Thieves in the Night

by Arthur Koestler

  Meanwhile the erection of the watch-tower and of the living quarters within the fortified area had started. The watch-tower, a panelled wooden frame thirty-five feet high and weighing over three tons, had travelled on a specially constructed caterpillar carrier; its erection was a delicate job tackled by specialists who had done it before in other settlements. Their method was primitive and ingenious. They made a heap of stones and drove the front part of the carrier over it, until the base of the tower which was jutting out over the rear of the carrier, touched ground. Then they fixed a steel cable with one end to the top of the tower; the other end was attached to a drum worked by the engine of a tractor. They also fixed two ropes to the head of the tower and held them tight at right angles to the cable, a dozen hands pulling on each side to prevent the tower toppling over sideways. The tower now lay on the carrier like a giant figure, the ropes forming its outstretched arms; then the engine of the tractor started to work, the drum turned and the cable began to pull the giant by its forehead, forcing it to rise slowly into the air. There was something solemn and stirring about the tower’s slow, majestic erection, and while it lasted all work stopped. Silent and breathless the crowd watched the tower rise to an angle of thirty degrees, then forty-five, then sixty. When it had almost reached the vertical position the engine was stopped, and in the sudden silence the tower continued to swing forward, very slowly, under its own gravity, like a man balancing on his heels; while the men at the end of the two ropes hung anxiously on to them to ensure the tower’s smooth alighting. At last, with a slight bump, the whole base touched ground; the tower quivered once and stood on the earth, firm and erect. A spontaneous yell burst forth from the crowd, hoarse and inarticulate. All the tension of the previous night seemed to explode in that one gasping shout, a long-drawn a-a-ah, a roar of savage release. For a moment it looked as if they were all going to start dancing round the tower some pagan roundelay of priapic worship; then, with an awkward hesitation, they picked up their tools and went back to their work.

  At 6.30 A.M., the moment when the Mukhtar of Kfar Tabiyeh was woken from his sleep, two tents had been roped to the ground, the unloading of the trucks was in full swing, the first pre-fabricated section of the first living-hut was being carried to its site, and Ezras Tower had an air about it of having stood there from time immemorial. On the small platform on top of the tower stood Bauman in his black leather jacket, armed with a telescope; at his side stood a boy with a red signalling flag. Soon after sunrise Bauman had sent out mounted patrols to the surrounding hills, and the first of these had just emerged on the hill across the wadi to the west. The three riders moved slowly in single file along the crest; they wore Arab headgear and fitted quite convincingly into the landscape. Presently the first rider lifted his red flag with a wide, sweeping gesture over his head.

  “Signal,” Bauman said to the boy, without taking the glass from his eye.

  The boy swept the flag round in a semicircle, held it for a second stiffly over his head, and dropped it abruptly. His arm moved in swift, precise movements like a mechanical doll’s, and the flag gave a faint rustling sound each time it swished through the air.

  Now it was the turn of the rider on the hill. His flag was to the naked eye a tiny red dot jumping about in the air in vertical, horizontal and circular lines with beautiful precision.

  “All quiet,” Bauman read through his glass. “Too quiet for my liking,” he said to the boy. “Tell them to hang on.”

  By 9 A.M. the rough path from the dirt track to the site had been sufficiently cleared for the heavy trucks to move up. Their unloading started at once. The empty trucks were formed into a convoy and sent back to Gan Tamar to fetch the rest of the materials. At that time three walls of the first living-hut were already standing, the hole for the latrine was dug, the water-tank installed on its ramshackle temporary base, and the pipes for the shower-bath were unloaded. Some of the Helpers were beginning to think of a break, but there was to be none until twelve o’clock.

  At 10.45 the watch-post reported the approach of Arabs from the direction of Kfar Tabiyeh. Bauman had already spotted them from the tower. They were a strange procession. In front walked two barefooted children in their loose, striped kaftans which looked like nightgowns. Behind them three or four women in black, also barefooted. Behind these the men, about ten of them, in striped skirts and European jackets, their naked feet in string-laced shoes. They were unarmed except for some shepherds’ sticks. They came unhurriedly up the slope; the children’s faces looked scared, the women’s vacant, the men’s watchful and blank.

