Hav

by Jan Morris

  ‘Voilà!’ said Magda, slightly ironically, when we reached a very small clearing in the middle of a cluster of housing blocks, with a narrow arcade around it. ‘There’s our sacred site. It was here that the Cathars used to hold their fateful séances, in a secret hall in an old Arab house that used to stand here. You would never have noticed it — nobody did. But inside it, or underneath it perhaps, on this very spot, all that has happened to Hav in our time was plotted and decreed.’

  ‘That is so,’ said Azzam. ‘Like it or not, this is the crucible of our present.’

  I wandered off by myself, thinking. Was it really here that I had, all those years before, been hurried up those steep dark steps to spy upon the Cathars below? Was it here that I had half-imagined, half-dreamed the identities of the red-cloaked Perfects, and promised never to reveal where I had been or what I had seen? I felt a pang of guilt about what I had written in the event, written in ignorance as it was, and wondered if that was why my book had been banned — evidently the Sustenance people, at least, had never read it.

  In the centre of the little clearing there was a raised oblong platform of marble, with an inscribed plate of bronze on top of it. Step-ladders were placed nearby for the convenience of visitors, and while Magda, Azzam and Henri watched me from the arcade I climbed up one and bent over to read its inscription. It was in five languages, Havian, Arabic, Turkish, Chinese and English, and this is what it said:

  ON THIS SITE WAS BORN

  THE HOLY MYRMIDONIC REPUBLIC OF HAV

  BY THE SACRIFICE OF THE CATHARS

  AUGUST 17 1985

  HISTORY, YOU PASSER-BY, REMEMBER!

  I stood up there for a moment or two, wondering what it meant, until Magda came over and asked if I was all right. Still bemused, I clambered down the ladder, and she said: ‘I know just what you’re feeling. I felt it, the first time. Remember what? — that’s you’re thinking, aren’t you? Or remember who? That’s the sacredness of it, that we none of us have the faintest notion what it’s all about, and probably never will. I saw your old friend Porvic standing here once in tears, and I bet you anything he didn’t know what he was crying about.

  ‘Come on, Jan, blow your nose; we’ll have a last cup of tea before we trundle you off on your buggy to the delights of Lazaretto.’

  ‘Did you ever know a lady named Fatima Yeğen?’ I asked them when we went to the café for our tea. ‘She was something to do with the railway.’

  Magda and Henri looked blank, but Azzam said he thought he’d read something about her in Myrmidon Mirror, the more gossipy, he said, of the city’s two newspapers. ‘I think you’ll find she’s running the old station hotel.’

  ‘L’Auberge Impériale,’ I cried in delight. ‘D’you mean to say it still exists?’

  ‘Only in name really, only what’s left of it. The station was completely destroyed, of course, and the railway itself never reopened. But I rather think the Yeğen family had some official connection with it — wasn’t there somebody called the Tunnel Pilot in those days?’

  Indeed there was, I told him. In my time the Pilot was Fatima Yeğen’s cousin Rudolph, and if she was still alive and letting rooms I wouldn’t take a Lazaretto buggy, I’d find my way to L’Auberge Impériale instead.

  ‘Well don’t expect too much,’ said Azzam. ‘I’ve only seen it from the outside, but I wouldn’t fancy it myself, and alas the three of us have to be back at the League for a Sustenance discussion. Can you find your way there by yourself?’

  ‘She’s a grown woman, Azzam. It’s easy, Jan. Go back to the Fondaco Quay, and after the warehouses, before you turn the corner to the Carlotto, you’ll see a big motorway running away from the harbour. That’s August 17 Street. Walk up it for a few hundred yards and you’ll find Centrum Square. That’s where the station used to be and you can’t miss what’s left of the hotel. We’d come with you, but we just haven’t got time. You must continue your investigations all alone.’

  So we parted, and I walked alone in the evening through the streets of the city — streets and quays of ghosts they were to me — thinking of all I had seen there once, fancying the lights of the old British Residence across the water, imagining the little Electric Ferry bustling to and fro across the water, hearing the voices of old friends, smelling the lost scents of Hav, treading the pavements I might once have trodden until —

  ‘Can I help you, dirleddy?’ asked a smiling lady in black, sitting in a kiosk of glass and gilded ironwork.

