by Jan Morris
This meant so positioning ourselves that we could see the three climactic moments of the race, one after the other — the start, the Bazaar Leap and the finish. For aficionados this is the only way to watch, and over the years dozens of ways of doing it have been devised. Some use bicycles to race around the outer circle of the walls. Some are alleged to know of passages through the city’s cellars and sewers. Our system however would be simple: we would just barge our way, with several thousand others, down the clogged and excited streets from one site to the other.
Forty-two young men took part in the race this morning, and when we hastened in the half-light to join the great crowd at the Market Gate, we found them flexing their muscles, stretching themselves and touching their toes in a long line below the city wall. Two were Chinese. One was black. One I recognized — he works at the Big Star garage, where I bought my car. One was Mahmoud’s cousin Gabril, who works for the tramways company. Several wore red trunks to show that they had run the race before, in itself a mark of great distinction, and they were all heavily greased — a protection, Mahmoud said, against abrasions.
The eastern sky began to pale; the shape of the high wall revealed itself before us; from the mosque, as we stood there in silence, came the call to prayer; and then from the distant castle heights sounded Missakian’s trumpet. The very instant its last notes died those forty-two young men were scrabbling furiously up the stonework, finding a foothold here, a handhold there, pulling themselves up bump by bump, crack by crack, by routes which, like climbers’ pitches, all have their long-familiar names and well-known characteristics. A few seconds — it cannot have been more — and they were all over the top and out of sight.
‘Right,’ said Mahmoud, ‘quick, follow me,’ and ruthlessly pushing and elbowing our way we struggled through the gate into the street that leads to the Great Bazaar in the very middle of the Medina. In sudden gusts and mighty sighs, as we progressed, we could hear spectators across the city greeting some spectacular jump, mourning some unfortunate slither — first to our right, then in front of us, then to our left, and presently behind our backs, as the runners finished their first lap. ‘Quick, quick,’ said Mahmoud to nobody in particular, and everyone else was saying it too — ‘quick, only a few minutes now, we mustn’t miss it, come along, dirleddy’ — and at last we were beneath the vaulted arcade of the bazaar, lit only by shafts of sunlight through its roof-holes, shoving along its eastern axis until we found ourselves jammed with a few hundred others in the circular open space that is its apex.
We were just in time. Just as we got there we heard a wild padding of feet along the roofs above, and looking up we saw, wham! one flying brown body, then another, then a third, spreadeagled violently across the gap, rather like flying squirrels. One after the other they came, momentarily showed themselves in their frenzied leaps and vanished, and the crowd began to count them as they appeared — dört, bes, alti, yedi . . . Twenty-five came over in quick succession, then two more after a long pause, and then no more. ‘Eight fallen,’ said Mahmoud. ‘I hope my cousin was not one’ — but by then we had all begun to move off again, up the bazaar’s north axis this time, to the Castle Gate. Now the crush was not so hectic. Everyone knew that the second half of the race was run much slower than the first — though the light was better by now; the terrible exertions had taken their toll. So we had time to conjecture, as we moved towards the finish line. Was that Majourian in the lead at the bazaar, or was it the formidable Cheng Lo? Who was the first Red Trunk? Had Ahmed Aziz fallen, one wondered — he was getting on a bit, after all . . . In a great sort of communal murmur we emerged from the bazaar, hurried down the Street of the Four Nomads, and passed through the Castle Gate into the square outside.
