Thieves in the Night Page 2

  “Then there is a Beduin tribe which, without Zaid Effendi’s knowledge, used to graze their camels and sheep each spring on the pastures. Their Sheikh has been paid compensation. When all this was settled, the villagers of Kfar Tabiyeh suddenly remembered that part of the hill did not belong to Zaid, but was masha’a land, that is communal property of the village. This part consists of a strip about eighty yards in width running straight to the top of the hill and cutting it in two. According to law masha’a land can only be sold with the consent of all members of the village. Kfar Tabiyeh has 563 souls distributed over eleven hamulles or clans. The elders of each clan had to be bribed separately, and the thumb-prints of each of the 563 members obtained, including the babes’ and village idiot’s. Three villagers had emigrated years ago to Syria; they had to be traced and bribed. Two were in prison, two had died abroad, but there was no documentary proof of their death; it had to be obtained. When all was finished, each square foot of arid rock had cost the National Fund about the price of a square foot in the business centres of London or New York….”

  He threw his cigarette away and wiped his right cheek with the palm of his hand. It was a habit which originated from his experience with the humorous jailer in Graz.

  “It took two years to finish these little formalities. When they were finished, the Arab rebellion broke out. The first attempt to take possession of the place failed. The prospective settlers were received with a hail of stones from the villagers of Kfar Tabiyeh and had to give up. At the second attempt, undertaken in greater strength, they were shot at and lost two men. That was three months ago. You are making to-day the third attempt, and this time we shall succeed. By to-night the stockade, the watch-tower and the first living-huts will have been erected on the hill.

  “Our detachment is going to occupy the site before dawn. A second detachment will accompany the convoy of the settlers which will start two hours later. The Arabs will not know before daybreak. Trouble during the day is unlikely. The critical time will be the first few nights. But by then the Place will be fortified.

  “Some of our cautious big-heads in Jerusalem wanted us to wait for quieter times. The place is isolated, the next Hebrew settlement eleven miles away and there is no road; it is surrounded by Arab villages; it is close to the Syrian frontier from which the rebels infiltrate. These are precisely the reasons why we have decided not to wait. Once the Arabs understand that they cannot prevent us from exercising our rights, they will come to terms with us. If they see signs of weakness and hesitation, they will first fleece us and then drown us in the sea. This is why Ezra’s Tower has to stand by to-night.—That’s all. We have five minutes left; single file into the kitchen for coffee.”

  At 1.20 A.M. Bauman and the forty boys got into three lorries and drove with dimmed headlights out through the gates of the settlement.

  3

  For a while the huge dining-hall remained empty in the blaze of its electric lights. Lazy night insects flew from the darkness into the close wire-netting of the windows. Cockroaches crept busily over the cement flooring, and now and then a rat made a dash across the white surface.

  About 2 A.M. Misha, the night watchman, came in to fetch hot water from the kitchen boiler for a glass of tea. Then he went off to wake the cooks and dining-hall orderlies. They began to drift in about a quarter of an hour later, their faces still swollen with sleep but nervously alert from the shock of the cold shower-bath. They had got up almost three hours before their usual time to provide breakfast for the new settlers who were to depart in an hour. The cooks disappeared into the kitchen; the orderly girls, in shorts and khaki shirts, began methodically to lay the tables.

  At 2.30 A.M. Dov and Jonah stamped in in their rubber gumboots. They were in charge of the cowshed and started work half an hour before milking began. Leah, one of the orderlies, put a big wooden bowl of salad before them, mixed of tomatoes, radishes, cucumber, spring onions and olives, the whole seasoned with lemon and olive oil. They chewed it in silence, between bites from thick chunks of bread. Dov was blond, with a narrow face and blue, short-sighted eyes; his frail figure looked lost in the heavy oilskin overalls like a diving suit. He was twenty-five, came from Prague, and was one of the founders of the Commuhe of Gan Tamar. Though he had been in charge of the cowshed for the last three years, he still couldn’t get accustomed to getting up before dawn; it was torture crystallised into routine. To go to bed at nine in the evening, as he was supposed to do, would have meant exclusion from the Commune’s social life—the meetings, lectures, discussions and the orchestra in which he played the’cello. He also reviewed once a fortnight modern poetry for the Jerusalem Mail, and was translating Rilke into Hebrew.

