Thieves in the Night: Chronicle of an Experiment Page 8

  Joseph took that to mean that they hadn’t, and felt relieved, though he did not understand how Reuben could tell. But his intellectual curiosity had left him entirely, and his only desire was to be an automaton and obey. The shooting calmed down a little, and then Joseph saw a vicious gun-flash directly in the line of his aim, and almost simultaneously he fired. He could not say why, but this time the act of pulling the trigger and the report seemed to be different from all the previous occasions and the wild idea crossed his brain that, just as some women were supposed to know by instinct the moment when they conceived, so a man might know the moment when he has killed. In fact, he was convinced of having hit; he had the almost physical sensation of his bullet having been stopped by, and buried in, some dully and elastically resisting matter. A moment later the searchlight was on again.

  A wild cheer went up from the trench and Joseph felt the conviction sweep through his whole body that from now on they were safe. It was a sensation like drinking something hot and sugary when very tired; its sweet warmth seemed to penetrate into all his tissues. Only now did he realise that his feet were all a-tremble and his knees on the point of giving way. He pulled a drenched cigarette out of his pocket but it disintegrated between his fingers.

  The return of the light seemed to have a demoralising effect on the raiders. Their fire became rather desultory and more distant. Doubtless they were retreating behind the farther slope of their hillock. That white, dazzling eye staring at them from its height like a watchful giant’s, and its majestic, slow movement must be an uncanny sensation for them.

  Joseph badly wanted a cigarette and asked Naphtali whether he had a dry one, but the youngster gave no answer. He crouched in a curiously huddled-up position against the back of the parapet, and Joseph thought he had perhaps fainted. He went down on his knees by Naphtali’s side, reproaching himself for not having looked after him better, and groped for his face. Instead of a face his fingers found a soft, dripping mess and his forefinger went straight into some slushy cavity. He withdrew his hand with a cry and began shaking it wildly through the air as if he had burnt it. Reuben flashed his torch on the youngster and Joseph saw what he had touched, but only for a second. He turned to the other side and vomited.

  The youngster by the name of Naphtali had kept some hold on himself until the light went out. From that moment he had been a shaking, teeth-chattering bundle of horror. His brain, paralysed by toxic fear, held only one idea: that the killers had got into the hollow and would in the next second burst through the barbed wire. When Reuben started throwing his hand grenades, Naphtali finally went off his head. He jumped up and down on one spot, gurgling inarticulate sounds and biting his clenched fists. His neighbours were too busy to pay any attention to him. He went on leaping into the air like a joyful child, gurgling and whimpering, until something hit him massively in the eye. He thought it was Reuben, angry because he had not kept his head down; and that Reuben did not have to hit him so hard. He saw great coloured circles spinning and crossing each other like flaming hoops that jugglers throw into the air, and everything became rather quiet; only one last fiery wheel kept turning and expanding, until it too faded and only darkness and peace remained.

  11

  About 4 A.M. it became clear that the attack had been beaten off. No shot had been fired during the last half-hour; the raiders must have returned to their own hills, anxious to reach their hide-outs before daybreak. Bauman sent the men to sleep, keeping only those on guard duty in the dug-outs.

  Joseph felt that he would be unable to sleep and decided to look in at the first-aid tent, hoping that Dina might still be on duty. He had learned that, besides Naphtali who was dead, two men had been wounded at the height of the attack: one of the Auxiliaries had been shot through the chest, and Mendl had received a bullet in his arm while repairing the electric cable, but had gone on until he had finished the job. Stamping through the mud with his torch, Joseph thought that his feet had never in his life felt so heavy. His mind was in a dreamy, floating haze, while his whole body seemed imbued with the consciousness of gravity. This, he thought, is what people on Jupiter must feel like, where every object weighs three times heavier than on the Earth. I wonder whether Jupiter too has its Jews…. No doubt it has; no species would be complete without its Jews; they are the exposed nerve, an extreme condition of life…. There was light showing from the first-aid tent; he lifted the flap and saw Dina making Turkish coffee over a spirit-lamp as if she were waiting for him. On a stretcher on the floor lay the wounded Auxiliary, covered with a rug, asleep. Dina had put the bright acetylene lamp out and lit candles instead. She seemed pleased to see him. He leaned his rifle carefully against the canvas and with a feeling of bliss squatted down on the floor. “Where is Mendl?” he asked in a whisper.

  “He is all right,” she said. “It was only a flesh wound and he went to sleep in his own bed with his mouth-organ under the pillow.—You need not whisper; he’s had a shot of morphia.” She spoke in a low murmur which sounded less strained than whispering, and more intimate. “They are going to send the ambulance car from Gan Tamar first thing to-morrow morning.

  “It is to-morrow already,” said Joseph.

