Thieves in the Night: Chronicle of an Experiment

by Arthur Koestler

  (e) Maintain a common purse into which all the earnings of their members shall be paid and from which all their requirements shall be provided;

  (f) To assist members in raising their economic, cultural and social level by mutual aid, to care for their sick, to support the old and feeble … and to maintain and educate the children of the members;

  (h) To supply all the social, cultural and economic requirements in the settlement and to undertake all steps which may be deemed necessary for improving these conditions, and in particular to establish and maintain crèches, kindergartens and schools for the education and bringing-up of the children;

  (i) To establish and maintain in the settlement public institutions and services and generally undertake all activities which are customarily undertaken by village authorities.

  SECTION D: SPECIAL PROVISIONS RELATING TO THE BUSINESS OF THE SOCIETY

  (3) Rights and Duties of Members:

  (a) The members have equal rights to receive from the common purse of the Society food, drink, clothing, housing and other necessities and amenities of life.

  SECTION C: FINANCIAL PROVISIONS

  (1) Capital:

  The Society has no capital.

  2

  Pages from the chronicle of Joseph, a member of the Commune of Ezra’s Tower

  Friday, October … 1938

  To-day it is a year since young Naphtali was shot through his eye and brains because he couldn’t keep his head down. He has since become a hero and our local patron saint. Particularly as the poor, squinting little fool did not believe in violence and had so much set his heart on educating our Neighbours. However, heroes should be looked at through the telescope, not through the microscope.

  History is a series of futilities with grandeur as their cumulative effect. That, I suppose, is another example of the dialectical change of quantity into quality….

  Anyway we have waxed and expanded during this first year and are beginning to look more or less like a village—or rather a cross between a fortified camp and a life-size model from a town-planner’s drawing-board. The Watch-tower is our parish church, the Dining Hut our club, town-hall and forum ro-manum, all in one. So far the living quarters are still of wood, but the first concrete buildings are completed and look most impressive—they are the cowshed, dairy and the Children’s House. The latter has up to date five inmates who are quite fun. Two of them were born since we have settled and there are more on the way. The female comrades all seem to walk about with big bellies, terribly pleased with themselves for improving the national birth-rate and looking even less attractive than usual. I suppose they sing the Anthem during the act of procreation.

  We also have our graveyard with so far five concrete slabs. One died of typhus and three more were sent Naphtali’s way by our Neighbours: two during night attacks, the third ambushed while walking alone through the wadi and killed with particular beastliness—castrated, eyes out and all. And the people of Kfar Tabiyeh still have the cheek to come to our dispensary with their boils and belly-aches and fly-ridden children.

  The height of this tragi-comedy was the visit the Mukhtar paid us to-day to congratulate us on our first anniversary. He came on a white stallion, accompanied by his eldest son, Issa. The son is a pock-marked, shifty-eyed lout, but the Mukhtar looked magnificent. Reuben showed them the library, tractorshed, Children’s House, tree-nursery, etcetera; the Mukhtar praised everything with clickings of the tongue and avuncular beams, while Issa looked like a fellow with jaundice in a delicatessen shop.

  Reuben asked them to stay on for the midday meal, and the Mukhtar started with gusto the ceremonial game of protest. He protested with both hands pushing an imaginary dish away into the air and clasping them to his chest as if to assert his innocence of any intention of robbing his hosts of so delicious a dish; and after this had been repeated three times we went into the Dining Hall. He looked quaintly out of place at the communal table with his checked head-cloth floating round his shoulders and his enormous behind bulging over the narrow form; while his cunning eyes scanned with curiosity the informal coming and going of the comrades, particularly the girls. I thought the meal appallingly poor after so much ado and felt rather ashamed of it, though I knew that Reuben was right not to make any fuss about the Mukhtar and, by making him eat according to our custom and not theirs, to show him that we are here in our own right. The Mukhtar felt it too and didn’t like it, though he kept up his jovial tone, while Issa sulkily munched his food without saying a word, and cast his furtive eyes down whenever a bare-thighed girl brushed past him in her shorts. The four of us were left alone at our table, only Max and Sarah from our extreme Arab-liberating anti-Imperialist wing kept casting loving glances at Mukhtar and son, itching to explain to them that Allah is opium for the people and that their women should use birth-control; fortunately they can’t talk Arabic.

