Thieves in the Night (20 page)

“
Tov, tov
,” said Moshe. “Whether it's a double-decker conceit or simple arrogance is all the same to me.”

Having said his evening prayers and put on his blue-and-yellow striped pyjamas, the Hamdan Mukhtar voluptuously stretched his huge body in his bed. It was the first time for many years that he had gone to bed without the shadow of danger hovering over his dreams. He was too excited to go to sleep at once, and after a while called for Issa. Issa came in, his abaye hurriedly thrown over his underclothes.

“Well, son,” said the Mukhtar with unusual geniality, “thanks to God it was a great day.”

“Yes, Father,” said Issa.

“With God's help there will be peace in the village now for ever,” said the Mukhtar.

“So help us God,” said Issa.

“Did it hit your eyes that the English and the Hebrews did not speak together?” the Mukhtar asked thoughtfully. “There must be something behind this. And Henderson effendi made a certain remark …”

“What did he say, Father?”

The Mukhtar looked at the pock-marked face of his son and didn't like it. But he had to talk to somebody.

“He made a remark about the Dogs' Hill. He said it was not certain that there would be more settlers coming to live there. He did not say anything clearly. Henderson effendi always talks in riddles.”

“What does it mean, Father?”

“I don't know,” said the Mukhtar. “But it is certain that they did not talk together. They are like cats and dogs, thank God….” He laughed to himself, and added:

“If there are cats and dogs, what else is there? This is also a riddle, son.”

“I don't know,” said Issa.

“The stick,” said the Mukhtar. He laughed to himself and would have liked Issa to laugh with him. But Issa only gave a sour smile, and the Mukhtar stopped laughing. “The stick,” he repeated. “The stick beats both, the cat and the dog.”

“Yes, Father,” said Issa.

Outside in the hills, the moon was just rising over Ezra's Tower; the big, peaceful, orange-coloured moon of Galilee.

Pages from the chronicle of Joseph, a member of the Commune of Ezra's Tower

Sunday
, November … 1938

Since last week our population has almost doubled. Ezra's Tower now counts 77 souls: 41 old settlers (including the five children), plus 11 newcomers who are to become permanent members of the Commune, plus 25 boys and girls who are to spend here six months of their vocational training.

The whole of last week was simply bedlam. All the sweet peace and routine wrecked, shattered, blown to smithereens. Oh our salad days, legendary days, days of youth and innocence.

The eleven new settlers were the first to arrive. They came on Tuesday. All we knew about them was that they were a mixed bag—Germans, Poles, Rumanians, and even an Egyptian—whom our Colonisation Department was to dump or rather graft on us, as a first instalment of further grafts which, within a year or two, should bring us up to our full establishment of two hundred adult workers. We further knew that they had only recently arrived in the country and were refugees—as distinct from us who, with the exception of Dina and Simeon, had all come before persecution in Europe had started in earnest and more or less out of our own free choice. Finally we knew that they were seven men and four girls, all
unmarried so far, and our bachelors of both sexes were looking forward to their arrival with ill-concealed expectations. Particularly Gaby, our red-haired Viennese Messalina who, having a year ago left Max for Mendl, has now left Mendl too—(who, however, does not seem to care much, dividing all his time between the tractor and the string quartet).

Anyway, we rigged up our three disused tents from the early days, put up a streamer with “BLESSED BE HE WHO COMES” across the gate in the fence, and hoped for the best. They came from Tel Aviv in a truck and arrived during the midday break; so all of us except those working out in the fields lined up at the gate to welcome these newcomers with whom, for all we know, we are going to spend the rest of our lives.

