Thieves in the Night (3 page)

There was an interlude of a few minutes which gave the orderlies time to finish their preparations. The long deal tables became a more cheerful sight as they were covered with bowls of salad, heaps of thick-sliced bread, stone mugs, bakelite plates and cutlery. The first people arrived at a quarter to three, and a few minutes later the hundred and fifty men and women who were to leave with the convoy had occupied their seats.

There were eight seats to each table, four on each of the wooden forms alongside; according to custom they were filled up in order of arrival from the kitchen end of the hall towards the entrance, without preference to place or company; a custom which eased the work of the orderlies and at the same time served as a kind of social cement-mixer, reshuffling the members of the Commune three times a day.

This, however, was an unusual crowd: the twenty-five young people who were to become the future settlers of Ezra's Tower, and the hundred and twenty Helpers who were to assist them in erecting the fortified camp before sunset, and to return by the end of the first day. The Helpers were volunteers who had come from the older Communes of Judaea, the Samarian coast, the Valley of Jezreel and Upper Galilee; most of them were well known, and some quite legendary figures of the early pioneer days. The new settlers, among their silent and hard-eating elders, felt awe-stricken like debutantes. Though theoretically they were the centre of the show, they had shrunk to timid insignificance; they sat on the deal forms jammed between the massive Helpers who paid little attention to them—too excited to eat and with a vague nervous feeling of
being cheated out of the pathos and solemnity of this nocturnal hour to which they had looked forward through months and years.

Dina, to her delight, found herself placed next to old Wabash from K'vuzah Dagánia, oldest of the Hebrew Communes. Dagánia stood in the Jordan Valley at the southern tip of the Lake of Tiberias. It had been founded in 1911 by ten boys and two girls from Romni in Poland, who had decided to put theory into practice and embarked on the first experiment in rural communism. They shared everything—earnings, food, clothes, the Arab mud huts which were their first living quarters, the mosquitoes and bugs, the night-watches against Beduins and robbers, malaria, typhoid and sand-fly fever; everything except their beds, for, true to romantic tradition, they lived for a number of years in self-imposed chastity. They refused to employ hired labour, to handle money except in their dealings with the outside world, and even to mark their shirts before they went to the communal laundry for fear that the bug of individual possessiveness might start breeding in them. They regarded themselves as the spiritual heirs of the Essenes, who, fleeing from the shallow glamour of Jerusalem, had founded in the desert their communities based on the sharing of labour and its fruits. They had studied the Bible, Marx and Herzl, and knew neither how to plant a tree nor how to milk a cow. The Arabs thought they were madmen, and the old Jewish planters in Judaea thought the Commune of the Twelve a bad joke and a heresy. Yet to-day Dagánia's third generation was being brought up in the communal nurseries on the same mad Essene principles, while more than a hundred other Hebrew communal villages had spread all over the country, from the Mediterranean to the Dead Sea and from Dan to Beersheba. Some, like Yagur and Herod's Well, had over a thousand members, and some only fifty; the older ones were prosperous, with parks, swimming-pools and amphitheatres, and the new ones poor, hard-living, squalid and ugly. Some did mixed farming, others specialised in exotic
fruit or artificial fishponds; but all of them had the same basic features: the communal dining-hall, workshops and children's house; the prohibition of hired labour; the abolition of money, barter and private property; the sharing of the work according to everyone's capacity and of its produce according to his, needs.

Dagánia, which the twelve founders had named with self-conscious under-statement after the modest blue cornflower of the Jordan Valley, was their common ancestor; its members were regarded as a kind of collective aristocracy; and with its giant palm trees and shaded valleys the ancient Commune of the Twelve had indeed an air of exclusiveness and patrician prosperity.

Old Wabash, sitting next to Dina and paying no attention to her, looked in her opinion exactly like an oil print of a biblical patriarch. His white, frizzled beard grew all round his face and even out of his nostrils and ears. He had blue eyes and wore a blue, open-necked cotton shirt and brown corduroy trousers, held up by a worn leather belt around his voluminous stomach. He ate his porridge with great application, and as the beard got in his way he kept tucking it back absentmindedly into his shirt. Dina felt thrilled by her close contact with one of the three survivors of the legendary Twelve. As he paid no attention to her, she nudged him after a while with her elbow:

“Comrade Wabash? I wonder what you are thinking about.”

