Thieves in the Night (31 page)

—And yet the morning was of a lovely freshness and the air sweet with the taste of young apples like the Shulamite's breath. Patterns of wild tulips, iris and cyclamen lay spread beneath the slender pines like carpets under young princes' feet. Nestling in the woods shone the red roofs of the Communes “Ginegar” and “David's Hill”;—the latter drawing another painful spark of association, for the David in whose honour the Commune
was named was not the dancing king, but the Welsh statesman under whose premiership the promise of the Return, now broken, had been given.

As at each turn of the road more fields and pine woods came into sight, the fresh blades of the wheat sparklingly aquiver with fat drops of dew, Joseph's mood rose again and his delight with the beauty of the resurrected valley got the upper hand. This delight was in him each time he travelled through the valley, together with a childish pride. Look, he told himself, there is another Hebrew cow munching the pasture irrigated from a Hebrew well, and a Hebrew hen brooding over her Hebrew eggs—which will doubtless become infant chicken prodigies. But his self-mockery could not erase that jubilant pride of ownership, the joyously insane feeling that everything around here was his own private and exclusive creation—including the sows, the hens and the flock of sheep coming down the slopes of Ephraim.

After Nahallal the road drew nearer to the massif of Carmel, its soft slopes patchy with tufts of scrub, green firs and silvery olive groves. They passed through another cluster of Communes with their square white concrete blocks and red roofs. There were also some Beduin camps and one or two small Arab places in picturesque decay—amidst their modern surroundings they looked like reconstructions of native villages in some colonial exhibition.

As they approached the western gateway of the valley, there was another wrench for Joseph. To their left, perched on a hill, stood the ruins of the great Galilean necropolis and onetime seat of the High Court of Israel, the town of Beth Shearim, where the survivors of Bar Kochba's revolt had hidden. It was a lonely, and nostalgic place, strewn with broken columns and honeycombed with burial chambers. But the hallowed site was now named after some obscure Moslem saint called Sheikh Abreik, whose shrine happened to be in the vicinity….

Come now, Joseph nudged himself, we are getting rather like the Irish—or the Welsh who deplore that all cities on the isles
haven't got names with fifteen consonants on a string. But then, nationalism is only comic in others—like being seasick or in love. Oh, well, he thought, a people fighting for survival can't afford a sense of humour. That's perhaps why we lose our renowned wit when we return to the Land. To think that we have over a hundred Hebrew periodicals and dailies, but not a single comic paper! This is an essentially humourless country. Hebrew doesn't lend itself to stories about two Jews in a railway compartment—it is an angry tongue.

The road was now closely hugging the slope of Carmel; to their right opened the plain of Acco, littered with factories and oil refineries; beyond it, one could catch glimpses of the yellow dunes and the glassy expanse of the sea. The nearness of the great port made itself felt in the dense traffic on the road in spite of the early hour; there were Arab buses loaded like Noah's Ark, and Hebrew buses shabby and workmanlike, and camels and donkeys and petrol trucks. At last, shortly after seven o'clock, they passed the old railway station in the Arab suburb of Haifa, where one of Bauman's bombs had killed forty people a few weeks ago.

Topmost in Joseph's dispatch-case lay the weekly shopping list for his household of a hundred and fifty people.

The wholesale offices of the Co-operative were down-town in the new business centre and were more like a debating club than a shop. Joseph placed his orders for a sack of sugar and the required quantities of spaghetti, rice and tea, then took an autobus which took him uphill to the Hebrew quarter “Glory of the Carmel”. As it climbed the steep serpentine road, the view over the sparkling bay expanded, and the edge of the sea widened its circle and was lifted higher, keeping level with the ascent of the bus. The harbour shrank and the yellow dunes with their wavering white surf-line stretched out to the
horizon. The curved massif of the Carmel was hugging the bay in its protecting elbow; near its bend the breakwater jutted out and the glassy sea was dotted with steamers and fishing boats. A little further out a single ship with a black hull rode at anchor, isolated from the rest. It was the Rumanian cattle steamer
Assimi
with two hundred and fifty refugees on board, who had been refused permission to land.