  When we got to the coffee which, as a concession, was made the native way, the Mukhtar let the cat out of the bag. He lowered his voice to confidential intimacy and asked whether we knew what boundary between the Arab and Jewish states the Partition Commission is going to propose. Reuben said truthfully that he knew nothing about it except that the report of the Commission is supposed to be published shortly; besides, in his opinion the whole idea of partition is going to be dropped. The Mukhtar then started nudging both of us with his elbows, with tremendous laughs and slappings of knees, pretending that we knew everything and were trying to hold back the secret from him. Finally he came out with it himself: according to rumour, the boundary is to cut Galilee into halves, with the village of Kfar Tabiyeh falling into the Jewish State….

  Reuben merely shrugged and repeated that in his opinion the partition scheme is going to be abandoned. I asked the Mukhtar where he got his information from; he put on a secretive air and said he got it from a very high and important personality. Probably it was the travelling cloth-merchant whom we saw the day before yesterday ride into Kfar Tabiyeh on his donkey; but the Mukhtar seemed firmly convinced that it’s true. Reuben was bored, but I enjoyed the situation. I asked the Mukhtar whether he did not think that they would be much better off in the Hebrew State, reciting to him the whole stock-in-trade of arguments: how the Arab living-standard has risen and the death-rate fallen since our coming; how the country was nothing but swamps and desert twenty years ago, while to-day the Arabs of Palestine are envied for their prosperity by all those in the neighbouring states. Hamdulillah, the Mukhtar said solemnly, Thank God. I told him that we were paying all the taxes out of which the Government built the roads and Arab schools; Hamdulillah, he said, nodding his head. I told him that the Arab labourer in this country earned about five times more than in Egypt and ten times more than in Iraq thanks to the capital we have brought in, and that Arab infant mortality had dropped to less than one-third thanks to our hospitals; Hamdulillah, he said with emphatic vigour. I told him that the great Feisal himself, son of the Kalif Hussein and King of Iraq, had after the last war officially welcomed the rebuilding of the Hebrew State and that after all the Kalif’s son knew better what was good for the Arabs than the assassins hired by the godless Germans; “Aywa,” said the Mukhtar, “God how true you speak! I have always held the same opinions but there are fools who will not listen to wisdom and even send a bullet into its seat.” He fell again into a conspiratorial whisper and revealed to us that he had always been a follower of the moderate Nashashibi clan, but since the extremist Husseinis were backed by the English and had got the upper hand; and since their leader, the Great Mufti Hadj Amin, was directing the terrorists from Damascus; and since most of the moderate Nashashibi leaders had been bumped off by the Husseinis for wanting to come to terms with the Jews; and since the other Mukhtar of Kfar Tabiyeh was a Husseini-man and had a blood-feud with our Mukhtar;—and so on. In short, it was clearer than daylight that we never had a better and truer friend than the Mukhtar of Kfar Tabiyeh, and that the least we could do to repay our debt to him was to give him, once the Hebrew
State was established, a nice, remunerative function like Collector of Taxes or Inspector of Road Transport; and of course to hang the other Mukhtar with his whole family….

  At last he was off, with protestations of eternal friendship and good-neighbourhood. Though his charm was wasted on Reuben, I couldn’t help liking the old brigand. How convincing he was even when he lied, and how unconvincing our Glicksteins are even when they speak the truth! That’s one of the reasons why the English like them and loathe us. We keep on demonstrating our loyalty to them, and the Arabs keep on double-crossing them. But the point is that the English don’t for a minute expect the Arabs not to double-cross them; it’s part of the game. They have an old and subtle tradition of dealing with Natives; they are attracted and amused by them, they exploit them as a matter of course and expect to be stabbed by them as soon as they turn their back, as an equal matter of course. Whereas with us they don’t know where they are. They regard us not as Natives but as Foreigners, and that is quite a different matter. There is no superiority complex without an inferiority complex; and while the native appeals mainly to the first, the foreigner appeals mainly to the second. Our protestations of loyalty make us only the more suspect.

  Sunday

  Thank God, Moshe our Treasurer is coming back from Hospital, so after the General Meeting next week I shall be relieved from deputising for him and go back to my own work. But first I have to prepare the annual Balance Sheet for the meeting, which is a rather unpleasant job. Though it is understood that for the first three years we shall work with a deficit, and shall only start paying ground rent and repaying our investment loans to the National Fund after the fifth year, it is nevertheless depressing to have to produce a balance-sheet which starts:

  So far our only sources of income were the first crops of about three acres of wheat and barley, milk and butter from our dairy, a few pounds from the chicken farm and vegetable garden, the cash earnings of six of our members who work as day-labourers in the Haifa cement factory, and under the item “Miscellaneous” the sale of a gold watch which Max’s aunt in New York sent him as a birthday present.

  However, communal bookkeeping has its fascinating side. The basic unit of our arithmetic is not the pound but the “Work Day” and the “Maintenance Day”. A Work Day is the amount of work done by one member in one eight-hour day. The value of the Work Day varies according to production branch. It is calculated by dividing our total annual income from e.g. milk and butter by the number of Work Days expended in dairy and cowshed. This is what the cow boys and dairy workers theoretically earn per day; but of course they are not paid, the money remains in the communal purse. The fewer the Work Days spent on each pound’s worth of produce, the more profitable is that branch of production and (taking amortisation and depreciation into account) we thus obtain a check on rentability. As in all new settlements the average value of our Work Day is still very low: three shillings and sixpence is what we theoretically earn per head per day.

  But this of course applies only to the “earners”, i.e. to those who are engaged in income-producing work. The work of the cooks, orderlies, seamstresses, laundresses, etc., produces no income. A little under half of the members of the Commune are employed on such non-productive household work. Thus the income from a Work Day should be at least twice the expenditure per Maintenance Day (that is the cost of feeding, clothing, and social services per head and day). Alas, it is not. The cost of a Maintenance Day is still two shillings and ninepence.

  What really fascinates me is the quaint statistical picture of how the average civilised human being in a rationally organised society spends his or her time to satisfy the basic human needs. There are now 36 adults in Ezra’s Tower (37 founding members minus 5 dead plus 4 new probationers). There are 365 days in the year, so the theoretical total of working days is 36 × 365 = 13,140. Of these, 6,624 Work Days were spent on income-earning labour (that is in the fields, orchards, olive groves, dairy, poultry farm, vegetable garden, tending the sheep, and maintenance work). If we divide this total by the number of members we find that the average member spent 196 days in the year to earn his keep. By the same method we find that he (or she—the statistical average is always a hermaphrodite) spent 28.5 days on cooking, washing up and serving meals; 12.6 days on dressmaking and repairing; 3 days on shoe-making, 3.5 on laundering, 3.5 on cleaning his/her living quarters, 4 on tending the lawn and other embellishments of the Commune, 6.5 on travelling, 1.5 on looking after the Library and Stores, 3 on dispensing medical care, 21 on running the Children’s House, 20 on being ill, 5.6 in childbed and suckling, 4 on leave, 56 on Shabbaths and Holydays and 2.2 on doing nothing because of heavy rains.

  Now according to this time-table about one-eighteenth of the total working days of the Commune are spent in running the Children’s House—in other words two people are employed full time to look after our five children—quite apart from the time which the parents spend with the children in their leisure hours. Whence follows that the children are much better looked after in the Commune than in the family. The wife of an individual farmer with five children not only looks after them alone, but has also to cook, do the housework, and at times to help in the fields and with the cattle. Her time-table would show about 700 Work Days in the year to do all these jobs—and less well than in our case. She can only manage it by squeezing two eight-hour days into each day of her life; and the same goes for the man.

  The revolutionary thing about the Commune is that it makes farming possible on an eight-hour basis and turns it into a civilised occupation. From 5 P.M. onward my time is my own. And when all is said, what is the final aim of socialism if not the conquest of leisure?

