Thieves in the Night (37 page)

Sabbath

More than half of my month's leave has gone. If I look back at this last fortnight, the days and nights seem to melt into one dim, shapeless smudge. It has the ambiguity of being both a very short and very long time—like a single flash fixed on a film where one can only afterwards measure its length. Most
of the time I spent in my room working on Pepys or brooding and day-dreaming. I don't know what I would have done had Moshe not given me the money to take a room by myself. I have spoken to nobody except Simeon. Once I went swimming in the sea; but I remembered the last time I had gone swimming with Dina, so I went home and it was worse than ever. I feel constantly hungry but am unable to eat the things which she liked. At first I re-lived all our memories; now I try to avoid everything that reminds me of her. I move about like an invalid with a bandaged wound anxious to avoid rubbing against the furniture and walls. It is a kind of tight-rope walk where one always falls off the rope.

I know that I have a decision to take, but if I try to think it out I get nowhere. Instead of arriving at a result, I find myself lost in a day-dream. I try to straighten out the coils of my brain but they keep slipping from my grasp and curling up again. Perhaps real decisions are never thought out; they mature by themselves as a tree grows. So I have postponed the whole issue until after I have spoken to Bauman. Simeon says it will be some time next week. They have to be careful, as a whole bunch of them were arrested a few days ago.

The trouble is, I don't seem to care either way. I haven't been home since the funeral, and I rather dread seeing the Place again. It appears to me empty, changed and hostile. The Tower is like a threatening memento. A new disease: turrophobia.

But the alternative holds no lure either. To bump off somebody and get caught and hanged would probably be all right. But one doesn't get oneself hanged as easily as that. Nothing is easy in this specialised world of ours. They didn't even let me take part in the killing of the Mukhtar. You have to start from scratch, and work your way with patience and perseverance until you earn your cord. Simeon took some pains to explain this to me. And I haven't got the patience to take a course in terrorism as if it were practical gardening or rabbit-breeding. For one thing, it tastes too much of the cinema. For another,
I have no patience left for anything. To hug a phantom in one's arms night after night doesn't leave one much vigour for the day.

No watchmaker can mend a broken spring; he has to send for a new one. Where can I look for a new spring?

Words, words, words. The trouble is that the whole issue upon which I have to decide has lost its reality for me. I no longer care a damn about Round Table Conferences, Arabs, Hebrews and National Homes. I wonder whether I ever did.

There was of course the Incident. But what a squalid little incident to decide a man's fate—even if the man was only an over-sensitive boy. Simeon's, for instance, is quite a different case. Simeon has all the Roman virtues; he loves his people and hates their enemies. I do not even love my people. I rather dislike them. Self-hatred is the Jew's patriotism, Matthews said.

Sunday

Before my father died there was a time when he took me every Sunday to the slums. There I learned that the poor were not the nice superior people which they appear in fairy stories, but wretched, illiterate and drunk; the women were hags with shrill voices and the children had nits. So I became a socialist not because I loved, but because I hated the poor. They were what conditions had made them, and therefore conditions had to be changed.

After the Incident I began to frequent those whom I had decided to regard henceforth as my people. They were as disappointing as the poor had been. I was attracted by their keenness, their intensity and their brains, but their achievements were spoiled for me by their ostentation. I hated their acid analytical faculty, their inability to relax. I hated their lack of form and ceremony and breeding, their shortcuts from courtesy to familiarity, their mixture of arrogance and cringing. They were the slum race of the world: their slums were the ghettos, whether the walls were made of stone or prejudice.

Constant segregation would thwart the healthiest race; if you keep slinging mud at people they will smell. Persecution has not ceased for the last twenty centuries and there is no reason to expect that it will cease in the twenty-first. It will not cease until the cause is abolished, and the Cause is in ourselves. With all the boons we have brought to humanity we are not liked, and I suspect the reason is that we are not likable. If the poor were as idealised propaganda paints them, it would be a crime to interfere with their happiness; if the Jews were as the philosemites describe them, there would be no reason for this Return. But Jewry is a sick race; its disease is homelessness, and can only be cured by abolishing its homelessness.

I became a socialist because I hated the poor; and I became a Hebrew because I hated the Yid.

