Thieves in the Night: Chronicle of an Experiment

by Arthur Koestler

  I became a socialist because I hated the poor; and I became a Hebrew because I hated the Yid.

  Monday

  On Simeon’s advice I have been re-reading the chapters in Flavius Josephus about Massada, the last Hebrew fortress which, after the fall of Jerusalem, held out against the Romans. When the Romans set fire to the inner wall by means of catapulted fire-brands, and Massada had become untenable, the Commander of the Fortress gave orders to the garrison to kill first all the women and children and then themselves. In his last speech he explained to them what fate awaited those who fell alive into the hands of the Romans; then he went on:

  “But I find that you are such people as are no better than others either in virtue or in courage, and are afraid of dying, though you be delivered thereby from the greatest miseries. For the laws of our country and of God himself have from ancient times continually taught us that it is life that is a calamity to man and not death; for the union of what is divine and what is mortal is disagreeable….”

  He must have been a personality of remarkable powers to persuade his men to cut the throats of their women and children and afterwards their own; and it was a long and protracted business for there were nine hundred and sixty-two of them; and only two women, who had hidden themselves in an underground cave, escaped to tell the tale. Each man slew his own family; then they chose ten men by lot who slew all the other men; then they cast lots again and the one to whom it fell killed the remaining nine and finally himself. The name of this last man, the last free Hebrew to live, has not been recorded, nor any other names of the garrison, except that of the Commander, one Eliezer Ben Yair; and Yair is the alias adopted by the spiritual leader of the Bauman gang: Abraham Stern.

  It is a savage tale, this story of the last Hebrew fortress, and yet strangely soothing. “The union of what is divine and what is mortal is disagreeable….” There is an unmistakable Christian accent, and yet neither Ben Yair nor his chronicler Josephus seems to have had any knowledge of the new sect. But it was a time of howling and gnashing of teeth, and the new religion with its emphasis on immortality and resurrection was in the air. “Who is there,” Yair asks referring to the mass slaughter of Hebrews by the Romans, “who is there that revolves these things in his mind and yet is able to bear the sight of the sun, though he himself might live out of danger? …” I believe there is a similar reason for the religious trend among our terrorists. The Hebrew underground began as a purely political movement and has developed more and more mystic accents. Simeon showed me yesterday some of Yair-Stern’s poetry. It has a strange archaic fervour—quite untranslatable:

  My teacher carried his praying-scarf in a velvet bag to

  the synagogue:

  Even so carry I my sacred gun to the Temple

  That its voice may pray for us.

  Or the refrain of the anthem he wrote for the underground movement:

  These are the days of wrath, the nights of holy despair:

  Fight your way home, eternal tramp,

  Your house we shall repair

  And mend the broken lamp.

  Though he tries to hide it, Simeon has an almost religious admiration for Yair-Stern. He seems to regard him as a kind of gunman-messiah.

  Tuesday

  At last—tomorrow I am going to see Bauman in Jerusalem. Apparently that is where he lives, or at least, where he is at present. Curious—all the time I imagined that he was here in Tel Aviv; and though Simeon never directly said so, I was under the impression that he lived somewhere just around the corner. This somehow strikes me as a particularly neat piece of deception, though properly speaking there was no deception at all. Simeon never gives himself conspiratorial airs, and yet he is completely wrapped up in a shroud of elusiveness. Conspiring has become such a routine with him that it is invisible. I believe he hardly ever lies to me; he just automatically omits every reference to relevant facts. The closer I come to these people’s world the more I feel as if I were running into a dense bank of fog inside which all is muffled and dim, and full of deceptive echoes.

  To leave this room where I have been hiding since I came back from the funeral is like breaking up another link with Dina. There has never been such intimacy between us as within these solitary walls. Her picture hangs over the bed; I shall take it off the last minute before we leave. It was her room as much as mine; the scene of our bitter honeymoon.

  To-morrow she will become homeless again and have to look for another exile and suffer another betrayal. The law of universal indifference will have stolen another victory, and will go on ticking in my flesh.

