Thieves in the Night (15 page)

In the Dining Hut the string quartet was rehearsing a movement of Beethoven. I listened for a while, then went back to my room in a pacified mood. My restlessness seemed to have evaporated in the cool night air. Max had turned with his face to the wall and had stopped snoring. I felt that my taste for the night job had returned and put about three hundred words of Pepys into Hebrew, complete with footnotes and annotations. Seventeenth Century English lends itself admirably to translation into biblical language. Turns of phrases presented themselves, bowing like willing brides. I read over the last chapter, very pleased with myself; smoked my last cigarette (until the next weekly issue to-morrow afternoon);
w'az la'mittà—and
. so to bed.

Shabbath

Old David, the truck-driver of the milk-cooperative who often drops in to my workshop for a chat, brought yesterday the first news that Bauman has split the
Haganah
. He has walked out of it with about three thousand of his followers and a considerable amount of illegal arms, and has gone over to the extremists. Old David who is himself a member of the Regional Command of the
Haganah
was stammering with indignation. “Just imagine,” he shouted at me, “to join those
hooligans, those fascist cut-throats who walk about throwing bombs into Arab market-places, killing women and children. And Bauman of all people!” But he didn't know any details.

I am still unable to understand what happened. If the split had been caused by some romantic hothead, it would be just another episode in our internal quarrels. But Bauman is one of the most balanced and responsible fellows I know. He has grown up in the traditions of Austrian Social-Democracy and is a Socialist to his bones, by instinct and conviction. If he has decided to throw in his lot with Jabotinski's right-wing extremists, then the situation must be more critical than we in our isolation know. After all we live here on an island—Ezra's Ivory Tower. I haven't been to Jerusalem or Tel Aviv for more than a year. And we are so absorbed in our problems that we lost contact with reality. The egotism of a collective is no less narrowing than the individual's.

I became quite excited and alarmed.
Aux armes, citoyens!
The only person here with whom one can talk about these things is Simeon, so I left my shop in the middle of the working hours and went out to see him. He was in the tree-nursery, planting a row of saplings. That is
his
passion. He did not see me coming and I watched him. He was absorbed in his work, He knelt with his back to me, patting with his hands the hole into which the sapling was to go. He closed one eye, gauging whether the centre of the hole was exactly in line with the row. His violent, unhappy profile was softened up; it had the self-abandon of a child muttering to himself in play. He put the sapling in and heaped the earth round it with his fingers; then he remained looking at it quite still on his knees. When he noticed me standing a few steps behind him, he blushed; I had violated the chastity of his passion.

It is curious how most of us develop our specific passions here. They are not hobbies, for they are directly connected with the job. There is Dasha with her vitamin-and-calory mania running the kitchen; there is Arieh who is so intimate with his sheep that I suspect him of committing sodomy in
the true bucolic tradition; there is Dina with her Children's House, and Moshe, our Communal Shylock. This fusing of job and hobby among the more skilled workers is partly of course a consequence of the freer choice of occupation which the Commune provides compared with town life or individual farming. But only partly. There is an additional something in Simeon's relationship to the trees or Dina's to the children who are not hers. It has to do with a new kind of possessive, proprietary feeling which the Commune breeds. I feel it in myself, but it is difficult to express. Last Shabbath, when we came back after the concert from Gan Tamar, this sensation was particularly vivid. As we turned late at night from the wadi into the dirt-track leading up to the Place, I remembered our first night here, my journey with Dina and Simeon on top of the swaying truck; and how we built that dirt-track at dawn, sweating and full of vague fears—I seemed to remember the imprint of each stone we cleared from the path. It was my path, more intimately mine than anything I ever possessed, wrist-watch or cigarette-case. And it is more mine because this mine-ness is shared by Dina and Simeon whose memories echo my own; for after all the feeling of possessiveness towards an object is the reflection of the memories it represents; its value is crystallised memory. And the same applies to the Tower which we all saw going up into the air like a dead colossus coming to life, and to every building we built, to every engine and tool and head of cattle we bought. This intimate feeling of possession is common to all peasants, but in our case there is more to it. Take an individual farmer who has built up his small farm with his wife. The value of each shed they have built is enhanced for him by sharing it with her, because he shares his memories with her, because there is more crystallised memory in it. When she dies he feels impoverished—a partnership of memories has been dissolved. The Commune is a great, dense, tight-woven partnership of memories. Thus by sharing everything in the Place with all the others, my feeling of mineness is not diminished but increased—and this is not a theoretical
deduction but the analysis of an intimate experience. It could also be applied to analyse patriotic emotions—but the Race and Nation are more heterogeneous and diffuse bodies than the Commune.

