Hav

by Jan Morris

  The train moved so laboriously through these unlovely suburbs, frequently stopping altogether and ringing its bell mournfully all the way, that by the time we were in the city proper it was pitch-dark. The lights outside were all very faint, and I could see nothing much but burly dark shapes in silhouette, a power station, a dome, a square tower, what looked like a minaret, and a general monumental mass: and so, well after midnight, we lurched at last exhaustedly, as though the rolling stock were all but worn out too, into the vestigially brighter lights of the Central Station, which seemed to be immense, but turned out to have, in the event, only the one platform. ‘Hav!’ a great voice boomed. ‘Hav Centrum!’

  In a matter of moments, it seemed to me, my few fellow-passengers had all scuttled away into the dark, and I was left alone upon the platform, wondering where to spend the rest of the night. But enormously facing me I saw an advertisement made, as in mosaic, of brightly coloured china tiles. On the right it offered a stylized depiction of Russia, onion domes, troikas, fir forests. On the left, bathed in golden sunshine against a cobalt sea, was the city of Hav, with elaborately hatted ladies and marvellously patrician beaux sauntering, a little disjointedly where the tiles met, along a palm-shaded corniche. Florid in the middle, in Russian Cyrillic, in Turkish Arabic and in French, a sign announced the presence of L’Auberge Impériale du Chemin de Fer Hav, and immediately below it a cavernous entrance invited me, along red-carpeted corridors lined with empty showcases, to a kiosk of glass and gilded iron-work in which there sat a stout woman, smiling, in black.

  ‘You encountered the tunnel pilot, I hear,’ she remarked unexpectedly when I presented my passport for registration. ‘He is my cousin Rudolph. He was named, you may be interested to know, after a Crown Prince of Austria who came here long ago, and took the pony cart with my great-grandfather to see the train come from the tunnel.’

  ‘Your family meets everyone.’

  ‘Used to meet everyone, should we say? Whom did we not meet? All the crowned heads, all the great people, Bismarck, Nijinsky, Count Kolchok of course many, many times. You should see the pictures in the pilot’s office at the frontier — everyone is there! Even Hitler came once, they say, though we did not know it at the time. Our last great lady was Princess Grace — I met her myself, such a lovely person — they had a special car waiting for her, over from Izmir, they said it was the biggest car that ever went down the Staircase, even bigger than the Kaiser’s . . .’

  Chatting in this good-natured way, Miss Fatima Yeğen signed me in and showed me to my room, which was very large, like a salon, and had thick curtains of faded crimson. So, I thought as she stumped away down the corridor, late in a life of travel I am in Hav at last! A big blue-and-white samovar stood in the corner of the room, and there was a picture of a rural winter scene signed T. Ramotsky, 1879 — the very year, I guessed, when they had fitted out the Imperial Railway Hotel for its original guests. A palpable smell of eggs haunted the apartment, mingled with a suggestion of pomade, and when I drew the curtains there was nothing to be seen outside but the well of the hotel, lugubriously illuminated and echoing with the clatter of washing-up from a kitchen far below. At the foot of my bed was a television set, but when I turned it on it was showing a black-and-white Cary Grant film dubbed into Turkish; so I went to sleep instead — confusedly, as in a state of weightlessness, having no idea really what lay outside the walls of L’Auberge Impériale du Chemin de Fer Hav, and fancying only, in my half-waking dreams, the bubble of the samovar, the drab grey salt-flats, the windmills, and the procession of kings, dukes and chancellors winding their way with plumes of swirling soil, like defiances, down the mule-track from the frontier.

  But I was awoken in the morning by two marvellous sounds as the first light showed through my shutters: the frail quavering line of a call to prayer; from some far minaret across the city, and the note of a trumpet close at hand, greeting the day not with a bold reveille, but more in wistful threnody.

  2

  Legend of the trumpet — to the market — scholarly shopper — Katourian’s Place — all Hav — Missakian breakfasts

  Hardly had the last note of the trumpet died away than I was dressed and on my way down the silent hotel corridors towards the daylight.

