Hav (13 page)

But at least it possesses, as few such artificial towns do, an air of hopeful guilelessness. Just this once, it seems to say, just for this moment, even our separate patriotisms are merely amusing. And most guilelessly amusing of all, to my mind, are the three arches by which each radial boulevard, as it debauches into the central Place, is ornamentally bridged. I can see all three from my terrace, if I lean out far enough. Close to the left a replica of the Bridge of Sighs ambiguously links our quarter with the French. Further round the Place, the Avenue de France is spanned by a squashed and potted representation of the towered bridge at Cahors. And opposite me stands an elevated Brandenburg Gate, splendid indeed when a No. 2 tram comes storming underneath with its rocking red trailer.

Armand thinks them all very silly, but he should not scorn Hav's follies, for the most gloriously ludicrous of them all was contributed by his own country. In those days it was an official French custom to distribute among Francophone communities across the world small iron replicas of the Eiffel Tower, still to be seen in places like Mauritius or Madagascar. It was thought improper, I suppose, to make such an offering to Tripartite Hav, so instead the French government presented the Conveyor Bridge which spans the harbour mouth beside the Iron Dog, perhaps ten miles south of the city centre, as a gesture of France's profound respect for the people and civilization of the peninsula. Only the French could build conveyor bridges — archetype was Lanvedin's magnificent Pont Transbordent at Marseilles — so its unmistakable outline on the finest site in Hav would be a perpetual reminder of French skill and generosity.

No matter that almost nobody wanted to cross the harbour down there, or that the elaborate solution of a conveyer bridge was perfectly unnecessary anyway. The French mind was majestically made up, and to this day the bridge operates with the help of generous subsidies from Paris — besides being, thanks to its regular maintenance by French engineers, the most efficient piece of mechanism in Hav. Twelve times a day its platform, slung on steel wires from the girders high above, sets off in a gentle swaying motion across the harbour mouth, guided by a captain wearing a derivation of French naval uniform in his small wooden cabin in the middle. The pace is measured. The machinery is silent. A long chequered pennant streams from the cabin roof. To the north you can see the castle, rising on its rock above the city, to the south the Mediterranean sea lies blue, green and flecked with foam. Below you, perhaps, a white salt-ship slips elegantly out of the haven for Port Said and the Red Sea. In all Hav there is nothing much more foolish than the Conveyor Bridge — but nothing much grander, either!

The Iron Dog — graffiti — on Greeks — on Greekness — something haunting

Last week, for the first time, I stood like Nijinsky beside the Iron Dog.

You can reach it direct from the Medina, but I preferred to approach the beast from the east, snout-on so to speak; so I drove through the German gate of New Hav after breakfast, took the rough track around the back of the British Agency, and arrived at the Conveyor Bridge in time for the nine o'clock crossing (which for myself I think of as a flight, so airy is the motion of that platform beneath its spindly wires, with its wind-indicator swirling and its pennant streaming bravely). The other passengers were all Greeks — a man in a truck, three black-shawled women with an empty pony cart. As we approached the western shore, I noticed, the eyes of us all, even the captain's, were drawn to the enigmatic creature on its high headland; and when we drew level with it, almost at the same height as our platform, all the women crossed themselves.

For the bridge disgorges its passengers a little way inland from the Dog, and you must walk back along the windswept moor to get to it. No good taking the car, for there is no track, and the ground is thick with scented scrub — so scented that it fills the air with its fragrance, and is said to give an intoxicating bouquet to the water from the spring which, sprouting halfway up the sea-cliff, is thought to be the reason why the Greeks landed here in the first place. The wind blew about me, then, the captain waved from his high gazebo, and through the perfumed sunshine I walked towards the most celebrated of all Hav's monuments.

It was not, when I reached it, how I had foreseen. From a distance it looks all stark arrogance, its head held so high, its tail outstretched, its legs, slightly splayed, planted fiercely in the ground. It has been called the Iron Dog at least since the eleventh century, when the Crusaders wrote the earliest descriptions we possess; but so relentless does it appear, especially in photographs, that some modern scholars have declared it to be not a dog at all, but rather the fox that young Spartans were supposed to take into the hills, to gnaw at their bellies and make men of them. ‘I can never see a picture of that animal', wrote T. E. Lawrence, who subscribed to the theory himself, ‘without feeling a pain in my tum.'