Later

I am digressing as usual; though this time it might be an unconscious evasion of the issues which arose in my talk with Simeon. I said that he blushed when he became aware of my presence. He got to his feet and brushed the dust from the knees of his canvas trousers. His tidiness is fantastic. He never wears shorts and his trousers, though faded and patched like those of the rest of us, are meticulously clean and even have a hint of creases—he probably puts them under his mattress at night.

I told him the news old David had brought, though by now it seemed to me rather pointless that I had specially come to talk to him about it in the middle of working hours. There is always a certain embarrassment in the air when one talks alone with Simeon. His gaze has a thrusting and aggressive quality; he doesn't seem to know what to do with his eyes while he talks, like an adolescent with his awkward hands; one gets the impression that he would like to put his eyes into his pockets. Then, after a minute or so, his gaze gets suddenly locked with one's own and there results the same curious awkwardness as when two strangers get stuck with their glances in a tram-car or lift.

“I know,” he said when I had finished speaking, “I have kept in touch with Bauman.”

This was news to me; and yet I had expected that Simeon would know more than anybody about this business. I also remembered the scene on our first night when Simeon was preaching terrorism and Bauman's curiously dry voice when, asked his opinion, he had said: “I agree with Simeon.”

“Then will you tell me what prompted Bauman to his decision?” I asked.

Simeon paused for a moment, then he said:

“How seriously are you interested in this business?”

“I think we are all equally interested,” I said.

“No,” he said slowly. “The majority are blind and dumb. They cultivate our little collective garden and close their eyes to reality.”

“You were quite happy cultivating your little trees when I came,” I said. I had become aggressive because already I was on the defensive, because already I knew what was coming; and wanted to escape it; and still want to escape it. But Simeon was no longer embarrassed by my having surprised him off his guard; he said with a kind of sadness:

“It won't be for long….” He looked at his row of saplings and said bitterly:

“In two, three years there will be the beginnings of a forest….”

“Will you talk to me straight, or not?” I said.

This was when the awkwardness happened and our eyes got stuck. But I was wrong in comparing it to the accidental embarrassment that occurs in a lift; there is nothing accidental about the stark black directness of Simeon's gaze. It is impossible not to avert one's eyes when confronted with such nudity of expression; and Simeon knows it and that's why he tries to put his eyes into his pocket. He seemed to measure the degree of my reliability but there was not much need for it—in Ezra's Tower everybody knows everything about everybody.

“If you want to talk, let's sit down for a minute,” said Simeon. (I am slightly taller than Simeon and he doesn't like to talk uphill.) We sat down, Simeon jerking up his trousers between thumb and forefinger. He came at once to the point.

“The English are preparing to sell out on us. They have practically stopped immigration already, and shortly they are going to stop it altogether and for good. In Germany the night of the long knives has begun; our people stand lined up facing a bolted door while the knife penetrates inch by inch into
their backs. Most of us here have relations among them; and what are we doing about it?—arguing about Russia and cultivating our little gardens.”

He spoke quietly, only his hands were rubbing his knee as if trying to soothe a rheumatic pain.