He turned to her in mild surprise, his spoon suspended in the air.

“Thinking, my dear?”

Joseph, who sat opposite Dina, drew his intelligent monkey face into a grimace. At this moment she disliked Joseph. She laid her hand on Wabash's arm.

“It was kind of you to come and help us, Comrade Wabash.”

He again turned to her and she couldn't help noticing that his eyes were watery and that his round, childish face looked rather weak and insignificant if one imagined the beard away.
It was Joseph's stare that always made her realise such things; that was why she disliked him sometimes.

“So you are one of the new pioneers, my dear?” old Wabash said. “Good, very good. The youth carries on. You will continue the work that we began….”

Dina wished she had never spoken to old Wabash. She avoided looking in Joseph's direction and concentrated on picking out the olives in her salad-bowl. But old Wabash, having finished his porridge, became talkative. He spoke in a mild, rabbinical voice, his Hebrew betraying a strong Yiddish accent, of the national renaissance and socialist ideal, the joy of rebuilding the twice-promised land and the tragedy of the unredeemed millions in exile. He dwelt repeatedly and sorrowfully on the “masses” and the “millions” and seemed to derive a grievous satisfaction from words like “tragedy” and “persecution.” But as they came mildly spouting out from among the oil-print curls of the white beard, those words seemed to Dina to lose all reality and meaning, to have no connection with that ulcerous tissue of her memory, the thing to forget.

At last a sharp whistle signalled that the lorries were ready, and caused a great shuffling of boots as they all rose simultaneously from the tables. Dina walked in the crowd towards the door, leaving old Wabash without a word. In the centre passage Joseph caught up with her; she looked as if she were going to cry.

“The trouble was,” he said to her with a grin, “that he had to keep on saying ‘milliohnim, milliohnim.' Has it occurred to you that there is no word in Hebrew for million? Thousand is the highest figure we can name. Hence he had to use the modern numeral with the old Hebrew plural; that is what makes it so jarring. We should banish the millions from our vocabulary. Thousand is the upper limit of the imaginable; above that one enters the sphere of abstractions.”

They had been carried out by the crowd through the open door into the darkness, and waited with the others for their turn to embark. The trucks drove up one after another, their
blinding headlights full on, took their load of passengers and jogged off on the bumpy road, across the sleeping settlement and out through the open gate. Each truck, as it departed, made the darkness appear vaster and deeper. As they stood waiting for their turn, they felt the cool morning breeze from the sea and the insistent silence of the starry sky.

Next to Dina stood Simeon. He stood still, as if to attention, wrapped in his loneliness as in a scarf. She laid her hand on his arm:

“Let's all climb on top of a truck. It will be lovely to travel on the top….”

It was just past 3 A.M. when the last truck of the convoy set out for the distant hill basking in the starlight, undisturbed for the last thousand years, which was to become the Commune of Ezra's Tower.

The Mukhtar of Kfar Tabiyeh was the only man in the village who slept in pyjamas. The other Mukhtar, who lived at the other end of the village, slept in his clothes on a mat, Beduin fashion.

At 6.30 A.M. the Mukhtar was woken by Issa, his eldest son. Issa had been standing for quite a while next to the bed not daring to touch his father; his close-set, slightly squinting eyes in the pale, pock-marked face were anxiously fixed on the enormous bulk in the blue-and-yellow striped pyjamas. The Mukhtar had thrown the blanket off in his sleep; his crumpled pyjama-jacket had slipped upward, revealing a strip of brownish skin covered with black fluff just above the navel. Issa averted his eyes from his father's nakedness. He held a small cup of bitter coffee in his hand which would soon get cold and thus lead to violent unpleasantness. His eyes shifted nervously round the whitewashed room, bare except for the bed, the straw mat, some low wicker stools and a fly-paper hanging from
the ceiling. The wall opposite the bed was adorned with a coloured paper fan and portrait prints of General Allenby and of a smirking person in striped trousers with a carnation in his buttonhole, who looked like a ladies' hairdresser from Leeds and at closer scrutiny proved to be Mr. Neville Chamberlain. The portraits were each decorated with a bunch of dry cornflower stalks as a token of the Mukhtar's loyalty, and a chain of blue glass beads to protect Mr. Chamberlain against the Evil Eye.

