Thieves in the Night (46 page)

Reuben smiled. “If I am not mistaken, I once heard you rave against the ‘curse of knowingness' on our race. And there was a time when you admired Bauman's terrorists who refuse to see the other side of the medal.”

Joseph looked at him, rather taken aback for a second. “What a snake in the grass you are,” he said. “In fact there is no contradiction—except the old one that you have to use your fist to protect your block in which the thinking takes place; which paradox is not of my making but inherent in the human condition and particularly noticeable in a moral ice age. You pacifists have always to drop your principles in an emergency because you refuse to acknowledge that basic antinomy of nature. Keep your gun oiled and your mirror clean. There is no contradiction in that.”

“Well, well,” said Reuben, rising to his feet. “I liked your parable better…. I must be getting back. Come along,
Moshe is waiting with the accounts. He wants to kiss you for getting the cash advance from the Co-operative. That certainly was a triumph of your articulateness….”

Joseph sighed, but got to his feet obediently. They walked back together, discussing the preparations for the evening. Joseph had decided to go out with the settlers' convoy to the new Place to-night and come back with the returning lorries the next day. Reuben, too, would have liked to go, but he had a meeting of the Education Committee on the Shabbath morning. Joseph pitied him.

“I wonder whether we shall ever grow out of this meetingitis,” he said. “It's the measles of democracy.”

“But harmless,” said Reuben. “Fascist pox isn't.”

Joseph, for a change, agreed. Amicable, they discussed the location of the new cowshed and the extensions to the children's house, which had become too small for its thirty-seven inmates—and, with Joseph's daughter, thirty-eight.

As a send-off for the advance party of the new settlers, a special meal had been prepared in the dining-hut. The tables had been put together to form a long double horseshoe covered with a white tablecloth and decorated with flowers; the hut was transformed into a solemn banqueting-hall. This happened only three or four times a year, on the eve of Passover, on New Year's Day, at the Feasts of the Maccabeans and of the Planting of Trees. In the monotony of communal routine the white, glittering tables and the festive atmosphere were highlights of the season whose memory lingered on for weeks.

The advance party consisted of only twelve people—eleven boys, and one girl called Rachel who seemed to play an important role among them. She was very short, under five feet, with short-cropped black hair, quick movements, and such a high-voltage charge about her dominating little person that
one was afraid to touch her lest one get an electric shock. She came from Rumania, and her boy friend, who was secretary of the group, from Germany. His name was Theo; he was blond and tall, with an awkward stoop, timid and slow in gesture. He was obviously the ideal type for a communal secretary, a lightweight junior edition of Reuben; what he lacked in vitality Rachel would supply. The two of them sat together at the top part of the banqueting-table between Moshe and old Wabash, who never missed an opportunity to be present at the founding of a new settlement.

There were few Helpers this time and only a small advance party, partly because the Arabs had been calmed by the White Paper, and had left the rioting for a change to the Jews, and mainly because the advance party was for some time to live in an abandoned Arab house which stood on the site of the future Settlement and would give them reasonable protection while they prepared the ground for the main group, to follow a few weeks later. The Settlement was to be called Tel Joshua, or Joshua's Hill; it was to be built on a hill at twelve miles' distance from Ezra's Tower and to serve as a strategic link between the Upper Galilean Communes and the Valley of Jezreel. The land had been bought by the National Fund a few years ago but had been thought unfit for colonisation as it had no water, which had to be carried on donkeys from a place four miles away. This group of fifty young people, recent arrivals from Germany and Rumania, still at the bottom of the queue for land, had applied for Joshua's barren hill, and after a long struggle with the Hebrew Colonisation Department, had got their way. They had left Europe much later than the crowd of Ezra's Tower, and their load of Things to Forget was accordingly heavier and more lurid in detail. Half of them had arrived without a visa; they were illegal immigrants with faked papers, liable to be deported if caught. They did not care how long they had to bore until they found water, nor about the malaria rate; these were trifles compared with the things they had experienced where they came from. They were hungry for
land, hungry for stability, hungry for the smell of cattle-sheds, of donkeys and horses; hungry above all for a life that made sense, sustained by the warmth of a fraternity where every boy and girl had been tested, was liked and approved.