Half-way up the Carmel, Joseph got out of the bus and continued his shopping. He had discovered a cheap grocer of Lithuanian origin, a bearded little man wearing a skull-cap, who had located the ten lost tribes of Israel in the Caucasus and found each week a new proof for his theory, so that it took Joseph half an hour to buy a hundredweight of dried apples, which, Dasha maintained, were essential for the vitamin diet of the under-nourished arrivals in the new draft. The rest of the morning went on the acquisition of ten cubic metres of timber for the Commune's carpentry shop (they were now producing their own furniture at Ezra's Tower), three sheets of leather for the shoe shop, whose smell gave him a nostalgic pang for the good old days, and various tools and spare parts for the tractor.

He lunched heretically in a small Arab eating-house where the food was cheap, dirty and tasty, and whose fat proprietor confidentially informed him that Hitler, Protector of Islam, would soon destroy the British Empire, restore the country to the Arabs and drive the Jews into the sea—except Joseph himself who, being the proprietor's friend and an educated person, would be spared and might even get a job in the establishment, provided he brought some capital with him.

He lingered over the sweet, strong coffee, striking off the finished tasks from his crammed notebook; then, in the damp midday heat, started once more on his rounds. He bought plywood and shoe polish, sun-glasses and contraceptives, toothbrushes and insecticides for the Communal stores, took the Dr. Phil.'s spectacles to an optician, and as a special treat visited Ringart's bookshop from which he emerged, after an
hour's browsing, with a three-piaster pamphlet on combating tomato pests for the Communal Library. By then it was dark and his jangling nerves told him that there was a khamsin in the air. For some unknown reason he was worried about Dina, though when he had last seen her she had been neither better nor worse. Perhaps it was only because he knew how badly the spring khamsins affected her. And anyway, there was nothing to be done about Dina.

He had supper in the Workers' Club, listened to a lecture on the new Russian theatre, and went, very tired, to the cheap lodging-house where he always stayed in Haifa. It was a dirty, bug-ridden place run by an orthodox Polish Jew. Here he had to share a room, with no furniture except the beds in it, with three others. However, his room mates were not yet in, and by the time they arrived he was asleep.

The next morning he took a couple of hours off to attend the hearing of a case of illegal immigration in the Magistrate's Court, about which there had been some talk in the Co-operative Office.

He had never been to a Magistrate's Court before and was surprised by the lack of ceremony in the proceedings, the bleakness of the court-room and the informal, almost familiar atmosphere prevailing in it. There were about twelve to fifteen rows of benches, on which policemen and civilians, Jews and Arabs sat mixed together, with the sleepy expression of schoolboys when the sun shines outside. Facing them on a dais sat the Magistrate, Mr. Wilmot, a dry, elderly man with an absent-minded air. The dais was only a few inches high, but the table in front of the Magistrate had a marble top, which was the only solemn thing in the room. To the left of the dais were two separate benches at right angles to the others, representing the dock.

When Joseph entered the room, an old, bleary-eyed Arab with a red tarbush was standing in the dock and making an excited speech to the Magistrate, who stared dreamily at his
nails. In front of the dais stood an English Police sergeant listening to the Arab's speech with a righteous and sour smile. Gradually it became clear that the sergeant had charged the Arab with cruelty to his mule. The mule was covered with sores caused by a skin disease and the sergeant had obtained a previous injunction against the Arab prohibiting the use of the mule until it was cured from its disease; however, at the date specified in the charge, the sergeant had seen the mule standing before the Arab's cart, which was heavily loaded with durra, near the Arab's hut up on Mount Carmel. The Arab, or the other hand, offered to bring ten witnesses who would swear that the mule had not worked for the last three weeks; and nobody in the audience doubted that he would be able to bring them.

When the Arab paused for breath, Mr. Wilmot, the Magistrate, seemed to wake up. “Ask him,” he said in a small, dry voice to the interpreter, “whether he thinks that the sergeant was telling lies.” The Arab raised both arms in protest; he had never said such a thing.

