Thieves in the Night Read Online Free PDF Page A

the coiled agál with both hands into the air like a crown and adjusted it on top of the kefiyeh. He had just finished dressing when the old man, stick in front, emerged on the balcony. Disregarding his son’s and grandson’s greetings, he advanced with small firm steps to the parapet, rested his stick on its top and lifted his blind face towards the hills. “Where?” he asked with a curt, commanding bellow. His sparse white goat’s-beard stuck out in front, and his bony nose with the hawk’s bend seemed to sniff the air for the smell of the intruders.
    â€œOver there, on the Dogs’ Hill,” the Mukhtar said submissively, guiding the stick in the old man’s hand towards the spot.
    The old man gave no answer; he stood erect and motionless at the parapet, his face lifted to the hills. Issa, avoiding the Mukhtar’s eye, had disappeared into the house. The Mukhtar stood behind his father like a waiter in attendance, his big, heavy body slumped into guilty shapelessness. At last he could bear the old man’s silence no longer.
    â€œIt is not my fault,” he said in a throaty, plaintively bumptious voice. “The whole village wanted to sell. They would have sold even against my will, the dogs, and we would have got nothing.”
    The old man made no answer and no move.
    â€œI only got eight hundred,” said the Mukhtar, “and they would have sold anyway. I could do nothing. They cheated us, the swine. In Khubeira they paid six pounds for the dunum and another five hundred to the Mukhtar.”
    The old man again said nothing and after a while turnedround and hobbled back into the house, his stick stepping in front.
    The Mukhtar listened to the receding clop-clop on the tiles. By God, he thought, what does he know? He sees nothing and understands nothing of the world. By God….
    He retreated into his bedroom without turning again towards the hill; but in the centre of his back, between the shoulder-blades, he felt its contemptuous stare like the stare of the Evil Eye.
    On his morning walk through the village the Mukhtar felt lonely and weighed down by the decisions he had to take within the next few hours; in fact he knew that he should have decided at once when Issa woke him with the news. He would have cancelled the walk but for the inferences which the villagers and the other Mukhtar would have drawn from such an omission. So he marched as usual along the one cobbled street which wound its way serpent-like through the village, stately in his bulk, unapproachable with his dark, morose face, dignified and awe-inspiring. Despite the holes and bumps in the street he never had to look down at his feet, which knew every gap between the cobbles and each turn of the gutter-canal that ran along the middle of the street as the serpent’s inverted spine—its lay-out had not changed since the time of the Romans. The fellaheen who were not out in the fields greeted him with their usual deference in front of the clay huts, while the women on the doorsteps withdrew with their usual modesty into the semi-darkness inside. At the sight of their shapeless, slatternly black widow-gear, of their faces which were withered and dumb at twenty, and of the eternal infant with the fly-ridden slimy face which they carried on their sagging breast or in a sling on their back, the Mukhtar thought with renewed fury of the shameless bitches on the Hill of Dogs and their naked arms and thighs. Yes, everything was as usual, and when he stopped to honour some elder of prominent family or other man of consequence, by inquiring after his health and the health of his sons andthe state of his fields and of his cattle, the Mukhtar got the usual answer that thanks to God all was well and nothing to complain about. Not one referred, by word or implication, not even by a questioning glance, to the impending events; and yet their shadow lay on every face, and they all knew of the decision which the