Hope Valley

by Haviva Ner-David

  “Cane. C-A-N-E. She’s half-Canaan.”

  Not spelled like the biblical Cain, then. “Yes, I know. And half-Shepherd. She’s an exceptionally beautiful dog.”

  “Yes, she is,” the woman said. She looked more relaxed. “And sweet, like a sugar cane.” So that explained the name. “Although you should have seen her when I found her a few weeks ago in my yard in the moshav over there.” The woman pointed up in the direction of Moshav Sapir. So she did live there. Too bad. Ruby would make this encounter as brief as possible. “She was barely alive. So, when she ran off because of that gunshot, I came looking for her. She seems sensitive, still. Vulnerable.”

  “That’s a sign of trauma. Unfortunately, there’s too much of that going around.”

  The woman shivered.

  “I heard that gunshot,” Ruby added. She was still standing above the woman, looking down at her. “Did it frighten you?”

  “No. I assumed it was just a wedding in one of the . . . um . . . local villages.”

  “At this time of day? No . . .” Ruby said, shaking her head. She would milk this for what she could.

  “So, what was it?” The woman looked concerned.

  “Are you scared it was a terrorist attack?” Ruby asked, putting her hands on her hips.

  The woman looked taken aback. “I don’t know. Maybe.” She sounded defensive. “There is precedent for that kind of thing. Especially over the past few months.”

  Ruby took a stick from the ground and offered it to the dog to chew on. She held the stick and pulled it while the dog pulled from the other side with her mouth. Tug-of-war. She looked at the woman with penetrating eyes. “Well, the people in my village might think it was an Israeli soldier killing an innocent civilian, so I guess we’re even.”

  The woman started to stand. “I should be going. Come on Cane,” she said to the dog, who was now sitting by her side. But the color was draining from her face again. She sat back down.

  Ruby sat next to the woman, took her knapsack off of her shoulder, and put it on the rock beside her. She indicated for the woman to drink more from the thermos. She was mildly sorry she had scared her. “Don’t worry. It was probably some kids fooling around, or someone from my village out shooting porcupines or wild boars.” She gave the woman a quizzical look. “What did you say your name was?”

  “I didn’t. You didn’t ask.”

  “Well, what is it?”

  “Tikvah. My name is Tikvah.”

  “Which means what, again?” she asked even though she knew that word as the name of Israel’s national anthem. In fact, she remembered some of her Hebrew from when she had studied at the University of Haifa years ago. At least the Jews had brought a co-ed university, and even secondary schools in the villages, to Galilee.

  “It means Hope.”

  “Like the name of this valley.”

  “This valley has a name?”

  “Yes. Maybe not an official one, on your people’s maps, but all of the Arab villagers around here know it. Hope Valley. Marjat Amal. And my village, there, up on the hill across from your moshav, Bir al-Demue—that is on your maps, so I assume you know what that means . . .” Tikvah shook her head. “Well, it means Well of Tears. There’s a historic well in the village where women would come to cry, their tears mixing with the water in the well. Hopes and tears. Appropriate, considering the history of the area.”

  Tikvah took another sip of water from her thermos and tried to stand. But Ruby could see that she still felt too shaky to go anywhere.

  “This tree we’re sitting inside, it has a name, too. Tree of Hope. Shajarat al-Amal. This is the oldest olive tree in the valley. These trunks are all part of one tree. My father used to take me here often when I was a kid. He said he named the tree himself, before I was even born.” Ruby ran her fingers along the rough bark of one of the tree’s trunks. “I used to say the tree had wrinkles. Legend has it that this tree is around two thousand years old, and that it was planted by Joseph when Jesus was born.”

  “That would make sense. It’s a Jewish custom to plant a tree when a child’s born. Joseph was Jewish. Jesus, too, as you must know.”

  Ruby watched Tikvah examine the three gnarled and knotty tree trunks and then look up, to where thick winding branches tangled together into a canopy of thin oblong leaves, dense enough to shade the women from the blazing sun.

