Thieves in the Night: Chronicle of an Experiment Read online

  Later

  I am digressing as usual; though this time it might be an unconscious evasion of the issues which arose in my talk with Simeon. I said that he blushed when he became aware of my presence. He got to his feet and brushed the dust from the knees of his canvas trousers. His tidiness is fantastic. He never wears shorts and his trousers, though faded and patched like those of the rest of us, are meticulously clean and even have a hint of creases—he probably puts them under his mattress at night.

  I told him the news old David had brought, though by now it seemed to me rather pointless that I had specially come to talk to him about it in the middle of working hours. There is always a certain embarrassment in the air when one talks alone with Simeon. His gaze has a thrusting and aggressive quality; he doesn’t seem to know what to do with his eyes while he talks, like an adolescent with his awkward hands; one gets the impression that he would like to put his eyes into his pockets. Then, after a minute or so, his gaze gets suddenly locked with one’s own and there results the same curious awkwardness as when two strangers get stuck with their glances in a tram-car or lift.

  “I know,” he said when I had finished speaking, “I have kept in touch with Bauman.”

  This was news to me; and yet I had expected that Simeon would know more than anybody about this business. I also remembered the scene on our first night when Simeon was preaching terrorism and Bauman’s curiously dry voice when, asked his opinion, he had said: “I agree with Simeon.”

  “Then will you tell me what prompted Bauman to his decision?” I asked.

  Simeon paused for a moment, then he said:

  “How seriously are you interested in this business?”

  “I think we are all equally interested,” I said.

  “No,” he said slowly. “The majority are blind and dumb. They cultivate our little collective garden and close their eyes to reality.”

  “You were quite happy cultivating your little trees when I came,” I said. I had become aggressive because already I was on the defensive, because already I knew what was coming; and wanted to escape it; and still want to escape it. But Simeon was no longer embarrassed by my having surprised him off his guard; he said with a kind of sadness:

  “It won’t be for long….” He looked at his row of saplings and said bitterly:

  “In two, three years there will be the beginnings of a forest….”

  “Will you talk to me straight, or not?” I said.

  This was when the awkwardness happened and our eyes got stuck. But I was wrong in comparing it to the accidental embarrassment that occurs in a lift; there is nothing accidental about the stark black directness of Simeon’s gaze. It is impossible not to avert one’s eyes when confronted with such nudity of expression; and Simeon knows it and that’s why he tries to put his eyes into his pocket. He seemed to measure the degree of my reliability but there was not much need for it—in Ezra’s Tower everybody knows everything about everybody.

  “If you want to talk, let’s sit down for a minute,” said Simeon. (I am slightly taller than Simeon and he doesn’t like to talk uphill.) We sat down, Simeon jerking up his trousers between thumb and forefinger. He came at once to the point.

  “The English are preparing to sell out on us. They have practically stopped immigration already, and shortly they are going to stop it altogether and for good. In Germany the night of the long knives has begun; our people stand lined up facing a bolted door while the knife penetrates inch by inch into their backs. Most of us here have relations among them; and what are we doing about it?—arguing about Russia and cultivating our little gardens.”

  He spoke quietly, only his hands were rubbing his knee as if trying to soothe a rheumatic pain.

  “Tov,” he went on. “That is what the closing of the gates means to those outside the walls. To us, who are inside, it means that we are caught in a death-trap. We are to-day in minority of one to three, and the Arab birth-rate is about twice as high as ours. Cut off from the outside world our small community will become a stagnant pool, will have to adjust its living standards to the native level, become levantinised, submerged in the Arab sea. We came on the solemn promise that this would be our national home, and find ourselves sentenced to live in an oriental ghetto and finally to be wiped out, as the Armenians were….”

  He suddenly turned his embarrassing eyes on me, full beam. “Do you think I exaggerate?” he asked.

  “No,” I said. “Provided that they really intend to stop further immigration and to sell out on us, of which I am not yet convinced.”

