Thieves in the Night (11 page)

He had been eleven when his father died. His father had been a Russian-Jewish pianist of some renown. His mother was English and a gentile. Her people had never approved of her marriage. After her husband's death she went back to live with them in their house in Oxfordshire. Joseph was an only child; he grew up in the large country house, played cricket and tennis, went to church, rode a pony and later a horse. His father was rarely mentioned and Joseph at eleven accepted this as one of the many paragraphs in the sacred code of “don'ts”.

In due course he was sent up to Oxford, and during the summer vacation after his second term fell in love with a woman from the neighbourhood whom he met at a local tennis tournament. Lily was five years older than Joseph, blonde, slim, pretty and divorced. She was generally liked among the neighbours, and sometimes teased by them on account of her enthusiasm for a new political movement which organised demonstrations through the London East End, and whose members wore black shirts and had fights with policemen. But Joseph at that time was not interested in politics.

After his third term Joseph proposed to Lily and was told not to be an ass. After his fourth term they went to a hunt ball where they drank several cocktails and a good deal of
champagne. During the last dance he caught a peculiar smile in her eye; while the band played God Save the King she asked him in a whisper where his room was, and told him how to find hers.

He had known Lily for almost two years, was humbly in love with her, had talked to her poetry, sex and eternity, and had never kissed her lips. After the ball, without transition, he became the lover for a wildly unreal and elusive hour, of a woman so completely transformed that he kept stammering her name aloud to convince himself of her identity. Then came the awakening and the crash. Even now, years later, he grew hot with humiliation as he thought of it. In her dark room she had switched the bedside lamp on to look for a cigarette. The sudden light had revealed their nudity, and with it the sign of the Covenant on his body, the stigma of the race incised into his flesh. The horror in her face made him at first think that she had discovered in him the symptoms of some repulsive disease; then, in a voice icy with contempt she had accused him of infamy and deception, cross-examined him about his ancestry, ordered him to get dressed and clear out of her room. At last the reason dawned on him.

It was indeed a squalid little incident, impossible to tell Dina or anybody else. Even less could he explain to them that it had changed the course of his life. Not because of Lily—that aspect of it he got over after a while. Lily had merely been an instrument, and perhaps without her some other incident would have produced the same result. The result was a kind of shell-shock. Everything was changed. He began making inquiries about his father. He made a cult of his memory, to atone for his own cowardly part in the conspiracy of silence about him. This led to a breach with his mother's family. He took rooms in London and frequented the people whom he was henceforth to regard as his own. At first he did not like them, but he read the newspapers and learned that Incidents were the rule in their lives. He read books and learned that it had been the same in the past. He read more
books and learned about the movement of the Return and its founder, the Viennese journalist Dr. Herzl, whose story reminded him of his own. He too had thought that the stigma was buried in the past, until he had met with his Incident: the trial of Captain Dreyfus which he had been sent out to report. Towards the end of his life he had summed up his philosophy to a friend:

“If you are faced with a fence and can't creep through under it, your only choice is to jump. For twenty centuries we have tried to creep through under the fence. They wouldn't let us. Now we are taking the jump.”

Once Joseph had taken the jump the rest became easy. He forgot about Lily and the shell-shock. He no longer ran away from something, but ran forward towards an aim. It had the lure of an exotic country, the fascination of a romantic revival and the appeal of a social utopia, all in one—almost too good to be true. It had been a curious journey—from Lily's bed to Ezra's Tower in Galilee. Whether it was a pilgrim's progress or a wild-goose chase he did not know; and at the moment he did not care to know.

He felt the soft weight of Dina's face on his arm, and the quiet rhythm of her breathing carried him off to sleep.

They woke at daybreak both at the same time. Neither of them had changed position or moved in their sleep. Both of them were fully awake at once.

“Come,” said Dina. “Let us see the sun rise.”

They walked out of the tent into the light grey morning mist and the fresh dewy smell of the air. To the east, behind the hill with the sleeping Arab village, the sky was pink and yellow, rapidly changing colour. Dina threw her hair back and shook herself like a puppy getting out of the water.

“I talked a lot of nonsense last night,” she said.

“Did you? I slept,” said Joseph. “Look at the sheep.”

