Thieves in the Night (24 page)

Anyway, we like the idea of having the Ancestor's Cave, although it only contains a headless skeleton and the inscription with his name, and is an altogether modest affair compared to the antiquities discovered in other Communes—such as the Byzantine mosaic floor of the ancient synagogue in Beth Alpha, with its lovely picture of Abraham sacrificing Isaac, and various arabesques which look like draughts-boards. There is a story that when the Hebrew religion was made illegal after Bar Kochba's revolt, the believers would assemble in the synagogue and, when the watchposts signalled the approach of soldiers, would all squat down to play draughts.

I found Arieh with his sheep near the Ancestor's Cave; he
was lying as usual on his back, his fringed cartwheel-hat pulled over his face. Arieh is perhaps the only one of us capable of relaxing by lying on his back in the open air. When I go for a walk with Ellen or Dina or Moshe and we stop for a rest, they either squat on their haunches with knees pulled up, or lie on their stomachs kicking the earth with their toes; and always after a minute or two they become fidgety and change position. Living on the land has washed a good deal of restlessness out of our blood, but there is still something atavistic in us constantly on the alert. Our collective unconscious must be crowded with the hosts and ghosts of Legionaries, Inquisitors, Crusaders, Landsknechts and Cossacks. But our Tarzans, I believe, have got rid of them. Theirs the dreamless aseptic sleep without the fear and the vision—
chevaliers sans peur et sans rêves
.

Arieh is an exception; but then Arieh is simple-minded—to put it mildly. I am fond of him, and I think it is reassuring to have in at least one Commune a shepherd who is not an ex-professor of semantics but a moron.

I couldn't make out whether he was asleep or not. Guri, our giant sheep-dog, lay with his fore-paws across Arieh's chest. As I came closer he began to growl. Obviously Guri has taken over the element of suspicion from his master's subconscious. For though Guri is collective property, he regards Arieh as his real master, while for the rest of us he shows a kind of friendly condescension. We are all jealous of Guri and I wonder whether Sarah won't one day take the matter up in the General Assembly.

As Arieh did not stir, I decided that he was asleep and continued up the slope to the caves. I found the one I was looking for, and lowered myself through the narrow entrance-hole into the vestibule of the burial chambers. It was muddy and smelt of damp and urine. There are three small chambers opening from the vestibule—no more than niches hewn into the rock, each the size of a small coffin. But of course the ancestors were buried without coffins, just wrapped in a sheet and pushed
into their niche. In the first chamber there are a few scattered bones, the others are empty except for the damp sand on the bottom of the niche. There is always a candle-stump in the first chamber; I lit it and went down the three slippery steps into the lower passage, careful not to bang my head against the rock. The lower vestibule contains three more niches, and the centre one is headless Joshua's. Engraved by a clumsy, childish hand into the hard lime-rock over the narrow entrance of the niche are the four letters
yod, shin, vaf
and
a'yin:
Joshua or Jeshu or Jesu. I looked at the bones embedded in the damp sand of the niche and tried unsuccessfully to work up some emotion; but I just couldn't believe that there ever was warm flesh round those pathetic bones, and strange clothes round the flesh, and ideas in the missing head. Least of all could I imagine what he may have looked like. However, according to the laws of probability, there must be a fraction in me which is directly descended from him. Inside my testicles there are some complicated but stable groups of molecules which were handed down to me from him with their pattern unchanged; and maybe some day I shall pass them on to Ellen and so down the chain. It is as if a long, long pipeline were laid out not in space but in time, and at every time-mile or so there is a tap attached to a pair of loins. Now and then the tap opens and the ancient stream mixes with other streams in other pipes. An elaborate system of irrigation, like our vegetable garden's, expanded over the dry crust of the globe. Well, well….

Come to think of it, there are not even so many taps between old Joshua and myself: the length of the pipe is about seventeen centuries which equal no more than fifty-one generations. In other words, old Joshua was only about the twenty-sixth grandfather of my grandfather. Quite likely he was one of Bar Kochba's underground rebel army which fought the Legionaries in these same hills of Galilee, and his wife and kin were crucified or put to the sword, and his missing head, once bearded and warted and furrowed by yellow wrinkles, was buzzing with Things to Forget.

I climbed out of the cave, and who should be waiting for me outside the hole but Guri, whining with anxiety about the vanishing in the bowels of the earth of the one thirty-sixth fraction of his collective proprietor. As my head emerged from the hole he was howling with joy, and as I needed both hands to climb out of the hole he profited from the occasion to wash my face all over with his slobbering tongue. I was of course delighted; there is nothing more flattering than the attentions of a dog with a strong personality. People like you for this or that quality, but dogs pay homage to the very
Ding an sich
in you.

While walking down the slope I kept my eyes on the ground, looking for coins and surface-pottery. Coins abound here at this time of the year—the autumn rain washes them out of the soil of the decayed terraces. The other day the Dr. Phil. found a “Judaea capta” which is a rarity. He would. I only found some Constantines and Jupiter Ammons.

When Guri and I got back to Arieh, he was sitting up and smoking a cigarette with his great pal Walid, the Arab shepherd from Kfar Tabiyeh. Guri, who has strong racial prejudices, growled at Walid, but at a word from Arieh flopped his ears back and settled down in the classical Sphinx-pose, watching us with his tongue hanging out.

I shook hands with Arieh and Walid, and sat down with them for a cigarette. Walid is a quiet and very polite boy, so I went through the regulation question-and-answer ceremony.

“How are you, ya Walid?”

“I am well, thank God.”

“So you are well, ya Walid?”

“I am very well, thank God.”

“And your father is well too?”

“He is very well, thank God.”

“I am glad your father is well, ya Walid.”

“My father is well, thank God.”

“And how is your older brother, ya Walid?”

And so on through the two younger brothers and the horse and the two mules and the cattle and the flock. The answer is always that all is well, even if the whole family is dying and the flock decimated by foot and mouth disease. It is a soothing, gentle ritual, of which the British lovely-day game is but a crude and simplified variation. When we got through with it, Walid, who had finished his cigarette and was chewing a halm of grass, said:

“I have just remarked to your friend that your young trees look very beautiful.”

“Walid likes trees,” Arieh said languidly, by way of explanation.

“I think trees are beautiful,” said Walid.

“Why don't you plant some in your village?” I asked.

“Tzz!” said Walid, tossing his head up as a sign of violent negation. “That is impossible.”

“Why is it impossible?”

“Tzz! The trees would not last.”

“Why would they not last?”

“You have a quarrel with your neighbour and he cuts your trees down.”

“That is very bad,” I said. “Can you do nothing about it?”

“Tzz!” he said. “No. We can't grow trees.”

We were quiet for a while, and just sat and watched the sheep and the clouds. Arieh offered cigarettes, but he had only two left, so he broke one into halves and he and I shared it. Walid twice politely refused to take the whole cigarette and accepted it the third time. After a while he said:

“You are very poor.”

“Not very,” I said. “And we have only just started.”

“You have tractors and electricity but you have no cigarettes.”

“We put all our money into tractors and machines, and later we shall be rich.”

“No,” he said. “When you have more money you will buy more tractors.”

For some reason this irritated me, and I said to tease him:

“Well, you have no tractors and no cigarettes either.”

“But I am free,” Walid said. “And you live like in prison.”

“Walid thinks we work too hard,” Arieh explained.

“Nobody tells us how much we are to work,” I said. “We do it because we like it.”

“You start planting trees and then you have to go on tending them. You always start something new and then you have to finish it, and when it is finished you have to start again something new. You are like prisoners. I am free. If I like I can go tomorrow to Egypt or to America or to England.”

“You need money for that,” Arieh remarked philosophically.

“
Ma lesh
— that doesn't matter,” said Walid. “I can go wherever I like. Egypt or America or India. I am free and you are prisoners.”

“Everybody who has set himself a task becomes a prisoner,” I said. “But that doesn't matter.

“
Ma lesh” “Ma lesh
” Walid agreed.

“
Ma lesh
” said Arieh, lying over on his back and pulling his fringed hat over his eyes….

Thursday

To-night I told Dina that I am going to marry Ellen. She said that she had expected it and made no further comment. We were standing together on the platform of the Tower, after dark.

We stood for perhaps five minutes in silence. Several times I wanted to speak, but each time I felt my voice thicken in my throat, and gave it up. I knew that we were both thinking of the same scene: that first morning when she had slept on my arm in the first-aid tent and we had climbed up the Tower to watch the sun rise over the hills.

Suddenly I had the wild idea that perhaps Dina's trouble was just fuss and hypochondria, and that by taking her by surprise I could break down the barrier. I silently counted
ten to myself and then turned towards her and grabbed her by the shoulders with a hard grip. She did not shrink back, it was almost as if she had expected it; in fact I am convinced that she had expected it. She did not resist as I drew her towards me, but her body grew taut and unyielding; and she trembled so violently that I could hear the faint grinding noise of her teeth as she locked her jaws to prevent herself from crying out. By then I was terrified but I wanted to go through with it and I knew that Dina wanted me to go through with it, in the same desperate hope. Against her will her rigid body strained away from me; and at the second when I pressed my mouth against her tight dry lips, hardened by the clenched teeth behind them, she flung me away with the uncontrollable violence of an explosion. While we both stood panting on the dark platform, she managed to say in a kind of hiss: “Sorry, Joseph—please go away—quick”; and before I could make up my mind she was sick over the parapet. I did not even dare to hold her head.

After a while she got better and we climbed down the ladder. Again I did not dare to help her. In the faint light which came through the open door of the dining-hut she said good-night, contriving a kind of smile.

I walked out into the fields and threw myself down on the soft dewy earth. I closed my eyes and went into a day-dream about what I would do to the fellows who had done this to Dina if I could lay my hands on them. It was the first time in my life that a fantasy of this kind got hold of me, and when I pulled myself out of it I was all sweaty in my clothes and trembling. But sobering up was almost unbearable, so I began once more to dig my nails into the damp earth which became transformed into the liquid eye-sockets of Dina's torturer. When I sobered the second time, the attack was over.

Even now, in my full senses, I would accept the opportunity of physical revenge. This is against my reasoning and my convictions. But reasoning cannot satisfy either hunger or rut, and to-night I have learned that the thirst for revenge may
become physiological reality. It would not help Dina, but it would help me.

I know a story of a Sicilian peasant who had spent five years in prison for the attempted murder of his wife's seducer and who, the day he was released, went straight to the seducer's house, killed him, and went contentedly back to prison for the rest of his life. The Italian Communist who told me the story, said that after ten years in prison the peasant seemed perfectly happy and knew no regret. At the time I could not believe this; now I understand that under certain circumstances a life-sentence or the gallows may appear as a reasonable price to pay for regaining one's peace of mind.

The Arabs seem to know this. And some of Bauman's youngsters too, like that boy Benjosef who went on singing the anthem until the cord choked his voice. That isn't so easy as it sounds. The climate, or the contact with this earth riddled with ancestors' caves, seems to reopen certain taps in the pipe which had better remain sealed.

Now that I have written it down I have exorcised the headless Joshua. Articulateness is the death of instinct. But have I not said before that the trouble with us is that we have become too articulate? …

Friday

Ran into Dina first thing in the morning outside the shower-baths, and walked with her to the dining-hut for breakfast. Her hair was still damp from the shower and faintly steaming in the cold morning air. The contrast of the fresh cold-water-gloss on her face and the blue shadows under her eyes made her look more attractive than ever. At breakfast she chattered with unforced gaiety. She seemed to have forgotten all about yesterday, and after the first plate of porridge I too felt much better.

Anyway, yesterday has settled it: Ellen is moving into my room to-morrow.