Thieves in the Night: Chronicle of an Experiment

by Arthur Koestler

  “If I forget thee, Jerusalem …”

  “If I forget thee, Jerusalem …”

  “… as long as my soul resides in my body.”

  “… in my body. Amen.”

  For the full length of a minute Bauman said nothing and let everybody stand to attention. In the tense silence one could feel how the significance of the moment sank into the boy’s soul, to leave its indelible mark there. Every nerve in Joseph’s body craved to cry out at them to stop, that they had no right to do this to a child. He tried to evoke Dina’s mutilated face in the open coffin, but it did not help and did not connect. We shall never be forgiven this, he thought, for we know what we do.

  And we should never be forgiven, he answered himself, if we omitted to do it.

  “Dismiss,” said Bauman.

  The boy turned about and marched out of the room, with the precise movements of an automaton.

  Later, when Joseph took his leave from Bauman in the corridor, Bauman asked him:

  “What did you think of it?”

  “I thought,” said Joseph, “that I did not envy you. I would rather obey than command.”

  “Who would not?” said Bauman.

  The yellow malaria colour of his cheeks seemed more pronounced now, but perhaps it was merely the pallid light of the oil-lamp.

  The Day of Visitation

  (1939)

  “… And indeed that was a time most fertile in all manner of wicked practices, in so much that no kind of evil deeds were then left undone; nor could any one so much as devise any bad thing that was new, so deeply were they all infected.”

  FLAVIUS JOSEPHUS, “The Wars of the Jews”

  The Day of Visitation (1939)

  1

  The uncertainty about the country’s future was brought to an end on May the 17th. On this day the British Government issued a Statement of Policy, known as the White Paper of 1939, which was meant as a final settlement of the Palestine problem.

  “It has been urged,” the Statement ran, “that the expression ‘a National Home for the Jewish people’ offered a prospect that Palestine might in due course become a Jewish State or Commonwealth. His Majesty’s Government therefore now declare unequivocally that it is not part of their policy that Palestine should become a Jewish State.”

  It was an unusually candid political document. For the next five years a last batch of Jews, numbering seventy-five thousand in all, was to be allowed to scramble in before the doors were closed; then, from June 1944 to the end of the world, no further Jews were to be allowed to enter Palestine. By that date, the document reckoned, the Hebrew community would have reached one-third of the total population of the country. From then onward, owing to the disparity of birth-rates and unrestricted Arab immigration, it was condemned proportionally to fall to a smaller and smaller minority. To prevent any economic expansion of this minority, the High Commissioner of Palestine was further empowered to prohibit the purchase of land by Jews. Making use of these powers, the Land Transfer Acts of February 1940 restricted the zone in which Jews were free to buy land to five per cent of the total area of the country. The National Home had become transformed into one more cramped Oriental ghetto with sealed gates.

  In the Parliamentary debate which followed a few days later, the Right Hon. Winston Churchill (Conservative) called the White Paper “a plain breach of promise, a base betrayal, the filing of a petition in moral and physical bankruptcy, a new Munich and an act of abjection”. Sir Archibald Sinclair (Liberal) declared that “the arbitrary prohibition of Jewish immigration without any corresponding restriction of Arab immigration, introducing an element of discrimination against the Jews on grounds of race and religion—these things are grave departures from the terms of the Mandate, and they call in question our moral right to continue to hold it”. Mr. Herbert Morrison (Labour) declared that his Party regarded “this White Paper and the policy in it as a cynical breach of pledges given to the world”; and that he “would have had more respect for the Colonial Secretary and his speech if he had frankly admitted that the Jews were to be sacrificed to the incompetence of the Government in the matter, to be sacrificed to its apparent fear, if not indeed its sympathy with violence and the methods of murder and assassination”.

  According to the terms of the international Mandate, the White Paper could only gain legal validity if endorsed by the League of Nations. The League’s Permanent Mandates Commission met on June 16 and found unanimously that the new policy contradicted the terms of Britain’s trusteeship. The last word now rested with the League’s Council. It was to meet in September 1939. It never met, and the White Paper never acquired legal validity.

  Its provisions however were implemented point by. point: the sale of land to Jews was prohibited in 94.8 per cent of their homeland, access to it was refused to survivors of the great massacre and shiploads of them drowned in 1941 and’42 in the waters of the Mediterranean and the Black Sea. Those who succeeded in getting ashore were sent to prison or deported to Eritrea, the Sudan or the Island of Mauritius; helpers in the work of rescue were treated as criminals and given long sentences of imprisonment. A document with no legal validity became the legal guide of Government, Law Courts and Police; lawlessness reigned as the supreme law in the Holy Land.

  2

  The reign of lawlessness began on the very evening of the new policy’s inauguration. It began at precisely 8 P.M., the hour at which the Palestine Radio was to broadcast the official text of the White Paper in Arabic.

  At that hour, Issa, son of the late Mukhtar of Kfar Tabiyeh, was sitting with two newly won acquaintances on the terrace of the little Arab coffee-house near Bab el Mandeb, the Damascus Gate, waiting for the broadcast to begin. The proprietor of the coffee-house, who had once been a follower of the moderate Nashashibi clan, and whose establishment had been burnt down by the Mufti’s followers during the riots of 1937, had specially installed a loudspeaker for the occasion to prove his patriotic feelings.

