Thieves in the Night: Chronicle of an Experiment Read online

  “So there we are back again where we started,” I said. “Exactly how serious is it, Reuben? You don’t mean to say that there will be a motion to expel me? …”

  Reuben kept on throwing pebbles though there were no more vultures about. As his silence became more prolonged, I felt my throat going dry. I had at last understood the danger in which I was, and felt the familiar pressure of fear in my heart and bladder. I had seen this kind of panic on a negro’s face in a film, who was going to be lynched by a mob—a man accused of a crime he hadn’t committed and who suddenly understood that the judges refused to believe in his innocence. All he did was to cry No! No! with a white-lipped mouth torn wide open like a gasping carp’s, and knowing already that it was going to be yes! yes! solemnly, fatally, as in an irrevocable dream.

  “So they are going to lynch me?” I said.

  Reuben shrugged and kept throwing his pebbles with a distracted precision. A swarm of starlings circled over us and the sensation of the dream grew stronger. There were the hills before us, unchanged, and they would look just as still and unconcerned when they cast me out and I would have to go. In the declining sun they had begun to light up in a violet glow. It is a colour between silver and lilac, peculiar to our hills. Though barren, there is nothing rugged about them; they are soft and wavy, a great tide of undulating earth slumbered into immobility; a solid sea of silver limestone and terra rossa which combine into that unique, pale hue. They have an erotic fascination for people, and after the first showers in autumn when they begin to cover themselves with green fluff I sometimes dream at night that I lie on my belly and bite into the live throbbing flesh of the earth, sucking the milk of Galilee.

  “So I am going to be lynched?” I repeated.

  Reuben stopped throwing pebbles, but he didn’t look at me.

  “I don’t know,” he said. “If you remain stubborn, things look pretty nasty. There will be talk of unsocial behaviour, frivolity, disrespect for the female comrades, and so on. They cannot, of course, force you, and I don’t think there is a sufficient case for expulsion. But they will all make unctuous speeches and then adjourn the whole thing, and after a while it will start again. And meanwhile the atmosphere will be poisoned. We have not had a scandal for years and everybody will enjoy it. It will appeal to the scavenger-instinct in all of us. And you will lose your temper as usual and provoke them even more. There is already a lot of feeling because of the sympathies you expressed for Bauman’s dissidence and terrorism, and what one may call, not quite unfoundedly, your fascist inclinations. It will all be brought up and will make an even worse mess of it.”

  I said nothing. I thought of how I had boasted to Dina on the night when we occupied the Place: To approve and be approved of, to like and be liked—and how strangely she had looked at me when I had said that. I had a tugging, homesick feeling in my chest. Reuben went on in his groping voice:

  “The trouble with you, Joseph, is that you are such a many coloured bird. In a Commune the grey birds get on best—like myself.”

  I said nothing. It is true that Reuben is a grey bird, but I am terribly fond of him—perhaps just for that reason. And the reason for my panic was that I had suddenly lost the conviction that he was equally fond of me. And Moshe? And Max? And Dasha, Mendl, Simeon, Arieh, all of them? In what fool’s paradise had I lived? What is the tie between us all? A kind of vague cohesion, habit, common interests—but is there any real friendship or intimacy? We hang together like a rubber belt which has lost its elasticity.

  I wanted to be alone. I got up and started walking up the slope again. I said nothing to Reuben because I could not trust my voice. For a minute I thought I would go to see Dina, but then it occurred to me that when talking to her I would again forget myself and touch her hand, and she would withdraw it with a frightened little jerk. I stumbled over a stone and kicked it and went on climbing the slope as fast as I could until I lost my breath. Then I heard Reuben calling behind me and stood still.

  When he caught up with me he laid his hand on my arm—a rare sign of affection with Reuben. It calmed me almost instantly. I felt as if my blood were, after a momentary stop, circulating again, starting at the place on my arm where Reuben’s hand lay.

  “Don’t be a fool, Joseph,” he said. “Though, in a way, it serves you right. At least you know now how Ellen felt all this time.”

