Thieves in the Night: Chronicle of an Experiment

by Arthur Koestler

  “Stand against that rock,” said the Yemenite, and the Mukhtar retreated two steps until he stood with his back against the rock. “Who killed the Hebrew girl?” asked the Yemenite.

  Ah, so they did not know, the fools. Of course—had they known they would have taken Issa and the two others, instead of him.

  “What Hebrew girl?” he asked; his voice sounded genuinely surprised.

  “Don’t play the fool, ya Mukhtar. Either you tell us who they were, or you will die in their place.”

  “I heard there was an accident with a Hebrew girl, but I know no more.”

  The man from Beyrout suddenly jumped forward and hit him with the butt of his automatic across the face. The Mukhtar did not budge. He slowly passed his hand across his nose and mouth, looked at the blood on it and let it slowly drop; then he spat out the broken teeth.

  “Who killed her?” asked the Yemenite.

  “Whom?” said the Mukhtar.

  The Syrian hit him again with the revolver butt, twice and with full force on the face and skull. The Mukhtar supported himself with the palms of his hands against the rock, then slowly slid down onto his knees. He remained thus for a few seconds, breathing heavily, then sat down on the rubble, his back against the rock.

  “The English will hang you,” he said with an effort.

  “If you don’t tell us who killed the Hebrew girl, you will die, ya Mukhtar,” said the Yemenite.

  The Mukhtar panted. “I don’t know,” he said. “What is she to you? You are not from her village.”

  “She was from our tribe, ya Mukhtar. Therefore we must kill one of your tribe to wash out the shame.”

  Through the mist and haze which surrounded his brain, the Mukhtar dimly realised that the Yemenite was talking sense. “We will pay blood-money,” he panted. The upper half of his body swayed and had a tendency to slump down, but he supported himself in an erect position by the flat palms of his hands on the rubble. The world around him grew confused, he was back in the days of his youth, haggling with Beduins over a blood feud. “We will pay you forty camels, he panted. He began to recite like a litany the traditional list of camels to be paid:

  “Raba w’rabaiah, male and female, four years old. Hag w’hagga, male and female, under four years. Jeda w’jeda, two smaller ones. Marbout w’marbouta, male and female, even smaller. Libne w’libnieh, two yearlings. Mafroud w’mafrouda, two small ones being weaned from their mother….”

  “Who killed the Hebrew girl?” asked the Yemenite.

  “She was a whore,” the Mukhtar panted. “Who can blame them? You are strangers—bringers of whores and corruption-strangers….”

  His heavy body suddenly slumped over. The Yemenite picked up the Mukhtar’s knife from the stones.

  “Wake up, ya Mukhtar, for you are going to die now,” he said.

  The Mukhtar raised himself and, panting, tried to crawl away on all-fours. For a minute or so the Yemenite watched him crawl blindly round in circles among the scree; then he stabbed him between the shoulders. The Mukhtar groaned and tried to crawl quicker, while the Yemenite went on stabbing him, until he collapsed on his stomach.

  They found him the next day on exactly the same spot where Dina had been found, with twenty-seven stabs in his body, and a typewritten note in Arabic pinned to it: “Akhaza assar w’nafa ellar— revenge has been taken and the shame done away with”. It was the ancient Beduin phrase which the tribe chants in triumph when a blood-guilt has been avenged.

  Investigation by the Police established that the murderers had come in a motor-car from a different part of the country, that there was no evidence of their having any connection with the settlers of Ezra’s Tower, and that they were persons originating from Arab countries, one of them a Yemenite. The Police further assumed that the killers belonged to Bauman’s notorious “Plugath ha-shakhorim” or Black Squad, recruited from among the coloured Jews from Iraq, Kurdistan, Yemen and Bokhara; but they were unable to produce any decisive clues.

