Thieves in the Night: Chronicle of an Experiment

by Arthur Koestler

  A camel rocked past them, occupying with its load almost the whole width of the lane. They had to flatten themselves against the wall. The Arab, riding on a heap of sacks, was asleep. The camel passed them with measured sullenness, its hooves whirling up a cloud of dust as it reached the unpaved end of the lane.

  “And what did you say when they asked you?” Joseph pressed the boy. It had become of a sudden importance to him to know what the reasons were which had got him and this boy into the same boat.

  “What I said? I gave them Exodus 20:1, and Deuteronomy 19:21 and 25:19 and 32:41 and 32:42….”

  “Meaning?” Joseph asked; but already his curiosity was extinguished.

  “Meaning,” said the boy, with mocking triumph in his voice, “meaning: Blot out the remembrance of Amalek from under heaven. Thine eye shall not pity, but life shall go for life. I will render vengeance to mine enemies and will reward them that hate me. I will make mine arrows drunk with blood, and my sword shall devour flesh….”

  He had begun hopping up and down on one foot, clapping his hands, his side-locks flapping round his ears. He looked like a big clumsy child in an outgrown coat skipping a rope.

  Joseph watched him with fascinated disgust. “That will do,” he said.

  “Now you know,” said the boy, coming to rest. His eyes resumed their former expression of timid mockery. In a different voice he said, as if trying to comfort Joseph:

  “It is also said: In much wisdom there is much grief; he that increaseth knowledge increaseth sorrow. And how dieth the wise man? as the fool.”

  He made a deep, mocking bow at Joseph and made off in a hurry, hop-skipping along like a schoolboy, his side-locks flapping, the velvet bag tightly pressed under his arm.

  It was almost morning, and the sky a transparent, silky grey, preparing for the sun to rise over Mount Zion.

  “There goes your undiluted substance,” Joseph thought, following the boy with his eyes.

  Thieves in the Night

  (1939)

  “To have one’s heart with God is not the same thing as having one’s head in the clouds.”

  THE REV. FATHER P. N. WAGGETT, S.S.J.E., in a sermon on the Mount of Olives, 1918.

  Thieves in the Night (1939)

  1

  In May the sky over Ezra’s Tower is a blue lava field. The earth looks as if Jehovah had thrown a carpet down on Galilee; the air bubbles caught under the carpet are the hills, and the creases the wadis. Seen from Kfar Tabiyeh, the red-roofed white houses of the Settlement look like a colony of mushrooms spreading over an ever wider area of the hill. There were five and twenty on the Dogs’ Hill when they came, and now after two years there were almost three hundred. And the God of the Hebrews had blessed their cattle and multiplied their flocks.

  The happiest days for Joseph during this spring of 1939 were the Fridays and Shabbaths he spent at home. Ezra’s Tower was a lotus-land untouched by the gales of the ice age which were shaking the world with increasing fury. He had fallen in love with the hills all over again, and he had a theory that the Song was written by Solomon during a Galilean spring-excursion. Its counterpart, the sermon of vanities, was a product of the glum hills of Judaea where the royal pessimist resided; but the Song clearly belonged to Galilee:

  … The fig tree putteth forth her green figs, and the wines with the tender grape give a good smell. Take us the foxes, the little foxes, that spoil the vines.

  The world was invaded by the barking little foxes, but Ezra’s Tower still held its own. The saplings which Simeon had planted threw their lattice of thin shadows on the grass as a token of the future forest’s shade. It was curious that the memory of Simeon’s sharp, bitter personality should survive in the form of this baby forest of firs. Simeon the heretic was dead to the Commune, but already a different, legendary Simeon grew in the forest’s roots. And in the minds of those who had come after her death there was a mythical Dina, an image of purity and perfection from the early legendary days.