  As they approached the barbed wire, the Hebrews working on the site lifted their heads, gave them a short look and went on working, pretending to ignore their presence. Their faces had become taut and shut; the quiet elation of the work had gone. Bauman and Reuben met the Arabs at the barbed wire. The Arabs came slowly up to them, the women and children falling back, the men approaching the fence with a negligent stroll. They saw the symbolic furrow, and their eyes followed the furrow’s course around the site.

  “Marhaba,” said one of them, “Welcome.”

  “Welcome twice,” Reuben said.

  The Arabs started moving along the fence towards the end which was not yet fenced in. But where the barbed wire ended the boys of the Haganah stood leaning on their rifles, wooden-faced, barring their way.

  “We want to come in,” one of the Arabs said. He looked more like a Turk and smiled blandly.

  “Two of you are welcome to come in,” said Reuben. His Arabic, as his Hebrew, was fluent and businesslike.

  “God,” cried another Arab, an excitable little man with one eye, “can’t we even walk on the land of our fathers and of our own?”

  “The land is ours,” said Reuben, “and there are people working who should not be disturbed. But if you come in a few days’ time you are welcome to share our meal.”

  “We came to talk,” said the Turk, smiling over the stumps of some decaying teeth.

  “Then come in and be welcome—the two of you.”

  “Don’t go,” said the excitable one. “Who knows what will happen? God, and on our own land….”

  “Come, ya Abu Tafidi. We shall go in and talk to them,” said the Turk.

  “Don’t go, ya Abu Tafidi,” cried the excitable one. “These men are bad, otherwise they would let us all in.”

  The Arabs parleyed loudly among themselves, while the Hebrews watched them with expressionless faces. Finally the Turk and Abu Tafidi walked into the camp, while the others squatted down outside the barbed wire. Abu Tafidi was a member of the Mukhtar’s clan; in fact he was his cousin, great-uncle and son-in-law all at the same time; and yet, owing to the caprices of heredity, he belonged to a different type. He was a tall and bony old man with a distinguished stoop about his shoulder and a quiet, pensive way of speech. The Turk was fattish, smooth-mannered and jaunty. They exchanged compliments with Bauman and Reuben, sat down at the foot of the tower and started earnestly to discuss the weather and the crops. Then in due course the Turk came to the point. Smiling, emphatic and with every sign of sincerity, he explained that the settlers—nice, strong young people to whom he wished every good in the world—were victims of a cruel mistake in starting to build on this hill, for the land was not theirs and shortly of course they would have to evacuate it, according to the law. So why not go in peace at once, to avoid unpleasantness and remain friends?—He spoke with great simplicity, in a rapid and friendly way, while his hands milled round in smooth swift gestures as in a deaf-mute pantomime.

  Reuben interrupted him. “What is this nonsense about the land not being ours?” he asked evenly.

  The Turk laughed as if at an excellent joke. But surely, he explained, they all knew the law—the law of 1935 about the protection of tenants in cases of transfer of land? Of course the settlers knew it, they only played the innocents, ha-ha—and he winked his eye and slapped his knees and shook his finger at Reuben and Bauman, while the old man looked on, s
ilent and impassive. Of course, the Turk went on, the settlers had offered some compensation to the dispossessed tenants, but was it enough? Was it fair? Of course it was not. The law guaranteed protection to dispossessed tenants, and the law was sacred. And if some of the tenants, poor, ignorant, uneducated fools, had in momentary confusion agreed to take some compensation money and signed some paper which they did not understand—what did that mean, and who was to prove that such an agreement was valid? “Oh, come, come,” the Turk said with paternal affability, “you are educated young people, you have been to schools and universities, surely you know all this? Surely you want to act according to the law, and avoid trouble and bloodshed?”

  Bauman and Reuben both rose at the same time, without having exchanged a glance. “We must get on with our work,” said Bauman. “This land has been lawfully acquired, and there is nothing more to be said about it.”