But when you get close to the figure, such notions seem implausible. Whatever else he may be, the Iron Dog is certainly not a fox. His face is genial. His legs are implanted not ferociously at all, but playfully. His elongated tail streams eagerly, as though he is only waiting the word to spring after grouse or gazelle. He is made of bronze, with the remains of gilt showing on it, but so subtly is he structured, and so infinite are the little cracks of time and weather that layer his skin, that the material looks more like wood, and makes the figure seem remarkably light — especially as its big metal plinth has long since disappeared into the soil, turf and scrub.

The Iron Dog is about six feet high, paw to ear, and there are many graffiti on his hide. There is the famous rune, companion to that on one of the Arsenal lions in Venice, which proclaims that men of the Byzantine emperor's Norse bodyguard once landed on this peninsula. There are indecipherable scratches in Greek. A very hazy M.P., on the animal's rear flank, is popularly supposed to be Marco Polo's. There are some marvellously flowery little ciphers which have been identified as the marks of Venetian silk merchants, and scores of stranger devices, apparently of all ages, which seem to have some cabalistic meaning. Henry Stanley the explorer, who came here after the opening of the Suez Canal in 1869, has signed himself shamelessly beneath the animal's chin. More disgracefully still a large crowned eagle, deeply and professionally chiselled, commemorates the visit here of Kaiser Wilhelm, on his way to Jerusalem.

Disgraceful, and yet . . . There is something intensely moving about those mementoes, cut, all down the centuries, in the skin of so ancient a beast. I found a stone and added my own emblem (I will not tell you what), establishing my line of succession, too, to the first of all the peoples who have put ashore in Hav. Here as everywhere, one likes to lay claim to the heritage of the Greeks.

The modern Greeks of Hav certainly enjoy it. If I have been told once, I have been told a thousand times about the lost glories of the Hav acropolis, about Schliemann and Achilles, about the great Spartan assault, in the fourth century
BC
, whose siege-work was the still recognizable canal, and whose triumphant trophy is supposedly the Iron Dog. ‘Hav is essentially a Greek city,' said the Orthodox bishop boldly when I went to see him in his palace beside the cathedral. ‘It is the last of the Greek colonies along the shore of Asia Minor.' But then he is profoundly prejudiced against everything Turkish, including Turkish geography. He frequently calls the Turkish people barbarians, and once publicly declared them to be the enemies of God. I asked him if this was not playing with fire, Hav being where and what it was. He merely shrugged his brawny shoulders. ‘I think what I think, I say what I say.'

Others of the Greek community are more cautious. The Greek shops and loan offices which have always proliferated in the Balad rarely announce themselves in Greek script nowadays, and many of their owners, I am told, have adopted Turkish or Arabic names. Several people important in the administration are supposed to have concealed Greek origins.

‘Do you really suppose your friend Mahmoud is an Arab? Some Arab! He's no more Arab than Missakian's Armenian!'

‘Missakian's not Armenian?'

‘Of course not. He's pure Greek, anyone can see that, like half the people in this place who call themselves Armenian, or Jewish, or Syrian . . .'

‘Dear God,' I said to Magda one day, trying to assimilate all these confusions, ‘I don't think I shall ever master the meaning of Hav.'

‘The meaning of Hav is easy,' she said coldly, ‘it's the meaning of Greeks that's hard.'

Certainly theirs is a somewhat shadowy presence in the city. There seem to be no Greeks at the Athenaeum. I have noticed none in the bar of the Adler-Hav, or listening to the jazz at the Bristol, and there were certainly no Greek names on the roster of the roof-runners. Signora Vattani scoffs when I remark upon these facts. ‘Of course there are no Greeks in
society
. Greeks are shopkeepers. You never saw a Greek in New Hav, in the old days, unless he was delivering the groceries. If you want to meet Greeks, you must go to the Balad.' But the bishop gave me different advice. ‘To see the Hav Greek as he really is — to see the true Havian, in fact — you should visit San Spiridon. You have seen the Iron Dog. Now go and see the people who created it.' He himself was born on the island, and he gave me, there and then, a letter of introduction to his sister Kallonia — ‘It means beautiful in our dialect,' he said, ‘but I'm sorry to say she isn't.'

