Hav
Page 4
‘May I help you?’ asks a peripatetic supervisor, carrying a large and battered clipboard.
‘We are looking for the Department of Temporary Contributions.’
‘Ah, that will be our Monsieur Tarbat, let me see now, Section A10 I believe’ — he consults his board — ‘ah no, he has passed to Section K . . . it must be — let me see — I think perhaps it’s a branch of Domestic Registrations. . . I wonder now — patience, mesdames, forgive me —’
But at that moment we catch fight of our friend Boris, a keen member of the New Hav Film Society, accepting a coffee from a passing waiter. ‘Temporary Contributions?’ he laughs. ‘Forget it, nobody has bothered about them since the end of the concessions. Put it out of your minds — enjoy yourselves!’
‘Excellent advice,’ says the supervisor, moving on.
Behind the Serai, in a ceremonious half-circle, stand the former legations. These were built on the edge of the old parade ground when the Russians first opened Hav to diplomatic representation, and are now given over to less lofty purposes, the British consul (who is called the Agent, actually) living at the former British Residency above the harbour. The legations are like a little museum of lost consequence, so many of their proud sponsors having vanished with the great convulsion of the First World War, but they are also a display of fin de siècle architectural styles. Thus the French built theirs, now the Hav Academy of Music and Dancing, in a sprightly Art Nouveau style, rich in coloured glass and ornamental lamp brackets, while the Americans next door erected one of the earliest steel-construction buildings in Europe — a building which, though now turned into the somewhat disconsolate Hav Museum, still looks by Hav standards remarkably up-to-date. My own favourite, though, is the wonderfully eccentric mansion at the northern end of the crescent, which is built partly of wood and partly of massive rusticated stone, and is splendidly embellished with balconies, external staircases, decorative busts, half-timbering and twisted chimney-pots in a style I can only describe as thoroughly Balkanesque. This was the legation of the Montenegrins, during the short-lived monarchy of the Black Mountain.
Nicholas I, the one and only king of Montenegro, had close links with Russian Hav. Two of his daughters married Russian Grand Dukes, he was an honorary Field-Marshal of the Imperial army, and his Ruritanian capital of Cetinje was modelled upon the arrangements of the Czars. Every year, when the Russian aristocracy descended upon the peninsula by train from the north, Nicholas was disembarked upon its shores from the south, having sailed there in state on board the royal yacht Petar Njegos̆. In the years before Sarajevo he was one of Hav’s most familiar celebrities, contributing to all charities, attending all summer balls, gracing every garden party, sitting through every ballet and even having a street named in his honour—the Boulevard de Cetinje, an entirely unnecessary but properly dignified thoroughfare which the Russians cut through the Medina in 1904 in order to reach their bathing station beyond the western hills.
It was not surprising that when the Russians invited specified powers to open legations in Hav the Montenegrins were among the first to accept. No conceivable diplomatic interest required the representation of the Black Mountain in this inessential station, but the King welcomed the chance to build himself a villa in such a prime position, within the Forbidden City so to speak. The legation is generally claimed to be a replica of his own palace at Cetinje, but it is really no more than an idealized approximation, being, as it happens, rather bigger and much more comfortable.
At eleven every morning the guard changes outside the Serai. This is an engaging spectacle. Since the departure of the Russians the gubernatorial guards have always been Circassians, recruited in Turkey. They are a stalwart crew, and provide solaces of many kinds, so the common rumour says, for both the wives of high officials, and the high officials themselves. Their pageantry is fine. They move less like soldiers than stage performers, in a flourishing, curly style, marching to a modified goose-step, swinging their arms exaggeratedly, and wearing upon their faces stylized smiles of ingratiation, or perhaps self-satisfaction. Their orders I take to be shouted in Circassian, since nobody I have met understands a syllable of them, and they are armed with rifles inherited from the Russians for which there is, I am assured, no longer any ammunition.
