THE NEXT MORNING, after Alon had gone, Tikvah went to check on the dog, who was still there, barely conscious but alive. It was not too difficult to lift the limp, skeletal dog into the pickup truck and drive to the veterinarian, who lived and worked at a clinic on Kibbutz Zohar and, luckily, had early morning hours. Her kibbutz was not more than a five-minute drive from Tikvah’s home and bed-and-breakfast on Moshav Sapir. Living on a kibbutz had not even been a thought for Tikvah and Alon when they looked into moving from bustling Tel Aviv to a rural community in northern Israel; they were in search of more peace and privacy, not an agricultural commune where their business—both professional and private—would be everyone else’s.
The moshav was an agricultural village with some shared public spaces and communal taxes, but families had their own plots to do with them what they wished—providing they could acquire the proper permits from the regional council—and their profits were their own. Tikvah and Alon planted passion fruit vineyards, pomegranate, avocado, and olive orchards when they moved in, as well as pick-your-own raspberry patches to accompany the mulberry bushes that had already been there for years. They also built a dozen bed-and-breakfast cabins on the property, adding more as the years passed and the business took off.
Ten-year-old Talya had reluctantly joined in the building and planting when they first moved to the moshav. She had not been happy to leave her friends in Tel Aviv. But as the months passed, she made new friends and appreciated the freedom afforded children living on the moshav. Still, it had not surprised Tikvah when her now-grown daughter moved back to the Tel Aviv area a couple of years ago.
Tikvah drove through Kibbutz Zohar’s front gate, which was open during daylight hours. She followed the signs to the clinic, where she had been numerous times with sick hens to make sure what the birds had was not contagious. The hens were an investment. Freshly laid eggs and raw goat milk (from the neighbors’ farm) were a draw for B&B guests seeking an authentic Galilean country experience.
Tikvah spotted the vet coming to help carry the dog inside. Tikvah had sent her a text message first thing in the morning to ask about bringing the dog in. Apparently, the woman had been looking out for them. Her cheer and springy walk made Tikvah feel somber and heavy in comparison. And old. This woman was surely at least fifteen years younger than Tikvah, with her smooth skin and dark thick wavy hair, whereas Tikvah’s once-unmarked skin was beginning to show signs of wrinkles, and even age spots, and her hair was thinning and was already more gray than the deep brown, almost black, it once was.
“She’s a beauty,” the vet said with a smile, once they were inside and the dog was lying on the examining table. She inserted an I.V. into a vein on the dog’s leg—but not without first gently petting the dog and explaining to her what she was about to do. The gesture moved Tikvah. This woman knew who she was and what she was meant to be doing at this exact moment in her life.
“It’s hard to tell in her state. I’m not the dog person in our family.”
“So, I gather you didn’t know she’s a mixed breed.”
Tikvah shook her head. Alon had once started to teach her about dog breeds, but that was years ago. Before his trusty canine companion Roi died in the line of duty in the First Lebanon War, and Alon refused to get another dog.
The vet covered the dog with a blanket, up to her neck. “She’s a Canaan-Shepherd mix.”
Tikvah knew something about Canaan dogs. That was the kind Alon’s mother had bred and trained as service dogs for the sick and handicapped. They were the ancient breed of this land. That much she knew.
“Canaan pure-bred dogs are practically non-existent,” the vet continued. “There was a woman who used to breed them years ago, up in the Jerusalem Hills, but not anymore.”
Tikvah did not reveal that the woman was Alon’s mother. The vet would undoubtedly want to talk to Alon about her, his childhood, his work with dogs in the military. The past Alon had come to Galilee, after his Lebanon war trauma, to forget. He had been right to retire from service. It was almost two decades ago, and Israel had just now withdrawn from Lebanon. She looked at the dog, who was lying peacefully on the examining table, with only her head showing from beneath the blanket. Tikvah could have sworn the creature was thanking her with those slanted olive eyes.
“Will she be okay?”
