Thieves in the Night: Chronicle of an Experiment

by Arthur Koestler

  Joseph’s gaze travelled the round of faces of the old guard, trying to discover the changes they had undergone since that night when they had set out for Ezra’s Tower. Moshe had grown fatter, with a touch of baldness, and looked a little like a successful stockbroker. Hunchbacked little Mendl had grown even quieter, the listening look in his eyes had become more pronounced, and his sudden transformations into the pied piper rarer; he had recently finished his Galilean Symphony and there was some talk of the National Philharmonic Orchestra producing it. Gaby, the communal Messalina now in charge of the dressmaker shop, was beginning to develop a puffed and tartish look; instead of fluttering her eyelashes as she once used to, she had now taken up quivering nostrils. Six months ago she had caused another scandal by being unfaithful to the Egyptian—and, of all people, with the Dr. Phil. Ham, the dark savage, had threatened to kill poor Fritz and could only be dissuaded from it by the whole matter being thrashed out in the General Meeting, where Max had delivered a much-admired speech on sex and society, Gaby had cried, Fritz publicly confessed his unsocial behaviour, and Ham, moved almost to tears, had solemnly forgiven them all and was stopped just in time by Sarah from singing the Anthem. After that, Sarah had used her pedagogic talents to comfort the Egyptian by opening spiritual vistas for him, and three weeks later the Egyptian had suggested that they should get married and live together on a higher plane. Sarah had made a terrible fuss, asking each member of the Secretariat separately for advice and accusing herself of being unfair to poor Gaby. Ham got so ashamed of his base desires that he told Sarah he was ready to renounce her and to agree with her higher view of the matter, whereupon Sarah got hysterics, and it had taken all of Reuben’s diplomacy to bring the affair to a happy conclusion.

  Almost from the first week they were married, a change began to occur in Sarah. Her pinched little face with the hungry-virgin eyes began to fill up into matronly softness and she put on weight at a fantastic rate. Since Dina’s death she had been in charge of the children’s house but without being officially confirmed in her office—all major decisions resting with a committee of three—and this had been the second great frustration in Sarah’s life. Three months after her marriage Reuben, had proposed to the General Meeting that the committee should be reduced to an advisory capacity and Sarah be made a member of the Secretariat with full responsibilities. The meeting, though with some doubts and hesitations, had voted for the proposal, and this had completed Sarah’s transformation from a skinny, frustrated little squirrel into a rotund and efficient matron. It had taken her seven bitter years of detours and self-deceptions to find the form of life she was made for; but at last she had found it. In the world outside, without the sustaining warmth of comradeship around her, she would probably have gone to pieces….

  Becoming conscious of Joseph’s gaze, Sarah turned her head. He gave her a friendly grin and continued his silent survey of the old guard. Dasha, fat and pretty with her round face and high Slavonic cheekbones, was just coming back from the kitchen, flushed and triumphant at the success of the meal. Arieh the shepherd was chewing his shashlik in contented rumination; the Dr. Phil, was holding forth on the merits of bootmaking to an admiring girl from the youth camp. He, too, had lost his nervous fidgetiness and looked broader and more self-assured. Joseph contrasted in his mind’s eye the men and women around him with the crowd in the cafés of Tel Aviv, the crowd with the frozen shrug about their shoulders, and he felt a deep satisfaction, a conceitless pride which was close to humbleness, at being one of the founders of Ezra’s Tower. This was right and good and made sense. Here something broken was being made whole again: men were recovering their lost integrity.

  His eyes met Reuben’s, and Reuben gave his snake-in-the-grass smile and said: “Speech”. Joseph shook his head but others had heard, and a minute later the whole table was clamouring for a speech. It came almost as a shock to Joseph that, despite his unbalancedness and contradictions and the sense of his own futility, these people liked him. As he stood before them and they looked at him with curiosity and expectation, the mirror in his mind revolved and he asked himself how he, always unable to see himself as a whole, was reflected in their eyes. Oh well, they would just see the old monkey face with one or two grey strands over the temples, eyebrows meeting in the middle and lifted in the usual grin. He decided to tell them the parable of the fish.