A ferry goes there once a day, out in the morning, back in the afternoon, so yesterday I drove to the ferry station, which is near the south-eastern extremity of peninsular Hav, and joined the islanders for the crossing. The little steamboat was packed to its gunwales — women in black sitting on piles of their own parcels, powerful men with moustaches smoking bitter pipes, young bloods with motorbikes singing to the music of their transistors, children scampering everywhere, mules, horses, brawny dogs with spiked collars, the inescapable priest in his tall black hat and a few cheerful girls in cotton frocks.

The crossing takes half an hour — the ferry-boat is elderly, the currents there, sweeping in and out of China Bay, are very strong — and by the time we had tied up at the island dock, I swear, nobody on that ship was unaware of my purposes. I could almost hear the intelligence running around those decks. ‘She's a writer — Iron Dog — Greeks — Kallonia Laskaris — saw the Bishop — Kallonia — writer — Iron Dog . . .' And when we disembarked, amid a little harbour settlement of tin shacks that looked more like western Canada than eastern Mediterranean, three or four of the women, and an indeterminate number of dogs and children, guided me up the hill through the celery fields to the Laskaris house, which seemed to occupy the very centre and apex of the island.

Well, it was true, Kallonia was not very beautiful, but she was extremely kind, and in no time at all she had fixed up a lunch for me — ‘just to meet a few of our people, you must get the
truth
about us in your writing'. But first she detailed her daughter Arianna, eleven years old, to show me round the island. This was not difficult. It is only about a mile round, and is speckled all over, as by pimples, with small stone houses like Kallonia's own, each with its pergola and its garden. The only village is the little ferry-port, and the church (St Spiridon's, naturally) stands all alone on an islet at the southern tip, approached by a stone causeway. There is not much else — a couple of taverns, a shop or two, a disused cinema (every house has its TV aerial). The fishing-boats were nearly all at sea just then, but when they came back, so Arianna said, each would be moored directly outside the owner's home, some at little wooden landing-stages, some in docks cut alongside the houses.

By the time we got back to the house the luncheon party was already assembled and the food was on the table beneath the pergola — smoked mullet, shrimps, tomato with fetta cheese, lots of celery, ouzo. The company, six or seven men, rather more women, greeted me courteously; the priest I had seen on the boat, the chairman of the fishing cooperative, some miscellaneous elders and their wives. Once we were settled, they tucked into their victuals in vigorous silence. They seemed to have huge appetites. ‘Now you see', said the priest, ‘what the Hav Greeks are really like.' In the city, he said, they had been oppressed for so long that they had lost their national characteristics, and had become subdued and inhibited. Evasive too, somebody said between mouthfuls. One would not know, seeing them in their poky shops and offices, that they were of a great seagoing race, a martial race — it was here after all that Achilles built his fortress, here that the Spartans created the Iron Dog! They had lost their gaiety, too, and their sense of comradeship — yes, and even their ancient culture, which flourished now only on San Spiridon, whereas once, all the old historians said, Hav had been a very cradle of Hellenism. Now the city Greeks had been forced into subterfuge and secrecy. ‘What you see now', said the priest, waving his arms around the assembled company, who had fallen into rapt and solemn attention, ‘is the Greekness of Hav as it always was — here alone, on our beloved island.'

After the meal they sang songs to me. Somebody fetched a mandolin, and some younger people began to dance on the terrace beneath the pergola, weaving an intricate, fairy-footed step. But happy and grateful though I was, well fed, well ouzo'd too, the more I watched and listened to them, somehow the less Greek those Greeks really seemed to be. There was something odd about them. Were they really Greeks at all? All the externals were there, of course, clerical beard to fetta cheese, but something else, something more profound, seemed to be wrong. Their faces did not look quite like Greek faces, ancient or modern: there was a hint of something oriental to them, just the faintest suggestion of eye and cheekbone, as in the faces pictured by the old Hav portraitists. Then their bodily shape was not quite Greek either, being stringier, or tauter, or more sinewy. Their earnest ethnic loyalties seemed to me more Arab in style than Hellenic. Their ravenous appetites surprised me. Their music sounded less like melodies of Crete or Athens than of places well to the east of us, while the performance of the dancers on the terrace began to remind me uncomfortably, in its silent, deft and expressionless zeal, of tranced dervishes!