Thieves in the Night (12 page)

At last he was off, with protestations of eternal friendship and good-neighbourhood. Though his charm was wasted on Reuben, I couldn't help liking the old brigand. How convincing he was even when he lied, and how unconvincing our Glicksteins are even when they speak the truth! That's one of the reasons why the English like them and loathe us. We keep on demonstrating our loyalty to them, and the Arabs keep on double-crossing them. But the point is that the English don't for a minute expect the Arabs not to double-cross them; it's part of the game. They have an old and subtle tradition of dealing with Natives; they are attracted and amused by them, they exploit them as a matter of course and expect to be stabbed by them as soon as they turn their back, as an equal matter of course. Whereas with us they don't know where they are. They regard us not as Natives but as Foreigners, and that is quite a different matter. There is no superiority complex without an inferiority complex; and while the native appeals mainly to the first, the foreigner appeals mainly to the second. Our protestations of loyalty make us only the more suspect.

Sunday

Thank God, Moshe our Treasurer is coming back from Hospital, so after the General Meeting next week I shall be relieved from deputising for him and go back to my own
work. But first I have to prepare the annual Balance Sheet for the meeting, which is a rather unpleasant job. Though it is understood that for the first three years we shall work with a deficit, and shall only start paying ground rent and repaying our investment loans to the National Fund after the fifth year, it is nevertheless depressing to have to produce a balance-sheet which starts:

So far our only sources of income were the first crops of about three acres of wheat and barley, milk and butter from our dairy, a few pounds from the chicken farm and vegetable garden, the cash earnings of six of our members who work as day-labourers in the Haifa cement factory, and under the item “Miscellaneous” the sale of a gold watch which Max's aunt in New York sent him as a birthday present.

However, communal bookkeeping has its fascinating side. The basic unit of our arithmetic is not the pound but the “Work Day” and the “Maintenance Day”. A Work Day is the amount of work done by one member in one eight-hour day. The value of the Work Day varies according to production branch. It is calculated by dividing our total annual income from
e.g
. milk and butter by the number of Work Days expended in dairy and cowshed. This is what the cow boys and dairy workers theoretically earn per day; but of course they are not paid, the money remains in the communal purse. The fewer the Work Days spent on each pound's worth of produce, the more profitable is that branch of production and (taking amortisation and depreciation into account) we thus obtain
a check on rentability. As in all new settlements the average value of our Work Day is still very low: three shillings and sixpence is what we theoretically earn per head per day.

But this of course applies only to the “earners”,
i.e
. to those who are engaged in income-producing work. The work of the cooks, orderlies, seamstresses, laundresses, etc., produces no income. A little under half of the members of the Commune are employed on such non-productive household work. Thus the income from a Work Day should be at least twice the expenditure per Maintenance Day (that is the cost of feeding, clothing, and social services per head and day). Alas, it is not. The cost of a Maintenance Day is still two shillings and ninepence.

What really fascinates me is the quaint statistical picture of how the average civilised human being in a rationally organised society spends his or her time to satisfy the basic human needs. There are now 36 adults in Ezra's Tower (37 founding members minus 5 dead plus 4 new probationers). There are 365 days in the year, so the theoretical total of working days is 36 × 365 = 13,140. Of these, 6,624 Work Days were spent on income-earning labour (that is in the fields, orchards, olive groves, dairy, poultry farm, vegetable garden, tending the sheep, and maintenance work). If we divide this total by the number of members we find that the average member spent 196 days in the year to earn his keep. By the same method we find that he (or she—the statistical average is always a hermaphrodite) spent 28.5 days on cooking, washing up and serving meals; 12.6 days on dressmaking and repairing; 3 days on shoe-making, 3.5 on laundering, 3.5 on cleaning his/her living quarters, 4 on tending the lawn and other embellishments of the Commune, 6.5 on travelling, 1.5 on looking after the Library and Stores, 3 on dispensing medical care, 21 on running the Children's House, 20 on being ill, 5.6 in childbed and suckling, 4 on leave, 56 on Shabbaths and Holydays and 2.2 on doing nothing because of heavy rains.