  There is one alone, and there is not a second.

  If two lie together then they have heat: but how can one be warm alone?

  15

  The city of Jerusalem is a mosaic of religious and national Communities, more or less neatly divided into separate residential quarters competing in holiness and mutual hatred.

  Its sacred core, the Old City, is surrounded by Soleiman’s Wall and divided into a Moslem, a Christian, an Armenian and a Jewish quarter. Outside the Wall there is the German Colony, the Greek Colony and the Commercial Centre; the rest of the town is part Arab, part Hebrew. The latter part is again subdivided according to the origin and period of the immigrants who built it, from the ancient slum ghetto of the quarter of the Hundred Gates to ultra-modern Rechavia, non-Aryan offshoot of the Weimar Republic complete with glass, chromium, Goethe, Adler and Thomas Mann. Each of these separate worlds lives at no more than a ten minutes’ walk from the others. They stare and sniff at each other without mixing, rather like camels sniff at the exhaust pipes of motor-cars, and derive about as much satisfaction from it.

  The night after their arrival in Jerusalem, Joseph and Simeon walked through the badly lit Arab quarter of Musrara, almost deserted at this late hour, then turned into Me’a She’arim, the Street of the Hundred Gates. The “Hundred Gates” is the oldest of the Hebrew quarters outside the confines of the Old City; it was founded in the eighteen-seventies, and its first inhabitants were the ancient and pious who came to the Land not to live but to die. They brought with them their savings of a lifetime, which they handed over to the Kehillah, the Jewish Community, in exchange for a monthly pittance to the day of their death. While waiting to die they prayed, quarrelled, studied the Book and made souvenirs of the Holy Land—albums with pressed flowers from Mount Scopus, sachets of velvet filled with holy earth, pen-holders of olivewood with a tiny inlaid lens through which one could see a micro-panorama of Jerusalem. These souvenirs were sent abroad to be sold to other Jews, and their proceeds were the main income of the Community. In between these godly occupations the elders of the Hundred Gates fought their family feuds, cheated, begged, got drunk once a year to celebrate Esther’s triumph over Haman, fasted on the day of the Temple’s destruction, ate bitter herbs to commemorate the exodus from Egypt, blew the ram-horn which brought down the walls of Jericho, expected Messiah’s arrival from week to week, and while waiting to die begot children at a patriarchal age. As the years passed younger people too began to inhabit the Hundred Gates, men in black kaftans and fur hats, women with shorn heads and wigs, pious and prolific. A dozen children to a couple were no rarity in those days, the younger ones sleeping in their parents’ beds, the others on the floor; they lived in holiness and squalor, in tenements with labyrinthine courts and long narrow iron balconies teeming with toddlers and vermin. Unlike the Moslem slums which were fragrant with spices, horse-dung and charcoal, the Hundred Gates smelt of oil lamps and Primus cookers, damp washing and hot beans in grease. However, underneath all this variety of smells lay as an ever-present foundation the odour of Jerusalem: the odour of the sun-heated rocks and of the white chalk dust in the streets, product of the decaying stone on which the city stands.

  “If you bandaged my eyes,” said Joseph, “I could still tell the Hundred Gates by their holy stench.”

  They had walked in silence for the last few minutes and Joseph spoke mainly to ease his own tensio
n. But while he spoke he remembered Dina’s obsession about smells, and instantly he knew that Simeon remembered it too. The lines of transmission from Ezra’s Tower, from their common past, were still functioning, though they trailed loosely like telegraph wires damaged by a storm. He still felt the old affection for Simeon, but they had both changed, and so had the quality of their relationship.

