Thieves in the Night: Chronicle of an Experiment

by Arthur Koestler

  Almost at the same second the sergeant yelled out a command and Turner felt his rifle fly upward and dig its butt firmly into his shoulder, as if the rifle had obeyed of its own accord. The next command followed immediately and Turner pulled the trigger—whether he felt regret or relief for having been ordered to fire only over the heads of the crowd he couldn’t say, for simultaneously with the flash he saw a dark and supple mass, like a jumping wild-cat, fly at him, and felt a hot stinging pain in his left knuckle. He screamed and let go of the rifle; then he saw as if in a crazy dream that the boy with the grimacing devil’s face was hanging on to his neck and biting into his knuckle, holding fast with his teeth. Crazed with fright and frantically trying to wrench his hand free, young Constable Turner suddenly remembered the words of the psalm: Deliver me from the hand of strange children; then he lifted his right fist and gave the devil a whacking blow on the head.

  The boy tottered and let go, but before Turner could grab him some of the mob had torn the boy back, and Turner’s rifle had gone too. He looked round with dazed eyes and saw that there still was a number of separate skirmishes going on in the street, but the mass of the crowd was floating back and the cordon had re-formed. The volley had after all had its effect, and a minute or so later there were again about twenty yards of free space in front. “Order arms,” the sergeant shouted; but Turner had no longer any arms to order. “I’ll pay them back for this,” he muttered under his breath; then he saw the blood trickling from his hand, and reported for permission to fall out.

  4

  Later in the same night Joseph was walking home to his dingy hotel in the Street of the Prophets, chuckling to himself. A week ago the utter futility of this demonstration would have filled him with despair; since the action last Friday he did not mind. But how like the Glicksteins that this day of days should end in such a contemptible and humiliating manner! Bauman’s organisation had taken no part in it; they believed in action, not in demonstrations. The official leaders had all made speeches about “deeds and not words” and “resistance to the last drop of blood”; the only thing they had forgotten to say was what deeds they expected from the people and what form their resistance should take. The crowd, keyed up and then left without a lead, had acted under its own confused impulses; and to-morrow the Glicksteins would issue a statement against rowdyism and for order and discipline, and everything would go on as before.

  Why could the Irish, the Serbs, the Indians with their ninety per cent of illiterates, find the proper form and expression for their struggle—and this proverbially clever race be so utterly helpless every time a disaster befell them? It was not cowardice—the story of each of the Galilean settlements was an epic in itself. But the nation as a whole had lost its self-confidence in the centuries of dispersion. Its leaders came from the small towns of Poland and Tsarist Russia, where authority was represented by a corrupt police sergeant, usually drunk, and where the only way to deal with authority was to bribe or cringe. They could argue and protest and write brilliant memoranda to the League of Nations; when it came to action the ghetto in their blood began to tell, and they were helpless….

  The street was deserted and littered with broken glass. As he turned into Jaffa Road, plunged into darkness, he ran into a Police patrol armed with tommy-guns. There were two of them and they shouted at him to put his hands up; while one held him at the point of his gun, the other began to search him for weapons. Their manner showed that they were frightened and expected him to throw a bomb at them at any moment; and this fact filled Joseph, who was unarmed, with an ironical satisfaction. “What’s the matter with you two?” he asked in English with a careful drawl. “Got the wind up?”

  Their manner changed instantly. The one who had been patting his pockets stopped doing it, the other lowered the barrel of his gun.

  “Sorry, sir,” he said. “We are under orders, and thought you were a …” He looked doubtfully first into Joseph’s face, then at his clothes. Accent and appearance did not fit d the man looked somewhat puzzled.

  “… a Jew?” Joseph asked helpfully.

  The policeman became even more confused.

  “It’s all right, sir, we were only acting according to instructions,” he said.

  “But I am a Jew,” Joseph said, childishly enjoying himself. “Good night, officer.”

  “Good night, sir,” said the constable, comoletely taken aback.

  Joseph walked on, grinning in the dark. He had gone about a hundred yards before he asked himself what reason he had to be so pleased with himself. After all, one couldn’t expect the Glicksteins to acquire that certain accent. And when all was said he had only got away with being of the Race by the fact that he was not entirely of it…. He suddenly stopped grinning. It struck him that, hypocrisy apart, this was the real reason why the Race was persecuted in the East but tolerated in the West. They were tolerated to the extent that their substance became diluted. No normal people could endure the undiluted substance—that extreme and exposed condition of life which had crystallised in it.

  Oh, damn, he thought, there we go again. And he had believed that since last Friday he had got over this kind of thing. Perhaps last Friday night had been just a trifle too easy. The Arab night watchmen on the beach had become gentle as lambs once they saw the muzzles of the automatics point at them, and the rest had been almost incredibly smooth going. The boat had turned up in the deserted bay near Natanya only half an hour after the appointed time. Directed by Morse signals from torches on the beach, it had anchored just outside the shallows so that the lifeboats with the cargo had had no more than fifty yards to row. The crates with the guns and ammunition had been safely loaded onto the milk-trucks within an hour. Most of the two hundred passengers were able to wade ashore from the lifeboats themselves; only the children and some old people, among them one with a wooden leg, had to be carried. When they came out of the water they all kissed the earth and most of them wept. Had they not been firmly told to shut up, they would have started singing hymns. Long before dawn they had all been put into trucks and dispersed in safe places; the action was over. The night watchmen were found, gagged and tied, three hours later by an Arab shepherd in the hills of Samaria….

