Hope Valley

by Haviva Ner-David

  Tikvah sat at her butcher block kitchen table, designed and built, like most of the furniture in their house, by Alon, with his one-name signature—like that woman, Ruby, had said about herself, too. As she drank her morning coffee from her favorite ceramic mug, Tikvah pondered where to walk with Cane. She could process all of this while on their morning outing. She needed some fresh air.

  As she clutched her mug with both hands, feeling its grainy ceramic warming her fingers and palms, she looked down into her foamy double cappuccino. The mug was oversized, just how she liked it, so she could really sit with her coffee. It was handcrafted by a British potter who had stayed at the cabins the year before. He had sent it when he returned home to England, as a thank-you for the service and hospitality. Artist to artist, he had written in the note, because he had seen Tikvah’s paintings hanging in his cabin.

  Tikvah had not revealed anything about her artist’s block to the potter. She had been moved by the man’s gesture, but even more moved by the artistry itself—the earthy look of the pottery, its solidity and presence, and the thought that no other mug like this one existed in the world. She gazed at the drip in the brown glaze half-way down the mug’s exterior. It looked like a tear frozen forever in place. What had Ruby said the name of her village meant? Well of Tears. And the valley was named Hope Valley. Tears and hopes, she had said.

  A knock on the door took Tikvah out of her thoughts. She assumed it was one of the guests, since she was not expecting any deliveries, and there was no one on the moshav who would spontaneously stop by to say hello or chat. When they had first moved in, a couple of women came by with generous offerings—fresh garden tomatoes with the potent vine scent wafting into Tikvah’s nostrils as she opened the door; home-grown-and-pressed olive oil shining like liquid emeralds in the jar; kumquat jam and home-made sourdough bread; smelly goat cheese wrapped in brown wax paper. But when Tikvah invited them in for tea, they said they were too busy, they had to get back to work.

  Some of the men had also come by to ask Alon about his and Tikvah’s plans for the property, which had lay fallow for decades; they asked if he wanted advice or help, perhaps even partners. Alon had said thank you but he preferred to work alone, and he had his own visions for the project that would only be disturbed by input from others. He would, however, appreciate contacts for hiring farmhands and construction workers to assist in the work he and Tikvah could not manage alone. The property was not just a business venture; it was a vocation, a creative vision, something to give life hope and meaning after what had happened to him in Lebanon—a story about which Tikvah herself knew very little, except what she could piece together from what Alon called out in his fretful sleep.

  Part of her and Alon’s isolation was their own doing, part was due to the layout of the moshav and the non-stop attention farming and hosting required, and part was due to the tough nature of the moshavnikim, who were not prone to displaying or sharing emotions. Everything about them—their calloused hands, their weathered skin, their stolid expressions—signaled: Don’t expect any sympathy from us, we’ve been through too much to let your pain, or anyone else’s, shake our resolve. So Tikvah learned quickly not to let her vulnerabilities show around them, nor to expect to find any bosom buddies among them. Besides, she was a foreigner, an outsider, an immigrant. She knew they considered her a spoiled American, even if she had been in Israel for so long.

  Most of Tikvah and Alon’s socializing was with their guests. People liked the personal connection, and it brought them back year after year, so that the Cabins tended to draw some regulars. This arrangement worked well for Alon, who did better with people who came and went and did not ask too many private questions. And Tikvah was glad to have people to talk to. Sometimes she even invited them into the house for a cup of tea or coffee. They were on vacation; they were not too busy to sit and chat. And they liked hearing about her life as an American ex-pat living in Israel.

  Tikvah stood to open the door. She guessed it was that couple of honeymooners staying in the Carmel cabin—named after the coastal mountain range upon which the city of Haifa was built, as they had named all of the cabins after natural Galilean sites—the one with the hot tub, king-sized bed, and the reservoir view. She had hung her “Lovers” series in that cabin. It was all hands and feet, in pairs. Hands clasped, feet intertwined, toes touching, fingers hooked. She had painted those during that first year, after Alon and his dog, Ze’eva, came back to her apartment—and never left.