  The legend of the trumpet is this. When at the end of the eleventh century the knights of the First Crusade seized Hav from the Seljuks, they were joined by hundreds of Armenians flocking down from their beleaguered homelands in the northwest. Among them was the musician Katourian, and he became the cherished minstrel of the Court, celebrating its feats and tragedies in beloved ballads, growing old and grey in its service.

  In 1191 Saladin, after a siege of three months, forced the surrender of the Crusaders, and on the morning of the Feast of St Benedict the Christians left the Castle with full courtesies of war and marched to the galleys waiting in the harbour. Their Armenian followers were left to face the fury of the Muslims, and as the last of the long line of Franks passed through the Castle gate between the rows of Arab soldiery, the musician Katourian, feeble and bent by now, appeared on the breastwork high above and sang, with more power and emotion even than in the heyday of his art, the most famous of all his great laments, ‘Chant de doleure pour li proz chevalers qui suet morz’. It rang across the city as a magnificent farewell, so the fable says, and with its last declining cadence Katourian plunged a dagger into his breast and died upon the rampart, known from that day to this as Katourian’s Place.

  Moved by the tragic splendour of this gesture, Saladin ordered that in honour of the minstrel, and of the Christian knights themselves, the lament should be sung each morning, from the same place, immediately after the call to prayer. The Arabs never did master the words of the song, which concerned the immolation of a group of otherwise forgotten Gascon men-at-arms, but the melody they subtly adapted until it sounded almost Muslim itself, and at dawn each day, throughout the long centuries of Islamic rule, it was sung from Katourian’s Place. The British, during their half-century in Hav after the Napoleonic wars, substituted a trumpeter for the muezzin’s voice; the Russians who followed honoured the old tradition, and the governors of the Tripartite Mandate, after them. And so it was that on my first morning I was hastening towards my opening revelation of the city to the echo of a dirge from the European Middle Ages.

  I passed through the deserted station (the train still standing there lifeless) and stepped into the yellowish mist of the great square outside. I could hardly see across it — just a suggestion of great buildings opposite, and to my right the mass of the Castle looming in a dim succession of stairs, terraces, curtain walls and gateways, only the very top of the immense central keep, Beynac’s Keep, being touched with the golden sunshine of the morning. Though I could hear not far away a deep muffled rumble, as of an army moving secretly through the dawn, the square itself was utterly empty; but even as I stood there, striding down the last steps from the Castle came the trumpeter himself, down from the heights, his instrument under his arm, huddled in a long brown greatcoat against the misty damp.

  ‘Merhaba, trumpeter!’ I accosted him. ‘I am Jan Morris from Wales, on my very first morning in Hav!’

  He answered in kind. ‘And I am Missakian the trumpeter,’ he laughed. ‘Merhaba, good morning to you!’

  ‘Missakian! You’re Armenian?’

  ‘But naturally. The trumpeters of Hav always are. You know the legend of Katourian? Well, then you will understand’ — and after an exchange of pleasantries, expressing the hope that we might meet again, ‘not quite so early in the morning, perhaps’, trumpet under his arm, he resumed his progress across the square.

  Which reminded me, as the mist began to lift, of somewhere like Cracow or Kiev, so grey and cobbled did it seem to be, and so immense. It was hardly worth exploring then, so instead I followed that rumble, which seemed to have its focus somewhere away to my left, and found myself in a mesh of sidestreets I knew not where, joining the extraordinary procession of traffic that make
s its way each morning to Hav’s ancient market on the waterfront. Pendeh Square, the great central plaza of the city, is closed to all traffic until seven in the morning, but the thoroughfares around it, I discovered, were already clogged with all manner of vehicles. There were pick-up trucks with brightly painted sides. There were motorbikes toppling with the weight of their loaded sidecars. There were private cars with milk-churns on their roofs. Men in wide straw hats and striped cotton gallabiyehs and women in headscarves and long black skirts lolloped along on pony carts, and a string of mules passed by, weighed down with firewood. They moved, for all the noise of their engines and the rattle of their wheels on the cobblestones, in a kind of hush, very deliberately; and I found myself caught up in the steady press of it, stared at curiously but without comment, until we all debouched into the wide market-place at the water’s edge, where fishing-boats were moored bow to stern along the quay, and where as the sun broke through the morning fog all was already bustle and flow.

  In every city the morning market, the very first thing to happen every day, offers a register of the public character. Few offer so violent a first impression as the waterside market of Hav. Apparently unregulated, evidently immemorial, it seemed to me that morning partly like a Marseilles fish-wharf, and partly like the old Covent Garden, and partly like a flea-market, for there seemed to be almost nothing, at six in the morning, that was not there on sale. Everything was inextricably confused. One stall might be hung all over with umbrellas and plastic galoshes, the next piled high with celery and boxes of edible grass. There were mounds of apples, artistically arranged, there were stacks of boots and racks of sunglasses and rows of old radios. There were spare parts for cars, suitcases with images of the pyramids embossed upon them, rolls of silk, nylon underwear in yellows and sickly pinks, brass trays, Chinese medicines, hubble-bubbles, coffee beans in vast tin containers, souvenirs of Mecca or Istanbul, second-hand-book stalls with grubby old volumes in many languages — I looked inside a copy of Moby Dick, and stamped within its covers were the words ‘Property of the American University, Beirut’.

  In a red-roofed shed near the water, shirtsleeved butchers were at work, chopping bloody limbs and carcasses, skinning sheep and goats before my eyes; and there were living sheep too, of a brownish tight-curled wool, and chickens in crude wicker baskets, and pigeons in coops. Women shawled and bundled against the cold sold cups of steaming soup. On the quay Greek fishermen offered direct from their boats fish still flapping in their boxes, mucous eels, writhing lobsters, prawns, urchins, sponges and buckets of what looked like phosphorescent plankton.

  Almost any language, I discovered, would get you by in Hav — not just Turkish, but Italian, French, Arabic, English at a pinch, even Chinese. This was Pero Tafur’s ‘Lesser Babel’! Some people were dressed Turkish-style in sombre dark suits with cloth caps, many wore those wide hats and cotton robes, rather like North Africans, some were dark and gypsy-looking, a few were Indian, some were high-cheeked like Mongols, and some, long-haired and medieval of face, wearing drab mixtures of jeans, raincoats and old bits of khaki uniform, I took to be the Kretevs, the cave-dwellers of the escarpment. Tousled small dogs ran about the place; the Greeks on their boats laughed and shouted badinage to each other. Moving importantly among the stalls, treated with serious respect by the most bawdy of the fishermen, the most brutal of the butchers, I saw a solitary European, in a grey suit and a panama hat, who seemed to go about his business, choosing mutton here, fruit there, in a style that was almost scholarly.

  He was followed by a pair of Chinese, who saw to it when their boss had made his decisions that his choice was picked from its tank, cut from its hook or removed unbruised from its counter, and placed in the porter’s trolley behind; and I followed the little cortège through the meat market, along the line of the fishing-boats, to the jetty beyond the market. A spanking new motor-launch was moored there, blue and cream, like an admiral’s barge, with a smart Chinese sailor in a blue jersey waiting at the wheel, and another at the prow with his boathook across his arms. Gently into the well, amidships, went the crates of victuals; the European adeptly stepped aboard; and with a snarl of engines the boat backed from the quay, turned in a wide foamy curve, and sped away down the harbour towards the sea.

  ‘Good gracious,’ I said to one of the Greeks, ‘who was that?’

  ‘That was Signor Biancheri, the chef of the Casino. Every morning he comes here. You’ve never heard of him? You surprise me.’

  ‘You should go up to Katourian’s Place,’ the trumpeter had told me ‘but wait for an hour or two, until the sun comes up.’ So now that the sun was rising above the silhouette of the Castle, and its warm light was creeping along the quays and striking into the cobbled streets behind, I walked back across the still empty square and clambered up the steep stone steps to see for myself the city this remarkable populace had, over so many centuries, evolved for itself

  I passed through barbicans and curtain walls, I clambered up shattered casements, I entered the immense gateway upon which Saladin had caused to be carved his triumphant and celebrated proclamation: ‘In the name of God, the Merciful, the Almighty, Salah ed Din the warrior, the defender of Islam, may God glorify his victories, here defeated, humiliated and spared the armies of the Infidel.’ And immediately inside, on the half-ruined rampart beside the gate, I found a second inscription, in English, upon a stone slab. ‘In memory’, it said, ‘of Katourian the musician. Erected by subscription of the Officers of Her Majesty’s Royal Regiment of Artillery in the Protectorate of Hav and the Escarpment, AD 1837. Semper Fidelis.’

  On the platform beside the plaque, the very spot where Katourian is supposed to have killed himself, I spread out my map and looked down for the first time upon all Hav. The last morning vapours were dispersing, and the greyness of the night before was becoming, as the sun rode higher in the sky, almost unnaturally clear — the blue rim of the sea around, the low hillocks to west and east, the line of the escarpment, still in shadow, like a high wall in the distance. Salt gleamed white in the wide marshlands. There were patches of green crops and pasture to the north-east, and curving across the peninsula I could see the line of the canal cut by the Spartans during their long investment of Athenian Hav. Here and there around the coast, fishing-boats worked in twos and threes; rounding the southern point went the scud and spray of Signor Biancheri’s provision launch, hastening home to breakfast.

  Now I could get the hang of the place, for the Castle stands on the bald hill which is the true centre of Hav, and which was for centuries the seat of its power too. To the north of it, away to the salt-flats, extended the hangdog suburb where Hav’s multi-ethnic proletariat, Turkish, Arab, Greek, African, Armenian, lives in a long frayed grid of shacks and cabins. It was marked on my map as the Balad, and it looked altogether anonymous, blank like a labour camp but for the spike of a minaret here and there, one or two church towers and brickwork chimneys, a stagnant-looking lake in the middle of it and a power station spouting smoke at its southern end. The railway track cut a wide swathe through the Balad, and parallel to it ran a tram-line, about which in places swamped dense clusters of figures, some in brown or black, some in white robes — ah, and there came the first tram of the morning, pulling a trailer, already scrambled all over by a mass of passengers clinging to its sides and platforms. I watched its lurching progress south — through those shabby shanty-streets — past the power station — out of sight for a moment in the lee of the castle hill . . .

  . . . and turning myself to follow it, I saw spread out before me downtown Hav around the wide inlet of its haven. To the west, at the other end of the castle ridge, stood the vestigial remains of the Athenian acropolis, its surviving columns shored up by ugly brick buttresses. Away to the south I fancied I could just make out the Iron Dog at the entrance to the harbour, and beside it the platform of the Conveyor Bridge was already swinging slowly across the water. A couple of ships lay at their moorings in the port; on the waterfront the mar
ket was still thronged and bustling. And at my feet lay the mass of the central city, the Palace, the brightly domed offices of government, the circular slab of New Hav, the narrow crannied streets and tall white blocks of the Medina.

  A red light was flashing from the prison island in the harbour, but even as I watched, it was switched off for the day, and instantly a hooter somewhere sounded a long steady blast. Seven o’clock, Hav time! Immediately, as if gates had been unlocked or barriers removed, the first traffic of the day spilled into Pendeh Square below me, and soon the din of the market had spread across the whole city, and there reached me from all around the reassuring noises of urban life, the hoots and the revs, the shouts, the clanging bells, the blaring radio music. The fishing-boats of the market sailed away in raggety flotilla down the harbour. Sunshine flashed from the upperworks of the ships, and wherever I looked the streets were filling up, cars were on the move and shopkeepers were unlocking their doors for the day’s business. A small figure appeared upon the roof of the Palace, beneath its gilded onion dome, and raised upon its flagstaff the black-and-white chequered flag of Hav (which looks bathetically like the winner’s flag at a motor-race, but was chosen in 1924, I have been told, so as to be utterly unidentifiable with the flag of any one of the Mandatory Powers).