from the baby’s touch.
The baby was completely absorbed in the revelry around him and in Akiva’s wild dancing, and did not pay the slightest attention to the distress of the person in whose lap he had been dropped. His curvy brown body rocked cheerfully to the rhythm of the song and the clapping, his arms moved around as though he were conducting the tumult, and his fleshy mouth, a perfect little red heart, opened wide in a bright smile, and immeasurable sweetness poured forth.
Ora did not move. Avram stared straight ahead and seemed not to see anything. His heavy head with its stubbly beard was suddenly dark and foreign behind the baby’s illuminating face. There was something almost intolerable in the scene. Ora imagined that this was the first time since his captivity that Avram had held a baby, and then it occurred to her that it might be the first time in his life. If only I had brought Ofer to him when he was a baby, she thought. If only I had come to him, unannounced, and placed Ofer in his arms, just like that, naturally, with utter confidence, as Akiva did. But it was now, with the actual picture before her, that Ora could not imagine Avram holding Ofer in his arms, and she wondered how he had caused her to erect a total barrier within herself between him and Ofer.
The baby must have been incredibly even-tempered; he reached out and grabbed hold of Avram’s hand, which was lying lifelessly next to his hip, and he tried to hold it up to his head. When he found it too heavy, he twisted his face angrily and reached his other hand out. With great effort he pulled Avram’s hand up and moved it this way and that like a conductor’s baton, and it seemed to Ora that the baby had not grasped that he was holding a person’s hand, and moreover, that he was sitting on a living human being. His distress grew when he noticed the hand’s fingers and began to study then, and then play with them, but he still did not look back to see who the hand belonged to and in whose lap he was sitting so intimately. He simply folded and bent the unfamiliar fingers at their joints, wagged them in his hands as though they were a soft hand-shaped toy or a glove, and every so often he smiled at Akiva dancing before him and at the women and the girls who came and went from the kitchen. After he had carefully examined the gentle fingers and wondered about their fingernails and a fresh scratch he found—Ora remembered the way Avram used to torture himself with endless hand flexes, struggling to tone his muscles—the baby turned over Avram’s hand and explored its soft palm with his finger.
Everyone was now busy setting the table and distributing bowls of food, and no one apart from Ora was watching. The baby put his lips to Avram’s palm and made a soft, truncated bleating sound: “Ba-ba-ba.” He utterly delighted in the sound and the tickling sensation on his lips. Ora herself felt a teasing hum in her throat and mouth. Inside her, a voiceless murmur also bleated, Ba-ba.
With both hands the baby held the limb and played with it on his rosy mouth, wrapped his cheeks and chin in it, gave himself over to the apparently pleasurable touch of the hand—Ora remembered, she remembered Avram’s amazingly thin skin, astoundingly soft, all over his body—and the baby’s dark eyes focused somewhere in the space of the room, and he was consumed with pure wonder at his own voice echoing through the shell he had made. Within the hubbub around him he listened only to his voice coming from outside and inside at the same time, as if hearing the first story he had ever told himself. He seemed to sense that with Avram it was good to tell stories, Ora thought. Avram did not move, and hardly breathed, so as not to disturb the baby, but after a while he shifted and straightened up a little in the chair, releasing his body, and Ora saw his shoulders soften and open and his lower lip tremble slightly in a movement that only she noticed because she knew to anticipate it—how she had once loved these reflections of his subcutaneous turmoils, and the way every emotion left its mark on him, and the way he used to blush like