The dining-hall was bright, looked much brighter than usual with the light reflected from the white tablecloth; it smelled of the fresh salad and herbs in the big wooden bowls and was saturated with that convivial buzz produced by the vibration of plates, voices and glasses. There were speeches; old Wabash, white-bearded and blue-shirted and looking more than ever like a slightly gaga Prophet from the Bible, told with gusto the tale of the first Twelve in Dagánia and of the suffering
milliohnim
; he was followed by Moshe dispensing some good horse-sense advice to the new settlers, and by Max with quotations from Glickstein and Lenin. But except for the awestricken and solemn debutants of Tel Joshua nobody paid much attention to the speeches. As on each of the rare occasions when they drank wine, the people of Ezra's Tower revealed themselves in a light normally dulled by routine and fatigue. Putting their emptied glasses down on the white tablecloth with a show of recklessness, their faces shone like mirrors from the lumber-room with the cobwebs and dust wiped off.

Joseph's gaze travelled the round of faces of the old guard, trying to discover the changes they had undergone since that night when they had set out for Ezra's Tower. Moshe had grown fatter, with a touch of baldness, and looked a little like a successful stockbroker. Hunchbacked little Mendl had grown even quieter, the listening look in his eyes had become more pronounced, and his sudden transformations into the pied piper rarer; he had recently finished his Galilean Symphony and there was some talk of the National Philharmonic Orchestra producing it. Gaby, the communal Messalina now in charge of the dressmaker shop, was beginning to develop a puffed and tartish look; instead of fluttering her eyelashes as she once used to, she had now taken up quivering nostrils. Six
months ago she had caused another scandal by being unfaithful to the Egyptian—and, of all people, with the Dr. Phil. Ham, the dark savage, had threatened to kill poor Fritz and could only be dissuaded from it by the whole matter being thrashed out in the General Meeting, where Max had delivered a much-admired speech on sex and society, Gaby had cried, Fritz publicly confessed his unsocial behaviour, and Ham, moved almost to tears, had solemnly forgiven them all and was stopped just in time by Sarah from singing the Anthem. After that, Sarah had used her pedagogic talents to comfort the Egyptian by opening spiritual vistas for him, and three weeks later the Egyptian had suggested that they should get married and live together on a higher plane. Sarah had made a terrible fuss, asking each member of the Secretariat separately for advice and accusing herself of being unfair to poor Gaby. Ham got so ashamed of his base desires that he told Sarah he was ready to renounce her and to agree with her higher view of the matter, whereupon Sarah got hysterics, and it had taken all of Reuben's diplomacy to bring the affair to a happy conclusion.

Almost from the first week they were married, a change began to occur in Sarah. Her pinched little face with the hungry-virgin eyes began to fill up into matronly softness and she put on weight at a fantastic rate. Since Dina's death she had been in charge of the children's house but without being officially confirmed in her office—all major decisions resting with a committee of three—and this had been the second great frustration in Sarah's life. Three months after her marriage Reuben, had proposed to the General Meeting that the committee should be reduced to an advisory capacity and Sarah be made a member of the Secretariat with full responsibilities. The meeting, though with some doubts and hesitations, had voted for the proposal, and this had completed Sarah's transformation from a skinny, frustrated little squirrel into a rotund and efficient matron. It had taken her seven bitter years of detours and self-deceptions to find the form of life she was made for;
but at last she had found it. In the world outside, without the sustaining warmth of comradeship around her, she would probably have gone to pieces….

Becoming conscious of Joseph's gaze, Sarah turned her head. He gave her a friendly grin and continued his silent survey of the old guard. Dasha, fat and pretty with her round face and high Slavonic cheekbones, was just coming back from the kitchen, flushed and triumphant at the success of the meal. Arieh the shepherd was chewing his shashlik in contented rumination; the Dr. Phil, was holding forth on the merits of bootmaking to an admiring girl from the youth camp. He, too, had lost his nervous fidgetiness and looked broader and more self-assured. Joseph contrasted in his mind's eye the men and women around him with the crowd in the cafés of Tel Aviv, the crowd with the frozen shrug about their shoulders, and he felt a deep satisfaction, a conceitless pride which was close to humbleness, at being one of the founders of Ezra's Tower. This was right and good and made sense. Here something broken was being made whole again: men were recovering their lost integrity.