  “Ellen?” I said. “It hadn’t occurred to me.”

  “No—it had not occurred to you, because you were too preoccupied with yourself.”

  “That is not true. I pity her. It was a real wrench to me when the other day she started crying. Believe me, I have a feeling of great warmth and pity for her—but I can’t help her.”

  “Pity is not the point,” said Reuben. He smiled a little, his dim, resigned smile. “Your heart bleeds when she is there, and heals up at once when she turns her back. She is an object to you, not a subject. She only exists for you with reference to yourself. You are an emotional positivist. You only recognise observable phenomena of feeling. You love in abstractions. You are engrossed in Judaism but don’t like the Jews. You love the idea of mankind but not the real man. You have lived with us for six years and still we are objects to you, not subjects.”

  “It isn’t true,” I shouted. “I am much fonder of you than you are of me.”

  Reuben’s hand on my arm had gradually closed in a firm grip, and he was gently shaking me.

  “That is sentimentality,” he said. “You have emotions but no affections. You are fond of people as objects of observation and as projector-screens for your own feelings. That is how one is fond of a horse or a dog.”

  I felt hollow and exhausted. I wrenched my arm free and sat down on the damp slope. Reuben remained standing in front of me; I had never seen him so eloquent and commanding.

  “Everybody carries with him a portion of loneliness,” he said. “In a Commune more than outside. Outside, there is the family with its concentrated affections. Here there is only a diffuse, evenly distributed benevolence. It is not enough to satisfy people’s cravings for intimacy, particularly not the women’s. We have to supplement it by lasting personal unions.”

  “And so back to the holy family from which we thought we had broken away.”

  “Don’t be absurd and unfair. We have liberated the child from parental tyranny, and the parents from economic tyranny. Don’t you think that is quite a lot?”

  “There remains the tyranny of monogamousness.”

  “Look,” said Reuben, for the first time showing signs of impatience. “The idea of the Commune is to find a solution for pressing national and social problems. Do you not think it would be taking on rather too much if we tried to solve the biological and sexual problem as well? The difference between utopia and a working concern is to know one’s limits.”

  I thought, and not for the first time during our argument, of Esther, Reuben’s wife, a mousy, insipid little creature who, shortly expecting her first baby, looks like nothing but an enormous drum-belly with the rest attached to it as mere accessories. I have never been able to find out what Reuben’s feelings towards her were.

  “All right,” I said. “We have argued enough. What do you expect me to do?”

  “To conform to the unwritten law of the community—without which it could not exist, would, in fact, disintegrate within a year or so. To make the one final adjustment—or sacrifice, if you want to dramatise it. But what it all practically amounts to is that you share a room with Ellen instead of with Mendl and possibly the Dr. Phil. as a third. For, as you know, when the next graft arrives we shall have to put three bachelors into one room.”

  I had to grin. “If this isn’t blackmail …”

  “I haven’t invented the Dr. Phil.,” said Reuben. “And the bachelors have to live together.”

  “But even if I agreed, it would be a dreadful humiliation for Ellen that I should live with her because of outward pressure.”

  “Not if you switch on your proverbial charm and
explain every thing away as a misunderstanding….” He smiled. “Besides, even sensitive women are surprisingly thick-skinned when it is a question of getting themselves married.”

  “You are the bloodiest Jesuit I have ever seen,” I said.

  “I am merely trying to discharge my duties as the elected one-year Secretary of the Commune,” he said, with a quite serious face.

  “And the alternative, if I refuse, is that I have to leave?”

  He looked down at me with his faint smile.

  “I never for a moment expected that you would choose it. After all, Joseph, you are one of our ancients.”

  I said nothing, but I knew that I had given in already. After the panic of a moment ago everything else was sheer relief—the relief of the candidate for lynching who hears his sentence commuted to life imprisonment. Life with Ellen even seemed suddenly to have its attractions—a nice, cosy prison-cell with books to read and plenty of exercise in the courtyard….

  This was the moment when Reuben, the communal Jesuit, came out with his surprise.