  After the Mukhtar’s funeral a crowd of villagers from Kfar Tabiyeh marched up the slope of the Dogs’ Hill and threw stones at Ezra’s Tower, but they were dispersed without serious incident by the reinforced Settlement Police. For a few days there was considerable excitement in the village, and rumours circulated to the effect that Fawzi’s gang would return and burn down the whole of the Hebrew Settlement. These rumours were discussed with mixed feelings, as the Patriots had drawn heavily on the village’s cattle and sheep; besides, the harvest of the winter crop was at hand, and if trouble broke out again most of the harvest would be lost.

  The basic reason, however, of the villagers’ half-hearted reaction to their Mukhtar’s death was that they regarded the matter as a private blood feud between the Hamdan clan and the Settlers. They called the Hebrew girls whores and bitches, but they had disapproved of the hideous deed of Issa and his accomplices. Issa was anyway disliked throughout the village, and the two others were known as thoroughly bad lots, both of them having been previously jailed for theft. After the murder of the Hebrew girl the villagers had expected to find one at least of the three with his throat cut any morning, and would have regarded this more or less as a matter of course, a logical development of the blood feud. That the Hebrews had picked on the Mukhtar instead of Issa was an unexpected and sensational turn of events, but nevertheless strictly in conformity with blood law, according to which the injured party is entitled to take its revenge on the first near relative of the murderer they can lay their hands on. The fact that they had chosen the most important member of the Hamdan clan even rather impressed the villagers. The issue now clearly rested between Issa and the people of the Dogs’ Hill. It was Issa’s duty and privilege to avenge his father, and it would have been grave presumption on anybody else’s part to interfere in the matter.

  However, Issa appeared in no hurry to take action, except for the dropping of occasional hints to the effect that he was making elaborate plans and would soon be on the murderers’ track. Meanwhile he made preparations for a journey to Jerusalem, allegedly in connection with his planned revenge, in fact because there was some business to settle with the Arab Bank about his father’s heritage, and also because he wanted to have a look round the capital, to which he had never been before.

  With the approach of the harvest, the excitement in Kfar Tabiyeh began to ebb. For some weeks there was still tension between the two villages; the people of Kfar Tabiyeh ceased to hire the tractor from Ezra’s Tower and to send their children to the dispensary—until the other Mukhtar’s first grandchild had its arm bitten through by an enraged mule. The child was saved, and after that relations were gradually resumed. The death of Dina and of the Mukhtar were never referred to, and for some years to come no further acts of aggression were committed by the people of Kfar Tabiyeh against the settlers of Ezra’s Tower.

  14

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

  Tel Aviv, Monday, May … 1939

  The eternally surprising thing after a shock which at the time seemed to unhinge the world is that the earth keeps turning and one’s stomach digesting. It is this benevolent indifference of Nature pedantically sticking to her routine which keeps us sane. But as we are parts of Nature, her indifference is also at work inside ourselves. Our heartbeat has only stopped for a moment. Once it has resumed its regular ticking we have already surrendered to the universal law of indifference, and its total assertion will only be a question of time. At this stage our suffering undergoes a change of colour; the original pain turns into a secondary feeling of guilt. For to go on living is already a betrayal, a breach of solidarity towards the dead.

  This is the stage when the transformed pain becomes almost unbearable. Up to now we were dazed, floating over the border between the two realms. Now the day has come when the line between them is drawn; and only now do we realise the finality of the division and the callous surrender of making it. By returning to life we have made a frontier and
condemned the dead to permanent exile.

  Then comes the second change. We no longer suffer with the dead, but from the void she left behind her. The person has been replaced by her hollow mould. It is impressed upon all the objects that surround us, and on everything we do. The more we suffer from, the aggression of these petrified traces, the guiltier we feel. Live memories become fossilised. We don’t pity the dead but ourselves for the loss suffered—those parts of us which were shared, and have been torn off. It is a loss of property, a depreciation in value of all our activities. It is an egotistic pain, as all pain is. This, if any, is the meaning of “let the dead bury their dead”.

