Thieves in the Night Read Free Page B

face.
    â€œThey will have a hard time at first,” she said, and added with a little shudder: “God, I wouldn’t start again at the beginning.”
    â€œI don’t know,” said Dov, considering the matter while he went on chewing bread thickly spread with cheese. Leah was always fascinated by the contrast between his dreamy look and enormous appetite. They both thought of the hardships of the first years—the physical exhaustion caused by the unaccustomed work, the malaria and typhus; the heat, the irksome discomfort of tent life with no water, no lavatories, no sanitation; the dirt, the mud, the mosquitoes and sand-flies…. Looking back from the relative comforts of Gan Tamar in its seventh year of existence, those early pioneer days appeared like a heroic nightmare.
    â€œI don’t know,” said Dov in his slow way. “We were all different then. We used to dance a lot of horra….”
    â€œThere was always something to celebrate,” said Leah. “The first calf. The first crop. The first tractor. The first baby. The water pump. The diesel. The electric light….”
    Her mood, always narrowly balanced between extremes, had already transformed the nightmare into romance. She leanedwith her elbow on Dov’s shoulder. “Shall I get you another plate of porridge?” she asked.
    He shook his head. “I must be going,” he said, rising from the table. Followed by Jonah, he tramped out of the dining-hall and towards the cowshed, his flapping oilskin overalls enveloping him in stable-smell and rusticity.
    There was an interlude of a few minutes which gave the orderlies time to finish their preparations. The long deal tables became a more cheerful sight as they were covered with bowls of salad, heaps of thick-sliced bread, stone mugs, bakelite plates and cutlery. The first people arrived at a quarter to three, and a few minutes later the hundred and fifty men and women who were to leave with the convoy had occupied their seats.
    There were eight seats to each table, four on each of the wooden forms alongside; according to custom they were filled up in order of arrival from the kitchen end of the hall towards the entrance, without preference to place or company; a custom which eased the work of the orderlies and at the same time served as a kind of social cement-mixer, reshuffling the members of the Commune three times a day.
    This, however, was an unusual crowd: the twenty-five young people who were to become the future settlers of Ezra’s Tower, and the hundred and twenty Helpers who were to assist them in erecting the fortified camp before sunset, and to return by the end of the first day. The Helpers were volunteers who had come from the older Communes of Judaea, the Samarian coast, the Valley of Jezreel and Upper Galilee; most of them were well known, and some quite legendary figures of the early pioneer days. The new settlers, among their silent and hard-eating elders, felt awe-stricken like debutantes. Though theoretically they were the centre of the show, they had shrunk to timid insignificance; they sat on the deal forms jammed between the massive Helpers who paid little attention to them—too excited to eat and with a vague nervous feeling ofbeing cheated out of the pathos and solemnity of this nocturnal hour to which they had looked forward through months and years.
    Dina, to her delight, found herself placed next to old Wabash from K’vuzah Dagánia, oldest of the Hebrew Communes. Dagánia stood in the Jordan Valley at the southern tip of the Lake of Tiberias. It had been founded in 1911 by ten boys and two girls from Romni in Poland, who had decided to put theory into practice and embarked on the first experiment in rural communism. They shared everything—earnings, food, clothes, the Arab mud huts which were their first living quarters, the mosquitoes and bugs, the night-watches against Beduins and robbers, malaria, typhoid