Hav (27 page)

‘So there we are, dirleddy. Our cards are displayed. It is an ornament to have you here, and I hope you will allow me personally to conduct you on an inspection of our new Hav. I know you have already tasted the wonder of Lazaretto. (They spell it with a symbol of astonishment, you know, just for effect — a cranky modernism, in my opinion, but you know what publicists are.) Now, you are expected for a morning conference with my deputies here at the Office, disposed for 10.30 sharp, and after an early lunch we shall spend the afternoon
en promenade
, so to speak. (We used to have a French resident here, before the Intervention — a literary cove himself, as it happens — and he always used to amuse me by his talk of going
en promenade
— so much more gentlemanly, he seemed to think, than simply taking a turn, as you or I would have exclaimed it.)'

With elaborate politesse he showed me to the door.

‘My private name, by the way, is Dr Porvic, and I will now say you goodbye. See you later, alligator.'

I very nearly responded in kind, but I wasn't at all sure that he was joking.

Downstairs his deputies awaited me, five of them. They reminded me of the ideologues of apartheid who, long before, had greeted me with similar earnest solemnity at Stellenbosch in South Africa. There would be no joking with them, I knew. They sat me down on a hard chair in a small conference room, and gathered about me rather like medical students at an anatomy theatre. They were all young, all in suits and ties, all with small Achillean badges in their lapels, and they were clearly settling down to put me straight.

It was a bit like being lectured — not exactly brainwashed, just having inaccurate notions corrected. They knew, they said, of my well-known sympathy for the Havian ethos — the Director had told them about it, and they had read the Office's extracts from my book, and now wished only to make clear to me what had been achieved since the end of the Intervention.

Fundamentally, they said, the change was revelatory. When the Cathar Perfects had assumed power, after the withdrawal of the Intervening Force, they had made public the results of secret scholastic research which they had undertaken down the centuries, and which made apparent for the first time the profoundest origins of the State. As was well known, although the Cathars had been forced into anonymity in the sixteenth century, they had always been the true guardians of the Hav identity, but it had hitherto been supposed that the cult had been established here by knights of the First Crusade.

‘Now then,' said they (I forget now which one of them actually said it — in my memory they seem to have spoken with one voice), ‘I'm sure you are aware that the earliest known urban settlement on our peninsula was that of Troy. Schliemann himself identified its remains on the western coast, and there is no doubt that Achilles set up his camp there when the Iliadic expedition first arrived from the Aegean (there was, of course, no such thing then as Greece).

‘You also surely know that Achilles brought his own bodyguard with him, Myrmidons, from the province of Thessaly in the north of what is now Greece. They sailed in their own ships — fifty of them in all. The Myrmidons long ago vanished from history, or legend for that matter, except as a synonym for fierce and dogged loyalty. By the time Achilles died they had dispersed, gone, vanished we know not where — Homer does not tell us.'

I was beginning to see the light.

‘Are you beginning to see the light, Ms Morris? Dr Porvic tells us that your enlightened attitude to the meaning of Hav comes, he believes, purely by instinct. As we remember it, he tells us that you yourself come from the country of Wales — Cymru, is it? He says it is itself an often forgotten province of heroic origins, and suggests that this predisposes you, as it were, to absorb the Hav epic and its aesthetic.

‘Be that as it may . . . I dare say you are aware that in the past it has sometimes been proposed that the Kretevs, the cave-dwellers of the Escarpment, were not as had previously been thought Celts from central Europe, but descendants of that lost Myrmidonic host. It is also indisputable that the Cathar cult itself drew its original inspiration from Eastern mysteries—in particular Manicheanism and related dualistic conceptions. Now DNA tests carried out by our Office ethnic scientists have indeed established that the Kretev blood-stream, or as we prefer to call it, Ethnic Authority, had no known Celtic affinities. On the other hand it showed scientifically detectable analogies to ethnicities of certain provinces of what is now called Greece.