“
Tov
,” he went on. “That is what the closing of the gates means to those outside the walls. To us, who are inside, it means that we are caught in a death-trap. We are to-day in minority of one to three, and the Arab birth-rate is about twice as high as ours. Cut off from the outside world our small community will become a stagnant pool, will have to adjust its living standards to the native level, become levantinised, submerged in the Arab sea. We came on the solemn promise that this would be our national home, and find ourselves sentenced to live in an oriental ghetto and finally to be wiped out, as the Armenians were….”

He suddenly turned his embarrassing eyes on me, full beam. “Do you think I exaggerate?” he asked.

“No,” I said. “Provided that they really intend to stop further immigration and to sell out on us, of which I am not yet convinced.”

“They do. Look how they sold out on the Czechs.”

“That's different. Germany is a real threat, while the Arabs are not.”

“They'll do it nevertheless.”

“How do you know with such certainty?”

“We have our information.”

“Who is ‘we'?”

“About that we may talk another time—perhaps.”

We sat in the hot sun, side by side. On the slope opposite us, about half a mile away, Arieh was grazing his sheep; in the clear, transparent air we could see him lying on his back, his hat pulled over his face. Simeon was chewing a blade of dry grass and I was doing the same. I felt no emotion, only the dull awareness of some fatality slowly, smoothly, inescapably closing in on me.

“So now,” I said, “assuming that your political weather forecast is correct, what will Bauman and his people do?”

“Fight.”

“Whom? How? With what?”

Simeon repeated his previous phrase:

“About that we may talk another time.”

“What are you waiting for?”

“For things to ripen inside you.”

“How will you know when I am ‘ripe'?” I asked.

“You will come to me,” he answered with such simple, complete conviction that I had nothing more to say.

Monday

Tirza had to be killed; the calf is all right, wobbling on its thin legs. It's a heifer; we have called it Electra.

Dina is in hospital with sand-fly fever and won't be back for another fortnight.

Tuesday

Old Greenfeld's show has done something to our girls. It isn't exactly the mystic force of the Name working on the deaf, but something more prosaic and earthbound; a stirring of ingrained tradition which they thought they had overcome. They don't talk about it, but if one has lived for years in an intimate community, one feels the slightest changes in the atmosphere. Some of them walk about with a definitely wistful look, which came into their eyes while watching the performance under the faded velvet canopy and hasn't left them since. It will pass after a few days as it did after old Greenfeld's last visit, but for the moment the air is full of the stale ghosts of the past.

When, during the noon-break to-day, Ellen came into my workshop, I knew that the hour of “talking things over” had struck. Her eyes bore that expression of dull hurt and reproach which has lately become a permanent feature with her. And yet it had all started in such a nice, enlightened and business-like
manner. No nonsense about love—no—agreed. Sympathy—yes—moderate, agreed. Mutual need, give and take, agreed. No obligations, no entries on the credit or debit columns, quits. The perfect barter system on the Schacht model. Christ, were we enlightened.

She lingered and loitered and hovered round the shop and finally leant with her back against my working bench, and with each moment the shop became more saturated with the silent reproach of the wounded but proud female who keeps her sufferings to herself, yes, all to herself—unless of course you press the button which opens the sluices and drowns you in the rushing cataract; but then it was you who started it, was it not? On the other hand if you refrain from pressing the button you are an insensitive brute, and the silent reproach will increase in tension until your nerves vibrate like a chord. I decided to be a brute and to avoid touching off anything. “How is the veg-garden?” I asked, hammering away on the boot in hand.

“All right,” she said, but her tone signified “so what?” Ellen works in the veg-garden. She is a good and conscientious worker, held in high esteem by the community, which all goes to make me feel the more a cad. For it must be admitted that the situation is, according to our standards, irregular. The regular and simple procedure would be to inform the Secretariat of our decision to share a room together. There would be a congratulatory party, Moshe would have to fork out twenty piasters for three bottles of wine and a cake, and everything would be all right. Old Greenfeld would not have to appear on the scene unless and until a child was on the way; and theoretically each of us could break up the union and move back to bachelor quarters at any time and without giving any reasons; the children, if any, would go on living in the Children's House as before, and there would be no financial or other obligations whatsoever.