Thieves in the Night: Chronicle of an Experiment

by Arthur Koestler

  “This is very kind of you, Rabbi,” I said.

  “You must give me the three shillings, young man,” he said. “It must be transacted properly.”

  “But I haven’t got them. You know that we never carry money—we don’t own any, individually.”

  “Betakh,” he said. “Of course. I always forget the ways of you lunatics.”

  “Moshe, our Treasurer, will pay you for the rings when we arrive,” I said.

  “We shall see,” he said doubtfully, putting the rings away in his pocket. “But don’t forget: no money no rings, no rings no wedding.” He spoke in earnest, pushed his glasses down and reverted to his Bible. Old Greenfeld lives in a world petrified into symbols and make-believe; but the rules of the make-believe have to be strictly adhered to. For the last two thousand years the believers left their doors open on Passover-eve for Messiah to walk in, and laid a cover for him to partake of their meal, and assured each other that “next year we shall celebrate in Jerusalem”. They also sold all their plates and cutlery which had been in touch with leaven to their gentile neighbours, and bought them back when the festival of the unleavened bread was over. It was all make-believe, but this stubborn ritual alone held them together during the centuries of dispersion. There was cunning behind this naïveté and shrewdness behind their mysticism;—I wondered whether old Greenfeld was really so unaware of the farcicality of these marriage ceremonies as he pretended to be.

  As if he had followed the trend of my thought, he suddenly turned to me:

  “You speak the Tongue very fluently,” he said.

  “You know that we speak nothing else among ourselves,” I said. (Old Greenfeld’s Hebrew is fluent too, but he speaks in the traditional sing-song voice of the prayer; he sounds like a Catholic priest alighting from Wells’ Time Machine in the Roman Suburra on a market day, addressing the fish-wives in Church Latin).

  “But what is the good of the language if you do not read the Book?” he said. “Do you know for example what Rabbi Eliezer of Safet said with reference to Jochanan the Cobbler?”

  I confessed that I didn’t, while watching the bumps on the road, for we were just turning into the wadi.

  “Oi,” cried old Greenfeld, shaken by a jolt and adjusting his fur-rimmed hat. “Drive slowly, what is the hurry? We shall arrive in time, blessed be the Name…. Now about Rabbi Eliezer of Safet. Whenever his way led him past the shop of Jochanan the Cobbler, he used to go in and read to him the day’s chapter from the Book. Jochanan was highly pleased and honoured, though he couldn’t hear a word as it had pleased the Lord to create him stone-deaf. So some of his disciples asked Rabbi Eliezer about this matter. And Rabbi Eliezer said: ‘There is of course a difference whether he can hear or not, but it is a small difference. The sacrament of the Name acts upon the person even if he is unaware of it.’ …” He looked at me with his red-veined eyes from under the brim of his fur hat.

  “Nu, does this story convey a meaning to you?”

  I smiled and nodded, keeping my eyes on the road.

  “Then come and visit me when you come to Safet. I live in the house next to the Synagogue of the Ari. Have you been in Safet before?”

  “No, but I always wanted to go.”

  “Shame upon you,” said the Rabbi. “There he lives for I don’t know how many years in the Land and has not been to Safet. It is like living in an attic and having never been to the cellar.”

  In a way old Greenfeld is right. It is a shame never to have seen the cradle of Hebrew mysticism and poetry, the town of the mediaeval kabbalists and centre of Hebraism after the exodus from Spain. I promised old Greenfeld to visit him in Safet.

  “From what country do you come?”

  “From England.”

  “England? Very few come from England,” he said.

  “What made you come?”

  I gave an evasive answer and he pushed his glasses up to look at me.

  “Nu, come, come, tell me,” he said impatiently. “It is written: who can withhold himself from speaking?”

  And suddenly I was itching to tell old Greenfeld about the Incident. “I am waiting,” he said peremptorily.

  So I told him the whole thing, choosing my words as tactfully as I could. Old Greenfeld shook his head meditatively.

  “Oi, the stories one hears from you young people,” he said. “You want to tell me that you left everything because of this stupid woman?” he asked with a sly twinkle in his eye.

  “Oh, not because of her. But it was a kind of shock, you know. From that moment I saw everything in a different light.”