Now according to this time-table about one-eighteenth of
the total working days of the Commune are spent in running the Children's House—in other words two people are employed full time to look after our five children—quite apart from the time which the parents spend with the children in their leisure hours. Whence follows that the children are much better looked after in the Commune than in the family. The wife of an individual farmer with five children not only looks after them alone, but has also to cook, do the housework, and at times to help in the fields and with the cattle. Her time-table would show about 700 Work Days in the year to do all these jobs—and less well than in our case. She can only manage it by squeezing two eight-hour days into each day of her life; and the same goes for the man.

The revolutionary thing about the Commune is that it makes farming possible on an eight-hour basis and turns it into a civilised occupation. From 5 P.M. onward my time is my own. And when all is said, what is the final aim of socialism if not the conquest of leisure?

Saturday

Yesterday at the weekly stores distribution I played Father Christmas for the last time before Moshe's return. “Shopping hour” on Shabbath eve is one of the highlights of the week, and to be salesman in a free-for-all shop one of the most gratifying occupations. The queuing-up in front of the stores is a kind of social occasion; everybody comes fresh from the showers, in clean linen and Shabbath-gear, looking his or her best, cheered by the prospect of to-night's meat dinner and to-morrow's long sleep and rest. Then they file with their shopping-lists into my decrepit shack with an air of looking for a fur coat in Bond Street. The standard allowance is fifteen cigarettes, one cake of soap and one razor-blade a week, one tube of toothpaste and boot polish a fortnight, one toothbrush a month; furthermore note-paper, envelopes, stamps, bootlaces, contraceptives, electric bulbs, torch-batteries, combs, hairclips and so on, by special order according to need. All of us get one complete issue of
working clothes and one Shabbath-outfit each year. The working clothes are bought from wholesalers ready-made, the Saturday clothes for the women are made in our own workshop according to taste, so as to provide variety. It is surprising how few basic needs people have once competition and hoarding are abolished.

In a couple of years we shall have our own furniture workshop and start going in for luxuries. For the time being our luxury-budget for the whole Commune is twelve pounds a year—the equivalent of two Work Days per head per year….

Moshe has a trick of handing out the goods with some terrific sales-talk in a mixture of three languages, giving each item a fantastic imaginary price and carrying on a bitter mock-haggling with the customers. It is a performance one never gets tired of. Perhaps because it tickles our conceit, our feelings of superiority towards the capitalist world;—or because it comforts us by deriding the fleshpots of Egypt which we have left so irretrievably behind, and enhances the virtue of our appalling poverty?

For, when all is said, ours is a hard and drab existence, and one has to do a lot of sales-talk to oneself to stick it. Even so there are days …

However, they are only days. Remember Joseph, remember. Hast thou forgotten Pharaoh's hosts?

Powder and cosmetics are banned from our stores as attributes of “bourgeois decay.” I wish they weren't. I wish we were now and then visited by some charitable scarlet woman of Babylon.

Sunday

Yesterday being Shabbath a bunch of us went down in the truck to Gan Tamar to listen to a concert by the Philharmonic Orchestra which is touring the settlements. Although Gan Tamar played the rôle of god-father to us, relations have been steadily deteriorating since we became solidly established on our own. There were the usual minor frictions about a truck
they once borrowed and returned with a broken spring, and so on, but the root of the trouble is of course political. I wonder whether any other race has the same capacity for doctrinaire fanaticism as ours. It has, I suppose, to do with the Exile;
émigrés
always have cliques and quarrels, and we have been
émigrés
for two thousand years. The exiled have nothing to hang on to except doctrines and convictions; hence they fight over ideas like dogs over bones. The others call it politely our semitic intensity.

