Thieves in the Night (8 page)

They had been adolescents when they arrived, and now they were men and women hardened by experience. They had undergone certain transformations during those years, but as the change had been gradual and simultaneous, they were not aware of it. The men had become less talkative, their movements slower and more deliberate; the women's faces had grown coarser under the hard climate and work, and they had a tendency to develop strong hips and breasts. But though they had aged in experience and changed in appearance twice the value of that time, they still regarded those five years as nothing but a prelude, a prehistoric era, the embryonic stage in the life of the Commune, which was really to start on the Day of Settlement. For five long and hard years they had waited for that day, dreamed of that day, schemed and prepared for it; and now the day had come—and after the day, the night.

The silence which fell when the last lorry had turned its back on them and was swallowed up by the dusk had only been a short one, for they recovered quickly and went on. shovelling gravel into the stockade. But during that short moment or two they had felt like children who, after being told to be brave, were left alone in an empty house where the silent shadows crept in through the windows and reflections in mirrors froze into horrible masks. In that moment most of them would gladly have jumped onto the crowded trucks to be carried back, out of the horror of these archaic hills and their savage tribesmen, back to the safety of their own race and kin.

The night came quickly. The searchlight on the top of
the watch-tower was on; its sharp white beam was directed in an acute angle downward onto the stockade. They went on filling in the gravel under a shower of dazzling light which made the outer darkness even thicker and more impenetrable.

By 7 P.M. the work was finished. The reflector lifted its beam into the air, and slowly lowered it again as it began its patient revolutions round and round, sweeping the terrain beyond the barbed-wire fence with its white broom of light. The dugouts and the observation post on the watch-tower were manned; there was nothing else to be done. Those not on guard duty filed silently into the dining-room for the first hot meal in their new home.

The dining-room had as yet no electric light; there were candles on the tables and a single oil-lamp near the door. The kitchen was behind a wooden partition, and the food came out through a hatch in it, with a counter in front. They had onion soup, bully beef and oranges; and, to mark the occasion, a cupful each of sweet white Carmel wine. Apart from the twenty-five settlers, only Bauman and ten of the
Haganah
boys had stayed behind, and if all went well these too would go in a few days, to wherever they were needed next. Thirty men were enough to man the trenches, and they only had twenty rifles and two automatics to go round anyway. It was a principle that each Commune had to be self-supporting from the beginning, and that included defence as well.

Joseph had as usual succeeded in sitting next to Dina; on her other side sat Reuben and opposite them Dasha and Simeon. All five held responsible positions in the Commune, and though strictly speaking places were to be occupied in the order of arrival, they usually sat together at meals.

Joseph looked across the dim, stuffy dining-hall. There were no candlesticks, and the cheap candles were stuck on the deal tables in little pools of frozen tallow. Hardly anybody talked; the men slouched on the forms like exhausted animals. At the table next to theirs a boy with a round, puffed, vacant face sat with his cheek propped against his left hand, while the right
half-consciously spooned soup into his mouth. His neighbour slept with his chin on his arms. Everywhere Joseph saw the same slumping figures, their jaws in slow grinding movement as they chewed their food.

So this was their bridal night with the earth. At regular intervals the beam of the searchlight passed over the roof of the hut; its lower fringe swept through the upper part of the windows and through the room, forcing the diners to avert their faces or close their eyes. They might as well have been on an island with a lighthouse in the middle of the ocean. The darkness outside was complete and the wind whined and whistled in protest at the unexpected obstacle on its ancient course through the hills.

