Hav (21 page)

When the war came, Topolino left the city — to avoid conscription, the Signora maintains — and with a few of his followers built himself a hermitage on the moorland south of Hen Chiau Lu. There he died in 1954, his body being unexpectedly claimed, and taken to Italy, by an eminent Christian Democrat politician (‘No, I will not tell you his name — I have my loyalties') who turned out to be the Little Mouse's brother. However, I had often been told that his hermitage still existed, and last week I drove out to find it. Nobody could say exactly where it was, but all agreed that you could not take a car all the way. So I started early in the morning, with a packed lunch in a knapsack, and leaving the car at the southern end of China Bay, set off across the tufty grassland into the rolling bare moors, apparently uninhabited, that lie to the south.

It was a marvellous walk. Sometimes the Hav sky seems higher and wider than any sky anywhere, except perhaps in Texas, and on mornings like this the Hav sea, too, seems matchless — so profoundly, bottomlessly blue, so beautifully flecked with the buoys and boats of the Chinese in their wide bay, and falling so lazily, in such long slow waves, upon the silent foreshore. To the south-west silently lay San Spiridon, its church tower protruding over the ridge, and much further away, far out at sea beneath the drifting white clouds, I fancied I could see the distant smudges of other countries altogether — Cyprus? Syria? The Hesperides?

In front the moors looked empty. The magical spring flowers have left Hav now, and the only bright colours in those heathlands were occasional splodges of yellow furze and speckles of a sort of blue poppy they call in Turkish
göz kraliçe
, ‘eye of the queen'. Otherwise all was brownish-green, and more brown than green. Sometimes a hawk hovered high above me. Sometimes I started a gamebird from my feet. As the sun came up every rock seemed to flicker with its lizard, and out of the earth the warmth brought a faint aroma, dry, sweet and pungent, which I took to be a memory of all the flowers that had been born, blossomed and died there. But of human life, not a glimpse looking across the moors suggested to me the battlefields of the Boer War, whose similarly treeless landscapes so often looked just as deserted, until the rifle-fire of the Afrikaners spat and blazed from hidden kopje trenches.

No Mausers, I am glad to say, opened up on me. The morning was absolutely silent. But presently, scrambling around a rocky outcrop (lizards twitching everywhere, dark lichen in declivities), I looked up and saw, on a low rise far ahead, a small patch of tangled green, like an overgrown garden, and beside it, waving, two brown-clad figures. It took me a good hour to get up there; and whenever I looked up again, there those figures always seemed to be, waving their encouragement.

They came the last half-mile or so to meet me, and when I saw them striding easily in my direction I remembered for a moment a Buddhist mystic I encountered thirty years ago in the Himalayas, who seemed hardly to walk at all over the snows, but rather to levitate. However these ascetics of Hav turned out to be anything but ethereal — light on their feet perhaps, because they were very thin, but smiling very straightforward smiles, offering me jolly greetings in Italian, and showing evidence all too clear, in their stooped old figures and arthritic-looking fingers, that they were as corporeal as anyone else. Their cassocks, tied with straw ropes in monkly style, were neatly patched. They wore rubber flip-flops, incongruously blue and yellow, upon their feet. They had straggly grey beards, and both looked to me in their seventies.

I was ashamed to find myself breathless as these old men, so agile despite their infirmities, cheerfully paced me over the moor. But they laughed my apologies aside. It was no competition, they said, since they lived such wonderfully healthy lives out there; and indeed when we reached the hermitage, and the seven other members of the community, four men, three women, crowded around to welcome me, they did look extraordinarily spry, though all were of a similar age, and gave the impression that were it not for the deep tans of so many summers on the moorland, their cheeks might have been quite rosy.

They seemed to inhabit a pergola: at least the wide shelf of the rising ground there, perhaps a hundred yards long, had been roofed with a construction of wood and wire which, covered as it was all over with wild vines, meant that the place was half indoors, and half out. It was all green and leafy, wonderfully cool, and it was bisected by a small stream which came out of a conduit above, and went splashing away through the heather towards the sea. Along this dappled belvedere were eight or nine little wooden huts, very well built of rough oak, which formed the cells of the community, together with a store-house at the end. Outside was a long trestle table with benches, and an iron stove whose chimney disappeared through the leaves of the pergola. The hermits produced water in thick white china mugs, and we all sat down at the table while they explained things.