  She let a drop of cold water fall on the thick brown liquid in the shiny copper pot and poured it out into two small cups. Joseph sipped it voluptuously, leaning his back against the foot of the chair.

  Dina had a leather jacket wrapped round her shoulders, with its empty sleeves hanging down. She seemed to be shivering. There were dark-blue shadows under the lighter blue of her eyes and her hair kept falling into her face as if it were too tired to remain in its proper place.

  “Would you like to wash your face?” she asked after a while. He touched his face with his fingers; it was all grimy. He grinned, slowly shaking his head. “Too lazy,” he said. “Just let me sit for a while. You need not look at me.”

  He closed his eyes and after a while opened them again and saw that she was looking at him with a kind of approval.

  “Reuben looked in before you came,” she said. “He mentioned that you had done quite well.”

  So Dina had specially inquired after him, Joseph thought happily. And Reuben had approved of him. He suddenly felt the tears shoot into his eyes. Oh, it was good to be approved of. There was nothing better than to be approved of—to like and be liked. In that moment he was so full of a warm, simple certainty about everything that he felt no shame and no need to pose. He leaned his head against the foot of her chair, closed his eyes and let the tears run down his face. He felt that in this moment of abandon he lost his last chance of ever winning her. But the bliss of surrender, of shedding all pretence, was stronger than his desire. It is finished, he thought, for it is I who am giving myself, not she….

  The next time he opened his eyes he knew that he must have slept though he could not remember it. The candle had grown short and old, covered with knobs of tallow like a warted gnome. Dina had slumped down in her chair and was resting with her cheek on his shoulder, asleep. At a slight movement of his she woke and moved her head away. “It will soon be day,” she said in a murmur.

  “Another hour,” said Joseph.

  She lay back in her chair, shivering. The Auxiliary on the stretcher moved in his sleep. “How did Naphtali die?” she asked after a while.

  “I don’t know. We should have watched him….” He remembered the unutterable contact of his hand with the slushy mass, and remained silent.

  “Poor Naphtali,” said Dina. “I never liked him.”

  Joseph said nothing; he felt no desire to speak or to move; he only wished he could remain there, for a while, leaning against the chair, limp and desireless.

  “You know,” said Dina, “I have never understood why you joined us. You don’t really fit in here.”

  “Do you?” he said.

  “That’s different…. But even by race you only half belong to us.”

  “I have opted for the belonging half.”

  “But why?
You would be happier among the others. Why won’t you tell?”

  “There was some incident.” “What incident?”

  “Is this a confessional?” he asked tiredly.

  They remained silent for a while; he could feel through the chair, acting as a conductor, that she shivered. The Auxiliary on the stretcher moaned. Dina got up and smoothed his blanket. Her teeth were chattering.

  “It is cold,” she said. “I must lie down.”

  “All right,” said Joseph. “I will go.” He started wearily to scramble to his feet.

  “But you needn’t,” said Dina. She slid down to the floor and touched his face with her lips, “Will you let me sleep with my head on your arm?” she asked, lying down at a little distance from him and pulling the blanket over both of them. “But please don’t do anything.”

  “No,” he said, lying stiff and frozen with the soft warm weight on his arm. “Sleep, Dina, you are safe; we are both safe here.”

  She breathed quietly against his head. After a while she asked:

  “Was it very bad—the shooting?”

  “No,” he said. “It was all bluff and bluster, like everything these Arabs do.”

  After another while she said timidly:

  “Is it very beastly of me to lie on your arm and ask you to keep still?”

  He did not answer at once. Then he swallowed and said huskily:

  “Anything you like, darling. Darling, anything you like.”

  12

  He could not go to sleep again. Instead his thoughts travelled once more back the worn path to the Incident. He wished he could bring himself to tell Dina about it, but shame and the fear of ridicule always held him back. It was such a squalid and grotesque story that he could not expect even her to understand its influence on his life.

  He had been eleven when his father died. His father had been a Russian-Jewish pianist of some renown. His mother was English and a gentile. Her people had never approved of her marriage. After her husband’s death she went back to live with them in their house in Oxfordshire. Joseph was an only child; he grew up in the large country house, played cricket and tennis, went to church, rode a pony and later a horse. His father was rarely mentioned and Joseph at eleven accepted this as one of the many paragraphs in the sacred code of “don’ts”.

  In due course he was sent up to Oxford, and during the summer vacation after his second term fell in love with a woman from the neighbourhood whom he met at a local tennis tournament. Lily was five years older than Joseph, blonde, slim, pretty and divorced. She was generally liked among the neighbours, and sometimes teased by them on account of her enthusiasm for a new political movement which organised demonstrations through the London East End, and whose members wore black shirts and had fights with policemen. But Joseph at that time was not interested in politics.