  “They do. Look how they sold out on the Czechs.”

  “That’s different. Germany is a real threat, while the Arabs are not.”

  “They’ll do it nevertheless.”

  “How do you know with such certainty?”

  “We have our information.”

  “Who is ‘we’?”

  “About that we may talk another time—perhaps.”

  We sat in the hot sun, side by side. On the slope opposite us, about half a mile away, Arieh was grazing his sheep; in the clear, transparent air we could see him lying on his back, his hat pulled over his face. Simeon was chewing a blade of dry grass and I was doing the same. I felt no emotion, only the dull awareness of some fatality slowly, smoothly, inescapably closing in on me.

  “So now,” I said, “assuming that your political weather forecast is correct, what will Bauman and his people do?”

  “Fight.”

  “Whom? How? With what?”

  Simeon repeated his previous phrase:

  “About that we may talk another time.”

  “What are you waiting for?”

  “For things to ripen inside you.”

  “How will you know when I am ‘ripe’?” I asked.

  “You will come to me,” he answered with such simple, complete conviction that I had nothing more to say.

  Monday

  Tirza had to be killed; the calf is all right, wobbling on its thin legs. It’s a heifer; we have called it Electra.

  Dina is in hospital with sand-fly fever and won’t be back for another fortnight.

  Tuesday

  Old Greenfeld’s show has done something to our girls. It isn’t exactly the mystic force of the Name working on the deaf, but something more prosaic and earthbound; a stirring of ingrained tradition which they thought they had overcome. They don’t talk about it, but if one has lived for years in an intimate community, one feels the slightest changes in the atmosphere. Some of them walk about with a definitely wistful look, which came into their eyes while watching the performance under the faded velvet canopy and hasn’t left them since. It will pass after a few days as it did after old Greenfeld’s last visit, but for the moment the air is full of the stale ghosts of the past.

  When, during the noon-break to-day, Ellen came into my workshop, I knew that the hour of “talking things over” had struck. Her eyes bore that expression of dull hurt and reproach which has lately become a permanent feature with her. And yet it had all started in such a nice, enlightened and business-like manner. No nonsense about love—no—agreed. Sympathy—yes—moderate, agreed. Mutual need, give and take, agreed. No obligations, no entries on the credit or debit columns, quits. The perfect barter system on the Schacht model. Christ, were we enlightened.

  She lingered and loitered and hovered round the shop and finally leant with her back against my working bench, and with each moment the shop became more saturated with the silent reproach of the wounded but proud female who keeps her sufferings to herself, yes, all to herself—unless of course you press the button which opens the sluices and drowns you in the rushing cataract; but then it was you who started it, was it not? On the other hand if you refrain from pressing the button you are an insensitive brute, and the silent reproach will increase in tension until your nerves vibrate like a chord. I decided to be a brute and to avoid touching off anything. “How is the veg-garden?” I asked, hammering away on the boot in hand.

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p; “All right,” she said, but her tone signified “so what?” Ellen works in the veg-garden. She is a good and conscientious worker, held in high esteem by the community, which all goes to make me feel the more a cad. For it must be admitted that the situation is, according to our standards, irregular. The regular and simple procedure would be to inform the Secretariat of our decision to share a room together. There would be a congratulatory party, Moshe would have to fork out twenty piasters for three bottles of wine and a cake, and everything would be all right. Old Greenfeld would not have to appear on the scene unless and until a child was on the way; and theoretically each of us could break up the union and move back to bachelor quarters at any time and without giving any reasons; the children, if any, would go on living in the Children’s House as before, and there would be no financial or other obligations whatsoever.

  Yes, theoretically. But in practice …

  “Joseph,” said Ellen.

  “Yes?”

  “What is the matter with you?”

  “With me?”

  “Yes.”

  “Nothing is the matter with me.”

  “Really?”

  “Really.”