What did they call themselves? I asked. Nothing. What were their beliefs? Nothing: they were a community of agnostics, dedicated to the certainty of uncertainty. Would they describe themselves as disciples of Topolino? No, they had simply been friends of his, who had all chosen the same course of life. How did they live? ‘We have our garden, we used to do some fishing, and fortunately some of us have a little money of our own.' Four of them, they said, smiling affectionately at one another, were married couples. One of the men was a widower, whose wife had lived with him ‘on the terrace', as they described their situation. The others were bachelors. ‘And we are all friends,' they cried triumphantly, ‘after forty-five years on the terrace!'

Forty-five years! ‘Come with me,' said one of the old women, scrambling off the bench and taking me by the hand. She led me into her cabin, which was bare, and neat, and had two beds and a vase of eye-of-the-queen on the table. ‘There we all are,' she said; on the wall, a little mildewed, was a photograph of a dozen laughing young men and women, wearing summer clothes but holding in front of them, each one, a cassock and a cord. ‘The twelfth of April, 1940,' said my companion, ‘the day we took our vows — and there's Topolino in the middle.' He looked a splendid fellow, the very opposite of a little mouse, being tall, muscular and evidently exuberant. He alone was wearing his cassock already, beneath a wide Hav hat, and he was holding a paper of some kind scrunched above his head with one hand, while with the other he waved to the camera in a gesture of delight. In the background I could see the walls of the Fondaco, and at each end of the picture two or three small boys, in short trousers, were peering mischievously around the edges of the group.

‘Where are you?' I asked my companion. She showed me herself in the front row, wearing a Spanish-looking blouse with full frilled sleeves, and white trousers. ‘Oh,' she said, ‘I was very modern then.'

I ate my picnic lunch with them, on the trestle table, in the vine-patterned shade. They ate salads and what looked like cold noodles. I offered them some of my wine, but they said no, they hadn't touched the stuff for forty years — ‘but we drank it often enough before!' They were all educated people, two of them at least speaking excellent English, and several of them French. They were Italian by birth, they told me, but now regarded themselves as being of no nationality. ‘We are the people of nowhere.' Nihilists? Certainly not, for they believed that nothing and everything were the same thing. They had long outgrown any instinct for material possession, they said, but at the same time they had foresworn from the very start any striving for mystic enlightenment. They never prayed or meditated, or even read much any more. If they worshipped anything, it was life itself; if they had any doctrine, it could best be identified as a sense of humour.

Of course, said I, they had advantages over other varieties of eremite, in that they were people of intellectual resource, were evidently not destitute, and seemed to have no responsibilities towards anyone else on earth. It was true, they readily admitted. They were mostly the children of business and official families of the Italian concession, and some of them had inherited properties in Italy, which had relieved them of many worries — occasionally for instance some of their members had gone to Beirut, or even to Italy, for medical or dental treatment. Also they often bought food in Yuan Wen Kuo, all walking there and back together — ‘we enjoy the exercise'. I said they must seem exotic figures, the nine of them, strolling down the main street past the Palace of Delights. ‘Oh do you think so?' they said.

They seemed to me on the whole the happiest, the friendliest, the most truly banal and the most entirely selfish people I had met in all Hav. They seemed drained of everything but satisfaction. All nine walked back with me to the start of the outcrop, and all shook my hand affectionately. I said they had been described to me as the only religious people in Hav, and this made them laugh. ‘No,' said one of the old men in an uncharacteristically ironic tone of voice, ‘the only religious people in Hav are the Cathars.'

And so I first heard of the Cathars of Hav. I thought it odd that nobody had mentioned them before, and when I asked about them people seemed evasive. The Cathars were somewhat like Freemasons, I heard it suggested. They no longer existed, somebody else said, or if they did, were all immensely old. Magda just laughed, when I asked her. Dr Borge looked knowing.