Joseph was struck by the ugliness of the faces around him as they were lit up in the intermittent ghastly flash of the searchlight. It was not the first time that he had noticed it, but tonight his revulsion against this assembly of thick, curbed noses, fleshy lips and liquid eyes was particularly strong. At moments it seemed to him that he was surrounded by masks of archaic reptiles. Perhaps he was over-tired and the one cup of sweet wine had gone straight to his head. But it was no good denying to himself that he disliked them, and that he hated even more the streak of the over-ripe race in himself. The only oasis was Dina; but then Dina only half belonged to them like himself, though in a different way. The other girls made him shudder in incestuous revulsion. Their flesh had lost its innocence from birth or before. They might be chaste and prim, and yet some acrid spice of their intellect permeated the very pores of their bodies. That knowingness expanded over the nervous surface of their skin, destroyed their capacity for self-forgetfulness. They were saturated with the long experience of the race which lingered in their eyes and on their skin like the heat of the former occupant in a chair.

“You can have the rest of this,” he heard Dina say, pushing her cup of wine to him. “It's too sweet for me.”

“Blessed be the grape,” said Joseph, lifting the cup and
emptying it. And blessed be Dina, my oasis, he thought. Without her it would be the desert. But alas, she is the mirage, not the well.

“What has happened to the searchlight?” asked Dasha. The periodic flashes had stopped for the last minute.

“Signalling,” said Reuben with his mouth full. “Bauman is talking to Gan Tamar.”

Reuben is all right, thought Joseph. He liked Reuben's laconic matter-of-factness, his unvarying even temper. Reuben was neither witty nor brilliant; he completely lacked vanity and ambition. His leadership was based mainly on his lack of negative qualities, on a kind of neutral personality which offered no points for attack and made him the socially ideal type for collective life.

“I hope Bauman won't forget to tell them to send up my carrots to-morrow,” said Dasha. Dasha was in charge of the communal kitchen and a stickler about the right vitamin diet; she had been through a training course.

“Bauman never forgets anything,” said Dina—a remark which Joseph disliked. His mood, when he was near her, was like a precision barometer on an April day; everything she said, however apparently remote from personal implications, produced a change.

“What did you think of our guests?” he asked. “That female walked about the camp as if she were inspecting a zoo.”

“She was the typical English aristocrat,” said Dasha, who was a fervent socialist and had never spoken to a live Englishman.

“Aristocrat my foot,” said Joseph. “She is what they call at home the lower middle class, and what in the colonies becomes the ruling class. It is a kind of Pygmalion-miracle which is automatically performed each time a P. & O. liner passes Gibraltar. The whole Empire is a kind of glorified suburbia.”

“‘Pygmalion' was written by G. B. Shaw,” stated Dasha.

“Look,” cried Dina, mimicking Mrs. Newton and pointing at Simeon. “He reads his paper from right to left. Isn't it
funny?” In Europe Dina had studied for the stage. By sucking in her lips and pushing out her chin and drawing in her nostrils she managed to give her face a pinched, hag-like expression. They all laughed, except Simeon who had not spoken a word during the whole meal. Now that he had become the target of Dina's act, he lifted his gaze from his plate.

“There was no need for Bauman to be polite to that Police officer,” he said. “Nor for you, Reuben.”

“We were correct to them, that's all,” said Reuben.

“Precisely,” said Simeon. He put his fork down. “We keep on being correct and the Arabs keep on shooting. Result: the Arabs are appeased and we pay the bill.”

“We have had that out before,” said Reuben, whose mind was on to-morrow's tasks: the reinforcement of the trenches, the installation of electric light, the laying of the foundations for the cowshed.

“But Simeon is right,” said Dina. The barometer rose: if Dina supported Simeon, then her previous praise of Bauman had also to be seen in a purely objective light.

“Pressure demands counter-pressure,” said Simeon. “Otherwise we shall continue to lose ground. The only answer to violence is retaliation.”

“An eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth,” said Dasha with her rather silly laugh.

“No,” said Simeon. “It has nothing to do with ethics. The concept of revenge is archaic and absurd. We have to counter terror by terror for purely logical reasons.”

The discussion had attracted some people from other tables. They lingered around them, with one foot on the bench and elbows propped on the table.

“I don't believe in terror,” said Dasha. She had the stubborn aggressiveness of the female arguing against an intellectually superior partner.

