but painfully close relationship, the closer because the two of them were orphaned at an early age. Lonergan's script wisely gives Rudy rather little to say. Yet when the camera finds Rory Culkin, silent and downcast as the regrets and recriminations fly back and forth between Laura Linney and Mark Ruffalo, the boy's silence speaks more movingly than words could.

A blind boy of about 2 is an even more inarticulate and poignant figure in Bahman Ghobadi's emotionally devastating Turtles Can Fly, the first film made in Iraq since the war began. Henkov and his sister Agrin, about 17 and 15, respectively, are orphaned Kurds living as refugees in a tent camp near the heavily mined Turkish border. For arms, Henkov has stumps that end above the elbow. The camp thinks Agrin is the 2-year-old boy's sister; in fact she is his mother. Saddam's soldiers raped her during the same savage raid that cost Henkov his arms. By giving us the aftermath first, Ghobadi is able to make the raid itself—in a scene that lasts barely two minutes—almost unbearably traumatic.

Agrin would willingly let her son, the proof of her shame, wander off in the night, as is his alarming habit, and blow himself up in a minefield. But Henkov, maimed as he is, desperately loves his little nephew. In the privacy of their tent, as sister and brother discuss the secret dilemma created by her violation, its result, her son, lies between them in innocent incomprehension.