Hav (28 page)

After lunch — a second bowl of soup for Dr Porvic, I noticed, on the house of course — we walked around the corner to the Museum of the Intervention, which was a building precisely the same as the Ideology Office, only smaller, and with fewer Achillean helmets on it. We were met at the door by the curator, who greeted Porvic obsequiously but hardly noticed me. The very first thing he showed us, in a solitary cabinet inside the entrance, was Missakian's badly dented trumpet, described as ‘The historic instrument of Missakian Costas'. Beside it, I was touched to see, was the plaque erected on the castle rampart in 1837 by officers of the British Royal Artillery. It had commemorated the original musician, Katourian, after whom the trumpet-place was named, but Dr Melchick said it was now there to remember everyone who had blown the Lament at Katourian's Place down the generations. ‘Call me sentimental,' he said, ‘if you like, but I myself caused that plaque to be re-erected here' — and it seemed to me that he blushed.

Next there was a room called Animal Pride, ‘in memoriam,' the curator said, ‘of the Havian species exterminated in the Intervention'.

‘Sad, sad losses,' murmured Porvic to me.

‘Sad indeed,' the curator sanctimoniously confirmed. ‘Oh the sadness of it!' The Hav bear was apparently gone at last, and a pair of them looked out at us from their specimen case in sad self-memorial. ‘The Kretev troglodytes were their guardians,' said the curator, ‘and when they were driven out of their caves nobody was left to champion the bears.' The Hav hedgehog had disappeared too, and there had certainly been no sighting of the Hav wolf since the Intervention.

Only the Hav mongoose, said the curator, seemed to have increased during the past twenty years, and even it had migrated out of the coastal districts into the city suburbs. ‘A good thing too, perhaps,' I ventured to suggest, remembering what Arthur had said about the creatures, but the curator looked at me coldly. ‘On the contrary,
herpestes hav
is one of our national emblems, a mongoose like no other, with its uniquely elongated tail. Some scholars say the Iron Dog itself was modelled upon it. It has been proposed that it might indeed be recognized as the official animal of the Holy Cathar Republic.'

Oops, sorry, I almost said, but Dr Porvic said it for me. ‘Our honoured guest, though empathetic indeed to the Hav ethos, is as yet relatively innocent of its fauna, and does not realize the import of the mongoose.'

‘Ideological import?' I asked.

‘Quite,' said the curator, mollified, and we moved into the main rooms of the museum, the Labyrinth of Memory. There were six of them, and every inch of them, even their ceilings, wall after wall, room after room, was covered with photographs from 1985. It was like being buried alive in a ruin. Everywhere one looked there were piles of rubble, tottering walls, blackened beams, figures huddled in the shadows, burnt-out cars, skeletonic girders. I could almost smell the charred wood. I did not want to linger.

‘I understand,' said Dr Porvic sympathetically. ‘It is an emphatic representation. Yet it was a wonder that so few people were killed — such utter destruction, such miraculous refuge. A wonder too that the native morality of Hav, our moral inheritance, was not shattered by the bombardment. And as a final tribute to that fiery spirit, descended from our distant ancestors, those bare bronze-torsoed heros you have yourself celebrated, we have kept our museum's final room as a symbolical tribute.'

He signalled to the curator, who thereupon flung open huge double doors of oak, to reveal a single enormous oil-painting, magnificently framed, standing like an icon in the middle of the room. It was painted in the half-naif, half-oriental style known as the Hav-Venetian, and I knew at once what it showed. It showed the House of the Chinese Master, in flames.

‘Our most noble public treasure, at its moment of supreme nobility.'

There stood the legendary building, ablaze on all its floors, swirled around by smoke, and all about it were charred and tumbled ruins. It alone was brilliantly illuminated, by its own lights, by the fires, by what seemed be a shaft of sunlight — or moonlight? — penetrating the black smoke to throw its ancient silhouette into relief. It was like a shrine.

‘We call this the Ark of Genius. As you know, the architect of the House remains unknown, but of course the reference is allegorical anyway. It is the genius of Hav itself that this room commemorates, defiant through thick and thin, stiff upper lip despite all.'

‘Who painted the picture?' I asked.

‘That is the final miracle. Nobody can know. It was found torn and crumpled on the person of Missakian the trumpeter, before his burial.'

Directly behind the shrine, outside the museum doors, there was a viewing platform. From there I could see no sign of carnage. I was looking over the site of the old Serai, but I could hardly make out even its outlines, so devastating was the destruction but so complete the rebuilding. What we saw from that platform was a brand-new metropolis of mirror-glass, steel and concrete, metallic, regimented, criss-crossed with over-passes, traffic-lights blinking everywhere, teeming in an almost stylized way with traffic and pedestrians — some in Turkish-style hats and suits, some in traditional Havian
gallabiyehs
. Its buildings were flat-roofed and of uniform height throughout, except for a few shining tiled minarets, lumpish cranes and aerials. Nearly all had been built, so Porvic said, by the very same Chinese firms who had built the International Settlement sixty years before.

It was like one of those Cities of the Future one used to see at World Fairs, or in architectural journals. Touches here and there of post-modernism — here a pinnacle, there a squirl — only emphasized the intense functional feeling of everything, and I looked in vain for some familiar street pattern, the echo of a bazaar, the remnant of a park. I could hardly believe that in this very city, only twenty years before, I had lived in surroundings that were, in their peculiar way, really rather homely — the Russian domes, the German beer-gardens, the French cafés, the whole melded into a a shabby Levantine languor. Now, it seemed to me, I was looking at a cityscape machine-made, computer-calculated, absolute.