  “That is one way of looking at the Hundred Gates,” said Simeon. “I will tell you another way. A few weeks ago two elderly rabbis of the Chassidic sect contacted the Command. They were brought with the usual precautions before Bauman. I was present at the interview. When they were led into the hide-out they were literally trembling with fear. Bauman asked them what they wanted. The older rabbi asked him after some humming and hawing whether it was in our power to occupy on a given day the Mosque of Omar for two hours. Bauman asked for what purpose. The rabbi explained that the two of them were kabbalists, students of the Zohar, and that they had established beyond doubt the conditions under which the advent of Messiah can be brought about. This year was the propitious one and it was only necessary to perform a certain sacrifice accompanied by a certain ritual on the Sacred Rock where Abraham offered Isaac, where the First Temple stood and where the Mosque of Omar now stands. Seven Kohanim of the rabbi’s choice, direct descendants of the priestly aristocracy of Israel, were already undergoing the prescribed rites of purification, and the animals for the sacrifice had been chosen and bought. All they needed now was that we should occupy the Mosque of Omar on the given day, and hold out for two hours.

  “‘Do you realise, rabbi, that it would cost us many dead and bring immediate civil war over our heads?’ said Bauman.

  “‘Yes, there would perhaps be some people killed,’ said the rabbi, ‘but they would only be dead for a few hours because Resurrection would follow immediately. And as for civil war’—he smiled—‘well, well, Messiah will look after that.’

  “So Bauman told them he would look into the matter, and as they left, the younger man, who was one of the chosen Kohanim, kissed his hand, and the older one kissed him on the mouth.—I am glad you did not laugh at the story,” Simeon concluded.

  Joseph knew that a few months ago he certainly would have laughed. Even now he listened to the story with mixed feelings. He envied Simeon for whom it was easy not to laugh-Joseph actually could not remember ever having seen Simeon laugh, and his rare smile was confined to the lower half of his face. Once, Joseph remembered, he had asked Dasha, who for a time had been in love with Simeon, why she did not live with him. “One does not embrace a razor,” Dasha had said.

  They left the labyrinth of the Hundred Gates and turned into the Bokharian Quarter. It was plunged into darkness except for an occasional window lit by a candle or oil-lamp. In the thin light of the crescent moon the chalk dust of the decaying rock shimmered white on the unpaved road. The houses here were more spacious; it was a poor quarter, but of austere dignity. Its inhabitants had come towards the end of the last century from the Emirate of Bokhara in Central Asia. Their ancestors had begun their Eastward migrations after the destruction of the Temple by Titus. They had first gone to Mesopotamia where Hebrew culture flourished for a while at the universities of Sura and Pompedita; then, when the usual happened, they had wandered on to Kurdistan and Turkmenistan and Bokhara. After the Moslem conquest they formed small indestructible islands in the Islamic Sea; cut off as they were from the rest of the world, the Bokharian Community gradually became convinced that they were the only surviving Jews on the earth. For about fifteen hundred years nothing happened to shake their conviction. They lived in segregation; their shops in the bazaars had to be two feet under street level so that their heads should not reach over the Moslem customers’ shoulders; in the streets they had to wear a rope round their waist so that an instrument of punishment should be handy if they gave offence.

  In 1866 a Russian army under Suvorov entered the Emirate of Bokhara. Among the Russian soldiers was a Jew. He brought the incredible tale that there were millions of Jews left in the world, and was called a liar. Challenged to name a town in Europe where such alleged Jews lived, he named the Warsaw suburb Nalewki. The Jews of Bokhara went into council and finally produced a letter which was duly stamped and addressed “to the Venerable Jews in the Town of Nalewki on the Continent of Europe”. The letter arrived; and in due time an answer reached the Chief Rabbi of Bokhara. It began with a rather cool confirmation of the soldier’s tale, the Jews of Nalewki obviously resenting the doubt cast upon their existence; while the rest of the letter was devoted to a detailed analysis of the grammatical offences against the Holy Language contained in the letter of the Bokharian Jews.

  Simeon and Joseph turned into a narrow side lane. It was dark and steep; the part of the lane behind them ended abruptly in a field of stones. They were near the outer confines of the city, where Jerusalem ended and the Judean desert began. Somewhere on that dark stony slope were the tombs of the Judges with seventy burial shafts hewn out the rock, supposedly the graves of the Sanhedrin, the High Court of Israel. Joseph had visited them a few weeks before; the closely packed, narrow burial chambers looked much the same as the Ancestor’s Cave at Ezra’s Tower and the countless other rock-graves all over the country. The land was honeycombed with them; wherever one travelled they looked at one like tiny black windows in the white surface of the rocks. And yet there were no ghosts or haunted houses anywhere. Perhaps the dead hereabouts were too old and intimate with God to indulge in such clumsy manifestations.

