Hope Valley

by Haviva Ner-David

  Still looking around, Tikvah asked, “Aren’t you afraid of making a mistake?”

  “Mistakes can be fatal.” Ruby thought of her own biggest mistake. Marrying Mustafa. “But I’m an expert. Foraging is in my blood. So, do you want to join me?”

  Tikvah looked at Ruby again now. “I did want to learn to forage once. But I didn’t trust my instincts enough to actually do it.”

  “It’s not just about instincts. It’s also about courage to go out into the wild and take chances. And because mistakes can be fatal, you can’t judge by a first glance. It takes really getting to know what’s out there. You don’t want to be foolish. But you also don’t want to let fear—or prejudice—prevent you from trying.” Ruby stared at the woman. But she had to stop attacking her if she didn’t want to scare her away.

  “Maybe another time,” Tikvah said as she lifted her backpack from the rock and put her sunglasses back down over her eyes. “I really do have to go. And I’m feeling much better now. Come on Cane!” At the sound of the woman’s voice, the dog appeared from behind an olive tree, came running towards her, and followed as she walked away.

  “I’ll be back here tomorrow. Same time, same place!” Ruby called out to the woman’s back. Tikvah, she said her name was. Hope. Ruby was not going to let her get away so easily.

  JAMAL

  July 29, 1947

  Dear Father Allah,

  If I am going to be a writer, I must write. Now that I am out of a formal educational framework, I need to be disciplined about my writing. Written Arabic is not the same as Spoken Arabic. It is one of the richest and most beautiful languages there is, but also one of the most difficult. If I want to master it and take myself seriously as a writer, I must start now. When Mouallim gave me this journal as a secondary school graduation present, he said I was one of his most promising pupils. He told me to write in it regularly, whatever is on my mind, and to write not for an audience, but for myself—to let go of all inhibitions and simply write. He suggested I write as if to a confidant, to encourage the words to flow. So I chose to address this diary to you, Father Allah, as I have already been speaking to you in my head for as long as I can remember.

  No one knows my secret name for you. Father is not one of your 99 names. But Father Allah is the only name that rings true when I think of my Christian mother and my Muslim father. Even if I was raised Muslim, Umm Ahmad still crosses herself when she thinks no one is looking, and when I was a young boy, she whispered Hail Marys to lull me to sleep. To this day, I chant “Hail Mary full of grace,” like a lullaby, as I drift off at night. I find the notion of grace comforting, the idea that God bestows gifts from a place of unconditional love and that there is some greater design and meaning that connects all that is. When I feel your grace, I feel held in your embrace, like I did that day when you took me to heaven and brought me back down to earth again.

  It was when I was only four years old, but I remember it vividly. It is the first real memory I have. The grownups were busy in the orchards. It was olive harvest season. They had taken the heavy metal cover off of the well so they could get to the water more easily while harvesting. It was a hamsin, those easterly desert winds making it especially hot for olive harvest season, when the air would normally be beginning to cool down from the scorching heat of summer. There was only a bamboo cover laid out on the mouth of the well. I wasn’t bothering anyone, just playing by myself, as I often did. My brothers had told me about a game they saw some British soldiers playing, which included hitting a ball with a stick. It was cricket, but I did not know that then. They were laughing when they told me about it, saying how foolish the soldiers looked; but it looked like great fun to me. While everyone else was busy hitting olives down from the trees, I snuck off with a harvesting stick to give the game a try. But when the rock landed on the bamboo cover, I went to fetch it, and the next thing I knew, I was in the water.

  I did not know how to swim back then. None of the village children did. There was no reason to know. The closest body of water is Buhayret Tabarriyah—what the New Testament calls the Sea of Galilee, where Jesus walked on water, performed the miracle of the loaves and fish and calmed the stormy waters—which is at least a day’s journey on horseback from Yakut al-Jalil. But after that incident, we made the trip, and my father taught me how to swim. Since that day, when I felt what it is like to live submerged yet held, I feel drawn to the water.

