Thieves in the Night (42 page)

“It is a curious thing,” he said dreamily. “These Jews come from the towns of Europe to become peasants—and our peasants all want to run away to the towns.”

“Ah!” said Issa. “It is very bad.”

“Well, what about that article for our magazine?” asked Salla.

“I don't know,” said Issa. “I have never written poetry before.”

“Poetry?” asked Salla, arching his eyebrows and lifting his chin by means of the stick.

“There you see,” Farid said gloomily. “Even our youth still identifies writing with poetry. And what poetry! ‘My beloved's lips are red corals, her teeth are shining pearls, her haunches like a cedar tree', all over again.”

“I did not really mean it,” said Issa, who had grown copper-red. He particularly resented being placed in the category of “our youth” by this badly-dressed town boy who was probably younger than he and did not know what a woman is. Ah, if he could only tell them about that Hebrew bitch.

“Anyway,” said Salla, in a tactful attempt to turn the conversation. “All this is going to change now. Once the Hebrews are prevented from buying up the land and tempting the
fellah, the rush to the towns will stop. By God, it was time the English did something about it.”

“Do you believe they did it for our sake?” said Farid. “They don't want more Jews to come in because they are even more afraid of the Jews than they are of us; that is all.”

“
Falastin baladna, Yahud kalabna
,” suggested Issa, trying to regain the lost ground.

Salla ignored him. “For whatever reason they do it, I can only say
hamdul'illah
and praise God for it,” he said, knocking his stick for emphasis against the floor.

“You will soon put on a tarbush,” said Farid, and they both laughed. The red tarbush had been the emblem of the moderate Nashashibi party, and since their leading members had been bumped off by the Patriots, it had practically disappeared from the country. On the terrace everybody wore either Arab headgear or was bareheaded as they themselves were.

“But seriously,” said Farid in a changed voice. “I admit that this White Paper is the first fair move of the British for twenty years—since they so generously promised our country to the Jews without asking us….” He made a pause: when Farid talked seriously he was very careful in the choice of his words. “But this much admitted, you have still to see that it does not go far enough to repair the fantastic injustices of the past. All Arab States have their Parliaments—we are denied it because it would give us a majority over the Jews. Egypt and Iraq have attained independence—but though Iraq is a country of savages compared to us, they ask us to wait another ten years until we are granted the same international status. Who knows how often they will change their minds in these ten years, as they did in the past? It is all or nothing—and now.”

Issa looked at him open-mouthed. He had never before heard anybody speak so cleverly and with such a beautiful choice of words.

Salla nodded, silently acknowledging his friend's superiority. “It is almost time,” he said, looking at his watch. At the same moment the proprietor of the Café switched on the wireless
and the loudspeaker on the terrace began to crackle. It was a few minutes early and the Hebrew Children's Hour was still on. For a few seconds a warm, husky, girl's voice spoke in an amplified whisper to the mute crowd on the terrace. She spoke the words of a Hebrew nursery rhyme; her voice sounded so close that they thought they could feel her warm breath exhaled through the loudspeaker. They listened with expressionless faces, their eyes on the bubbling pipes, to the rhymed words of a language so kin to their own. “… And the sailors stuffed wax into their ears,” Farid quoted to Salla, who smiled appreciatively, while rapping the silver knob against his teeth. Issa wondered what sailors they were talking about but did not really care. He thought of the Hebrew girl, and the fury of his unappeased desire for her paled the pock-marked skin of his face.

“Peace with you, children,” the voice whispered, fading away in a smile; and for about twenty seconds there was silence. Then a male, factual voice announced the next item on the programme: a summary of the Government's Statement of Policy for Palestine, in Arabic. The faces on the terrace grew a little tenser. They waited in silence. A sharp and very loud crack came from the loudspeaker;—then nothing. The silence continued for an entire minute, then for a second and third one; the only sound on the terrace came from the tauleh players slamming down their disks.

