Thieves in the Night Page 7

  He closed his eyes for a moment. Something extraordinary was happening to him, something which he had never experienced before. He saw the drowning people before his eyes. It was a sharp, short flash which lasted only a split second but was fantastically clear. There were hundreds of them, with arms and legs sticking out of the water, but there was no sound and the whole scene was laid out on a calm and peaceful sea basking in the hot sun.

  There was a heavy silence, in which Reuben said drily:

  “I think Simeon is exaggerating. At any rate I don’t think we can gain anything by imitating Fascist methods.”

  Unnoticed by most of them, Bauman had entered the hut a few minutes before, and had remained standing at the door, listening to Simeon’s speech. Dina saw him; in the prolonged silence she asked:

  “And what do you think, Bauman?”

  They all turned their heads.

  “I share Simeon’s opinion,” Bauman said curtly. “By the way, Dasha, your carrots will be here first thing in the morning.”

  Bauman’s entry broke the spell. Naphtali, a short dark boy with a squint who had so far restrained himself with some effort, began savagely to attack Simeon, but nobody listened to him. They all crowded round Bauman to hear the latest news from the outside world. Simeon too wanted to get up, but Naphtali didn’t let him. “I don’t believe in violence,” he cried. “I hate violence. We have to come to an understanding with the Arabs….”

  “But if they don’t wish to come to an understanding with you?” said Simeon, who had regained his calm and his caustic tone.

  “We have to educate them. We must get them to join our trade unions. We have to emancipate the fellaheen and break the influence of their priests and replace their chauvinism by class-consciousness.”

  “And how long will this modest programme take to be carried out?”

  “I don’t know. It doesn’t matter.”

  “No, it doesn’t. Our people will wait on the burning stakes until we have finished.”

  He pushed past the excited youth and walked out into the darkness. They paid no attention to him. They were listening to Bauman’s news, passed on by heliograph from Gan Tamar where they had a wireless. But there wasn’t much in it. The Spanish rebels had occupied most of the Basque country and were closing in on Bilbao. The Council of the League had discussed the planned partition of the country into a Hebrew and an Arab state, proposed by the Royal Commission a few months ago, but there were as yet no details….

  They did not comment on this last item; they had discussed the question of partition, its pros and cons, till they had become sick of it. Besides, nobody really believed that the Government would have the determination to carry the idea out. Joseph quoted a joke he had seen in an English paper: the best partition would be to let the Arabs have the country during the summer and the Jews during the winter;—but only Dina and Bauman smiled. They all stood about irresolutely, wondering whether they should snatch a few hours’ sleep before they were called for guard duty, but a vague feeling of despondency, of a disappointing anticlimax, made them linger on.

  In the midst of this indecision the thin voice of a mouth-organ filtered in from the darkness outside, grew stronger as it approached, and a moment later Mendl burst in through the door, blowing with puffed cheeks his mouth-organ and lifting his knees high into the air, in the marching pose of the Pied Piper. He seemed unconscious of the crowd, stalked straight into the centre of the hut, and broke into the tune of “God will rebuild Galilee”, swaying and squirming with his hunchbacked body to the swift vigorous rhythm of the tune. He gave the impression of being drunk, but they knew that he was merely seized by one of his sudden moods, when the otherwise quiet and rather silent little Mendl became possessed by a kind of craze, spontaneous and irresistible. Like fog under a violent gust of wind, the stupor which had lain on them burst into shreds. They kicked the forms aside and ran the tables against the wall, clearing an open space in the centre of the hut where already the dark squinting boy and two others had formed the first ring of the horra, the stamping and swaying round-dance, a savage ring-polka. Others joined in; with arms interlaced round each other’s shoulders and heads thrown back, they formed a wheel which now spun round as they all raced clockwise to the left, now halted, swaying in and outward as they stamped their feet shouting the refrain of the song, their bodies leaning back almost to the horizontal. The wheel broke and re-formed as more dancers joined in and threw their arms round their neighbours’ shoulders, thus welding it again. Soon the circle became too large for the hut; part of it tore itself off and formed a second, smaller ring inside the first, spinning in the opposite sense; and then a third concentric ring, of five dancers only, formed inside the second, spinning again in the reverse direction. The whole horra was like a whirling eddy, giddy and rapturous; and in its centre stood, all by himself, Mendl with his mouth-organ, swaying and squirming like an ecstatic dervish.

