Hav (22 page)

He was using the word, I knew, in its French sense, but all the same it gave me an eerie jolt.

‘
If it is necessary
, I say. You will know. Otherwise you must swear to me that you will reveal nothing — where you have been, who you saw. You must ask me no questions — promise me.'

‘I promise.'

‘Very well, then we need not blindfold you. Try not to look where we are going.'

I tried hard, and it was not difficult. We rode in George's Citroën, Yasar in the back with me, and I could scarcely help observing that we sped straight across Pendeh Square, turned behind the old legation buildings, and entered the Medina by the small gateway, only just wide enough for a car, which is called Bab el Kelb, ‘Dog's Gate'. After that I was lost. We went up this alley and that, more than once seemed to double back on our tracks, crossed a square or two, passed through one of the open bazaars; and finally, leaving George and the car in a yard full of iron pipes and asbestos sheeting, and half used as a football pitch, Yasar and I entered the back door of one of the towering old Arab houses which form the core of the Old City. I could see the minaret of the Grand Mosque over a rooftop to my right, but for the life of me I could not tell which side of it was facing us. Their secret was safe. I had no idea where I was.

Up some steep stairs we went, across a landing, around an open gallery above the interior courtyard of the house, up some more stairs, through what appeared to be some kind of robing-room, for there were outdoor clothes on hooks, hangers and chairs all over it, until we entered a small chamber, more a cupboard than a room, through whose wall I could hear a muffled drone of voices, sometimes a single speaker, sometimes a chorus, talking what sounded like French. Yasar closed the door. We were in utter darkness. He pulled aside a curtain then, and through a glazed and grilled little window I could see into a dimly lit room below.

‘The
séance
,' whispered Yasar. ‘You see the Cathars of Hav.'

Actually, now that I was there it reminded me more of a Welsh eisteddfod than a spiritualist meeting, for the forty or fifty people down there were all strangely robed. On the left sat the women, in white, veiled like nuns. On the right were the men, in black, with cowls worn far forward over their faces. And on a dais in the middle sat a dozen men whose robes were bright red, whose turbans were wound around the lower halves of their faces like Tuaregs, and whose tall wooden staves were each capped with the shining silver figure of an animal, tail extended. I could not hear what was being said. It seemed to be a sort of ritualized conference, for sometimes one of the elders spoke alone, sometimes a man or woman rose from the floor to make a contribution, and sometimes the whole company broke into the droning mechanical chant that I had heard before. ‘Remember,' said Yasar, ‘you know nobody here.'

I nodded, but wondered. Were not some of those veiled figures familiar to me, beneath their theatrical cloaks and hoods, behind their veils? Did not that woman in the front row, the tensely crouching one at the end — did she not look a little like — who was it? — Yes! Anna Noyochka's misanthropist housekeeper? Was it possible — surely not — but was it possible that the man speaking now, his hood deeply down over his forehead, was standing somewhat in Missakian's stance? Could they conceivably be Assyrians, those stocky men just behind him? Was it altogether fancy, or could I detect above the red veil of the most stalwart of the elders the tunnel pilot's lordly stare?

I could be sure of none of them. I was disturbed and bewildered, and began to see the most unlikely people disguised in those queer vestments among the shadows of the chamber — the Caliph, Mr Thorne, Chimoun, even crazed old Dr Boschendorf! They were probably all in my imagination, and I did not have long to search for more substantial clues, because at a word from the chief elder, and a knock on the floor from his stave, the company rose to its feet and turned towards the dais, as if they were about to recite a creed or mantra. Instantly Yasar drew the curtain and hurried me out of the room, down the stairs and into the car where George was waiting.

‘You must ask us no questions,' said Yasar. ‘You have the evidence, if it is needed. Remember your promise.'

‘
Remember
,' said George, less kindly I thought.

‘Yes, yes, I remember. But just let me ask you one thing — only one, and nothing more I swear. Who were the men on the platform, the ones in red? Were they priests?'

The young men looked at each other, and shrugged. ‘I don't know how you say it in English,' said Yasar, ‘but we call them
Les Parfaits
.'