No matter: the ceremonial life of the Serai is essentially easy-going anyway. The old protocol of the Russians has been whittled away, rule by rule, precedent by precedent down the years, and the nearest the Governor comes to any kind of grand-ducal progress nowadays is an occasional outing in his official barouche to pay a call upon the leader of one community or another. Then the guard lines up to see him off, smiling indefatigably, and the barouche is followed out of the Palace yard, across the avenue of palms, by a pair of jolly postilions wearing their astrakhan hats at a jaunty angle and equipped with gleaming swords.
But here, even in Hav, all is not picturesque flummery around the seat of power. Even the lovable Serai, it seems, has its anxieties. As it happened, when I was walking across the square one morning last week the Governor did come clopping out in his carriage, hauled by four high-stepping but rather shaggy greys, and followed by those stagy postilions. The guard saluted them as they passed, and they turned to the right, down the narrow street beside the South Block in the direction of the Medina. Hardly had they gone, however, than I heard a commotion of shouting and counter-shouting. I ran to the corner at once, and was in time to see one of the postilions, dismounted, thwacking a young man over the shoulders brutally with the flat of his sword. The youth slid to his haunches against the wall, his hands over his head. The postilion agilely remounted and cantered after the disappearing cortège.
I ran to the spot as fast as I could, and the young man looked up at me with a gaunt and melancholy face. ‘What’s happening?’ I cried. ‘Are you all right?’ But he answered me — how disconcerting! — with a spit.
APRIL
Hav Rig
5
New Hav — a survivor — national characteristics — Germans of another kind — ‘that old ogre’
Immediately outside my window is the circular Place des Nations, supervised by a large statue of Count Alexander Kolchok, the last and most famous of the Russian governors. It was erected, so the plinth says, ‘IN HOMAGE’, by the administrators of the Tripartite Mandate, and shows him in court dress, loaded with medals and holding a scroll. Very proper, because if it were not for Kolchok there would have been no mandate, and no Place des Nations either.
Lenin never came to Hav, so far as is known (though a film made by Soviet dissidents is supposed to show him shamelessly dissipated among the flesh-pots). When in 1917 the news of the Revolution reached Russian Hav, which had been a demilitarized zone throughout the First World War, Kolchok the Governor immediately declared the place a White Russian republic, and called for help from the Western Allies. A French brigade was sent from Salonika, and Hav remained in a kind of limbo until in 1924 the League of Nations declared its mandate over the peninsula, and appointed Kolchok, the last Governor under the old dispensation, the first Governor under the new. He it was who, until his death in 1931 (he is buried here), presided over the unique experiment in international reconciliation which was Hav between the wars.
The delegates at Geneva invited three powers to take control of the peninsula, and to establish commercial concessions there: France because, so Magda would say, there was no choice — the French army was already on the spot, and unlikely to budge; Italy, because the Italians demanded parity with the French as a Mediterranean power; and in a stroke of unexampled idealism, the Weimar Republic of Germany, which was not then even a member of the League. Hav kept its old Russian forms of government, but with an elected instead of a nominated assembly; and across the harbour from the Medina there arose the international concessionary quarter of New Hav. It is in the very heart of this circular settlement that I have my apartment, looking down on the Place des Nations and the triumphant Count.
Actually he
does not look altogether triumphant, because the open space around him, once so elegant, is now sadly run-down, while he himself is patchy with verdigris and bird droppings. The formal gardens are overgrown and weedy, the railings sag, and as I look down now I see a couple of figures swathed in brown stretched out asleep upon the benches. Still, the statue remains the focal point of New Hav. A wide tree-lined ring road surrounds the Place des Nations, and from it run the three boulevards which divide the international quarter, Avenue de France, Viale Roma, and Unter den Südlinden — which is shaded in fact not by limes but by lovely Hav catalpas.
The grand plan of Hav was imposed by the League, but within each national segment, served by smaller streets, the concessionary powers could do as they liked. From the start, all three parts developed strong national characteristics, and even now I know almost without thinking, as I wander through New Hav, which quarter I am in. The smart restaurants, the fashion houses and the clubs have gone, to be replaced by Greek and Syrian stores, import-export agents, homelier eating houses and the offices of dubious investment banks; but it is the easiest thing in the world, early in the evening especially, when the cafés are filling up and the young people are strolling arm-in-arm beneath the shade of the trees towards the Lux Palace or the Cinema Malibran, to summon up New Hav in its brief but glittering heyday.