  Stage dialogue between two enlightened people living in a communistic society…. I began to sweat with the effort to remain a brute and not to touch the button. In the hard light of the noonday Ellen looked hefty, robust and sexless like any farm-wench at work. She had come in straight from the veg-garden on her way to the showers. In moonlight, the fragrance of a girl’s armpits is an aphrodisiac; in the morning it is a deterrent. Particularly when mixed with the smell of cobbler’s glue. But then I also knew that if I brought this thing with Ellen to an end, within three days I would start running about like a rat poisoned with sex hormones. There is no escape from the feminine blackmail. Of course if I refused to be blackmailed Ellen would suffer the same privation. But the essential difference is that a sex-starved woman is compensated by a feeling of virtue and moral satisfaction, while the sex-starved male feels in addition ridiculous and humiliated….

  Oh, the specious over-simplifications of enlightened theorists! Papa Marx and Uncle Engels made fun of the bourgeois family, but had nothing to propose instead; as for the Russians, they have established a code of Proletarian Morality compared to which our Victorian grandparents were wild libertines.

  “Joseph …”

  “Yes?”

  “I would like to talk things over with you….”

  Bang! There we go; there was no escape. And Ellen had started biting her nails—the short, square nails of a competent veg-gardener and responsible comrade. Well then, if we must have it out, let’s have it out; I put the shoe down and gave up pretending.

  “Tov,” I said. “We will talk it over on condition that you stop biting your nails.”

  She suddenly burst into tears.

  “Why are you so beastly to me? At the beginning you were quite different.”

  The trite stereotypy of the scene made me indeed feel beastly. It is another kind of chess: King’s pawn four, Queen’s pawn four—helpless, I knew beforehand the answer to everything she or I might say.

  “‘The present pleasure,’” I quoted, “‘by revolution lowering, does become the opposite of itself.’”

  “What’s that?” Ellen asked, interrupting her snivels.

  “‘Antony and Cleopatra,’ my own translation. In the English original it doesn’t sound much better either.”

  “Oh please, Joseph, don’t mock me,” she said, starting once more to bite her nails and crying helplessly.

  And there it was—pity, the poisonous adhesive plaster, which one can’t tear off without plucking one’s own skin.

  “I am not mocking,” I said. “The translation comes in by right. It is my night-job and half of my life. If we lived together in one room I couldn’t work.”

  “But why? If you can work with Max there, why not with me?”

  “Max doesn’t mind my leaving the light on and trampling up and down the room and going for a walk in the middle of the night; he turns to the wall and snores. But you wouldn’t be able to sleep, and knowing that I am disturbing you, I couldn’t work.”

  I knew it sounded a laboured excuse though it was true; but only half the truth. The other half—that Max’s presence in the room was a neutral one whereas hers would be a constant impingement, a saturation of the room’s space which would make all privacy and work impossible; that, in short, I wanted at intervals the amenities of her body but not her constant company—how on earth could one say this without horribly wounding a fellow-creature whom one likes and respects? So this “talking-things-over” must always remain a farce. Our enlightened three-quarter truths are sometimes worse than the Victorian half-truth. They frankly oppressed the flesh by the tyranny of sacramental consent; we grant it a certain autonomy but are still far from recognising its full, sovereign right of independence. And it is easier to rebel against tyranny than against an unctuous, hypocritically liberal compromise. It would be easier for me to refuse to marry Ellen if she were a conventional middle-class prude, than to deny her claims on intimate companionship beyond the purely sexual.

  Ellen was sobbing and biting her nails in complete misery. “I promise I won’t disturb you,” she sobbed. It was a promise as futile as humiliating to make; and this self-abasement of a proud and strapping girl made me ache inside and made the adhesive poison the more effective.

  “Why,” I asked in despair, “why do you insist on a thing which we both know won’t work?” But I knew that my arguments made no difference; and suddenly I had a suspicion.

  “Or are you going to have a baby?”

