Thieves in the Night: Chronicle of an Experiment

by Arthur Koestler

  It started as usual with Russia—the one-party system, the inequality of pay, the Purges, the let-down of Spain, etc. The Gan Tamar crowd had a ready excuse for everything, and our radicals Max and Sarah supported them. It is depressing to watch how these two gradually drift into a position where political grudges and personal discord fuse into one. Sarah feels frustrated, among other things because she believes that she should be in charge of the Children’s House instead of Dina. Sarah is an Adlerian juvenile-individual-psychologist cum vegetarian-dietarian; she has a pale, pinched little face with large starved-virgin eyes. Max, who has an enormous, sniffing tapir-nose and an unkempt I.L.P.-name, feels that he should be a member of the Secretariat—which indeed he should according to his brains, but being quarrelsome and unpopular he ends up in all elections as an also-ran—a member of the Committee for Culture or such like. Both are unmarried.

  So the argument on Russia took its usual course, rather like a game of chess where at the opening stages both partners know the other’s answer in advance, and once it gets really going throw the chessmen at each other’s head. This time the throwing was started by Moshe our Treasurer. We had already got through the opening, to wit:

  White (Queen’s pawn 4): Obvious untruth of the accusations against the Trotskyite opposition.

  Black (Queen’s pawn 4): All opposition in a Workers’ State is a priori counter-revolutionary.

  White (Queen’s Bishop pawn 4): Growing inequality of pay and privileges for the Bureaucracy.

  Black (King’s Bishop pawn 3): Necessity to stimulate production by temporary expedients.

  White (King’s Knight Bp. 3): Chauvinistic education, boosting of leadership, religious revival, etc.

  Black (Queen’s Knight Bp. 3): Necessity of preparing backward masses for imperialist war and fascist aggression.

  White (Dasha, pawn takes pawn): “They even encourage bourgeois decadence like lipstick, rouge and powder.”

  Black (Sarah, retakes pawn, blushes with rage): “The dialectics of proletarian sex-appeal as opposed to the prostitution of bourgeois matrimony …”

  It was at this stage that Moshe lost patience and upset the game. Moshe is a heavy-weight, in every respect. He is short and stocky like a bull; he sits on our Communal purse like the Lord Chancellor on the Woolsack; he is a financial genius capable, like the other Moses, of drawing water from rock; and he has a way, with his slow speech and heavy common sense, of trampling through the thick of an argument like an elephant through the jungle. So Moshe told the Gan Tamar crowd that if they wanted to imitate Russia they would first of all have to abolish the Common Purse as a left deviation and start paying out salaries, it being understood that members of the Secretariat would be entitled to draw about three hundred times the amount paid to the average worker and to keep a secret police authorised to deport or shoot-anybody without trial. As the next step they would have to build a separate dining hut for the skilled Stakhanovites, and a third one for the comrades of the Secretariat; they would have to abolish co-education, introduce school-fees and so on….

  There was a terrific uproar. When it had subsided, Felix’s sharp academic voice made itself heard. Felix is an expert in timing; he can wait patiently behind his complicated lenses for the psychological moment, the short lull when everybody is off his guard; and before the others have recovered, he is in the middle of a lecture. Felix is the pocket-Lenin of Gan Tamar and one of the leading theoreticians of the Hebrew I.L.P. Among other things he is the inventor of the system, practised in some of the Hashomer Hatzair settlements, according to which up to the age of eighteen boys and girls take their shower-baths together but are bound by vows of chastity. For all that he looks like a male spinster practising the solitary vice every other Shabbath according to plan, with an extra go on the anniversary of the October Revolution. So now Felix set out to analyse, dissect, split, twist, turn and re-turn Moshe’s arguments, and everybody, friend and foe, sat back to let the inevitable take its course. Felix’s lectures have a quality of making one realise how hard the chair is on which one sits. He spoke for a quarter of an hour in complicated abstractions; the upshot of it all was that the Russian kolkhoz should not be compared with our Communes, because in Russia Socialism had to be imposed upon a backward population whereas our Communes were built by a picked élite of volunteers.