  I did try to keep my head above the water at first, that day I fell in. I thrashed around and grabbed on to a root I saw sticking out of the dirt wall. But the root was slippery. I could not grasp it. It was no use, I was going under. So I let it happen, surrendered to the water. Surrendered to you, Father Allah. I couldn’t fight it, so I just allowed myself to sink. The water was cold and refreshing compared to the air. I tried to breathe, but I couldn’t. So I held my breath in my cheeks and wondered for how long I could. Abu Ahmad had told me that although a tadpole loses its gills when it metamorphosizes, as a frog it can hold its breath for hours under water and can even breathe through its skin. So I pretended I was a frog and did not panic. I wondered when someone would find me in there. It was magical.

  I felt a hand lifting me up out of the water. Was it really you, Father Allah? No one knows how I got out. There is no rational explanation, unless an anonymous passerby lifted me out and left me lying unconscious on the ground, where my frantic mother found me. The next thing I knew, I woke up in hospital in an-Nasira. That is the first time I met my grandparents, Umm Ahmad’s parents. They, devout Christians, were estranged from my mother after she married my father. But what happened to me caused so much concern that they set aside their disappointment in my mother to come visit me. Although they still refused to speak to my mother. I lay in a coma for days. When I awoke, everyone was calling me by a new name. Ayush. Long life. They call me by both names now. Ayush Jamal.

  Everyone coddled me from then on, always observing, to make sure there had been no damage to my brain. But it seems my time under water only made my mind sharper, because the next year, at the early age of five, I started attending the one-room school house with my older brothers. Within months, I was ahead of them all in my studies. I was the only one who went on to the single Arabic secondary school in the area, in an-Nasira. The few students from the village who study there go on scholarship, especially since they must pay for room and board.

  I was lucky to have grandparents in an-Nasira, although my mother was too proud to ask any favors of them. She said if I wanted to live there during the week, I should ask them myself, and they agreed. They called me a miracle child, like Jesus. They took me to church with them when I needed to be in school over the weekends, which I loved: the organ, the robes, the hymns—but more than anything, the quiet that felt so sacred, so pure. And the beauty. The inside of my grandparents’ church is the most exquisite sight created by human hands I have beheld. I have seen photos of churches like it in Europe, where I hope to go one day. Maybe for university. Fallaheen don’t have money for higher studies, but Abu Ahmad says he will put money aside every year there is a bountiful crop, and he has already agreed that the money I earn in the book shop will go towards my education. He does not want me to be a fallah. There are enough other men in the family to help him and my mother take care of our farm when my sisters marry and move to their husbands’ families’ villages, he says.

  At least putting off my higher studies also puts off my marriage to Naima. Before I can marry, I need a house; and if we are putting money aside for my education, there is certainly nothing left for a house for me. The expectation is that I will go study and then come back with a degree so I can make a living and marry her.

  Naima has been betrothed to me since she was born, when I was barely four years old. If I broke the engagement, it could cause a feud within our clan, destroy the good relations we have with my father’s cousins in Bir al-Demue. It would shame Abu Ahmad. In his eyes, I have no good reason not to marry her—although he himself marr
ied my mother instead of his betrothed. “Winds blow counter to what ships desire,” he says; he tells me that he was a foolish young man and is lucky everything turned out for the best. He was in love with my mother; he met her delivering vegetables to her father’s, my grandfather’s, store, and he was smitten.

  But I am not in love with someone else; I have no good reason not to marry Naima, as my father says. She is beautiful, I am not blind. I have not seen her hair since she started wearing hijab a few years ago—a sign that she has started to become a woman, although it is clear, too, from how her chest has grown so generously since then—but I remember her locks were dark and luminous, like a night sky with a full moon. And her eyes are round and deep brown, like the earth, with thick lashes. Her lips full and red like a pomegranate. She is tall, lean and graceful, like a date palm, and she moves like a gazelle. When I imagine Naima without her hijab, how her body will look in a few years without her loose-fitting abaya, I know I would have no trouble with her in our nuptial bed. That is not my concern.

