Thieves in the Night (6 page)

Joseph grinned. “Where did you learn all this psychology, Bauman?” he said.

“Intuition,” said Bauman.

“I thought one only had intuitions about people one liked.”

“Who told you that I don't like them?” said Bauman.

“I wish my Arabic was as good as yours,” said Joseph. “What was the old Sheikh explaining so solemnly?”

“He explained that every nation has the right to live according to its own fashion, right or wrong, without outside interference. He explained that money corrupts, fertilisers stink and tractors make a noise, all of which he dislikes.”

“And what did you answer?”

“Nothing.”

“But you saw his point?”

Bauman looked at him steadily:

“We cannot afford to see the other man's point.”

During the half-hour's break at noon, two private cars came jolting up the wadi, escorted by a Bren carrier and followed by a cloud of dust. The first car carried the Assistant District Commissioner
and Mrs. Newton, accompanied by a Major of the Police Force. Mr. Newton was a thin, tired-looking middle-aged man with a sparse and untidy moustache. He had been transferred to this country after eight years of service as an Assistant Commissioner in Roonah, North-West India. In the club in Roonah he had always been referred to by the men as a Decent old chap and by the women as Such a dear, followed by an imperceptible pause and a change of conversation. During his term of office in Roonah he had been involved in no scandal and acquired no distinction; he had vanished out of the colony as unobtrusively as he had entered it eight years before, leaving no memory-trace except for an occasional mild joke about his only known hobby, chess, and a compassionate reference to the only major blunder he had ever committed, the marrying of his wife.

Mrs. Newton was the daughter of a Sergeant-Major in the Indian Army. An intimate analysis of the motives which had attracted timid Mr. Newton to that tall, bony and virginal female would have produced embarrassing results by unearthing Mr. Newton's steady, stealthy and fervent loathing for Roonah, the Club, the Indian Civil Service and Army; and his oblique sense of humour which the first time led him to visualise the Sergeant-Major's chaste and angular daughter in a series of those preposterous attitudes which the act of procreation entails. It started as a grotesque private joke and grew until it became an obsession of Mr. Newton's starved and chess-trained mind, accustomed to visualising positions after both partners' various moves. What he did not foresee—for he was a kindly man with no more repressed nastiness than the average—was; the stalemate which followed the first few opening moves almost immediately after their marriage. The real situation had none of the humour and mystery which made the imagined one so fascinating; but it was too late by then. A stalemate cannot be undone.

The third passenger in the car, copper-faced Police Major Edwards, was in a bad temper because Mr. Newton, pretending
to be polite, had taken the seat next to the driver which the Major liked; while Mrs. Newton vaguely thought, as always when in the company of a man in uniform, how much happier she would be had she married into the Forces.

In the second car sat Mr. Glickstein and Mr. Winter, both members of the Zionist Executive in Jerusalem, and wedged in between them an American newspaper man named Dick Matthews who was on a ten days' tour through the country. On the front seat next to the driver sat the Zionist Executives official photographer, Dr. phil. Emil Lustig. The photographer and the driver were discussing in German Nietzsche's influence on Fascist ideology. The journalist was listening with one ear to their conversation, looking bored. Glickstein noticed it.

“Do you understand German?” he asked.

“A little,” said Matthews.

“We. are a funny country, what?” said Glickstein. He had put on his propaganda smile, baring his gold teeth. “Our driver was a graphological expert at the Criminal Court of Karlsruhe before he became a pioneer.”

“They are all great guys,” said Matthews, bored.

“The photographer,” Glickstein continued, “was a lecturer of philosophy at Heidelberg.”

“Yeah,” said Matthews, who had stood two hours of propaganda in Glickstein's bumpy English. “It reminds me of the taxi-drivers in Paris after the last war who were all Russian Grand Dukes.”

Glickstein's smile became pinched. “Allow me,” he said. “Those people were thrown out of Russia. But most of our pioneers came to our country of their own free will, long before Hitlerism began.”