“I think so. I want to keep her here for a while to get some fluids into her and fatten her up. Vaccinate her, too. She needs to rest and regain her strength. From the look of it, she was neglected wherever she came from.” She looked up at Tikvah. “I’ll call you when she’s ready to go home.”
Home? Was the abode she and Alon shared a place where this lost creature could get back to herself? Would she dare to bring the dog back to the house against Alon’s will?
“You are keeping her? Aren’t you?”
“I don’t know. My husband wouldn’t approve. And he’s the one who knows about dogs. I never had a dog growing up,” Tikvah said, starting to nibble on her thumbnail—a habit she had since childhood.
A dog might have alleviated Tikvah’s loneliness as an only child in suburban New York—where she had lived until she, an avid Zionist youth, left for Israel right out of high school after Israel’s Six-Day War victory—but she knew better than to ask for one. For her parents, Holocaust survivors, dogs were a sign of danger. Tikvah’s entire extended family, on both sides, were murdered by the Nazis. Although her parents did not talk about their pasts, Tikvah always assumed her name—Hope—had something to do with their stories. Yet, giving her the name was probably the last hopeful thing her parents did.
“And you never had one living out here, either?” the vet asked in surprise.
Tikvah shook her head. Practically every family on Moshav Sapir had a dog. Not necessarily because they liked dogs—although some certainly did—but more to scare off burglars from the Arab villages that surrounded Moshav Sapir and Kibbutz Zohar on all sides. It was common knowledge that Arabs didn’t keep dogs. At least not Muslim Arabs—except shepherds who used them for herding, but definitely not as pets in their houses. It had something to do with dogs being impure. But Alon’s refusal to get a dog was not because he disliked them, Tikvah knew, but because he loved them too much.
“She’s a mature dog. Not so many years left in her,” the vet added.
Tikvah stroked the dog on the white tuft between her ears. She had known as soon as she saw the yearning in the dog’s eyes, that she and this creature shared a common something. When Tikvah’s doctor had given her the diagnosis several years ago, he said that MS—even her rare form with epileptic-type fits in addition to the other more common symptoms, like pins-and-needles and shakes—is not fatal, although patients do not tend to live as long as they would without the disease. They die from “related causes,” he had said. Since hearing that from her doctor, Tikvah felt, viscerally, that her days were numbered.
The vet patted the dog’s back and looked up at Tikvah. “You have time to think about it. She won’t be strong enough to leave here for at least another week.”
But Tikvah had already decided. The hard part, she knew, would be convincing Alon.
WHEN THE VET called, Tikvah went to bring the dog home.
“I’ll call you Cain,” she said, as she arranged cushions in the old supply shed. “Sounds like Canaan, and I’ve always had an affinity for the underdog,” she mused, smiling at her own pun. She felt sorry for the biblical Cain, who was forever demonized as the evil brother. The story seemed more complicated than the black-and-white traditional interpretation. Killing was not justified, but perhaps Cain, the mythological first murderer in the history of humanity, did not understand the consequences of his actions when he let his emotions get the better of him and attacked Abel. Clearly, he did not mean to end his brother’s life. According to Tikvah’s read, it seemed possible God provoked Cain, unfairly setting him up for failure, to teach him a lesson about accepting one’s fate and the unfairness of life. Perhaps Cain was not the
only one to blame in that narrative of victim and perpetrator. If anyone was to blame at all.
Cain. Yes. That’s what she would name the dog.
There was the matter of the dog’s sex, though. The biblical Cain was male, and this dog was female. But the unconventional nature of that, too, appealed to Tikvah, who was feeling rebellious lately.
“I could spell it C-A-N-E, like a sugar cane. Your eyes are that kind of green . . . and you are sweet,” she continued, tapping the dog on her cold black nose. “Yup. I’ll go for it. Cane. Do you like it?”
The dog wagged her tale, and Tikvah chuckled. “Glad that’s decided.” She turned her attention to making her new guest comfortable.
