Thieves in the Night (29 page)

“Come, come, Mr. Matthews,” the A.Ch.C. said, putting on his harassed air, though secretly he was enjoying himself. “This is rather strong language, and a bit unfair too.”

Kamel Effendi had jumped up from his seat. He was gasping for words.

“Bbah!” he brought out at last. “Now we know where we are. You come here as our guest, saying you are a journalist from America—but you are just one of those people whom they …” He made a frantic gesture of rubbing his index against his thumb, and his face underwent a rather unpleasant change.

“Yeah,” Matthews said calmly. “I am one of the Elders of Zion—huh?”

“I think it is time we joined the ladies,” said the A.Ch.C., and the Professor obediently got to his feet, but Kamel paid no attention to him.

“I care not who you are,” he shouted. “You come here as our guest and then you abuse us. This is what we receive for our hospitality….”

“Come off it, Mr. Kamel,” said Matthews. “I am not your guest, I am paying my keep, and I haven't asked your permission.”

“I care not whether you pay,” cried Kamel Effendi. “And I care not for their hospitals and their schools. This is our country, you understand? We want no foreign benefactors. We want not to be patronised. We want to be left alone, you understand! We want to live our own way and we want no foreign teachers and no foreign money and no foreign habits and no smiles of condescension and no pat on the shoulder and no arrogance and no shameless women with wriggling buttocks in our holy places. We want not their honey and we want not their sting, you understand? Neither their honey nor their sting. This you can tell them in your America. If they are thrown out in other countries—very bad, very sorry. Very, very sorry—but not our business. If they want to come here—a few of them, maybe thousand, maybe two thousand—
t' faddal
, welcome. But then know you are guests and know how to behave. Otherwise—to the devil. Into the sea—and
hallass
, finished. This is plain language. You tell them.”

There was a painful silence while Kamel Effendi wiped his forehead and the A.Ch.C. stood hovering over the group like an unhappy flamingo. Then Matthews said unexpectedly:

“Yeah—I see your point, Mr. Kamel. I guess you are wrong, but wrong in your own right.”

The A.Ch.C. gave him a curious little stare with his two-coloured eyes; he seemed on the point of making a remark, and on second thoughts didn't. But Kamel Effendi laughed stertorously and without transition.

“Ho!—ho!” he shouted. “Wrong within your own rights. It is a profound saying, my friend—very profound.” He appreciatively clicked his tongue, and spontaneously grasped Matthews' hand, pumping it. “No offence, Mr. Matthews,” he said. “Here we all get a little heated sometimes. It is our climate, you know—the khamsin.”

And so they all repaired to join the ladies in a fairly jolly mood—except for the Professor who slunk along the corridor with his head on one side and trailing his finger along the wall.

The Shenkins soon left—they had to visit a daughter-in-law who had just given birth to her third child in the maternity clinic of the Hadassah; Kamel Effendi followed a few minutes later. Matthews, having asked the A.Ch.C. for a quarter of an hour's off-the-record talk, stayed on. Joyce retired to lie down in her room; the khamsin was getting worse and so were her nerves.

“Cigar?” the A.Ch.C. asked when they were alone. He sank into his favourite armchair and let the harassed look slowly fade from his face. “Well, Mr. Matthews,” he said, “to-day you had a taste of the peculiar atmosphere of this little country. And they were both moderates, mind you….”

“The Professor sure was,” said Matthews. “I reckon the matching of the teams was pretty unfair.”

The A.Ch.C. smiled. “Possibly,” he said. “But you can't expect me to invite for fairness' sake a Hebrew terrorist. Mind you, I would enjoy it, but my wife is rather fond of her furniture.”

Matthews filled up his half-empty brandy glass with soda. “Christ,” he said. “Your khamsin takes it out of a guy.” He emptied the glass and put it down on the inlaid table with a slight clank. “And now tell me straight, Mr. Chief Commissioner,” he said, shifting his heavy body forward in the chair, “why are you selling out on them?”

“I am afraid …”

“Aw, come off it. Don't be afraid. This will be strictly off the record, Mr. Chief Commissioner.”

“Assistant,” corrected the A.Ch.C. Though he kept smiling politely, the difference in colour between his two eyes became accentuated, a sign that he was angry. “May I ask what exactly you mean by ‘selling out'?”

“Aw, come off it,” Matthews repeated, drawing out each wowel into a lingering flourish. It was as if a massive bull deliberately
tried to excite the slender matador. “You have read the League of Nations reports. They say plainly that you have been inciting the Arabs against the Hebrews so that you should have an excuse to let Zionism down.”