  “Listen,” he said to Jonah after five minutes of silent chewing, “I would like to go out with the convoy of the new ones.”

  “Tov,” said Jonah, “All right.”

  “I shall be back to-night.”

  “Tov.”

  “Do you think you can manage alone?”

  “Yes.”

  “Miriam is due to calve some time to-day.”

  “Yes.”

  Jonah was not yet a member of the Commune; he had arrived three months ago from Latvia and worked as a probationer. He was a good worker, slow and reliable. He beat all records in taciturnity; Dov could not remember having heard him utter one complete sentence. He was rather a puzzle to the community of Gan Tamar, who couldn’t make up their minds whether to regard him as a philosopher or a moron.

  Leah brought them white cheese, porridge and tea. She lingered at the table, trying to catch Dov’s veiled, sleepy eyes.

  “Going out with them to the new place?” she asked, propping her elbows on the table beside him.

  Dov nodded.

  “They are quite nice kids, the new ones,” she said, in a tone which implied: But we, the old-timers, were of course of a different sort. Leah too had lived in the Commune of Gan Tamar ever since its beginnings seven years ago. She was about Dov’s age but looked older. Her dark, sharp-featured semitic face was not without beauty, but it had matured precociously and wilted early, as happened to many of the girls in the Communes. She wore tight khaki shorts and socks like all the others, and her athletic thighs were curiously dissonant with her unyoung face.

  “They will have a hard time at first,” she said, and added with a little shudder: “God, I wouldn’t start again at the beginning.”

  “I don’t know,” said Dov, considering the matter while he went on chewing bread thickly spread with cheese. Leah was always fascinated by the contrast between his dreamy look and enormous appetite. They both thought of the hardships of the first years—the physical exhaustion caused by the unaccustomed work, the malaria and typhus; the heat, the irksome discomfort of tent life with no water, no lavatories, no sanitation; the dirt, the mud, the mosquitoes and sand-flies…. Looking back from the relative comforts of Gan Tamar in its seventh year of existence, those early pioneer days appeared like a heroic nightmare.

  “I don’t know,” said Dov in his slow way. “We were all different then. We used to dance a lot of horra….”

  “There was always something to celebrate,” said Leah. “The first calf. The first crop. The first tractor. The first baby. The water pump. The diesel. The electric light….”

  Her mood, always narrowly balanced between extremes, had already transformed the nightmare into romance. She leaned with her elbow on Dov’s shoulder. “Shall I get you another plate of porridge?” she asked.

  He shook his head. “I must be going,” he said, rising from the table. Followed by Jonah, he tramped out of the dining-hall and towards the cowshed, his flapping oilskin overalls enveloping him in stable-smell and rusticity.

  There was an interlude of a few minutes which gave the orderlies time to finish their preparations. The long deal tables became a more cheerful sight as they were covered with bowls of salad, heaps of thick-sliced bread, stone mugs, bakelite plates and cutlery. The first people arrived at a quarter
to three, and a few minutes later the hundred and fifty men and women who were to leave with the convoy had occupied their seats.

  There were eight seats to each table, four on each of the wooden forms alongside; according to custom they were filled up in order of arrival from the kitchen end of the hall towards the entrance, without preference to place or company; a custom which eased the work of the orderlies and at the same time served as a kind of social cement-mixer, reshuffling the members of the Commune three times a day.

  This, however, was an unusual crowd: the twenty-five young people who were to become the future settlers of Ezra’s Tower, and the hundred and twenty Helpers who were to assist them in erecting the fortified camp before sunset, and to return by the end of the first day. The Helpers were volunteers who had come from the older Communes of Judaea, the Samarian coast, the Valley of Jezreel and Upper Galilee; most of them were well known, and some quite legendary figures of the early pioneer days. The new settlers, among their silent and hard-eating elders, felt awe-stricken like debutantes. Though theoretically they were the centre of the show, they had shrunk to timid insignificance; they sat on the deal forms jammed between the massive Helpers who paid little attention to them—too excited to eat and with a vague nervous feeling of being cheated out of the pathos and solemnity of this nocturnal hour to which they had looked forward through months and years.

