She tried to control herself, biting her lips and pushing the hair out of her face. “Are you ill?” Max asked, bending towards her, and sniffing sympathetically. But Dina suddenly hit out at his chest with her fist, and while Max stumbled back, she ran out of the room.
It was hot and there was nobody outside. The khamsin caught her from behind; it felt as if somebody were blowing on the nape of her neck with a hot, foul breath. Behind the tower the rust-coloured moon hung motionless on a greyish gauze of mist; it looked like a clot on a soiled bandage. She hurried across the Square and past the dining-hut where some meeting was on; the hum of the all too well-known voices came out floating on the hot breeze like a swarm of insistent flies. She hurried on through the married living quarters with its square white concrete blocks. The door of Joseph’s room stood open and the room was brightly lit. On the bed, facing the door, Ellen, Gaby and the Egyptian were sitting side by side. Ellen, with her swollen belly, was leaning back on the bed and reading out something from a magazine, and they all three laughed. The Egyptian had his arm round Gaby’s shoulder; her leg was pressed against his from knee to ankle.
Lifting her eyes from the magazine, Ellen saw Dina’s slender figure silhouetted against the darkness; she called out to her, but the figure moved on as if frightened.
Once outside the circle of light, Dina hesitated for a second whether she should turn back and join the company of the others. But the idea of sitting still in that cramped, narrow cubicle with its stuffy air and the odour of Joseph and Ellen’s copulations lingering on the bed, made her hurry on again. It seemed to her that she knew not only all their voices by heart but also the individual smell of their perspirations. There was an itching dryness inside the hot shell of her nostrils; for a while the world seemed to consist of smells alone, floating in the air like threads of various colour. There was the greasy whiff of tepid dishwater from the communal kitchen, the sour-milk smell of the nursery, the acid smell of the sheep-pen, the biting ammonia of the men’s urinary, the sickly-sweet odour of indisposed women. When a small child she could always tell when her grown-up sister or her friends were unwell. She closed her eyes and scratched frantically with her sharp finger-nail in the dry cavity of her nose. At last she had discovered what she was going to do; sobbing and biting her nails, she burst into the stable-shed and groped her way in the hay-warm darkness towards Salome’s box.
The brown mare was asleep, but as soon as Dina’s hand touched her flank she scrambled to her feet with a docile and plaintive neigh. Dina found the stable lantern and a box of matches; while she put the saddle on the horse she felt suddenly quite cheerful. She had gone out on night rides several times before when a similar mood had come over her; and though lately snipers had again taken occasional pot-shots at the settlement in the dark, wounding two people, and it was not considered safe to walk alone outside the entrenchment at night, this only gave an additional thrill to her undertaking. She extinguished the lantern and led Salome quietly out of the shed and past the rows of tents of the youth camp. A moment later she had reached the barbed wire and passed through the gate. She looked round, but there was nobody to see her; she gave Salome a pat on the flank, planted her left foot firmly in the stirrup and, with an elastic jump, mounted. She would have liked to go for a wild gallop but the moon was not bright enough, and if she broke a leg of the communal mare she might as well commit suicide at once. They had a way of unctuous forgiveness in such cases which made one feel a leper for weeks. It delighted her that she was doing something definitely “asocial” and naughty; and that, as Salome couldn’t tell tales, nobody would know a thing about it.
As she walked the horse down the slope on the farther side of Kfar Tabiyeh, the hills around her looked as if dipped into a silver bath. Their silence gave her an unearthly feeling. From the height of Salome’s back even the khamsin felt like a warm, impersonal caress. She decided to ride straight down into the wadi, follow its course and then take the path up the opposite hill to the Ancestor’s Cave.
However, as she reached the bottom of the slope and rode through the narrow, twisting bed of the wadi strewn with boulders and dry thistles and tufts of scrub, a sense of oppression came over her. The slopes now rose on both sides over her head; she could no longer dominate them with her view. Salome was carefully picking her way among the rubble and could not be induced to go quicker. There was no sound except the dry crunching of her hooves and the occasional screech of her slipping on a stone. Dina thought longingly of the noises in the far-away dining-hut and of the bright light streaming through the door of Joseph’s room. The hills had withdrawn into themselves; there was an air of refusal about them, the exhalation of an immense loneliness. She was on the point of admitting defeat and turning Salome’s head, when at a sudden twist of the wadi she saw a man in Arab dress walking steadily towards her.
Something in his gait and clothing told her that he was one of the villagers from Kfar Tabiyeh. At the first moment the man seemed as startled as she was and stopped uncertainly about twenty yards in front of her; then, probably perceiving that she was a woman, he resumed his walk and came steadily closer. To turn back now would have meant admitting that she was scared; she pressed her heels into Salome’s flank and rode on. She could not induce the horse to walk quicker on the slippery rubble, nor did the man hasten his steps, so that the few yards which were still between them seemed to drag on for minutes. She now saw that he wore a kefiyeh with a black cord and a striped Arab skirt with a checked European jacket. When at last they were level he stepped aside and looked up at her, silent and open-mouthed. She could see the gap of two missing front teeth in the dark cavity of his mouth and the blind, milky pupil of one eye destroyed by trachoma. When she had passed him he said something which she couldn’t understand in a hoarse voice and, after a moment’s hesitation, turned and began to follow her. But now there was a clean stretch of path before her, and Salome, suddenly frightened, broke of her own accord into a gallop. When Dina turned her head after a minute, there was nothing behind her but the empty wadi, deserted between the silver hills.