Tikvah scanned the inside of the shed. With Talya grown, there was room where her bike and other sports equipment used to be. Tikvah had junked most of her daughter’s play things, but kept the best-quality favorites for the grandchildren—should there be any one day. So far, Talya, who was already twenty-five years old, did not appear to be on the road to marriage or children any time soon. After her mandatory army service, she had travelled and worked odd jobs, and only now was she starting to study and show signs of stability.
Tikvah stood back and admired her work. Turning the shed into a dog house had given her the impetus to finally clear away years of accumulated stuff—creating an airy yet cozy space for the dog. She had even thrown away her old art supplies that had been sitting in a carton collecting dust. The brushes were hard, the paints dried out, and the turpentine evaporated. Since Alon came home from Lebanon, she had slowly lost her desire to paint. Her emotional and creative energy was sapped. All the more so when her own symptoms started. If she hadn’t painted seriously in almost ten years, and abandoned it completely when she was finally diagnosed, why would she start again now? So when she brought the carton to the moshav’s garbage lot and threw the art supplies into the big metal dumpster, it had been a relief to finally let them go—even if she cried the whole ride back to her house.
“What do you think of your new home, Cane?” The dog, whose rib cage was no longer bulging beneath her now-shining gray fur, wagged her tail and proceeded to pee right there under a tree next to the shed. Marking her territory. She lay down on the cushions and closed her eyes. Cane looked at home.
“WE CAN’T KEEP a dog,” Alon said immediately, when Tikvah passed him with Cane later that afternoon on their way out for a walk.
Alon’s refusal to have a dog since he returned from Lebanon was, like her illness, one of those things they did not discuss. Whereas the ability to share what was in their hearts had been what brought them together, now, knowing what not to share had become the thing that kept them together. She avoided bringing up his war trauma, and he avoided discussing her illness. Although he avoided the subject not because she did not want to discuss it; she wanted so much to share their pain and all that was coming between them now. It was he who had closed himself up in his armor.
“I thought I made that clear,” Alon added, hardly even glancing at the dog.
He was on his knees, hammering away at the foundation of a wall for the new clubhouse he was building and wearing a canvas sun hat to protect his fair skin. His goal was to have the building ready for the week-long Sukkot holiday in the fall, when Jews build huts in which to sleep and eat, and generally head outdoors to experience life at the whim of the natural elements. There was so much demand for a cabin in Galilee on the holiday, which came on the heels of Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur, that even once they were booked, people continued calling, asking to camp out on their grounds. With a clubhouse, equipped with bathrooms and a lounging space, they could offer that option, which would be a boost for their business.
“I could use a friend,” Tikvah almost pleaded.
Meeting Alon had been such a welcome change from living with her parents. They came and went from Long Island Jewish Hospital—where they both got jobs right out of medical and nursing school, as the hospital had just been founded at the time, which was when they moved out to Long Island from New York City—nurse and doctor but usually on different shifts, leaving notes stuck with magnets to the refrigerator. Her father was the more talkative of the two, even engaged Tikvah in conversation at times, asking her how she was, what she was up to; but he was hardly around. How could even a surgeon spend so much time at the hospital?
When her mother had her bouts of depression that sent her to her room for days at a time, her father tried to be home more often. He would bring tea and toast up to her mother’s room, and she would even let him in sometimes, although she did not let Tikvah or anyone else enter. Once he brought a colleague to examine her. A psychiatrist, Tikvah now assumed. After that, her mother functioned better; she did not retreat to her room as often as far as Tikvah could remember. But she seemed even more distant than before. There were times Tikvah caught her sitting on the living room couch with her embroidery or an open book in her lap, staring out the window, or at the kitchen table looking blankly into her tea cup. It was as if that doctor had put a veil between Tikvah’s mother and the reality surrounding her that made it possible for her to bear it. But that veil also came between her mother and her only child; so much so that Tikvah could barely recall a hug or loving word from the woman who had brought her into the world.