  Saturday

  Yesterday at the weekly stores distribution I played Father Christmas for the last time before Moshe’s return. “Shopping hour” on Shabbath eve is one of the highlights of the week, and to be salesman in a free-for-all shop one of the most gratifying occupations. The queuing-up in front of the stores is a kind of social occasion; everybody comes fresh from the showers, in clean linen and Shabbath-gear, looking his or her best, cheered by the prospect of to-night’s meat dinner and to-morrow’s long sleep and rest. Then they file with their shopping-lists into my decrepit shack with an air of looking for a fur coat in Bond Street. The standard allowance is fifteen cigarettes, one cake of soap and one razor-blade a week, one tube of toothpaste and boot polish a fortnight, one toothbrush a month; furthermore note-paper, envelopes, stamps, bootlaces, contraceptives, electric bulbs, torch-batteries, combs, hairclips and so on, by special order according to need. All of us get one complete issue of working clothes and one Shabbath-outfit each year. The working clothes are bought from wholesalers ready-made, the Saturday clothes for the women are made in our own workshop according to taste, so as to provide variety. It is surprising how few basic needs people have once competition and hoarding are abolished.

  In a couple of years we shall have our own furniture workshop and start going in for luxuries. For the time being our luxury-budget for the whole Commune is twelve pounds a year—the equivalent of two Work Days per head per year….

  Moshe has a trick of handing out the goods with some terrific sales-talk in a mixture of three languages, giving each item a fantastic imaginary price and carrying on a bitter mock-haggling with the customers. It is a performance one never gets tired of. Perhaps because it tickles our conceit, our feelings of superiority towards the capitalist world;—or because it comforts us by deriding the fleshpots of Egypt which we have left so irretrievably behind, and enhances the virtue of our appalling poverty?

  For, when all is said, ours is a hard and drab existence, and one has to do a lot of sales-talk to oneself to stick it. Even so there are days …

  However, they are only days. Remember Joseph, remember. Hast thou forgotten Pharaoh’s hosts?

  Powder and cosmetics are banned from our stores as attributes of “bourgeois decay.” I wish they weren’t. I wish we were now and then visited by some char
itable scarlet woman of Babylon.

  Sunday

  Yesterday being Shabbath a bunch of us went down in the truck to Gan Tamar to listen to a concert by the Philharmonic Orchestra which is touring the settlements. Although Gan Tamar played the rôle of god-father to us, relations have been steadily deteriorating since we became solidly established on our own. There were the usual minor frictions about a truck they once borrowed and returned with a broken spring, and so on, but the root of the trouble is of course political. I wonder whether any other race has the same capacity for doctrinaire fanaticism as ours. It has, I suppose, to do with the Exile; émigrés always have cliques and quarrels, and we have been émigrés for two thousand years. The exiled have nothing to hang on to except doctrines and convictions; hence they fight over ideas like dogs over bones. The others call it politely our semitic intensity.

  Anyhow, at the last municipal elections in Tel Aviv they had thirty-two competing party lists, and each party was convinced of being the only true prophets of the kingdom of heaven.

  But the real fun only starts when the Hebrew prophetic streak cross-breeds with socialist sectarianism. Then dots on I’s and crosses on T’s become a matter of life and death and deviations from the party line are castigated with all the wrath of Amos and Isaiah. This is what turned Marx into such a quarrelsome old bully; and we the disciples have inherited, if not his grandeur, at least his cantankerousness. Thus even our rural Communes, though they are all built on the same principle, are split up between three rival Federations. Ezra’s Tower is affiliated to the “United Group of Communes” which supports the Hebrew Labour Party; whereas Gan Tamar belongs to “Hashomer Hazair” (“The Young Guardian”) which stands on the extreme left of our Labour movement and corresponds to the British I.L.P. They have strong sympathies for Russia, whereas we are rather critical of the Soviet system. So after the concert there was the usual argument in the Reading Room of Gan Tamar—passionate, venomous and futile, as is proper and befitting in the socialist fraternity.