A flock of tiny light woolly specks were zigzagging down the slope beyond the wadi.

“We shall have a bigger flock,” said Dina. “And cows. What shall we call the first calf?”

“Dr. Karl Marx,” said Joseph. “Let's climb on top of the tower.”

They climbed up the wooden ladder, Dina first. Her legs were over his head and he saw the muscles play in her calves and had to restrain himself not to bite into the smooth, brown skin. Well, he thought, that will never be; but there are other things. To approve and be approved of, to like and be liked….

They stood on the platform of Ezra's Tower, surrounded by the gently undulating silver-grey hills of Galilee. They saw Dasha emerge from the living-hut, a towel round her neck and a big sponge in her hand, on her way to the showers.

“To-day we shall start building the cowshed,” said Dina.

The sparkling tip of the sun had pierced the yellow mist. It was 5.30 A.M.; and the evening and the morning were the first day.

(1938)

Extract from the Constitution of Communal Settlements, in Compliance with the Standard Rules under the Cooperative Societies Ordinance, Government of Palestine, 1933:

The general objects of the Society are to organise and promote the economic and social interests of its members in accordance with co-operative principles and in particular to
—

(
a
)
Manage and develop a collective farm
;

(
d
)
Dispose of products of the settlement and purchase its requirements
;

(
e
)
Maintain a common purse into which all the earnings of their members shall be paid and from which all their requirements shall be provided
;

(
f
)
To assist members in raising their economic, cultural and social level by mutual aid, to care for their sick, to support the old and feeble … and to maintain and educate the children of the members
;

(
h
)
To supply all the social, cultural and economic requirements in the settlement and to undertake all steps which may be deemed necessary for improving these conditions, and in particular to establish and maintain crèches, kindergartens and schools for the education and bringing-up of the children
;

(
i
)
To establish and maintain in the settlement public institutions and services and generally undertake all activities which are customarily undertaken by village authorities
.

(3)
Rights and Duties of Members:

(
a
)
The members have equal rights to receive from the common purse of the Society food, drink, clothing, housing and other necessities and amenities of life
.

(1)
Capital
:

The Society has no capital
.

Pages from the chronicle of Joseph, a member of the Commune of Ezra's Tower

Friday
, October … 1938

To-day it is a year since young Naphtali was shot through his eye and brains because he couldn't keep his head down. He has since become a hero and our local patron saint. Particularly as the poor, squinting little fool did not believe in violence and had so much set his heart on educating our Neighbours. However, heroes should be looked at through the telescope, not through the microscope.

History is a series of futilities with grandeur as their cumulative effect. That, I suppose, is another example of the dialectical change of quantity into quality….

Anyway we have waxed and expanded during this first year and are beginning to look more or less like a village—or rather a cross between a fortified camp and a life-size model from a town-planner's drawing-board. The Watch-tower is our parish church, the Dining Hut our club, town-hall and forum ro-manum, all in one. So far the living quarters are still of wood, but the first concrete buildings are completed and look most impressive—they are the cowshed, dairy and the Children's House. The latter has up to date five inmates who are quite fun. Two of them were born since we have settled and there are more on the way. The female comrades all seem to walk about with big bellies, terribly pleased with themselves for improving the national birth-rate and looking even less attractive than usual. I suppose they sing the Anthem during the act of procreation.

We also have our graveyard with so far five concrete slabs. One died of typhus and three more were sent Naphtali's way by our Neighbours: two during night attacks, the third ambushed while walking alone through the wadi and killed with particular beastliness—castrated, eyes out and all. And the people of Kfar Tabiyeh still have the cheek to come to our dispensary with their boils and belly-aches and fly-ridden children.

The height of this tragi-comedy was the visit the Mukhtar paid us to-day to congratulate us on our first anniversary. He came on a white stallion, accompanied by his eldest son, Issa. The son is a pock-marked, shifty-eyed lout, but the Mukhtar looked magnificent. Reuben showed them the library, tractorshed, Children's House, tree-nursery, etcetera; the Mukhtar praised everything with clickings of the tongue and avuncular beams, while Issa looked like a fellow with jaundice in a delicatessen shop.