The
Perfects!

Not Prefects — Perfects!

I told nobody about my visit to the upper room of the Cathars, but I did tell Mahmoud that I had been to see the hermits, and that they only confirmed what he had said about Hav — they were not in the least religious. He was intensely disappointed. He had thought them the great exceptions. As a matter of fact in his adolescence he had cherished the ambition of joining them one day in a life of prayer and meditation. ‘They were my ideal,' he said.

‘Why
didn't
you join them, then?'

‘Why was I never a roof-runner? Cowardice, Jan, pure cowardice. I have lived a life of it.' Having met Topolino's followers for myself, I did not think much courage was needed to join them on the terrace: but I was not so sure about the Cathars.

A visit to the troglodytes

All this time (it may have crossed your mind) and I still had not clambered the escarpment to the cave-homes of the Kretevs, the most compelling of all the Havians! I wonder why? Sometimes I was afraid of disillusionment, I suppose, in this city of reappraisals. Sometimes I reasoned that I should end with the beginning, and keep those atavists for my last letter. And sometimes I felt that, what with the Cathars, and the British Agency's radio masts, and the peculiar island Greeks, I was surfeited with enigma. But I kept in touch with Brack, and at the market the other day he beckoned me over to his stall. He said that if I wanted to come to Palast (which is, so far as I can make out, more or less what the troglodytes themselves call their village) I had better come that very day — if I brought my car I could join the market convoy when it went home in the afternoon. Trouble was brewing in Hav, he said, bad trouble, and it might be my only chance. He shook his head in a sorrowful way, and his ear-rings glinted among his dreadlocks. So at three o'clock — sharp! — I drove down to the truck park, and found the Kretev pick-ups all ready to go. Brack leant from his cab and gestured me to follow him. The other drivers, starting up their engines, stared at me blankly.

Trouble? All seemed peaceful, as we drove along the edge of the Balad and into the salt-flats. The old slave settlement looked just as listless as it had when I first saw it, so dim-lit and arid, through the windows of the Mediterranean Express. Some small boys were playing football on the waste ground beside the windmills. Away to the west I thought I could distinguish Anna's villa, in the flank of the hills, and imagined her settling down, now as always, to tea, petits fours and her current novel (she is very fond of thrillers). The usual lonely figures were labouring in the white waste of the salt-pans, and now and then one of the big salt-trucks rumbled by on its way to the docks.

But just as we left the marshes and approached the first rise of the escarpment, Brack leant out of his window again and pointed to something in the sky behind us and there were two black aircraft, flying very low and very fast out of the sea — except for the passing airliners, the first I had ever seen over Hav.

In the event I did not have to clamber to the caves, for one can drive all the way. It is a rough, steep and awkward track though, and most of the Kretevs left their trucks at a parking place at the foot of the escarpment, piling vigorously into the back of Brack's pick-up and into my Renault. Thus I found myself squeezed tight in my seat by troglodytes when I drove at last into the shaly centre of Palast — which, like so many things in Hav, was not as I expected it to be.

I had supposed it something like the well-known cave settlements of Cappadocia, whose people inhabit queer white cones of rock protruding from the volcanic surface. But Palast is much more like the gypsy colony of Sacramonte in Spain, or perhaps those eerie towns of cave-tombs that one finds in Sicily, which is to say that it is a township of rock-dwellings strung out on both sides of a cleft in the face of the escarpment. Wherever I looked I could see them, some in clusters of five or six, some all alone, some at ground level, some approached by steps in the rock, or ladders, some apparently altogether inaccessible high in the cliff face. Many had tubs of greenery outside, or flags of bright colours, and some had whitewashed surrounds to their entrances, like picture frames.

The flat floor of the ravine was evidently common ground, with a row of wells in the middle. Shambled cars, not unlike my own, were parked at random around it, stocky ponies wandered apparently at liberty, hens scooted away from my wheels. Out of some of the cave doors, which were mostly screened with red-and-yellow bead curtains, heads poked to see us come — a woman with a pan in her hand, an old man smoking a cigar, half a dozen boys and girls who, spotting my unfamiliar vehicle, came tumbling out to meet us. Soon I was sitting at a scrubbed table in Brack's own ground-floor cave, drinking hot sweet tea with his young wife, whose name sounded like Tiya, and being introduced to an apparently numberless stream of neighbours, of all ages, who came pressing into the cave.