‘And here is the glory of it. During the Intervention, evidence was clandestinely discovered which proved without doubt —
we repeat, without doubt, Ms Morris
— that the ancient Cathar families of Hav, the Perfects of the ancient cult,
shared the same ethnicity
. In short, that our Cathar theocracy could claim unquestioned and legitimate descent from the Myrmidon warrior people who first came to Hav with the hero Achilles — possibly, unlikely though it sounds, through the medium of the troglodytes! It has even been suggested that Mani, the original prophet of Manicheanism, may have settled on our peninsula during his meditative wanderings. So it was established that the Cathars were, so to speak, the divinely sponsored rulers of our republic, suppressed for so many years by prejudice religious, political and ethnic.'

The five deputies sat back in their chairs, observing my reaction. It must have satisfied them. I was fascinated, and astonished. So much about the new Hav now fell into place.

‘I see that the implications of this momentous certainty are apparent to you, and now you will begin more truly to understand the nature of our Republic. It is indeed revelatory. We honour, as it were, two aesthetics, one spiritual, one secular — not unlike the division of loyalties in the old Soviet republics, between theoretical Communism — Leninism, if you like — and the Stalinist State. On the one hand there is the mysterious aesthetic of the maze, which has been for many centuries the inspiration of Havian art and philosophy. It was itself perhaps introduced here from Crete — the Cretans themselves, you may remember, sent eighty ships to Troy. On the other hand\??\. there is the more absolute aesthetic of the Myrmidonic tradition, bold, warlike, glittering. Just as the concepts of Good and Evil are accorded equal respect by Manicheans, so these two structures of thought and beauty have now been reconciled by the Cathar theocracy, resulting in the Republic which, while grandly Myrmidonic in its outward aspects, is sustained by more ethereal principles beneath.

‘Both are animated,' he continued, ‘by an inner conviction, cherished by Cathars down the generations, that Hav occupies a particular transcendental position in the world at large, peculiar to itself, which is how it has maintained its separateness down the centuries. You will have noticed, perhaps, from your visit to the Tower, that when our famous Kiruski designed the Lazaretto island, he made sure that all three conditions were to be allegorically represented. The brilliance of the resort is balanced by that less lovely appendage, the Diplomatic Suburb, expressing the darker nature of creation, and high above there rises in culmination the magnificent assurance of the Tower. And the whole is embraced within our immemorial symbol of the maze.'

So there, said the directors, as one man, now I knew all.

‘But you talk about aesthetics,' I protested, ‘you say nothing about practices.'

‘Practices?' said their leader. ‘You mean political practices, economic practices, matters like that? Dirleddy, they fall outside our province. We deal in this Office with Ideology and Ethnic Authority. Day-to-day management affairs you must discover for youself — and if we are to go by Dr Porvic's assessment of your talents, we are sure you will! Ah, and here he is now!'

For the Director was waiting for me in the lobby, when I left the conference chamber with all the deputies. ‘Well, how did the convening occur?' he asked to the radiant smiles of the woman at the reception desk. ‘Did my deputies instruct you well?'

‘Excellently, although I have to say that in some ways they left me more confused than I was before.'

Ha ha, laughed all the deputies, and Porvic did too. ‘Ah, dirleddy, that is the mazian aspect of our national personality. If you would like to discuss it more deeply I will happily introduce you some of my colleagues with a profounder knowledge of it than I can myself profess, or even my learned deputies here. Best of all, I can lead you to our famous Professor Kiruski, who is the most eminent authority of them all.'

But no, I said hastily, ‘I've only got two weeks,' and the Director and his deputies laughed again.

‘Urchin soup?' he asked as we left the building, to the winning salute of the sentry. ‘Would that satisfy your taste-buds?' I remembered the waterfront café I used to frequent, which made a speciality of sea-urchins, and attracted a wonderfully cosmopolitan, raffish and bohemian clientele. I assumed it had been buried under the concrete of his own office, but he took me round the back, and there in a cluttered alley, overshadowed by that wall of Achillean helmets, the same old café appeared to thrive.