  “All right, we know all this,” puffed Moshe. “But if we are allowed to experiment in pure rural communism on territory ruled by capitalistic Britain, why could not a similar élite of Russian volunteers carry out similar experiments on Soviet Russian territory?”

  Because, Felix explained, quoting various speeches by Stalin, conditions in Russia were different from conditions everywhere else, and methods employed by the proletarian state could not be compared to the methods of capitalistic states, and vice versa. Felix was fighting a battle of attrition, but one cannot wear down an elephant.

  “You are all maniacs,” puffed Moshe. “Our Communes are the only place in the world where individual property is completely vested in the community, where all men are really equal, and where you can live and die without ever having touched money. In these hundred-odd settlements of ours we have now been practising pure rural communism for over thirty years, have survived all trials without sacrificing a single basic principle, and have transformed a seemingly utopian idea into a small-scale but significant working concern. Now I ask you: why do the Russians not send delegations and experts to study experimental communism on the only spot on the earth where it is really practised? They send commissions to study American factories, English football and German police methods. Would you not expect them to be equally interested in the economic and social phenomena which applied rural communism produces? But they haven’t sent a commission yet, not even a single journalist; every reference to us is banned in their Press, the Hebrew language is illegal in Russia and our comrades are shot. I see no reason why we should get excited about Russia, and every reason why they should get excited about us.”

  “Typical chauvinistic conceit,” sniffed Max. The Gan Tamar crowd seconded. The curious thing is that their papers keep on boosting the “shining socialistic example of the Hebrew Communes” until one gets sick of it and begins to doubt whether we really exist or are merely an invention of our own propaganda; but when they talk about Russia they suddenly get self-deprecating and humble as if in church.

  Felix had withdrawn into silence, and the discussion petered’ out in the usual stalemate. We all went into the kitchen and Ruth made us coffee. The cosiest place in all our settlements is the deserted kitchen around midnight, when the others are asleep and one starts cooking coffee and pinching biscuits from the larder with a feeling of being on a spree. It is called a “cumsitz”—a corruption of the German “come and sit down.” During the cumsitz we all became quite jolly again. There were the usual bits of gossip about the other Communes: the snobs of Commune Khefziba (where practically each member has an academic degree) have started building a swimming-pool although they had a deficit last year. In Kfar Gileadi, one of the oldest Communes in Upper Galilee, the younger generation captured the Secretariat at the last election and the patriarchs of old Wabash’s time are all very bitter about it. In Tirat Z’wi, a new Commune in the Jordan Valley run by the Orthodox party, they had a terrible quarrel about milking the cows on the Shabbath; they submitted the question to the Chief Rabbinate which ruled that the cows should be milked but that vinegar should be put into the pails to prevent Shabbath-milk being used for commercial purposes.

  It was all very jolly—and would have been even jollier with a bottle of brandy or Scotch. I wonder when we shall get over this puritanism in our Communes. Sometimes I feel that I must get drunk or I can’t stand our virtues any longer. But the new generation doesn’t seem to miss anything; these Sabra-boys regard a glass of wine as something like opium or hashish, and the girls look upon lipstick as an invention of the devil, who dwells in the Babel of Tel Aviv arid wears a dinner jacket with a whit
e carnation.

  Thursday

  Mendl the Pied Piper is back from Jerusalem, and he’s got the cello. I saw the cello advertised for sale by its refugee owner in the Jerusalem Mail a week ago. It was only five pounds-dirt-cheap; and luckily Moshe wasn’t yet back. So in me capacity as Temporary Treasurer I decided to buy it for us—from next year’s luxury budget, as this year’s twelve pounds are already exhausted. I should of course have consulted at least the other members of the Secretariat, but I didn’t. When Moshe heard about it he was puffing with fury and promised that the Annual Meeting would come down on me like a ton of bricks. I certainly let myself in for something—but what matters is that we now have our string quartet complete.

  I asked Mendl whether he had picked up any political gossip in Jerusalem, about Partition and so on, but he hadn’t. He is completely unpolitical—self-contained, silent and rather dreamy. He is our tractor-driver and mechanic and loves tinkering so much that I am sure he is secretly happy whenever something goes wrong with our electricity plant. His shyness prevented him from showing his excitement about the cello. He is always shy and restrained about music—until he gets going and becomes transformed into the Pied Piper. Each passion has its own chastity.

