Hav (19 page)

There have been many enforced refugees, from many countries and many situations, who have found in this confused and eclectic city a temporary haven. Even as I write, I see one of them on a park bench below. I know him slightly. He is dressed anachronistically even by Hav standards, for he presents an image direct from the American 1960s: his hair is long and pigtailed, his moustache is droopy, he wears baseball shoes and patched jeans frayed at the bottom. His guitar is propped against the bench beside him, and he is fast asleep — head back, mouth slightly open, arms on the back of the bench showing (I happen to know) a tattooed dove of peace on one bicep the words
ROLLIN' STONE
on the other. He is in his late thirties, I would guess. He is known in Hav as Bob.

Scores of young Americans, evading the draft for the Vietnam War, found their way to Hav in the sixties and seventies, mingling easily enough with the travellers on the hippie route to Afghanistan and Katmandu who used, in those days, sometimes to stop off in the peninsula. As far as I know Bob is the only survivor, having scornfully disregarded the amnesty which took most of the draft evaders home to the United States. He is rumoured to be rich really, and to be supported by subsidies from his family, but I doubt it: he busks with his guitar for money, a familiar figure on the waterfront and the pavements of New Hav, and once he took me to his lodgings, a bed-sitting-room in the German quarter plastered all over with anti-war posters, pictures of Joan Baez and Dylan, and touching colour snapshots of his mother and father, gazing into the dark little apartment, with its crumpled bed and chipped mugs by the sink, out of a well-tended garden in Iowa.

Look over there now, through the gateway to the promenade, and you will see, dangling their legs over the edge of the quay, two fugitives of another sort. They are stocky men in their thirties, unshaven rather, in brown baggy trousers and open-necked shirts. Their hair is quite long now, but it was close-cropped when I first saw them, shortly after my arrival in Hav. Unlike Bob, who knows everyone, they are extremely aloof, lodging in a Turkish boarding-house near the central post office, and supporting themselves certainly not by busking, but rumour says by subventions from the British Agency (which is to say, it is knowingly added, the CIA).

They are, we are told, deserters from the Soviet army in Afghanistan, and arrived in Hav nobody knows how — some say by sea. They are supposed to have been thoroughly interrogated by Mr Thorne and his assistants, and then let loose in the city. They seem quite happy. One is a skilled mechanic, and sometimes does odd jobs for people, if he can be made to understand what is needed — very few people speak Russian in Hav now, while the two deserters speak nothing else. The other is variously rumoured to be a fighter pilot and a colonel in the KGB. When I try to speak to them, they smile pleasantly and say nothing. Magda says they would be admirable recruits for the Athenaeum.

Of course they may not be deserters from Afghanistan at all. Another theory is that they are dissident Russian artists, scientists or writers, kept here in reserve, so to speak, until the Western powers feel their propaganda value will be most useful. This has happened before. In the 1950s a distinguished young Russian physicist arrived on a boat from Syria, and immediately made his way to the British Agency. There he stayed for some months safe, sound and secret, awaiting the apposite moment.

But one day a senior British official arrived by train from Ankara supposedly for a last de-briefing of the man, or perhaps a final indoctrination, and thereafter nothing was ever heard of the refugee again. The name of the senior official is lost too: but I wonder, could it have been H. A. R. (‘Kim') Philby?

Pace
Armand, much the best-known refugee in Hav today is that meditative old Nazi he first pointed out to me — do you remember? — as being very much wanted by the Israelis. The Mossad do not seem to have been searching very hard, for Oberführer Boschendorf is to be found, most days of the week, buttonholing people with his story in the pleasure-gardens of the Lazaretto.

I often go there myself, for I love to watch the solemn Hav children enjoying themselves on the biplanes, steamrollers, cocks and wooden camels of the elderly roundabouts, and one afternoon Boschendorf picked on me. ‘Please, please, I know you are a writer, I want you to know the truth' — so we went into the old Admiralty House café, and placing his hat carefully on the seat beside him, he told me his tale.