As the big lorry jolted up the dirt-track with the eleven settlers standing upright in a bunch, and their bundles and possessions piled up messily around them, my first impression was that of a transport of survivors from a fire or earthquake who had saved whatever came first to their hands; there were mattresses, saucepans, a cuckoo-clock, a granny-armchair, a bicycle and even a bird-cage. But they were singing full blast “
El yivneh ha-galil
” and that improved things a little; though, as the lorry turned in through the gate, we all stared at them silently and dumbly, like an assembly of village yokels at the arrival of the summer guests. I too felt paralysed, and for a second I saw in a frightening flash our own crowd of heavy, slow-moving men and women, mute, wary and backwoodish as we had become during this first long hard year…. But then we began running alongside the lorry, escorting it to the Square, waving and shouting, and the spell was broken. The lorry stopped in front of the Tower and the new ones jumped down and started singing the anthem, standing nicely to attention; so we did the same, joining in. We hadn't sung the anthem for God knows how long, and it was all rather solemn. In the middle of it one of the new girls began to cry; she is very fat with a round pudding-face, and she went on singing the refrain with the tears streaming down her face:

Not yet dead is our hope, the ancient hope

To return to our Land, the ancient Land,

To return to our town, the town which David built….

The second face which caught my eyes was the Egyptian's. He is swarthy to the point of being quite a Coloured Hebrew Gentleman, with the bluish-white eyeballs and the rubbery loose-jointed limbs of a negro step-dancer. He stood to attention in complete stillness of body—one of the things that Jews as a rule are unable to do—with even his pupils immobilised; they were turned upward, fixed on the topmost point of the Tower. The third one I noticed was a lean and gauche young man, the typical German Akademiker and future Dr. Phil. (subject: Neo-Kantianism). He had jerked to attention over-eagerly with all his muscles cramped and now stood looking as if his bones had been broken and re-set in the wrong way, trying to readjust them by little fidgets. I made a vow not to dislike him and had already broken it at the end of the first verse. Meanwhile Gaby's eyes had begun melting at the Egyptian (she seems to be capable of having an orgasm in her pupils), while Sarah's pinched little bird-face assumed that expression of primly indignant refusal which always comes over it when a man appeals to her starved senses. While we went on singing it occurred to me that, while with nine out of ten men Gaby would win hands down, in the case of the Egyptian boy it was just possible that the first impact of Ad-lerian psychotherapy would lay him out and make him forsake Gaby's more obvious charms. Then my eyes fell on Moshe, standing opposite me and singing full blast, while his gaze wandered with an experienced pawnbroker's appraisal over the goods and chattels heaped on the truck, which from to-morrow will enrich our Communal stores.

When the anthem was over we all flocked into the dining-hut, and the process of making friends with the new ones began. Max took the fat girl under his protection, his tapir-nose was fairly sniffing at her while he talked with great agitation (probably about the necessity of fostering Arab Trade
Unions). She listened, obviously not understanding a word and admiring him with her good big cow-eyes. Ellen was engaged in a serious and measured conversation with the Dr. Phil., now and then looking at me from the comer of her eyes. Dina took no part in the thawing-up proceedings. Contact with new arrivals from Europe always has a bad effect on her. She sat on the furthermost end of a bench, spooning her soup with a listless, withdrawn air. Since she is back from hospital the blue shadows under her eyes have deepened and she looks lovelier than ever.

On the whole we were doing our best; and yet it will be a long time until we make the new ones feel at home, and until we ourselves accept them. And even then, I feel, there will always remain a difference—hardly perceptible, unavowed, and yet implied in all relations. There will be memories of the early days which they do not share, allusions and jokes from which they will feel left out. They will always regard us as old-timers, the
Mayflower
-aristocracy of the place; and so shall we ourselves, in the secrecy of our hearts. (And, when all is said, we
have
built this place out of the wilderness, or haven't we?) But when the next graft arrives they will look up to both the older groups with awe and respect, unable to distinguish between them;—like the last arrival in the doctor's waiting-room who, unaware of the hierarchy previously established, lumps together all those present into one category of “those who were here before”.

This little patrician arrogance will remain lingering about us and in due time we, the original seven-and-thirty, will become, as in Dagánia, Khefziba and Kfar Gileadi, a bunch of picturesque elders, with pipes and gout and prophetic beards—respected, legendary, and rather tiresome…. That is, those of us who live to see the day.

Later

The advent of the youth-group was less inspiring. To tell the truth, rather depressing.

