Hav (23 page)

Not Havians, I laughed, and that brought us to the condition of the city which lay, feeling a thousand miles away, through the string-bead curtains of that cave, and down the gulley across the salt-flats. What was happening down there? What was the vague feeling of malaise or conspiracy that seemed to be gathering like a cloud over the city? Who slashed the paintings in the palace chapel? Most ominously of all, what were those black aircraft we had seen on the way up? None of them knew. ‘Bad things,' said Brack, ‘that's all we know.' Were they worried? They did not seem to be. ‘We are here, it is there.' Besides, they had no high opinion of life down on the peninsula. ‘Do you not know', said Brack, speaking for himself now, ‘what sort of people they are? Each talks behind the other. Have you not discovered? Hav is never how it says. So . . .' He splayed his hands in a gesture of indifference, and all around the table the brown faces gravely nodded, or leaned backwards with a sigh. ‘We are here, it is there.'

And did they, I asked, ever see a Hav bear these days? Supper was over by then, and we were drinking out of a cheerful assortment of tumblers, cups and souvenir mugs from Port Said the Kretevs' own liqueur, made from the little purple bilberries which abound on the upper slopes of the escarpment, and alleged to cause hallucinations, like the magic mushroom, if you drink too much of it. There was silence for a moment. Somebody made a joke and raised a laugh. They talked among themselves in undertones. Then, ‘Come on,' said Brack, taking a torch from the mantelpiece, ‘come with us.' Out we trooped into the moonlit night, the whole company of us, some people scattering to their own caves to pick up torches; and so in an easy straggle, fifteen or twenty of us I suppose, torch beams wavering everywhere up the ravine, we walked up the gravel track towards the face of the escarpment. Above us the rocks rose grey and blank; all around the lights of the cave-dwellers twinkled; low in the sky, across the flatlands, a half-moon was rising. Through some of the open cave-doors I could see the flickering screens of TV sets, and discordant snatches of music reached us stereophonically from all sides. The engine of the generator rhythmically thumped.

It was a stiff climb that Brack led us in the darkness, off the sloping floor of the ravine, up a winding goat path, very steep, which took us high up the escarpment bluff, until those lights of Palast were far below us, the music had faded, and only the beat of the generator still sounded. The Kretevs, though considerably more out of breath than the hermits of the eastern hills, were not dismayed. They were full of bilberry juice, like me. The women merrily hitched up their skirts, the men flashed their torches here and there, they laughed and chatted all the way. They seemed in their element, in the dark, on the mountain face, out there in the terrain of
Ursus hav
and the snow raspberries.

Quite suddenly, almost as though it had been switched off, we could no longer hear the noise of the generator. ‘When we hear the silence', said Brack, ‘we know we are there' — for at the very same moment we crossed a small rock ridge and found ourselves in a dark gullet, with a big cave-mouth at the end of it. The Kretevs stopped their chatter and turned their torches off. ‘We must be quiet now,' whispered Brack. In silence we walked up the gulley, and I became aware as we neared the cave of a strange smell: a thick, warm, furry, licked smell, with a touch of that muskiness that I had noticed on the Kretevs themselves — an enormously old smell, I thought, which seemed to come from the very heart of the mountain itself.

We entered the cave in a shuffling gaggle, like pilgrims, guided only by Brack's torch. It was not at all damp in there. On the contrary, it felt quite particularly dry, like a hayloft, and there was no shine of vapour on its walls, or chill in its air. The further we went, the stronger that smell became, and the quieter grew the Kretevs, until they walked so silently, on tip-toe it seemed, that all I could hear was their breathing in the darkness. Nobody spoke. Brack's torch shone steadily ahead of us. The passage became narrower and lower, so that we had to bend almost double to get through, and then opened out once more into what appeared to be a very large low chamber, its atmosphere almost opaque, it seemed to me, with that warmth and must and furriness. Brack shone his torch around the chamber: and there were the bears.

At first (though by now I knew of course what to expect) I did not realize they were bears. They looked just like piles of old rugs, heaped on top of one another, like the discarded stock of a carpet-seller. They lay in heaps around the walls of the chamber, motionless. But the Kretevs began to make a noise then, a sort of soothing caressing noise, something between singing and sighing, and all around the cave I heard a stirring and a rustling — grunts, pants, heavings. When Brack shone his torch around again, everywhere I could see big brown heads raised from those huddles, and bright green eyes staring back at us out of the shadows. The bears were not in the least hostile, or frightened. One or two rolled their heads over sleepily, like cats, burying them in their paws. One was caught by the torch light in the middle of a yawn. None bothered to get to their feet, and as the Kretevs ended their crooning and we stole away down the passage again, bumping into one another awkwardly in the silence, I could hear those animals settling down to sleep again in their soft and fusty privacy.

When we reached the open air again the moon was glistening upon the salt-flats below, and the Kretevs burst once more into laughter and conversation. They seemed refreshed and reassured by their visit to the bears, and gave me the impression that they would one and all sleep like logs that night, in their own scattered caverns of the hillside.

I did too, in my sleeping-bag in the cool back room of Tiya's cave, and got up in the morning in time to say goodbye to the market men before the dawn broke. The goatherds and gardeners were already climbing up the ravine. ‘Come back again,' said Brack as he shook my hand, but I felt I never would. ‘Look after yourselves,' I said in return. When I left Palast myself, a couple of hours later, all the young men had gone, and there were only women, children and old men to see me off. Their farewell was rather formal. They stood there still and silent, even the children, as I turned on the engine and started the Renault's reluctant ignition (not what it was when the tunnel pilots had it). ‘Goodbye,' I said, ‘goodbye.' They smiled their wistful smiles, and raised their hands uncertainly.