  “Well, I take it that we are agreed,” he said lightly. “Now there is another matter I wanted to discuss with you. The next graft is due in a fortnight. The Colonisation Department is speeding up the whole plan of our expansion. That means a lot of travelling about for the treasurer, to negotiate loans, buy new machinery and building material, and so on. Moshe is already unable to cope with both the outside and the local work. And now with this rush, and all our planning being upset, we shall need him here all the time. That means that we have to elect a new member of the Secretariat for outside work, who will have to spend five days a week in Jerusalem and Tel Aviv. Moshe and I have decided to propose that you should be elected for this job at the monthly meeting next week….”

  I gasped. “What is this—a bribe?”

  “Think for yourself whether you can suggest anybody better qualified for the job. You are the best solution for our needs—and it is the best solution for yours.”

  Thus ended this memorable conversation. I have been cast into the well and pulled out again, and on Friday week I shall probably be appointed to the new job—as Joseph the Provider. Meanwhile I have to give a series of lectures to the Dr. Phil., called Introduction into the Elements of the Theory and Practise of Applied Shoe-making, with a view to turning him into my temporary deputy.

  Marriage as a week-end institution won’t be too bad either. I am almost looking forward to it; maybe one could do something about the National Birthrate. And I shall be in towns again and walk the solid pavements of Sodom and Gomorrha.

  However, I am still too excited to see the consequences of it all. I had under-estimated Reuben, God bless him. I wish every Commune had a Jesuit like him. Some have in fact, or almost;—but then, what other place can stand comparison with Ezra’s Tower? …

  Wednesday

  We had a break of a few sunny days, and yesterday during the lunch hour I climbed up the hill on the other side of the wadi to pay a visit to the Ancestor’s Cave.

  The Ancestor’s Cave was discovered six months ago by Arieh the shepherd. The whole hill above the new vineyard is riddled with caves, about half a dozen of which served as burial chambers in Byzantine days. They have all been plundered countless times and even the bones have been scattered. The relatively best preserved is the one Arieh has found, the cave of Joshua the Ancestor. But his skull is missing; perhaps some Arab terrorist has pinched it to have one Hebrew less to cope with in the civil war after the Resurrection. They feel very strongly about this. To prepare for the coming campaign they have already buried four hundred Moslem heroes with their swords beneath the south-east corner of the Haram el Sheriff, whose task it will be to defend the Mosque of Omar against a post-apocalyptic attack from the Hebrew cemetery in the Valley of Josaphat.

  Anyway, we like the idea of having the Ancestor’s Cave, although it only contains a headless skeleton and the inscription with his name, and is an altogether modest affair compared to the antiquities discovered in other Communes—such as the Byzantine mosaic floor of the ancient synagogue in Beth Alpha, with its lovely picture of Abraham sacrificing Isaac, and various arabesques which look like draughts-boards. There is a story that when the Hebrew religion was made illegal after Bar Kochba’s revolt, the believers would assemble in the synagogue and, when the watchposts signalled the approach of soldiers, would all squat down to play draughts.

  I found Arieh with his sheep near the Ancestor’s Cave; he was lying as usual on his back, his fringed cartwheel-hat pulled over his face. Arieh is perhaps the only one of us capable of relaxing by lying on his back in the open air. When I go for a walk with Ellen or Dina or Moshe and we stop for a rest, they either squat on their haunches with knees pulled up, or lie on their stomachs kicking the earth with their toes; and always after a minute or two they become fidgety and change position. Living on the land has washed a good deal of restlessness out of our blood, but there is still something atavistic in us constantly on the alert. Our collective unconscious must be crowded with the hosts and ghosts of Legionaries, Inquisitors, Crusaders, Landsknechts and Cossacks. But our Tarzans, I believe, have got rid of them. Theirs the dreamless aseptic sleep without the fear and the vision—chevaliers sans peur et sans rêves.

  Arieh is an exception; but then Arieh is simple-minded—to put it mildly. I am fond of him, and I think it is reassuring to have in at least one Commune a shepherd who is not an ex-professor of semantics but a moron.