  With the growth of the Commune its fraternal homogeneity had transformed itself into a more articulate structure. As in a mature organic cell there was now a clear distinction between core and periphery. The periphery was made up of concentric layers according to their age, though the division between neighbouring layers became blurred with time. But the core retained its peculiarity and distinction. They were the founders, the Old Ones: Reuben, Moshe, Dasha, Ellen, Arieh the shepherd, Mendl the pied piper; Sarah, who since Dina’s death was in charge of the children’s house; Max, who was still in the opposition. At the last General Meeting most. of them had been re-elected to the administrative posts they held, and though the Secretariat contained some new blood from the outer layers, it was easy to foresee that for the next few years they would continue to monopolise all key positions—until the periphery, in growing frustration, produced its own leaders, and captured the Secretariat in turn. This was how it had happened in the older Communes, and the same would doubtless happen in Ezra’s Tower. The absence of privileges for the bureaucracy prevented its crystallisation; they had no army, police or party apparatus to support them, their actions down to the minutest detail were under constant public scrutiny, and the principle of total economic equality, outlawing money and barter; made it impossible for them to bestow favours or bribe the electorate. Their only satisfactions were increased responsibility, a more direct influence on the development of the Commune, and the sensation of power derived from it. It was but the shadow of power, without substance and stability, and yet for those who yielded it real enough to be cherished more than they were prepared to admit, even to themselves. The instinct to dominate had not been abolished, merely tamed and harnessed; but that, Joseph thought, was as much as anybody could hope for.

  Of course, the model society of the Commune was limited both in size and by the necessary selection of its human material. Repeated on a large scale and by compulsory means it was bound to collapse. Oases are not expandable. But it had proved that under certain conditions a different form of human life could be attained; and that again was as much as one could hope for….

  On this particular Friday, the last in May, Joseph was lying in the field near the Ancestor’s Cave under the blue lava sky, chewing a grass halm. On his way back from Jerusalem he had been to see Ellen and the child in the maternity clinic at Gan Tamar. She had looked very happy and almost pretty in the white bed with the red poppies on the bedside table. Joseph had brought them, and she had been so grateful and overjoyed that he in turn had felt moved by a mixture of pity, fondness, physical desire and the guilt of not being able to feel more for her. However, if one did not analyse this mixture too closely, it could almost pass for the real thing. And what, after all, was the real thing? So many emotional compounds passed under that name, that this one might claim it as well as any other. Who knew whether what he felt for Dina was more real? Perhaps if Ellen had been the unattainable one and Dina the mother of the child, his feelings, too, would have been reversed.

  Anyway, the child was a girl and it was to be called Dina. It had been Ellen’s suggestion, and it was one of those things about Ellen which went into the compound and made it more solid and adhesive.

  —Leaning on his elbow and chewing the sweet halm of grass, he saw Reuben strolling towards him. Reuben had grown even more quiet and self-effacing during this last year; he for one was immune against the temptations of power. Or was he? What if his reserve and modesty were only a subtler, inverted means of deriving satisfaction from it? Oh, the fallacy of those simple words which people used to describe each other, as if the qualities expressed by them were irreducibles and not highly complicated mixtures! “Modesty” was believed to be an irreducible element like nitrogen; and lo, neither of them was….

  “How does it feel to be a father?” Reuben asked, settling in the grass at Joseph’s side in the relaxed, lazy mood of the Shabbath eve which descended over the whole Commune after the traditional hot shower-bath.

  “God knows,” sai
d Joseph. “I was just trying to work it out. I am busy convincing myself that there is no cause for loin-pride, that the fact that the thing was born with some fluff on its head is no merit of mine, and that others have equally small pink nails on their fingers and toes, the opening and closing of which is a rhythmical reflex and no certain sign of early genius.”

  Reuben smiled. “What a rabbi you are,” he said. “Your thinking proceeds in a kind of mirror-writing—from right to left like the Hebrew letters. Sometimes you give the impression that you live altogether in a mirror.”

  “And what of it?” said Joseph. “People shoot themselves in front of mirrors and make love before mirrors. It is an old prejudice to think that self-awareness destroys the power for emotion, and that feeling must be dumb and innocent. The dog while eating enjoys himself, but he doesn’t know that he enjoys himself, otherwise he would eat slower and leave the best bits to the last; and thus by lack of self-awareness enjoys himself less. ‘Innocence’ means the opposite of nocentem, hurt. To be nocent is more human, and it hurts more….”