The A.Ch.C. tipped the ash from his cigar with the circumspection of a clinical operation. It occurred to him that he couldn't go to see Jimmy in the hospital on Sunday as he had promised to open a Horticultural Exhibition in Tel Aviv.

“My dear sir,” he said, “I am a sincere admirer of the Jews. They are the most admirable salesmen in the world, regardless of whether they sell carpets, Marxism, psychoanalysis or their own pogromed infants. It is child's-play for them to get around well-meaning people such as Professor Rappard and other members of the Geneva Mandates Commission— or members of both our Houses if it comes to that. If those fantastic accusations were true, how would you explain the fact that we had two hundred British soldiers killed fighting the Arab revolt? Don't you think the fact that they were defending Jewish life and property deserves to be mentioned when certain rash criticisms are made?”

“That's so much sob-talk,” said Matthews, filling up his glass uninvited.—I'll drive this smug guy mad, even if he calls his Ahmed or Mahmed to throw me out, he thought. “A year back,” he went on, “when I was here the first time, I saw a gang of your Mufti's Arab cut-throats throwing stones at a couple of old Jews and yelling at the top of their voices: ‘
Eddaula Ma'na
,' ‘The Government is with us.' Will you deny that, Mr. Chief Commissioner?”

“Assistant,” the A.Ch.C. corrected. “I shall certainly not deny it. The trouble-makers make the crowd believe it, just as they make them believe that Jews are throwing dead pigs into the Mosque of Omar. But it would be a bit unfair to make us responsible for each rumour in the shuks, wouldn't it?”

“No, you won't get away with that,” said Matthews. “The Arabs believed that you welcomed the killing of Jews because
your whole attitude encouraged them to believe it. You backed the Mufti during twenty years though you knew about his doings. I have read your Royal Commission's Report, all the four hundred pages of it, which accuses your local administration of condoning Arab terrorism. This isn't Jewish sales-talk— it's printed in your Majesty's Stationery Office. I know one of your Intelligence guys who toured in his car the Arab villages near Nazareth, telling them not to sell land to the Jews because your Government is against it. I know of others who smuggled arms to the Syrian rebels. I know this isn't your personal responsibility, but you should have raised hell to stop those romantic young pansies from your universities being let loose to chase about in Beduin dress and stir up trouble. I have met a few of these hush-hush guys, and if I had a say in your Government I would spank their arses and send them back to college. Aw, let's talk straight, Mr. Chief Commissioner. You've been asking for trouble and you've got it, and now you complain because English soldiers are killed. You had to crush the Arab gangs, not for the sake of the Jews but for your own sake, because this country is the strategic centre of your Empire, and you need it. Even so, you did bloody little to defend the Hebrew settlers who were left to look after themselves and sent to jail for possessing rifles with which to defend themselves and their women-folk….” He pulled a dog-eared notebook from his pocket. “Here, your Royal Commission's Report, page 201: ‘
To-day it is evident that the elementary duty of providing public security has not been discharged. If there is one grievance which the Jews have undoubted right to prefer it is the absence of security
.' … No, Mr. Chief Commissioner, you won't get away with it so easy. Your gratitude-talk may go down with your phony professor and his like, but it won't go down with an impartial observer.”

He puffed and finished the rest of his glass. ‘Christ,' he thought, ‘if he doesn't rise to that he's a dead fish.'—The A.Ch.C. looked at him thoughtfully.

“The impartial observer referred to is doubtless yourself, Mr. Matthews?” he asked quietly.

“I guess I am,” Matthews said. “I am not a Jew, and back home I disliked them as much as anybody else did.”

“But you seem to have undergone a conversion.”

“Yea. You can call it that if you like.”

“Doubtless our persuasive Mr. Glickstein had a strong influence on you.”

“Glickstein be damned. He's the same type as your Professor. They stink of ghetto.”

“Then what made you change your mind in this rather-violent way, if I may ask without being unduly curious?”

“You may. I've seen their settlements. I've been down the Jordan Valley and up in Galilee and in the Jezreel Valley and in the Huleh swamps. Those are some guys. They're a new type. They've quit being Jews and become Hebrews.”

“I share your admiration for them. But after all, don't you think you are being a little romantic about it—just as some people whom you dislike are being romantic about the Arabs?”

“Nope. I haven't seen the Arabs producing anything worth showing off, except cabarets and filthy postcards, from Tangier to Teheran—not for the last thousand years.”

The A.Ch.C. smiled.

“Has it never occurred to you that a race may cherish and preserve certain values or a way of life, which are not expressed in spectacular achievements?”