  After his third term Joseph proposed to Lily and was told not to be an ass. After his fourth term they went to a hunt ball where they drank several cocktails and a good deal of champagne. During the last dance he caught a peculiar smile in her eye; while the band played God Save the King she asked him in a whisper where his room was, and told him how to find hers.

  He had known Lily for almost two years, was humbly in love with her, had talked to her poetry, sex and eternity, and had never kissed her lips. After the ball, without transition, he became the lover for a wildly unreal and elusive hour, of a woman so completely transformed that he kept stammering her name aloud to convince himself of her identity. Then came the awakening and the crash. Even now, years later, he grew hot with humiliation as he thought of it. In her dark room she had switched the bedside lamp on to look for a cigarette. The sudden light had revealed their nudity, and with it the sign of the Covenant on his body, the stigma of the race incised into his flesh. The horror in her face made him at first think that she had discovered in him the symptoms of some repulsive disease; then, in a voice icy with contempt she had accused him of infamy and deception, cross-examined him about his ancestry, ordered him to get dressed and clear out of her room. At last the reason dawned on him.

  It was indeed a squalid little incident, impossible to tell Dina or anybody else. Even less could he explain to them that it had changed the course of his life. Not because of Lily—that aspect of it he got over after a while. Lily had merely been an instrument, and perhaps without her some other incident would have produced the same result. The result was a kind of shell-shock. Everything was changed. He began making inquiries about his father. He made a cult of his memory, to atone for his own cowardly part in the conspiracy of silence about him. This led to a breach with his mother’s family. He took rooms in London and frequented the people whom he was henceforth to regard as his own. At first he did not like them, but he read the newspapers and learned that Incidents were the rule in their lives. He read books and learned that it had been the same in the past. He read more books and learned about the movement of the Return and its founder, the Viennese journalist Dr. Herzl, whose story reminded him of his own. He too had thought that the stigma was buried in the past, until he had met with his Incident: the trial of Captain Dreyfus which he had been sent out to report. Towards the end of his life he had summed up his philosophy to a friend:

  “If you are faced with a fence and can’t creep through under it, your only choice is to jump. For twenty centuries we have tried to creep through under the fence. They wouldn’t let us. Now we are taking the jump.”

  Once Joseph had taken the jump the rest became easy. He forgot about Lily and the shell-shock. He no longer ran away from something, but ran forward towards an aim. It had the lure of an exotic country, the fascination of a romantic revival and the appeal of a social utopia, all in one—almost too good to be true. It had been a curious journey—from Lily’s bed to Ezra’s Tower in Galilee. Whether it was a pilgrim’s progress or a wild-goose chase he did not know; and at the moment he did not care to know.

  He felt the soft weight of Dina’s face on his arm, and the quiet rhythm of her breathing carried him off to sleep.

  13

  They woke at daybreak both at the same time. Neither of them had changed position or moved in their sleep. Both of them were fully awake at once.

  “Come,” said Dina. “Let us see the sun rise.”

  They walked out of the tent into the light grey morning mist and the fresh dewy smell of the air. To the east, behind the hill with the sleeping Arab village, the sky was pink and yellow, rapidly changing colour. Dina threw her hair back and shook herself like a puppy getting out of the water.

  “I talked a lot of nonsense last night,” she said.

  “Did you? I slept,” said Joseph. “Look at the sheep.”

  A flock of tiny light woolly specks were zigzagging down the slope beyond the wadi.

  “We shall have a bigger flock,” said Dina. “And cows. What shall we call the first calf?”

  “Dr. Karl Marx,” said Joseph. “Let’s climb on top of the tower.”

  They climbed up the wooden ladder, Dina first. Her legs were over his head and he saw the muscles play in her calves and had to restrain himself not to bite into the smooth, brown skin. Well, he thought, that will never be; but there are other things. To approve and be approved of, to like and be liked….

  They stood on the platform of Ezra’s Tower, surrounded by the gently undulating silver-grey hills of Galilee. They saw Dasha emerge from the living-hut, a towel round her neck and a big sponge in her hand, on her way to the showers.

  “To-day we shall start building the cowshed,” said Dina.

  The sparkling tip of the sun had pierced the yellow mist. It was 5.30 A.M.; and the evening and the morning were the first day.

  More Days

  (1938)

  More Days (1938)

  1

  Extract from the Constitution of Communal Settlements, in Compliance with the Standard Rules under the Cooperative Societies Ordinance, Government of Palestine, 1933:

  SECTION A: NAME, ADDRESS, OBJECT, POWER
S AND AFFILIATIONS

  The general objects of the Society are to organise and promote the economic and social interests of its members in accordance with co-operative principles and in particular to—

  (a) Manage and develop a collective farm;

  (d) Dispose of products of the settlement and purchase its requirements;