Materially, she had all that she needed as a child: private prep-school, studio art lessons, a beach within biking distance from her house, a room with a canopy bed and even a window seat, where she sprawled out and read book after book from the local public library, or simply watched the leaves change color and fall. But that was just it. She could sit there for hours and no one would bother her. How she longed for someone to bother her. The house was already so full of pain unspoken, unshared, that there seemed to be no room for her own.
Tikvah’s tactic as a child had been to be as compliant and amenable as possible—so as not to upset her fragile mother and distracted father. But when she hit adolescence and realized that being “good” did not make her parents more stable or present, she changed tactics. She spent increasingly less time at home and more by herself at the seashore, or sleeping over at friends’ houses. She knew her friends’ parents felt sorry for her, an only child of survivors, so they welcomed her into their homes. But she did not bring her friends back to her house, where the density of the air was not something she wished upon others. Boarding that plane to Israel at age eighteen was as much grabbing onto a life boat as it was fulfilling her Zionist dream to move to the Jewish homeland.
Tikvah looked at her husband now, working on yet another building project. While she and Alon had not resorted to communicating through notes on the refrigerator, their lives had taken on a routine and balance that was important for Alon’s peace. He did not retreat to his room sporadically like her mother had; instead, he was in a continual state of retreat. He had found his own way to put up protection from the pain of living. Moving to Galilee, throwing himself into building Galilean Dream Cabins, running every morning at sunrise—it was all his way of coping. By refusing to take in another dog, he was preventing the inevitable loss. She knew this, which is why she had surprised herself by deciding to adopt Cane.
Alon looked up at Tikvah with those sea-glass green eyes, and for a moment she saw a hint of the spark that had made her fall for him that day at the watering hole.
It had been a day even hotter than this one, and she had come to that oasis in the Jerusalem Hills for some time alone in the water. Moving to Jerusalem—a city on a hilltop far from any shoreline whatsoever—to study art right out of high school, had been a fulfillment of her dreams as both a Zionist and an artist. But at the expense of being near the ocean, her saving grace as a teenager. Tel Aviv would have been a better choice in terms of water proximity, but there was no art school there back then. She was relieved to have found this choice spot, not more than a short bus ride from her Jerusalem apartment, with not only water but also a shady fig tree where she could sit and paint.
But just as she was getting comfortable beneath the tree, along came a backpacker—in khaki shorts, a faded T-shirt, and leather sandals—with his wolf-dog trailing behind him. The first thing she noticed about him was his hair. Although it was cut fairly short, it was scraggly—she guessed he was growing it out, which she later discovered was true, since he had only been discharged from the army a few months before—and the ends curled. Tikvah imagined it would look much like hers when long. Except for its color, which suggested baked yams, as opposed to hers, which was more the color of yam skins—when burnt. When he removed his sweaty T-shirt, her attention shifted from his hair to his broad shoulders, taut abdomen, and muscular arms—all dotted with freckles the color of her favorite shade of ochre oil paint. His chest hair was darker than his head hair. Cinnamon. He stripped down to his boxers, jumped into the water, and did not come up for air for three minutes. Tikvah was counting.
When he surfaced, she stood and walked over to the water’s edge. “Where did you learn to hold your breath like that?” she asked in Hebrew. Although she had grown up in the U.S., she had learned Hebrew in her Zionist youth movement, and when she arrived in Israel, she got six free months of intensive Hebrew language immersion; so by the time she met Alon, a year later, she could already get by in the language.
He seemed startled, and she realized he had not noticed her sitting beneath the tree. Stuck in his own world. “Snorkeling without a snorkel in Sinai,” he answered.
“Well, my record is three minutes and six seconds. I’ve been practicing. It’s one of my hobbies.”
Looking intrigued, he swam in her direction. She had a closer view of him now. His face was covered with freckles, too. She had never been attracted to a red-head before. But looking into this stranger’s green eyes that reminded her of the sea she was missing, it occurred to her that his was a face of which she would never grow bored. Each freckle was a world to explore.
Hope Valley Page 2
