Thieves in the Night (38 page)

“‘Do you realise, rabbi, that it would cost us many dead and bring immediate civil war over our heads?' said Bauman.

“‘Yes, there would perhaps be some people killed,' said the rabbi, ‘but they would only be dead for a few hours because Resurrection would follow immediately. And as for civil war'—he smiled—‘well, well, Messiah will look after that.'

“So Bauman told them he would look into the matter, and as they left, the younger man, who was one of the chosen Kohanim, kissed his hand, and the older one kissed him on the mouth.—I am glad you did not laugh at the story,” Simeon concluded.

Joseph knew that a few months ago he certainly would have laughed. Even now he listened to the story with mixed feelings. He envied Simeon for whom it was easy not to laugh-Joseph actually could not remember ever having seen Simeon laugh, and his rare smile was confined to the lower half of his face. Once, Joseph remembered, he had asked Dasha, who for a time had been in love with Simeon, why she did not live with him. “One does not embrace a razor,” Dasha had said.

They left the labyrinth of the Hundred Gates and turned into the Bokharian Quarter. It was plunged into darkness except for an occasional window lit by a candle or oil-lamp. In the thin light of the crescent moon the chalk dust of the decaying rock shimmered white on the unpaved road. The houses here were more spacious; it was a poor quarter, but of austere dignity. Its inhabitants had come towards the end of the last century from the Emirate of Bokhara in Central Asia. Their ancestors had begun their Eastward migrations after the destruction of the Temple by Titus. They had first gone to Mesopotamia where Hebrew culture flourished for a while at the universities of Sura and Pompedita; then, when the usual happened, they had wandered on to Kurdistan and Turkmenistan and Bokhara. After the Moslem conquest they formed small indestructible islands in the Islamic Sea; cut off as they were from the rest of the world, the Bokharian Community gradually became convinced that they were the only surviving Jews on the earth. For about fifteen hundred years nothing happened to shake their conviction. They lived in segregation; their shops in the bazaars had to be two feet under street level so that their heads should not reach over the Moslem customers' shoulders; in the streets they had to wear a rope round their waist so that an instrument of punishment should be handy if they gave offence.

In 1866 a Russian army under Suvorov entered the Emirate of Bokhara. Among the Russian soldiers was a Jew. He brought
the incredible tale that there were millions of Jews left in the world, and was called a liar. Challenged to name a town in Europe where such alleged Jews lived, he named the Warsaw suburb Nalewki. The Jews of Bokhara went into council and finally produced a letter which was duly stamped and addressed “to the Venerable Jews in the Town of Nalewki on the Continent of Europe”. The letter arrived; and in due time an answer reached the Chief Rabbi of Bokhara. It began with a rather cool confirmation of the soldier's tale, the Jews of Nalewki obviously resenting the doubt cast upon their existence; while the rest of the letter was devoted to a detailed analysis of the grammatical offences against the Holy Language contained in the letter of the Bokharian Jews.

Simeon and Joseph turned into a narrow side lane. It was dark and steep; the part of the lane behind them ended abruptly in a field of stones. They were near the outer confines of the city, where Jerusalem ended and the Judean desert began. Somewhere on that dark stony slope were the tombs of the Judges with seventy burial shafts hewn out the rock, supposedly the graves of the Sanhedrin, the High Court of Israel. Joseph had visited them a few weeks before; the closely packed, narrow burial chambers looked much the same as the Ancestor's Cave at Ezra's Tower and the countless other rock-graves all over the country. The land was honeycombed with them; wherever one travelled they looked at one like tiny black windows in the white surface of the rocks. And yet there were no ghosts or haunted houses anywhere. Perhaps the dead hereabouts were too old and intimate with God to indulge in such clumsy manifestations.

“I am sure that Dina went to see the cave that night,” Joseph heard himself say without knowing why, or remembering his intention of saying it.

“How do you know?” Simeon asked in a curious voice.