Reuben asked them to stay on for the midday meal, and the Mukhtar started with gusto the ceremonial game of protest. He protested with both hands pushing an imaginary dish away into the air and clasping them to his chest as if to
assert his innocence of any intention of robbing his hosts of so delicious a dish; and after this had been repeated three times we went into the Dining Hall. He looked quaintly out of place at the communal table with his checked head-cloth floating round his shoulders and his enormous behind bulging over the narrow form; while his cunning eyes scanned with curiosity the informal coming and going of the comrades, particularly the girls. I thought the meal appallingly poor after so much ado and felt rather ashamed of it, though I knew that Reuben was right not to make any fuss about the Mukhtar and, by making him eat according to our custom and not theirs, to show him that we are here in our own right. The Mukhtar felt it too and didn't like it, though he kept up his jovial tone, while Issa sulkily munched his food without saying a word, and cast his furtive eyes down whenever a bare-thighed girl brushed past him in her shorts. The four of us were left alone at our table, only Max and Sarah from our extreme Arab-liberating anti-Imperialist wing kept casting loving glances at Mukhtar and son, itching to explain to them that Allah is opium for the people and that their women should use birth-control; fortunately they can't talk Arabic.

When we got to the coffee which, as a concession, was made the native way, the Mukhtar let the cat out of the bag. He lowered his voice to confidential intimacy and asked whether we knew what boundary between the Arab and Jewish states the Partition Commission is going to propose. Reuben said truthfully that he knew nothing about it except that the report of the Commission is supposed to be published shortly; besides, in his opinion the whole idea of partition is going to be dropped. The Mukhtar then started nudging both of us with his elbows, with tremendous laughs and slappings of knees, pretending that we knew everything and were trying to hold back the secret from him. Finally he came out with it himself: according to rumour, the boundary is to cut Galilee into halves, with the village of Kfar Tabiyeh falling into the Jewish State….

Reuben merely shrugged and repeated that in his opinion the partition scheme is going to be abandoned. I asked the Mukhtar where he got his information from; he put on a secretive air and said he got it from a very high and important personality. Probably it was the travelling cloth-merchant whom we saw the day before yesterday ride into Kfar Tabiyeh on his donkey; but the Mukhtar seemed firmly convinced that it's true. Reuben was bored, but I enjoyed the situation. I asked the Mukhtar whether he did not think that they would be much better off in the Hebrew State, reciting to him the whole stock-in-trade of arguments: how the Arab living-standard has risen and the death-rate fallen since our coming; how the country was nothing but swamps and desert twenty years ago, while to-day the Arabs of Palestine are envied for their prosperity by all those in the neighbouring states. Hamdulillah, the Mukhtar said solemnly, Thank God. I told him that we were paying all the taxes out of which the Government built the roads and Arab schools; Hamdulillah, he said, nodding his head. I told him that the Arab labourer in this country earned about five times more than in Egypt and ten times more than in Iraq thanks to the capital we have brought in, and that Arab infant mortality had dropped to less than one-third thanks to our hospitals; Hamdulillah, he said with emphatic vigour. I told him that the great Feisal himself, son of the Kalif Hussein and King of Iraq, had after the last war officially welcomed the rebuilding of the Hebrew State and that after all the Kalif's son knew better what was good for the Arabs than the assassins hired by the godless Germans; “Aywa,” said the Mukhtar, “God how true you speak! I have always held the same opinions but there are fools who will not listen to wisdom and even send a bullet into its seat.” He fell again into a conspiratorial whisper and revealed to us that he had always been a follower of the moderate Nashashibi clan, but since the extremist Husseinis were backed by the English and had got the upper hand; and since their leader, the Great Mufti Hadj Amin, was directing the terrorists from Damascus;
and since most of the moderate Nashashibi leaders had been bumped off by the Husseinis for wanting to come to terms with the Jews; and since the other Mukhtar of Kfar Tabiyeh was a Husseini-man and had a blood-feud with our Mukhtar;—and so on. In short, it was clearer than daylight that we never had a better and truer friend than the Mukhtar of Kfar Tabiyeh, and that the least we could do to repay our debt to him was to give him, once the Hebrew State was established, a nice, remunerative function like Collector of Taxes or Inspector of Road Transport; and of course to hang the other Mukhtar with his whole family….