  So why am I so resistant? Umm Ahmad says she is a good cook, too. And intelligent, even. She can’t read or write, but no females in the village can. Everyone in the village says that we will make a fine couple. But when we are in the same room, she turns away from me. I cannot even catch her eye. I would like to speak to her before I marry her. I would like to know we have something to talk about, a common outlook.

  I want to fall in love with a whole woman, not just her outer beauty, and not with a fantasy created by my imagination. Why should I settle for anything less? Why should I marry for any reason other than love? We are not royalty who need to marry to form alliances and join fortunes. We are simple people. What else do we have if not our feelings, our thoughts and our dreams? Like the old Arab proverb my father himself likes to quote: If you steal, steal a camel, and if you love, love the moon. Since that day in the well, I see things differently than the people around me do, but that seems to be my fate.

  My parents say it was you, Father Allah, who prevented me from drowning. They say my destiny is a different one than my brothers’, because you saved me to accomplish important things. I don’t know if that is true. I keep to myself; I am not like my brothers, telling everyone I know what is best. But maybe this journal is a first step towards bringing out into the world what is going on inside my head. I don’t know if I really have something so unique to contribute, but I do want to share the way I see things with others. When I am ready.

  For now, I sit in the diwan with my father and brothers, woozy from the smell of sweet nargileh smoke and sadah with cardamom, and try to belong. When I feel most alone, I steal down to the rainwater cistern and dunk myself when no one is looking. I know it is forbidden for me to swim in the cistern, our extra supply of drinking water, but since that day in the well, I cannot bear to be so close to water and not go in. I want to conjure again that feeling of being in your embrace, Father Allah. And unlike my brothers, I need time to myself. To turn things over in my mind, look at them from different angles.

  Usually I do not agree with what my brothers say in the diwan, but I am the youngest, so I must be respectful; and I do not want them to tell me to go back with my mother and sisters, Nahla and Fatima. Besides, I do not want to argue. That is not my way. I observe, absorb, and process. And then I speak to you, Father Allah, instead, telling you what is in my heart. Like I am doing now, only in writing. As my grandmother says: Open your mouth only if what you are going to say is more beautiful than silence. I hope writing in this diary will help me make my words more beautiful than silence. But that is a lofty goal, as silence is one of the most beautiful things you created, Father Allah.

  What my brothers say in the diwan these days is that the British have been plotting with the Jews against us Arabs from the start, that they want to build a haven for the Jews on our land. Perhaps this is true, although only a couple of weeks ago, the British refused entry to a boat full of Jewish refugees from Europe. (The Exodus it is called. Well, it doesn’t look like those Jews will reach their promised land like the Israelites under Nabi Musah’s leadership did.) And just today the British executed three Jewish Irgun fighters. Of course, the Irgun executed two British hostages of their own in return. I heard it all on the wireless today when I was in an-Nasira at Kamal’s book shop talking to him about working there.

  Now that I will be in an-Nasira almost every day, I will finally have the opportunity to talk to the Jews. The Hebrew lessons Mouallim gave me will pay off. I want to know what their life is like on that commune up Hope Valley. Kibbutz Zohar. Zohar means Illuminating. Enlightening. We could use some improvements here. A secondary school for everyone, even for girls, and a university. Improved medical care is also a necessity. We don’t even have a doctor in our village; if we had a village doctor, maybe Maysa and Nur, the sisters I never met, would have been saved from the measles.

  Maybe my brothers are right. Perhaps it is all a show—this fighting between the British and the Jews. I think the British just can’t wait to get out of here, nice and clean, like a piece of hair from the dough before it goes in the oven and burns, as the old Arabic saying goes. They’d rather let us fight it out amongst ourselves, which is what will happen, of course, when the British do leave. My brothers are angry, very angry. I see their hatred—which is really just fear, I know—in their eyes. They do not trust the British or the Jews. Their life is their land, their village. They are fallaheen. They live off the earth. They would rather die defending their village, their olive orchards, their farmland, than imagine a life without. I understand my brothers, but I disagree. Perhaps because my imagination is bigger than theirs.