Anyhow, at the last municipal elections in Tel Aviv they had thirty-two competing party lists, and each party was convinced of being the only true prophets of the kingdom of heaven.

But the real fun only starts when the Hebrew prophetic streak cross-breeds with socialist sectarianism. Then dots on I's and crosses on T's become a matter of life and death and deviations from the party line are castigated with all the wrath of Amos and Isaiah. This is what turned Marx into such a quarrelsome old bully; and we the disciples have inherited, if not his grandeur, at least his cantankerousness. Thus even our rural Communes, though they are all built on the same principle, are split up between three rival Federations. Ezra's Tower is affiliated to the “United Group of Communes” which supports the Hebrew Labour Party; whereas Gan Tamar belongs to “Hashomer Hazair” (“The Young Guardian”) which stands on the extreme left of our Labour movement and corresponds to the British I.L.P. They have strong sympathies for Russia, whereas we are rather critical of the Soviet system. So after the concert there was the usual argument in the Reading Room of Gan Tamar—passionate, venomous and futile, as is proper and befitting in the socialist fraternity.

It started as usual with Russia—the one-party system, the inequality of pay, the Purges, the let-down of Spain, etc. The Gan Tamar crowd had a ready excuse for everything, and our radicals Max and Sarah supported them. It is depressing to watch how these two gradually drift into a position where
political grudges and personal discord fuse into one. Sarah feels frustrated, among other things because she believes that she should be in charge of the Children's House instead of Dina. Sarah is an Adlerian juvenile-individual-psychologist cum vegetarian-dietarian; she has a pale, pinched little face with large starved-virgin eyes. Max, who has an enormous, sniffing tapir-nose and an unkempt I.L.P.-name, feels that he should be a member of the Secretariat—which indeed he should according to his brains, but being quarrelsome and unpopular he ends up in all elections as an also-ran—a member of the Committee for Culture or such like. Both are unmarried.

So the argument on Russia took its usual course, rather like a game of chess where at the opening stages both partners know the other's answer in advance, and once it gets really going throw the chessmen at each other's head. This time the throwing was started by Moshe our Treasurer. We had already got through the opening, to wit:

White
(Queen's pawn 4): Obvious untruth of the accusations against the Trotskyite opposition.

Black
(Queen's pawn 4): All opposition in a Workers' State is
a priori
counter-revolutionary.

White
(Queen's Bishop pawn 4): Growing inequality of pay and privileges for the Bureaucracy.

Black
(King's Bishop pawn 3): Necessity to stimulate production by temporary expedients.

White
(King's Knight Bp. 3): Chauvinistic education, boosting of leadership, religious revival, etc.

Black
(Queen's Knight Bp. 3): Necessity of preparing backward masses for imperialist war and fascist aggression.

White (Dasha
, pawn takes pawn): “They even encourage bourgeois decadence like lipstick, rouge and powder.”

Black (Sarah
, retakes pawn, blushes with rage): “The dialectics of proletarian sex-appeal as opposed to the prostitution of bourgeois matrimony …”

It was at this stage that Moshe lost patience and upset the game. Moshe is a heavy-weight, in every respect. He is short
and stocky like a bull; he sits on our Communal purse like the Lord Chancellor on the Woolsack; he is a financial genius capable, like the other Moses, of drawing water from rock; and he has a way, with his slow speech and heavy common sense, of trampling through the thick of an argument like an elephant through the jungle. So Moshe told the Gan Tamar crowd that if they wanted to imitate Russia they would first of all have to abolish the Common Purse as a left deviation and start paying out salaries, it being understood that members of the Secretariat would be entitled to draw about three hundred times the amount paid to the average worker and to keep a secret police authorised to deport or shoot-anybody without trial. As the next step they would have to build a separate dining hut for the skilled Stakhanovites, and a third one for the comrades of the Secretariat; they would have to abolish co-education, introduce school-fees and so on….