Thieves in the Night (16 page)

Yes, theoretically. But in practice …

“Joseph,” said Ellen.

“Yes?”

“What is the matter with you?”

“With me?”

“Yes.”

“Nothing is the matter with me.”

“Really?”

“Really.”

Stage dialogue between two enlightened people living in a communistic society…. I began to sweat with the effort to remain a brute and not to touch the button. In the hard light of the noonday Ellen looked hefty, robust and sexless like any farm-wench at work. She had come in straight from the veg-garden on her way to the showers. In moonlight, the fragrance of a girl's armpits is an aphrodisiac; in the morning it is a deterrent. Particularly when mixed with the smell of cobbler's glue. But then I also knew that if I brought this thing with Ellen to an end, within three days I would start running about like a rat poisoned with sex hormones. There is no escape from the feminine blackmail. Of course if I refused to be blackmailed Ellen would suffer the same privation. But the essential difference is that a sex-starved woman is compensated by a feeling of virtue and moral satisfaction, while the sex-starved male feels in addition ridiculous and humiliated….

Oh, the specious over-simplifications of enlightened theorists! Papa Marx and Uncle Engels made fun of the bourgeois family, but had nothing to propose instead; as for the Russians, they have established a code of Proletarian Morality compared to which our Victorian grandparents were wild libertines.

“Joseph …”

“Yes?”

“I would like to talk things over with you….”

Bang! There we go; there was no escape. And Ellen had started biting her nails—the short, square nails of a competent veg-gardener and responsible comrade. Well then, if we
must have it out, let's have it out; I put the shoe down and gave up pretending.

“
Tov
,” I said. “We will talk it over on condition that you stop biting your nails.”

She suddenly burst into tears.

“Why are you so beastly to me? At the beginning you were quite different.”

The trite stereotypy of the scene made me indeed feel beastly. It is another kind of chess: King's pawn four, Queen's pawn four—helpless, I knew beforehand the answer to everything she or I might say.

“‘The present pleasure,'” I quoted, “‘by revolution lowering, does become the opposite of itself.'”

“What's that?” Ellen asked, interrupting her snivels.

“‘Antony and Cleopatra,' my own translation. In the English original it doesn't sound much better either.”

“Oh please, Joseph, don't mock me,” she said, starting once more to bite her nails and crying helplessly.

And there it was—pity, the poisonous adhesive plaster, which one can't tear off without plucking one's own skin.

“I am not mocking,” I said. “The translation comes in by right. It is my night-job and half of my life. If we lived together in one room I couldn't work.”

“But why? If you can work with Max there, why not with me?”

“Max doesn't mind my leaving the light on and trampling up and down the room and going for a walk in the middle of the night; he turns to the wall and snores. But you wouldn't be able to sleep, and knowing that I am disturbing you, I couldn't work.”

I knew it sounded a laboured excuse though it was true; but only half the truth. The other half—that Max's presence in the room was a neutral one whereas hers would be a constant impingement, a saturation of the room's space which would make all privacy and work impossible; that, in short, I wanted at intervals the amenities of her body but not her
constant company—how on earth could one say this without horribly wounding a fellow-creature whom one likes and respects? So this “talking-things-over” must always remain a farce. Our enlightened three-quarter truths are sometimes worse than the Victorian half-truth. They frankly oppressed the flesh by the tyranny of sacramental consent; we grant it a certain autonomy but are still far from recognising its full, sovereign right of independence. And it is easier to rebel against tyranny than against an unctuous, hypocritically liberal compromise. It would be easier for me to refuse to marry Ellen if she were a conventional middle-class prude, than to deny her claims on intimate companionship beyond the purely sexual.

Ellen was sobbing and biting her nails in complete misery. “I promise I won't disturb you,” she sobbed. It was a promise as futile as humiliating to make; and this self-abasement of a proud and strapping girl made me ache inside and made the adhesive poison the more effective.

“Why,” I asked in despair, “why do you insist on a thing which we both know won't work?” But I knew that my arguments made no difference; and suddenly I had a suspicion.