  “I understand, you must not talk so much,” old Greenfeld cried excitedly. “His tongue is like a ready pen but he understands nothing.”

  “I don’t often tell this story, you know.”

  “I know, I know. You are frightened that the other heathens will laugh at you, instead of praising the Name for Its cunning ways to teach a fool a lesson. And what is the lesson?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Then let old Greenfeld tell you. Because you were a traitor in disguise, He showed you up in the nakedness of your flesh….”

  He pushed his glasses down again and turned back to his Bible, with an air of having settled the matter definitely and to everybody’s satisfaction.

  The arrival home with truck, rabbi, petrol and khupah was a triumph. Everything went smoothly. We bought the rings and married all three couples with Max deputising for the bridegroom with dysentery, and sold the rings back to old Greenfeld, and fed him on onions and noodles which he took quite nicely. Then I drove him to Gan Tamar and came back rowing Garbo.

  It was a highly enjoyable day. In the evening I took Ellen out into the fields.

  Wednesday

  The annual meeting is over and I was not even lynched. I was saved by the news that we are going to receive a new batch of 30-40 people next month, and that within a year or so we are going to be brought up to our full establishment of 200 adults. The new wave of persecution in Central Europe has led to a speeding-up of the programme; all Communes are to be brought in the quickest time to their maximum absorptive capacity, according to the amount of land they hold.

  This means that we are getting credits for urgent building and investments, and that the whole budget for the next year is changed. Most of the building programme is laid down according to the standard plans of the Fund, so that our opposition, led by Max and Sarah, had not much to argue about. Their opportunity came with the non-specific items of “general improvements” and “miscellaneous” (the latter including the so-called luxury budget). Having said all there was to be said about the wretched cello (“Joseph fiddles while Rome burns”), Max brought in a resolution according to which all not specifically allocated sums should be spent to the last penny on the Children’s House. This was the signal for starting one more of the interminable debates about the children which have been going on in all Communes for the last twenty years. Everybody agrees that the children are the most important “produce” of the Communes and that their care and education should come before everything else. Accordingly the first stone or concrete building in any Commune is the Children’s House; the second is usually the cowshed. The children first; then the cattle; then the workers, is the fundamental principle, the iron hierarchy of priorities according to which all our settlements are built. Even in a new pariah-settlement like ours, with up to now only five children, the Children’s House is a little marvel of luxury, with tiled shower-baths and lavatories, and a separate kitchen, while the majority of the adult workers still live in wooden block-huts—icy in winter, baking-hot in summer—and some even in tents. We bring up our children like princes, while their elders live like pigs. It is one of the unhealthy extremes to which semitic intensity crossed with Left radicalism is so inclined. The new generation is becoming a fetish, the old one is mere “manure for the future” as they used to put it in the early puritan days of the Russian Revolution. Result: the high illness-rate among the adults,
and the frequency of physical and mental crack-ups.

  Another paradoxical result of communal upbringing is that, instead of eliminating, it increases the parents’ sentimental addiction to their offspring which I always found one of the most tiresome attributes of our race. The children live in the House almost from birth, which means that they are brought up by trained nurses instead of untrained dilettanti (parenthood, the most responsible job in society, is the only one for which no licence is required). Our system has the further advantage of freeing both parents for work during the day, guaranteeing them uninterrupted sleep at night, and protecting the infant against old papa Oedipus and other plagues. I believe our children grow up in better physical and mental health than others, and the parents are even more devoted to them than in the normal family. As soon as they knock off work they rush to the Children’s House, and from five o’clock until dinner-time one sees in all settlements nothing but proud parents taking their little angels for a walk. Most people find this charming, I think it is a bore; but then, I have always liked or disliked children according to their personality and not as a separate kind of species as most people seem to do.

  The discussion ended after midnight because of general exhaustion. A few, as usual, were asleep, others dozing. But we all would rather sleep through a whole meeting than be for a minute absent from it; and rather lose a finger than the right to vote on the question of where the next chicken-house should be built.

