“The pettiness of it all,” said the A.Ch.C.
Miss Clark gave her little gasp. “One sometimes wonders whether they will ever become really civilised,” she ventured.
Miss Clark would have been at a loss to give an exact definition of the word “civilised”, yet she had a vivid image of its meaning: it meant lunching at the Strand Corner House on tea, two rolls and butter and a slice of cheese, to the accompaniment of the uniformed women’s orchestra playing Liszt’s Hungarian Rhapsody.’
The A.Ch.C. seemed to-day in a relaxed mood; he was leaning back in his chair, pursuing his thoughts.
“Too much sanctity in the air—don’t you think, Miss Clark? It poisons the atmosphere. Holiness is only bearable in mild solutions, like bath salts. The concentrated essence is venom.”
The absence of the usual gasp made the A.Ch.C. realise that he had shocked Miss Clark. Confident, however, of her imminent forgiveness, he turned to the urgent tray, of which the main item was a lengthy confidential report from the C.LD. Political Department, Branch for Hebrew Affairs, on the activities of the Irgun Z’wai Le’umi or “National Military Organisation”. This extreme nationalist para-military body had considerably increased in strength since the affiliation of the so-called Bauman Group. There also seemed to be a marked change in their policy. Up to now the Irgun had been mainly engaged in smuggling in illegal immigrants from Eastern Europe and in acts of retaliation against the Arabs. During the last week, however, it had succeeded in establishing a secret short-wave transmitter operating on wavelength 37.3 for about two hours a dav. The station was apparently ambulant as the direction of the beam had been traced on different days to locations varying from Tel Aviv to Lower Galilee. The main announcer was a Hebrew girl with a Sephardi accent and a pleasant contralto voice. The contents of the broadcasts were divided about equally between attacks on the Mandatory Power’s alleged anti-Zionist policy and attacks on the passivity of the Haganah, the leftist Defence Organisation controlled by the official Zionist bodies. The broadcasts began and closed with a recorded chorus of the Hebrew national anthem and were interspersed with the slogan “Your kin is murdered in Europe. What are you doing about it?” monotonously repeated every five minutes. The switch in emphasis from anti-Arab to anti-British propaganda was marked, and seemed to point to intended terroristic action against the Administration. A supplementary list of suspects (List III B) was attached. It contained about thirty names, among others that of a certain Simeon Stark from the Communal Settlement of Ezra’s Tower.
“… Well, well,” said the A.Ch.C. “What do you think of that?”
“I think it is a shame,” Miss Clark said primly, her pale cheeks faintly flushed with indignation. “We let these people in and defend them against the Arabs, and instead of gratitude we get this.”
“Quite,” said the A.Ch.C., and it occurred to him for the first time that Jimmy would have to cancel his entry for the Sports Club’s tennis tournament. “Quite so, Miss Clark— though not entirely so.”
He leaned back in his chair and for a moment stared at her absentmindedly. Miss Clark, lowering her lids, thought that the A.Ch.C. looked to-day even more harassed than usual. He will kill himself, what with all those beastly sects and communities, she thought. And yet, she confessed to herself with a little flutter of the heart, that harassed look somehow increased his indefinable air of distinction. She knew nobody so distinguished-looking as her chief—not even H.E. Everything about him contributed to the effect: his slimness and height, the delicate slope of his shoulders which was a result of his always having to bend down when talking to others; the grey strands in the dark hair and even the slight irregularity of his eyes, one of which was a shade darker than the other, giving his glance a certain impersonal fixity as if he were wearing a monocle.
Gradually the A.Ch.C. seemed to come to life again, as if a battery gone flat inside him were being re-charged. ‘Quite so, Miss Clark, but not entirely so,’ he repeated to himself, wishing that one could see things in such a simple, straight-cut, black-and-white manner as Miss Clark did. Alas, one could not. And alas, the way one saw them made little difference to the final outcome.
He at last turned to the top-urgent tray with a suppressed grimace of reluctance. It contained only one memo, and he had known all the time what it was: H.E.’s request for the draft of the Suggestions for a Statement of Policy by H.M. Government, to be submitted at London’s request. And he also knew the main points of H.E.’s Suggestions, as summed up in the pithy handwriting on the memo.
