Hav (26 page)

‘Dear God!' said I, ‘you might have warned me.'

‘Wait, my dear, in a moment or two you will be soothed. It is all arranged. Trust me.'

And it was true, for the elevator presently slowed, the lights were dimmed, my heart stopped pounding, and as we then sidled gently upwards I discovered that on all four sides of us there was an aquarium — an upright aquarium, as it were, extending to the top of the tower — an acquarium 200 floors deep, through whose waters, oblivious to us as we passed, a multitude of fish floated and loitered, golden, black and crimson shapes, with prickly fins or languidly trailing tails, drifting here and there in and out of the elevator's lights. Soft tuneless music played. The lights were dimmed. Up we glided through the fish and the water, weightlessly. After the detonation of our launch it was delightfully comforting.

‘An old Chinese device,' Biancheri said. ‘Haven't you seen the fish tanks in Chinese dentists' waiting-rooms? They were originally to calm anxious patients, but their effect is so addictive that nowadays dentists have them there for their own pleasure — like a narcotic. The Chinese who built this place carried the idea to extremes, and reversed it. First we get that almighty shock, and then in contrast we are given this lovely feeling of beauty and release. They call it Peace after Murder. It is part of The Lazaretto Experience.'

I wondered if every elevator travelled through the fish-tank in this therapeutic way, but no, it was only Summit Car 7, the number 7 being a traditional Havian symbol for contentment. It alone was non-stop, too. ‘After all, the people who live here have to get off at their own floors sometimes — give them a chance!'

‘And who are they,' I asked, ‘when they're at home?'

But before he could reply we had reached the top, and stepped out into a second lobby, equally policed. We showed our passes. We signed a book. An electric door slid, and we stepped out on to the summit gallery. High above us blazed the great letter M, flashing its colours, and behind it Achilles' crested helmet, and above them both, invisible from the ground, were batteries of aerials and electronic dishes. There was a ceaseless hum of machinery somewhere. Below us a great glow of light emanated from the building itself, almost as though it was burning — it was like standing on top of a pillar of fire. And far down there on the ground Lazaretto was now laid out for me like a diagram, or a mathematical theorem.

Oh, the famous Kiruski had done his job well! Now I understood. It reminded me of those immense sand-drawings in the Peruvian desert whose subjects are apparent only from the air — spiders, crabs, monkeys that only the gods can see. Kiruski had so arranged things that the meaning of Hav itself should be represented in this, its newest incarnation, but that only from its utmost pinnacle, beneath the lamp of the great ‘M' itself, could it be understood. Now I saw it all, in all its allegory! There were the lights of Lazaretto, far below us, and now I realized that all its paths and tunnels and shrubberies and towered villas were in the form of the circular labyrinth, the old Cathar symbol for mystic perfection. On the other side the Diplomatic Suburb was a metaphor of the mundane, patchily symmetrical,
sans
mystery,
sans
discipline — decidedly lacking, as the lady had warned me, ideological certainty. And high above it all, god-like in its strength and selfishness, indestructibly the Myrmidon Tower spread its glory, flashed its message of conviction across maze and mediocrity, island, harbour and city itself.

‘Are you all right?' asked Biancheri on the way down. ‘You look a little shaky.'

Something did seem to have happened to me up there — a spasm of dizziness, like a transient mini-stroke. It might have been the elevator, I told him, the rocket-jolt and the fish, Murder and Peace, or perhaps it was the effect of all those electronics, or just the height maybe. I thought it was more probably, though, an overwhelming sensation of sheer
power
that had overcome me in the tower — some kind of transcendental influence, you might say . . .

‘Aha,' he said. ‘Well perhaps you're right. There's a lot of power stacked up in that building. And believe you me, they know all about Ibsen's paw up there! Perhaps you're right!'

He walked me back to Palast One, through the garden torches and the bazaars, and when we parted he said: ‘You take care of yourself, now. This isn't Llanystumdwy. Oh and by the way, you can disengage the tele-dado by pressing a little pink button behind the jacuzzi.'

The Way of Genius

A baleful effect — expecting the answer yes — his deputies awaited me — a magical tale — in memoriam — taking a turn

Because of the time change I woke early next morning, and went out to my balcony to watch the dawn break. I remembered that on my very first morning in Hav, two decades before, I had awoken to the sound of Missakian's trumpet from the castle rampart, thrillingly echoing across the wakening city. I stood there now in the half-light, looking towards the distant outline of the citadel, hoping to hear that magical reveille again.

As the sun's rim showed itself above the horizon I imagined the trumpeter in the cold lee of the castle wall, wetting his lips and raising his instrument as the city's minstrels had done every morning for so many generations. But no. No silvery trump called, to die away heart-rendingly into the mist. Instead there suddenly sounded, tremendously amplified over loudspeakers across the city, the lugubrious clanging chimes of a carillon, playing music that I did not recognize but which sounded almost fictionally antique. I was reminded, there and then, of the prehistoric horns they keep in the National Museum at Copenhagen, found deep in a peat-bog, which are sometimes taken from their cases and played on ceremonial occasions, and which were once described to me as sounding ‘older than the bogs themselves'. And I remembered too how a folk-band leader, in the Balad of years before, had described Havian music as ‘something very cold out of the long ago'.

So that carillon seemed — older than Hav itself, not indeed in the timbre of the instrument itself, but in the nature of its music, which seemed to employ rhythms I had never heard before, chords and intervals beyond the rungs of the harmonic ladder — rarities of nature, perhaps, like triply diminished thirds. Was it in some lost mode — Lydian, Phrygian, Havian? The effect was baleful anyway, and the loud clanging so depressed me that I went indoors and shut the window, so that the discreet rush of the air-conditioning would drown it. Poor Missakian, thought I, if he were still alive to hear it.