  Thursday

  The night-job didn’t progress tonight; the snoring of Max, with whom I share a room, suddenly began to irritate me. I gave it up. I went out of the hut and over to Ellen’s room. But Ellen was already asleep; and as Dasha, with whom she shares the room, was also there, nothing could be done about it. In a sense I was quite glad, for I had caught a peculiar look of Ellen’s during old Greenfeld’s performance, and I was in no mood to-night for explanations and “talking-things-over”.

  I strolled across the Square in the dark. The tower at night always looks enormous against the stars: a friendly colossus watching over us. The searchlight has not been on for the last two months, since things have quietened down in our district. I walked up to the northern fence. All was silence and majesty in the great starry illumination. After a while Herman, one of our two Auxiliaries, walked quietly up to me and offered me a cigarette. He looked picturesque with his rifle and Bersaglieri hat; but he complained about the boredom of being tied down here where there hadn’t been a raid for almost three months, while his colleagues in Wingate’s Special Night Squads were having a great time hunting down Arab terrorists. He spoke with admiration of Wingate whose name is quickly becoming a legend throughout the country—a kind of Lawrence of the Hebrews. He explained to me in some detail the tactics of the counter-ambush which Wingate invented, with apparently unarmed working parties serving as decoy. I thought it must take some guts to act as a decoy, but since our heroic period is over, playing at war has lost its attraction for me. And even while it lasted and we had two to three raids every week and random sniping almost every night, it had soon all become a tedious routine and the main worry was lack of sleep. (For all that we have killed about thirty terrorists and injured a lot more, according to the police reports and the blood-tracks we used to find the following morning. But the corpses had always vanished as the Arabs invariably carried them away.)

  How quickly one forgets if the present is absorbing and each day brings new excitements and fulfilments. But to start the bloody game all over again would be rather trying.

  I left poor Herman to his martial frustrations and strolled back towards the Children’s House. It is a pleasant white cubic concrete block with the beginnings of a garden in front. I looked in through the mosquito-grating of the open window of the nursery, and saw in the faint blue light of the night lamp the three toddlers deeply absorbed in the business of sleeping. One of them lay with its face to the window, its mouth half-open and its clenched fist curiously sticking up in the air, in a miniature anti-fascist salute.

  I wandered on, across the Square, to the cowshed. It is also made of concrete and our main pride after the Children’s House. For some reason the electric light is left on all night. The brightly illuminated interior with its two rows of sleeping beasts on both sides of the concrete gangway has something stage-like and enchanting. One black cow, name of Tirza, who is due to calve to-morrow, was standing upright alone among her sleeping neighbours. From under her tail the foetal bag was already hanging down—a clean, membranous globe filled with transparent liquid and suspended on what looked a thin tubular thread. She turned her head as I walked in at the end of the passage and followed me with her eyes as I came closer. I always think a cow’s eyes have a particularly soft look before she calves, but it may be imagination. I rubbed her with my knuckles on her bony forehead and she pressed her head against my fist; and then I suddenly remembered the wretched tragedy of our cowshed. We cross Syrian cows with Dutch bulls, as this gives the best results in our climate. But as the Dutch race is bigger than the Syrian, the head of the foetus frequently gets stuck; and as there is as yet no technique for performing the Caesarean on cattle, one has in such cases to kill the cow in order to save the calf. At one of our weekly meetings Sarah actually made a hysterical fuss about it, accusing us of premeditated murder and bringing in Tolstoy, Buddha and the Bible. But we have to get through with the wretched business, and once we have our crossbreed established it won’t have to be done again. However, as Tirza looked at me with her soft, sloppy eyes, rubbing her head trustingly against my knuckles, I felt rather like Raskolnikow. I also wondered whether Tirza had a premonition in her cloudy and floating inward awareness that she was going to die. Then her neighbour woke with a low, dumb moo, and the spell broke. I gave Tirza a pat and walked out of the shed.

  In the Dining Hut the string quartet was rehearsing a movement of Beethoven. I listened for a while, then went back to my room in a pacified mood. My restlessness seemed to have evaporated in the cool night air. Max had turned with his face to the wall and had stopped snoring. I felt that my taste for the night job had returned and put about three hundred words of Pepys into Hebrew, complete with footnotes and annotations. Seventeenth Century English lends itself admirably to translation into biblical language. Turns of phrases presented themselves, bowing like willing brides. I read over the last chapter, very pleased with myself; smoked my last cigarette (until the next weekly issue to-morrow afternoon); w’az la’mittà—and. so to bed.