It was perfectly true, he said, as I had doubtless learnt, that during the late war (he always called it the late war) he had been involved in the deaths of Jews, but it was not out of racial hatred. It was because he had cherished since childhood a deep, a truly mystical empathy for the destiny of the Jewish people — ‘but am I ever believed in Hav, this snake-pit, this Babylon? Never!' His obsession began when he had been taken as a boy to the Passion Play at Oberammergau. ‘The sublime and awful meaning of it! A Jew, the noblest of Jews, condemned to death by his own people — but only, as I realized in revelation that day, as their own imperishable contribution to the destiny of all humanity. It was they themselves that they were sacrificing upon the Cross. Christ was but the image of all his people, the Jews but an enlargement of Christ!'

At first he had seen Hitler and the Nazi party as the embodiment of all evil, the Anti-Christ — ‘how I suffered for the Jews with their horrible yellow badges and their degradations'. But then came the war, and he first heard of the Final Solution, the plan to exterminate all the Jews of Europe. ‘It was a second revelation to me. The Jews, the Christ-people, were to be sublimated at last in total sacrifice, and join their archetype upon the Cross. I saw it all in ecstasy, those tragic millions, deprived of all but their heritage, in pilgrimage to their own Calvaries. I could not imagine — it would take a Wagner to imagine! — what it would mean for the future of the world, and I came to see Adolf Hitler, as I had long seen Pontius Pilate, as a divine instrument of redemption. I saw all the mighty energies of Germany, beset by enemies on every front, directed to the sacred task — inspired!'

Boschendorf got himself into the SS, and was concerned, as a junior administrative officer, with paperwork for Eichmann's death-trains; but he was never charged with war crimes, and came to Hav after the war not through the tortuous channels of Odessa, but by paying his own fare on the Mediterranean Express. This anti-climax seemed to prey upon his mind.

‘They will not listen! They do not hear! Am I a criminal? Am I not rather an agent of God's passion? Was I not to the Jews as Judas was to his master, no more than the means of holy destiny? Have I not risked death to bring them death?' Suddenly unbuttoning his jacket and baring his chest, he showed me tattooed there a Star of David — ‘There, as they branded the Jews entering upon their fulfilment so they branded me, at my instructions, Hauptsturmführer, SS, with the badge of the Chosen!'

‘Quick, Herr Boschendorf—'

‘
Dr
Boschendorf.'

‘—quick, button up your shirt, everyone is staring at you.'

‘WHY?' he shouted. ‘Must I be ashamed of my badge?' He rose to his feet and displayed his chest right and left across the café, whose customers were in fact assiduously pretending not to notice. ‘MUST I BE ASHAMED?'

One or two of our neighbours now offered me sympathetic smiles, as if to say that they had seen and heard it all before, and the waiters, to a man, conscientiously looked the other way.

‘Oh I know what these people' — he threw a hand around the room — ‘have been telling you. That's Hav! That's Babylon! They say I am wanted in four continents, don't they? But do I hide myself? Do I hide my badge of sacrament? The Israelis know and respect me for my love of their people, for whom I shed their blood . . .'

I thought he was going to break down. ‘I saw you that day with Armand Sauvignon. Did you believe what he told you? Do you know what he did in the late war? He it was, when Jews arrived in Hav, who saw to it that they were shipped to France, and thence to Germany — but he did it not in love, but in hatred. Ask anyone! Oh, we all know Monsieur Sauvignon, novelist, gentleman of France, hypocrite.'

He calmed down presently and politely paid his bill. The head waiter bowed to him respectfully as we left the café. ‘I so much enjoyed our talk,' Boschendorf said, ‘and feel relieved that you are now in possession of the truth — always a rare commodity in Hav. Use it how you will.' He asked me if I would care to join him on the Electric Ferry back to the Fondaco, but I said no, I would stay on the island a little longer, and watch the children on the merry-go-round as the fairy lights came up.

Who else is sheltering, here in the haven of Hav? A few Israeli deserters, and a few Syrians, who are said to enjoy regular get-togethers at which they damn each others' governments indiscriminately. Plenty of Palestinians, they say. The Caliph's Assyrians. Perhaps one or two of Boschendorf's old comrades. A clutch of Libyans, often to be seen, heads together, gloomily eating kebabs at the Al-Khouri restaurant in the bazaar.

And me, of course, and me. ‘What are you running away from?' Magda asked me once. I said I wasn't running away from anything. ‘Of course you are,' she said. ‘In Hav we are all running.' Perhaps we are, too, each of us finding our own escape in this narrow sultry cul-de-sac. Like many another cage the peninsula of Hav, blazed all about by sun, trapped in dust and moulder, offers its prisoners a special kind of liberation. The harsher, the freer! When the sun goes down on these summer days I feel the city to be less than itself, and look forward impatiently to the hot blast of the morning.

