Thieves in the Night (23 page)

“Oh, God Almighty,” I said.

“Moshe and I tried to dissuade her, but we didn't succeed.”

“I thought,” I said miserably, “that we had got over that period of adolescent exhibitionism years ago.”

“Well, there you are,” Reuben said sullenly.

Despite my feeling of wretchedness I began suddenly to laugh. I had detected in Reuben's attitude a shamefaced masculine sympathy and solidarity, quite incompatible with his convictions and the part he had to play. At the same time memories came back to me of our early days and our comically embarrassing public confessions….

“What's the matter with you?” asked Reuben.

“Do you remember,” I said, “the time when Dasha solemnly confessed at a meeting that she was a vain, egotistic petty-bourgeois because she was afraid of getting fat?”

Reuben smiled. The afternoon sun was nice and hot, and we sat down on stones on the slope.

“And Max,” I went on, “confessing that he was unable to rid himself of an ‘irrational and antisocial' dislike of me, and asking the comrades to help him to get over it? And Sarah lecturing us on the virtues of chastity as a means of sublimating biological into social impulses? And the discussions about whether the smokers should give up smoking because the pleasure thus derived gave them a hedonistic advantage over the non-smokers? …”

“It was youthful nonsense,” said Reuben, “and we soon stopped it.”

He threw a pebble at a vulture perching at a few steps
from us, which rose flapping its heavy wings and emitting a sharp, protesting cry.

“Look, Joseph,” he said, “we have been together almost six years. We were young fools when we came. Those confessions and sharings were the effusions of half-baked adolescents under the spell of the Essenes and the socialist mystics of Galizia. But now we have grown up, and if a mature comrade like Ellen feels driven to appeal to the whole community it is a quite different and serious matter.”

“So there we are back again where we started,” I said. “Exactly how serious is it, Reuben? You don't mean to say that there will be a motion to expel me? …”

Reuben kept on throwing pebbles though there were no more vultures about. As his silence became more prolonged, I felt my throat going dry. I had at last understood the danger in which I was, and felt the familiar pressure of fear in my heart and bladder. I had seen this kind of panic on a negro's face in a film, who was going to be lynched by a mob—a man accused of a crime he hadn't committed and who suddenly understood that the judges refused to believe in his innocence. All he did was to cry No! No! with a white-lipped mouth torn wide open like a gasping carp's, and knowing already that it was going to be yes! yes! solemnly, fatally, as in an irrevocable dream.

“So they are going to lynch me?” I said.

Reuben shrugged and kept throwing his pebbles with a distracted precision. A swarm of starlings circled over us and the sensation of the dream grew stronger. There were the hills before us, unchanged, and they would look just as still and unconcerned when they cast me out and I would have to go. In the declining sun they had begun to light up in a violet glow. It is a colour between silver and lilac, peculiar to our hills. Though barren, there is nothing rugged about them; they are soft and wavy, a great tide of undulating earth slumbered into immobility; a solid sea of silver limestone and terra rossa which combine into that unique, pale hue. They have an
erotic fascination for people, and after the first showers in autumn when they begin to cover themselves with green fluff I sometimes dream at night that I lie on my belly and bite into the live throbbing flesh of the earth, sucking the milk of Galilee.

“So I am going to be lynched?” I repeated.

Reuben stopped throwing pebbles, but he didn't look at me.

“I don't know,” he said. “If you remain stubborn, things look pretty nasty. There will be talk of unsocial behaviour, frivolity, disrespect for the female comrades, and so on. They cannot, of course, force you, and I don't think there is a sufficient case for expulsion. But they will all make unctuous speeches and then adjourn the whole thing, and after a while it will start again. And meanwhile the atmosphere will be poisoned. We have not had a scandal for years and everybody will enjoy it. It will appeal to the scavenger-instinct in all of us. And you will lose your temper as usual and provoke them even more. There is already a lot of feeling because of the sympathies you expressed for Bauman's dissidence and terrorism, and what one may call, not quite unfoundedly, your fascist inclinations. It will all be brought up and will make an even worse mess of it.”