  The only hitch had been that they were unable to finish refuelling before daylight came, and just as it was lifting anchor for the return journey, the boat had been sighted by a coastal patrol launch and seized by the authorities. However, they only got the Rumanian captain and his crew, who couldn’t give away much as all their dealings had been with straw men under assumed names. The old tramper was lost—but there were two others on their way with eight hundred illegals this time; and after these there would be yet others with fugitives and arms….

  Joseph walked along the dark Jaffa Road, carefully picking his way among the broken glass and fragments of bricks. Without being aware of it, he was whistling under his breath the tune of “We shall rebuild Galilee”. Since last Friday he felt a changed person—a patient who has undergone a magic cure after a long, toxic disease. His only regret was that he would not be allowed to take part in any more actions. Bauman was firm on that point; and with Bauman, unlike Reuben or Moshe, arguing was impossible. On the other hand, Bauman had taken him to a certain extent into his confidence and had given him certain explanations connected with last Friday’s action—that is, he had told him as much as Joseph ought to know to get the background right when he started doing propaganda for them.

  The people and the arms came from various countries, but mainly from Poland, via Rumania and Greece. The boats were old Greek or Rumanian cattle ships, coastal tramps or Turkish smuggler ships which could not be found on Lloyd’s register. They had to be chartered by the Organisation’s middlemen at a high price to cover the risk of their being seized by the British. For the time being the Organisation had plenty of money, mainly from rich American Jews to whose imagination this kind of thing appealed more than the subscription lists of the National Fund for the planting of trees or of t
he Hebrew University for the creation of a chair for Mathematics. There was, for instance, a certain Rumanian millionaire who had made his money by trafficking in arms and who, having lost his daughter in a pogrom of the Iron Guard, had given half his fortune to the Organisation on condition that it should be used for buying arms. Others gave a fixed amount for the smuggling of a fixed number of refugees into the country. There were many such sources which the law-abiding Glicksteins had never been able to tap.

  The arms came mainly from Poland. The Polish Government was anxious both to get rid of its Jews and to make trouble for the British. Official Zionism had been too scrupulous to make capital out of this opportunity. The Bauman organisation had as few scruples as Mr. Chamberlain’s Government. Its leaders, Raziel and Stern, had gone to Warsaw and made contact with a certain branch of the Polish General Staff. They had been received with open arms and come back with more positive results than they had ever expected. The Poles were providing as many Jews with passports and were sending as many arms as the Organisation could transport. The only difficulty was to find ships whose owners were willing to run the risk. For the time being they could not bring in more than five hundred people a month, plus a few tons of arms. But this was only the beginning. By the end of the year they hoped to reach a monthly five thousand; and by the end of 1940, if there was no war …

  “Boy, oh boy,” Bauman had exclaimed at this point, pacing up and down the room, head thrust forward, hands in his leather jacket. “Give me five years and we shall have another half-million in, and with it the majority in the country. Once we have the majority the rest is easy. Five years, man—if they would only wait five years with their bloody war, our problem would be solved….” He had stopped in front of Joseph, looking at him with wild eyes.

  “Do you think there will be no war until 1944?” he asked, putting his hands on Joseph’s shoulder. “Listen,” he went on, talking in a fever, “we are only just beginning. But we have got our start. Man, is it too much to ask for five years, having waited for two thousand? Tell me, is that too much?”

  He was shaking Joseph by the shoulders. Last Friday’s had een the seventh transport to arrive since the Polish action had started, and so far all had arrived without a hitch, only two ships having been seized after unloading. Bauman was wild and drunk with hope. A precarious hope has a more unbalancing effect than despair. He suddenly took his hands from Joseph’s shoulders and looked at him as if he were a stranger.

  “Dismiss,” he said, for the first time treating Joseph as a subordinate.

  5

  It was curious, Joseph reflected as he continued his walk towards Zion Circus, now dark and deserted, it was strange indeed that political imaginativeness was nowadays only to be found among extremist movements of the tyrannical type. Nazis, Fascists and Communists seemed to hold the international monopoly of it. It was not due to their lack of responsibility, as the envious democracies pretended, for these movements remained equally imaginative in their methods after they had ascended to power. One would have expected that a democratic structure would leave ampler scope for the display of originality than these rigidly disciplined bodies; and yet the opposite seemed to be true. Apparently submission to discipline and boldness of vision were not as incompatible as was generally assumed. Those who denied the freedom of ideas were full of ideas and ingenuity; while the defenders of free expression were dull and pedestrian with hardly an idea worth expressing.

  —Well, obviously these were symptoms of the political ice age. Exposed to temperatures approaching absolute zero point, all matter displayed a curious and irregular behaviour. Even in physics different laws seemed to operate on different climatic levels….