Among the Chinese — Feng Shui in Hav — the Palace of Delights — piracy — X's story — ad infinitum

To Yuan Wen Kuo last night, for dinner with M, in the cool of the July evening. We ate early at the Lotus Blossom Garden, and afterwards wandered agreeably around the streets thinking how pleasantly unremarkable everything looked. The Chinese consider it lucky to live in uninteresting times, and it seemed to me that by and large they go to some lengths to live in uninteresting places, too.

Ten miles across the peninsula from the city of Hav proper, which is by any standards unusual, the Chinese have created a town of their own which seems quite deliberately its antithesis: a town without surprises, homogenous in its slatternly makeshift feeling, and imbued with all the standard Chineseness of all the Chinatowns that ever were — the tireless crowds and the smell of cooking, the piles of medicinal roots and powders, the shining varnished dead ducks hanging from their hooks, the burbling bewildered live ones jammed in their market pens, the men in shirtsleeves leaning over the balconies of upstairs restaurants, the severe old ladies on kitchen chairs, the children tied together with string like puppets, as they are taken for walks in parks, the rolls of silk from Shanghai, the bookshops hung with scroll paintings of the Yangtze Gorges, the nasal clanging of radio music, the clic-clac of the abacus, the men playing draughts beneath trees, the disconsolate sniffing dogs, the rich men passing in the back seats of their Mercedes, the poor men pedalling their bicycle rickshaws, the buckets full of verminous threshing fish, the labourers bent double with teachests on their backs, the dubious little hotels, their halls brightly lit with unshaded bulbs, the glimpses of girls at sewing-machines in second-storey windows, the fibrous blackened harbour-craft, the old-fashioned bicycles, the shops full of Hong Kong television sets, the Yellow Rose Department Store, the Star Dry-Cleaning Company, the pictures here of Chiang Kai Shek peak-capped against a rising sun, there of Mao Tse-Tung bare-headed against the Great Wall — in short, the threshed, meshed, patternless, hodge-podge, sleepless, diligent and ordinary disorder of the Chinese presence.

How I enjoyed it last night! As we loitered around the streets of Yuan Wen Kuo, digesting our Sautéed Chicken with Wolf-berry (recommended to me in Beijing long ago as a specific against depression), I felt extraordinarily reassured by the prosaic activity of it all. I felt in fact, in a calm illogical way, as though I were enjoying a brief spell of home leave from the front.

Perhaps this is what the architects and soothsayers had in mind when, so many centuries ago, they laid out on this inconceivably distant shore the pattern of the first Chinese city west of the Gobi Desert. The principles of Feng Shui, the Chinese art of relating buildings to their landscapes, are easy to recognize in Yuan Wen Kuo. Two low hillocks, still bare but for an ornamental tea-house on each of them, stand here half a mile or so from the water's edge, facing south-west. Nothing could be more suitable. Though down the generations the shape of the town has inevitably been blurred, essentially Yuan Wen Kuo still lies, as the Feng Shui men doubtless decreed, between the benevolent arms of the Azure Dragon, the White Tiger, and the Black Tortoise — the three protective ridges which protect it from the north. Halfway up the hill they laid out the main street, for Feng Shui insisted that a site should be commanding, but not exposed; though there are a few rich villas now near the summit of the slope, the ridge itself remains bare to this day, except for the semaphore mast overlooking the fishing-harbour at the eastern end.

We are told that the imperial architect Han Tu Chu himself decreed the original ground-plan, but architecturally Yuan Wen Kuo never seems to have been anything special. Perhaps, being so far away, and so vulnerable, the Chinese thought it was hardly worth spending money on expensive buildings there. Marco Polo dismissed it cursorily. ‘There is nothing to be said about Yuan Wen Kuo. Let us now move on to other places.' Ibn Batuta thought it ‘mean and dirty, with small narrow houses and thieving people', and was glad to get back to the civilized comforts of the Medina, where he was told of a charitable fund established especially to help the victims of extortion in Yuan Wen Kuo. Possibly it was the unimpressive character of the place that encouraged the Chinese authorities, when the time came in the fifteenth century, to build the House of the Chinese Master with such fine extravagance.