David Grossman - To the End of the Land

His arms and legs were already flying, and he started to sing and dance around the whole room, clapping his giant hands over his head and sweeping up one boy after the other. He snatched an eight- or nine-month-old baby out of a girl’s lap and proceeded to wave him in the air. The brave baby was brown and chubby: he was not scared at all, and he laughed out loud, and his laughter infected everyone. Even Avram smiled, and Akiva’s eye picked it up, and in a graceful wave he danced over to Avram and placed the baby in his lap.

Within the joyful commotion Ora felt a thin frosty line stretch instantly around Avram as his body hardened and fossilized. His hands enveloped the outline of the baby’s body without touching him. From her side of the room she could feel Avram’s limbs retreat into the shell of their skin, far 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 a girl. She wondered if she should get up and rescue him by taking the baby, but she could not move. From the corner of her eye she could see that Akiva had also noticed what was going on, and that as he danced to and from the kitchen he constantly monitored the situation. He did not look worried or fearful for the baby, and her heart told her to trust his calmness.

She leaned back and allowed herself to sink into Avram, who finally turned to her and gave her a complete, lingering look, the look of a living person, and Ora felt then, right in the palm of her hand, the baby’s breath, and how without even touching her the baby was imprinting her with the stamp of his warm, damp vivacity. Her hand closed over the burning secret, the kiss of another human’s inner being, a tiny human in a diaper. Avram gave her a very slight nod of recognition, of acknowledgment. She replied with a similar nod, and for the first time since leaving home, and in contradiction to the despair that had consumed her only a few hours ago, when she had buried her face in the earth, she now had the thought that things might be good, and that perhaps she and Avram, together, were doing the right thing after all. But it was then that the baby started crying. He spread his chubby arms and cried at the top of his lungs, his face lit up in bright purple insult, and Ora dashed over and took him. As she did so, Avram let a few quick words escape, but she did not hear them properly because of the crying baby, or because of a slight shock that hit her when she touched the place where the baby’s body had sprung from Avram’s — and what she thought he said was, “But start from a distance.”

She smiled awkwardly, confused by his words. Start what? And why from a distance? The baby’s mother hurried in from the kitchen, her face red from the stove, and apologized for leaving the baby with Avram. “We turned you into a baggage claim! Any minute now he’d be calling you daddy.” She laughed at how the little one had already been passed around, keeping everyone busy. “Not one minute of quiet from this one,” she complained affectionately. “Hungry, Daddy?” she asked, and Ora noticed that Avram was nodding distractedly, but he quickly pulled himself together and looked away from the mother, who sat down nearby and deftly pushed the baby under her blouse, where his head disappeared.

Ora thought about Ofer, and the terrible pain from last night subsided. Akiva walked through the room with a large bowl, humming a tune, and looked at her out of the corner of his eye as if he knew now why he had dragged them all this way. Her gaze was drawn to the baby, whose tiny fist kept opening and closing as he sucked eagerly, and she knew that Ofer, wherever he was, was safe and protected now. She repeatedly played through her mind what Avram had whispered, and then she understood.

Start from a distance?