  Tikvah had felt an urge to be in the murky water with Alon that day at the watering hole. She had unbuttoned her denim cut-off shorts, wiggled out of them and dropped them on the ground among some sticky fallen figs and leaves. She had watched Alon watch her strip down to her red bikini bottom. She positioned herself on the bank, ready to dive, but on second thought, she rolled in with a somersault.

  Then she held her breath. The excitement of the moment had empowered and emboldened her. She was sure she had broken her own personal record when she came up, panting for air. Alon seemed amused, and impressed.

  “What do you do, Tikvah, when you’re not hanging out at watering holes and feeding figs to strangers?” He was treading water, moving toward her.

  “I’m starting at Bezalel in the fall. Visual arts. Majoring in drawing and painting. I do my art and wait tables.”

  “That’s a lot of waitressing. Tuition and rent. It’s a rigorous program.”

  “My father is covering the bill. He even bought me an apartment,” she had explained. “Once he understood that my wanting to live here was not just a passing phase.”

  Alon looked at Tikvah quizzically. “Only your father?”

  “Yes. He’s no Zionist, but he does support my right to decide my own path. That’s important to him. My dad’s okay. He even brought me to the airport to see me off. He told me then that even though he thought I was making a mistake, he knew it was important to be true to myself, that that was something he regretted not having been able to do in his own life. I’m not sure what he meant by that, but so much of my parents’ lives are a mystery to me . . .” Tikvah had trailed off, wistfully. “Anyway, they have the money. My mother was against his buying the apartment, though. She doesn’t want to own land in Israel, she says. She refuses to even come visit.”

  “My mother won’t visit, either. When the government evicted her for squatting, they razed her kennels and my childhood home. As I said, she’s principled to a fault. The only way she’ll come back is if they rebuild her house and give her the land. And there’s no chance of that. I know. She left me with the Supreme Court lawsuit. It’s a lost cause.”

  “So where do you live?” Tikvah had asked him that day.

  “I’ve been backpacking in these hills since my army discharge, sleeping under the stars. But when the rains start, Ze’eva and I will need to find a different arrangement for ourselves,” he said, throwing a glance at the dog, who had fallen asleep beneath the fig tree. Judging from her name, female for Wolf, the dog had at least some of that wild dog species in her. Tikvah later discovered that she had Canaan, Wolf, and Shepherd blood. She was one of Alon’s mother’s dogs. His mother had brought some of her dogs back with her to Italy, sold others, and saved Alon’s favorite, Ze’eva, her only mixed breed, for him. Along with the lawsuit. Roi, who was born not long after Talya, was the one puppy of Ze’eva’s Alon had not sold and who became his trusty sidekick after Ze’eva died at a ripe old age.

  “Truth is, I also got into Bezalel. For the fall,” he had added that day. “I’m waiting to hear about a scholarship. No father paying my bills. I have my army grant, and I can do dog training on the side. And some breeding. But that won’t cover both tuition and rent.”

  “You’re a painter, too?”

  “No. A sculptor. I build things. With wood, metal, clay. Whatever I can get my hands on.” He smiled, suggestively. “I like using my hands.”

  “You do, do you?” Tikvah laughed, and he laughed too, revealing two crooked fro
nt teeth.

  Another world to explore, she remembered thinking. She had felt like exploring it then, with her tongue. She had noticed his hands moving towards her hair. He had twisted one of her wet curls around his finger. She had touched his shoulder, firmly. They had moved closer. After that, things progressed quickly. They had sex right there on the ground next to the watering hole, with Ze’eva watching. And several times more during the course of the evening and into the morning back at her apartment. Within weeks, the sex turned into making love. Tikvah felt both a physical and an emotional yearning being satiated, and Alon found a home—in her, and in her apartment. It had been a win-win situation for them both.

  Tikvah reached her front foyer, with its uniquely designed cedar wood and wrought iron shoe-and-coat rack—another of Alon’s creations. As she had guessed, the couple from the Carmel cabin, dressed in hiking gear, were standing on the other side of the door when Tikvah opened it. They were wearing matching T-shirts, and their fingers were hooked, like a pair of hands right out of one of her paintings.