  “Well, this tree is amazing, whether or not Jesus’ father planted it . . .” Tikvah looked at Ruby, somewhat apologetically. “I’m afraid I didn’t know any of this. Not about the tree’s history, and not even its name.” Her tone was tentative. “But speaking of names, what’s yours?” she asked, her voice becoming more cheery, her body more animated.

  “Rabia.”

  “What does that mean?” Tikvah screwed the top of her thermos back on and returned it to her knapsack.

  Ruby decided she could at least educate this woman about the language of the people who had lived here before she and the rest of those moshavnikim came. Hebrew may have been an older language than Arabic, but it was used only as a written language in Galilee for centuries until the Zionists came and revived it as a spoken language. “It has the connotation of companion for life, because Rabia ibn Keb was the prophet Muhammad’s companion. But its literal meaning is spring.”

  “As in the season?”

  “Precisely. But people outside the village call me Ruby. It’s my professional name. Just Ruby. No family-name. I’m an artist. The only Ruby Palestinian-Israeli woman artist around. I’m pretty well-known internationally—although less so here—even if I never had huge commercial success. Good enough to get by, though. So I’m not complaining.”

  Tikvah looked at her with interest. “Well, do you know what the name of my moshav means? Sapir?”

  “No, not really,” Ruby said, although she knew all too well what it meant.

  “Well, it means sapphire. Not exactly ruby, but pretty close.”

  Should Ruby tell this woman what the name of her father’s village had been? What it felt like to be reminded of all her family had lost each time she heard the name of this woman’s moshav? It was as if the Jews were waving an eternal victory flag in the villagers’ faces.

  “Are you feeling better now?” she asked, purposely changing the subject.

  “A little.” Tikvah breathed deeply and closed her eyes for a few moments. “Probably just a little dehydrated.”

  Possible, considering the heat. Still, this woman looked generally unsteady. Weak and shaky. Like it was more than just dehydration that ailed her. But Ruby did not want to pry. She knew what it was like to want to talk about other things, to think about other things. The thought that this woman might also be unwell made her less antagonistic, less anxious to end the conversation as quickly as she had wanted to just moments before. Even if the woman lived on that moshav.

  “Here, try this,” she said, releasing the buckle of her knapsack. She reached inside and took out her burlap foraging sack, which she opened. She removed from the sack one of the ugly brown roots she had collected earlier that morning. “This is turmeric. You may know it as a spice in curry, but it’s also medicinal. It’s an anti-inflammatory and anti-oxidant, among other things. Do you want to try some?” She took a pocket knife out of her bag and scraped some of the outer layer off of the root. She loved watching the bright orange flesh of the root slowly appear, like a sun rising up from behind the arid mountains.

  Tikvah hesitated.

  “Go on. I won’t poison you.”

  Tikvah stretched out her arm. Ruby scraped some of the peelings into the palm of her hand, and the woman put some in her mouth. “Yuck!” she said, spitting the partially chewed root back out into her cupped hands.

  Ruby laughed and took a bite. “Yes, raw it is pungent,” she said as she chewed. “But you get used to the taste. My mother has me eating it constantly. She makes tea out of it, too. With an herbal Bedouin remedy from the south. Sheicha, or fragrant star. She says it’s a cure.”<
br />
  “For what?”

  She swallowed what was in her mouth. “Cancer, of course. Did you think this was hijab I’m wearing here?” She lifted her hand to her head scarf and pushed it back ever so slightly, to show there was no hair underneath. “I have not covered myself since I left this place years ago. If a man has a problem with me showing my hair, it is his problem, not mine.” She shifted her weight from her right leg to her left. “Was his problem, I mean.”

  “I’m sorry. It must be hard.”

  It was hard. Even if this woman was living on the moshav, she did seem sympathetic. Ruby did not have anyone she could talk to about her illness. She did not want to worry her family. If this woman, too, was ill, she might understand. No need to tell her the depressing details of her prognosis, though. She just met the woman. “I was living in Manhattan when I was diagnosed. I came back for treatments. This country is not a choice place to live if you’re an Arab, in case you haven’t noticed. There are worse, but there are better, too. And my village is not a choice place to live if you’re a woman artist with a mind of her own. But I don’t have too many options at the moment. My healthcare is covered here. I’m a citizen.”