Monday

On Simeon's advice I have been re-reading the chapters in Flavius Josephus about Massada, the last Hebrew fortress which, after the fall of Jerusalem, held out against the Romans. When the Romans set fire to the inner wall by means of catapulted fire-brands, and Massada had become untenable, the Commander of the Fortress gave orders to the garrison to kill first all the women and children and then themselves. In his last speech he explained to them what fate awaited those who fell alive into the hands of the Romans; then he went on:

“
But I find that you are such people as are no better than others either in virtue or in courage, and are afraid of dying, though you be delivered thereby from the greatest miseries. For the laws of our country and of God himself have from ancient times continually taught us that it is life that is a calamity to man and not death; for the union of what is divine and what is mortal is disagreeable
….”

He must have been a personality of remarkable powers to persuade his men to cut the throats of their women and children
and afterwards their own; and it was a long and protracted business for there were nine hundred and sixty-two of them; and only two women, who had hidden themselves in an underground cave, escaped to tell the tale. Each man slew his own family; then they chose ten men by lot who slew all the other men; then they cast lots again and the one to whom it fell killed the remaining nine and finally himself. The name of this last man, the last free Hebrew to live, has not been recorded, nor any other names of the garrison, except that of the Commander, one Eliezer Ben Yair; and Yair is the alias adopted by the spiritual leader of the Bauman gang: Abraham Stern.

It is a savage tale, this story of the last Hebrew fortress, and yet strangely soothing. “The union of what is divine and what is mortal is disagreeable….” There is an unmistakable Christian accent, and yet neither Ben Yair nor his chronicler Josephus seems to have had any knowledge of the new sect. But it was a time of howling and gnashing of teeth, and the new religion with its emphasis on immortality and resurrection was in the air. “Who is there,” Yair asks referring to the mass slaughter of Hebrews by the Romans, “who is there that revolves these things in his mind and yet is able to bear the sight of the sun, though he himself might live out of danger? …” I believe there is a similar reason for the religious trend among our terrorists. The Hebrew underground began as a purely political movement and has developed more and more mystic accents. Simeon showed me yesterday some of Yair-Stern's poetry. It has a strange archaic fervour—quite untranslatable:

My teacher carried his praying-scarf in a velvet bag to
the synagogue:

Even so carry I my sacred gun to the Temple

That its voice may pray for us
.

Or the refrain of the anthem he wrote for the underground movement:

These are the days of wrath, the nights of holy despair:

Fight your way home, eternal tramp
,

Your house we shall repair

And mend the broken lamp
.

Though he tries to hide it, Simeon has an almost religious admiration for Yair-Stern. He seems to regard him as a kind of gunman-messiah.

Tuesday

At last—tomorrow I am going to see Bauman in Jerusalem. Apparently that is where he lives, or at least, where he is at present. Curious—all the time I imagined that he was here in Tel Aviv; and though Simeon never directly said so, I was under the impression that he lived somewhere just around the corner. This somehow strikes me as a particularly neat piece of deception, though properly speaking there was no deception at all. Simeon never gives himself conspiratorial airs, and yet he is completely wrapped up in a shroud of elusiveness. Conspiring has become such a routine with him that it is invisible. I believe he hardly ever lies to me; he just automatically omits every reference to relevant facts. The closer I come to these people's world the more I feel as if I were running into a dense bank of fog inside which all is muffled and dim, and full of deceptive echoes.

To leave this room where I have been hiding since I came back from the funeral is like breaking up another link with Dina. There has never been such intimacy between us as within these solitary walls. Her picture hangs over the bed; I shall take it off the last minute before we leave. It was her room as much as mine; the scene of our bitter honeymoon.

To-morrow she will become homeless again and have to look for another exile and suffer another betrayal. The law of universal indifference will have stolen another victory, and will go on ticking in my flesh.

There is one alone, and there is not a second
.

If two lie together then they have heat: but how can one be warm alone?

The city of Jerusalem is a mosaic of religious and national Communities, more or less neatly divided into separate residential quarters competing in holiness and mutual hatred.