  To surrender to life and yet to try to preserve the full integrity of the pain is a hypocrisy born of guilt. Once the choice is made there is no going back, and the task is to adapt oneself to a changed and impoverished world. The constant mourner lives in the magic hope that it may become again what it was before. It never will. The world has lost some of its warmth which it will not recapture. A solar spot has burst and expanded its heat into the great pool of entropic indifference. Its spectrum has undergone a change which affects everything I experience or do. Ezra’s Tower will never be the same. Triumph will be less triumphant and defeat less stinging. Everything has become a little less important, a little paler, a little greyer. That is all. After a year this general impoverishment will be all that remains of Dina, who rode with me on a truck on our first night, and always wore a blue shirt open at the neck, and whose hair was blown over her face when we climbed to the top of the Tower, by the soft wind of Galilee….

  Tuesday

  The death of the Mukhtar makes everything only more final. It was as if Dina had been buried with an undrawn cheque in her fist. Now the account is settled and the file closed. There is nothing more to be done. Yesterday there still was.

  Perhaps if they had allowed me to take part in the action it would have been different. I wonder. I remember that night, after I had tried to kiss her dry lips with the clenched teeth, how …

  GOD, GOD, THE THINGS THEY MUST HAVE DONE TO HER….

  Later

  I have to go through with it. Words are the only magic to exorcise the pain.

  … I remember that night, after I had tried to kiss her dry lips with the clenched teeth—how I lay in the field, biting the earth and raving of revenge. It was the same during the whole week before I learned about the Mukhtar’s death. I implored Simeon to let me take part in it and I demanded in all earnest that they should not only kill but torture-screaming at him until he threw me out. And now it means nothing to me, except a hideous anticlimax;—and the knowledge that the file is closed and nothing remains to be done.

  An eye for an eye would be a wise rule if the victim could regain his sight by the culprit’s eye. I have experienced that the desire for revenge may become a physical yearning like thirst; but its consummation is like drinking salt water. Some men adrift on the sea go on drinking it until they lose their reason. Some killers go on kicking their dead victim in the rage of their impotence. But the dead is always triumphant and the living is always defeated.

  Wednesday

  If I had emotions to spare I would perhaps even pity the fat Mukhtar. Nevertheless I believe that this action was necessary and justified. Whether we like it or not, all social life is based on the implicit assumption of collective responsibility for individual deeds. Jesus was denounced not by one Caiaphas but by “the Jews” who carry the blame to this day; the first Parliament was instituted by “the English” and every Englishman is proud of, and seems to participate in, this act; the same goes for the Rights of Man which “the French” gave the world and the concentration camps in which “the Germans” murder us. In war we act on the principle that the blame is homogeneously distributed among the individuals who constitute the enemy nation and hence that it makes no difference which particular individual is killed. Civilised warfare is as promiscuous in the choice of its targets as an Arab blood feud—which Europeans regard as a barbarity; and in three-dimensional war even discrimination between ages and sexes disappears completely. The only remaining difference is that the laws of the tribal blood feud are more honest and explicit in treating the adversary as a homogeneous, collectively responsible unit.

  “The Arabs” have been waging intermittent tribal war against us for the last three years; if we want to survive we have to retaliate according to their accepted rules. By throwing bombs into Arab markets the Bauman gang performs exactly the same inhuman military duty as the crew of a bomber plane; the only difference is that the latter do it from the comparative safety of a few thousand feet in the air. To throw a hand-made bomb in a crowded bazaar needs at least as much courage as to press a button opening the bomb-trap. And yet pilots are called heroes and the Bauman gang are called gangsters and terrorists and what have you.

  Of course, to press a shining metal button high up in the air is a more hygienic business than to plant a knife into a fat Mukhtar. What the public resents is not the killing but the detail and the mess. To sign a declaration of war is an act of statesmanship; to bump off the man before he can sign is a crime. Our ethics are but an elaborate form of schizophrenia.

  But all this has nothing to do with Dina. I do not wish to avenge her any longer. If I decide to quit and join Bauman, it will not be for this reason. Dina, you are out of this. “Into thy hands I commend my spirit.” Ah, if it were as simple as that. Into thy hands with the broken nails and bits of torn skin under them…. My spirit yes—but my reason I deny you. And if my heart is burnt to ashes, my reason I shall keep on ice.