Her heart-beat became normal again as soon as she found herself on the ascending path to the Ancestor’s chamber; only her thighs, locked round Salome’s warm flanks, went on trembling for a while. She told herself that she was a coward and a fool to be frightened by a harmless villager. The words he had spoken to her had probably been just a greeting, and her riding past in silence must have offended him. There was after all something in what Max had said about the human approach. She should have given him a friendly and firm “marhaba” and not betrayed her fear. That was what Ellen or Dasha would have done in her place. But then Ellen and Dasha had never known—anyway, she was all right now and quite cheerful again. Only her legs in the stirrups went on trembling; for her flesh knew better, and knew that what the man had said had not been just a greeting.
The caves in the moonlight were rather a disappointment. There was no tree or pole to which she could fasten Salome, so she had to drag the horse after her up and down the slope while she searched for the entrance which at night was not easy to find. Twice she thought she had found it, but each time it was only one of the empty smaller caves. The moon was already fairly low and it must have been pretty late in the night, but the sky had cleared, so its light shone brighter.
At last she found the little mound and behind it the steep narrow hole leading to the vestibule. She pulled Salome’s head down so that she could weigh the end of the reins with a stone, then, lying flat on her stomach, put her feet into the hole and let herself slide down. Down in the vestibule the smell was terrible—some Arab shepherds must have used the hole as a latrine. She groped nervously in the pockets of her shorts for the matches she had brought with her from the stable, broke one, lit the second, and found the candle stump which was always left lying about in the first burial-chamber. In the yellow light of the candle the cave looked friendlier, but her apprehensions had been correct: the sand on the ground of the p
assage was littered with dried excrement. Covering her nose and mouth with her free hand and stooping under the low ceiling, she descended the three stone steps to the lower vestibule. There were the three niches, and the middle one was Joshua the Ancestor’s.
The bones were still there all right and the skull was still missing; no miracle had happened since her last visit. The bones lay in a disorderly heap on the damp sand of the narrow chamber. “Hallo, Ancestor,” Dina whispered, squatting on her heels. She scratched a little with her nails in the sand, in the exciting hope of finding a coin. But the chamber had been plundered God knew how many times and by whom: Roman Legionaries, Arab shepherds, Crusaders, Turks, until they had even pinched the Ancestor’s head and strewn his bones about so that his left tibia lay upside-down across his ribs, like a ballet dancer’s leg thrown up in a high kick. She wanted to replace the tibia in its proper position but couldn’t get herself to touch it; and while she hesitated, her bust squeezed into the chamber, a trickle of liquid tallow dropped from the candle, into the sand just beneath Joshua’s pelvis and glinted there, an obscene jelly-blot. It was as if even the Ancestor derided her by spilling his semen under her face. She flinched, and as she hurriedly withdrew her body from the niche, knocked her head against the low rock ceiling.
Biting her nails and feeling sick, she scrambled out of the passage. She put the candle back into the first chamber of the upper vestibule and crawled out through the hole, lifting herself up by her elbows. Salome was patiently waiting for her outside the entrance, her head bent under the pull of the reins; but instead of the fresh night air for which she thirsted, there was once more only the hot, foul breath of the khamsin.
With trembling lips she mounted the horse and began her descent down the steep path. The moon was almost gone and the hills were no longer silver-smooth and aloof, but dark, hulking silhouettes. She dreaded riding once more through the wadi but there was no other way home. She wished Joseph or Reuben were here with her but they slept far away in their beds unaware of her doings. She said a prayer, forgetting even to be ashamed. At some distance in front of her rose two dark round hillocks, almost symmetrical, side by side; “the Giant’s Buttocks” Moshe had once called them. She had thought it funny then, but now she saw the naked giant lying flat on his stomach, his hind-part lifted in monstrous blasphemy to the sky.
She had reached the wadi. This was the smooth end of it; she dug her heels into the tired horse’s flanks until it broke into a jerky gallop. But they soon came to the narrow, twisted stretch choked with rubble where the horse could only advance step by step; and as they turned the corner she saw the Arab with the gaping teeth standing in the middle of the gorge; but this time there were two others behind him, waiting for her.
11
Having finished with this week’s business in Haifa, Joseph early next morning took the autobus to Tel Aviv. He slept for most of the three hours’ journey through the orange and lemon groves of the Maritime Plain of Samaria of which the strip along the coast was in Hebrew, the next, parallel inland belt in Arab possession. Whenever Joseph, waking, looked through the window, he saw not the landscape but an unprotected flank. When they arrived in Tel Aviv, the khamsin had just reached its peak.