“Have you killed your radio, ya Ahmad?” a fat man shouted at the proprietor. Some men laughed. “It is in order, by God, but it has gone dumb,” the proprietor said in an anxious voice. He was frightened lest the Patriots should make him responsible for the trouble and burn his awnings and wicker stools for the second time.

Suddenly the loudspeaker spoke again. It was a different announcer this time and he sounded rather flustered. He explained in Arabic, and then repeated in the two other languages, that for technical reasons the broadcast of the Statement
of Policy had to be postponed for an hour and a half. Meanwhile the station would send recorded Arab music.

A low murmur went over the terrace; then the players resumed rolling their dice and slamming down their disks with the mechanical movements of a lifetime's routine.

Salla rapped the floor furiously with his stick. “Oh, the hyenas, they have changed their minds again,” he cried.

“Idiot,” said Farid quietly. “You heard the broadcast from London. They can't change a Government Statement in an hour.”

“But what happened? what happened, in the name of God?”

“Most likely the Jews have blown up the radio station in Ramallah.”

“Ah! perhaps,” said Salla, regaining hope. “Yes, surely that is it,” he added, already convinced. “But that won't help them.”

“No,” said Farid, stirring the live coal in the small metal cup on top of the glass bowl.

“But all the same—they have courage, those children of death,” Salla said, twisting his moustache in reluctant admiration.

“They have learned from us,” said Farid, who was practising English equanimity.

Issa looked at them with gloomy dislike. He thought of the two dark figures who had come at night to fetch his father, and once more that icy ripple of fear ran through him, receded, and swept through him again, with the pitiless monotony of the tide.

The cable connecting the broadcasting studio in Jerusalem with the transmitting station in Ramallah had been cut at
8
p.m., precisely at the minute when the broadcast was to start,
by members of the “Haganah”. A convoy of armed cars carrying the Director of Programmes and his staff was at once dispatched to Ramallah
.

At 9.30 p.m., by the time the broadcast was resumed, a crowd had assembled in front of the District Commissioner's Offices in Tel Aviv; they sang the anthem, stormed the District Offices, tore up the records of the Immigration and Land Registry Departments, threw the furniture through the windows, hoisted the Zionist flag and set fire to the building
.

At 10 p.m., by the time the British Police had succeeded in dispersing the rioters, the Central Immigration Department in Jerusalem was burning too; when the fire brigade arrived the building was gutted and the files containing the lists of illegal immigrants earmarked for deportation had been destroyed
.

At 11 p.m., by the time the Jerusalem fire had been put out, a new demonstration marched down Allenby Road in Tel Aviv and clashed with reinforced British Police. The Military Commander of the District imposed a curfew upon the town, and for the remaining hours of the night the country slept an uneasy sleep, until the Day of Visitation dawned
.

This was the name given to the day by the National Council of the Hebrew Community, who had chosen it from Isaiah:

And what will ye do in the day of visitation, and in the desolation which shall come from far? to whom will ye flee for help?

To whom indeed? For a few days the Press and public opinion in Britain denounced the strangling of the National Home; American public figures protested against the “tearing up of a pact with the conscience of mankind”; there was the usual hue and cry as in the case of the Chinese, the Spaniards and the Czechs. Then all grew tired and quiet, and the law of universal indifference had its way; for the conscience of mankind is a diffuse kind of vapour which only rarely condenses into working steam
.

And so the Day of Visitation dawned.

From early in the morning groups of boys and girls marched in military formation through Jerusalem. The Hebrew National Council, led by Glickstein, had proclaimed that it should be a day of protest with (orderly) processions, (peaceful) demonstrations and a complete stoppage of work (in all but the essential Government services). There was also to be a national registration of volunteers who were to pledge themselves to be ready for any emergency. The street walls and hoardings were plastered with posters bearing slogans like “We were here before the British and shall be here when they are gone” and “For Zion's sake will I not hold my peace and for Jerusalem's sake will I not rest”.