“Thank you, Miss Clark,” the A.Ch.C. said. “I shan’t need you any more this morning.” And, craning his back in a gothic arch over the desk, he began to draft out the paper in his small punctilious hand.
“Shall I remind you of the time?” Miss Clark asked him from the door. “You have guests for luncheon.”
“Yes—call me at a quarter to one, will you?” he said without looking up from the paper.
It was one of the habits of the A.Ch.C. which increased Miss Clark’s respect for him that, when immersed in his work, he regularly forgot the time.
4
A year and a half after his first trip, Dick Matthews had arrived for a second visit to the Middle East. His last book, Has Democracy Lost Its Guts? published a few months before, had been a success, which enabled him to drop newspaper work and concentrate on magazine pieces. He had been commissioned to do a series which would cover his expenses and were later to form the backbone of a new book.
As he walked down the street of the Prophets with his heavy, lumbering gait and with the pleasant sensation of a double-arrack consumed at the King David Bar slowly mounting inside his head, he saw a hatless young working man, wearing shorts and the zipped leather jacket of the Communal Settlements, coming towards him. He had a kind of humorous monkey face which Matthews thought he had seen before, and he was walking in the middle of the dusty road talking to himself, his lips moving and his eyebrows grown together over the saddle of the nose, jumping up and down.
Matthews halted at the edge of the pavement. “Sh’mana Bakhur,” he called in a throaty Michigan-Hebrew with a half-choked flourish after each vowel, “amod, stop, I know you from somewhere.”
The young man stopped, looked at him blankly for a second, then smiled.
“Joseph—from Ezra’s Tower,” he said in ringing public-school English. “So you have come back to us and have learned Hebrew as well.”
“Yepp—a few words,” said Matthews. “I grew to like your bloody country.”
“Which half of it—ours or the Arabs’?”
“For God’s sake,” said Matthews. “Can’t you lay off it even for the first thirty seconds?”
“No,” said Joseph. “You couldn’t either if you lived here.”
“What were you reciting to yourself when I wakened you? A manifesto?”
“No—our monthly deficit. I am now a kind of treasurer of the Commune, you see.”
“Is that why you are in Jerusalem instead of tilling the soil in Galilee?”
“Precisely.”
“And where are you going now?”
“To the Settlement Department of the Executive. Trying to get them to guarantee a six months’ promissory note for a hundred pounds on the Workers’ Co-operative Bank, of which sum I shall pay fifty pounds as a token of goodwill to the Agricultural Co-operative Institute, where a bill of ours for two hundred and fifty pounds was due yesterday.”
“Christ,” said Matthews. “And what are you going to do with the remaining fifty?”
“Lend it to the Treasurer of Commune Dalia, who in exchange promised me a promissory note of three hundred pounds guaranteed by the Dairy Co-operative ‘T’nuva’, out of which I hope to get at least seventy-five cash from the W.C.B., for which I hope to buy a second-hand tractor engine which was advertised in Davar by a farmer in Rekhovot.”
“And when are you going to be bankrupt?” asked Matthews.
“Never. On the contrary, we are qui
te prosperous. We have discovered a new spring which will give us enough water to irrigate another sixty dunums. But we have got a credit-inflation in the country and no cash, so one has to juggle along.”
“I want to hear more about that,” said Matthews. “Now I ‘ve got a luncheon date with your honourable what’s-his-name. What about dining with me at the King David to-morrow?”
“Like this?” said Joseph, pointing to his leather jacket and shorts. “I haven’t got any other clothes here.” (Nor anywhere else, he thought.)
“Who cares?” said Matthews. “Got some complexes about it?”
Joseph smiled, shaking his head. “All right, I’ll come,” he said after a moment’s hesitation. “Good-bye.”
“So long,” said Matthews. But after a few steps Joseph turned and walked back towards him.
“Listen,” he said with some hesitation. “You come from abroad and know what’s going on there. We here know nothing. What do you think our chances are—I mean politically?”
Matthews looked at him steadily for a second.
“Bad,” he said. “Mr. Chamberlain is selling out on you.”
Joseph gave no answer. He stood for a moment or two, his eyebrows raised, then turned to go.