  The Turk’s face had grown a shade darker; it looked as if he had never smiled.

  “You young fools and children of death,” he said quietly. “You don’t know what may happen to you.”

  “We are prepared,” Bauman said curtly.

  There was a moment’s silence. One of Bauman’s boys came up to them, carrying a copper tray with four small cups of unsweetened coffee. The Turk, after a short hesitation, took his cup; the old man refused. They sipped their coffee standing. Then the old man spoke for the first time.

  “I know not much about the law,” he said; his voice was gentle, almost soft. “A man who is rich and cunning may offer money to another one who is poor and ignorant, and this other man may sell him his cattle and his hut. There is no justice in this. This hill belonged to our fathers and our fathers’ fathers.”

  “And before that, it belonged to our fathers’ fathers,” said Bauman.

  “So the books say. But your ancestors lost it. A country which one has lost one cannot buy back with money.”

  “This hill has borne no crop since our ancestors left it,” said Reuben. “You have neglected the land. You let the terraces fall to ruin, and the rain carried the earth away. We shall clean the hill of the stones and bring tractors and fertilisers.”

  “What the valley bears is enough for us,” said the old man. “Where God put stones, man should not carry them away. We shall live as our fathers lived and we do not want your money and your tractors and your fertilisers, and we do not want your women whose sight offends the eye.”

  He had spoken angrily, but without raising his voice, as one accustomed to see young men take his words reverently and in blind obedience.

  “Our ideas differ,” Bauman said with polite finality. “And now I believe we have said all that is to be said.”

  The old man turned silently on his heels and walked out of the camp. The Turk hesitated, then said with a certain reluctance:

  “The fellaheen of Kfar Tabiyeh are peaceful men. There are Arabs in the hills around who are not so peaceful. You have been warned.” He lowered his voice and added in a confidential tone: “… This warning our Mukhtar charged me to transmit to you, as a sign of his goodwill, although the Patriots would pay him ill if they knew about it.”

  Bauman chuckled softly. “Your Mukhtar is a wise man,” he said. “Nobody likes to see his house blown up by soldiers. Your Mukhtar is like a fox who lives in a hole with two escapes, one to sunrise and one to sunset.”

  The Turk shrugged. “Peace with you,” he said, turning to catch up with the old man.

  The Arabs outside the barbed wire rose to their feet. At first they had sat there in tense silence and watched the proceedings under the tower. As the minutes had passed and they saw the Turk laugh and slap his knees in animated talk, they had relaxed. When they were offered coffee on trays, which they refused twice and accepted the third time as is befitting, they had relaxed even more. The children had munched oranges and the women, sitting huddled together at a little distance from the men, had started giggling and pointing at the girls with naked legs. Then the men had started chatting with some of the Haganah boys who knew Arabic; the boys, leaning on their rifles, had answered condescendingly and treated them to cigarettes. When the parley at the tower broke up, the excitable one-eyed villager had just started inquiring whether the new settlers would bring a doctor and open a dispensary as the other settlements had done, and whether the doctor would be able to cure his blind eye. Now, as their speakers returned and they saw their dark faces, they surrounded them with the guilty look of children who had been naughty in their parents’ absence. The Turk and the old man walked silently through the group. The others formed into pairs behind them, and the procession slowly descended the slope without turning their heads.

  The Turk and the old man did not speak until they had almost reached the valley. Then the Turk said:

  “The devil may take them away, but he could leave their tractors. They are dogs and sons of bitches but they know how to work. They will grow tomatoes and melons and God knows what out of that stony hill….” He sighed. “We are too lazy, ya Abu; by God …”

  The old man turned on him with a hard look.

  “You speak like a fool,” he said. “Is the hill here for me, or am I here for the hill?”

  After the villagers left, Joseph, who had watched the parley with curiosity from the top of a truck which he was helping to unload, came up to Bauman. “Listen,” he said, “why did you not let them all come in? It was very rude.”