I learned something of their beginnings from Jean Antoine's
Hav et les Crusades
, which was published in 1893, but is still the only work on the subject. The Cathar heresy of France, it appears, probably originated among the knights of the First Crusade. They had picked up its basic ideas from the Manicheans, whose roots were in Babylonia, and whose religion was based upon the existence of two equal principles in the world, the Good and the Evil, the Light and the Dark, both to be placated. The Yezidis of modern Iraq, who seem to have had Manichean origins, have come over the centuries to place far more emphasis on the Evil One than on the Good, and have been seen by foreigners as Satan-worshippers — they will not pronounce the sound
sh
, because Satan abhors it, they will not wear the colour blue, because Satan does not like it, they will not eat lettuce because Satan is associated with it, having once hidden under its leaves in time of emergency.

The Crusaders on the other hand evolved their ideas into a recognizably Christian heresy. Like Pelagianism, it postulated that Man was essentially the master of his own destiny — human will was far more important than divine decree; and it was supposed too that Satan had never fallen from heaven, but was still co-regnant with God, dividing the responsibilities of omnipotence, each pulling mankind towards opposite poles of morality. In France Catharism in a more sophisticated form so gripped the imagination of people in the south-east, particularly, that the thirteenth-century Albigensian Crusade was required to exterminate it, the last of the cultists holding out to the bitter end in the hilltop fortresses of Roussillon and Languedoc.

According to Antoine, Hav was a stronghold of Catharism among the Crusaders. Among their Armenian followers were several Paulicians, who held similar views to the Manicheans, and are said powerfully to have influenced the knights — Katourian the minstrel was one. Beynac, himself a native of Roussillon, is said to have been an early convert, and many of his lieutenants followed suit. More than that, they and the Armenians converted to their beliefs many of Hav's cosmopolitan citizens, Greek, Arab, Turkish, Syrian, so that when in 1191 Saladin put an end to Christian rule in the peninsula, and the Crusaders surrendered the castle to the sound of Katourian's lament, they left behind them under Arab rule a resolute Cathar cult of a unique kind. ‘Of all the legacies that remain to us of the Crusader era in Hav', wrote Antoine in 1893, ‘the most mysterious and perhaps the most resilient is the movement of Cathars, which has its connections throughout the Near East, and which long ago crossed the borders of sect or confessional, to become a fraternity still influential — 700 years later — within the body politic of the city.'

It was Fatima Yeğen who led me to the modern Cathars. Yes, she told me cautiously when I mentioned the movement, she knew of their existence, but their affairs were very secret. ‘You cannot guess how secret, how private.' However she would do her best to help, and a few days later, when I was eating my picnic lunch in the Serai garden, she accosted me theatrically. ‘You know the subject we were discussing — those people, you know? Come tonight to the hotel, nine o'clock, and you shall meet somebody who will tell you about them' — and conspiratorially, looking right and left, she flitted away among the flower-beds. ‘Nine o'clock sharp,' she said over her shoulder:

So that night I turned up at the hotel, where Fatima was waiting for me expectantly, nervously I thought, inside her kiosk. ‘Now you must remember', she said, ‘that I have sworn you to secrecy — you must not let me down.' Never, I assured her, and she stopped outside one of the downstairs bedroom doors, said, ‘In there,' and left me. I entered, and two young men rose to greet me. One was Yasar Yeğen, who had driven me down the Staircase on my very first day in Hav. The other, introduced to me simply as George, was the man who had spat at me outside the Palace, when the gendarme dismounted and beat him up.

Neither mentioned our previous encounters. They shook my hand gravely, offered me Cyprus brandy from a bottle that stood, with a couple of toothmugs, on the bedside table, and said they were ready to take me to a Cathar meeting that evening.

‘You must realize', said Yasar, ‘that we do this only because we have heard good things of you, and we may want you to give evidence.'

‘Evidence?' I did not like the sound of that.

‘We want you to tell the world, if it is necessary, that you saw the Cathars of Hav this very night in
séance
.'