Hav (14 page)

Perhaps it was the ouzo. But when they took me down to the port to catch the ferry home I happened to mention the graffiti on the hide of the Iron Dog. Out of the corner of my eye I saw Kallonia, the bishop's sister, crossing herself like the women on the ferry.

Today I mentioned these peculiar sensations to Dr Borge, as we lunched together at the Al-Asima, in the Great Bazaar. He looked at me in a penetrating way. ‘You are walking on quicksands,' he said. ‘I will say no more. We cannot rewrite history. Nevertheless, when you have a moment take a look at a picture of the dragons on the Ishtar Gate at Babylon — not the lions, the dragons. See what you make of them.'

I went to the Athenaeum the moment we parted, and found a photograph of the dragons, proud but not vicious beasts, made of glazed brick, with jaunty serpents' tails and heads held high. I was none the wiser, though. I could see the resemblance, of course, to the Iron Dog, but so what? What could he mean? Magda says she has not the faintest idea. ‘He's an old fraud anyway.' But the mystery of it, the strangeness of those Greeks, the presence of the Dog there, graffiti-scarred upon his headland, haunt me rather.

British Agency

At the Victor's Party

I have been into the Palace, and met the Governor. A month after the Roof-Race the winner, by then assumed to have recovered from the ordeal, is honoured at a gubernatorial garden party, the Victor's Party, which is one of the great public occasions of the Hav year. It takes no great social clout to be invited, though Signora Vattani did look rather miffed when the big official envelope, stamped rather than embossed with the Governor's emblem (a Hav bear, rampant, holding a maze-mallet) plopped through our letter-box for me. Before the war, she said, she always used to go with her husband, but of course (with a sniff) everything was so different now . . .

Long before I reached the Palace gates I could hear the thump of military music over the traffic of Pendeh Square, and the party was evidently in full swing by the time I presented my invitation to the smiling sentries, and had been stentoriously announced by the footman at the door of the central salon. The Governor was there to receive his guests. ‘Dirleddy, I have heard so much of your presence here. You are welcome to Hav! Allow me to introduce our guest of honour and our hero, Irfan Izmic.' Izmic looked very unlike that heap of blotched, greased and bloody flesh which had dropped from the Castle Gate four weeks before. He was in a smart tropical suit now, his hair slicked, his moustache urbanely trimmed, in his lapel the red ribbon which winners of the great contest wear until the end of their days. ‘Delighted, dirleddy,' said he. ‘Honoured to meet you,' said I, and so I was left, as one is left at garden parties the world over, hopefully to circulate.

I was happy enough to do so. It was a grand festivity to watch. Partly in the garden, partly in the salon beneath the chandeliers, the confused society of the peninsula milled, ambled or was clotted, offering for my contemplation a splendid cross-section of
Homo hav
. The noise was considerable. Not just the military band played, resplendent in white and scarlet in the little garden bandstand, but two other musical ensembles worked away indoors. In the blue drawing-room a piano quartet, three ladies and the urbane Chinese pianist I had last seen thumping jazz in Bar 1924, played café music with much careful turnings of pages and rhythmic noddings of heads. In the pink drawing-room a folk group of six girls and six men, dressed alike in straw hats and
gallabiyehs
, performed in penetrating quarter-tones upon flutes, lutes and tambourines.

Through these varying melodies the Havians shouted to each other in their several languages, so that as I wandered through the crowd I moved from Turkish to Arabic, from Italian to Chinese to surprisingly frequent enclaves of English — for as I have discovered from the Athenaeum, Hav intellectuals in particular love to talk English among themselves. Mahmoud was there and introduced me to his hitherto unrevealed wife, who looked like a very pretty deer, but seemed to speak no known language at all. Dr Borge was there and told me to ignore the folk-artists banging and fluting away in the other room, as they were pure phonies — ‘One of these evenings I'll take you to a place I know and let you hear the real thing.' Magda, in yellow, was accompanied by a handsome-bearded black man, and who should be with Fatima (brown silk, helping herself to urchin mayonnaise from the buffet) but the stately figure of the tunnel pilot himself. ‘I hear you have bought one of our old cars,' he said. ‘A wise purchase. We keep them scrupulously.'