  Dina, to her delight, found herself placed next to old Wabash from K’vuzah Dagánia, oldest of the Hebrew Communes. Dagánia stood in the Jordan Valley at the southern tip of the Lake of Tiberias. It had been founded in 1911 by ten boys and two girls from Romni in Poland, who had decided to put theory into practice and embarked on the first experiment in rural communism. They shared everything—earnings, food, clothes, the Arab mud huts which were their first living quarters, the mosquitoes and bugs, the night-watches against Beduins and robbers, malaria, typhoid and sand-fly fever; everything except their beds, for, true to romantic tradition, they lived for a number of years in self-imposed chastity. They refused to employ hired labour, to handle money except in their dealings with the outside world, and even to mark their shirts before they went to the communal laundry for fear that the bug of individual possessiveness might start breeding in them. They regarded themselves as the spiritual heirs of the Essenes, who, fleeing from the shallow glamour of Jerusalem, had founded in the desert their communities based on the sharing of labour and its fruits. They had studied the Bible, Marx and Herzl, and knew neither how to plant a tree nor how to milk a cow. The Arabs thought they were madmen, and the old Jewish planters in Judaea thought the Commune of the Twelve a bad joke and a heresy. Yet to-day Dagánia’s third generation was being brought up in the communal nurseries on the same mad Essene principles, while more than a hundred other Hebrew communal villages had spread all over the country, from the Mediterranean to the Dead Sea and from Dan to Beersheba. Some, like Yagur and Herod’s Well, had over a thousand members, and some only fifty; the older ones were prosperous, with parks, swimming-pools and amphitheatres, and the new ones poor, hard-living, squalid and ugly. Some did mixed farming, others specialised in exotic fruit or artificial fishponds; but all of them had the same basic features: the communal dining-hall, workshops and children’s house; the prohibition of hired labour; the abolition of money, barter and private property; the sharing of the work according to everyone’s capacity and of its produce according to his, needs.

  Dagánia, which the twelve founders had named with self-conscious under-statement after the modest blue cornflower of the Jordan Valley, was their common ancestor; its members were regarded as a kind of collective aristocracy; and with its giant palm trees and shaded valleys the ancient Commune of the Twelve had indeed an air of exclusiveness and patrician prosperity.

  Old Wabash, sitting next to Dina and paying no attention to her, looked in her opinion exactly like an oil print of a biblical patriarch. His white, frizzled beard grew all round his face and even out of his nostrils and ears. He had blue eyes and wore a blue, open-necked cotton shirt and brown corduroy trousers, held up by a worn leather belt around his voluminous stomach. He ate his porridge with great application, and as the beard got in his way he kept tucking it back absentmindedly into his shirt. Dina felt thrilled by her close contact with one of the three survivors of the legendary Twelve. As he paid no attention to her, she nudged him after a while with her elbow:

  “Comrade Wabash? I wonder what you are thinking about.”

  He turned to her in mild surprise, his spoon suspended in the air.

  “Thinking, my dear?”

  Joseph, who sat opposite Dina, drew his intelligent monkey face into a grimace. At this moment she disliked Joseph. She laid her hand on Wabash’s arm.

  “It was kind of you to come and help us, Comrade Wabash.”

  He again turned to her and she couldn’t help noticing that his eyes were watery and that his round, childish face looked rather weak and insignificant if one imagined the beard away. It was Joseph’s stare that always made her realise such things; that was why she disliked him sometimes.

  “So you are one of the new pioneers, my dear?” old Wabash said. “Good, very good. The youth carries on. You will continue the work that we began….”