  Yakut al-Jalil is my home. It is where I was born, and my father before me, and his father and mother before him, and their parents before them. But I want to see more of the world than just my village. Maybe there are people out there who are like me. Maybe I will not always have to feel so alone.

  TIKVAH

  COULD THAT RUBY woman she met the day before have been right? Was Tikvah living in the woman’s father’s family home? She had never heard anything about an Arab village here where the moshav now stood. Maybe a few Arabs here or there, some nomadic Bedouin living in tents—like they did before the State had them permanently settle—but not a whole village. Even if there had been a small village on this hill top, surely the inhabitants were uncivilized clans living in squalor and at war with one another. They must have been happy when the Zionists came and upgraded their lifestyle.

  Tikvah needed a cup of coffee. She went to the kitchen to prepare one. Alon had just finished his first cup for the day and was heading out to work on the new clubhouse.

  “Will you be coming in for lunch?” she asked.

  “No. I fixed myself a sandwich,” he said, holding up his metal lunch box from his army days. Some things he saved from that period in his life, while others he had quickly discarded.

  “I guess I will, too, then. I’ll take it out with me on my walk.” Tikvah remembered when they used to make a point of eating all of their meals together. It was their chance to catch up, even if only on what was growing well in the orchards, what Tikvah was working on in her studio, what Alon was planning to build next, who needed to drive Talya where, or when guests were due to arrive. Now dinner was the only meal they ate together with any consistency. “I’ll fix a quiche for dinner, though,” she added. “And a salad.” She thought of Ruby and her invitation to meet in the valley for foraging.

  “That sounds nice,” Alon said, taking Tikvah’s delicate hand in his solid one and kissing her on the forehead before he headed for the side door off the kitchen.

  She felt his lips brush her skin, his hand slip from hers. She grabbed at his fingers, as if trying to catch them before they fell, which halted him in his tracks. He turned to her and smiled hesitantly, revealing his crooked front teeth framed by his familiarly freckled lips. Tikvah felt that fluttering in her abdomen again, and this time it was moving downwards
.

  “Maybe we can open a bottle of wine, too,” he said, as if in response to her grasp.

  “I’d like that.” It had been a while since they had wine with dinner. The alcohol helped them melt into each other with the ease they once did, before they had each put up the barriers that both protected and isolated them.

  “Great. I’ll come in before dark. We can eat around seven, after I have a shower.” He stole a glance out the window. “You’re going out?” he asked, as if her comment about taking a sandwich on her walk had only just registered.

  “Cane likes to run free outside the moshav, and I’m enjoying getting out, too.”

  He closed his eyes, took in a breath, and let it out. “Yes, I can see that it’s doing you good,” he said, and he squeezed her hand.

  He had understood her desperation in adopting the dog, and he was trying to accommodate her. She could tell it wasn’t easy for him. She longed to feel his lips on her neck and almost pulled him back towards her. The idea of going to bed with him after the dinner and wine excited her. But she did not hold him back now. She let him go to start his day. She would start hers, too.

  “Just don’t go off too far,” Alon added as he went out the door. “It’s hot out there. And I’ll feel better knowing you’re sticking close to home.”

  Alon was right. It was best to stay on the moshav side of the valley. Yesterday had been an adventure, but it had not been intentional. And it had been disturbing. She had no good reason to repeat that encounter. But she was curious about Ruby, who made all kinds of outrageous claims—and not just about the house. Was she really a well-known artist?

  While Tikvah ground the coffee for her espresso maker, she looked out of her bay kitchen windows, from where she had a clear view of the large Arab village, practically a small city, where this woman said she now lived. Bir al-Demue. It had never looked particularly inviting; there were no clearly visible parks. Just a hodgepodge of cement and stone buildings. The turquoise dome of what must be the village mosque stood out like a jewel in the sand. Sapphire of Galilee, Ruby had said had been the name of her father’s village. Certainly it had not been large enough to have a mosque like the one she saw across the valley.