“Or are you going to have a baby?”

She shook her head, and violently blew her nose.

“Look, Ellen. In the capitalistic world girls want to get married for reasons of prestige and economic security. Among us here there exists no such thing. Even if you have a baby it doesn't make the slightest difference whether we live in one room or not. Our huts are at a distance of twenty yards and we can see each other as often as we like. So why do you torture us both and spoil everything?”

Ellen swallowed hard to control her sobs, and started hiccup-ing instead. It was pathetic. With a small, timid voice, and looking the other way, she said between two hiccups:

“Don't you ever want to sleep with me—I mean really to sleep, all night, side by side, and wake up in the morning together?”

(That is precisely what I do not want.)

“But darling, of course, I want it very much. But don't you understand? …”

“
To grant the Crown Colonies of the Flesh full sovereignty and independence, as the Honorable Member for Ezra's Tower proposes, would inevitably lead to chaos and anarchy”—“Hear, hear
.”

“If we don't like it,” Ellen interrupted, “we can always separate again, can't we?”

“
The Crown Colonies of the Flesh have, however, the constitutional means to appeal against any alleged infringement of their rights and may be assured that a sympathetic hearing will be given to their case”—“Hear, hear
.”

“Well, you know, Ellen,” I said, “you know as well as I do that it isn't quite so easy to divorce here, although theoretically there is no obstacle. So far we have had only one case, and you remember all that hue and cry about poor Gaby's ‘unsocial behaviour' and ‘disruptive tendencies' because she got fed up with Max and went to live with Mendl….”

There was a silence; then abruptly Ellen jumped down from the bench. She had realised the futility and humiliating nature of our discussion.

“All right,” she said. “Save your arguments. Anyway, I know what, or who, is the cause of it all….”

I knew it too; but I didn't ask her, and she had the decency not to mention Dina. She walked out, slamming the door behind her.

Damn old Greenfeld.

Haven't seen Simeon the whole day.

Wednesday

The Assistant District Commissioner and his wife were here yesterday to pay us their annual visit. This time they came without the Major. Newton seemed to be impressed by what
we have made of the Place—which, when he saw it the first time a year ago, was just a fenced-off quadrangle in the desert. He didn't say much, only hummed and hawed in his absent-minded way that makes one think that he is always trying to work out some chess-problem (which he probably is), but nevertheless one could see that he was impressed. We took them over the fields, veg-garden, tree-nursery, laundry, etc. etc., and didn't miss a single chicken to show off with. I suppose he sees much the same thing in all the Settlements; it will take some time until we get accustomed to the idea that our cows and chickens are just like other cows and chickens, and stop boring visitors with our childish pride about each tomato we grow.

Looking across to Kfar Tabiyeh, Newton mentioned that they are going to assist next week at the great peacemaking ceremony which is to end the twenty-year-old blood feud between the families of the two Mukhtars. When I said that several of us are also invited to the ceremony, Mrs. Newton pulled a face as if we had been gate-crashing into the Club at Roonah. She looked more pinched than ever and seemed surprised that we had not been wiped out by the Arabs, and were still alive and kicking. According to custom they had lunch with us in the Dining Hut, and as usual the food was poor—onion soup and noodles with gravy. “Is that what you eat every day?” she asked, apparently implying that we had cooked a specially filthy lunch for them on purpose. Had we given them a rich meal she would have remarked afterwards on poor Arabs and guzzling Hebrews. To ease the tension I told them the story of Sir Arthur Wauchope's famous lunch at Khefziba. When Wauchope was appointed High Commissioner of Palestine, he paid a formal visit to Khefziba, one of the oldest Communes in the Valley of Jezreel. It was a rather ceremonious and political occasion, and the Khefziba people gave the new High Commissioner a princely meal. “Do you eat every day like this?” Wauchope asked; whereupon Lederer, the Secretary of Khefziba, said:

“Your Excellency, when we heard about your proposed visit we called a meeting to discuss whether you should eat as we eat every day, or whether we should eat as you eat every day; and we decided to adopt the latter course.”