The Agent writes — symptoms — trouble — a decision in the night — saying goodbye — looking back

When I got home from my visit to the Kretevs Signora Vattani knocked on my door with a letter for me. It looked vaguely official, and important, or she would have left it on the table downstairs. She doubtless thought it was a social invitation, but it wasn't.

I immediately went round to the Aliens Office and presented the letter to Mahmoud. What did it mean? Nothing, he said, nothing. It was just rumours, that was all. I should take no notice of it. What could the British Agent know that he didn't know? — why, he had been with the Governor himself that very morning. ‘But if I were you,' Mahmoud added, ‘I would not show the letter to anyone else.'

I showed it to everyone, of course, but they nearly all pooh-poohed it, or professed to. As the days passed, nevertheless, I felt the city's usual indeterminate disquiet, its habitual grumble or frisson in the air, unmistakably resolving itself into something more menacing. If I had been haunted before by the Iron Dog or the Cathars, I was pursued now by the implication of those two black aircraft.

Yes, what about those aircraft? Few people admitted to having seen them at all, but those who did said they were probably just passing over, or taking part in Turkish war games. Then it seemed to me that there were rather more of those baffling tramp steamers coming and going in the harbour, vague of destination and improbable of cargo, but Chimoun assured me that it was ‘merely a seasonal fluctuation of traffic'. The gunboat moored at the Lazaretto had steam up one morning, for the first time since I have been in Hav, and that afternoon I found the Fondaco wharf screened off by canvas awnings, and was told to go round the back way by a sentry shouting down at me from the roof; I peered through a gap when he wasn't looking, but all I could see was a pile of banana boxes. The annual football match between the Salt Men and the Runners, representing in effect the Balad and the Medina, was indefinitely postponed ‘owing to probable weather conditions', and it was announced in the
Gazette
that in future the Electric Ferry services would end at sunset, instead of midnight as before.

Little symptoms, symptoms in the mind perhaps. Nobody seemed to be worrying. Signora Vattani said: ‘Believe me, I know what trouble is. I've seen enough of it in my time. I know when trouble's in the air.' Armand said: ‘Yes,
ma chérie
, these are feelings that we all have after our first few months in Hav. It is like an island here. After a few months we pine to get off — then we pine to get back again.' Magda said darkly: ‘You're right, you're right, at last you feel it, you are becoming the true Havian at last.' Fatima Yeğen said she did not like to think about such things. I took to listening to the BBC news each night, but there was no mention of Hav.

I telephoned Ronald Thorne and asked him if he would elucidate his warning, or allow me to come to the Agency to talk about it. ‘Really, Miss Morris,' he said, ‘I think I have done my duty in writing to you. These are busy times for me. You must take your own counsel on these matters.' I telephoned Hav 001, too, but it was always engaged. I kept my eye on the various refugees I knew in the city, the Israelis, the Libyans, those two Russians, somehow supposing that they would be more sensitive than the rest of us to stirrings in the political atmosphere: they were still drinking in the same cafés, loitering around Pendeh Square, sitting on the water-front, as they always did.

But by last week nobody could ignore the signs. On the Monday morning, very early, there was an explosion somewhere, and the electric power was off all day. The
Gazette
appeared with half its front page blank, and worshippers going to the Grand Mosque for morning prayers found that indecipherable graffiti in red paint had been scrawled all over its arcades. On Wednesday I was told there had been some kind of riot in the Balad, and when I walked across the square I found the Palace guards no longer in their white drill and epaulettes, with those quaint guns and those stylized smiles: they were in camouflage suits now, held automatic rifles, and seemed to be cultivating the facial expressions of martial art. ‘Don't worry,' Mahmoud said, ‘don't worry, that always happens at the end of July — this is their training time.' But when I drove south from the Medina later that day, intending to draw some pictures of the Iron Dog, the track was blocked with barricades, and notices said that the Conveyor Bridge was closed to traffic for essential repairs.

Now everybody was beginning to be anxious, without admitting it, without knowing why. The
Gazette
told us nothing, but nobody could fail to see the two black aircraft when they came back on Thursday morning, because they flew deafeningly backwards and forwards very low over the centre of the city, shaking the windows with the thunderous blast of their engines. There was a long, long line at the bank when I went to collect my draft. Fatima reported an unusual number of passengers leaving on the train. Somebody said they had seen all the rich yachts from Casino Cove sailing away together, as in convoy, south past San Spiridon towards Cyprus. At the café in Pendeh Square I met a disconsolate group of young Germans who had come to Hav on an overland adventure tour: they had expected to stay a week, they said, but had been ordered back up the Staircase that same night. When I asked Armand what could be happening, he said, testily: ‘How can I know? I am just an old pensioner. I am no longer in touch.'

On Thursday night, soon after midnight, I heard a single protracted burst of automatic gunfire, somewhere quite close. Nothing more. I ran to my balcony and looked out across the city, but all seemed peaceful. A few people were walking along the pavement below. The last No. 2 tram was disappearing under the Brandenburg. I could see the lights of a ship moving slowly down the harbour past the dim outline of the Lazaretto. The Serai domes shone ominously above the roofs, and made me think of Diaghilev, the King of Montenegro, and Rimsky-Korsakov playing his piano in the palace garden. High above us I could sense, rather than see, the grey shape of the castle, up whose winding path, in a few hours, Missakian would be labouring with his trumpet for another day's lament — how many had the city heard, I wondered, and with what variety of feeling, since the Crusaders marched off between the silent ranks of Arabs to their waiting galleys at the quay?