  She was much older — of course she was; her hair was white and her figure was less ample, but it was undoubtedy Miss Fatima Yeğen, the Tunnel Pilot’s cousin. Out she came from her kiosk to embrace me, and of course she had a room for me, and of course we must have supper together, and there was so much to talk about wasn’t there? and oh! the things that had happened to Hav since I went away, wasn’t it a shame about the beautiful old tiled hotel sign? hadn’t I noticed? mind the step, if I needed anything I had only to ring the bell, and how lovely it all was, and she’d be seeing me later, and she’d turned the geyser on to let me have a nice hot bath.

  Azzam was, I have to admit, right. The Impériale was no great shakes, as dear Dr Porvic would have put it. It was a bum joint, as Henri might have said (in Hav all foreign slang is out of date). About half the size of the original, I suppose, it had been salvaged from the ruins of Hav Centrum, and was apparently still shored up with temporary girders and scaffolding. On one external wall, seen from the old station square outside, there still showed the fireplaces and blocked up doors of grander times.

  Here and there inside, too, as I explored the yellow-painted corridors, I found reminders of the past: here a decidedly Russian-style landscape (muffled ladies in long skirts snowballing with preternaturally rosy children), here a chipped and rusted enamel advertisement (TAKE THE TRAIN! MEDITERRANEAN EXPRESS DIRECT TO MOSCOW, with a fanciful representation of onion domes and Cossacks), and standing in a dark corner cold and unpolished, a fine old samovar surmounted by a Russian imperial eagle. But they were no more than hints, really, rather than relics of what had once been there.

  ‘Oh dear me no, Miss Morris, the Impériale is not what it was,’ said Miss Yeğen, when we settled down in her cosy sitting-room for, as she put it, ‘a little light something before bed’.

  ‘But what would you do? No trains, very few visitors — only Chinese and Arab commercials, by and large — and certainly no help from the Government. They wanted to pull the place down, actually, when they pulled down the station ruins, and it was only because we all made a fuss that they let it stand.’

  So making a fuss did have some effect, in the new Hav?

  ‘Not often, but sometimes. There’s not much what you might call public opinion these days. The papers don’t spend much time on everyday matters — I was surprised when the Mirror had that article about me and the hotel, but that may have been the influence of Signor Biancheri, who’s always had a soft spot for the Impériale. Still, it was certainly people making a fuss who saved the Roof-Race.’

  I’d forgotten all about the Roof-Race.

  ‘Oh feelings ran so high about the Roof-Race that those Cathars really couldn’t go ahead and do away with it. They meant to, you know. When they rebuilt the Medina they were going to make no provision at all for the Roof-Race, and it was only because everybody was up in arms that they made the new course — not a patch on what it was, but something, I suppose — worth your while to take a look at, anyway.’

  I said I was surprised the Cathars had given in on the matter. ‘Me too,’ said Fatima, ‘what with them being so mad on health and safety and all that. But who knows what they really think about anything?’

  And apropos of that, did she remember when, thanks to her, I had gone with Yasar and George to that secret séance? What had become of them?

  Fatima fell silent for a moment then, while she looked about for a sugar-spoon.

  ‘I’ll tell you what,’ she said. ‘Why don’t you borrow my car for the day
tomorrow, take a turn around, see what you want to see, and then in the evening we can have a nice long chat. What do you think? You can stay another night, can’t you?’

  I thought so. I had my blue pass, after all. So after accepting a warm dry kiss from Miss Yeğen, off I went along the gloomy corridor to bed. There seemed to be no other guests at the Impériale that night, and all I heard as I dozed off was a gurgle of antique plumbing, and a distant barking of dogs. No steam-whistle from the station, when the Hav Express pulled in. No clanking of wagons or porters’ shouts. Not another sound, until the carrillon woke me like a bad dream in the morning.

  THURSDAY

  Myrmidon Rural Enterprises

  4

  Continuing my investigations — the Chinese factor — country life — Myrmidon style — ‘out of the bright heroic past’

  Surely hers wasn’t one of the Tunnel Pilot’s cars, was it, I asked Fatima Yeğen in the morning, like the one I had bought all those years before?