His eyes met Reuben's, and Reuben gave his snake-in-the-grass smile and said: “Speech”. Joseph shook his head but others had heard, and a minute later the whole table was clamouring for a speech. It came almost as a shock to Joseph that, despite his unbalancedness and contradictions and the sense of his own futility, these people liked him. As he stood before them and they looked at him with curiosity and expectation, the mirror in his mind revolved and he asked himself how he, always unable to see himself as a whole, was reflected in their eyes. Oh well, they would just see the old monkey face with one or two grey strands over the temples, eyebrows meeting in the middle and lifted in the usual grin. He decided to tell them the parable of the fish.

“
Chaverim
,” he said, savouring the mellow archaic taste of the word, born in the hard desert, which had given a new turn to the history of man; “chaverrim—comrades …”

The engine roared and the truck swayed like a drunkard as the convoy entered the dry stream-bed of the wadi. They had passed the Giant's Buttocks and were now following the wadi's course towards the south, away from the familiar country of Ezra's Tower and Gan Tamar, into new, strange hills, deserted but for a few wretched mud villages perching on the slopes of desolation. In front and behind, the other trucks crept cautiously forward with dimmed headlights.

Joseph lay stretched out on the canvas cover of the truck, his arms folded under his head. This time he had a truck all to himself, for there were few Helpers needed. It was a comfortable one, loaded with crates of farm implements and some sacks of flour on top.

On the truck in front the new settlers were singing “God will rebuild Galilee”. On the truck behind, which carried some of the Helpers, they were arguing over the White Paper. As the truck of the Helpers came closer or fell back, Joseph caught fragments of the debate and lost it again, while the singing in front swelled and faded. The stars over his head displayed all their Galilean brilliance, the Great Bear sprawling on his back and the Milky Way clotted into a luminous, branching scar.

The truck behind was pulling close again. They were still arguing. A girl's voice said:

“Once we have irrigated the southern desert we can bring another four millions in.”

“That still leaves twelve millions out,” a man said.

“It doesn't matter,” said the girl. “Half of them will be killed anyway. The other half will be all right for a while….”

The truck receded, but the girl's voice lingered on in Joseph's ear: “Half will be killed, the other half will be all right for a while.” She had said it as soberly as if checking a household account. What a grandiose arithmetic history had
taught this race. Their population chart, instead of moving in a curve, looked like the zigzag of lightning.

The truck gave a jolt and slowed down; the singing in front became weaker, and from the truck behind came once more the girl's voice arguing in the dark:

“… Nationalism? Nonsense. It's homesickness.”

“How can people be homesick for a country they have never seen?” said a man's sceptical voice.

“It's in the race. Homesickness is endemic in the race….”

Joseph's truck accelerated and the rest of the argument was lost. How they always harped back to this question of “race”—as if it explained anything. As if some biological variation could explain this phenomenon of the lightning zigzag trace of their fate—that jagged scar across the face of human history.

He lay back on the canvas, glad to have the truck to himself. To the south he saw a very bright planet, perhaps Mars or Jupiter, he didn't know. He remembered that first night, walking back after the shooting to Dina's tent, when he had seen this same planet rising, and had decided that if other stars were populated they must doubtless have their own kind of Jews. For Jews were not an accident of race, but simply man's condition carried to its extreme—a branch of the species touched on the raw. Exiled in Egypt, in Babylon, and now over the whole globe, exposed to strange and hostile surroundings, they had to develop peculiar traits; they had no time nor chance to grow that hide of complacency, of a specious security, which makes man insensitive to and forgetful of the tragic essence of his condition. They were the natural target of all malcontents, because they were so exasperatingly and abnormally human….