There the Governor was waiting, with the gold goblet on the table before him, attended by sundry worthies: the gendarmerie commander in his white drills and silver helmet, the chairman of the Assembly, the Catholic, Orthodox and Maronite bishops in their varied vestments, the Imam of the Grand Mosque, and many another less identifiable. There seemed to be a demonstration of some kind happening over by the Serai — a clutch of people holding banners and intermittently shouting: but the gendarmes were keeping them well away, and the dignitaries were not distracted. They did not have long to wait, anyway. Those spurts of wonder and commiseration grew closer and closer. The Governor joked benignly, as governors will, to ever-appreciative aides. The churchmen chatted ecumenically. The gendarmerie commander resolutely turned his back on the scuffles by the Serai. Splosh! like a loose sack of potatoes the first of the roof-runners, without more ado, suddenly fell, rather than jumped or even scrambled, down the sheer face of the gateway, to lie heaving, greased, bruised and bloody at the Governor’s feet. Every few seconds then the others arrived, those that were still in the race. They simply let themselves drop from the gate-tower, plomp, like stunt-men playing corpses in western movies, to lie there at the bottom in crumpled heaps, or flat on their backs in absolute exhaustion.
It looked like a battlefield. The crowd cheered each new deposit, the dignitaries affably clapped. And when the winner had sufficiently recovered to receive his prize, the Governor, taking good care, I noticed, that none of the grease, blood or dust got on his suit, kissed him on both cheeks to rapturous cries of ‘Bravo! Bravo the Victor!’ rather as though we were all at the opera.
‘Who won?’ demanded Missakian, looking up from his beans and newspaper as we entered the station café for our breakfast.
‘Izmic,’ said Mahmoud.
‘Izmic!’ cried Missakian disgustedly, and picking up his trumpet he blew through it a rude unmusical noise.
10
To Little Yalta — ‘fresh start’ — Russian Hav — Diaghilev and Nijinsky — the graveyard
Boulevard de Cetinje, which slices its way so arrogantly through the Medina, turns into something nicer when it crosses the canal and winds into the western hills. Though it is little more than a rutted track now, you can see that it was once an agreeable country avenue. Many of its trees are dead and gone, but the survivors are fine old Hav catalpas, sometimes so rich, if decrepit, that they lean right across the road and touch each other. Halfway to the sea, at a crest of the road, there is a little wooden pavilion, showing traces of blue paint upon it; at weekends a girl sells fruit, biscuits and lemonade there, to lugubrious Havian music from her transistor, and outside there are pretty little rustic tables and benches, and the remains of a flower-garden.
This is the road the Russians built, purely for their own convenience, in the days of Imperial Hav. Many a memoir mentions the little blue pleasure-pavilion on the road to the sea. And when, like the princes and Grand Duchesses; the generals and the courtesans of long ago, you emerge from the hills a few miles further on, there before you, on a wide sandy bay beside the glistening sea, stand the houses of the small bathing resort they used to call Malaya Yalta, Little Yalta. They are hardly houses really, only glorified bathing huts, to which the servants would hurry beforehand with food and wine, to get the samovars going and put out the parasols, but from a distance they look entertainingly imposing. Each with its own wooded stockade, they are merrily embellished with domes, turrets, spires, ornate barge-boarded verandahs and ornamental chimney-pots. It looks like a goblin Trouville down there, full of colour and vivacity: it is only when the road peters out at the remains of the boardwalk that you find it all to be a spectral colony, its fences collapsed, its verandahs sagging, its paintwork flaked away, its comical little towers precariously listing, and only three or four of its once-festive houses at the northern end remaining, occupied by sad families of Indian squatters.
Even the ghosts of those who were happy here have left the seashore now.
There are a very few old Russians, still alive in Hav, who can just remember the bright pleasures of Little Yalta. The most prominent of them is Anna Novochka, who lives alone with a housekeeper in the very last of the old patrician villas of the western hills still to be inhabited. She is
a dauntless old lady. Though she is now in her nineties, and almost penniless, she dresses always in bright flowing colours, blouses of swathed silk, brocade skirts which I suspect to have been made out of curtain fabric. ‘We Russians’, she likes to say, ‘are people of colour. We need colour, as other people need liberty.’