  I couldn’t make out whether he was asleep or not. Guri, our giant sheep-dog, lay with his fore-paws across Arieh’s chest. As I came closer he began to growl. Obviously Guri has taken over the element of suspicion from his master’s subconscious. For though Guri is collective property, he regards Arieh as his real master, while for the rest of us he shows a kind of friendly condescension. We are all jealous of Guri and I wonder whether Sarah won’t one day take the matter up in the General Assembly.

  As Arieh did not stir, I decided that he was asleep and continued up the slope to the caves. I found the one I was looking for, and lowered myself through the narrow entrance-hole into the vestibule of the burial chambers. It was muddy and smelt of damp and urine. There are three small chambers opening from the vestibule—no more than niches hewn into the rock, each the size of a small coffin. But of course the ancestors were buried without coffins, just wrapped in a sheet and pushed into their niche. In the first chamber there are a few scattered bones, the others are empty except for the damp sand on the bottom of the niche. There is always a candle-stump in the first chamber; I lit it and went down the three slippery steps into the lower passage, careful not to bang my head against the rock. The lower vestibule contains three more niches, and the centre one is headless Joshua’s. Engraved by a clumsy, childish hand into the hard lime-rock over the narrow entrance of the niche are the four letters yod, shin, vaf and a’yin: Joshua or Jeshu or Jesu. I looked at the bones embedded in the damp sand of the niche and tried unsuccessfully to work up some emotion; but I just couldn’t believe that there ever was warm flesh round those pathetic bones, and strange clothes round the flesh, and ideas in the missing head. Least of all could I imagine what he may have looked like. However, according to the laws of probability, there must be a fraction in me which is directly descended from him. Inside my testicles there are some complicated but stable groups of molecules which were handed down to me from him with their pattern unchanged; and maybe some day I shall pass them on to Ellen and so down the chain. It is as if a long, long pipeline were laid out not in space but in time, and at every time-mile or so there is a tap attached to a pair of loins. Now and then the tap opens and the ancient stream mixes with other streams in other pipes. An elaborate system of irrigation, like our vegetable garden’s, expanded over the dry crust of the globe. Well, well….

  Come to think of it, there are not even so many taps between old Joshua and myself: the length of the pipe is about seventeen centuries which equal no more than fifty-one generations. I
n other words, old Joshua was only about the twenty-sixth grandfather of my grandfather. Quite likely he was one of Bar Kochba’s underground rebel army which fought the Legionaries in these same hills of Galilee, and his wife and kin were crucified or put to the sword, and his missing head, once bearded and warted and furrowed by yellow wrinkles, was buzzing with Things to Forget.

  I climbed out of the cave, and who should be waiting for me outside the hole but Guri, whining with anxiety about the vanishing in the bowels of the earth of the one thirty-sixth fraction of his collective proprietor. As my head emerged from the hole he was howling with joy, and as I needed both hands to climb out of the hole he profited from the occasion to wash my face all over with his slobbering tongue. I was of course delighted; there is nothing more flattering than the attentions of a dog with a strong personality. People like you for this or that quality, but dogs pay homage to the very Ding an sich in you.

  While walking down the slope I kept my eyes on the ground, looking for coins and surface-pottery. Coins abound here at this time of the year—the autumn rain washes them out of the soil of the decayed terraces. The other day the Dr. Phil. found a “Judaea capta” which is a rarity. He would. I only found some Constantines and Jupiter Ammons.

  When Guri and I got back to Arieh, he was sitting up and smoking a cigarette with his great pal Walid, the Arab shepherd from Kfar Tabiyeh. Guri, who has strong racial prejudices, growled at Walid, but at a word from Arieh flopped his ears back and settled down in the classical Sphinx-pose, watching us with his tongue hanging out.

  I shook hands with Arieh and Walid, and sat down with them for a cigarette. Walid is a quiet and very polite boy, so I went through the regulation question-and-answer ceremony.