Joseph gave no answer. They walked past a window lit by candle-light inside. Joseph saw a bare room, a little under
street level. It was furnished with one iron bed, straw mats on the stamped mud floor and one large piece of Bokhara tapestry—red sun-disks on black silk—hung on the whitewashed wall. On the bed sat a young woman in a coloured head-cloth giving her breast to a child. The man was lying on his stomach full length on the floor, with two candles in front of him, studying the Book in a thick-papered folio print yellow with age; around him on the floor lay the various Commentaries in equally bulky editions. He was in shirt-sleeves, had a black beard and wore a coloured skull-cap on the back of his head. He read rapidly, marking the line with his finger and nodding his head; from time to time he turned to one of the Commentaries and then back to the Book. The woman was slowly rocking her body forward and back, her gaze fixed on the candle. The lips of the man moved in a steady murmur and he kept on nodding rapidly with his head and shoulders. The two rhythmic movements were like two pendulums out of step.

—They walked on and turned another corner. There were no lights showing anywhere, but it was not completely dark, as it never is in Jerusalem, the stars being numerous, bright and close. There was a faint odour of chalk dust, burnt logs and thyme—in the Bokhari Quarter, Arab and Hebrew smells became fused. In one of the barrel-vaulted doorways stood a boy and a girl in shorts, their arms round each other. They looked closely at Simeon, apparently resenting the disturbance. Simeon said something which sounded like a password. “
B'seder
,” said the boy, “All clear.” Again they turned a corner and almost stumbled over a Yemenite beggar asleep with his head on a doorstep. He woke and put his hand out, drowsily wailing his litany. Simeon gave the password and the Yemenite waved them on, flashing his white teeth over the scant black beard.

“Is he sleeping on his tommy-gun or what?” Joseph could not refrain from asking.

Simeon walked on a few steps before he answered; then he said:

“If you think this is a comedy there is still time to turn back.”

“I am sorry,” said Joseph.

The street was as dark and quiet as before, but suddenly there seemed to be something uncanny about its silence. Joseph felt as if eyes were watching them from behind each of the dark windows. They arrived in front of a large stone building whose massive front was broken up by vaulted windows and gates and some thin columns, which gave it a vaguely oriental look. It had a flat roof, and Joseph saw the silhouette of a man bend over the parapet to peer down at them, and then withdraw. A relief inscription over the main gate told him that this was a House of Prayer and Learning, built by one Ephraim Ben Huda, a native of Bokhara, who had arrived in the Land with his wife, nine children and five brothers, in the year 5672 from the creation of the world; which, Joseph worked out, was roughly fifty years ago.

They passed the main gate and a second gate, and halted in front of a side door where Simeon rapped out a signal on the panelling. After a few seconds it was opened by the
shamash
or door-keeper. He was a short and very thin old man in a kaftan reaching down to his feet,' and with a black skull-cap from which two long plaited side-locks emerged like pigtails and hung down to the edge of his jaw. He closed the door behind them without a word. They were in a dark corridor from which opened the door to the
shamash's
lodge, lit by a candle. On a mat on the floor lay the
shamash's
wife under a large, striped quilt cover. She had a round face framed by black plaits which gave her a youngish air, and a terribly fat body which shaped the quilt into a hillock. The
shamash
shuffled into his room and closed the door from inside, leaving them in darkness. Simeon pulled an electric torch from his pocket and in its light Joseph saw that they were walking over a floor of stone mosaic in a chess-board pattern. They came into a hall which, judged by the echo of their steps, must be vast and empty.

“This place is called ‘The Palace',” said Simeon in a voice only slightly lower than normal. “You will have to learn to find your way in the dark, as on the ground and upper floors we can use no light. In the cellars it is safe.”