It is not the first time that I have felt frightened by our new generation. These twenty-five adolescents of both sexes are fairly typical; they are all Sabras—born and educated in the country; they are all between sixteen and nineteen. The larger part of them are sons and daughters of farmers from Petakh Tikwa, Rosh Pina, Metullah and other villages of the old type, founded before the time of the Communes. The others come from the towns. School and the youth-movement brought them together and they formed a group with the aim of founding a Commune of their own. They will spend six months of their vocational training with us, and will be settled in about a year's time, on land promised to them by the National Fund in the Eastern part of the Valley of Jezreel, somewhere near Beisan. The group counts in all about a hundred and fifty youngsters who have been split up into smaller units for the period of their training.

So far so good. It is a good sign that many among the native youth want to go in for Communal life. This choice is of course made easier for them by our propaganda in the schools—our teachers are all Labour or I.L.P., and the Teachers' Trade Union sees to it that no right-wing heretics creep into the flock. With that too I agree—all education is propaganda for one way of life or the other; so why not propagate the way in which we believe? And yet, there is already a difference between us, who came from abroad groping for a new form of social and national existence, an experimental Order or Fraternity such as has never been tried before—and them, who slip into a ready-made form, guided by their elders. For us, the choice involved a revolutionary negation of our past—for them, it is an act of conformism.

That, however, would not matter so much. When a nebulous experiment solidifies into an institution, that only proves that it has succeeded. We do not want romantics and permanent upheavals. We want a stable pattern of life for our people. And if the new generation accepts the pattern which we evolved, there should be nothing but rejoicing.

And yet something inside myself, perhaps my innate scepticism, tells me that all this is too good to be true. The snag is not in the institution, but in the human quality of the new generation. I have watched them ever since they arrived—these stumpy, dumpy girls with their rather coarse features, big buttocks and heavy breasts, physically precocious, mentally retarded, over-ripe and immature at the same time; and these raw, arse-slapping youngsters, callow, dumb and heavy, with their aggressive laughter and unmodulated voices, without traditions, manners, form, style….

Their parents were the most cosmopolitan race of the earth—they are provincial and chauvinistic. Their parents were sensitive bundles of nerves with awkward bodies—
their
nerves are whip-cords and their bodies those of a horde of Hebrew Tarzans roaming in the hills of Galilee. Their parents were intense, intent, over-strung, over-spiced—they are tasteless, spiceless, unleavened and tough. Their parents were notoriously polyglot—they have been brought up in one language which had been hibernating for twenty centuries before being brought artificially back to life….

There, in the language, is the main rub. The revival of Hebrew from its holy petrifaction to serve again as the living tongue of a nation was a fantastic achievement. But this miracle involves a heavy sacrifice. Our children are brought up in a language which has not developed since the beginnings of the Christian era. It has no records, no memories, hardly any trace of what happened to mankind since the destruction of the Temple. Imagine the development of English having stopped with “Beowulf”—and even “Beowulf” is a thousand years nearer to us! Our Classics are the books of the Old Testament; our lyrics stopped with the Song of Songs, our short stories with Job. Since then—a millennial blank….

To talk in an archaic idiom has of course its charms. We travel in a bus and offer a cigarette to a neighbour: “Perchance my lord desires to make smoke?”— “No, thanks. To make smoke finds no favour in my eyes.”

But we are no longer conscious of this quaintness of our speech; where all walk on stilts nobody will stop to wonder. And so this young generation is brought up in a language which suffers from loss of memory; with only the sketchiest knowledge of world literature and European history, and only a very dim idea of what everything was about since the day when the Ninth Legion under Titus captured David's Citadel. They speak no European language except a little English on the Berlitz-school level; the not too numerous and not too competent translations of world classics strike no chords in them; the humanistic hormones of the mind are absent, no Latin or Greek being taught in our schools. As against this, they know all about fertilisers and irrigation and rotation of crops; they know the names of birds and plants and flowers; they know how to shoot, and fear neither Arab nor devil.