“No, you don't,” said Simeon with trenchant sarcasm, “but you believe in carrots because of vitamin A. What you mean to say is that you don't
like
terror. It disagrees with your
conditioning. I dislike carrots. They disagree with my conditioning. But I eat them—because they contain vitamin A.”

“So what?” said Dasha, who had been unable to follow.

“So we shall eat no more carrots,” said Reuben with his conciliatory smile.

“Talking of logic,” said Joseph. “Arab terrorism is directed partly against us, partly against the Government. So to restore your equilibrium we would not only have to retaliate against the Arabs, but also to terrorise the Government.”

“It will depend on their attitude,” said Simeon with deliberate elusiveness, after a moment's silence.

“But we know their attitude,” Dina burst out. “They hate us; they all hate us like that female to-day. I saw it in her eyes, that look of suburban hatred. I bet she has a photograph of the sweet little Fuehrer. She must—all suburban haters adore him. Because he tells them what a noble feeling their pet hatred is and because he wears his hair plastered down like the hairdresser's assistant of their dreams….”

Her full, violent mouth dropped at the corners, and for a moment it looked as if she was going to cry.

“All right, Dina,” said Joseph gently, “all this we know. But Simeon has not answered my question.”

“We have to force them to change their attitude,” said Simeon.

“Force them—how?”

“By our achievements,” said Reuben quietly.

“By whatever means we find expedient,” said Simeon.

It had become quiet around them. There was now quite a crowd round their table. Joseph, while following the argument with one half of his mind, observed with the other how Simeon grew in stature when he had an audience. Practically everybody here was opposed to the views he held, but they listened to him with a reluctant admiration, and the longer they listened the stronger became his spell over them. They followed the argument with an inward-turned look, as if searching for an answer which they did not quite dare to face.
“Let us get this quite clear,” said Joseph, who had grown pale. “Assuming they don't change their policy towards us. And assuming there is further persecution in Europe which leads to a mass exodus——”

“Why assuming?” Simeon interrupted with cold irony. “The synagogues in Europe are burning and our girls are walked through their towns with sandwich-boards round their necks inviting passers-by to spit into their faces.”

“Oh, shut up,” said Dasha with a note of hysteria in her voice.

“Why shut up?” Simeon continued in the same acid manner. “As it happens, it happened to my sister. Don't look like that; why does it make any difference whether it's my sister or somebody else's? She was just a fat, dumb girl like Dasha, name of Rose. She studied chemistry.”

There was a silence, then Dina said in a constrained voice:

“Why did you never speak about it before?”

“Why should I speak about it? I came to be a peasant in my country, not to the wailing wall. I only mentioned it because of Joseph's ‘assuming.' Well, let's go on with our assumptions. I assume that the British won't change their policy unless we force them to. I have studied their history, their traditions, their methods. If the
autos-da-fé
are resurrected in Europe and our people burnt alive, they will be very indignant about it. They will write letters to their newspapers, ask questions in their Parliament and their Bishops will pray for our souls. But if some wretched survivors ask to be let into this our promised land, they will talk of economic difficulties and the poor dispossessed Arabs. And if the wretches won't listen to reason and come swimming for their lives across the sea, they will put barbed wire on our beaches and let them drown….”

He closed his eyes for a moment. Something extraordinary was happening to him, something which he had never experienced before. He saw the drowning people before his eyes.
It was a sharp, short flash which lasted only a split second but was fantastically clear. There were hundreds of them, with arms and legs sticking out of the water, but there was no sound and the whole scene was laid out on a calm and peaceful sea basking in the hot sun.

There was a heavy silence, in which Reuben said drily:

“I think Simeon is exaggerating. At any rate I don't think we can gain anything by imitating Fascist methods.”

Unnoticed by most of them, Bauman had entered the hut a few minutes before, and had remained standing at the door, listening to Simeon's speech. Dina saw him; in the prolonged silence she asked: