Thieves in the Night: Chronicle of an Experiment

by Arthur Koestler

  When the anthem was over we all flocked into the dining-hut, and the process of making friends with the new ones began. Max took the fat girl under his protection, his tapir-nose was fairly sniffing at her while he talked with great agitation (probably about the necessity of fostering Arab Trade Unions). She listened, obviously not understanding a word and admiring him with her good big cow-eyes. Ellen was engaged in a serious and measured conversation with the Dr. Phil., now and then looking at me from the comer of her eyes. Dina took no part in the thawing-up proceedings. Contact with new arrivals from Europe always has a bad effect on her. She sat on the furthermost end of a bench, spooning her soup with a listless, withdrawn air. Since she is back from hospital the blue shadows under her eyes have deepened and she looks lovelier than ever.

  On the whole we were doing our best; and yet it will be a long time until we make the new ones feel at home, and until we ourselves accept them. And even then, I feel, there will always remain a difference—hardly perceptible, unavowed, and yet implied in all relations. There will be memories of the early days which they do not share, allusions and jokes from which they will feel left out. They will always regard us as old-timers, the Mayflower-aristocracy of the place; and so shall we ourselves, in the secrecy of our hearts. (And, when all is said, we have built this place out of the wilderness, or haven’t we?) But when the next graft arrives they will look up to both the older groups with awe and respect, unable to distinguish between them;—like the last arrival in the doctor’s waiting-room who, unaware of the hierarchy previously established, lumps together all those present into one category of “those who were here before”.

  This little patrician arrogance will remain lingering about us and in due time we, the original seven-and-thirty, will become, as in Dagánia, Khefziba and Kfar Gileadi, a bunch of picturesque elders, with pipes and gout and prophetic beards—respected, legendary, and rather tiresome…. That is, those of us who live to see the day.

  Later

  The advent of the youth-group was less inspiring. To tell the truth, rather depressing.

  It is not the first time that I have felt frightened by our new generation. These twenty-five adolescents of both sexes are fairly typical; they are all Sabras—born and educated in the country; they are all between sixteen and nineteen. The larger part of them are sons and daughters of farmers from Petakh Tikwa, Rosh Pina, Metullah and other villages of the old type, founded before the time of the Communes. The others come from the towns. School and the youth-movement brought them together and they formed a group with the aim of founding a Commune of their own. They will spend six months of their vocational training with us, and will be settled in about a year’s time, on land promised to them by the National Fund in the Eastern part of the Valley of Jezreel, somewhere near Beisan. The group counts in all about a hundred and fifty youngsters who have been split up into smaller units for the period of their training.

  So far so good. It is a good sign that many among the native youth want to go in for Communal life. This choice is of course made easier for them by our propaganda in the schools—our teachers are all Labour or I.L.P., and the Teachers’ Trade Union sees to it that no right-wing heretics creep into the flock. With that too I agree—all education is propaganda for one way of life or the other; so why not propagate the way in which we believe? And yet, there is already a difference between us, who came from abroad groping for a new form of social and national existence, an experimental Order or Fraternity such as has never been tried before—and them, who slip into a ready-made form, guided by their elders. For us, the choice involved a revolutionary negation of our past—for them, it is an act of conformism.

  That, however, would not matter so much. When a nebulous experiment solidifies into an institution, that only proves that it has succeeded. We do not want romantics and permanent upheavals. We want a stable pattern of life for our people. And if the new generation accepts the pattern which we evolved, there should be nothing but rejoicing.

  And yet something inside myself, perhaps my innate scepticism, tells me that all this is too good to be true. The snag is not in the institution, but in the human quality of the new generation. I have watched them ever since they arrived—these stumpy, dumpy girls with their rather coarse features, big buttocks and heavy breasts, physically precocious, mentally retarded, over-ripe and immature at the same time; and these raw, arse-slapping youngsters, callow, dumb and heavy, with their aggressive laughter and unmodulated voices, without traditions, manners, form, style….