Later on Joseph learned the history of “the Palace”. It was a building originally meant to serve as a synagogue and Bible seminary, and also as a residence for the rich Bokhari who had built it. The synagogue and seminary had been on the ground floor; upstairs there were a large, now derelict, banqueting-hall and a great number of bedrooms. The old Bokhari was still alive and said to be over a hundred. His wife had died, his brothers and children had gone out into the world; he lived alone in a small room with a painted glass door opening onto a landing, which had once served as a pantry. There he sat all day and night smoking his water pipe and studying the Book, hardly ever emerging from it. The
shamash
who was almost as old as he and whom he had brought with him from Bokhara, and the
shamash's
wife who was about half a century younger than her husband, were looking after him. From time to time his children and grandchildren came to see him, and once a year on the eve of Passover the whole tribe assembled in the banqueting-hall, cleared for this occasion of the cobwebs and the plaster flaking from the ceiling, to eat the meal of bitter herbs and unleavened bread, and listen to the recital of the exodus from Egypt.

Underneath the ground floor there was a labyrinth of cellars, vaults and rooms. Here had once lived the servants, the servants' relatives, the servants' friends and the servants' guests. It was said that since the building was finished the rich Bokhari had never been down to the cellars. A year ago one of his great-grandsons had joined Bauman's organisation and had asked the old man for permission to use the cellars at night “for purposes of teaching and learning”. He did not say what was going to be taught and learned, but the old man consented without asking; he was not interested in the cellars, and he was not interested in anything any longer—except his water
pipe, the Book, and playing kabbalistic patience by shuffling the letters which make up the Name to derive new' meanings from each chance permutation.

The
shamash
asked no questions either. Though the sounds of the rifle-range installed in the thick-walled cellars reached him only as muffled thuds, he presumably understood that the friends of his young master were preparing to fight the Moslems; and he wholeheartedly approved of fighting the Moslems, who, when he was a boy, had cut off three fingers of his right hand for the theft committed by another boy of three apples. The
shamash
knew his place; he never spoke a word to the members of the organisation, nor was ever spoken to by them.

As to the
shamash's
young wife, she had once asked her husband what those nightly goings-on meant, and had received such an unusually terrible beating with the rope from the withered little elder whom she over-towered by a head's length, that she never committed the sin of curiosity again.

They crossed the vast empty hall, their steps faintly resounding; the yellow circle of Simeon's torch moved over the floor like a puddle of light in front of them. They had passed a young sentry in khaki shorts and shirt at the end of the corridor; a second one grew suddenly out of the darkness as they reached the staircase leading down to the cellars. The sentries saluted, clicking their heels and lifting the right forearm bent at the elbow, with the open palm facing forward. No words were exchanged. They walked down the steps into a passage in the cellars, lit by oil-lamps. Joseph was glad of the light; the dark hall with its silent sentries had been rather distasteful and oppressive. Three boys stood together in the corridor, talking; at their approach they sprang to attention, saluted, and stood rigid until they had passed them. It was an intimation to Joseph that Simeon must hold a relatively high rank in their organisation.

They passed a door with another very young sentry in front and a muffled voice faintly audible from inside. It was a female
contralto voice with a Sephardi accent, which was repeating a slow text in a monotone:

This is the voice of Fighting Zion, the voice of liberated Jerusalem. Your kin is murdered in Europe; what are you doing about it? This is the voice of Fighting Zion. They send them back in swimming coffins; what are you doing about it? This is the voice
.

“Recording,” said Simeon. “The transmitter is mobile.”

It was the first bit of inside information Simeon had ever given him and Joseph couldn't help feeling thrilled. There were intermittent short bursts from some automatic weapon, but though they must have been fairly close to the range, the sound of the firing was muffled. Simeon, who guessed Joseph's unspoken question, smiled with the lower half of his face.

“We have got a fellow who was an expert in sound-isolation with a German aircraft firm,” he explained with suppressed pride in his voice. A man with a portfolio hurried past them who, while saluting, smiled at Simeon—a sight which gave Joseph a feeling of relief after the pathetically earnest faces of the young sentries. They stopped at a door. “Wait here for a moment,” said Simeon. He knocked and entered; but almost on the doorstep he collided with Bauman coming out with brisk steps.

Instead of his battered black leather jacket Bauman wore a newish brown one, but otherwise he looked less changed than Joseph had for some reason expected. He greeted Joseph, smiling all over his broad, comfortable face. Joseph felt relieved to see Bauman holding his hand out instead of giving the bent-arm salute.