Presently the Governor adjourned with his guest of honour to a wide divan, covered with carpets in the Turkish way, which stood just within the French windows of the salon, looking out on to the garden. There they were joined by the Governor's wife and daughter, ample ladies both, in long white dresses and small tilted hats, who draped themselves side by side at the end of the divan, slightly separate from Izmic and His Excellency, and looked to me suggestively like odalisques. In twos and threes the citizenry took their turn to wait upon this court, and were greeted I noticed with varying degrees of condescension.

When for example athletic young men, with shy young wives, went over to grasp Izmic by the shoulder or pretend to rumple his hair, the Governor was all jollity, his ladies sweet with smiles. When elderly Turkish-looking gentlemen went, without their wives, sometimes the Governor actually rose to his feet to greet them, while his ladies adjusted their skirts and all but tidied their black hair. Others seemed less graciously received. I could not hear what was said, from my peregrinating distances, but I got the impression that sometimes the exchange of courtesies was curt. The Caliph's Wazir, though greeted by formal smiles, did not last long at the divan. A group of Greeks was all but waved away, and went off laughing rather rudely among themselves. And when Chimoun the Port Captain approached the presence with his svelte and predatory wife, I thought for a moment the Governor seemed a little nervous.

Magda and her black man, each holding a plate of langoustines, pressed me to a garden bench, in the shade of a fine old chestnut, from where I could view this intriguing pageant
in toto
. From there it all looked very colourful, very charming — the splash of crimson from the band in the corner, the bright dresses and gaudy hats, the wonderfully varied wandering wardrobe of kaftans,
gallabiyehs
, white uniforms, tight-buttoned suits and ecclesiastical headgear — and in the middle, intermittently revealed to us between the comings and goings of the guests, the Governor there on his divan, with his ladies and his champion, looking now so unmistakably Levantine that I almost expected him to pull his feet up under him and sit cross-legged on his rugs.

‘I suppose you are thinking,' Magda remarked, ‘what a pretty scene!' and her friend laughed cynically.

‘Well it
is
a pretty scene,' I replied.

‘You are so innocent,' Magda said, ‘for a person of your age. You cannot have travelled much, I think. You sit here smiling around you as though it is a little show. You think it is all lobsters and urchins and nice music. Believe me it is much more than that.'

‘You can say that again,' said her companion idiomatically.

‘This is almost the only time in the whole year', she went on, ‘when all these people meet at the same time. Do you suppose they are here just to talk about the Roof-Race, or congratulate the Governor's daughter on her smart dress from Beirut? No, my friend, they're talking about very different things.'

‘They're talking about money,' said the black man.

‘Certainly,' said Magda, ‘they're talking about money. And they're talking about power, and many other things too. They're not just here for fun. Look at them! Do they look as though they are having fun?'

They did actually, since half of them were stuffing urchins into their mouths, and many were laughing, and some were looking at the garden flowers, and others were deep in what seemed to be very absorbing gossip. But I saw what Magda meant. It was not exactly a
blithe
party. Currents I could not place, allusions I could not identify, seemed to loiter on the air. Separate little groups of people had assembled now, and appeared to have turned their backs on all the others. The longer I looked at the Governor the less he seemed like the benevolent figurehead of an idiosyncratic Mediterranean backwater, and the more like one of those spidery despots one reads about in old books of oriental travel, crouching there at the heart of his web.

‘Well what d'you suppose they all
want
?' I asked.

‘Ah,' said Magda sententiously, ‘if we knew that, we would know the answer to life's riddles, wouldn't we?'

‘That's for sure,' her friend added.