  Sabbath

  More than half of my month’s leave has gone. If I look back at this last fortnight, the days and nights seem to melt into one dim, shapeless smudge. It has the ambiguity of being both a very short and very long time—like a single flash fixed on a film where one can only afterwards measure its length. Most of the time I spent in my room working on Pepys or brooding and day-dreaming. I don’t know what I would have done had Moshe not given me the money to take a room by myself. I have spoken to nobody except Simeon. Once I went swimming in the sea; but I remembered the last time I had gone swimming with Dina, so I went home and it was worse than ever. I feel constantly hungry but am unable to eat the things which she liked. At first I re-lived all our memories; now I try to avoid everything that reminds me of her. I move about like an invalid with a bandaged wound anxious to avoid rubbing against the furniture and walls. It is a kind of tight-rope walk where one always falls off the rope.

  I know that I have a decision to take, but if I try to think it out I get nowhere. Instead of arriving at a result, I find myself lost in a day-dream. I try to straighten out the coils of my brain but they keep slipping from my grasp and curling up again. Perhaps real decisions are never thought out; they mature by themselves as a tree grows. So I have postponed the whole issue until after I have spoken to Bauman. Simeon says it will be some time next week. They have to be careful, as a whole bunch of them were arrested a few days ago.

  The trouble is, I don’t seem to care either way. I haven’t been home since the funeral, and I rather dread seeing the Place again. It appears to me empty, changed and hostile. The Tower is like a threatening memento. A new disease: turrophobia.

  But the alternative holds no lure either. To bump off somebody and get caught and hanged would probably be all right. But one doesn’t get oneself hanged as easily as that. Nothing is easy in this specialised world of ours. They didn’t even let me take part in the killing of the Mukhtar. You have to start from scratch, and work your way with patience and perseverance until you earn your cord. Simeon took some pains to explain this to me. And I haven’t got the patience to take a course in terrorism as if it were practical gardening or rabbit-breeding. For one thing, it tastes too much of the cinema. For another, I have no patience left for anything. To hug a phantom in one’s arms night after night doesn’t leave one much vigour for the day.

  No watchmaker can mend a broken
spring; he has to send for a new one. Where can I look for a new spring?

  Words, words, words. The trouble is that the whole issue upon which I have to decide has lost its reality for me. I no longer care a damn about Round Table Conferences, Arabs, Hebrews and National Homes. I wonder whether I ever did.

  There was of course the Incident. But what a squalid little incident to decide a man’s fate—even if the man was only an over-sensitive boy. Simeon’s, for instance, is quite a different case. Simeon has all the Roman virtues; he loves his people and hates their enemies. I do not even love my people. I rather dislike them. Self-hatred is the Jew’s patriotism, Matthews said.

  Sunday

  Before my father died there was a time when he took me every Sunday to the slums. There I learned that the poor were not the nice superior people which they appear in fairy stories, but wretched, illiterate and drunk; the women were hags with shrill voices and the children had nits. So I became a socialist not because I loved, but because I hated the poor. They were what conditions had made them, and therefore conditions had to be changed.

  After the Incident I began to frequent those whom I had decided to regard henceforth as my people. They were as disappointing as the poor had been. I was attracted by their keenness, their intensity and their brains, but their achievements were spoiled for me by their ostentation. I hated their acid analytical faculty, their inability to relax. I hated their lack of form and ceremony and breeding, their shortcuts from courtesy to familiarity, their mixture of arrogance and cringing. They were the slum race of the world: their slums were the ghettos, whether the walls were made of stone or prejudice.

  Constant segregation would thwart the healthiest race; if you keep slinging mud at people they will smell. Persecution has not ceased for the last twenty centuries and there is no reason to expect that it will cease in the twenty-first. It will not cease until the cause is abolished, and the Cause is in ourselves. With all the boons we have brought to humanity we are not liked, and I suspect the reason is that we are not likable. If the poor were as idealised propaganda paints them, it would be a crime to interfere with their happiness; if the Jews were as the philosemites describe them, there would be no reason for this Return. But Jewry is a sick race; its disease is homelessness, and can only be cured by abolishing its homelessness.