I often go to see her, to take tea in her sparse and airy drawing-room (where pale squares upon the walls show where pictures used to hang), followed often enough, as we talk into the evening, by glasses of vodka with squeezed lime juice. She was not always called Novochka. Like many of the Russians who stayed in Hav after the Revolution, she adopted a new name of her own invention: she says it means ‘Fresh Start’. Her housekeeper is Russian too, but of more recent vintage; she came to Hav via Israel five or six years ago, and is, so Anna tells me, totally disenchanted with everything. She does look rather sour. Anna herself on the other hand is the very incarnation of high spirits, and in her I feel I am meeting the miraculously preserved mood of Imperial Hav itself.
For Russian Hav was nothing if not high-spirited. It was, of course, very artificial and snobbish, like all such colonies — ‘Why must you always be talking of Hav?’ says Chekov’s Vasilyev to his friend Gregory (in An Affair). ‘Isn’t our town good enough for you then? In Hav you never hear a word of Russian, I’m told, nothing but French and German is good enough down there.’ But it seems to have possessed a certain underlying innocence. The Russians eagerly accepted Hav, under the Pendeh Agreement of 1875 as their only outlet to the Mediterranean (having lost the Ionian Islands to the British half a century before), and as a stepping-stone perhaps towards those Holy Places of Jerusalem which meant so much to them in those days. They knew well enough, though, that strategically it was useless to them — its harbour hopelessly shallow, its position fearfully vulnerable. To these disadvantages they cheerfully reconciled themselves, and instead set out to make the place as thoroughly agreeable as they could.
Politically, of course, it was an absolute despotism — Hav had never been anything else — but the Russian yoke was light enough, minorities were not suppressed, opinions were given reasonable latitude. At the end of the nineteenth century indeed Hav became a favourite destination for young Russian revolutionaries on the run, until in 1908 somebody blew up the Governor’s private railway coach, and Count Kolchok was obliged to accept a detachment of the secret police.
Even the grandiose buildings around Pendeh Square — more grandiose still before the Cathedral of the Annunciation and the Little Pushkin Theatre were burnt down in the 1920s — even those somewhat monstrous buildings are generally agreed to be fun. They may have been intended to blazon Russia’s Mediterranean presence to the world, but at least they did so exuberantly, Anna says that in her girlhood, before the First World War, they used to be positively dazzling in their golds and blues, their gardens exquisitely maintained and the gravel of the avenue in front of the Palace raked and smoothed so constantly that it looked like ‘coral sand, when the tide has just gone out’. And the villas in the hills, where most of the richer Russians preferred to live, seem, if Anna’s memories are true, to have been the happiest places imaginable.
‘You must realize there are so few of us. We were all friends — enemies too of course, but friends at the same time. Many of us were related. I had three cousins living in Hav at one time. Kolchok himself was a relative on my mother’s side. And when le haut monde came down for the season from Moscow and St Petersburg, why, we knew all of them too — or if we didn’t, we very soon did. It was like the very nicest of clubs. And everyone felt freer here, far from the Court, without estates to worry about, or serfs I suppose in the old days. We were Russia emancipated!’
In the high summer season Hav was terrifically festive. To and fro between the villas went the barouches and the horsemen, laughing in the evening. Trundling hilariously down the road to the sea went the bathing parties, stopping at the blue pavilion to clamour for lemonades. Ever and again the waltzes rang out from the garden of the Palace, and the coaches and cars jammed the great square outside, and the lights shone, and long after midnight one heard the footmen calling for carriages — ‘Number 23, His Imperial Highness the Grand Duke Felix . . . Number 87, the Countess Kondakov!’ Little sailing-boats with canopies used to take the ladies and children for decorous trips around the harbour, to the Lazaretto pleasure-gardens, down to the Iron Dog, while the young men sometimes rented dhows to sail around the southern point and meet their families at Malaya Yalta.
‘Were you never bored, with so much unremitting pleasure?’