The coffee was getting cold. Issa cleared his throat. “Father,” he called. “Welcome, Father.”

The Mukhtar woke at once, and with one sudden heave got himself into an erect sitting position.

“Welcome twice,” he said, reaching for the coffee. He knew that they would not dare to wake him without urgent reason and waited to be told, his heavy bloodshot eyes on his son's insipid face, gulping the bitter coffee with noisy sips.

“Father, they have occupied the Hill of Dogs,” said Issa. Hill of Dogs was the name by which the villagers of Kfar Tabiyeh called the Place, derived from some old legendary event which they had forgotten.

The Mukhtar heaved himself out of bed, ignored the slippers which his son held out for him and, barefooted, walked out to the balcony. The sun had risen about an hour ago, and already the air was hot. He leaned heavily with his palms on the parapet of red bricks which, with gaps left between each adjoining pair, made a kind of horizontal lattice. Beyond the Mukhtar's house there were only a few clay huts which formed the outposts of the village, then the sparsely terraced slope down to the valley. The valley was arid and stony with a few patches of black, ploughed-up earth; on its further side rose the equally arid Hill of Dogs. The top of the hill seemed to swarm with tiny black crawling figures. In the midst of that busy antheap something like a vertical match-stick could be made out: the watch-tower.

With slow, deliberate chewing movements the Mukhtar
gathered the saliva in his mouth, masticated it and spat over the parapet. He cursed softly and savagely under his breath, then turned to Issa:

“Why are you standing about, you pock-marked mule? Get my war glass.”

The youth jumped and returned a moment later with a heavy and impressive telescope of brass. It was a relic of the Turkish Army, in which the Mukhtar had fought as an officer against General Allenby's forces in the first world war. He adjusted the glass and the Hill of Dogs jumped from a distance of two miles to one of two hundred yards. The panelled frame of the watch-tower, now visible in detail, dominated the scene; on its top one could see the cyclopean reflector-eye which at night would blink its messages to the intruders' confederates, defiling the peaceful darkness of the hills. Around the tower there were the messy beginnings of a camp with tangled barbed wire, trenches and dug-outs, several tents and the first wall of a pre-fabricated wooden hut in the process of erection. And all around bustling figures, digging, hammering and running about in undignified, alien hurry in their loathsome clothes, bareheaded in open shirts; and their loathsome shameless women with naked bulging calves and thighs, and nipples bursting through tight shirts—whores, harlots, bitches and daughters of bitches….

The Mukhtar let the glass sink. His face had become a greyish yellow, as in an attack of malaria, and his eyes were bloodshot. His stomach almost turned over at the thought that henceforth every morning when he got up the first thing to meet his eyes would be this abomination, this defilement, this brazen challenge of the intruders. Dogs on the Hill of Dogs, dropping their filth, wallowing in it, building their citadel of filth…. It was finished. The whole landscape was spoilt. Never again would he, the Mukhtar of Kfar Tabiyeh, be allowed to enjoy the use of his own balcony. His eyes would no longer rest in peace on God's creation, watch the fellaheen in the valley walking behind their wooden ploughs in dignified
leisure, watch the sheep flocking over the slopes—they would be drawn to that one spot in which the whole landscape had become focused, that poisoned fountain of evil, the well of blasphemy and temptation….

From inside the house he heard the slow clop-clop of the old man's stick on the stone floor. Issa, who had also heard it, quickly brought his father's clothes. The Mukhtar got into his long wide skirts, pulled the striped vest over his pyjamas, wrapped the kefiyeh round his head, lifted the coiled agál with both hands into the air like a crown and adjusted it on top of the kefiyeh. He had just finished dressing when the old man, stick in front, emerged on the balcony. Disregarding his son's and grandson's greetings, he advanced with small firm steps to the parapet, rested his stick on its top and lifted his blind face towards the hills. “Where?” he asked with a curt, commanding bellow. His sparse white goat's-beard stuck out in front, and his bony nose with the hawk's bend seemed to sniff the air for the smell of the intruders.