At ten minutes to one the A.Ch.C. turned through the gap in the stone wall into the cactus garden in front of his house. It was an old converted one-storey Arab building, from the outside nothing but an austere stone cube with thick walls and small windows; but inside it was cool and dim and comfortable with the slightly musty atmosphere of a vault. The entrance door opened into a large hall with a stone-tiled floor and a few Persian rugs. It was sparsely furnished with sofas and easy-chairs along the walls, low inlaid casual tables and a huge fireplace of bricks which, though rather incongruous, fitted pleasantly into the general picture. In the centre of the room stood, somewhat statuesque, Lady Joyce, offering her forehead to the ritual flamingo-kiss. From the quality of her smile the A.Ch.C. gathered that his wife was indisposed with a touch of migraine. Like many barren women, she tended to pay exaggerated attention to her periodic indispositions and the climate made it all the worse.
The Arab man-servant brought the tray with drinks and three letters. One was an invitation to a painter’s exhibition in Tel Aviv printed in English and Hebrew, the second an invitation by the Jaffa citrus growers printed in English and Arabic, the third a short typewritten letter on ordinary foolscap with no heading and no signature, in Hebrew only. The A.Ch.C.’s Hebrew being rudimentary, he was on the point of pocketing the letter to have it translated later, when a word typed in capitals caught his eye: it was MA’VET, death. He fetched the dictionary from the shelf, and sinking into his armchair, his legs crossed, began to decipher it while sipping his arrack.
“Why do you bother?” asked Joyce.
“It’s something rather quaint,” the A.Ch.C. said, looking up a word in the dictionary. After a couple of minutes he had finished.
“Now listen to this,” he said, holding the letter carefully at its edges between outstretched fingers.
“The Assistant Chief Commissioner, Jerusalem.—Repeated warnings were sent to the Police Informer and Agent Provocateur Itzhak Ben David of 133 Bukhara Street in Haifa, to stop his treacherous activities.
“These warnings having been of no avail, the High Command of the Hebrew National Military Organisation, after hearing the evidence submitted, has found Itzhak Ben David guilty of High Treason towards the Nation, and passed sentence of death on him.
“The sentence will be carried out at the first available opportunity….”
“Rather funny,” said Joyce.
“I don’t think it is. These fellows mean business. They have killed in what they call reprisal actions quite a lot of Arabs.”
“Killing Arabs is different,” said Joyce. “They won’t dare touch a man working with us.”
“I wonder,” said the A.Ch.C., replacing the dictionary on its shelf. His further comments were interrupted by the servant announcing the first guests, Professor Shenkin of the Hebrew University and his wife.
Professor Shenkin was an elderly little man with a goatee, who advanced towards the mistress of the house with a deep bow and an outstretched hand. His wife Rebecca was short, fat and swarthy; she came from one of the old Jewish families in Jerusalem who had lived there under Turkish rule for well over a hundred years. Her father, a baker in the Old City, had amassed a fortune by real-estate speculations and owned several houses in the ancient quarter of the Hundred Gates. He was an orthodox Jew and fiercely opposed to political Zionism. In the old Turkish days the few thousand Jews in the country—mostly saintly old people who had come to die in the Land—had been tolerated by the Moslems except for an occasional pogrom hardly worth mentioning; whereas now that the Zionists had come with their talk of a Hebrew State, the Arabs had become hostile, the National Fund made land speculation almost impossible, the heathen youth in the Communes were desecrating the Land, and the workers in the bakery were organised in trade unions. Mrs. Shenkin inwardly shared her father’s convictions, but she never argued about them with her husband who had come from Bucharest and was a Zionist, though of the most moderate wing. She was very proud of being married to a university professor. She was aware of the fact that her father’s money had been a decisive factor in the match but found this not disturbing; how could one expect a learned savant to marry a baker’s daughter if she had not even money? She had gratefully borne him five children, and on the whole their marriage had been very happy.
When the greetings were over, Mrs. Shenkin found herself standing in the uncomfortable presence of Lady Joyce Gordon-Smith at the fireplace, while the two men had drifted away towards the other end of the room. The servant offered her a drink, and Mrs. Shenkin violently shook her head. “I drink not. I am not a modernish woman,” she said in her terrible English.