  Their parents were the most cosmopolitan race of the earth—they are provincial and chauvinistic. Their parents were sensitive bundles of nerves with awkward bodies— their nerves are whip-cords and their bodies those of a horde of Hebrew Tarzans roaming in the hills of Galilee. Their parents were intense, intent, over-strung, over-spiced—they are tasteless, spiceless, unleavened and tough. Their parents were notoriously polyglot—they have been brought up in one language which had been hibernating for twenty centuries before being brought artificially back to life….

  There, in the language, is the main rub. The revival of Hebrew from its holy petrifaction to serve again as the living tongue of a nation was a fantastic achievement. But this miracle involves a heavy sacrifice. Our children are brought up in a language which has not developed since the beginnings of the Christian era. It has no records, no memories, hardly any trace of what happened to mankind since the destruction of the Temple. Imagine the development of English having stopped with “Beowulf”—and even “Beowulf” is a thousand years nearer to us! Our Classics are the books of the Old Testament; our lyrics stopped with the Song of Songs, our short stories with Job. Since then—a millennial blank….

  To talk in an archaic idiom has of course its charms. We travel in a bus and offer a cigarette to a neighbour: “Perchance my lord desires to make smoke?”— “No, thanks. To make smoke finds no favour in my eyes.”

  But we are no longer conscious of this quaintness of our speech; where all walk on stilts nobody will stop to wonder. And so this young generation is brought up in a language which suffers from loss of memory; with only the sketchiest knowledge of world literature and European history, and only a very dim idea of what everything was about since the day when the Ninth Legion under Titus captured David’s Citadel. They speak no European language except a little English on the Berlitz-school level; the not too numerous and not too competent translations of world classics strike no chords in them; the humanistic hormones of the mind are absent, no Latin or Greek being taught in our schools. As against this, they know all about fertilisers and irrigation and rotation of crops; they know the names of birds and plants and flowers; they know how to shoot, and fear neither Arab nor devil.

  In other words, they have ceased to be Jews and become Hebrew peasants.

  This of course is exactly what our philosophy and propaganda aims at. To return to the Land, and within the Land to the soil; to cure that nervous over-strungness of exile and dispersion; to liquidate the racial inferiority complex and breed a healthy, normal, earthbound race of peasants. These Hebrew Tarzans are what we have bargained for. So why am I frightened of them?

  Perhaps because of the eternally conflicting values of crea-tiveness and security. On one side the fever and the vision; on the other side the sluggish pulse of health. On one side of the scales persecution and otherness as spurs to spiritual achievement; hectic prophets and sick messiahs from Jesus to Marx and Freud. On the other side of the balance the price we had to pay for them; the smell of tons of burning flesh on the stakes of Spain; enough spilled blood to fill the Dead Sea; the stink and filth and claustrophobia of the ghetto; the deterioration of the hereditary substance through the survival of the nimblest, the humblest, the crookedest, into its final product, the flat-footed, shifty-eyed eternal tramp.

  In Buchenwald they now hang people on hooks by their mouths, like carps. Who would not swap all the formulae of Einstein to take a single jerking wrench off his hook?
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  But who, having completed the transaction, would rejoice about it?

  I almost forgot the episode which frightened me most. It was a story one of the young Tarzans told me with a grin when he saw me through the open door of my room working on Pepys. It was about a friend of his, born and educated in the Commune of Herod’s Well. When that boy was thirteen, his father made him a gift of a fountain pen. When he was seventeen, he wrote a letter to his father which said: “Dear Daddy, to-day I have finished school. So I shall not need that pen any more and am sending it back to you.”

  That was an extreme case. But it is no use denying that these young Tarzans are a step backward and that it will take a series of generations until we catch up again. It is a deliberate sacrifice but that does not make it less depressing. Rousseau was lucky that the French did not take him seriously; had they followed his advice and all become shepherds and tillers of the soil, he would have hanged himself.

  Wednesday

  The Commission appointed by the British Government to work out suggestions for the partitioning of the country has published its report. According to their recommendations the Jewish State should comprise less than one per cent of the total area of Palestine—a rectangle forty miles long and ten miles wide—excluding most of our settlements, excluding the whole of Galilee, the Valley of Jezreel, everything. It is not a political report but a printed sneer of derision.

  Together with the report, the Government has issued a White Paper rejecting partition—though not on the grounds of the monstrosity of the proposed frontiers, but because of the “political and financial difficulties involved”. Instead, there is to be a Round Table Conference to decide the future of the country—a Conference to which not only the two interested parties, but all the Arab States are to be invited. This is an innovation. I have never heard of Britain inviting Iraq and Syria to take part in their discussions with Egypt. It can only mean one thing: they are looking for an excuse to get rid of their obligations to us and to bury the idea of our National Home. Our future is under its debris.

  Thursday

  Simeon is in hospital in Haifa with typhoid. I wish he were back. The indifference of our people here towards the political situation drives me crazy; they do not even seem to realise that something is wrong. Most of them only read the headlines in the papers. In the evening everybody is tired and can’t be bothered; it is the old, honest and disastrous attitude: “we are doing our job; leave the rest to the politicians”.

  Last night there was a celebration; Judith, Moshe’s wife and head of our laundry, has come back from the maternity hospital with twins—inmates number six and seven of the Children’s House. There were sweet wine and cakes and the obvious jokes about Moshe’s methods of rationalising production. As their room has just enough standing space for ten people we took turns to get in; Moshe stood at the door, sturdy like a prize bull, shaking everybody’s hands with an earnest face and puffing with pride. As we drink wine only five or six times a year, even two small glasses of the revoltingly sweet stuff have an exhilarating effect; so there was a horra in the Square with Mendl doing his Pied Piper act and the new ones getting quite out of hand; the Egyptian dancing like a dervish, and the Dr. Phil. falling over his feet and breaking his glasses and generally making a fool of himself. The youth-group for a while looked on critically at us rapturous elders and then started a horra of their own among their tents, yelling and arse-slapping like a horde of Tarzans in the jungle.

  Round midnight some of us had drifted into the kitchen for the traditional “cumsitz” with coffee and biscuits. There was the usual crowd—Reuben, Moshe, Max, Dina, Dasha and myself. I turned on the midnight news on the radio in the dining-hall, but of course there was nothing. I knew it would only lead to one of our usual sterile arguments but I couldn’t keep quiet, so I started by asking the cumsitz-assembly what they thought should be done about the situation.

  There was a hush of resentment, and at once I felt guilty for disturbing the celebration—we don’t have so many of them. Then Reuben said cautiously:

  “The Partition proposal was a scandal—but after all they have turned it down.”

  “Don’t you see,” I said, “that the fact alone of the publication of such a monstrosity is characteristic of their approach to the whole problem? One per cent of the country—think of it! It indicates the lines along which they search for what they call a ‘reasonable compromise’. First they publish an insult with the comment that unfortunately for technical reasons it cannot be carried out; then they invite the representatives of the Moslem countries to decide upon our fate—having plainly hinted to them what the Government itself thinks should be done with us.”

  “Oh—you exaggerate as usual,” said Dasha.

  “Joseph’s got under the influence of the Bauman-people,” said Max. “He wants to throw bombs first on the Arabs, then on the English.”

  “Oh shut up,” said Dina. “Bauman is no fool.” When Dina talks about politics, her eyes assume the gravity of a child wondering whether it should eat its chocolates now or later.

  “No fool?” cried Max. “When he’s throwing in his lot with Jabotinski and his fascist terrorists?”

  “Look, Max,” I said. “Can’t we keep internal party politics out of it?”

