Hav (29 page)

‘Only joking, darling. I imagine the Legate's got quite enough to do here nowadays without bothering about espionage. Looking after himself all right, I suppose?' he said to me. ‘Nice house, garden parties and all that? He doesn't have to go far for the catering, does he?'

I gave them a quick run-down of the Legate's circumstances, as they had struck me, and I was about to tell them about the pamphlet he had given me when a servant approached our table with a mobile telephone on a silver tray. ‘Call for you, dirleddy,' he said to me.

‘Jan?' said the caller, extremely loudly. ‘Jan? Is that you? You'll never guess who this is. Remember Magda? Magda at the old Athenaeum? That's me! Yes, yes, terribly ancient but still alive and kicking, I'm happy to tell you.

‘Now listen, Jan. You must come and lunch with me today. Yes, this very day. No, I won't take no for an answer. Several of your old acquaintances want to see you too. Where? Why at the League of Intellectuals of course — the Athenaeum that was, though you'll find it very different from what it used to be. I know you have a blue pass, so all you have to do is jump into one of those horrid little buggies and come straight here. They'll know where it is. No, no, Jan, I won't take no for an answer. Twelve o'clock sharp, at the League. Anton will be here? Remember Anton? And Ludo Borovic and, oh, lots of people you know, not to mention my lovely black husband.'

I didn't know any of them, but ‘OK Magda,' I said, ‘twelve o'clock at the League.'

The Ponsonbys were intrigued. ‘So you have friends in the city?' said Vera rather querulously. ‘Fancy that!'

‘You see, darling, you never know,' Arthur said with a wink to me.

Magda was waiting for me in the hall of the League. I remembered her at once — twenty years older, her black hair turning to grey, but still dark and vibrant, as though she had something urgent to tell everybody every day, and dressed gypsy-style, as always, in a long flowered skirt and a white blouse half off her shoulders, numerous scarves and heavy brass bracelets. With her was a handsome middle-aged black man.

‘You see! Here we are — just the same only a little older! You remember Henri? Of course you do — you remember, you met at the Victor's Party, the year poor Izmic won?'

Of course I did, I could say with all honesty, as from some phantasmagorical dream — the Levantine colour and queerness of that lost Hav, the Governor and the elusive Caliph and Izmic himself with his red ribbon and his smarmed-down hair, and Mazda on the arm of this proud African.

‘But you may not realize that this building occupies the very remains of the old Athenaeum, where you and I first met — the one is the direct successor of the other, as it were. This is the same room!' I remembered that first meeting too, if only hazily, but as for the Athenaeum — well, nothing could be more different than the spotlessly clean and orderly club-room we now entered. It was enormous, as the old one had been, but this one was comfortable, panelled in pale Hav ash, pilastered and austerely symmetrical. It was lit by half-hidden ceiling lights, in clumps around the room were squashy sofas, armchairs and tables with spindly legs, and on the walls hung large but unexciting abstracts. If Lazaretto tended undeniably towards the nouveau riche, the League club-room struck me as modestly neo-Fascist — perhaps in the decor they used to call, in Mussolini's Italy, Rationalist.

The place was full of men and women. Some were in Hav caftans, and in one corner was a group of classically Arab-looking people, men in white kuffiyahs with silver daggers at their waists, women blackly veiled. All were talking very loudly in the manner I remembered from the Atheneaum. All were sitting — nobody standing about in conversation — but waiters in
gallabiyehs
glided industriously here and there, their trays cluttered with plates and glasses. The scene was almost disciplined. Only the noise was unrestrained.

‘It feels like
déjà vu
,' I wanly remarked.

‘Oh come on,' said Magda, ‘don't give us that balls. It's nothing like the old place. Don't you remember the mess of everything, and queuing for our food ourselves — at that very corner over there, as a matter of fact? And what about the people — look at them! Look at that huddle of Arabs, Henri — where have they sprung from? They call it the League of Intellectuals but there isn't one in a hundred here who writes or composes or even reads! Isn't that true, Henri?'

‘One in a thousand more like it.'

‘Oh no, Jan Morris,' Magda said, ‘don't give us any of that nonsense about old times.'

She led us to a table and chairs bang in the centre of the room, where the hubbub was worst. I wondered why.