When I say I was being introduced, it was generally in a kind of dumb show. Some of the men spoke Turkish, some a little Arab or French, but the women spoke only Kretev. We shook hands solemnly, exchanged names and inspected each others' clothes. Here I was at a disadvantage. I was wearing jeans, a tennis shirt and my yellow Australian hat, rather less spring-like now after so much bleaching by the suns of Hav. They on the other hand were distinctly not wearing the jumbled neo-European hand-downs I had expected from the appearance of their market men on the job; on the contrary, they were in vivid reds and yellows, like the door curtains, the women in fine flowing gypsy skirts, the men in blazing shirts over which their long tangled hair fell to great effect. They jammed the table all around me and I felt their keen unsmiling eyes concentrated hard, analysing my every gesture, my every response. Their faces were very brown, and they smelled of a musky scent. Sometimes their ear-rings and bangles tinkled. Whenever I was not talking they fell into a hushed but animated conversation among themselves.

‘They want to know', Brack told me, ‘what you think of our caves.' The caves seemed fine to me, if his own was anything to go by. It was far more than a cave really, being four or five whitewashed rooms, three with windows opening on to the common ground outside, furnished in a high-flown romantic mode, tapestry chair-covers and mahogany sideboards, and lit by electric lights beneath flowered glass lampshades definitely not designed by Peter Behrens of AEG. Everything was brilliantly clean: it all reminded me of a Welsh farmhouse, not least the miscellaneous mementoes of Brack's naval service that were neatly displayed in the glass-fronted corner cupboard. The water, I was told, had to be drawn from the wells, but the electricity came from the Kretevs' own generator.

It all seemed fine, I said. But was there any truth in the rumour that the caves really joined together, forming a secret labyrinth inside the escarpment? They did not, as I expected, laugh at this. They talked quite earnestly among themselves before Brack interpreted. ‘We don't think so,' he said, ‘we have never found one, but our people have always maintained that there is one great tunnel in the mountain behind us, and they say a great leader of our people long ago sleeps in there, and if we are ever in danger he will awake from sleep with his warriors and come out to help us. That is the story.' What about the treasures of the old Kretevs, the goblets, the golden horses, which I had been told from time to time were picked up on the escarpment? Then they
did
laugh. No such luck, they said, and when many years before some archaeologists had excavated the barrow-tombs down in the salt-flats, which were said to be the graves of primeval Kretevs, they found nothing inside but old bits of natural rock, placed there, it was supposed, because they bore some resemblance to human faces.

There was a thumping noise outside, and a rumble, and with a flicker the lights came on. Then we had supper. Everyone stayed for it, even the children who had been hanging about their parents' legs or staring at me from the doorway. It was goat stew in a huge tureen, with fibrous bread that Tiya had made. We helped ourselves with a wooden spoon and ate out of a variety of china bowls, some brought in from neighbouring caves because there were too few to go round. We never stopped talking. We talked about the origins of the Kretevs (‘We came out of the earth, with horses'). We talked about the snow raspberries (not so plentiful as they used to be, but then that made for higher prices). We talked about Kretev art (‘They do not understand your question') and Kretev religion (‘We do not talk about that'). We talked about earning a living (their goat-herds, their market-gardens, their grassland where the cattle grazed). We talked about their language, but inconclusively; every now and then I heard words which seemed vaguely familiar to me, but when I asked their meaning no bells were rung, and when I invited the Kretevs to count up to ten for me, hoping to recognize some Celtic affinities, I recognized not a single numeral. What were their names again? Around the room we went, but not a name seemed anything but totally alien — Projo (I write as I heard them), Daraj, Stilts, what sounded improbably like Hammerhead. They had no surnames, they said: just the one name each, that was all. They needed no more. They were Kretevs!