  “No,” said Reuben quietly, “you can’t. These people are fighting our Trade Unions and Labour Party tooth and claw. They have not created a single settlement of their own. They have split the Haganah, our defence organisation. They have no constructive achievements and nothing in their heads but shouting and playing at soldiers.”

  “In other words they are fascists. Hebrew fascists,” said Max.

  “You can’t call Bauman a fascist,” said Dina.

  “Why not?” cried Dasha. “They throw bombs into Arab markets, killing women and children.”

  “They turn the heads of young fools like Benjosef,” said Max, “inducing them to commit some idiotic outrage and get hanged for it. And Benjosef’s accomplice was a lunatic whom they had to send to an asylum. That’s symbolic. Fanatics and lunatics, the lot of them.”

  And so it went on, I was all the more furious because I knew that half of what they said was true. I let myself go and turned on Max.

  “That fool Benjosef,” I shouted, “was the first Hebrew hanged in this country since Bar Kochba’s last stand against the Romans. You talk as if you hated that boy, who after all died for our cause, more than those who put the rope round his neck. God damn your objectivity. A race which remains objective when its life is at stake will lose it.”

  They were all silent for a second or two, but my anger didn’t subside. Oh, what a relief it was to forsake objectivity and close my eyes to their point, to all the “buts” and “ifs” which I see as well and better than they do. And letting myself go I carried them—at least for a minute.

  “Now, Joseph,” said Ellen with all the seriousness of a responsible veg-gardener in a socialist rural settlement, “now, Joseph, let’s be reasonable….”

  “But I don’t want to be reasonable,” I shouted. “I have had enough of being reasonable for two thousand years while the others were not. I was the reasonable fly running in zigzags over the window-pane because there was light on the other side and I had my legs torn out and my wings burnt off with matches. I am through with your reasonableness.”

  “So what do you propose to do?” Reuben asked coolly. Despite his calm voice I heard the warning undertone.

  “I don’t know,” I said, feeling my rage change into impotence. “I only know that we have been offered one per cent of our country as a reasonable compromise. And I know that on that first night here when we were attacked in the open and could shoot back with a clean conscience and the blessing of God, I felt happy to kill….”

  “There you hear it—you hear the voice of fascism,” cried Max in a high-pitched voice almost breaking into a crow.

  “And you?” Dina asked suddenly, leaning across the table and breathing into Max’
s face. “And you, clever one? What do you propose to do? Sing ‘The Red Flag’, clever one?”

  Max flinched back as if her breath had singed his face. It occurred to me that Dina, made impotent for love, had, perhaps alone among us, retained the chastity of hatred. Max must have felt something similar, for he grew pale in the furrows round his nose.

  “If you still have the sense to listen,” he said with surprising restraint, “I can tell you my idea of what to do. We have to win over the Arabs, whether you like it or not. You can call me any name you like and play anthems into my ear and dangle banners under my nose, you won’t deter me from my creed. Proletarians of the world, the poor and humble of this world, unite. This is as sacred to me as the Ten Commandments or the Sermon on the Mount. The Arabs are the poor and humble and we are the poor and humble. There is no other way. This is my creed and I won’t sell my creed for a mess of chauvinist pottage….”

  His big tapir-nose quivered, and his eyes with the constantly inflamed lids quivered too. I liked and hated him in the same breath. So I said:

  “You should not have brought in that mess of pottage. It’s a tricky parable—a boomerang.”

  “What do you mean?” said Max, blinking.

  “Our ancestor, name of Jacob, got his blessing and the Land with it by cunning and crook. It’s a disgusting story. He swindled the guileless Esau; he helped himself, so God helped him too. Had he been more scrupulous in the choice of his method, we wouldn’t have got the Land—it would have fallen to the fur-skinned hunter of the deserts….”

  “Oh shut up,” said Max.

  “You shut up,” I shouted. “You with your world-redeeming pacifist phrases. What if the Arabs won’t be redeemed by you? They don’t want your money, nor your hospitals, nor your Trade Unions.”