“I do,” Joyce announced languidly. Leaning with her back against the fireplace she looked down at the top of Mrs. Shenkin’s head, trying to find out whether she wore a wig. Joyce had been told that all orthodox Jewish women had their hair cut when they were married and had to wear a wig for the rest of their lives. But through the thin, greyish strands on Mrs. Shenkin’s crown she could see the pale shimmer of her scalp; she wore no wig.
“We just come back from Tel Aviv,” Mrs. Shenkin said conversationally. “We were visiting my second son who studies in the Gymnasium. Tel Aviv is a beautiful city. You go often there?”
“Never,” said Joyce. She had only been to Tel Aviv once, and the dreadful architecture of the Hebrew town, its broiling streets lined with lemonade shops, teeming with a sweaty, noisy crowd, had made her feel that she had fallen into a Semitic ant-heap. She loved to walk through the Arab shuks, though they were even more crowded and smelly; but then, they were the Orient—whereas Tel Aviv was only a Mediterranean East End, a cross between Whitechapel and Monte Carlo.
“Why not?” asked Mrs. Shenkin. “Do you not like to swim in the sea?”
Mrs. Shenkin never swam in the sea but she rightly assumed that Joyce did.
“It is too crowded,” said Joyce.
“Yes—what crowds!” cried Mrs. Shenkin. “Soon Tel Aviv will have hundred fifty thousand people. And twenty years ago—nothing.” Though rather anti-Zionistic, Mrs. Shenkin shared in the general Jewish pride in Tel Aviv.
Joyce said nothing. She sipped her dry Martini with an inward-turned look, preoccupied with her indisposition. These fat Jewish women were supposed to know about herbal teas and things. But then it was of course impossible to ask her.
“This is my son,” announced Mrs. Shenkin. Left to bear the brunt of the conversation, she had produced a photograph from her bag.
“Nice,” said Joyce after a fleeting glance, without taking the photograph from Mrs. Shenkin’s hands. However, she had to admit that the slim, fair boy looked remarkably attractive. How these two ugly people had succeeded in producing him, beat her.
“He is a genius,” Mrs. She
nkin remarked matter-of-factly. “He translates Pushkin’s poems into the Hebrew language.”
“How clever,” said Joyce.
“Yes. He translates Pushkin and he knows not one word of Russian.”
Lady Joyce suddenly started coughing into her cocktail. She made a mental note of the story for the Club: the Jewish infant prodigy who translates Pushkin without knowing Russian. She put her glass down.
“Then how does he do it?” she asked with, for the first time, a certain warmth in her voice.
“Oh, it is quite easy,” said Mrs. Shenkin. “A friend of his who is Russian tells him the contents and then he makes it rhyme.”
“How very clever,” said Joyce.
The servant announced Mr. Richard Matthews, and the American lumbered into the room, looking rather untidy, somewhat absent-minded and slightly tight. Joyce had met him at a luncheon party which H.E. had given during Matthews’ first visit, and had instantly disliked him. He was clumsy, uncivil and conceited in a kind of vulgar-democratic way— typically American. However, he had made himself quite a reputation during the last two years, and as the A.Ch.C.’s wife one had to entertain all sorts of people. This party was in his honour, and the Shenkins had been produced because those American papers always complained that one was not nice enough to the Jews. To restore the balance she had also asked Kamel Effendi el Shallabi, the editor of a moderate Arab weekly, but he was late as usual.
They stood around the fireplace, holding their glasses, with the dull feeling of pointlessness which is the ritual atmosphere of all Jerusalem parties. Professor Shenkin was holding forth with some involved story about excavations on the Dead Sea, and why they had gone wrong. Now and then the A.Ch.C., with an air of friendly approval, put in an unobtrusive question which showed up the professor’s ignorance of archaeology. However, Shenkin was not an archaeologist but a professor of philosophy, though nobody knew what exactly he philosophised about. In a lifetime he had only published two short papers in Hebrew periodicals, one on “Spinoza and the Neo-Platonists”, the other on “Talmudic Influences on German Mediaeval Mysticism”. There was a rumour that he had obtained his chair at the University because some relation of his was on the Board of Curators in America from where the money came.
Thieves in the Night: Chronicle of an Experiment Page 21