  Monday

  One of our periodic financial crises, which even Moshe’s genius is unable to prevent. For the last three days we have been feeding on bread, olives, noodles and milk. Dasha says the vitamin balance is all right but we walk about with a hungry look, and whenever I meet anybody’s eyes, I see in them a cello crossed by a dagger. We haven’t had meat for a fortnight and Arieh refuses to sacrifice any of his sheep; it isn’t the season—it apparently never is. We have sold our late vegetable crop and all our cheese and butter, and there we are, high and dry. We have seven working people on the sick-list—three with malaria, two with typhoid and two with dysentery—which in itself is only slightly higher than the norm, but unfortunately four out of our five cash-earners are among them. Usually they bring home about ten to fifteen pounds each Friday from the cement factory (not to mention the tools, soap and sundry items which they pinch from the factory for the common good). This sum is the mainstay of our weekly cash-budget—the rest of the turnover consists in a series of complicated credit operations with the Workers’ Bank and the National Cooperatives who buy our produce and supply most of our needs; but a minimum amount of cash is needed to keep the concern going.

  Fortunately our great friend the Mukhtar of Kfar Tabiyeh turned up this morning, and after the usual nerve-racking big-talk about God’s blessings and the Universe in general, came out with the proposal to hire our tractor for the ploughing-up of his falha fields. I ran to fetch Moshe, and he and Reuben haggled with the Mukhtar for an hour and a half, plying him with the last of our coffee and sugar, and finally agreed to do the ploughing for ninety piaster per dunum. Moshe and the Mukhtar both swore that they were ruining themselves and that they were only doing it out of pure love for the other, and both were highly satisfied; the Mukhtar because he had already tried to hire the tractor of our dear neighbours of Gan Tamar who had asked ten piasters more per dunum; and Moshe, because he has found a heaven-sent fifteen to twenty pounds ready cash. (Mendl who is going to work the tractor is to collect the cash after each couple of dunums ploughed.)

  Anyway, Moshe promised that the crisis will be over by Friday and that on Shabbath we shall have a solid meal including sugared coffee; also an extra issue of pipe tobacco on shopping day. But these rosy prospects did not save me from having to go down to Gan Tamar to borrow some urgently needed items, including petrol for the tractor and two sheets of sole-leather for my shoe-shop. To borrow from Gan Tamar is never a pleasant job—they are eight years old and we only one; they are rich and we are poor; they have three hundred souls and we forty one; they are patronising and we are arrogant. Besides, we all have a bad conscience for under-cutting them in this tractor business, and on top of it all I had to borrow not only the goods but also a truck of theirs to bring them up, as we have run out of the last drop of petrol.

  So I took the donkey, and as I trotted down the wadi I felt like riding to Canossa. This kind of unpleasant mission always seems to fall to my lot; for instance if Moshe has to land a shady credit transaction with the Workers’ Bank in Haifa, Reuben usually sends me along to give Moshe moral support by using what he calls “the exotic charm of my gentile streak.” It is Reuben’s favourite joke.—He hasn’t many.

  Au fond of course I enjoy this kind of crook-mission; besides, I had to atone for the cello. It is always a change to get away from the old place, and I trotted along the wadi serenely whistling to myself. It was a glorious day, not too hot; last night we had our first rain and everything around, including the sky, looked freshly polished and glistening as after a spring: cleaning. I also like riding a donkey. I like the solid, dusty touch of its hide with its sun-heated dry stiff hair. Sitting on its back one feels one is riding not an animal but a stuffed rocking-horse. I admire the donkey’s head-strong pride and self-sufficiency, its complete lack of horsy or doggy sloppiness. If the camel is the ship of the desert, the donkey is a rowing boat: the oars are one’s legs. I have seen Arabs on donkeys doing with their legs seventy-five strokes a minute. Our Garbo is a perfect specimen; if one stops rowing her she comes to a standstill at once. For all her unsentimentality she has the gluey, long-lashed eyes of her namesake.