  “Go on, Rabbi Joseph, I am listening. Where does the chosen race come in?”

  Reuben was in an unusually happy mood. The reason was that to-night a new settlement was to be founded in the District, and that Ezra’s Tower was to serve as godfather to the new colonists, as Gan Tamar had once served to them. The trucks with the new settlers and their equipment had arrived in the morning, and to-night there would be a celebration before they set out.

  Joseph turned over on his belly. He grinned at Reuben with an affection that was increased by the fact that he was now hiding half his existence from him—the half connected with Bauman and the gang. But then, did not a well-meaning cheat always increase affection? Husbands never felt more affectionate than after the casual adultery so indispensable for happily balanced matrimony. Which went to prove that sincerity was just another compound, like affection.

  “Where the chosen race comes in?” he repeated. “I will tell you a parable. Once upon a time the most perfect product of creation were the fish. They were swimming happily the seven seas, and apart from the occasional accident of being eaten by the bigger ones, all was well with them.

  “Then came the time when some force drove some fish to creep ashore and become amphibious. Those who did had a terrible time of it. Instead of drifting with streamlined grace through the water, they had to waddle and wobble painfully on their bellies through swamp and muck, and gasp piteously for air with a new and imperfect contraption specially evolved for this purpose. It took ages until these new, ugly, awkward creatures began to appreciate the compensations for their debasement and sufferings: the sun, sound and form, copulation, hot rocks and cool winds.”

  “Is that all?” said Reuben. “Where do the Jews come in? Did the amphibians get circumcised?”

  “Don’t you see?” said Joseph. “The Arabs are the fish. They are happy, they have tradition and beauty and self-sufficiency and lead a timeless, care-free, lackadaisical life. Compared to them we are the graceless amphibians. That’s one of the reasons why the English love them and dislike us. It is not political. It is their nostalgia for the lost paradise—a kind of eternal week-end—and their detestation of the 8.35 to the City. For behold, we are the force that drives the fishes ashore, the nervous whip of evolution.”

  “That was beautiful, Rabbi Joseph,” Reuben said, smiling.

  “It was merely a digression to settle, once for all, this irksome Arab question,” said Joseph modestly. “However, in my present happy mood I can’t be bothered with Arabs and shall return to my original text, which is concerned with that mirror-writing of the mind that occurs on the higher levels of self-awareness. I wish to point out to you that it is sheer philistine nonsense to associate introspection with morbidity. Cogito ergo sum is the classic introspective statement which started modern philosophy and shaped our attitude to life. The theme-song of all evolution is the trend towards greater articulateness. Romeo loves as passionately as your dumb Arab shepherd, but his emotion has become articulate and introspected, and is therefore on a higher level. It has become nocent—that is, both its hurt and its bliss are sharpened, have a finer and keener edge. But that is just the opposite of morbidity. It means one rung up the ladder of living.”

  Reuben smiled. “If I am not mistaken, I once heard you rave against the ‘curse of knowingness’ on our race. And there was a time when you admired Bauman’s terrorists who refuse to see the other side of the medal.”

  Joseph looked at him, rather taken aback for a second. “What a snake in the grass you are,” he said. “In fact there is no contradiction—except the old one that you have to use your fist to protect your block in which the thinking takes place; which paradox is not of my making but inherent in the human condition and particularly noticeable in a moral ice age. You pacifists have always to drop your principles in an emergency because you refuse to acknowledge that basic antinomy of nature. Keep your gun oiled and your mirror clean. There is no contradiction in that.”

  “Well, well,” said Reuben, rising to his feet. “I liked your parable better…. I must be getting back. Come along, Moshe is waiting with the accounts. He wants to kiss you for getting the cash advance from the Co-operative. That certainly was a triumph of your articulateness….”

  Joseph sighed, but got to his feet obediently. They walked back together, discussing the preparations for the evening. Joseph had decided to go out with the settlers’ convoy to the new Place to-night and come back with the returning lorries the next day. Reuben, too, would have liked to go, but he had a meeting of the Education Committee on the Shabbath morning. Joseph pitied him.