‘Never. But then I was only a little girl, remember. I see it all through the eyes of childhood. Never have I been so excited, never in all my life, as I used to be when we were taken to the station to see the first train of the season arrive. It was a fixed day, you know, announced beforehand in the Court Gazette and so on, and the first train was one of the great events of the year. We were allowed to stay up especially! We would all wear our best clothes, and all the barouches and luggage-traps would be waiting out there in the square — oh, I remember it so clearly! — and it used to seem like hours till the train arrived. We could hear it hooting, hooting, all the way through the Balad.
‘And then, when it came at last, the excitement! All the grand ladies in the latest fashions, fashions we’d never seen before, and the gentlemen in their tall hats, with carnation buttonholes, and Kolchok would be there to greet whatever princess or Grand Duke was on board, and then he’d go around welcoming old friends and kissing cousins and so forth, and everybody else would be embracing their friends and laughing, and we children would be hopping up and down with the fun of it. And then all the servants jumping off from the coaches behind, and the bustle and fuss of getting the luggage together, and out we’d clop from Pendeh Square like a kind of army. It was so colourful, you have no idea. When we got home, before we children were packed off to bed, we were allowed to have a cup of cocoa with the grown-ups.
‘My father said to me once, “Whatever you forget in life, don’t forget the pleasure of this evening with our friends.” I never have, as you see. I can hear him saying it now! And now all those friends are gone, only one old woman living on and remembering them.’
Between 1910 and 1914 the supreme event of the Hav social calendar was the annual visit of the Diaghilev Ballet to the Little Pushkin Theatre. Diaghilev first came to Hav in 1908, was fascinated by the place, and was easily persuaded to bring his company from Paris for a week at the height of the season each year. Diaghilev in Hav became, for those few brief summers, one of the great festivities of Czarist Russia, and hundreds of people used to come by special train for the performances.
A huge marquee was erected in Pendeh Square for the week, and there after each night’s performance dancers and audience alike dined, drank champagne, danced again and ate urchins into the small hours, in a magical aura of fairy lights and music, beneath the velvet skies of Hav. In 1910 the French novelist Pierre Loti, then a naval officer, was in Hav for one night during the first Diaghilev season, his ship having anchored off-shore. ‘It was like a dream to me’, he wrote afterwards, ‘to come from my ship into this midnight celebration. The music of the orchestra floated about the square and rebounded, I thought, from the golden domes of the Palace. The ladies floated in and out of the great tent like fairies of the night — white arms, billowing silk skirts, shining diamonds. The men were magnificent in black, with their bright sashes and glittering orders, Diaghilev himself occupying the centre of the stage. And in and amongst this elegant throng there flitted and pranced the dancers of the ballet, still in their costumes — fantastic figures of gold and crimson, moving through the crowd in movements that seemed to me hardly human. When I walked across the square to the picket-boat awaiting me at the quay I saw a solitary figure like a feathered satyr dancing all alone with wild movements up the long avenue of palms outside the Palace. It was Nijinsky.’
It was said of Nijinsky that he was never happier
than he was in Hav, and he is remembered still with proud affection. ‘I saw Nijinsky clear’ is a leitmotif of elderly reminiscence in Hav, among Arabs and Turks as often as among the Europeans of the concessions. He used to love to wander the city by himself, an image so unforgettable that old people describe him as though they can actually see him still. Sometimes he would be on the harbour-front, watching the ships. Sometimes the trumpeter, arriving at Katourian’s bastion, would find the great dancer already there. He liked to go to the station to see the train leave in the morning. And Anna one day, hunting among her souvenirs in a black leather box full of papers, pictures, twists of hair, postage stamps, imperial securities — ‘Securities! Some securities!’ — produced for me a photograph of Nijinsky taken on an outing, it said in spindly French on the back, in 1912.
There were only two figures in the picture, against a background of sky and bare heathland. One was the Iron Dog, full face. Beside it, ramrod stiff, wearing a kind of peasant jerkin and baggy trousers, Nijinsky stared expressionless into the lens, his hair ruffled by the wind.