  “Good morning. Can we have those two boxed lunches we ordered?” the man asked. “We’re heading out now to explore the area. Any recommendations?”

  “Well, there’s the Mount Sapir trailhead if you walk straight out of the gate of the moshav. There’s a nice view from up there.”

  Tikvah had not been to the top of the mountain since her MS symptoms had become more acute. But the view had not changed, of course; only she had. She missed her runs with Alon. They would head out together every morning, leaving Talya fast asleep in bed, only to wake her for school when they arrived home after sunrise. She knew to call the neighbors if she needed anything—one of the benefits of moshav life. They climbed the mountain in a well-paced jog, Alon taking the lead. At the peak, they paused to take in the view, the top of Tikvah’s head just reaching the middle of Alon’s chest, so that she could feel his heart beating from the exertion of the run. As they watched the sunrise, they would sit and talk, watch the birds, note the changing seasons.

  In the evenings, they would walk around the moshav, hand in hand, either talking or in silence—rain or shine. Talya sometimes joined them on these walks, but the absence of a dog hung in the air as they passed neighbors out walking their dogs. Nevertheless, Alon seemed his most relaxed when they were running or walking. The movement, the talking, the bird-watching—it was all therapy for him. Tikvah even began to believe that their move to Galilee when Alon came back from Lebanon—without Roi and sealed shut like a pressure cooker—had indeed been a good idea, that things could return to some kind of normal again. He had even started to open up a bit, let her into his troubled soul. But then her symptoms started.

  First it had been the fatigue that made her take breaks along the route. Then she began falling—little trips and missteps at first; but after a while she just could not make it to the top. Her energy level was low and her balance off. Then began the tingling in her arms and legs. And then one morning, she ended up on the kitchen floor, her coffee mug shattered on the terra cotta. The doctor said there must have been other, less severe, episodes over the years, before that one, perhaps even in her sleep. Alon had seemed even more disappointed than she that she could no longer join him on his regular morning runs. She knew her absence symbolized for him what would eventually be her more complete absence from his life. She watched as their joint ritual turned into his solitary race against the inevitable. He would be abandoned once again.

  Even after Tikvah’s diagnosis, they continued to walk in the evenings. But with time, that too fell away—especially after Talya moved out. If it was too rainy, hot or cold. Or Tikvah was too tired, Alon too busy. Were they avoiding being alone together because it made the widened gap between them all the more palpable? And now, with Tikvah taking Cane out on walks twice a day, it was assumed Alon would not join. Because of the dog.

  “Just take plenty of water. It’s hot out there,” she said, echoing Alon’s warning to her.

  The couple thanked Tikvah, put their lunches in their backpacks, and set off.

  Tikvah set out too, with Cane, to wander in the fields. Not exactly close to home, but also not as far as the valley. And she would not stay out too long, either. She had started her walk late today. She passed the moshav’s front offices and noticed a petition hanging on the bulletin board. KEEP OUR COMMUNITY HOMOGENEOUS! it said, in Hebrew. Tikvah read on. It seemed an Arab family had bought the Regev place. Uri and Sharona—an elderly survivor couple who had both died over the past few years—had left their house to their son, who had sold it, apparently, to an Arab family from Nazareth. The petition was to keep them out. Tikvah scanned the names already on the list of signatures. It was a long list. Alon’s name was there, too. A pen tied to a string tacked onto the cork hung down alongside the petition. Whoever had written this petition had also made it easy to sign. Without even a thought, she could sign it, like most of her neighbors had already.

  But Tikvah was in no rush. She would come back in this direction on her way home. She could think about it while she walked. It was one thing to choose not to go into an Arab village, but it was another to keep an Arab family who had legally bought a house on the moshav, like she and Alon had, from moving into it. Even if that Ruby woman was wrong, if she decided to buy back what she claimed was her father’s house, why would anyone have a right to keep her out?