Its sacred core, the Old City, is surrounded by Soleiman's Wall and divided into a Moslem, a Christian, an Armenian and a Jewish quarter. Outside the Wall there is the German Colony, the Greek Colony and the Commercial Centre; the rest of the town is part Arab, part Hebrew. The latter part is again subdivided according to the origin and period of the immigrants who built it, from the ancient slum ghetto of the quarter of the Hundred Gates to ultra-modern Rechavia, non-Aryan offshoot of the Weimar Republic complete with glass, chromium, Goethe, Adler and Thomas Mann. Each of these separate worlds lives at no more than a ten minutes' walk from the others. They stare and sniff at each other without mixing, rather like camels sniff at the exhaust pipes of motor-cars, and derive about as much satisfaction from it.

The night after their arrival in Jerusalem, Joseph and Simeon walked through the badly lit Arab quarter of Musrara, almost deserted at this late hour, then turned into Me'a She'arim, the Street of the Hundred Gates. The “Hundred Gates” is the oldest of the Hebrew quarters outside the confines of the Old City; it was founded in the eighteen-seventies, and its first inhabitants were the ancient and pious who came to the Land not to live but to die. They brought with them their savings of a lifetime, which they handed over to the Kehillah, the Jewish Community, in exchange for a monthly pittance to the day of their death. While waiting to die they prayed, quarrelled, studied the Book and made souvenirs of the Holy
Land—albums with pressed flowers from Mount Scopus, sachets of velvet filled with holy earth, pen-holders of olivewood with a tiny inlaid lens through which one could see a micro-panorama of Jerusalem. These souvenirs were sent abroad to be sold to other Jews, and their proceeds were the main income of the Community. In between these godly occupations the elders of the Hundred Gates fought their family feuds, cheated, begged, got drunk once a year to celebrate Esther's triumph over Haman, fasted on the day of the Temple's destruction, ate bitter herbs to commemorate the exodus from Egypt, blew the ram-horn which brought down the walls of Jericho, expected Messiah's arrival from week to week, and while waiting to die begot children at a patriarchal age. As the years passed younger people too began to inhabit the Hundred Gates, men in black kaftans and fur hats, women with shorn heads and wigs, pious and prolific. A dozen children to a couple were no rarity in those days, the younger ones sleeping in their parents' beds, the others on the floor; they lived in holiness and squalor, in tenements with labyrinthine courts and long narrow iron balconies teeming with toddlers and vermin. Unlike the Moslem slums which were fragrant with spices, horse-dung and charcoal, the Hundred Gates smelt of oil lamps and Primus cookers, damp washing and hot beans in grease. However, underneath all this variety of smells lay as an ever-present foundation the odour of Jerusalem: the odour of the sun-heated rocks and of the white chalk dust in the streets, product of the decaying stone on which the city stands.

“If you bandaged my eyes,” said Joseph, “I could still tell the Hundred Gates by their holy stench.”

They had walked in silence for the last few minutes and Joseph spoke mainly to ease his own tension. But while he spoke he remembered Dina's obsession about smells, and instantly he knew that Simeon remembered it too. The lines of transmission from Ezra's Tower, from their common past, were still functioning, though they trailed loosely like telegraph wires damaged by a storm. He still felt the old affection for
Simeon, but they had both changed, and so had the quality of their relationship.

“That is one way of looking at the Hundred Gates,” said Simeon. “I will tell you another way. A few weeks ago two elderly rabbis of the Chassidic sect contacted the Command. They were brought with the usual precautions before Bauman. I was present at the interview. When they were led into the hide-out they were literally trembling with fear. Bauman asked them what they wanted. The older rabbi asked him after some humming and hawing whether it was in our power to occupy on a given day the Mosque of Omar for two hours. Bauman asked for what purpose. The rabbi explained that the two of them were kabbalists, students of the Zohar, and that they had established beyond doubt the conditions under which the advent of Messiah can be brought about. This year was the propitious one and it was only necessary to perform a certain sacrifice accompanied by a certain ritual on the Sacred Rock where Abraham offered Isaac, where the First Temple stood and where the Mosque of Omar now stands. Seven Kohanim of the rabbi's choice, direct descendants of the priestly aristocracy of Israel, were already undergoing the prescribed rites of purification, and the animals for the sacrifice had been chosen and bought. All they needed now was that we should occupy the Mosque of Omar on the given day, and hold out for two hours.