“You win—as usual,” said Matthews. His sense of fairness compelled him to admit that Glickstein was right and that all these admirable guys were doing an admirable job about this National Home of theirs. But he wished to God Glickstein would talk less about it, and with less of that intensity which sprayed the moisture from his lips into one's face, and that all
these clever and admirable guys would relax sometimes and offer a guy a drink instead of statistics and heroics, and would get drunk sometimes themselves. He had now spent almost five days touring the country and had collected a lot of stuff for his story, but somehow the story didn't come off—or came off the wrong way, with a twist in it which he hadn't intended to put in, and which would have been unfair to these guys whom, the more he was with them, the more he admired and disliked.

Matthews sighed and rather embarrassedly pulled a flat bottle from his hip pocket. These people didn't drink, and he did not wish to shock them, but sometimes a guy got fed up. He offered the bottle to Glickstein and to Winter and then gave it up and fiercely took a deep gulp, almost blushing. He saw Glickstein's indulgent, gold-flashing smile, and he wished to God Glickstein were a Fascist and that he had an excuse for a good, straight punch at his nose.

Winter, sitting on the other side of Matthews, had not said a word for the last hour. He was filled with a quiet, aching bitterness which each remark of Matthews' increased. A goy remains a goy, he thought, well-meaning or not. Here he travels through a country where our people are doing something more fantastic and difficult than their famous conquest of the West, and all he can think of is to compare us with Paris taxi-drivers and night-club whores; and all the emotion he is capable of working up comes out of his bottle;—look how he tilts it up and how his lips form a disgusting ring of flesh round its neck. Ay, don't we know the Bottle and what it does to the goy—the songs at the top, the sentimentality in the middle, and the pogrom at the bottom….

Joseph and Dina lay resting side by side in the narrow strip of shadow next to the still roofless dining-hut. Behind their heads sat Simeon with his back against the wall, knees drawn up against his body and trousers pulled up neatly over his
ankles. He was reading last night's
Davar
, the Labour evening paper which a lorry had just brought up from Gan Tamar. Next to him sat Dasha, a good-natured fattish girl with a pretty face already coarsening under the influence of climate and work.

“There come the big-heads,” said Joseph, as the two cars and their escort came in sight, struggling up the last stretch towards the top.

No one answered. They were all exhausted, fearful of the moment, twenty minutes ahead, when they would have to start work again. Except for the watch-posts the whole camp lay prostrate, dazed by the blazing sun, immobile like lizards on a hot rock. As the cars pulled up near the tower, they lifted their heads and let them fall back again on their arms. Only Reuben and Bauman got up to greet the guests.

Mrs. Newton got out first; she viewed the scene in disapproval, taking it as a personal insult that nobody seemed to get up or take any notice of their arrival. The Major climbed out next from the car. “Good morning,” he shouted with bluff heartiness, turning to Reuben and Bauman. “Are you the leaders of this happy gang?” His voice exploded like a shell in the heavy, dazed silence.

They all shook hands, except Mrs. Newton. The travellers from the other car joined them. They stood about in a group in the shadow of the tower. Dr. phil. Lustig took informal snapshots of them, prowling around the group with self-conscious unobtrusiveness, a permanent smile on his lips and behind his rimless, sharp-lensed glasses, which meant to convey that he was Only a Photographer. Then he strolled off with his Leica to photograph the hill with its stones and the camp
in statu nascendi
. Each time he clicked the shutter, he saw in his mind's eye the caption to the picture just exposed, as it would appear in some future propaganda album: “FIVE YEARS AGO EZRA'S TOWER WAS NOTHING BUT A STONY DESERT…” while underneath would be the photograph of a modern communal village, with white concrete houses, shady eucalyptus alleys,
lawns, orchards and laughing children: “…AND THIS IS HOW IT LOOKS NOW.”