Here, for example, in some fusty draper’s shop I sense even now the charm of the boutique it used to be, and here a frieze of senators, helmeted soldiers and grateful Africans transports me instantly to Mussolini’s Anno XIV. How earnest the peeling Gymnasium, with its busts of Goethe, Schubert and Beethoven! How sadly plush the Hotel Adler-Hav, with its velvet upholsteries, its gilt sofas and the tarnished mirrors of its Golden Bar, ‘the longest bar on the Mediterranean’! The names of the streets, often the names of the shops too, still speak of other countries far away; and even today, though the faces you see around you are overwhelmingly Levantine often you will hear blurred deviations of French, German or Italian along these nostalgic pavements.
And of course there are a few living survivors of the international regime, which lingered on increasingly inchoate until the abolition of the concessions in 1945. Of these the best known is Armand Sauvignon the novelist, who came to Hav as a young attaché with the French administration in 1928, and wrote all his books here (his fictional Polova is really Hav). He is in his eighties now, a widower for twenty years, and lives amidst his large library in an apartment overlooking the French cathedral. He embodies in himself, as it were, the whole history of New Hav, start to finish, and talking to him is like reliving the whole brave but somehow unreal initiative, street by street, character by character. He has a long beaky nose, a creased brow, and an odd mannerism of pursing his mouth between sentences, and all these features combine to give his company a more or less continual irony.
His first job was to be French observer at the concessionary courts, which dealt with all cases involving nationals of the mandatory powers, but whose judges were appointed directly by the League. ‘Such a collection, you can have no idea! It was like a music-hall. We had judges, I swear to you, who never saw a court of law before. The convenor would hiss at them ‘Twelve years’, ‘Deport him’, or ‘Insufficient evidence’, and His Honour would gather his robes around him, put on his gravest face, and do what he was told. It was killing! We had a judge from Texas, I remember (you must realize Americans were not so worldly then), who used to bring his accordion with him to court, to entertain us between cases. In the evening it was the thing for us young attaches, the Italians, the Germans, ourselves — we were all good friends — to go out to the Palace of Delights in Yuan Wen Kuo; once after a particularly gruelling fraud case, I remember, hour after hour in the hot courts, we all went out there to relax, and who should we discover playing his accordion in the Hall of Fair Beauties but old Judge Bales, surrounded by girls and half-incoherent with opium!’
‘You seem to have lived merry old lives.’
‘In the early years, very merry. Things changed later, as the world changed. But when New Hav was really new we were intoxicated by it all. You must remember the Great War had not long ended, we were lucky to be alive at all, and here we were working together in this place almost as though our peoples had never been enemies.
‘Besides, in the twenties and thirties Hav was extremely smart. My Polova was no exaggeration. The Russian aristocrats were still in their villas here, living on the last of their jewels and ikons, and when the Casino was opened, about 1927 I think it was, anybody who had a steam-yacht in the Mediterranean came to Hav sooner or later. People used to take the train from Paris to Moscow especially to catch the Mediterranean Express down here — you should talk to the tunnel pilots, they have amazing things to recall.
‘You see that poor old hotel there, the Bristol? It doesn’t look much now, does it? but believe me it was as smart as any hotel in Europe for a few years. Noël Coward wrote most of Pastiche there, did you know? I met him at the Agency one evening, a tiresome person I thought him. Hemingway used to go there too — they will still mix you a very nasty cocktail called Papa’s Sting, I believe . . .
‘All the great performers came. Goodman, Chevalier, the Hot Club de France. We met them all. My first chief here was a very great swell, the Marquis de Chablon, and he virtually set up a court at our Residency. The Germans and the Italians had nobody so soigné, the governors after Kolchok were nonentities, so really the social whirl of Hav revolved around us. For a young man, and especially a young artist, it was a dream. Out of season we had to find our own pleasures — shooting on the escarpment, pony-racing, the Palace of Delights of course. But in the summer, my God! we lived like millionaires!’