I said nothing. I thought of how I had boasted to Dina on the night when we occupied the Place: To approve and be approved of, to like and be liked—and how strangely she had looked at me when I had said that. I had a tugging, homesick feeling in my chest. Reuben went on in his groping voice:

“The trouble with you, Joseph, is that you are such a many coloured bird. In a Commune the grey birds get on best—like myself.”

I said nothing. It is true that Reuben is a grey bird, but I am terribly fond of him—perhaps just for that reason. And the reason for my panic was that I had suddenly lost the conviction that he was equally fond of me. And Moshe? And Max? And Dasha, Mendl, Simeon, Arieh, all of them? In what fool's
paradise had I lived? What is the tie between us all? A kind of vague cohesion, habit, common interests—but is there any real friendship or intimacy? We hang together like a rubber belt which has lost its elasticity.

I wanted to be alone. I got up and started walking up the slope again. I said nothing to Reuben because I could not trust my voice. For a minute I thought I would go to see Dina, but then it occurred to me that when talking to her I would again forget myself and touch her hand, and she would withdraw it with a frightened little jerk. I stumbled over a stone and kicked it and went on climbing the slope as fast as I could until I lost my breath. Then I heard Reuben calling behind me and stood still.

When he caught up with me he laid his hand on my arm—a rare sign of affection with Reuben. It calmed me almost instantly. I felt as if my blood were, after a momentary stop, circulating again, starting at the place on my arm where Reuben's hand lay.

“Don't be a fool, Joseph,” he said. “Though, in a way, it serves you right. At least you know now how Ellen felt all this time.”

“Ellen?” I said. “It hadn't occurred to me.”

“No—it had not occurred to you, because you were too preoccupied with yourself.”

“That is not true. I pity her. It was a real wrench to me when the other day she started crying. Believe me, I have a feeling of great warmth and pity for her—but I can't help her.”

“Pity is not the point,” said Reuben. He smiled a little, his dim, resigned smile. “Your heart bleeds when she is there, and heals up at once when she turns her back. She is an object to you, not a subject. She only exists for you with reference to yourself. You are an emotional positivist. You only recognise observable phenomena of feeling. You love in abstractions. You are engrossed in Judaism but don't like the Jews. You love the idea of mankind but not the real man. You have lived with us for six years and still we are objects to you, not subjects.”

“It isn't true,” I shouted. “I am much fonder of you than you are of me.”

Reuben's hand on my arm had gradually closed in a firm grip, and he was gently shaking me.

“That is sentimentality,” he said. “You have emotions but no affections. You are fond of people as objects of observation and as projector-screens for your own feelings. That is how one is fond of a horse or a dog.”

I felt hollow and exhausted. I wrenched my arm free and sat down on the damp slope. Reuben remained standing in front of me; I had never seen him so eloquent and commanding.

“Everybody carries with him a portion of loneliness,” he said. “In a Commune more than outside. Outside, there is the family with its concentrated affections. Here there is only a diffuse, evenly distributed benevolence. It is not enough to satisfy people's cravings for intimacy, particularly not the women's. We have to supplement it by lasting personal unions.”

“And so back to the holy family from which we thought we had broken away.”

“Don't be absurd and unfair. We have liberated the child from parental tyranny, and the parents from economic tyranny. Don't you think that is quite a lot?”

“There remains the tyranny of monogamousness.”

“Look,” said Reuben, for the first time showing signs of impatience. “The idea of the Commune is to find a solution for pressing national and social problems. Do you not think it would be taking on rather too much if we tried to solve the biological and sexual problem as well? The difference between utopia and a working concern is to know one's limits.”

I thought, and not for the first time during our argument, of Esther, Reuben's wife, a mousy, insipid little creature who, shortly expecting her first baby, looks like nothing but an enormous drum-belly with the rest attached to it as mere
accessories. I have never been able to find out what Reuben's feelings towards her were.

“All right,” I said. “We have argued enough. What do you expect me to do?”