Newton tittered. When we showed them the Children's House, Mrs. Newton said:

“Do you know to whom they belong?— I mean who the fathers are?”

There was a dreadful silence, poor Newton coughing and humming, and then Moshe said with a poker face:

“No, Madame. You know, we draw lots.”

“Oh, do you? How interesting,” said Mrs. Newton, whereupon several of our girls started to giggle and the unfortunate female went crimson. God, how she must hate us.

Simeon was invisible as long as the visit lasted.

Thursday

Worked all day in the shop, repairing shoes. Without the two sheets of leather from Gan Tamar half the Commune would have to run bare-foot in the coming rains. Repairing shoes is a very gratifying job, almost more so than making new ones. One has the surgeon's satisfaction in healing, without the risks; not even the oldest boot gets internal haemorrhage under my knife. I like the smell of fresh leather and of the glue; I always have to whistle when I drive the tags into a heel—it's a conditioned reflex. The work is never monotonous; there are no boring preliminary stages, as for instance in carpentry preparing the wood with sand-paper. The transformation under my hands of a mud-caked, punctured, twisted, wrinkled relic into a shining, re-born, as-good-as-new boot is quick and exhilarating; I feel like a benevolent magician.

There is no other trade which provides the same intense contentment. A patch on a suit is a blemish; hence repair-tailors are a meek, diffident race with a look of secret guilt in their eyes. Or, if you are a garage-mechanic, you are always liable to come up against some nasty hitch on a job; a big
rusty bolt which has got stuck somewhere where you can't get at it with the spanner, or a broken part for which there is no spare at hand. Hence garage-mechanics always look grumpy and reserved, and if asked how long the job will take they answer with wary and depressing you-never-can-tells; whereas I can always tell and have no fear of committing myself. My tags go in like a knife into butter and give me a sensation of effortless power. To cut a fresh leather sheet with a sharp knife following the curved contour of the heel gives me a clean, sensuous pleasure.

Take my opposite number, the hairdresser. He plays about with flimsy and futile embellishments on the top, whereas I provide the indispensable foundations for men walking the earth. Hence the hairdresser is a chatty, scatter-brained figaro, whereas the cobbler appears in all popular lore as a dignified and serene philosopher, full of contentment and benevolence. I can imagine myself at no other permanent manual task; the monotony of digging in a field would drive me crazy in a fortnight. I can't understand that the others don't all covet my job. But then Dasha and Moshe and Mendl and the other maniacs probably feel the same…. Why do people babble about the Red Scare, when it stands to reason that in a poor agrarian country nothing but a communal type of organisation can give a man sufficient scope to work only eight hours and to make his hobby his job?

Oh God, why can't I stay as I am? I was a fairly exacting chap, and yet, You see, here I have found peace—or as much peace as I am capable of holding. I have asked for much and yet, You see, I am content with little if given in the right way. I love these hills, and my day-job and my night-job; I am approved of and I approve; I like and am liked. Sometimes, lying on my back in the sun, I whisper the words of the Song: “and his banner over me was love….”

Oh, let me stay as I am. You have twice expelled us from the Land and driven us from Spain and turned us into a
race of eternal tramps; and however we try to disguise ourselves they smell us out and hold us up to derision in the nakedness of our flesh; now that the wheel is coming back full circle, with dry blood on each of its spokes, can't You make it stand still at last, at last …?

I seem to be getting hysterical. I thought there was not much selfishness in coming here to live as a cobbler in the barren hills of Galilee; and now according to Simeon it is pure egotism and escape.

I wish Dina were back and I could talk to her.

To-morrow our string quartet will give its first concert….

The peace-making ceremony in Kfar Tabiyeh was the most important event of its kind for many years in the district. Preparations for the great reconciliation meal had begun several days beforehand and a number of guests had been invited, among them a party of English people from Jerusalem, which was to include the wife of the Assistant Chief Commissioner, Lady Joyce Gordon-Smith.