“Then he admits that he used the mule with the cart?” asked Mr. Wilmot. Again the Arab protested. “But that's what the sergeant says,” said the Magistrate. The Arab was silent for a while, then he burst into a new torrent of speech.

“He says,” the interpreter repeated grinning, “that it is true that the mule stood before the cart, but he says it wasn't harnessed to the cart.”

“Then why did he put it there?” asked Mr. Wilmot.

“He says,” said the interpreter, “that this is a free country and he can put the mule where he likes.”

“Fifty piasters or two days,” said the Magistrate. The sergeant smiled contentedly and the Arab was led out, protesting.

The next case was that of a young Beduin from Transjordan, charged with contravening the Traffic Regulations by persisting in riding his camel on the wrong side of the road. He was fined ten piasters and produced contemptuously a
five-pound note which the Clerk could not change; they walked out of the court, shouting at each other.

Mr. Wilmot fumbled among his papers.

“Brod—etsky, Wilhelm,” he read out. “Illegal immigration…. Where is he?”

In the row in front of Joseph there was a stir. An Arab policeman rose and nudged a thin little man with an ear-trumpet who was sitting beside him. He had already aroused Joseph's curiosity by fidgeting incessantly with his trumpet and craning his neck to hear what was going on. His neck was long and thin like a scrofulous child's. He rose hurriedly, squeezed past the Arabs sitting in his row and walked with quick, jerky steps behind the policeman to the dock.

“Is he represented?” asked the Magistrate.

A tall, pale man had risen in the front row. “I am representing him, your Worship,” he said.

“Ah, Mr. Weinstein,” the Magistrate said drily. “As usual.”

“As usual, your Worship.”

For a silent second the Magistrate and Weinstein looked at each other. Mr. Wilmot's eyes were vague. Weinstein's were equally expressionless; he looked haggard and ill. Brodetsky in the dock craned his neck and held the trumpet to his ear.

“
Was ist los?
” he cried suddenly. “
Was will man von mir?
”

“Tell him to wait until he is questioned,” the Magistrate said, turning over his papers.

Weinstein crossed to the dock and spoke loudly into the trumpet:

“
Sie müssen warten, Herr Brodetsky. Geduld
.”

Brodetsky nervously jerked his shoulders. “
Geduld, Geduld
,” he repeated, probably to himself.

After establishing the defendant's name, age, place of birth and profession—questions which Brodetsky answered readily, even eagerly—Mr. Wilmot proceeded to read out the charge, according to which the accused person had, on the date specified, arrived in territorial waters on board the Rumanian cattle ship
Assimi
carrying two hundred and fifty-one persons without
immigration permits. The vessel had been intercepted by coastal patrol and ordered to return with its passengers to its Rumanian port of origin, but permitted to take food, drinking water and medical supplies, as epidemics had broken out on board. Under cover of night, while the detained vessel was riding at anchor in Haifa port, the accused person had jumped overboard and swum ashore, thereby entering the country without permission contrary to the Immigration Ordinance of 1933. He had been found lying unconscious on the beach by an Arab watchman and handed over to the Police.

“Does he plead guilty or not guilty?” the Magistrate asked.

“Not guilty—as usual,” said Weinstein. He looked at the Magistrate with the same look of cool, concentrated hatred which Joseph had often seen in Simeon's eyes.

During the evidence of the night watchman and the Police witnesses, Brodetsky kept on fidgeting. He alternately held the trumpet to his ear and tried to arouse the attention of his lawyer, who stood with his back to the dock. His eyes were shifting restlessly along the rows of the audience as if asking for support, but seemed unable to focus on any single face. In the momentary pause when the Police witness had finished his deposition, he suddenly pulled his lawyer's sleeve and explained something to him with frantic gestures.

“What does he say?” asked the Magistrate.

“He says he has been boxed on the ear and cannot hear well.”

“By whom?”

“By a guard in Dachau.”

“I don't see the connection with the charge.”

“No, your Worship.” Weinstein looked as if he were going to add something, but did not.

The defendant again explained something in great agitation.

“What is it now?”

“He says the battery of his hearing apparatus slipped from him while he swam in the sea and he asks to be provided with a new battery.”