  She laughed a tinkly girlish laugh. ‘No, no, Miss Morris, what a scream you are! They all went to the scrap heap long, long ago, like the railway itself.’ And when we went out to the hotel garage after breakfast, there awaited me a stylish new Shanghai coupé, white, with a sunshine roof and CD player — ‘all mod cons,’ tinkled Miss Yeğen again, ‘almost like Lazaretto!’

  There was a map on the passenger’s seat. ‘I think you’ll need this,’ she said, and spread it out for me on the roof of the car. She was right. Except for the shape of the peninsula itself, the very topography of Hav looked different. Slap across it, from one coast to the other, there now ran a dual-carriageway motor-road (H1), following the route of the filled-in Spartan Canal and linking the city with the new port at Yuan Wen Kuo. There was no sign now of the International Settlement — ‘vanished like a dream’, said Miss Yeğen — and what had been the heart of the old city, where the Serai had been, and the palaces, was apparently now absorbed within a large rectangular slab labelled Medina. And the Balad, the old Arab quarter? ‘Ah well,’ said Miss Yeğen, ‘I won’t tell you that. Give yourself a surprise!’

  And the rest of all I had known? The castle survived, of course, and there was evidently still a settlement on San Spiridon, the Greek island, but the old Russian pleasure-place of Malaya Yalta was not even marked, and the old motor-road up to the Escarpment was coloured in green (‘Unsuitable for motor traffic’).

  Miss Yeğen sighed heavily as I folded up the map. ‘Such changes! So much gone! But never mind, there’s lots for you to see still. Enjoy yourself! “Laugh and be happy” is my motto! Tell me all about it tomorrow!’

  And so, finding reverse gear with some difficulty, since the symbols on the knob were all in Chinese, I eased the car backwards into Centrum Square and continued my investigations.

  I hit the H1 north of the castle hill. One way led to the Medina (20 km, said a road-sign), the other to Yuan Wen Kuo (32 km, with a picture of a steamship puffing smoke). I turned to the east, and now and then saw traces of the old canal running now one side, now the other of the highway. It was a grey morning, and the landscape was much as I remembered it: bare rolling moorland, with occasional woodland clumps, running away to the distant line of the Escarpment. Here and there patches of wild flowers, brilliant in bright blues and yellows, were revealed when sunshine momentarily broke through the clouds. No animals crosssed my path — no animals seemed to be in the moors — but streams of bulky trucks with trailers, interspersed with plush black limousines, passed in both directions along the road.

  This part of the peninsula never was much populated, because of its harsh flinty soil, but it came as a shock to me when, descending a long gradual slope to the eastern shore, I found there was no sign of Yuan Wen Kuo, only a shack or two off the road and a few dingy shops.

  An elderly Chinese was sitting in a bamboo chair outside one of the buildings, looking rather like a Chinaman in an old western, so I pulled off the highway and asked him what had happened. Surely the whole town, which I remembered as a perfectly ordinary Chinese settlement, had not been destroyed in the Intervention?

  ‘No, dirleddy, much destroyed but not all. Rest all moved. Rest gone north — that way,’ and he pointed to the big road behind me.

  ‘All moved?’ I repeated incredulously. It sounded like an Old Chinese Fable. ‘Everything? Palace of Delights? Yellow Rose Store? Big Star Floating Restaurant? They all just got up and went? Like magic?’

  He thought this very funny. How he laughed, and pulled his beard, and puffed his pipe, and tilted back on his chair! No, no, no, he explained to me, very carefully. The town of Yuan Wen Kuo had been peaceably moved fifteen years before, to become the port town of the new deep-sea harbour, and the old place had been abandoned in a very short time — ‘one month, two month, everyone gone. Now not much to do here except watch the cars go by.

  ‘But Yuan Wen Kuo now very rich, dirleddy, big ships, rich people, many streets. Go and see! Back to big road, turn right. You soon be there. No, no, no, Yuan Wen Kuo no move by magic — ha, ha, ha . . .’ and I heard him chuckling still, waving his pipe at me, as I turned the car around and returned to the H1.