  Shabbath

  Old David, the truck-driver of the milk-cooperative who often drops in to my workshop for a chat, brought yesterday the first news that Bauman has split the Haganah. He has walked out of it with about three thousand of his followers and a considerable amount of illegal arms, and has gone over to the extremists. Old David who is himself a member of the Regional Command of the Haganah was stammering with indignation. “Just imagine,” he shouted at me, “to join those hooligans, those fascist cut-throats who walk about throwing bombs into Arab market-places, killing women and children. And Bauman of all people!” But he didn’t know any details.

  I am still unable to understand what happened. If the split had been caused by some romantic hothead, it would be just another episode in our internal quarrels. But Bauman is one of the most balanced and responsible fellows I know. He has grown up in the traditions of Austrian Social-Democracy and is a Socialist to his bones, by instinct and conviction. If he has decided to throw in his lot with Jabotinski’s right-wing extremists, then the situation must be more critical than we in our isolation know. After all we live here on an island—Ezra’s Ivory Tower. I haven’t been to Jerusalem or Tel Aviv for more than a year. And we are so absorbed in our problems that we lost contact with reality. The egotism of a collective is no less narrowing than the individual’s.

  I became quite excited and alarmed. Aux armes, citoyens! The only person here with whom one can talk about these things is Simeon, so I left my shop in the middle of the working
hours and went out to see him. He was in the tree-nursery, planting a row of saplings. That is his passion. He did not see me coming and I watched him. He was absorbed in his work, He knelt with his back to me, patting with his hands the hole into which the sapling was to go. He closed one eye, gauging whether the centre of the hole was exactly in line with the row. His violent, unhappy profile was softened up; it had the self-abandon of a child muttering to himself in play. He put the sapling in and heaped the earth round it with his fingers; then he remained looking at it quite still on his knees. When he noticed me standing a few steps behind him, he blushed; I had violated the chastity of his passion.

  It is curious how most of us develop our specific passions here. They are not hobbies, for they are directly connected with the job. There is Dasha with her vitamin-and-calory mania running the kitchen; there is Arieh who is so intimate with his sheep that I suspect him of committing sodomy in the true bucolic tradition; there is Dina with her Children’s House, and Moshe, our Communal Shylock. This fusing of job and hobby among the more skilled workers is partly of course a consequence of the freer choice of occupation which the Commune provides compared with town life or individual farming. But only partly. There is an additional something in Simeon’s relationship to the trees or Dina’s to the children who are not hers. It has to do with a new kind of possessive, proprietary feeling which the Commune breeds. I feel it in myself, but it is difficult to express. Last Shabbath, when we came back after the concert from Gan Tamar, this sensation was particularly vivid. As we turned late at night from the wadi into the dirt-track leading up to the Place, I remembered our first night here, my journey with Dina and Simeon on top of the swaying truck; and how we built that dirt-track at dawn, sweating and full of vague fears—I seemed to remember the imprint of each stone we cleared from the path. It was my path, more intimately mine than anything I ever possessed, wrist-watch or cigarette-case. And it is more mine because this mine-ness is shared by Dina and Simeon whose memories echo my own; for after all the feeling of possessiveness towards an object is the reflection of the memories it represents; its value is crystallised memory. And the same applies to the Tower which we all saw going up into the air like a dead colossus coming to life, and to every building we built, to every engine and tool and head of cattle we bought. This intimate feeling of possession is common to all peasants, but in our case there is more to it. Take an individual farmer who has built up his small farm with his wife. The value of each shed they have built is enhanced for him by sharing it with her, because he shares his memories with her, because there is more crystallised memory in it. When she dies he feels impoverished—a partnership of memories has been dissolved. The Commune is a great, dense, tight-woven partnership of memories. Thus by sharing everything in the Place with all the others, my feeling of mineness is not diminished but increased—and this is not a theoretical deduction but the analysis of an intimate experience. It could also be applied to analyse patriotic emotions—but the Race and Nation are more heterogeneous and diffuse bodies than the Commune.