He took a snapshot of one of Bauman's boys with his rifle, in profile, from a low angle, so that the figure became tower-ingly silhouetted against the sky: “… EVEN AS IN THE TIMES OF EZRA, WHEN THE MEN WHO RETURNED FROM THE BABYLONIAN EXILE WITH ONE OF THEIR HANDS WROUGHT IN THE WORK AND WITH THE OTHER HELD A WEAPON …”

Dr. Lustig was moved. The sun shone hard, sweat from his forehead trickled down under his glasses and stung his eyes. He rubbed them with the handkerchief from his breast pocket, wiped his glasses, and took a shot of Joseph and Dina, squatting on his heels behind their heads, at a refined angle which would make their horizontal faces appear hard and sculpted like partisans in a Russian film. His imagination, trained to see everything in patterns of “BEFORE” and “AFTER,” like advertisements for a face powder or nerve tonic, had already surrounded them with a bunch of children happily eating home-grown oranges, while Dina played on some vague string instrument, a harp or lute, as Bath Sheba had played for David.—He tiptoed on, smiling to himself, lost in his daydream of the resurrected Hebrew State, elated and quite forgetful of the fact that he was Only a Photographer.

Reuben was meanwhile showing the guests round the site. He made only a few matter-of-fact comments and Matthews thought that he liked this guy much better than those big-heads from Jerusalem. Mr. Newton listened absent-mindedly; he had a feeling of bewildered admiration for all these young people who started on these ventures against such heavy odds, driven on by a sentimental fanaticism which was entirely alien to him; at the same time he resented the bother which would arise if the Arab terrorist gangs started some monkey-business which they certainly would, though this was, thank God, the Major's business and not his. He also disliked all this messiness which went with the building of the camp. It was sure to become one more of those ugly, uncouth, modern settlements which were an
offence to the landscape. What a contrast to the melancholy beauty of Arab villages, like the one across the valley, peacefully dormant in the hot, trembling air….

Mrs. Newton, who walked in front at the Major's side, had similar thoughts, though they were less clearly defined and lacked aesthetic appreciation of the beauty of Arab villages. But at least with those Arabs one knew where one stood; they were natives and knew their place. Their notables were polite and dignified, the mob picturesque and obsequious. If occasionally they did some rioting or shooting that was only natural, for what else could one expect from them? But the Jews were different. They had no notables and no dignity and they were not picturesque. Instead of being grateful to the British for letting them in, they behaved as if the country belonged to them. Look how they lie about on their backs and stomachs, ignoring one, instead of jumping to attention when a Major and the A.D.C.'s wife inspect them. Good heavens, if they dared to behave like this in Roonah! … The trouble of course was that they were white—white natives, who has ever heard of such a thing? And on top of it they were all university professors or whatnots. Thought they were cleverer than oneself, and yet couldn't even offer one a decent cup of tea at their parties, or carry on a really nice conversation. Had to show off all the time with their bookishness and the languages they knew and what clever-clever fellows they were….

The Police Major, walking by her side, followed his own trend of thoughts. The dry heat reminded him, as it always did, of the Sudan from where he had been transferred only a few months before; and how much simpler everything had been there. Meanwhile he observed, with a curious and expert eye, the dug-outs and trenches those Jew-boys had made. They had some pluck to come up here just now, and if it was true that Fawzi's band had moved into the vicinity they were in for a hot time. When all was said, the twelve rifles they had been allowed did not amount to much—but then they had their blasted defence organisation, the
Haganah
, with its illegal arms….
Anyway, they had been warned, and if they wanted to play the dare-devils and insisted on getting their wretched hill—-like that famous pound of flesh—well, it was their funeral. As to Fawzi and his gang, that was the concern of the Military, bless their souls….

“Look!” Mrs. Newton exclaimed, and with sudden animation pointed at Simeon, buried in his Hebrew newspaper. “Look—he does read from right to left, isn't it funny?”

It was the first comment she had made since they had got out of the car, and it was made in her sharp, loud voice. Simeon slowly dropped his newspaper. The Major turned his head, and his blue, slightly goggling eyes plunged all of a sudden into a pair of burning black ones with an expression of such calm, concentrated hatred that the Major experienced something like a faint electric shock. He saw with bewilderment a lean young man sitting rigidly erect with his back to the hut, with a dark, gaunt face dominated by those fanatic eyes which quickly made him avert his own. “Christ,” the Major whispered to Mrs. Newton, “that fellow looks daggers….”

He had the weird feeling that he had met the fellow before under almost exactly the same circumstances and had received, equally undeservedly, the same dirty look. “Nonsense,” thought the Major, as he walked on at the abruptly silenced Mrs. Newton's side. “But by jove, what a country, what a country!—it's as if everybody was walking about with sunstroke.”