  “I am sure that Dina went to see the cave that night,” Joseph heard himself say without knowing why, or remembering his intention of saying it.

  “How do you know?” Simeon asked in a curious voice.

  Joseph gave no answer. They walked past a window lit by candle-light inside. Joseph saw a bare room, a little under street level. It was furnished with one iron bed, straw mats on the stamped mud floor and one large piece of Bokhara tapestry—red sun-disks on black silk—hung on the whitewashed wall. On the bed sat a young woman in a coloured head-cloth giving her breast to a child. The man was lying on his stomach full length on the floor, with two candles in front of him, studying the Book in a thick-papered folio print yellow with age; around him on the floor lay the various Commentaries in equally bulky editions. He was in shirt-sleeves, had a black beard and wore a coloured skull-cap on the back of his head. He read rapidly, marking the line with his finger and nodding his head; from time to time he turned to one of the Commentaries and then back to the Book. The woman was slowly rocking her body forward and back, her gaze fixed on the candle. The lips of the man moved in a steady murmur and he kept on nodding rapidly with his head and shoulders. The two rhythmic movements were like two pendulums out of step.

  —They walked on and turned another corner. There were no lights showing anywhere, but it was not completely dark, as it never is in Jerusalem, the stars being numerous, bright and close. There was a faint odour of chalk dust, burnt logs and thyme—in the Bokhari Quarter, Arab and Hebrew smells became fused. In one of the barrel-vaulted doorways stood a boy and a girl in shorts, their arms round each other. They looked closely at Simeon, apparently resenting the disturbance. Simeon said something which sounded like a password. “B’seder,” said the boy, “All clear.” Again they turned a corner and almost stumbled over a Yemenite beggar asleep with his head on a doorstep. He woke and put his hand out, drowsily wailing his litany. Simeon gave the password and the Yemenite waved them on, flashing his white teeth over the scant black beard.

  “Is he sleeping on his tommy-gun or what?” Joseph could not refrain from asking.

  Simeon walked on a few steps before he answered; then he said:

  “If you think this is a comedy there is still time to turn back.”

  “I am sorry,” said Joseph.

  The street was as dark and quiet as before, but suddenly there seemed to be something uncanny about its silence. Joseph felt as if eyes were watching them from behind each of the da
rk windows. They arrived in front of a large stone building whose massive front was broken up by vaulted windows and gates and some thin columns, which gave it a vaguely oriental look. It had a flat roof, and Joseph saw the silhouette of a man bend over the parapet to peer down at them, and then withdraw. A relief inscription over the main gate told him that this was a House of Prayer and Learning, built by one Ephraim Ben Huda, a native of Bokhara, who had arrived in the Land with his wife, nine children and five brothers, in the year 5672 from the creation of the world; which, Joseph worked out, was roughly fifty years ago.

  They passed the main gate and a second gate, and halted in front of a side door where Simeon rapped out a signal on the panelling. After a few seconds it was opened by the shamash or door-keeper. He was a short and very thin old man in a kaftan reaching down to his feet,’ and with a black skull-cap from which two long plaited side-locks emerged like pigtails and hung down to the edge of his jaw. He closed the door behind them without a word. They were in a dark corridor from which opened the door to the shamash’s lodge, lit by a candle. On a mat on the floor lay the shamash’s wife under a large, striped quilt cover. She had a round face framed by black plaits which gave her a youngish air, and a terribly fat body which shaped the quilt into a hillock. The shamash shuffled into his room and closed the door from inside, leaving them in darkness. Simeon pulled an electric torch from his pocket and in its light Joseph saw that they were walking over a floor of stone mosaic in a chess-board pattern. They came into a hall which, judged by the echo of their steps, must be vast and empty.