  Joseph stood by the door, watching the dancers. Their faces, thrown back and turned towards the ceiling, were covered with sweat; many of them had closed their eyes. When they stopped racing round to shout out the refrain, the three magic syllables of hag-al-il burst from their lips like savage barks. When they resumed their circular race their mouths remained half open in a self-forgetful, panting rapture. Thus transfigured, they no longer appeared to Joseph ugly and reptilious, but like some stylised Assyrian or Sumerian carving come to life in the flickering light of the candles. His feet had begun to stamp out the torrential rhythm of the dance, his body to sway, he longed to be swallowed up in the whirling eddy. He glanced at Dina who stood next to him. She shook her head. “But you go,” she said, trying to sound casual. He hesitated for a second, then took a short run. leant into the air with outstretched arms and broke into the chain. Before the drunkenness of the dance got complete hold of him he saw Dina walk out of the hut; but at that moment he did not care.

  Dina walked quickly across the dark square to the living-hut and entered the cubicle which she shared with Dasha and two other girls. Fortunately there was nobody in yet. For a second she stood still in the dark, stuffy little room, listening to the sound of the mouth-organ, the shouts and stamping of feet from the dining-hut. Then the tension in her snapped and she threw herself face down on her bunk. Her shoulders shook and her teeth bit into the straw mattress to stifle the sound of her gulping sobs. After a while she fell asleep, fully dressed, and was only woken two hours later by the crash of the first volley fired against the palisades.

  9

  The trouble with Dina was that she could not bear to be touched. It was curious to watch, when somebody touched her, a coarse gooseflesh spread on her skin and her face begin to quiver. She could put her hand on a man’s, or lay her arm around his shoulder, but winced in suppressed panic if he tried to do the same to her. She would sit on a form at the dining-table and suddenly become conscious of her shoulder or hip touching her neighbour’s; she would shrink into herself and make herself small and try to control her trembling so as not to offend the other; and after a while she would get up and slink unobtrusively out of the room, with her meal unfinished. Doctors had been consulted and had asked her questions which she refused to answer; they had suggested drugs, hypnosis, psychotherapy, but it all pointed in one direction, and she refused to let anybody touch upon the thing to forget.

  Dina’s father had been editor of a distinguished Liberal daily newspaper in the town of Frankfurt-on-Main. It was a patrician paper in a patrician town. She remembered her father as a frail, middle-aged man with gout-bent fingers, a very soft voice and a pointed greyish beard, pacing up and down the worn path on the carpet in the library which one could only enter on tiptoe, or writing with his back to the room at an old-fashioned standing-desk. He had published books on Federal Union, Pan-Europa, against militarism in general, and in his own country in particular; he had been a delegate at various disarmament conferences and a candidate for the Nobel Prize for Peace. He fought nationalism in every form and
disguise, adhered to no Church or religious community, and regarded his race as an accident of birth. When the National Socialists came into power he refused to go abroad, but was persuaded by his friends to hide. Dina, then seventeen, was to join her mother, who lived, separated from her husband, in the south of France. She was arrested at the frontier and kept for six months, during which they tried to find out from her her father’s whereabouts. When they let her out she was told that her father had given himself up to obtain her release and had died shortly afterwards in a non-specified way.—During those six months, when they kept on trying, methodically, scientifically, ingeniously, to make her betray her father’s hide-out, happened the things to forget.

  On the whole she was gay and composed. Somewhere inside her the memory of those things lay encrusted, like a bullet which had not been extracted, in its cocoon of insulating tissue. Normally the injured is unconscious of it except when touched near the scar; and Dina’s scar expanded over the whole immaculate surface of her body.

  10

  The first volley came shortly after midnight. It found them mentally unprepared. Although the probability of an attack had been the whole day at the back of their minds, the tension had gradually relaxed as the night wore on. The horra had come to an end about an hour earlier, as abruptly as it had started, and those not on guard duty had tottered to their palliasses in complete exhaustion. When the shooting woke them, they had the feeling of having closed their eyes only a minute ago.