  In Gan Tamar I found another guest-donkey tied to the post in front of the Secretariat, but this one was a fat white and solemn animal which made our hide-bound Garbo look like Cinderella. On entering the Secretariat I learned that it belonged to old Rabbi Greenfeld who had come on his bi-annual visit, complete with khupah and other sacred paraphernalia to marry those willing to undergo the ceremony. Thanks to this circumstance I found Felix in one of his mellower moods (he had obviously not yet heard of our shady transaction with the Mukhtar). His awe-inspiring glasses lay in front of him on the table, and his suddenly defenceless eyes made me feel almost mean for swindling the leather and petrol out of him which God alone knows when they will get back. But after all, they are rich and we are poor (they have just bought polished hardwood tables for their dining-hall with chairs instead of forms!). Felix granted, with a sourish smile, all my requests, and then suggested that we should go and see the “monkey-business” which was just being transacted in front of the dining-hall. On our way he apologetically referred to the fact that of course the couples only submitted to the “monkey-business” when a child was born or on the way, as the handicap of illegitimate birth would be “dialectically unfair” to the offspring in this prejudice-ridden world. At the entrance to the dining-hut we found old Rabbi Greenfeld officiating in front of a couple who stood in their working clothes under the khupah, the ritual canopy. Its four poles were held up by four boys in khaki shorts and cartwheel hats of straw with ragged fringes. It looked like a scene from a comic opera and they were all frankly grinning. The old Rabbi did his best not to notice it, burying his nose in his prayer-book. As I looked closer, I saw that the bride was fat Peninah who has been happily married for years and has three children; Samuel, her husband, stood next to me among the spectators, grinning. Seeing my surprise he whispered:

  “Hallo, Joseph. The real bride is eight months gone and didn’t want to hurt old Greenfeld’s feelings, so my Peninah is deputising for her. She’s done it three times in the last two years. Old Greenfeld’s short-sighted and Peninah loves to get married.”

  With some difficulty the bridegroom got the ring halfway up Peninah’s fat finger, and the ceremony was over. The next couple was already waiting. Before they walked under the canopy Peninah and the bridegroom discreetly passed the wedding ring on to them; they have only one in Gan Tamar which has to serve for all.

  I like old Greenfeld, so when it was all over I went up to shake hands with him. He looked at me over his gold-rimmed spectacles, trying to place me in his memory. I told him I was the cobbler from Ezra’s Tower, and he said:

  �
��Oh yes, yes—the new ones. A hard life up there, a hard life. Nu, how are things?”

  I told him there were three couples who wanted to get married. He took out his grimy pocket-book, licked his thumb, turned the pages forward and back, and said that according to his schedule he was to visit us in about three weeks’ time. At that moment Felix came up to me to say that if I wanted to go the truck was ready for me. “What, what?” said old Greenfeld, “you are going in the automobile, young man? Then I will come with you at once, it will save me a journey on the donkey and it will rest my piles.”

  So we set out for home, I driving the truck and old Greenfeld sitting beside me with an air of bliss and reading his Bible in spite of the bumps, while the khupah and other paraphernalia were stowed with the petrol and my precious leather sheets. In my hurry—for Felix wanted the truck returned before the night—I had forgotten to borrow their wedding ring as we had done on previous occasions; and on top of it I remembered that one of our prospective bridegrooms was in hospital with dysentery. That didn’t matter much as we could find a deputy (the only thing that mattered was old Greenfeld’s seal on the marriage licence); but the ring was rather embarrassing. So I coughed and told the Rabbi that as we had not counted on his visit so soon we had not yet bought the rings. He put the Bible down and looked at me over his glasses; he has little red veins in his eyes and yellow nicotine-stains in his beard. “I can sell you some rings,” he said. He fumbled in the pocket of his black silk kaftan and produced three rings. He held them on the palm of his soft white hand as though on a jeweller’s cushion. “Pure eighteen carat gold,” he said. “I will sell them to you for a shilling each. After the ceremony I shall buy them back from the young couples for a shilling each. Nu, will you make business?”