“To conform to the unwritten law of the community—without which it could not exist, would, in fact, disintegrate within a year or so. To make the one final adjustment—or sacrifice, if you want to dramatise it. But what it all practically amounts to is that you share a room with Ellen instead of with Mendl and possibly the Dr. Phil. as a third. For, as you know, when the next graft arrives we shall have to put three bachelors into one room.”

I had to grin. “If this isn't blackmail …”

“I haven't invented the Dr. Phil.,” said Reuben. “And the bachelors have to live together.”

“But even if I agreed, it would be a dreadful humiliation for Ellen that I should live with her because of outward pressure.”

“Not if you switch on your proverbial charm and explain every thing away as a misunderstanding….” He smiled. “Besides, even sensitive women are surprisingly thick-skinned when it is a question of getting themselves married.”

“You are the bloodiest Jesuit I have ever seen,” I said.

“I am merely trying to discharge my duties as the elected one-year Secretary of the Commune,” he said, with a quite serious face.

“And the alternative, if I refuse, is that I have to leave?”

He looked down at me with his faint smile.

“I never for a moment expected that you would choose it. After all, Joseph, you are one of our ancients.”

I said nothing, but I knew that I had given in already. After the panic of a moment ago everything else was sheer relief—the relief of the candidate for lynching who hears his sentence commuted to life imprisonment. Life with Ellen even seemed suddenly to have its attractions—a nice, cosy prison-cell with books to read and plenty of exercise in the courtyard….

This was the moment when Reuben, the communal Jesuit, came out with his surprise.

“Well, I take it that we are agreed,” he said lightly. “Now there is another matter I wanted to discuss with you. The next graft is due in a fortnight. The Colonisation Department is speeding up the whole plan of our expansion. That means a lot of travelling about for the treasurer, to negotiate loans, buy new machinery and building material, and so on. Moshe is already unable to cope with both the outside and the local work. And now with this rush, and all our planning being upset, we shall need him here all the time. That means that we have to elect a new member of the Secretariat for outside work, who will have to spend five days a week in Jerusalem and Tel Aviv. Moshe and I have decided to propose that you should be elected for this job at the monthly meeting next week….”

I gasped. “What is this—a bribe?”

“Think for yourself whether you can suggest anybody better qualified for the job. You are the best solution for our needs—and it is the best solution for yours.”

Thus ended this memorable conversation. I have been cast into the well and pulled out again, and on Friday week I shall probably be appointed to the new job—as Joseph the Provider. Meanwhile I have to give a series of lectures to the Dr. Phil., called Introduction into the Elements of the Theory and Practise of Applied Shoe-making, with a view to turning him into my temporary deputy.

Marriage as a week-end institution won't be too bad either. I am almost looking forward to it; maybe one could do something about the National Birthrate. And I shall be in towns again and walk the solid pavements of Sodom and Gomorrha.

However, I am still too excited to see the consequences of it all. I had under-estimated Reuben, God bless him. I wish
every Commune had a Jesuit like him. Some have in fact, or almost;—but then, what other place can stand comparison with Ezra's Tower? …

Wednesday

We had a break of a few sunny days, and yesterday during the lunch hour I climbed up the hill on the other side of the wadi to pay a visit to the Ancestor's Cave.

The Ancestor's Cave was discovered six months ago by Arieh the shepherd. The whole hill above the new vineyard is riddled with caves, about half a dozen of which served as burial chambers in Byzantine days. They have all been plundered countless times and even the bones have been scattered. The relatively best preserved is the one Arieh has found, the cave of Joshua the Ancestor. But his skull is missing; perhaps some Arab terrorist has pinched it to have one Hebrew less to cope with in the civil war after the Resurrection. They feel very strongly about this. To prepare for the coming campaign they have already buried four hundred Moslem heroes with their swords beneath the south-east corner of the Haram el Sheriff, whose task it will be to defend the Mosque of Omar against a post-apocalyptic attack from the Hebrew cemetery in the Valley of Josaphat.