  They ran towards their assigned posts, still dazed by sleep but automatically keeping their heads down. After the first salvo it had become quiet again; the men in the dug-outs had orders to fire only when they saw the attackers, and for the time being they could see nothing. The trouble was that the hill had the wrong shape. It was shaped rather like the back of a camel, but with three instead of two humps. They sat on top of the southern or rear hump with the two others in front of them, the camel’s head pointing north as it were. For this reason they had built two dug-outs facing north side by side, and only one each facing in the other three directions. The northern communicating trench was also the deepest.

  In front of the northern trench ran the barbed wire, and immediately beyond it the ground sloped down into a hollow, and beyond that hollow came the second hump less than a hundred yards away; and another hundred yards further the third. The height of each hillock was only about fifty feet, but this was quite enough to hide and protect the raiders. Bauman had thought of putting observation posts on each of the other two humps, but he had dropped the idea. There had been no time to fortify them, and the outposts, exposed from all directions, would have been bumped off at once.

  As was to be expected, the salvo had been fired from the north, either from behind the second or the third hump.

  The moon was due to rise in about an hour, and the sky was heavily clouded. The beam of the searchlight crept slowly along the top of the second hillock, then swept with equal care through the hollow, stopping here and there at a suspect bush of thistle or camel-thorn which grew in clusters out of the rock like ugly tufts of hair from a wart. But it could not penetrate through the rock and could not even expose the chinks and holes behind the stones, filling them instead with sharp, ink-black trembling shadows which acted rather unpleasantly on the defenders’ imagination. Bauman and the other leaders of the Haganah had known for some time that these famous watch-tower reflectors were not much good for the task of spotting snipers who knew how to exploit each nook and cranny of the terrain; they kept them up mainly for the sake of their psychological effect on both the raiders and defenders.

  The lull lasted about a minute. Then the searchlight performed one of its periodic quick sweeps round the hill to make sure that no surprise threatened from the flanks or rear; and during these few seconds of darkness the second volley came crashing in from the north. This time the trench and the two dug-outs facing north were fully manned, and the defenders could see the gun-flashes like sparks of St. Elmo’s fire all round the next hillock. Bauman ordered fire and presently about twenty rifles spat out a rather ragged volley, most of the men firing for the first time in their lives at human targets.

  Joseph, who also belonged to this category, stood in the left northern dug-out. His heart drummed, he felt an annoying pressure in the bladder and after the second volley of the attackers he lost a few drops of his water. At the same time he was in a way enjoying himself. ‘That happens to everybody the first time in battle,’ he told himself serenely. A bullet whined past, quite close so it seemed. ‘A hail of bullets round my bloody head,’ he explained to himself. Then he heard Bauman’s voice from the other dug-out to the right, giving the command to fire. ‘Now then,’ he thought, ‘hold your breath, close your left eye, aim slightly low on the target at six o’clock.’ But there was no target. He pulled the trigger and was deafened by the crash. ‘At night it sounds louder,’ he thought. ‘Now we must wait for a gun-flash and fire at it immediately.’ He did so, and would have given a lot to know whether he had hit something. ‘Ha,’ he told himself, ‘that’s the hunting passion awakening.’ He began positively to enjoy himself.

  For a while there were only isolated shots from both sides. Then Bauman yelled, “Hold it for a minute.” Bauman had so far not fired a single shot, only waited for the gun-flashes. Now he lifted his Lewis and gave a long burst, methodically sweeping round the dark contours of the hump in front. Joseph saw the flaming muzzle slowly move round in an arc and thought it was a beautiful curve. He regretted that they had no red tracer bullets for fireworks.

  To his right stood the squinting youngster Naphtali, and beyond him Reuben, who had the second Lewis gun and was in charge of their dug-out. Naphtali was fumbling about with his rifle, trying to put a new magazine in, but his hands shook and in the end Reuben took the rifle and pressed the magazine in for him. “Don’t waste your ammunition,” he said in his usual businesslike voice. “And don’t get rattled. This isn’t serious. There are no more than sixty or eighty of them.” Joseph thought resentfully that the youngster had already wasted a full magazine while he had only fired thrice and regarded each pull on the trigger as a special treat.

