Thieves in the Night (34 page)

At last she found the little mound and behind it the steep narrow hole leading to the vestibule. She pulled Salome's head down so that she could weigh the end of the reins with a stone, then, lying flat on her stomach, put her feet into the hole and let herself slide down. Down in the vestibule the smell was terrible—some Arab shepherds must have used the hole as a latrine. She groped nervously in the pockets of her shorts for the matches she had brought with her from the stable, broke one, lit the second, and found the candle stump which was always left lying about in the first burial-chamber. In the yellow light of the candle the cave looked friendlier, but her apprehensions had been correct: the sand on the ground of the passage was littered with dried excrement. Covering her nose and mouth with her free hand and stooping under the low ceiling, she descended the three stone steps to the lower vestibule. There were the three niches, and the middle one was Joshua the Ancestor's.

The bones were still there all right and the skull was still missing; no miracle had happened since her last visit. The bones lay in a disorderly heap on the damp sand of the narrow chamber. “Hallo, Ancestor,” Dina whispered, squatting on her heels. She scratched a little with her nails in the sand, in the exciting hope of finding a coin. But the chamber had been plundered God knew how many times and by whom: Roman Legionaries, Arab shepherds, Crusaders, Turks, until they had even pinched the Ancestor's head and strewn his bones about so that his left tibia lay upside-down across his ribs, like a ballet dancer's leg thrown up in a high kick. She wanted to replace the tibia in its proper position but couldn't get herself to touch it; and while she hesitated, her bust squeezed into the chamber, a trickle of liquid tallow dropped from
the candle, into the sand just beneath Joshua's pelvis and glinted there, an obscene jelly-blot. It was as if even the Ancestor derided her by spilling his semen under her face. She flinched, and as she hurriedly withdrew her body from the niche, knocked her head against the low rock ceiling.

Biting her nails and feeling sick, she scrambled out of the passage. She put the candle back into the first chamber of the upper vestibule and crawled out through the hole, lifting herself up by her elbows. Salome was patiently waiting for her outside the entrance, her head bent under the pull of the reins; but instead of the fresh night air for which she thirsted, there was once more only the hot, foul breath of the khamsin.

With trembling lips she mounted the horse and began her descent down the steep path. The moon was almost gone and the hills were no longer silver-smooth and aloof, but dark, hulking silhouettes. She dreaded riding once more through the wadi but there was no other way home. She wished Joseph or Reuben were here with her but they slept far away in their beds unaware of her doings. She said a prayer, forgetting even to be ashamed. At some distance in front of her rose two dark round hillocks, almost symmetrical, side by side; “the Giant's Buttocks” Moshe had once called them. She had thought it funny then, but now she saw the naked giant lying flat on his stomach, his hind-part lifted in monstrous blasphemy to the sky.

She had reached the wadi. This was the smooth end of it; she dug her heels into the tired horse's flanks until it broke into a jerky gallop. But they soon came to the narrow, twisted stretch choked with rubble where the horse could only advance step by step; and as they turned the corner she saw the Arab with the gaping teeth standing in the middle of the gorge; but this time there were two others behind him, waiting for her.

Having finished with this week's business in Haifa, Joseph early next morning took the autobus to Tel Aviv. He slept for most of the three hours' journey through the orange and lemon groves of the Maritime Plain of Samaria of which the strip along the coast was in Hebrew, the next, parallel inland belt in Arab possession. Whenever Joseph, waking, looked through the window, he saw not the landscape but an unprotected flank. When they arrived in Tel Aviv, the khamsin had just reached its peak.

Each time Joseph came to Tel Aviv he was torn between his contrasting emotions of tenderness and revulsion. Tenderness for the one and only purely Hebrew town in the world with the lyrical name of Hill of Spring and the jostling vitality of its hundred and fifty thousand citizens; revulsion from the dreadful mess they had made of it. It was a frantic, touching, maddening city which gripped the traveller by his buttonhole as soon as he entered it, tugged and dragged him round like a whirlpool, and left him after a few days faint and limp, not knowing whether he should love or hate it, laugh or scorn.