  Dina wished she had never spoken to old Wabash. She avoided looking in Joseph’s direction and concentrated on picking out the olives in her salad-bowl. But old Wabash, having finished his porridge, became talkative. He spoke in a mild, rabbinical voice, his Hebrew betraying a strong Yiddish accent, of the national renaissance and socialist ideal, the joy of rebuilding the twice-promised land and the tragedy of the unredeemed millions in exile. He dwelt repeatedly and sorrowfully on the “masses” and the “millions” and seemed to derive a grievous satisfaction from words like “tragedy” and “persecution.” But as they came mildly spouting out from among the oil-print curls of the white beard, those words seemed to Dina to lose all reality and meaning, to have no connection with that ulcerous tissue of her memory, the thing to forget.

  At last a sharp whistle signalled that the lorries were ready, and caused a great shuffling of boots as they all rose simultaneously from the tables. Dina walked in the crowd towards the door, leaving old Wabash without a word. In the centre passage Joseph caught up with her; she looked as if she were going to cry.

  “The trouble was,” he said to her with a grin, “that he had to keep on saying ‘milliohnim, milliohnim.’ Has it occurred to you that there is no word in Hebrew for million? Thousand is the highest figure we can name. Hence he had to use the modern numeral with the old Hebrew plural; that is what makes it so jarring. We should banish the millions from our vocabulary. Thousand is the upper limit of the imaginable; above that one enters the sphere of abstractions.”

  They had been carried out by the crowd through the open door into the darkness, and waited with the others for their turn to embark. The trucks drove up one after another, their blinding headlights full on, took their load of passengers and jogged off on the bumpy road, across the sleeping settlement and out through the open gate. Each truck, as it departed, made the darkness appear vaster and deeper. As they stood waiting for their turn, they felt the cool morning breeze from the sea and the insistent silence of the starry sky.

  Next to Dina stood Simeon. He stood still, as if to attention, wrapped in his loneliness as in a scarf. She laid her hand on his arm:

  “Let’s all climb on top of a truck. It will be lovely to travel on the top….”

  It was just past 3 A.M. when the last truck of the convoy set out for the distant hill basking in the starlight, undisturbed for the last thousand years, which was to become the Commune of Ezra’s Tower.

  4

  The Mukhtar of Kfar Tabiyeh was the only man in the village who slept in pyjamas. The other Mukhtar, who lived at the other end of the village, slept in his clothes on a mat, Beduin fashion.

  At 6.30 A.M. the Mukhtar was woken by Issa, his eldest son. Issa had been standing for quite a while next to
the bed not daring to touch his father; his close-set, slightly squinting eyes in the pale, pock-marked face were anxiously fixed on the enormous bulk in the blue-and-yellow striped pyjamas. The Mukhtar had thrown the blanket off in his sleep; his crumpled pyjama-jacket had slipped upward, revealing a strip of brownish skin covered with black fluff just above the navel. Issa averted his eyes from his father’s nakedness. He held a small cup of bitter coffee in his hand which would soon get cold and thus lead to violent unpleasantness. His eyes shifted nervously round the whitewashed room, bare except for the bed, the straw mat, some low wicker stools and a fly-paper hanging from the ceiling. The wall opposite the bed was adorned with a coloured paper fan and portrait prints of General Allenby and of a smirking person in striped trousers with a carnation in his buttonhole, who looked like a ladies’ hairdresser from Leeds and at closer scrutiny proved to be Mr. Neville Chamberlain. The portraits were each decorated with a bunch of dry cornflower stalks as a token of the Mukhtar’s loyalty, and a chain of blue glass beads to protect Mr. Chamberlain against the Evil Eye.

  The coffee was getting cold. Issa cleared his throat. “Father,” he called. “Welcome, Father.”

  The Mukhtar woke at once, and with one sudden heave got himself into an erect sitting position.

  “Welcome twice,” he said, reaching for the coffee. He knew that they would not dare to wake him without urgent reason and waited to be told, his heavy bloodshot eyes on his son’s insipid face, gulping the bitter coffee with noisy sips.

  “Father, they have occupied the Hill of Dogs,” said Issa. Hill of Dogs was the name by which the villagers of Kfar Tabiyeh called the Place, derived from some old legendary event which they had forgotten.