  Tikvah was walking with Cane on a leash towards the electronic gate, thinking this through as the dog pulled her along eagerly, when her cellphone rang. She ignored the phone; it would be hard to manage Cane on the leash while talking. She would call back once she and Cane were past the gate. She was not used to having this new gadget with her constantly. Only recently had she succumbed to Alon and Talya’s request that she take it with her whenever she went out. She had to admit that the feeling of security was reassuring, but not the idea that she could always be reached.

  The phone rang again, not more than a minute later. She stopped walking and, struggling with the leash, took the phone out of her knapsack to check who was calling. Talya. Calling from Jaffa—a mixed Arab-Jewish city—where Talya had moved a couple of years ago, along with a bunch of her other idealistic friends. She was working in a mixed nursery school, where Arab and Jewish children played together and where the teachers, who were from both sectors, spoke in both Hebrew and Arabic. They called it “co-existence.” This worried Tikvah. She, too, had been idealistic at her daughter’s age. But her idealism was about building a Jewish country. They saw the Arabs as the enemy, or at the very least hostile neighbors, but certainly not their partners. But as much as Talya’s lifestyle worried Tikvah, it worried Alon even more—although he chose to deal with his daughter’s choices mostly by ignoring them.

  Talya did not usually call at this time of day. She studied at night, even in summers, and she was working in the nursery school’s day camp, too; so during her lunch break was their regular phone time. Concerned, Tikvah answered the phone.

  “Why didn’t you answer the first time?” Talya asked, in her usual forthright manner. She was not one to hide her feelings.

  “No need to worry. I’m out walking with Cane, that’s all. She’s still on the leash.”

  “Does Abba know you’re out walking alone?”

  “I’m not alone,” Tikvah said. She did not say what was at the tip of her tongue, which was that Alon was probably glad she had taken the dog out of his sight. And that if he was so worried about her, he should tell her as much instead of literally running from his feelings every day at sunrise, and trying to hammer them away with his endless building projects. “I told you. I have Cane with me.”

  “That’s great, Ima, but what if you fall? Or worse. It’s not like Cane’s going to pick you up and carry you home.”

  “She’ll call for help,” Tikvah said. “I’m teaching her how. If your old fashioned mother has a cellphone, maybe it’s time for her dog to get one, too.”

  “Funny, Ima, but really . .
.”

  “It’ll be okay until it isn’t anymore,” Tikvah said, a little too sharply. That was the most exhausting thing about her illness—trying to convince everyone she was okay so as not to alarm them, and then trying to hide her resentment at their lack of alarm.

  “So how did you convince Abba to let you have a dog, anyway?” Talya asked.

  Tikvah pictured her daughter on the other end of the line, winding one of her crimson curls around her finger, a habit of hers since she had hair long enough to play with.

  “I told him she’d be a guard dog. The robbery situation has gotten pretty bad lately. We had a prowler on our property a few weeks ago.” Tikvah remembered that night—the dark, the silence, the shaking rosemary bush. The prowler had escaped, but she didn’t know what she would have done, anyway, had she caught him. Still, she was glad she had not been afraid to venture out. “The night I found Cane.”

  “You mean the barbed wire fences and big electric gate aren’t doing the job? And what about that new night guard you all hired?”

  “Not well enough, I guess.” Cane was practically pulling Tikvah as she walked down the hill towards the moshav entrance and that tease of a lake that was really a reservoir.

  “Maybe you should build a moat.”

  “A what?”

  “That should keep the Arabs out of your pristine Jewish fortress on the hill.”

  “Talya!” Tikvah was used to her daughter’s argumentative spirit, but she never felt personally attacked by her like she did now. Her daughter had a life and ideas of her own. She always had. But with her living in Jaffa, the emotional distance felt wider, too, not just the physical distance. As if Talya was aboard a ship, waving goodbye as she sailed off, slowly, into the horizon. Tikvah saw her mostly only when she came to visit, as she rarely made the trip to Jaffa. Having only one child had always made Tikvah feel her life was less full than others’ around her—being fruitful and multiplying was considered a virtue in Israeli society—but now that feeling was especially potent. Particularly when the Cabins were not occupied with guests.