‘We forfeited so much of our heritage in the Intervention,' the Director said, ‘that some of us have done our best to preserve those native institutions that survived. As it occurs, and you would not of course have known it, this café was always a gathering place of Cathars, where many adherents met to plan the continuance of the cult. It was very dangerous to be a Cathar in Hav, you know. Many of my own ancestors died for their heresy.'

We sat down at a heavy wooden table, on a heavy wooden bench, and very respectful servants, recognizing the Director, filled our soup-plates with the bubbling urchin-broth, fragrantly steaming. ‘You call it a heresy? That seems ironic.'

‘Well
they
called it a heresy first, when they tried to exterminate our enlightenment in the so-called Albigensian Crusade, but more recently we assumed the phrase ourselves as an emblem of our defiance. And our pride. Our heresy was, after all, the top-hole truth.'

I have never been absolutely sure what the Cathar heresy was, but having sat through one ideological lecture already that day, I changed the subject. What about the carillon and the dawn trumpet-call, I asked?

‘Ah, the trumpet, Katourian's Lament, ah, what a falling-off is there. Even in Hav we make our errors. Even in Hav we have our differences of taste or historical judgement. I don't altogether know how to affirm this, but it has to be conceded that some segments of our society are, you might say, more goahead than others — though all working from the heart, of course, for the good of our Republic, under the guidance of our Perfects, no argumentation about that. As Avzar Melchik worded it in his greatest work — now then, how can I translate it for you — let's see . . . well, something like ‘A rose without petals has lost its flavour' — you maintain my drift?

‘So, the petals of my particular Office — the Office of Ideology and Ethnic Authority, to give it its full title — our petals are of traditional flavour. We are Kiruskians lock, stock and barrel. Our colleagues at the Office of Public Ritual, on the other hand are, shall we postulate, somewhat less devoted to the
status quo ante
. We have contrived to reconstruct this café in its traditional posture, because it stands within the focus of our own building, but if the Public Ritual people had the authority they would undoubtedly have replaced it with a cafeteria.'

‘Dear God,' I said, spluttering politely over my soup, ‘a
cafeteria
!'

‘Precisely. Imagine! The trouble about the Lament arose when, after the Intervention, sympathizers of our republic in China, with whom we enjoy cordial relationships, on an old-boy basis in fact, wished to chip in a symbolical contribution to our efforts of reconstruction.'

‘Decent of them,' I said, for I was beginning to get the conversational hang of things.

‘Granted. But what they gave us was not hard cash but that confoundable carillon. It's mounted up there at Katourian's Place, in a little summer-house sort of place, and every damned morning it plays our national anthem — mechanically, of course, and frightfully loud.'

‘Dear me. No work for Missakian, then.'

‘By Jove no. Missakian Costas was the last trumpeter, killed poor fellow on the very day of the Intervention. The shell terminated his life just as he was playing the Lament that morning, and his very trumpet is preserved in the museum — we shall see it in a moment or two.'

‘But what is that anthem? I never heard it before.'

The Director assumed a mystic tone of voice, as if we were in church. ‘Ah, that is a different tale,' he said. ‘It is a magical tale. After the Intervention, when the Holy Cathar Government revealed itself and assumed authority, there was need for a new national hymn, more ideologically relevant. You may perhaps remember the former one? No? Well, be that as it was. Because of the ancient Cathar proscription of sacred song, it was decided that a solely melodic anthem must be sufficient to express our national gratitude. But how, dirleddy' — he asked me rhetorically — ‘how, dirleddy, could a sufficient tonality be found for so exalted a function?

‘The answer is: by a miracle. Unbeknownst to anyone, hidden in a wall of the Séance House was a most ancient manuscript, brought to light by the exact same shell-burst that terminated poor Missakian. Our Perfects hastened to examine it, and found it to be a hitherto unbeknownst musical score, in the medieval Catharist notation, of extreme beauty and obvious ideological reference.

‘One of our brilliant young music students re-notated it for contemporary use, and that is the smashing melody, dirleddy — smashing even at the hands of that monster machine — which you doubtless heard this morning calling us all to loyalty and gratitude. Isn't that a palpable miracle? Wouldn't you say so?'