The whole adventure had started less than a generation ago, when the handful of native Jewish families in Arab Jaffa decided to build a residential suburb of their own, on what they imagined to be modern European lines. Accordingly they left the molehill of the Arab port with its labyrinthine bazaars, exotic smells and furtive daggers, and started building on the yellow sand of the Mediterranean dunes the city of their dreams: an exact imitation of the ghetto suburbs of Warsaw, Cracow and Lodz. There was a main street named after Dr. Herzl with two rows of exquisitely ugly houses each of which gave the impression of an orphanage or Police barracks, covered for beauty with pink, green and lemon-coloured stucco which after the first rains looked as if the house had contracted
smallpox or measles. There was also a multitude of dingy shops, most of which sold lemonade, buttons and flypaper.

In the early nineteen-twenties, with the beginnings of Zionist colonisation, the town had begun to spread with increasing speed along the beach. It grew in hectic jumps according to each new wave of immigration—an inland tide of asphalt and concrete advancing over the dunes. There was no time for planning and no willingness; growth was feverish and anarchic like that of tropical weeds. Each newcomer who had brought his savings started to build the house of his dream; and woe to the municipal authority who tried to interfere. Was this the promised land or not? For a decade or so, while the Eastern European element predominated among the immigrants, the source of inspiration of all these petrified day-dreams remained the stone-warren of the Polish small town. The Hill of Spring became a maze of stucco, with rusty iron railings along narrow-chested balconies and an Ionic plaster-column or Roman portico for embellishment.

However, life in Tel Aviv in those early days owed its peculiar character not to the people who had houses built, but to the workers who built them. The first Hebrew city was a pioneer city dominated by young workers of both sexes in their teens and twenties. The streets belonged to them; khaki shirts, shorts and dark sun-glasses were the fashionable wear, and ties, nicknamed “herrings”, a rarity. In the evening, when the cool breeze from the sea relieved the white glare of the day, they walked arm in arm over the hot asphalt of the new avenues through whose chinks the yellow sand oozed up and which ended abruptly in the dunes. At night, they built bonfires and danced the horra on the beach, and at least once a week they dragged pompous Mayor Dizengoff or old Chief Rabbi Hertz out of their beds and took them down to the sea to dance with them. They were hard-working, sentimental and gay. They were carried by a wave of enthusiasm which had a crest and no trough. They were touchy only on one point, the Hebrew language. They fought a violent and victorious battle
against the use in public of any other tongue; the slogan “Hebrews talk Hebrew” was everywhere—on buses, shops, restaurants, hoarding-posts; speakers from abroad who tried to address a meeting in Polish, German or Yiddish were howled down or beaten up. There were few cafés in those days but many workers' clubs; the cheap cafés sold meals on credit and got their supplies on credit; landlords let rooms on credit in their houses which were built on credit; and yet the town, instead of collapsing into the sand on which it was built, waxed and grew….

—Ah, those were the good old times, the legendary days of ten years ago! As Joseph walked through the noisy crowd in Eliezer Ben Yehuda Street, of the two emotions battling in his chest revulsion got the upper hand. This cheap and lurid Levantine fair had ceased to be the pioneer town he had known and loved. One noisy café followed the other with flashy decorations, dance-parquets and microphones and blaring loud-speakers through which crooners from the suburbs of Bucharest and aged artistes from Salonica poured out their Hebrew imitations of American imitations of Cuban serenades. There were beauty parlours and antique shops and interior-decoration shops; and in the harsh white blaze of the sun it all looked like a noontide spook—the oppressive dream of a sybarite who has overeaten at lunch. This was the newest quarter of the town, built since the recent immigration from Germany and Central Europe had started, and the stucco-idyll of the older parts had been defeated by the aggressive cubism of the functional style. The houses here looked like rows of battleships in concrete; they had flat oval terraces with parapets jutting out like conning towers, and they all seemed to shoot at each other. The streets had no skyline and no perspective; the eye jumped restlessly along the jagged, disconnected contours without ever coming to rest.