The formations converged towards the football ground of the Hebrew Secondary School in the new residential quarter of Rechavia. All wore khaki shorts, and their political affiliation was only expressed in the colour of their shirts. For once all hostile factions were marching together. They paraded on the football ground, before a blue-and-white national flag at half mast. Glickstein made a speech calling them to fight the new policy to the last drop of their blood, but without violence and disorder. Nobody quite knew what he meant but it did not matter. There were several thousands of them, tightly packed between the two goals of the football ground with its cropped dry grass burnt yellow by the sun; the heat, emotion and perspiration fused them together into one coloured lump with a collective odour, voice and impulse, ready for anything. At the end of the meeting the order was given out to march in close formation down Ben Yehuda Street to Zion Circus; but on leaving the stadium they found the street barred by a cordon of Police. At once the formation broke up and merged again into an amorphous clot, as when the molecular structure of a solid is melted down to a thick, semi-liquid mass; and as its internal heat increased this seething mass began to throw out bubbles which burst and disintegrated against the firm wall of the Police; it could be foreseen that in a minute or so
the whole mass would boil over. Shouts went up and soared in shrill flutterings over the heads of the dense crowd of adolescents; behind them the smaller children pushed and shrieked in hysterical elation, ready to throw themselves upon the rifles and tommy-guns, which for them were but magnified models of tin. The hard-jawed policemen looked expressionlessly at this strange and vocal Eastern crowd which they over-towered by a head's length and the like of which they had never seen before; then, at an order of their Commander, who had been calmly parleying with an agitated Glickstein, they gave way and watched the unruly crowd pass by—most of them with considerable relief and a few with regret. Behind their broken line the procession re-formed with cries of triumph and contempt; the blue-and-white streamers floated once more over their heads in the blazing sun, asking for refuge for their murdered kin, and for the Hebrew State.

About the same hour, still before noon, a different crowd had assembled in the Synagogue of Yeshurun, the largest and most modern of the many prayer-houses in Jerusalem. They were all old or elderly people, about five thousand of them. Wrapped in their gold- and silver-spun praying scarves, the men stood in rows between the ascending grades of pews, alternately beating their chests and performing series of quick little bows, according to the text of their murmured prayers. The women, sitting apart in the gallery, looked down red-eyed and sobbing. While they mechanically recited the text, their thoughts roamed the brooding expanse of distant Europe, fastened on a brother's house in Warsaw, a daughter married in Vienna, on children and grandchildren whom they would never see. For there were six millions of them caught and writhing in the rapidly tightening net between the Dniester and the Rhine; and now the Government had said that only seventy-five thousand of these would be allowed to escape—the rest, if they tried to jump, were to be thrown back into the net.

“
Blessed be the All-present, blessed be He; blessed who gave the Law to His people, blessed be He
.”

The aged rabbi conducting the service threw open the carved doors of the Holy of Holies at the back of the altar. Inside the shrine stood six tall, doll-shaped figures clad in heavy velvet tunics with lace embroidery. In place of the head each figure showed, emerging from the tunic, two pointed sticks hung with small silver bells. The rabbi bowed his knee, kissed the hem of the first figure's velvet covering and took it into his arms. After him his aged attendants advanced one by one to the shrine, repeated the same ceremony and each lifted up one of the figures. Led by the rabbi, they formed into a procession and walked in single file round the synagogue. The silver bells tinkled thinly through the silence and the crowd pressed towards the procession to kiss the figures' velvet hems; the women on the gallery and those men who could not get close enough blew kisses with their finger-tips. When the procession had completed its circle, the ram-horn was blown three times and the congregation answered in chorus the traditional words. Then the six figures were laid alongside each other on the altar and the rabbi and his attendants proceeded to undress them. When the bells were dismantled and the tunics taken off, each figure was seen to consist of an ancient and voluminous parchment scroll. Each scroll contained the handwritten text of the five books of Moses; they had been rescued, complete with their traditional velvet drapings and silver bells, from burnt-down synagogues in Germany. Each parchment was mounted in the traditional way on two parallel wooden spools about four feet long. The sticks on which the bells hung were the handles of these spools; by turning both in the same direction the parchment was wound from one spool to the other and could be read like a moving screen.