  “Well, that is important. Healthcare coverage.” Tikvah looked like she was speaking from personal experience, but, again, Ruby did not want to pry. “You lived in Manhattan? I grew up in New York. On Long Island. So I guess we’re both transplants in one way or another. But I’ve been in this country longer than I lived in the U.S. I have dual citizenship.”

  Again, Ruby held herself back from attacking this woman, who could just step off of a plane and get Israeli citizenship because she is Jewish, while Ruby’s father’s family who were born here but had fled to Lebanon after their village was destroyed in 1948, could not even return, let alone become Israeli citizens.

  “Well, lucky for you,” she mumbled under her breath, but she said no more. “And I’m lucky my family was living in Galilee and not the occupied territories, or in Al-Quds—”

  “—Al-What? Where?” Tikvah asked.

  “Al-Quds. That’s the name for Jerusalem in Arabic. All of your cities have Arabic names, too, in case you didn’t know. Nazareth, or Natzrat in Hebrew, is an-Nasira in Arabic. Jaffa, Yafo, is Yaffa in Arabic. And Haifa is Hayfa.”

  “Ok. So you’re glad your family’s not from Jerusalem? Why?”

  “I mean East Jerusalem, where I doubt you’ve ever been. Like most Jewish Israelis. Things are heating up there, and in the occupied territories, too, as we speak . . .”

  Tikvah looked at Ruby with curiosity and fear. Ruby decided to drop the subject of the Palestinian cause. She could have reminded Tikvah of how the Arabs did not have it so great here in Galilee either, what with the land confiscations and the Judaization of the area, but she decided to give the poor woman a break. She took another burlap bag out of her knapsack.

  “Here. Try this,” she said, as she handed a leaf to Tikvah. “Saltbush. Returns minerals to the system. It’s the desert version of spinach. Grows all year round, even in this heat.” She wondered if she shouldn’t continue, but she couldn’t help herself. When it came to her father’s village and the moshav, she let her emotions get the better of her. “It’s native to Palestine, but they call it the desert colonizer. It occupies places disturbed by human or natural processes. I’ll bet your moshav is full of it.”

  “Excuse me?”

  “Well, if you call the Nakba a human disturbance.”

  “Nakba?”

  Ruby stood and stared at Tikvah. “Yes, Nakba,” she confirmed, with her free hand on her hip bone, which she felt protruding from behind the fabric of her jeans. “It means catastrophe. What you call the War of Independence, we call the Catastrophe. Some people’s disasters provide benefits for other people, as the old Arabic saying goes. My father’s village was destroyed, so your people could build your moshav in its place.” She looked at Tikvah sharply, detecting surprise in her face. “You didn’t know?”

  Tikvah shook her head, slowly.

  How could this woman not know? The privilege of winning the war. The victors get to decide which story to tell and erase any trace of a different version. “Well, they were expelled when you Jews captured the village in ’48, and were never let back in. You really didn’t know this?”

  Tikvah looked away. “I didn’t realize it was like that, exactly.” She looked frazzled. “The story sounded different the way I heard it. You know, my parents were refugees, too.”

  “Refugees?”

  “From Europe. World War II. What we call the Shoah. The Catastrophe. Our catastrophe.”

  Ruby’s face was getting hotter by the minute. “Well, being the victims of victims doesn’t make it any easier for my people, if that is what you’re implying.”

  “I really do have to go.” Tikvah stood up quickly this time. Her face did not go white. Was she feeling better? Should Ruby just let her go and continue on her privileged way? The woman did not make a move to leave.

  “My father fled to Lebanon with his mother, his sisters and his father’s extended family who lived in their village, too,” Ruby continued. “Many of the villagers did the same. Others went to Syria or Jordan. They were afraid of what the Jews might do to them if they stayed. Besides, they had nowhere to live, anyway. Some did not leave the country but went to an-Nasira or to different Arab villages in the area—if they were lucky enough to have family who could take them in. My father’s maternal grandparents, who were Christian, did live in an-Nasira, but they had disowned their daughter, his mother, for marrying a Muslim.”