‘I see you are taken aback,' said Porvic sympathetically. ‘It is indeed a shock, to see new life exploding so dramatically out of desolation. But from small acorns mighty oaks do grow, and out of our destruction we have extracted a sense of symbolism, of liturgy even, that offers some public expression to the nuances of our ideology.'

I was not at all sure what he was talking about, but I obeyed him when, with a courtly bow and a screw of his monocle, he concluded: ‘Pray to accompany me now, as we confirm our promised turn.'

From the front steps of the museum, in a direct straight line from the Ark of Genius, a wide pedestrian street of ceremonial, funereal or perhaps Masonic feel cut through a parade of doorless office blocks, with heavily barred windows. It was ornamented only with a single row of Achillean helmets. There was something occult about it — it reminded me of the street that runs straight as a die from the hill of Jingshan in Beijing through Tiananmen Square to the Temple of Heaven where the Emperors of China would commune with their only superiors, the gods. I recognized nothing as Dr Porvic led me solemnly down it. ‘We call this the Way of Genius,' he said, and presently we reached the end of it, and suddenly saw before us, astonishing as ever among a stern circuit of new buildings, the actual House of the Chinese Master.

It was no more than a blackened ruin, of course, propped up with steel girders, its terraces sagging, the pools and bridges at its base scummy and neglected, but from the utmost point of its pagoda flew not the helmet-ensign of the Myrmidonic Republic, but the old chequered flag of Hav — the first time I had seen it since my return. And surrounding the ruin, enclosed within a gold-tipped wrought-iron fence, was a garden, almost a park, brilliant with masses of wild flowers — Hav bluebells, buttercups of the Escarpment, white saxifrage, flowering moss, poppies, and everywhere, climbing over walls and up the parapets of bridges, softening and moistening the pavements, that spectacular queen of the Havian fauna,
scrophulariaecaea haviana
, Hav toadflax, with its tall bright plumes of purple and yellow.

It was overwhelming, this sudden glimpse of the innocently exotic. ‘The Perfects themselves compassionately decreed that here, and here only, the former flag of Hav should fly, night and day, to honour that time of tragedy and revelation, and that the House should never be demolished. And the flowers of the garden? Dirleddy, when this entire city was laid waste by our enemies, leaving only a steaming and blackened wreck, when our people were living in cellars or sheltering in shattered structures, or had fled the city to the countryside — at that black moment, like a promise of recompense our own native wild flowers sprang up everywhere through the city, carpeting the ruins and the shambled thoroughfares. This little patch of our native flora has been preserved just as it was from those grim times, untouched by gardeners or improvers, playing and weaving for ever just as it did around the Master's House in its forlornity.'

It was the most beautiful thing — the
only
beautiful thing — that I had seen in the new city. The Director removed his monocle from his eye, and wiped it thoughtfully with his handkerchief, before walking me back to Memorial Square. When a buggy arrived to take me home under the water to Lazaretto he seemed quite moved.

‘You do appreciate, dirleddy, do you not, that for Cathars the Intervention had a doubly allegorical intimation. It was a tragedy of course, but it was also a scouring, a purgation if you prefer. The Greek
, I don't have to inform you I'm sure, signifies a purgation, a catharsis in fact, and so to Cathars any kind of scouring, even the cruellest kind, carries within it a seed of perfection. Thus in an unwavering track our emblematic memory conveys us from the fire to the ruin to the flowers. And even the flowers carry a message, for the true flora of our beloved city are us, its sons and daughters.'

He paused for a long silence. ‘And so farewell, dirleddy,' he then concluded, as we shook hands. ‘No doubt we shall meet again.'

For a moment I considered my response. ‘See you about, trout,' I said at last, and looked at him cautiously. I think the old man smiled, but I couldn't be sure.

Warship Carlotta

‘
You never know' — league talk — on the Fondaco—an old ship — sacred site — but I didn't go home

Next morning I again had my breakfast in the sunshine at The Salt Trade, and there my English acquaintances greeted me enthusiastically.

‘Morning, morning, Jan!' cried Arthur. ‘Come and join us, do. Top of the morning to you!' and Vera observed that I was looking better already — ‘I did think you looked a little peaky the other day, but I expect it was just the long journey.'

And what had I been doing with myself? they wanted to know. They hadn't noticed me on the beach at all, in fact they hadn't seen me since that teatime — when was it? — Monday? — Tuesday? ‘How fast time passes when you're enjoying yourselves!'

I told them the first thing I had done when I left them last time was to call upon the British Legate.

‘Very wise, very wise. Can't be too careful in these places, even one like this.'

‘Do tell us. What kind of a person is the Legate? Is he, as it were, one of the old sort? Nowadays our Ambassadors and so on always seem to be commercial attachés or whatever they call themselves, so we don't generally bother to call. What's this one like? Do tell.'

‘I shouldn't pry, Vera darling, if I were you,' Arthur intervened. ‘They always used to say in the old days that the Hav Residence was a proper spy-nest, and perhaps Jan is in that racket too!'

She laughed a tinkly, silvery laugh. ‘Oh I hardly think so. Arthur spent a lot of time travelling, you know, before he retired from the company, and used to see spies all over the place, or thought he did.'