Each time Joseph came to Tel Aviv he was torn between his contrasting emotions of tenderness and revulsion. Tenderness for the one and only purely Hebrew town in the world with the lyrical name of Hill of Spring and the jostling vitality of its hundred and fifty thousand citizens; revulsion from the dreadful mess they had made of it. It was a frantic, touching, maddening city which gripped the traveller by his buttonhole as soon as he entered it, tugged and dragged him round like a whirlpool, and left him after a few days faint and limp, not knowing whether he should love or hate it, laugh or scorn.
The whole adventure had started less than a generation ago, when the handful of native Jewish families in Arab Jaffa decided to build a residential suburb of their own, on what they imagined to be modern European lines. Accordingly they left the molehill of the Arab port with its labyrinthine bazaars, exotic smells and furtive daggers, and started building on the yellow sand of the Mediterranean dunes the city of their dreams: an exact imitation of the ghetto suburbs of Warsaw, Cracow and Lodz. There was a main street named after Dr. Herzl with two rows of exquisitely ugly houses each of which gave the impression of an orphanage or Police barracks, covered for beauty with pink, green and lemon-coloured stucco which after the first rains looked as if the house had contracted smallpox or measles. There was also a multitude of dingy shops, most of which sold lemonade, buttons and flypaper.
In the early nineteen-twenties, with the beginnings of Zionist colonisation, the town had begun to spread with increasing speed along the beach. It grew in hectic jumps according to each new wave of immigration—an inland tide of asphalt and concrete advancing over the dunes. There was no time for planning and no willingness; growth was feverish and anarchic like that of tropical weeds. Each newcomer who had brought his savings started to build the house of his dream; and woe to the municipal authority who tried to interfere. Was this the promised land or not? For a decade or so, while the Eastern European element predominated among the immigrants, the source of inspiration of all these petrified day-dreams remained the stone-warren of the Polish small town. The Hill of Spring became a maze of stucco, with rusty iron railings along narrow-chested balconies and an Ionic plaster-column or Roman portico for embellishment.
However, life in Tel Aviv in those early days owed its peculiar character not to the people who had houses built, but to the workers who built them. The first Hebrew city was a pioneer city dominated by young workers of both sexes in their teens and twenties. The streets belonged to them; khaki shirts, shorts and dark sun-glasses were the fashionable wear, and ties, nicknamed “herrings”, a rarity. In the evening, when the cool breeze from the sea relieved the white glare of the day, they walked arm in arm over the hot asphalt of the new avenues through whose chinks the yellow sand oozed up and which ended abruptly in the dunes. At night, they built bonfires and danced the horra on the beach, and at least once a week they dragged pompous Mayor Dizengoff or old Chief Rabbi Hertz out of their beds and took them down to the sea to dance with them. They were hard-working, sentimental and gay. They were carried by a wave of enthusiasm which had a crest and no trough. They were touchy only on one point, the Hebrew language. They fought a violent and victorious battle against the use in public of any other tongue; the slogan “Hebrews talk Hebrew” was everywhere—on buses, shops, restaurants, hoarding-posts; speakers from abroad who tried to address a meeting in Polish, German or Yiddish were howled down or beaten up. There were few cafés in those days but many workers’ clubs; the cheap cafés sold meals on credit and got their supplies on credit; landlords let rooms on credit in their houses which were built on credit; and yet the town, instead of collapsing into the sand on which it was built, waxed and grew….
—Ah, those were the good old times, the legendary days of ten years ago! As Joseph walked through the noisy crowd in Eliezer Ben Yehuda Street, of the two emotions battling in his chest revulsion got the upper hand. This cheap and lurid Levantine fair had ceased to be the pioneer town he had known and loved. One noisy café followed the other with flashy decorations, dance-parquets and microphones and blaring loud-speakers through which crooners from the suburbs of Bucharest and aged artistes from Salonica poured out their Hebrew imitations of American imitations of Cuban serenades. There were beauty parlours and antique shops and interior-decoration shops; and in the harsh white blaze of the sun it all looked like a noontide spook—the oppressive dream of a sybarite who has overeaten at lunch. This was the newest quarter of the town, built since the recent immigration from Germany and Central Europe had started, and the stucco-idyll of the older parts had been defeated by the aggressive cubism of the functional style. The houses here looked like rows of battleships in concrete; they had flat oval terraces with parapets jutting out like conning towers, and they all seemed t
o shoot at each other. The streets had no skyline and no perspective; the eye jumped restlessly along the jagged, disconnected contours without ever coming to rest.
Last week Joseph had run into Matthews, and Matthews had asked him for luncheon to-day at the Café Champignon on the beach. As Joseph crossed the over-crowded terrace in the noise of the orchestra playing the “Merry Widow”, people turned their heads to look at him; he was the only person here in the traditional Commune dress. He felt a sudden homesickness for Ezra’s Tower; it seemed to him that he had left it not two days, but weeks ago.
Seated at a table near the railing, overlooking the sea, he saw Matthews, who was arguing with a waiter. Joseph felt a sudden relief at the sight of the heavy-jawed face with the squashed boxer’s nose—it was so obviously gentile in these sharp-featured semitic surroundings.
“Listen,” Matthews was explaining to the waiter as Joseph sat down, “I’ve ordered a bottle of Chablis. This is syrup.”
Thieves in the Night: Chronicle of an Experiment Page 26