  Tikvah frowned. “That’s harsh.”

  “Yes, well my father was on good terms with his grandparents in an-Nasira. I don’t know when that happened, but by the time I was born, we were very close with them. What I do know is that when he snuck back over the border from Lebanon in ’48, right after that war ended, he stayed with his grandparents part of the time, and the other part he camped outside the village ruins, watching your moshav being built. He wanted to keep an eye on his house.”

  “I thought you said the village was destroyed.”

  “It was. His family’s house was the only one left standing. Although he couldn’t get close to it out of fear of being caught. He ended up marrying his cousin, my mother, his betrothed, who was from Bir al-Demue right across the valley, where I was born less than a year later. There’s my parents’ house, where I grew up.” She pointed to the blue building right at the edge of the hilltop. “Although my father is no longer alive. Just my mother lives there, with some of my brothers.”

  “I’ve noticed that house before,” Tikvah said, her gaze towards the home of Ruby’s childhood. “I can see it from my kitchen windows.”

  “Like my father could see his childhood home from our kitchen windows. Although he was lucky enough to become an Israeli citizen soon after he came back, in his heart he was still a refugee, and he was reminded of that until the day he died. I know because he wrote poems about it. He never got over it.” Ruby paused to take a breath. “Which one is your house, anyway? Can we see it from here?”

  Tikvah pointed up towards the top of the hill. “That’s my house. You can even make out the cabins if you look hard enough. I run a bed-and-breakfast with my husband, Alon. Galilean Dream Cabins. We built it when we moved here and have been running it ever since.”

  Ruby followed Tikvah’s finger, which was pointing to a ridge of the hill on the other side of the valley. Could it really be? “The one with the flat roof?”

  “Yes.”

  So this woman was the owner of those vacation cabins on her father’s family’s land. Maybe she was the one who had come out of the house that night a few weeks ago, when Ruby had gone looking for the diary.

  It took a few moments for Ruby to compose herself. “That’s my father’s house.”

  Tikvah furrowed her dark eyebrows. “What do you mean?”

  “I mean—that’s the house where my father was born and raised.” Ruby
enunciated each word so the truth would be absolutely clear. “He lived in it until he was twenty years old, when the village was demolished and your moshav was built in its place. Moshav Sapir. Sapphire, as you said.” She would tell her the name of the village, after all. “My father’s village was named Yakut al-Jalil, Sapphire of Galilee.”

  Tikvah faltered. Would she faint again? Ruby did not want to have to deal with that. “Listen. I didn’t choose the name, and from what I know, those who did chose it because it was the name of the ancient Jewish city that was here. Besides, Alon and I bought our house more than two decades after the moshav was built. We paid good money for it. We have the papers to prove it. I don’t know what you’re talking about. And now I really do have to go.”

  Ruby wanted this woman out of her sight. She irritated her, playing oblivious and innocent. Even if she didn’t know all of this recent history, she should. But then Ruby had an idea. Maybe she wouldn’t need to sneak into the house after all. Maybe she would be invited in. “I’m sorry for attacking you. This is a loaded subject for me. I grew up here, looking out at your moshav. I was gone for many years. Coming back has brought up a lot of difficult emotions.”

  “Fine. But I still should go.” Tikvah looked around. Probably for the dog, who, Ruby now noticed, must have wandered off while they were absorbed in conversation.

  “Why go so soon? I could teach you how to forage, and you can help me keep up my English.”

  Tikvah looked a bit more relaxed now. “Foraging? Here? Now?” she asked. But she was still scanning the area. “Isn’t that more of a winter activity?”

  “For mushrooms and mallow it is. But those who really know this land can forage all year-round. That’s what I was doing when your dog interrupted me.” Ruby looked around for the dog now, too. “I’m gathering herbs for tea and ingredients for my family’s lunch.”