  “Chaverim,” he said, savouring the mellow archaic taste of the word, born in the hard desert, which had given a new turn to the history of man; “chaverrim—comrades …”

  3

  The engine roared and the truck swayed like a drunkard as the convoy entered the dry stream-bed of the wadi. They had passed the Giant’s Buttocks and were now following the wadi’s course towards the south, away from the familiar country of Ezra’s Tower and Gan Tamar, into new, strange hills, deserted but for a few wretched mud villages perching on the slopes of desolation. In front and behind, the other trucks crept cautiously forward with dimmed headlights.

  Joseph lay stretched out on the canvas cover of the truck, his arms folded under his head. This time he had a truck all to himself, for there were few Helpers needed. It was a comfortable one, loaded with crates of farm implements and some sacks of flour on top.

  On the truck in front the new settlers were singing “God will rebuild Galilee”. On the truck behind, which carried some of the Helpers, they were arguing over the White Paper. As the truck of the Helpers came closer or fell back, Joseph caught fragments of the debate and lost it again, while the singing in front swelled and faded. The stars over his head displayed all their Galilean brilliance, the Great Bear sprawling on his back and the Milky Way clotted into a luminous, branching scar.

  The truck behind was pulling close again. They were still arguing. A girl’s voice said:

  “Once we have irrigated the southern desert we can bring another four millions in.”

  “That still leaves twelve millions out,” a man said.

  “It doesn’t matter,” said the girl. “Half of them will be killed anyway. The other half will be all right for a while….”

  The truck receded, but the girl’s voice lingered on in Joseph’s ear: “Half will be killed, the other half will be all right for a while.” She had said it as soberly as if checking a household account. What a grandiose arithmetic history had taught this race. Their population chart, instead of moving in a curve, looked like the zigzag of lightning.

  The truck gave a jolt and slowed down; the singing in front became weaker, and from the truck behind came once more the girl’s voice arguing in the dark:

  “… Nationalism? Nonsense. It’s homesickness.”

  “How can people be homesick for a country they have never seen?” said a man’s sceptical voice.

  “It’s in the race. Homesickness is endemic in the race….”

  Joseph’s truck accelerated and the rest of the argument was lost. How they always harped back to this question of “race”—as if it explained anything. As if some biological variation could explain this phenomenon of the lightning zigzag trace of their fate—that jagged scar across the face of human history.

  He lay back on the canvas, glad to have the truck to himself. To the south he saw a very bright planet, perhaps Mars or Jupiter, he didn’t know. He remembered that first night, walking back after the shooting to Dina’s tent, when he had seen this same planet rising, and had decided that if other stars were populated they must doubtless have their own kind of Jews. For Jews were not an accident of race, but simply man’s condition carried to its extreme—a branch of the species touched on the raw. Exiled in Egypt, in Babylon, and now over the whole globe, exposed to strange and hostile surroundings, they had to develop peculiar traits; they had no time nor chance to grow that hide of complacency, of a specious security, which makes man insensitive to and forgetful of the tragic essence of his condition. They were the natural target of all malcontents, because they were so exasperatingly and abnormally human….

  Made home
less in space, they had to expand into new dimensions, as the blind develop hearing and touch. The loss of the spatial dimension transformed this branch of the species as it would have transformed any other nation on earth, Jupiter or Mars. It turned their vision inwards. It made them cunning and grew them claws to cling on with as they were swept by the wind through countries that were not theirs. It increased their spiritual arrogance: deprived of Space, they believed themselves chosen for eternity in Time. It increased the protective adaptability of their surface, and petrified their inner core. Constant friction polished their many facets: reduced to drift-sand, they had to glitter if they wanted to avoid being trodden on. Living in bondage, cringing became second nature to their pride. Their natural selector was the whip: it whipped the life out of the feeble and whipped the spasm of ambition into the fit. In all fields of living, to get an equal chance they had to start with a plus. Condemned to live in extremes, they were in every respect like other people, only more so.