  Issa had come to Jerusalem to arrange with the Arab Bank certain matters in connection with the Mukhtar’s death. He wore a cream-coloured suit with pink stripes, patent leather shoes with white suede inlays, and a black armlet as a sign of mourning. It was his first visit to the capital, and he successfully hid his excitement under a mask of blasé boredom. The circumstances of his father’s death had caused a certain stir and had helped Issa to gain access to circles of high Arab society not usually open to an obscure village Mukhtar’s son. His two companions he had only met the day before, at one of the weekly “at homes” of Mme. Makropoulos, widow of Josef Makropoulos, the author of Pan-Arab Renaissance. Mme. Makropoulos had a political salon where the higher British officials and visiting celebrities met the Arab intelligentsia in an easy and civilised atmosphere—and where they could relax from the strain of intense and purposeful Jewish hospitality where Banquo’s ghost kept cropping up from under the dinner-table. Issa had been taken to the party by a Director of the Arab Bank and was also armed with a letter of introduction from District Officer Tubashi. He had been received with kindly sympathy which helped him to overcome his shyness and assume the role of a martyr of the Cause, which from that moment onward he genuinely felt himself to be.

  The two other young men, seated on low wicker stools and sipping black coffee while waiting for the broadcast to start, belonged to the new Arab intelligentsia. Farid, a dark, lanky young man, had the untidy and romantic appearance, the tweedy nonchalance and languid air of an Oxford undergraduate. He came from one of the oldest Arab families in Jerusalem, had been educated by an English private tutor, wrote English poetry, and articles against English Imperialism in the Arab El Difa. Salla, his best friend, was a round-faced dandy with a clipped blond moustache. The two of them had been planning for over a year to launch the first Arab literary weekly, but had so far been unable to find the necessary financial backing.

  Issa, anxious to show his lights, had just told them a smutty story from Beyrout but had met with cool disapproval;
to ease the silence he hummed the popular jingle: Falastin baladna, Yahud kalabna, Palestine is our country, the Jews are our dogs—but that did not cut much ice either. There was still about a quarter of an hour left before the broadcast was to start, and Salla ordered more coffee. “Would you like a nargileh?” he asked, turning politely to Issa. Issa longed for one but thought that smoking a water pipe would be considered provincial and boorish. “No, thank you, I only smoke cigarettes,” he said. Salla offered his silver case and they both lit cigarettes, but Farid refused, shaking his head with the dark, wavy hair which had a tendency to fall over his brow. “I shall have a nargileh,” he said. Then, with one of his sudden changes from languidness to enthusiasm, he turned briskly to Issa.

  “When we start our magazine you must write us an article about Arab village life,” he said.

  Issa grinned, half flattered, half incredulous. “Village life?” he said. “What is there to write about? The fellaheen are stupid, backward and filthy.”

  “This is just the point,” said Salla, his chin propped on the silver knob of his walking-stick. “We must rouse the fellah from his apathy. Look at the Hebrews.”

  “Ah, the Hebrews,” said Issa. “They use tractors and fertilisers and imported livestock. They’ve got the money.”

  “Surely you must have enough money in Kfar Tabiyeh to buy fertilisers and even a tractor,” said Farid, with the mouthpiece of the water pipe between his teeth.

  “Ah—but we lack co-operation,” said Issa.

  “But that is just the point,” cried Salla. “Lack of co-operation. Jealousy and blood feuds. Ignorance. Superstition. A mediaeval economy. That is what we have to fight.” He was thumping his chin after each phrase with the walking-stick;

  “Ye-es,” said Issa. “But the younger ones all want to run away to the towns where they get wages and can go to the cinema.”

  “And sell the land to the Jews,” said Salla.

  “Ah—so it is,” Issa agreed. “The Jews have the money. And the prices they pay! I could tell you stories …”

  He hastily checked himself, and his eyes shifted round the tables in the neighbourhood. They were mainly occupied by small shopkeepers from the shuks, with a sprinkling of villagers and Beduins from Transjordan. The terrace was more crowded than usual because of the broadcast and the historic events, but the men all sat peacefully sucking their nargilehs or playing tauleh, the ancestor of backgammon, with an air of laziness and content.

  Farid sat with his legs stretched out, elbows on knees, sucking at the tube and watching the bubbles in the glass bowl. With his high forehead, dreamy eyes and sensuous lips he looked attractive and he probably knew it. He was a frequent guest at the rather dull parties of the English colony and, having had some of his poems printed in the Jerusalem Mail, was a favourite with the middle-aged and intellectually inclined among the English women. Young Farid, who was twenty and a virgin, allowed himself to be spoiled with a languid and blasé air. He knew from one painful experience that all European women were sex teasers, and he was careful not to expose himself to humiliation. Besides, he was in love with his three years older cousin Raissa, daughter of a Syrian patriot who had escaped being hanged by the Turks in 1916 and was shot by the French in 1926.

  “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 se
cond 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.

  3

  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.