“Maybe,” said Matthews. “But that isn't the point we were discussing. I am not so easy to side-track, Mr. Commissioner. It's not the philosophy of life we are discussing, but the policy of your Government which is selling out on the Jews.”

The A.Ch.C. gave a mock-distressed sigh.

“No, you are not easily side-tracked, Mr. Matthews. I had the privilege to admire your singleness of mind in your book ‘Has Democracy Lost Its Punch?'”

“Guts,” Matthews corrected. “Guts, guts, guts. But that too is beside the point.”

“Not so much as it seems,” the A.Ch.C. said mildly. “Your book is, if I may say so, a brilliant and pungent attack on what is termed by a popular though nebulous catch-word our policy of appeasement in Europe. Well, Mr. Matthews, I must confess I am an inveterate sinner in your and your friends' eyes. I am in favour of coming to terms with the Arabs—of appeasing them, if you like. In other words, I believe that all policy, past, present and future, has to be based on reasonable compromise.”

“Yea,” said Matthews. “The question is what you call reasonable.”

“Let's see,” said the A.Ch.C. “I thought the term self-explanatory. But that may be a national prejudice. So we had better consult the dictionary….”

He emerged from his armchair and crossed with his gentle flamingo-stoop to the bookshelf.

“Now let's see,” he said, visibly regaining the mood of quiet fun. “… Rear-arch, rear-vault, reason,
reasonable
. Here we are: “
Sound of judgement, sensible, moderate, not expecting too much, ready to listen to reason; agreeable to reason, not absurd, not greatly less or more than might be expected; inexpensive, tolerable, fair
…. That's about all the Concise Oxford Dictionary has to say. If this doesn't satisfy you, I've also got here the Shorter Oxford Dictionary in two volumes, and the Oxford Dictionary in twelve.”

Leaning against the bookshelves, he politely smiled down at Matthews who once more filled his glass with soda, conscious of the poisoned absurdity of this dialogue. It may have been the khamsin—which gave him the sensation that the rubbing of his shirt drew sparks from his skin and raised the fluff on his chest in tingling irritation; or perhaps it was just the general atmospheric poison of the country. As his eyes met the A.Ch.C.'s double-coloured gaze, he asked himself from what source that guy derived his arrogantly modest self-assurance. What's he got to be so modest about? he asked himself, his head slightly swimming. And suddenly he had an absurd vision
of the A.Ch.C. as a boy walking along that narrow passage of the via dolorosa with its twelve stations from the Lower First to the Upper Sixth. At its beginning stood a trembling little boy in a cricket cap, thin-limbed, sensitive, and rather too imaginative, rather too keen on poetry and all that; past the fifth or sixth station stalked a completely transformed person with a jutting Adam's apple and a breaking voice, in the painful process of having his sensitivity derided and his reflexes conditioned so that repression came before impulse and second thoughts preceded firsts; at the end emerged the striped-trousered finished product of that exclusive passion lane, that distinguished torture-chamber and soul-tannery— encased in a supple and resilient crust, a tanned hide impermeable both to outside influences and the sealed-off pressure from within; an adhesive armour the more impregnable as it was not something put on, but the crustification of formerly living tissue transformed into supple callousness….

Matthews yawned and stretched his legs out. “Aw, Mr. Chief Commissioner, let's come to the point.”

“Help yourself to another drink,” the A.Ch.C. said, crossing back to his armchair. “The whole matter is simpler than it appears. From the beginning the Husseini clan had the strongest following among the Arabs; and among the Husseinis Hadj Amin, the later Mufti, commanded the greatest authority. Hence the smoothest way of dealing with the Arabs was to deal through him. We would naturally have preferred to deal with the Moderates; just as we preferred dealing with Dr. Brüning to dealing with Herr Hitler. In both cases we were accused of ‘backing' the extreme wing whereas in fact our policy merely endorsed, and adjusted itself to, the regrettable but undeniable course of events. Arab Nationalism here is growing rapidly and inevitably as in Egypt, Iraq and Syria. There may be individual sympathisers with this trend in some of our Departments, just as we have individual admirers of Herr Hitler—though I may point out in parenthesis that I am not one of them; however, I can assure you that these personal inclinations
have hardly any influence on our basic policy. Nationalistic movements necessarily follow an irrational trend: hence it is useless to argue with Arab nationalists, even of the more moderate brand, about the indubitable benefits they derive from Jewish immigration. They want to be masters in a country where they form the majority; and they are afraid of and opposed to Jewish domination, regardless of any material benefits….”