  She shook her head, and violently blew her nose.

  “Look, Ellen. In the capitalistic world girls want to get married for reasons of prestige and economic security. Among us here there exists no such thing. Even if you have a baby it doesn’t make the slightest difference whether we live in one room or not. Our huts are at a distance of twenty yards and we can see each other as often as we like. So why do you torture us both and spoil everything?”

  Ellen swallowed hard to control her sobs, and started hiccup-ing instead. It was pathetic. With a small, timid voice, and looking the other way, she said between two hiccups:

  “Don’t you ever want to sleep with me—I mean really to sleep, all night, side by side, and wake up in the morning together?”

  (That is precisely what I do not want.)

  “But darling, of course, I want it very much. But don’t you understand? …”

  “To grant the Crown Colonies of the Flesh full sovereignty and independence, as the Honorable Member for Ezra’s Tower proposes, would inevitably lead to chaos and anarchy”—“Hear, hear.”

  “If we don’t like it,” Ellen interrupted, “we can always separate again, can’t we?”

  “The Crown Colonies of the Flesh have, however, the constitutional means to appeal against any alleged infringement of their rights and may be assured that a sympathetic hearing will be given to their case”—“Hear, hear.”

  “Well, you know, Ellen,” I said, “you know as well as I do that it isn’t quite so easy to divorce here, although theoretically there is no obstacle. So far we have had only one case, and you remember all that hue and cry about poor Gaby’s ‘unsocial behaviour’ and ‘disruptive tendencies’ because she got fed up with Max and went to live with Mendl….”

  There was a silence; then abruptly Ellen jumped down from the bench. She had realised the futility and humiliating nature of our discussion.

  “All right,” she said. “Save your arguments. Anyway, I know what, or who, is the cause of it all….”

  I knew it too; but I didn’t ask her, and she had the decency not to mention Dina. She walked out, slamming the door behind her.

  Damn old Greenfeld.

  Haven’t seen Simeon the whole day.

  Wednesday

  The Assistant District Commissioner and his wife were here yesterday to pay u
s their annual visit. This time they came without the Major. Newton seemed to be impressed by what we have made of the Place—which, when he saw it the first time a year ago, was just a fenced-off quadrangle in the desert. He didn’t say much, only hummed and hawed in his absent-minded way that makes one think that he is always trying to work out some chess-problem (which he probably is), but nevertheless one could see that he was impressed. We took them over the fields, veg-garden, tree-nursery, laundry, etc. etc., and didn’t miss a single chicken to show off with. I suppose he sees much the same thing in all the Settlements; it will take some time until we get accustomed to the idea that our cows and chickens are just like other cows and chickens, and stop boring visitors with our childish pride about each tomato we grow.

  Looking across to Kfar Tabiyeh, Newton mentioned that they are going to assist next week at the great peacemaking ceremony which is to end the twenty-year-old blood feud between the families of the two Mukhtars. When I said that several of us are also invited to the ceremony, Mrs. Newton pulled a face as if we had been gate-crashing into the Club at Roonah. She looked more pinched than ever and seemed surprised that we had not been wiped out by the Arabs, and were still alive and kicking. According to custom they had lunch with us in the Dining Hut, and as usual the food was poor—onion soup and noodles with gravy. “Is that what you eat every day?” she asked, apparently implying that we had cooked a specially filthy lunch for them on purpose. Had we given them a rich meal she would have remarked afterwards on poor Arabs and guzzling Hebrews. To ease the tension I told them the story of Sir Arthur Wauchope’s famous lunch at Khefziba. When Wauchope was appointed High Commissioner of Palestine, he paid a formal visit to Khefziba, one of the oldest Communes in the Valley of Jezreel. It was a rather ceremonious and political occasion, and the Khefziba people gave the new High Commissioner a princely meal. “Do you eat every day like this?” Wauchope asked; whereupon Lederer, the Secretary of Khefziba, said: