Thieves in the Night (33 page)

On Monday, February
27,
twenty-four hours after publication
of the British Government's proposals, the “Irgun” struck
.

In the early morning hours of that day, the secret wireless transmitter, “Voice of Fighting Zion”, announced that “punitive military actions are being carried out at this hour simultaneously in all the bigger towns and on the roads of the country. These punitive actions of our forces should serve as a warning to Arab terrorists who committed atrocities during the last thirty-two months against the Hebrew community; to the British Government, which has broken its solemn pledges and closed the gates of the Land of Israel; to the world at large, which has so far done nothing to prevent the slaughter of our kin
.”

It was not an empty boast. Simultaneously at the indicated hour, bombs and land mines exploded and volleys were fired in the Arab quarters of Jerusalem, Jaffa, Haifa and Sarafand; cars were assaulted, rails blown up and trains derailed all over the country. Arab casualties during that one hour equalled the Hebrew casualties during the last three months
.

The action had started everywhere at
6.30
a.m. and was over by
7.30
a.m. No member of the “Irgun” was caught by the Police. At
8.30
a.m. General Bernard Montgomery, Commander of the Haifa District, had the streets of the town cleared by armoured cars with loudspeaker vans who ordered everybody home. A daylight curfew was imposed until the next morning
.

A few hours later the Colonial Secretary, Mr. Malcolm MacDonald, made a statement in the House of Commons. In lieu of the expected official confirmation of the Government's proposals as released to the Press the day before, the Colonial Secretary appealed to the public in “England and Palestine … to withhold judgment until an authoritative statement could be made”. The Colonial Secretary also regretted that “incomplete and in some important respects misleading reports of the Government's intentions had gone to Palestine where they had been the cause of serious incidents”. Pressed
by the Leader of the Opposition for a statement “to prevent further misleading ideas”, Mr. MacDonald said that “after what had taken place in Palestine any further statement would be undesirable
.”

It looked as if, for the moment at least, disaster had been averted. The bombs and land mines had spoken in the only language which, anno domini
1939,
the world understood. A few hours later the Prime Minister confirmed the unconditional recognition of General Franco's Junta as the legitimate government in Spain. His announcement was received with cries of “shame”; one member shouted: “You should be impeached as a traitor to Great Britain
.”

The khamsin is a hot, dry, easterly wind blowing from the Arabian desert. The name is of Egyptian origin and signifies “fifty”—the fifty days between Easter and Pentecost on which the khamsin is said to be particularly frequent.

As with its kin: sirocco and foehn, bora and mistral, the khamsin's effect on the humours of man is violent and mysterious. Its intensity varies from a tepid breeze, importunate like an unwanted caress, to the scalding whiff from an open boiler. But it is not the surface effect of the moving air which counts; nor its heat; nor the thirst, the irking dryness in throat and nostrils. What matters is the khamsin's nervous effect, and the things which it does to those functions of the body which are beyond voluntary control.

There are no statistics on the increase of suicide, manslaughter and rape on khamsin days. Its influence on the nervous system cannot be expressed in measurable quantities.

Measurable are only the physical changes in the atmosphere. It is known that the temperature close to the ground may jump upward during a khamsin by 35 degrees and pass 110 degrees
in the shade. The relative humidity of the air may drop to one-seventh of the normal and come within 2 per cent of absolute dryness. The electrical conductivity of the air may increase to twenty times its normal value, while its radioactivity may increase two- to three-fold. But what do these measurements reveal? Not much, except perhaps the fact that man is subjected to the moods of Nature in more and subtler ways than he is wont to imagine. His apparent dominion over her is purely external; as Gulliver was tied in his sleep by the Lilliputians, so he remains attached to the blind forces by a web of thin, invisible threads tied to his solar plexus, the para sympathetic ganglia, the electrical charge of his nerve-sheaths, the vaso-regulators of his endocrine glands. A clumsy slave who imagines himself master because his chains have been replaced by a silken strait-jacket.

The sky on khamsin days over Ezra's Tower is leaden grey with high vapour and desert dust. On the slope facing Kfar Tabiyeh the twigs of the young pines move in a soft, rain-heralding way in the mute air; but there will be no rain. The liberating thunder seems on the tip of Nature's tongue; but she sticks her tongue out at you and there will be no storm. There is a protracted expectation and frustration in the sulphuric air; like Messalina's long, tormenting embrace it excites but refuses relief; a panting, suffocating ascent which never reaches its climax. A storm is brewing within arm's reach, brewing inside people's ears and ribs, which will never discharge itself.

The day after Joseph had left for Haifa, the khamsin was particularly bad. Dina had spent the evening trying to read, while Sarah, with whom she shared her room, was discussing with Max an article in the Hebrew I.L.P. paper about how to help the emancipation of the Arab woman. Sarah thought that the best way was a frontal attack on religion. Max thought that the question of the Veil and birth-control should come
first. Sarah thought that the main obstacle was the Arab fear of Hebrew domination. Max thought that they should renounce any claim to dominate in a solemn declaration. Sarah thought that Bauman's gang were Fascist criminals. Max thought that they were discrediting the whole movement and should be handed over to the Police. Sarah thought that it was the human approach to the Arabs which counted. Max agreed that the human approach had not been carried sufficiently far. At this point Dina unexpectedly started to scream. Max looked at her, bewildered, along his drooping tapir-nose. “Oh, go away,” she screamed, stamping her feet, “go, go away all of you and leave me alone….”

She tried to control herself, biting her lips and pushing the hair out of her face. “Are you ill?” Max asked, bending towards her, and sniffing sympathetically. But Dina suddenly hit out at his chest with her fist, and while Max stumbled back, she ran out of the room.

It was hot and there was nobody outside. The khamsin caught her from behind; it felt as if somebody were blowing on the nape of her neck with a hot, foul breath. Behind the tower the rust-coloured moon hung motionless on a greyish gauze of mist; it looked like a clot on a soiled bandage. She hurried across the Square and past the dining-hut where some meeting was on; the hum of the all too well-known voices came out floating on the hot breeze like a swarm of insistent flies. She hurried on through the married living quarters with its square white concrete blocks. The door of Joseph's room stood open and the room was brightly lit. On the bed, facing the door, Ellen, Gaby and the Egyptian were sitting side by side. Ellen, with her swollen belly, was leaning back on the bed and reading out something from a magazine, and they all three laughed. The Egyptian had his arm round Gaby's shoulder; her leg was pressed against his from knee to ankle.

Lifting her eyes from the magazine, Ellen saw Dina's slender figure silhouetted against the darkness; she called out to her, but the figure moved on as if frightened.

Once outside the circle of light, Dina hesitated for a second whether she should turn back and join the company of the others. But the idea of sitting still in that cramped, narrow cubicle with its stuffy air and the odour of Joseph and Ellen's copulations lingering on the bed, made her hurry on again. It seemed to her that she knew not only all their voices by heart but also the individual smell of their perspirations. There was an itching dryness inside the hot shell of her nostrils; for a while the world seemed to consist of smells alone, floating in the air like threads of various colour. There was the greasy whiff of tepid dishwater from the communal kitchen, the sour-milk smell of the nursery, the acid smell of the sheep-pen, the biting ammonia of the men's urinary, the sickly-sweet odour of indisposed women. When a small child she could always tell when her grown-up sister or her friends were unwell. She closed her eyes and scratched frantically with her sharp finger-nail in the dry cavity of her nose. At last she had discovered what she was going to do; sobbing and biting her nails, she burst into the stable-shed and groped her way in the hay-warm darkness towards Salome's box.

The brown mare was asleep, but as soon as Dina's hand touched her flank she scrambled to her feet with a docile and plaintive neigh. Dina found the stable lantern and a box of matches; while she put the saddle on the horse she felt suddenly quite cheerful. She had gone out on night rides several times before when a similar mood had come over her; and though lately snipers had again taken occasional pot-shots at the settlement in the dark, wounding two people, and it was not considered safe to walk alone outside the entrenchment at night, this only gave an additional thrill to her undertaking. She extinguished the lantern and led Salome quietly out of the shed and past the rows of tents of the youth camp. A moment later she had reached the barbed wire and passed through the gate. She looked round, but there was nobody to see her; she gave Salome a pat on the flank, planted her left foot firmly in the stirrup and, with an elastic jump, mounted. She
would have liked to go for a wild gallop but the moon was not bright enough, and if she broke a leg of the communal mare she might as well commit suicide at once. They had a way of unctuous forgiveness in such cases which made one feel a leper for weeks. It delighted her that she was doing something definitely “asocial” and naughty; and that, as Salome couldn't tell tales, nobody would know a thing about it.

As she walked the horse down the slope on the farther side of Kfar Tabiyeh, the hills around her looked as if dipped into a silver bath. Their silence gave her an unearthly feeling. From the height of Salome's back even the khamsin felt like a warm, impersonal caress. She decided to ride straight down into the wadi, follow its course and then take the path up the opposite hill to the Ancestor's Cave.

However, as she reached the bottom of the slope and rode through the narrow, twisting bed of the wadi strewn with boulders and dry thistles and tufts of scrub, a sense of oppression came over her. The slopes now rose on both sides over her head; she could no longer dominate them with her view. Salome was carefully picking her way among the rubble and could not be induced to go quicker. There was no sound except the dry crunching of her hooves and the occasional screech of her slipping on a stone. Dina thought longingly of the noises in the far-away dining-hut and of the bright light streaming through the door of Joseph's room. The hills had withdrawn into themselves; there was an air of refusal about them, the exhalation of an immense loneliness. She was on the point of admitting defeat and turning Salome's head, when at a sudden twist of the wadi she saw a man in Arab dress walking steadily towards her.

Something in his gait and clothing told her that he was one of the villagers from Kfar Tabiyeh. At the first moment the man seemed as startled as she was and stopped uncertainly about twenty yards in front of her; then, probably perceiving that she was a woman, he resumed his walk and came steadily closer. To turn back now would have meant admitting that
she was scared; she pressed her heels into Salome's flank and rode on. She could not induce the horse to walk quicker on the slippery rubble, nor did the man hasten his steps, so that the few yards which were still between them seemed to drag on for minutes. She now saw that he wore a kefiyeh with a black cord and a striped Arab skirt with a checked European jacket. When at last they were level he stepped aside and looked up at her, silent and open-mouthed. She could see the gap of two missing front teeth in the dark cavity of his mouth and the blind, milky pupil of one eye destroyed by trachoma. When she had passed him he said something which she couldn't understand in a hoarse voice and, after a moment's hesitation, turned and began to follow her. But now there was a clean stretch of path before her, and Salome, suddenly frightened, broke of her own accord into a gallop. When Dina turned her head after a minute, there was nothing behind her but the empty wadi, deserted between the silver hills.

Her heart-beat became normal again as soon as she found herself on the ascending path to the Ancestor's chamber; only her thighs, locked round Salome's warm flanks, went on trembling for a while. She told herself that she was a coward and a fool to be frightened by a harmless villager. The words he had spoken to her had probably been just a greeting, and her riding past in silence must have offended him. There was after all something in what Max had said about the human approach. She should have given him a friendly and firm “
marhaba
” and not betrayed her fear. That was what Ellen or Dasha would have done in her place. But then Ellen and Dasha had never known—anyway, she was all right now and quite cheerful again. Only her legs in the stirrups went on trembling; for her flesh knew better, and knew that what the man had said had not been just a greeting.

The caves in the moonlight were rather a disappointment. There was no tree or pole to which she could fasten Salome, so she had to drag the horse after her up and down the slope
while she searched for the entrance which at night was not easy to find. Twice she thought she had found it, but each time it was only one of the empty smaller caves. The moon was already fairly low and it must have been pretty late in the night, but the sky had cleared, so its light shone brighter.