  Bauman looked at him with a faint smile.

  “We are too weak to afford to be polite,” he said. “By keeping them out we established ourselves in their eyes as masters of the place. By now they have all unconsciously accepted the fact.”

  Joseph grinned. “Where did you learn all this psychology, Bauman?” he said.

  “Intuition,” said Bauman.

  “I thought one only had intuitions about people one liked.”

  “Who told you that I don’t like them?” said Bauman.

  “I wish my Arabic was as good as yours,” said Joseph. “What was the old Sheikh explaining so solemnly?”

  “He explained that every nation has the right to live according to its own fashion, right or wrong, without outside interference. He explained that money corrupts, fertilisers stink and tractors make a noise, all of which he dislikes.”

  “And what did you answer?”

  “Nothing.”

  “But you saw his point?”

  Bauman looked at him steadily:

  “We cannot afford to see the other man’s point.”

  6

  During the half-hour’s break at noon, two private cars came jolting up the wadi, escorted by a Bren carrier and followed by a cloud of dust. The first car carried the Assistant District Commissioner and Mrs. Newton, accompanied by a Major of the Police Force. Mr. Newton was a thin, tired-looking middle-aged man with a sparse and untidy moustache. He had been transferred to this country after eight years of service as an Assistant Commissioner in Roonah, North-West India. In the club in Roonah he had always been referred to by the men as a Decent old chap and by the women as Such a dear, followed by an imperceptible pause and a change of conversation. During his term of office in Roonah he had been involved in no scandal and acquired no distinction; he had vanished out of the colony as unobtrusively as he had entered it eight years before, leaving no memory-trace except for an occasional mild joke about his only known hobby, chess, and a compassionate reference to the only major blunder he had ever committed, the marrying of his wife.

  Mrs. Newton was the daughter of a Sergeant-Major in the Indian Army. An intimate analysis of the motives which had attracted timid Mr. Newton to that tall, bony and virginal female would have produced embarrassing results by unearthing Mr. Newton’s steady, stealthy and fervent loathing for Roonah, the Club, the Indian Civil Service and Army; and his oblique sense of humour which the first time led him to visualise the Sergeant-Major’s chaste and angular daughter in a series of those preposterous attitudes which the act of procreation entails.
It started as a grotesque private joke and grew until it became an obsession of Mr. Newton’s starved and chess-trained mind, accustomed to visualising positions after both partners’ various moves. What he did not foresee—for he was a kindly man with no more repressed nastiness than the average—was; the stalemate which followed the first few opening moves almost immediately after their marriage. The real situation had none of the humour and mystery which made the imagined one so fascinating; but it was too late by then. A stalemate cannot be undone.

  The third passenger in the car, copper-faced Police Major Edwards, was in a bad temper because Mr. Newton, pretending to be polite, had taken the seat next to the driver which the Major liked; while Mrs. Newton vaguely thought, as always when in the company of a man in uniform, how much happier she would be had she married into the Forces.

  In the second car sat Mr. Glickstein and Mr. Winter, both members of the Zionist Executive in Jerusalem, and wedged in between them an American newspaper man named Dick Matthews who was on a ten days’ tour through the country. On the front seat next to the driver sat the Zionist Executives official photographer, Dr. phil. Emil Lustig. The photographer and the driver were discussing in German Nietzsche’s influence on Fascist ideology. The journalist was listening with one ear to their conversation, looking bored. Glickstein noticed it.

  “Do you understand German?” he asked.

  “A little,” said Matthews.

  “We. are a funny country, what?” said Glickstein. He had put on his propaganda smile, baring his gold teeth. “Our driver was a graphological expert at the Criminal Court of Karlsruhe before he became a pioneer.”

  “They are all great guys,” said Matthews, bored.

  “The photographer,” Glickstein continued, “was a lecturer of philosophy at Heidelberg.”

  “Yeah,” said Matthews, who had stood two hours of propaganda in Glickstein’s bumpy English. “It reminds me of the taxi-drivers in Paris after the last war who were all Russian Grand Dukes.”