We were strolling as we walked, in the warm of the evening, among the straggly press of the boulevards, and their mingled smells of food, dirt, jasmine and imperfectly refined gasoline. We had walked all through the Italian quarter, and down past the Schiller Fountain (in whose water ugly fat carp swam in the half-light — ‘like submarines’, said Sauvignon. ‘Don’t you think so? — yellow submarines’) and we were in his own territory now, on the pavement opposite the Bristol. He took my arm. ‘You have half an hour?’ he said. ‘Join me in an aperitif — and a glimpse of the past.’
We passed through the huge dark foyer, where an old porter rose to his feet as Sauvignon passed by, and a clerk behind the reception desk, in open-necked pale-blue shirt and gold necklace, murmured a greeting; we passed the almost empty dining-room, decorated with large now-brownish murals of Parisian life; and pushing open a brass-handled double door inlaid with figures of seahorses and mermaids, we entered the Bar 1924. It was absolutely packed. Every table was full, but an obliging waiter, recognizing my companion, squeezed a party of young Lebanese together and found room for us. The air was full of Turkish tobacco smoke; the waiter thrust before us a stained typewritten list of archaic cocktails — Sledgehammers, Riproarers, Topper’s Special, and yes, Papa’s Sting! Blaring above it all, deafeningly vigorous and brassy, there was jazz.
It was an elderly combo which, spotting Sauvignon through the haze, dipped its instruments in welcome: a grizzled black trumpeter, a trombonist with rimless spectacles, a gentlemanly Chinese pianist, a grey-beard playing bass and a middle-aged elf in a red shirt frenzied at the drums. They performed with a somewhat desperate enthusiasm, I thought, a repertoire of long ago. Sometimes somebody shouted a request — “‘Honeysuckle Rose”!’ “‘A-Train”!’ “‘Sentimental Journey”!’ The pianist had a small cup of coffee on his piano. The trumpeter occasionally groaned ‘Yeah man . . .’ but more in duty than in ecstasy. “‘Yellow Submarine”!’ called Sauvignon during a pause in the music, and as the trombonist broke into an approximate lyric — ‘Weallivinayellersummerine’ — he raised his Manhattan towards me in a toast. ‘To yesterday’s youth,’ he said.
Above the door of No. 24 Residenzstrasse — in the old German quarter, hardly a stone’s throw across the Viale Roma from my apartment, there
is a modern plaque in German. It commemorates the fact that between 1941 and 1945 members of the German anti-Nazi resistance movement, der Widerstand, were given refuge there under the clandestine protection of the German concessionary administration.
The development of New Hav, and its last apotheosis during the Second World War, was as extraordinary as its beginning. Isolated there on that distant foreshore, with poor communications and the loosest of supervision from Geneva, the three regimes developed almost autonomously. The Italians, who saw themselves from the start as colonists, threw themselves enthusiastically into Mussolini’s imperial designs, putting up fasces all over the place, erecting ostentatious murals depicting Mare Nostrum or Africa Revicta, proudly welcoming Marshal de Bono when he paid a visit after his conquest of Ethiopia, and eventually refusing even to receive the timid representatives of collective security who now and then arrived on the train from Switzerland. They had high hopes, Signora Vattani has confided in me (her husband, she claims, was an ‘important official’ in the administration) — they had high hopes of taking over the whole of Hav, if ever war gave them a chance, and when war did come they openly disregarded the laws of neutrality by re-provisioning Italian submarines in the harbour.
The French treated Hav above all as a place of pleasure and prestige. They wished their quarter of New Hav to be a showcase of French panache. They sent stylish magnificos to be their Residents, the smartest young men of family to be their administrators. They sponsored visits by eminent musicians and French drama companies. The French gracefully gave way to their partners when it came to matters of political priority or protocol, but they saw to it that their quarter was much the most inviting, and made sure that, as Armand Sauvignon says, the social life of Hav revolved around their handsomely Moorish-style Residency on its artificial hillock. When France fell to the Germans in 1940 the Resident of the day, the ineffably fashionable Guyot de Delvert, unhesitatingly declared for Vichy, had banners portraying Marshal Pétain flying all down the Rue de France, and no longer sent social invitations to the British Agency.