‘Because here, in all this noise, nobody can bug us.'

Pure waste of time actually, Henri said. Bugging people as Magda imagined, with hidden mikes and all that, was just a joke by now. There were much subtler means of surveillance nowadays. ‘But bugger them anyway. Better safe than sorry. When we want to talk, we take a walk.'

So we settled ourselves in the middle of everything, and without anyone ordering there arrived a succession of dishes — cold goat-meat slices, chips, Hav hummus, frogs' legs, chunks of eel, urchins of course and, wonder of wonders, bowls of fruit that were defined for me as snow raspberries (canned of course, said Magda, but still . . .). From time to time people stopped by to greet us — a shifting company of Magda's and Henri's acquaintances, Antons and Ludovics and Marettas, who claimed somewhat unconvincingly to remember me, and solemnly took a single chip from our plates, or a prawn, or a lump of bass-roe, almost as a matter of ritual, before bowing and proceeding.

‘We call it sharing our sustenance,' Magda said, ‘which is a sort of code for sharing our convictions. We are the Sustenance folk! You have only been here half an hour, but already you have met half the true intellectuals of this so-called League. Oh, and here's another — remember Azzam, he of the Alien Office long ago? Now he's the most private of our private citizens — isn't that right, Azzam?'

Azzam delicately took a snow raspberry, and sat down with us. He was smiling gently. He had aged, but I remembered him. The earnest young bureaucrat with pens in his breast-pocket had become the stooped, scholarly-looking gentleman in a tweed shooting-jacket, carrying under his arm what looked like a sketching-pad. ‘A pleasure to meet you again,' he said. ‘You perhaps remember me as Mahmoud, but I am always Azzam now, don't ask me why.'

‘If you want the facts,' Magda said, ‘Azzam's your man. Isn't that right, Henri?'

‘Azzam's the boy, definitely,' said Henri. ‘Sit down, boy, give us the facts.'

‘The facts are,' said Azzam, fastidiously biting into his snow raspberry, ‘that there are no facts. Facts are factotum in the new Hav. Facts are faxes. Faxes are facts. Fair blows the fact on summer eve, and fierce the mountains fart.'

Magda laughed. ‘Bravo, Azzam. But Ezra Pound's dead, you know. So is constructivism. So is post-constructivism. So's Braudel, Jan, isn't he? that old fraud you used to admire so much. Melchik certainly is. So just talk straight now, dear Azzam, and explain to Jan here whatever it is you're going to explain.'

Azzam smiled again. ‘All right, Magda, but where to begin? How much does the dirleddy absorb?'

‘Try me,' I said.

‘Spill the beans,' said Henri.

‘Tell her the truth,' said Magda.

‘Tea?' said a passing waiter with a pot. ‘Best Hav Broadleaf, freshly plucked?'

‘
That's
the truth,' Azzam suddenly shouted. ‘
That's
the new Hav truth! Freshly plucked broadleaf that tastes like shit, and GM snow berries out of a tin!'

Half the people in the room turned to see who was shouting but, when they saw it was Azzam, seemed to lose interest. Magda said, ‘Enough already' (she loved old American movies, I remembered), and so the four of us left the League of Intellectuals, with me sheepishly in the rear.

I thought there seemed something something contrived or stagy to this episode. It was like a performance, climaxing in Azzam's blatant eccentricity. It was like a charade, in which I had played a non-speaking role.

‘Man, these Brits are too quick for us,' said Henri when I voiced the thought outside the club, ‘but believe us, don't disturb yourself, our Myrmidonic stiffs are too damn slow to perceive the nature of the game.'

What
was
the game, I wondered? but I was soon distracted. Out of the League, Magda led us round the back, past the Office of Ideology and down a street of blank new warehouses, until we found ourselves on the Fondaco Quay. ‘There,' said Magda, ‘now you
can
talk about old times!' For it was very like the waterfront I knew, only more so. It was more crowded, more bustling, more animated that ever it was in my memory. The afternoon was bright, and across the harbour I could see Lazaretto island with its topsy-turvy skyline of bobbles and wind-towers, and the immense pillar of the Myrmidon Tower flashing its signal still — from here it looked as though it was emerging from the water itself, shaking the drips off. Beyond, the hills closed in to the narrow passage of the Hook, and far away I could just make out, glistening blue-green, a stretch of open sea. It was a sparkling scene, and the activity of the waterfront matched it.