  “I wonder whether we shall ever grow out of this meetingitis,” he said. “It’s the measles of democracy.”

  “But harmless,” said Reuben. “Fascist pox isn’t.”

  Joseph, for a change, agreed. Amicable, they discussed the location of the new cowshed and the extensions to the children’s house, which had become too small for its thirty-seven inmates—and, with Joseph’s daughter, thirty-eight.

  2

  As a send-off for the advance party of the new settlers, a special meal had been prepared in the dining-hut. The tables had been put together to form a long double horseshoe covered with a white tablecloth and decorated with flowers; the hut was transformed into a solemn banqueting-hall. This happened only three or four times a year, on the eve of Passover, on New Year’s Day, at the Feasts of the Maccabeans and of the Planting of Trees. In the monotony of communal routine the white, glittering tables and the festive atmosphere were highlights of the season whose memory lingered on for weeks.

  The advance party consisted of only twelve people—eleven boys, and one girl called Rachel who seemed to play an important role among them. She was very short, under five feet, with short-cropped black hair, quick movements, and such a high-voltage charge about her dominating little person that one was afraid to touch her lest one get an electric shock. She came from Rumania, and her boy friend, who was secretary of the group, from Germany. His name was Theo; he was blond and tall, with an awkward stoop, timid and slow in gesture. He was obviously the ideal type for a communal secretary, a lightweight junior edition of Reuben; what he lacked in vitality Rachel would supply. The two of them sat together at the top part of the banqueting-table between Moshe and old Wabash, who never missed an opportunity to be present at the founding of a new settlement.

  There were few Helpers this time and only a small advance party, partly because the Arabs had been calmed by the White Paper, and had left the rioting for a change to the Jews, and mainly because the advance party was for some time to live in an abandoned Arab house which stood on the site of the future Settlement and would give them reasonable protection while they prepared the ground for the main group, to follow a few weeks later. The Settlement was to be called Tel Joshua, or Joshua’s Hill; it was to be built on a hill at twelve miles’ distance from Ezra’s Tower and to serve as a strategic link betwee
n the Upper Galilean Communes and the Valley of Jezreel. The land had been bought by the National Fund a few years ago but had been thought unfit for colonisation as it had no water, which had to be carried on donkeys from a place four miles away. This group of fifty young people, recent arrivals from Germany and Rumania, still at the bottom of the queue for land, had applied for Joshua’s barren hill, and after a long struggle with the Hebrew Colonisation Department, had got their way. They had left Europe much later than the crowd of Ezra’s Tower, and their load of Things to Forget was accordingly heavier and more lurid in detail. Half of them had arrived without a visa; they were illegal immigrants with faked papers, liable to be deported if caught. They did not care how long they had to bore until they found water, nor about the malaria rate; these were trifles compared with the things they had experienced where they came from. They were hungry for land, hungry for stability, hungry for the smell of cattle-sheds, of donkeys and horses; hungry above all for a life that made sense, sustained by the warmth of a fraternity where every boy and girl had been tested, was liked and approved.

  The dining-hall was bright, looked much brighter than usual with the light reflected from the white tablecloth; it smelled of the fresh salad and herbs in the big wooden bowls and was saturated with that convivial buzz produced by the vibration of plates, voices and glasses. There were speeches; old Wabash, white-bearded and blue-shirted and looking more than ever like a slightly gaga Prophet from the Bible, told with gusto the tale of the first Twelve in Dagánia and of the suffering milliohnim; he was followed by Moshe dispensing some good horse-sense advice to the new settlers, and by Max with quotations from Glickstein and Lenin. But except for the awestricken and solemn debutants of Tel Joshua nobody paid much attention to the speeches. As on each of the rare occasions when they drank wine, the people of Ezra’s Tower revealed themselves in a light normally dulled by routine and fatigue. Putting their emptied glasses down on the white tablecloth with a show of recklessness, their faces shone like mirrors from the lumber-room with the cobwebs and dust wiped off.