Just as I did so I noticed an envelope sliding beneath my door. It was stamped with the helmet logo, and was an invitation to visit the Office of Ideology at ten o'clock that morning — sharp. This sounded to me less an invitation than a summons, or at best one of those Latin interrogatives that expect the answer ‘yes,' so I thought it best to accept, and made sure to be at the tunnel entrance just before ten.

Transportation is one of the many polished pleasures of Lazaretto. Wherever you are in the resort, whether you are walking down to the beach or just wandering around, within a minute or two a bright-painted resort buggy is sure to slow down beside you and ask if you need a lift — ‘Welcome, dirleddy, make yourself comfortable, please; where would you like to go?'

It is especially convenient if you plan to go through the harbour tunnel to the city, because until late at night half a dozen buggies are perpetually going back and forth. All you must do is show your blue pass to the man at the gate, sign the exit book, and away you trundle into the underwater tunnel, which is gaily decorated all over with mosaics illustrating the history of Hav from Troy to the Intervention, concluding with a representation of the Myrmidon Tower, flat on the tunnel roof, whose colours gradually merge with the daylight that greets you outside. It is very stylish, very cool. ‘Ideology Office, dirleddy? Hold on.'

I was sad to think that these poky little vehicles, like something off a Florida golf course, had replaced the Electric Ferry that had contributed so inescapably to the atmosphere of the old Hav, but I had to admit advantages: in a trice we had emerged from the tunnel into a city square, and the buggy-driver, removing his straw hat with a courtly air, was surreptitiously accepting my tip (for gratuities, Biancheri had told me, are forbidden not just at Lazaretto, but anywhere in the new Hav).

The square, Memorial Square, was entirely unfamiliar to me. The sea was out of sight, the waterfront was presumably behind me somewhere, and every single structure seemed to be brand-new. The buggy had dropped me before a large low building of white concrete. Its façade was plastered with a myriad Achillean helmets of marble, row upon row, rather as the Casa de las Conchas in Salamanca is studded all over with cockle-shells. I did not have to ask if this was the Office of Ideology. It had ideology written all over it. An armed sentry in white uniform and astrakhan hat, much like the military livery I remembered, gestured me inside with a charming smile, and in the severely functional lobby I was almost fulsomely greeted. It is true that I had to insert my blue pass into an identification slot, rather like putting a ticket into a railway-station machine, but the woman at the desk was wreathed in ingratiation. The Director himself, she said, was eagerly expecting me, being himself a scholar of the English language, and she congratulated me on my punctuality, a virtue much prized in Hav. It was a great pleasure to have me at the Office, declared this amiable functionary, and she herself took me up the white marble staircase to the office at the top.

‘Ah, Dirleddy Morris, what a privilege to meet you,' said the trimly suited elderly man, wearing a red tarboosh, who rose from his desk to greet me. A monocle dangled from a golden cord around his neck, and what with this and the tasselled tarboosh, he looked remarkably like an Egyptian pasha of the previous century.

‘Please, sit down, take comfort, and I'll join you.' Coming round to the front of his desk he sat beside me on a squashy flowered sofa and asked me if I would care for tea. ‘No? Not indeed our finest Hav Broadleaf, cultivated in our new plantations on the escarpment slope? Well then, let us instead take a little chat.

‘We are particularly pleased to have you as our guest, Dirleddy Morris, because here in the Office we have all perused your book, and we feel that you have an instinctive sensation, a gut-sensation as it were, for the fundamental identity, one might say the basic soul, of our beloved country.'

‘I thought the book was banned,' said I.

‘Banned? Oh dear me no, certainly not. For one reason and another it has been difficult to obtain in recent years, but as you see, we certainly have our hands on it here' — and reaching up to his desk he showed me a well-worn copy of
Last Letters from Hav.

‘There is one memorable passage which checked us of your empathy for the Hav meanings, and encouraged us to have the League of Intellectuals send you their invitation. It occurs on page 99.'

The page evidently had a marker in it, for he immediately opened it there. ‘Would you care, dirleddy, if I reminded you of your own words? They are greatly moving to any true Havian, I think. You may remember that they demonstrate the return of fishing-boats into our harbour, and this' (he cleared his throat and put his monocle in his eye) ‘is how they run:

‘Those are your own words, dirleddy, and sublimital words they are. They bring the tears to my eyes to read them' — and he took out his monocle and wiped it, to demonstrate the fact — ‘because they seem to see through the tumbled years into the bright heroic times of our beginnings.
As though young navigators have found their way to Hav out of the bright heroic past
. There it is, dear Miss Morris, there is the truth of us. There is the beauty of our condition, as we sail, shouting and laughing at one another, brown-torsoed into our newly reborn city. Thank you. You write as if you are yourself writing out of the soul of Hav, and that is why you are here as our honoured guest today.'

I don't suppose his was quite the sort of figure I had in mind when I wrote the piece (which I had forgotten all about), but I let that go. ‘How very kind of you,' I said. ‘I did wonder why the League had invited me, especially as I had heard you'd banned the book.'

‘No, no, Ms Morris, I have told you. Indisputably not banned. Simply unobtainable for administrative reasons, I remonstrate you. As you will find, certain segments of it — that same glorious passage, for example — have been reprinted by this Office and intentionally circulated. We all very much hope that if you publish a sequel, bring your reflections on Hav up to the instant, we shall have the pleasure of reprinting it in full here in Hav — we would rather have it done here, because, you must know, your Western publishers are notoriously unreliable in matters of administrative cooperation. I am myself, as you may perhaps have observed, a student of English idiom, and I personally relish your use of vocabulary.