  Joseph heard the bell of an ambulance car coming down Ben Yehuda Street, and as he was too keyed up to go to bed he decided to have a look at the Hadassa Hospital, just off Jaffa Road, to get an idea how many people had been injured in the day’s riots. He turned back, and after a few yards turned into the steep, narrow side street leading to the hospital. As he approached the old drab building he saw that there was already quite a crowd—all anxious relatives, and all arguing at the same time with the British policeman and the Hebrew nurse guarding the entrance gate. The harassed nurse kept disappearing into the building to inquire about the names given to her, and the constable tried to persuade the crowd to form a queue, but without success. They kept on pushing towards the gate and shouting over each other’s heads whenever the nurse came back; the nurse kept plugging her two thumbs into her ears, yelling at them to keep quiet and to speak one at a time. Joseph watched the scene with disgust—a homely disgust which he experienced at least once a day when watching similar scenes at bus stops and office counters. As usual he told himself that these people acted under the pressure of their past. He had trained his mind to apologise for what his senses perceived; but it had little power over that momentary revulsion which was also a pressure-product of his own past and couldn’t be helped, just as the crowd’s reactions couldn’t.

  He turned to go home when he noticed the boy with the lovelocks whom Bauman had slapped, coming out of the gate. The boy had a bandage round his head but wore his skull-cap and the greasy black felt hat on top of it; he was smiling uncertainly with his thick lips and held the blue velvet bag pressed under his arm. It occurred to Joseph that members of the Organisation had been forbidden to take part in last afternoon’s demonstrations so as not to expose themselves unnecessarily, and that the boy had no business to get mixed up in a scrap. He waited until the boy had got clear of the crowd and was walking down the street, then caught up with him. “What have you been doing there?” he asked.

  The boy gave a start, then recognised Joseph and smiled, reassured. He had only seen Joseph twice in the Palace, and though he didn’t know what or who Joseph was, he knew by instinct that he was a kind of outsider, not part of the hierarchy of his superior officers, and therefore safe.

  “Ooh—I have been hit by a policeman,” he said in a triumphant sing-song. “But I took his rifle away.”

  “Did you?” said Joseph. “Just like that?”

  “No—I bit him in the ha-and.”

  It was too dark to see the expression in the boy’s face. In his sagging black cotton stockings and the long black kaftan he looked like a scarecrow.

  “You know you had no business to go there,” said Joseph. “And particularly not carrying that….” He rapped with his fingers on the bag under the boy’s arm. “If they had caught you, you would have got yourself into a bad mess—and others too.”

  The boy opened the bag and pulled the book out of it. They were close to a street lamp which had been out of the crowd’s reach, and he held it up to the light. It was an ordinary, tattered prayer-book. “What is wrong with tha-at if they caught me?” he asked mockingly. “I was on my way to the synago-ogue. What is wrong with going to the synago-ogue?”

  Joseph gave no answer. He hated meddling, but he had’ made up his mind to mention the matter to Bauman or Simeon. The boy was stuffing the book into the bag. They were standing near a hoarding plastered with posters from the eve. The ornate, loud-mouthed protests and threats of the official Hebrew bodies were torn and smeared with caricatures. On the heavy-lettered slogan “To THE LAST DROP OF BLOOD”, quoted from a speech by Glickstein, the word “blood” was crossed out and replaced by “ink”. Another poster with the words “IF I FORGET THEE, JERUSALEM” had been half torn off, so that the words were hanging upside-down showing the dry glue on the back of the paper.

  The boy was looking at the posters in the dim light of the street lamp. Joseph could see him smile mockingly. He was curious to find out what went on in the boy’s head.

  “What do you think of all this?” he asked.

  The boy lifted his shoulders.

  “Do I know?” he said. “It is written: A wolf in a sheep’s skin is a great danger, but a sheep in a wolf’s skin is an object of laughter.”

  “Where is that written?” asked Joseph.
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br />   The boy smiled, twisting his side-plaits round his finger.

  “You have made it up,” said Joseph, and for the first time the boy was not entirely repulsive to him. “Why have you joined the Organisation?” he asked.

  Again the boy shrugged. “Why not?” he answered in a singsong, with his half-humble, half-superior infant-prodigy smile. Somewhere beneath his cringing and gaucherie that boy was quite sure of himself, or of something encased in the very core of himself. It was as if he accepted the awkwardness of his own body and manners as something of no consequence, as a mere accident which could not touch that inner certainty.

  “Can’t you answer properly?” Joseph said. The boy reluctantly turned away from the hoarding and faced him. Under his black kaftan he wore a white, soiled, cotton shirt buttoned up to the neck but without a tie. Instead of a stud the shirt had a white thread-button which was broken, showing its wire frame. His face, between the two spiral braids hanging down to his shoulders, still had the bi-sexed ambiguity of adolescents and the coarser cherubim. His eyes and lips were moist, and the lips always moving.

  “Why do you ask a question to which you know the answer yourself?” he chanted, with a certain hostility.

  “Because your reasons may be different from mine,” said Joseph. “Well, why have you joined?”

  “Ooh,” the boy complained. “They have asked me that at each of the tests.”