‘Wow, what's happened here?' I exclaimed in delight, and they explained it to me. Since the dredging and widening of the Hook larger local craft had been able to use the city quays, and Hav's new status as a vibrant entrepôt meant that coastal shipping from a much wider area now brought their goods for unloading and re-shipping here. The really big freighters, the container ships, docked at the new deep-sea port at Casino Cove, but larger salt-ships could now tie up here, and a new traffic of dhows and traders found it profitable to sail through the Hook to Hav.

I could see it for myself. The Fondaco itself, the great Venetian caravanserai which had dominated the waterfront, had vanished, and in its place were five or six large and unlovely warehouse blocks, with a myriad aerials on their roofs and huge commercial signs all over them.. And the quays themselves were crammed with a marvellous variety of dhows, moored there side by side, sometimes three or four abreast, a jumbled mass of high poops and superstructures, fluttering flags, gangplanks from vessel to vessel, ship to shore, huge piles of crates or sacking, derricks and winches and rumbling generators. Along the quays trucks stood double- or triple-parked, nose to tail, with longshoremen stacking them with goods, foremen shouting through loudhailers, a revving of engines, a hooting of horns, and everywhere a busy mass of men and women, in dungareees or
gallabiyehs
, the wide straw hats of Hav, Arab
kuffiyas
, bright gypsy headscarves, turbans, skullcaps and occasional burkas — a tumult of humanity, always shifting, always noisy, laughing and shouting in a babel of languages. Off-shore idly lay a couple of coastal freighters, smoke drifting from their funnels, and there was a flurry of small boats. Fishing-boats with the graceful old Hav rig navigated their way among the mooring-buoys, and motor-boats scudded here and there, and out on the harbour I could see a lovely white streamlined vessel, low in the water, making its way to the salt-quay.

I was greatly encouraged by all this. ‘
Now
you can talk of old times,' said Magda, squeezing my arm affectionately. ‘Here, here on the old waterfront, the real old times survive.'

‘And it is here,' said Azzam, ‘that the real truth survives too — the ideological truth, that is. We can tell you now, Jan, now that we are clear of eavesdroppers, the reason for our performance at the League. Of course our conversations are bugged there, whatever Henri says, and the Office of Security knows that we and our friends — our friends of the Sustenance, as we say — talk subversively. But we present ourselves to them simply as common-or-garden silly intellectuals, econological nuts as you might say. We pretend to be crazy Greens — it was we who invented the joke that the “M” on the Tower stood not for Myrmidon but for Monsanto — rather funny, don't you think?'

‘Yeah, well we are Greens too,' Henri put in, ‘but not crazies.'

‘Quite, but our real quarrel with our rulers is part aesthetic, part ideological, part doctrinal, part liturgical.'

‘Bless my soul,' said I, ‘no wonder you bring me down to the quays to talk.'

‘Yes Azzam,' Magda said, ‘you always make things too complicated. He's really a poet you know, Jan, a very Havian poet. His mind works like a maze. Do you know that
anjlak
about the intricacy of intricacies? That's one of his. Let me put it all more simply. What we are really against, Jan, is the Republic's philistine manipulation of history — brainwashing really — which is beginning to infect ever the most high-minded of our citizens. Let me give you an example. You've met Dr Porvic, I know, and probably found him a perfectly decent sort.'

‘Absolutely, I laughed at him a bit, but I liked him.'

‘Quite right too. He's a genuine lover of books and words, and I'm assured he's a good Cathar. But you must surely have realized that he is also a fool.'

‘A sucker,' said Henri.

‘Yes, a sucker who has been brain-washed himself and is now brain-washing everyone else. Did you get the bit about Missakian? Of course you did. How he was killed by the first shot of the Intervention just as he was sounding the Lament? Well cast your mind back, Jan dear. You were here that day. You know just as well as we do that the first shots of the Intervention were fired
in the afternoon
!'

‘You don't have to be Agatha Christie', Azzam said, ‘to see the flaws in that. And what about that stuff about the picture of the burning House being found on Missakian's corpse, apparently painted before the House was burnt at all? Poor old Porvic, he genuinely believes that was a miracle.'