Last week Joseph had run into Matthews, and Matthews had asked him for luncheon to-day at the Café Champignon on the beach. As Joseph crossed the over-crowded terrace in the noise
of the orchestra playing the “Merry Widow”, people turned their heads to look at him; he was the only person here in the traditional Commune dress. He felt a sudden homesickness for Ezra's Tower; it seemed to him that he had left it not two days, but weeks ago.

Seated at a table near the railing, overlooking the sea, he saw Matthews, who was arguing with a waiter. Joseph felt a sudden relief at the sight of the heavy-jawed face with the squashed boxer's nose—it was so obviously gentile in these sharp-featured semitic surroundings.

“Listen,” Matthews was explaining to the waiter as Joseph sat down, “I've ordered a bottle of Chablis. This is syrup.”

The waiter, dressed in a white jacket whose sleeves were too short for him, lifted his shoulders. “But please—it is written on the bottle: Chablis.”

“It is muck,” said Matthews. “Taste it.”

“But please: here it is written on the bottle. Perhaps it should be sweet—I don't know. I have been a teacher before in Kovno, Lithuania.”

“Taste it,” said Matthews.

“But I don't drink—ulcers, sir, please.”

“Then take this away and get me some beer.”

“We have no beer, please, only wine.”

“Then call the manager.”

“But the manager is busy.”

“Listen,” said Matthews. “How would you like it if I bashed this bottle on your head?”

The waiter looked at him doubtfully, lifted his shoulders, and carried the bottle away. A minute later he returned with two jugs of iced beer, smiling all over his crumpled face.

“Well, how do you like Tel Aviv?” asked Joseph.

Matthews took a deep draught and put his glass down, sighing with contentment. “Swell,” he said. “If you were allowed to punch somebody's nose once a day, it would be the swellest city with the swellest people in the world.”

“Particularly the waiters,” said Joseph.

“Maybe the poor guy was really a teacher in Kovno, Lithuania, and got his ulcers in a concentration camp.”

Joseph looked round the terrace and sighed. The khamsin lay on people's faces like a spasm. The women were plump, heavy-chested, badly and expensively dressed. The men sat with sloping shoulders and hollow chests, thinking of their ulcers. Each couple looked as if they were carrying on a quarrel under cover of the “Merry Widow”.

“I can't blame the gentiles if they dislike us,” he said.

“That proves you are a patriot,” said Matthews. “Since the days of your prophets, self-hatred has been the Jewish form of patriotism.”

Joseph wiped his face. The khamsin was telling on him. He felt sick of it all: Judaism, Hebraism, the whole cramped effort to make something revive which had been dead for two thousand years.

“It is all very well for you to talk as a benevolent outsider,” he said. “The fact is, we are a sick race. Tradition, form, style, have all gone overboard. We are a people with a history but no background…. Look around you, and you'll see the heritage of the ghetto. It is there in the wheedling lilt of the women's voices, and in the way the men hold themselves, with that frozen shrug about their shoulders.”

“I guess that shrug was their only defence. Otherwise the whole race would have gone crackers.”

“I know. That's what I keep repeating to myself. But sometimes one gets fed-up and wants to run away to a country with a moderate climate and moderate people, who don't live in absolutes. Here even the sky conforms to the all-or-nothing law: nine months of scorching sun without a drop of rain, and three months of deluge….”

He leant back and drank some beer. “This is nice.” he said. “Reminds me of a certain country pub back home. It was dim and smoky and the men said one word each in half an hour.”

“It's always the same story,” said Matthews. “If you are a dumb ox you want to be a chatty parrot. If you are a parrot,
you wish you were a dignified ox. Drink your beer and take it easy with your Dostoevski.”

Joseph drained his glass, smiling. “Of course,” he said, “the crowd at a dog race at home isn't a much prettier sight than this one. But the flaws in other races are diluted, while with us you get them in concentration. It's the long inbreeding, I suppose. They called us the salt of the earth—but if you heap all the salt on one plate it doesn't make a palatable dish. Sometimes I think that the Dead Sea is the perfect symbol for us. It is the only big inland lake under sea level, stagnant, with no outlet, much denser than normal water with its concentrated minerals and biting alkaloids; over-salted, over-spiced, saturated …”

“They extract a lot of useful chemicals from it,” said Matthews.