  This went on for about half an hour and Joseph began to feel bored. Once or twice he thought of Dina who, together with little Mendl and another girl, was in charge of the first-aid tent, but he knew that she was reasonably safe behind the stockade. Only Naphtali at his side irritated him. The boy was very nervous and apparently obsessed by the idea that the attackers might have sneaked unobserved into the hollow in front of the barbed wire, and might pounce on them at any moment. Twice he had exposed his head over the parapet to peer down the incline in front, and had stammered some confused apology when Reuben sharply ordered him to take cover.

  About 1 A.M. a gale sprang up, with the suddenness and ferocity peculiar to these hills. Towards the east the clouds tore apart and for a minute the moon appeared, travelling rapidly across drifts of black steam; then the gap was filled up again with low. heavy clouds and an instant later the rain came down in torrents, its hard, blinding jets lashing at the defenders’ faces almost horizontally.

  Since the first sharp gust of wind Joseph had felt by instinct that things were going wrong. The density of the rain made the searchlight practically useless. The glitter of the beam on the streaks of falling water produced a strangely theatrical effect, but behind this wavering curtain of white threads anything might indeed happen now. The youngster at Joseph’s side became increasingly fidgety; Joseph had just pulled his head down with a hard grip on the back of his neck when the light suddenly went out. There was some confused shouting from the other dug-out and for a second Joseph felt touched by panic; he had the sensation of an icy jet injected into his veins. He fired three shots as a special treat aimlessly into the rain and regained his self-control. It took some time until his eyes became adjusted to the darkness; in the now total night around them the splash and splutter of the rain sounded louder while the firing of the e
nemy seemed more remote. He heard Reuben shout: “Cable short-circuited—nothing serious—pass it on,” and he passed the message on to the Auxiliary crouching in the connecting trench to his left. He thought that the ancient tongue never sounded more melodious than when shouted through wind and rain in the night; it was a wild and tragic language unfit for small talk. The cloudburst seemed on the point of exhausting its power, the rush of water sounded thinner, and Joseph became aware that for some time already the noise of the enemy’s firing had changed in character: instead of single shots one could now hear the steady rattle of an automatic, a Lewis or a Bren. Apparently they had received reinforcements.

  He was still digesting this when a dull explosion made them all jump. It had come from behind them, from the direction of the square. Reuben yelled a command over Joseph’s head which Joseph did not catch, but he saw the Auxiliary jump out of the trench and run with his head bent towards the square. “The others stay,” Reuben yelled, and Joseph turned once again towards the attackers. In all his anxiety he thought that Reuben was a brick, and that it was a great comfort to obey blindly instead of having to decide what to do. The enemy’s firing now sounded much nearer, and Joseph wondered whether they had really got into the hollow. In a surprisingly short time he heard the splashing footsteps of the Auxiliary running back through the mud. “Nothing,” he shouted while jumping back into the trench. “Only tent B collapsed. Pass it on.” Joseph passed it on, and for the next few minutes he was busy shooting at a great number of gun-flashes which now were definitely nearer on this side of the hump; the enemy was obviously advancing towards the hollow, and both Reuben and Bauman were now using their automatics practically without pause. The noise became deafening, the squall had once more increased to its maximum strength, everything was dark and hellish. Joseph aimed and fired in quick succession at target-flashes which now seemed only a few yards away; he felt his head swim and yet his fingers worked with smooth precision; somewhere at the back of his mind a last spark of self-consciousness marvelled at the nimble automaton which his body had become. He was aware of two sharp explosions in quick succession only a few yards ahead of him; in the reddish bengal flashes which accompanied the detonations the silhouette of the barbed wire emerged like a vision of a delicate etching, and vanished again; then he realised that Reuben was throwing hand grenades at the barbed wire, his long dark arm swinging forward and back like a flail. Judging by the frequency of the explosions, Bauman and somebody on the other side were also throwing grenades. “Give, give!” he yelled at Reuben, but Reuben bent over him across the crouching Naphtali and said quite calmly: “No need. It was only to make sure they haven’t crept up to the barbed wire.”