  A mile or two further on the new Yuan Wen Kuo hit me. It was recognizably Chinese still, with its garish signs and its ceaseless sense of movement, but Chinese in the twenty-first-century manner, brash, angular, blazing, like a miniature Shanghai. This Yuan Wen Kuo had been shifted from the arcane protection of its neighbouring hills, and the principle of Feng Shui, which had governed Chinese building aesthetics for so many years, had evidently been abandoned. Nothing remained of the Palace of Delights, and I saw no sign of the Kuomingtang-Communist rivalries that used to fester and flourish here. Gone, too, was the shambled homeliness I used to find so soothing, and the energy of the place was altogether more concentrated, more controlled. It was a small town still, but ostentatiously, even brutally modern, and I noticed that the ship on its civic greeting — WELCOME TO YWK, GATEWAY TO HAV — was certainly not a traditional steamer, like the ones on the highway sign, but a fiercely stylized and deeply loaded container ship. It all reminded me of one of the New Towns of Hong Kong, only rather more restrained.

  I parked the car in a multi-storey park, in the middle of the town, which formed part of a sprawling civic centre, flew a large helmet-flag and was plastered everywhere with garish posters. There was a concert hall and a children’s playground with trampolines. An open-ended arcade ran through the building, with a gilded canopy above the entrance, and an excessively uniformed Chinese commissionare stood at its wrought-iron gates. It looked dauntingly expensive, but Han Tu Chu Mall was not, as I expected, lined with antiquarian shops full of ivories, and scented boutiques. It was occupied entirely by the headquarters of corporations — The Hav East Corp, Peninsula Exchange, Achilles International, the Sunrise Company — all with offices too in Hong Kong, Shanghai, Taipeh or Singapore, and with showily opulent premises here. Corinthian pillars, dual marble staircases, discreet but impressive name-plates, elegant receptionists to be seen sitting at vast semi-circular desks — the whole repertoire of high capitalist display offered me a steely greeting as I walked down the arcade, and made me feel I was not in a small Chinese settlement a thousand miles from Beijing but in some powerful financial outpost of Chinese power. I remembered then that long ago Chevallaz had told me of Chinese money behind the old Casino, and when I reached the commissionaire at the other end of the mall I asked him if the Casino still existed.

  ‘I have heard about it, dirleddy, of course,’ he said, ‘my father used to talk of it, but I believe it disappeared beneath the works of the port. But they still call this Casino Cove, you know. You might perhaps enquire at the Port Captain’s office — straight down here, past the post office on the waterfront, not to be mistaken.’

  I thanked him. He bowed. ‘Ask for Mr Chimoun,’ he added. ‘He would be well informed about the old Hav. It was before my time!’

  Mr Chimoun! I hastened down the street, past the orna
tely decorated Post Office with sculpted storks along the roof, past the Black Tortoise Refreshment Restaurant and the Tiger Tea-House, until I reached the waterfront. This was different from the quays down at Hav City. A squadron of fishing-boats was tied up at one side of the cove, but the big ships lay off-shore in their dozens, swarmed about with lighters and motor-launches. The quays were piled high with containers, in piles as big as houses, with mobile cranes and transporters moving ceaselessly among them.

  The Port Captaincy occupied a severely functional Modernist block. The Chinese official behind the reception desk had never heard the name Chimoun. Not very enthusiastically he shuffled through the pages of a directory, and then shouted across the hall to a colleague: ‘Hey, Li, ever hear of a guy called Chimoun?’

  ‘Old guy?’ asked Li.

  ‘Old guy?’ asked the man of me.

  ‘Old by now, I suppose,’ I said, ‘but he used to be Port Captain.’

  ‘Try Transient Services,’ Li said, ‘they use some old-timers there’; and so I found myself led along bleak corridors, past conference rooms and offices full of computers, until I reached a door marked ‘Transient Enquiries (A)’, and there sure enough they directed me to Mr Chimoun. ‘That’s Mr Chimoun over there. Chimoun! Chimoun! CHIMOUN! Someone to see you!’

  For Mr Chimoun the Port Captain of twenty years before, who had born himself like an admiral and felt himself a doge, who had looked out from his stately headquarters on the old Fondaco Quay with so grand an air of possession — Mr Chimoun was now a deaf old clerk bent over a ledger-like volume, like an illustration by Boz. He stumbled over to me pushing his spectacles up his nose, and responded with a blank stare when I told him who I was. I thought he might have had a stroke, or a nervous breakdown, or had lost his memory, but no; after a baffling moment of silence he said perfectly lucidly: ‘We can’t talk here — we’ll go to the canteen.’