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be headed up her hill. She stayed this way until morning, frightened countless times by the rustlingof leaves on stiff branches. And more so, she was terrified by what she could not see, the ever-widening gyre of frontier blocked by the tree at her window.
     
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    After washing her hands and saying her prayers, Rena went outside with the ax to size up the task ahead. It was the biggest tree in their grove, a solid four meters around. Then she looked up to its top and knew she could conquer it. For the tree, like the men of that country, was much shorter than you’d imagine for something so tough. Rena spat in her hands. She took up her ax, and she swung at the tree’s knobbly base with all she had. She chopped and chopped, making little progress. When she was feeling forlorn, too tired to hack at that stubborn bole anymore, she’d look out past the tree over the edge of the hill at the Arab village below. And she’d swing.
    Watching this handsome mother of three at work, her hair tied back in a kerchief, and reigning over this stunning hill, in a sea of hills, on a day so clear that one could see well into the purple mountains of Moab from where Rena stood, you would not know that things weighed heavy at all. You would not know it if, upon taking her periodic look over the edge of that rocky slope and spotting a skinny young man climbing its worn, ancient terraces, she hadn’t buried that ax in the ground and lifted a rifle from the dirt.
    Rena chambered a round. She planted the butt on her shoulder and set her sights on the boy zigzagging his way up. When he was close enough to Rena that she could have as easily poked him back down the hill with the barrel as shot him through the heart, he said, in Arabic, “Stop chopping my tree.”
    Rena either didn’t speak Arabic or didn’t care to respond. And so the boy repeated the sentence in Hebrew.
    Again, it was as if he had not spoken. Rena, as if starting the conversation, said, “Who are you?”
    “I am,” he said, “your neighbor down the hill.”
    “Then stay down the hill,” she said.
    “I would have,” the boy said. “But I looked up and I saw that you were doing something that can’t be undone.”
    “It’s my tree, on my land, in my country. Mine to cut down if I please.”
    “If it was your tree, I’d have seen you at my side last year during harvest. I’d have seen you the year before that, and ten years before that, and a hundred.”
    “You weren’t here yourself a hundred years ago. And anyway,” Rena said, “you don’t look back far enough. The contract on this land is very old.”
    “A mythical claim, as meaningless as the one you make today.”
    Here the boy went silent as the shadows from a formation of fighters passed overhead. Then he waited a moment longer, for he knew they would be followed by the crack of broken sky.
    “You will see,” the boy said. “The Jewish court will return this hill to us. Anyway, it looks like it’s the war, not a judge, that will decide. Tomorrow, I’d say, or the next, this tree will be in Jordan, or Egypt, or, God willing, back home in Palestine.”
    “By tomorrow,” Rena said, “it will be at the bottom of the hill. And you can take it, along with your family, to any country you please.”
    Here the boy’s face darkened, as if a plane again had passed, though the sky stayed clear.
    “If I find one single olive branch off this tree at the bottom of the hill,” he said, a finger now raised, “I will plant you in its place myself. One more swing, I tell you, and a curse on your head—a curse on your home.”
    “You are very tough for a boy with a gun aimed at his heart.”
    “A settler who shoots for no reason would already have shot.”
    And here the boy turned and walked back down the hill. He was halfway down when Rena called to him, against her better judgment. “Child,” she yelled. “Cousin! Are we really losing the war?”
     
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    Rena chopped at that tree for