As I passed through the salon on my way out, having said my goodbyes to the divan (‘Charmed, charmed,' murmured the two ladies, and the Governor bowed distractedly from the waist, being deep in talk with the Maronite archbishop), a man in well-cut sharkskin intercepted me. He was Mario Biancheri of the Casino. He had heard I was about, he said, and as we had friends in common in Venice, wondered if I would care to visit the Casino, which was difficult to enter without an introduction. ‘You can drive out, of course, but it's a terrible road — you really need four-wheel drive. But if you're prepared to get up early you could come with me in the launch one morning when we return from the market. We would see that you got home again. You would be amused? Very well, signora, it's fixed.

‘By the way, did you enjoy the food? We did the catering. If you are planning to do any entertaining yourself we shall be delighted to help — we need not be as expensive as we look!' And so in the end I was seen off at the door of the Palace, past the Circassian sentries, beneath the onion domes, away from the mysteries of that somewhat dream-like function, with a brisk quotation of sample prices — ‘You prefer a sit-down meal? Certainly, certainly.' As I walked across the square the bands played on: thump of Souza from the garden, ‘Chanson d'amour' from the blue room, and a reedy wheeze and jangle of folk melody.

Mystery of Mr Thorne — Hav Britannica — in spite of all temptations — luncheon at the Agency — Lawrence Sahib and the Turkish gentleman — ‘very pale'

The British Agent's name is — well, I will call him Thorne. His wife's name is — well, let us say Rosa. They are the only English residents in Hav, and he is the only foreign diplomatic representative. He keeps very much to himself. He is officially invited every year, he tells me, to the Roof-Race and the Victor's Party, but has never been to either, confining himself to private contact with the Governor or the Foreign Department when the need arises, which seems to be infrequently. He is a tall thin man, very clever I think, with a high brow and the sort of nose which, without being retroussé, slopes downwards below the nostrils to the upper lip. She was at Cambridge, where she read foreign languages, and is clever too, while affecting Kurdish jewelry and sandals with heavy gold thongs. It is touted about, naturally, that Thorne is a spy-master, and that much British and American intelligence passes through his hands. Magda says he is the original of one of John Le Carré's characters, but she can't remember which.

He is a mystery, but a mystery the people of Hav seem perfectly content to ignore. From almost anywhere on the waterfront you can see his fine white house above the harbour, radio aerials sprouting from the outbuildings behind, yet hardly anybody goes near the place, and it stands there apparently aloof to the life of the peninsula. It is a tantalizing relic of the brief and not very glorious Hav Britannica.

If in 1794 Nelson had obeyed his original instructions, and attacked the peninsula of Hav instead of sailing west to invest Corsica, he might never have had his eye shot out at Calvi. As it was, the British never did have to take Hav by force, for it fell into their hands peacefully under the treaty arrangements of 1815. They wanted it for strategic reasons. They were coming to see India as the true source and focus of their power, and were more and more concerned with the safety of the routes that led there. With Gibraltar already theirs, with Malta to control the central Mediterranean, the Ionians to command the Adriatic, and with Hav flying the flag away to the east, their lines of communication through the inner sea seemed to be secure.

In those days warships were small enough to make use of Hav's poor harbour, and the British promptly established a garrison, built a Residency, an Admiralty House, an Anglican church and an ice-house, and made the Protectorate of Hav and the Escarpment a proper little tight-meshed outpost of their fast coalescing empire. Many well-known imperial figures had Hav connections at one time or another. Bold General C. J. Napier, conqueror of Baluchistan, spent some months in the city reorganizing the garrison, and wrote to his wife that it was ‘a dreadful hole — worse than Sind! I am sorry for the poor soldiers, but it is the price we pay for power'. The half-mad Lord Guilford, who established an Ionic university in Corfu, paid a brief spectacular visit to Hav, swathed in his usual flowing toga, to suggest a sister establishment here: it was to be called the Trojan Academy, but protests from the Sublime Porte direct to the Crown, so Guilford always claimed, put paid to the project. General Gordon was a more frequent visitor, sometimes in the course of his duties as a military engineer (he had a scheme for resuscitating the Spartan canal as a defence work), sometimes in the pursuit of Truth: just as he believed the Seychelles to be the true site of the Garden of Eden, so he was sure that Noah's Ark had really grounded on the Escarpment, and he wrote many learned papers to prove it.