  —A nationalist? I?—Joseph echoed the girl’s voice.—Nonsense. Our nationalism is homesickness for normality.

  The singing swelled up, receded. They were singing one of the popular horras, a folk-song with a passionate, almost hysterical tune.

  —Nationalism? Nonsense …—Joseph repeated to himself.—This earth means something different to us than Croatia means to the Croats or America to the Americans. They are married to their countries; we are searching for a lost bride. We are homesick for a Canaan which was never truly ours. That is why we are always foremost in the race for Utopias and messianic revolutions, always chasing after a lost Paradise. Defeated and bruised, we turn back towards the point in space from which the hunt started. It is the return from delirium to normality and its limitations. A country is the shadow which a nation throws, and for two thousand years we were a nation without a shadow….

  The wadi narrowed to a gorge; the starlit rocks on its flanks seemed to meditate the law of universal indifference. The convoy moved along them, a dark caravan of pilgrims. On setting out on their long pilgrimage they had left a house and garden behind; all that had been swallowed up by the desert and now they had to start building again. They were returning to a Canaan of thistles and thorns. Half of them were illegal immigrants: they survived without official consent. How those with the complacent hides and solid shadows grudged them even this waste of scrub and stones!

  —Ay, don’t give in to bitterness, Joseph told himself; oil your gun but keep your mirror clean. We shall always be betrayed because something in us asks to be betrayed. There is this urge in us for the return to earth and normality; and there is that other urge to continue the hunt for a lost Paradise which is not in space. This is our predicament. But it is not a question of race. It is the human predicament carried to its extreme.

  Far off in the night a light had begun to blink; it looked like a red spark suspended in the air. Straining his eyes, Joseph discovered the pale silhouette of the hill on which Tel Joshua was to stand.

  —Good, Joseph thought. We have occupied another acre of space. The hunt will go on and the stakes will keep burning, but a few hundred will live here; and the wilderness shall be glad for them.

  The truck stopped abruptly. The whole convoy came to a standstill; the drivers switched their headlights on and hooted wildly into the night. The distant spark went rhythmically on and off, flash and darkness, flash, flash and darkness, flash and flash, dot and dash.

  —They have gone crazy, Joseph thought, reading the message. They are sending Isaiah in Morse:

  And they shall build houses and inhabit them; and they shall plant vineyards, and eat the fruit of them.

  —They should send it in code, Joseph thought. It is a subversive message, opposed to official policy and against the law.

  The truck had started to move again. The argument in the truck behind continued. The drivers, sobered, dimmed their lights and the convoy resumed its journey, stealthily like thieves in the night.

  THE END

  A Note on the Author

  Arthur Koestler CBE (1905 – 1983) was a Hungarian–British author and journalist. Koestler was born in Budapest and educated in Austria. In 1931 Koestler joined the Communist Party of Germany but, disillusioned by Stalinist atrocities, resigned in 1938. In 1940 he published his novel Darkness at Noon, an antitotalitarian work, which gained him international fame.

  Over the next 43 years from his residence in Great Britain, Koestler espoused many political causes and wrote novels, memoirs, biographies, and numerous essays. In 1968, he was awarded the prestigious Sonning Prize for ‘outstanding contribution to European culture’ and, in 1972, he was made a Commander of the Order of the British Empire (CBE).

  In 1976, Koestler was diagnosed with Parkinson’s disease and, in 1979, with terminal leukaemia. In 1983 he and his wife committed suicide at home in London.

  Discover books by Arthur Koestler published by Bloomsbury Reader at

  www.bloomsbury.com/ArthurKoestler

  The Call-Girls

  Thieves in the Night

  This electronic edition published in 2012 by Bloomsbury Reader

  Bloomsbury Reader is a division of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc, 50 Bedford Square, London WC1B 3DP

  First published in Great Britain 1946 by Macmillan

  Copyright © 1946 Arthur Koestler

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  eISBN: 9781448210008

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